Chapter XIII: Life on the Upper Yangtze

At this point, before entering on the empire province of SZE CHUAN, it is desirable to give a few facts and impressions regarding life on the Upper Yangtze, my experiences of which extended over five weeks altogether.

The Upper River, with all its peculiarities, lies above Ichang. It must never be forgotten that it is the _sole_ highway for the vast commerce of the richest province of the Chinese Empire, with an area about the size of that of France, and a population estimated at from 50,000,000 to 70,000,000. The nature and risks of this highway may be gathered from these and other descriptions of it. Except in the gorges and some few quiet intervals, it is a series of rapids and races, which at present are only surmounted by man force. Mr. A. J. Little’s success in 1898 in getting a large steam launch up to Chungking proves that a steamer can ascend, but not that steam navigation can be made commercially profitable, or that if it were it would be the ruin of junk navigation.

A large up-river junk is from 80 to 120 feet long, from nine to twelve broad, and from 40 to over 100 tons burden.

They are all alike in that they have low square bows, lofty sterns, flat bottoms, and single masts from thirty to forty feet high, carrying huge oblong sails, with which they can only sail with the wind aft. They are very frequently built at Wan of a cypress which abounds in its neighbourhood, and being stained with orpiment and oiled over that with the oil procured from the _Aleurites cordata_, they look like varnished pine, and have a very trim as well as picturesque appearance. The planking is about an inch thick. The holds are only from three to seven feet deep. A junk to carry fifty tons of goods can be built at Wan complete for £125, and a first-class junk to carry 100 tons or more for £200, about 2500 strings of _cash_. The holds are in compartments. The forward part is uncovered in the daytime, and the cook does his unceasing work in a well in the middle with a clay stove in it. At night a framework covered with bamboo mats is erected, under which the crew sleep. The high stern cabin is usually occupied by the _lao-pan_ and his family. A junk of 120 tons carries a crew of 120 men.

In passage junks the open space forward is diminished as much as possible, most of the deck being housed over, but in cargo junks less than half is covered. In the big junks a sponson runs along each side, which is used both for poling and communication. Junks carry a spare mast and sweeps lashed outside. The helmsman stands inside, with his head and shoulders protected by a raised “wheelhouse,” in which he works with much skill and infinite patience a very long and clumsy tiller attached to a huge rudder, which often projects four feet from the stern. The roof of the housed portion is used for the monstrous coils of bamboo rope, ofttimes three inches in diameter and 1200 feet in length, which are used in tracking, and are coiled and uncoiled continually. These ropes only last one voyage.

The lofty stern is frequently much decorated, and in all cases has a fascinating picturesqueness. Its square windows are of ground oyster-shell or paper, or even of stained glass. Occasionally it has a carved gallery with flowering plants in pots. Altogether a SZE CHUAN junk is an ingenious and noble construction, and the owners take great pride in them. Their stately appearance and apparently large size are deceptive as to their carrying capacity, which is small. I believe that no junk on the Upper Yangtze draws over seven feet, which necessarily gives a shallow hold, and the freeboard is of startling scantiness. The large tenders smartly handled, which land and re-embark the trackers, are really big _sampans_, and often have a curious rig—two masts like sheers, forty feet high amidships, with the width of the deck between them, the spar which carries the sail running on both.

We call the junks “lumbering craft,” but no craft anywhere are more skilfully handled; none run such risks; no crews are better disciplined to act together and at a second’s notice in cases of emergency; no men work so desperately hard on such small pay and with such poor food; and it remains to be seen if vessels of any other build and management can supplant them in the carrying trade of the Upper Yangtze.

Large fortunes are not made in junks; the losses are too heavy. But, judging from the comfortable houses of retired junk owners in many a pleasant place, a moderate competence for old age is in sight of all except the very unlucky. The wife and family usually live on board, and these wives seem to have a speciality of strident and powerful voices, which are heard above the roar of the rapids and the yells of the crews.

As to the risks, the Chinese say that one junk in twenty is annually lost, and one in ten is stranded. Consul Bourne[23] states that one-tenth of the foreign goods shipped at Ichang arrives damaged by water, and Mr. A. J. Little estimates the loss of junks and merchandise since the formation of the Hing-lung-t’an, or “Glorious Rapid,” in 1896 as eight per cent.[24] Consul Bourne, writing in December, 1896, says, “A hundred junks and 1000 lives have been already lost, we are told, _i.e._, since September 28th of the same year at that rapid.” Both the upward and downward passages are full of tremendous risks. On the upward passage in February I counted forty-one junks stranded at different points between Ichang and Wan Hsien, some breaking up, others being repaired, and all having to discharge their cargoes; and when I came down like a flash on high water towards the end of June, though it was impossible to count the stranded junks, they must have been nearly half of that number, even with the much-reduced summer traffic, and I saw one big junk strike a rock while flying down a rapid and disappear as if she had been blown up, her large crew, at the height of violent effort the moment before, with all its frantic and noisy accompaniments, perishing with her.

Besides junks of various sizes, there are native house-boats, like mine, and others running up to four times its size, which carry passengers only, and _wupans_ and _sampans_—undecked boats with hooped bamboo roofs; these carry passengers or cargo. I have already described the arrangements of a house-boat. If the Upper Yangtze junks number from 7000 to 8000, the men employed on them at the lowest estimate must be a quarter of a million, in addition to many thousands working in house-boats and smaller craft.

Junks never anchor, and, indeed, carry no anchors, and choosing a mooring ground is a most important matter—not that there are not very many nooks and bays untouched by the current, but because of the caprices of the river, which often rises or falls, as I experienced, six or seven feet in a night, so that a careful watch must be kept in order to pay out or haul in line according to circumstances.

Big junks sound their way towards the bank, rig out great wooden fenders fore and aft to prevent their sheering into shoaler water than they draw, and one of the “water trackers” plunges into the water with a line, which he makes fast to a stake on shore, the fenders, which are really massive poles or straight young pines, also being lashed to rocks or stakes.

Junks bound west keep as close in shore as they can on the side freest from rocks and easiest for the trackers. When the wind is fair and strong they can stem the ordinary current with their huge sail only, and they take their trackers on board; but if the fair wind is light, it only gives the trackers an easier haul. At all rapids, races, and rocky points, the tow-line is in requisition. Eastward-bound junks lash their mast alongside at Chungking, and are rowed down, being steered by a prodigious bow-sweep. It is absolutely necessary that their speed should be in advance of that of the current, and at every rapid frantic efforts are required from the crew.

Junks carry trackers in proportion to their tonnage, but a _lao-pan_, or skipper, usually part owner, the steersman, the _t’au-t’ai-kung_, or pilot, the _tai-kung_, or bowsman, the cook, and the _t’au-lao_, or head tracker, are indispensable. The pilot and steersman never leave the bow-sweep and rudder, except for meals, while the junk is in motion. The skipper’s functions are chiefly to buy food, bargain for extra trackers, pay wages, and stimulate the crew to frantic efforts in dangerous places by yells and gesticulations.

The bowsman, or _tai-kung_, acting also as pilot in my small boat, is the most important man in a junk. I never ceased to admire mine, a tall, broad, well-made fellow, the personification of knowledge and carefulness, silent, alert, never flurried, hand and head steady, all that a pilot should be, until the moment when he collapsed with the opium craving, after which he might nightly be seen in a state of blissful vacuity lying beside his opium lamp. The work of the _tai-kung_ is to lead with his skilled touch the eight or ten men who, in a big junk, work the bow-sweep, a timber, from thirty to forty feet long, projecting over the bow, without which no boat could ascend or descend rapids and races in safety. When this great spar is not in use he stands at the bow sounding with a long iron-shod bamboo pole, giving the junk a sheer-off from upstanding points or rocks, and signalling to the steersman in which direction sunken rocks lie, which his trained eye discovers by the eddies in the river. His responsibility for life and property is enormous, and he bears it nobly. The sweep is used to shoot the junk out into the current, and enable her to clear rocks which cannot be avoided by the steersman and rudder.

Having slightly sketched the junks and the manner of navigating the Great River, I will conclude with a brief description of the “inhuman work” of the trackers, by far the worst of which is in the region of the gorges and the most severe of the rapids, extending for a hundred miles west of Ichang. Captain Blakiston, Captain Gill, and more lately Mr. A. J. Little in his delightful book, _Through the Yangtze Gorges_, have all expressed both sympathy with these men and their wonder at their hardihood, industry, and good-nature, and with my whole heart I endorse what these writers have said, and regard this class as typifying that extraordinary energy of the Chinese which has made and kept China what it is, and which carries the Chinese as thrifty and successful emigrants to every part of Eastern Asia and Western America.

The crews, which in big junks number 120 men, are engaged at Ichang. For the upward voyage, lasting from thirty to fifty days, they get about four shillings and their food, which is three meals a day of rice, with cabbage fried in a liberal supply of grease, and a little fish or pork on rare occasions, and for coming down, which rarely takes more than ten days (I did it in a _wupan_ in a little over four), about eighteenpence and food, and indeed many crews work their passage down for food only. For this pittance these men do the hardest and riskiest work I have seen done in any country, “inhumanly hard,” as Consul Bourne calls it, week after week, from early dawn to sunset. The opening of Chungking as a treaty port and various other causes have tended however to raise their wages.

The larger number of these trackers are usually on shore hauling, being directed from the junk either by flag signals or drum beat, under the _tai-kung’s_ direction; a proportion remain on board to work the huge bow-sweep, at which I have seen as many as fifteen straining. A few attend the trackers to extricate the tow-rope from the rocks, in which it is constantly catching, and two or more _tai-wan-ti_, or water trackers, specially expert swimmers, and without clothing, run ahead of the tow-rope ready to plunge into the water and free it when it catches among rocks which cannot be reached from the shore. If tracking and sailing are both impossible, the trackers propel the junk by great oars, each worked by two men, twenty at a side, who face forwards, and mark time by a combined stamp and a wild chant.

In descending, in order to keep steerage way on the junk in a current running from six to twelve knots an hour, every agency of progression is brought into play. The slinging of the mast alongside gives a lumbering, ungainly look. The deck is literally crowded with men, naked in summer, and in winter clothed in long blue cotton coats. Some are rowing face forwards; fifteen or more are straining for life at the bow-sweep; others are working the huge oars called _che_ (wheel), each of which demands the energies of ten men; others are toiling at _yu-lows_, big broad-bladed sculls, worked over the stern or parallel to the junk’s side—even women and children take part in the effort—the _lao-pan_ grows frantic, he yells, leaps, dances; drums and gongs are madly beaten, and yet, with all this frantic effort, it is all the junk can do to keep steerage way enough to clear the dangerous places, and not always that, as I saw on two occasions junks fly down rapids, strike rocks, and disappear as unconnected masses of timbers, as if exploded by dynamite.

I saw over eighty big junks descend the great rapids, and it was such an exciting sight, with its accompaniments of deafening din, that I not only never wearied, but would have been glad to see eighty more.

Where it is impossible to sail—and even with a fair wind there are few reaches except the gorges where it is possible—the trackers prefer the “inhuman work” of tracking to the slow headway made by the severe and monotonous toil of rowing, or of hugging the bank, and hooking the junk along by seizing with hooks on rings with staples driven into the rock for this purpose, or keeping her off with stout fenders while they pole her along with iron-spiked bamboo poles, which they drive into holes which have been made by this process in the course of ages in the hard conglomerate or granite.

In small house-boats like mine the trackers are landed from the boat, but in junks from the attendant _sampan_. Except the _tai-wan-ti_, they wear short cotton drawers, and each man has a breast strap. The huge coil of plaited bamboo, frequently a quarter of a mile long, is landed after being passed over the mast-head, a man on board paying out or hauling in as is required. Small boats pass under the loftier tow-ropes of big ones, which often saves time, and often leads to noisy quarrels and entanglements. The trackers uncoil the rope, each man attaching it to his breast strap by a hitch, which can be cast off and rehitched in a moment.

The drum beats in the junk, and the long string of men starts, marking time with a loud yell—“_Chor-chor_,” said to mean “Put your shoulder to it.” The trackers make a peculiar movement; their steps are very short, and with each they swing the arms and body forward, stooping so low to their work that their hands nearly touch the ground, and at a distance they look like quadrupeds.

Away they go, climbing over the huge angular boulders of the river banks, sliding on their backs down spurs of smooth rock, climbing cliff walls on each other’s shoulders, or holding on with fingers and toes, sometimes on hands and knees, sometimes on shelving precipices where only their grass sandals save them from slipping into the foaming race below, now down close to the deep water, edging round a smooth cliff with hardly foothold for goats, then far above, dancing and shouting along the verge of a precipice, or on a narrow track cut in the rock 300 feet above the river, on which narrow and broken ledge a man unencumbered and with a strong head would need to do his best to keep his feet. The reader must sympathetically bear in mind that these poor fellows who drag our commerce up the Yangtze amidst all these difficulties and perils, and many more, are attached to a heavy junk by a long and heavy rope, and are dragging her up against the force of a tremendous current, raging in billows, eddies, and whirlpools; that they are subject to frequent severe jerks; that occasionally their burden comes to a dead stop and hangs in the torrent for several minutes; that the tow-rope often snaps, throwing them on their faces and bare bodies on jagged and rough rocks; that they are continually in and out of the water; that they are running many chances daily of having their lives violently ended; and that they are doing all this mainly on rice!

Their work is indicated from the junk either by the rapid beating of drums and gongs when they are to haul hard, or a slow rat-a-tat when they are to cease hauling, or by flag signalling, one man being told off on shore to watch the signals and communicate them to the trackers. An error would be as fatal as if within a ship’s length of a reef ahead an engineer were to mistake the order “Full speed astern” for “full speed ahead.”

Occasionally rough steps help the men up and down spurs, and rock paths made by the pickaxe occur frequently. Many of these were thirty feet above the river when I went up, and were submerged when I came down. There is, however, one noble rock path, four feet broad, running for many miles at an even height, built, I believe, by a private individual as an act of benevolence to the trackers and for the “accumulation of merit.”

At some points where the rapids are bad and the shores are big broken rocks, only fitted for goats to climb, and the junks hang or slip back, and the men give way, and several big junks, each with from 200 to 300 trackers, are all making the slowest possible progress, gongs and drums are beaten frantically; bells are rung; firearms are let off; the hundreds of trackers on all-fours are yelling and bellowing; the overseers are vociferating like madmen, and rush wildly along the gasping and struggling lines of naked men, dancing, howling, leaping, and thrashing them with split bamboos, not much to their hurt. A tow-rope breaks, and the junk they are tugging at gyrates at immense speed to the foot of the rapid, the labour of hours being wasted in two or three minutes, if there is not a worse result.

Among the many perils encountered by junks and trackers are the _chipa_ or races, which are usually caused by a projecting point or spur of rock below which there is a smooth eddy. Arrived at the point and landing the trackers, the _tai-kung_ throws the boat’s head out into the current to get her clear of the point, with the bow-sweep, and with the strongest line in use, seventy or eighty trackers haul on it with all their force, men work with long poles to fend her off the rocks, and with her head on to the current the water foams and rages under her bow, but if all goes well, after a period of suspense she is dragged by main force round the point into smooth water, and then it is often the case that the cliffs are inaccessible; the trackers come on board and “claw” the junk along in deep water with claws on long boathooks, which they hook into the rocks, others fending her off.

Things do not always go smoothly. I went up these races in my boat many times, and such small incidents happened as thumping a hole in the bottom on a small rock, the rope catching on a rock in the water and a bold swimmer having to go overboard to detach it, and the tow-rope holding fast round some point of rock or getting entangled in a crevice which looked inaccessible. It was horrible to see the poor fellows climb with bare feet up apparently smooth precipices, “holding on with their eyelids,” while the drum beat “Cease hauling,” and the junk hung tugging and quivering in the torrent and fraying the rope which was her one salvation. On two occasions where there was absolutely no foothold for a cat, a man was let down over the precipice by a rope under his arms to free the fast-fraying tow-line. These lines, hardened by the silica in the bamboo, have cut channels two, three, and four inches deep over many of the points, neat, smooth grooves in which they run easily.

There is much more to be said about the trackers and their work, but the reader is weary, and I forbear. No work is more exposed to risks to limb and life. Many fall over the cliffs and are drowned; others break their limbs and are left on shore to take their chance—and a poor one it is—without splints or treatment; severe strains and hernia are common, produced by tremendous efforts in dragging, and it is no uncommon thing when a man falls that his thin naked body is dragged bumping over the rocks before he extricates himself. On every man almost are to be seen cuts, bruises, wounds, weals, bad sores from cutaneous disease, and a general look of inferior rice.

These trackers may be the roughest class in China—for the work is “inhuman” and brutalising—but nevertheless they are good-natured in their way; free on the whole from crimes of violence; full of fun, antics, and frolic; clever at taking off foreigners; loving a joke; and with a keen sense of humour.

Those who crowd in hundreds to the great rapids in the season for the chance of getting a few _cash_ for a haul are a rougher lot still. They bargain for the price of haulage with the _lao-pan_ through gangsmen, and very often where there is much competition, as at the Hsin-tan, get only about a penny for four hours’ hard work. Their mat camps are very boisterous at night. At the lesser rapids the _lao-pan_ goes ashore, dangling strings of _cash_, and as there is usually a village close by, he secures help, after some loud-tongued bargaining and wrangling, engaging even women and boys to tug at his ropes, and occasionally a woman with a baby on her back takes a turn at the dragging!

That so vast a traffic is carried on under such difficulties is a marvel. Many of these are created on the upward passage by the necessity which hauled junks are under of taking the shallow inshore water, with its rocks, obvious and sunken, reefs, broken water, and whirlpools. Full-powered steamers, with suitable steering arrangements, ascending the smooth deep-water channel used in the descent, might escape the majority of the risks run by junks; but then a complete survey of the Upper Yangtze is required. So far as I could judge of the Great River between Sui Fu, at the junction of the River of Golden Sand and the Min, and Ichang, leaving out the gorges, there are very few reaches in which rapids, races, and rocky broken water are not to be met with. Indeed, it may be said that there is no tranquil water, and Admiral Ho, the superintendent of police for the Upper Yangtze, is probably not exaggerating when in his official _Yangtze Pilot_ he enumerates about a thousand perils to navigation. When I returned I realised that Mr. Endacott’s remark concerning occupation had much truth in it: “You’ll have enough to do looking after your life.”[25]