Chapter XVI: Kuei Fu to Wan Hsien

The following morning my trackers, having no fumes of liquor to sleep off, were astir early. There was one long and strong rapid, Lao Ma (“Old Horse”), and a minor one, Miao Chitze “Temple Stairs”), where the water rushes furiously over a succession of steps with a clear but very rapid channel in the centre. Passenger boats turn out their fares there, and it was piteous to see the women with their bound feet hobbling and tumbling among boulders, where I, who am not a very bad climber, was glad to get the help of two men. Of course, the fathers and husbands gave them no assistance. The fierce cataract of Tung Yangtze, remarkable for a vigorous attempt which was made not very many years ago to overcome its difficulties by building a fine stone breakwater, now in decay, and a succession of _chipas_ and eddies, intervened between Kuei Fu and Yun-yang Hsien, or “Clouded Sun City,” on the bank of a fine gorge, its grey walls extending far up the mountain on the slope of which the city stands, high above the winter level of the river.

These cities on the Yangtze are captivating to the eye, and the touches of colour given by the glazed green and yellow tiles of the curved roofs of their many fine temples relieve the otherwise monotonous grey. The “City of the Clouded Sun” is not lively, and has very little trade, but it is stately and clean, and its temples are well kept and imposing, specially the Temple of Longevity, which has a wall richly decorated in high relief, in which fine bronze tablets are inlaid.

The glory of the city is, however, on the opposite bank—the Temple of Chang-fei, a warrior who died fighting for his country. The whole scene is beautiful, and it was most mortifying that the crowd which gathered round my camera, looking in at the lens and over my shoulder under the focussing cloth and shaking it violently, prevented me from getting a picture of it. Nature and art have combined in a perfect picturesqueness. On the flat vertical surface of a noble cliff rising from the boulder-strewn shore of the Yangtze are four characters—and what can be more decorative than Chinese characters “writ large”?—which are translated “Ethereal bell, one thousand ages.” This bell is believed by the people to ring of its own accord in case of a fire in the district.

Above it, and approached by a fine broad flight of 100 stone stairs, is a magnificent temple in perfect repair, and with its gorgeous decorations lately restored. It has three courts, one three-storeyed and two two-storeyed pavilions, their much-curled roofs tiled with glazed tiles of an exquisite green. Corridors, also roofed with green tiles and composed of elaborate and beautiful wooden fretwork with the peony for its motive, connect the courts. On one side of the temple is a deep narrow glen with fine trees and a waterfall, and over this a beautiful stone bridge has been thrown from the temple door. There are some noble specimens of the _Ficus religiosa_. There were large numbers of visitors, and a ferry-boat is continually crossing. A lovelier place for a religious picnic could not be found.[28]

At Yun-yang we took in a relation of the _lao-pan_, a Romanist, employed by the French priest resident in the city as doctor to a dispensary. According to him, there are 300 Roman Christians in Yun-yang, who are quite free from molestation. There is no Protestant missionary there or in the country we passed through during the previous eighteen days. On the river bank, after Mr. Stevenson had been talking with a number of men about Christianity, an old man said to him, “Teacher, you say what is good, but it is not all true. You say we have never seen God. Then we can’t have injured Him, and so don’t need His forgiveness.”

Above Yun-yang the country opens out, and the verdure and fertility are most charming. The bright red of the soil, the fresh green of the grain crops and sugarcane, and the brilliant yellow of the rape made a charming picture. Every now and then a noble specimen of the _Ficus religiosa_, with an altar and incense-burner below it, lent the contrast of its dark green foliage, and substantial farmhouses of “Brick Noggin,” each in a clump of bamboo, and fine temples in groves of evergreens gave an air of prosperity to the scene. I was not surprised at the encomiums which previous travellers have bestowed on this province.

Rape is universally grown for the oil. The people have neither butter nor grease for cooking, and their diet would be incomplete without abundance of some oily substance. Imported and native kerosene may take its place as an illuminant, but for cooking purposes it will be always grown. In such a fertile and beautiful region the absence of animal life is curious. There is no pasturage, the roads are not made for draught, and the cheerfulness of horses, cattle, and sheep about a farmyard is unknown. Buff dogs, noisy and cowardly, and the hideous water buffalo, which looks like an antediluvian survival and has a singular aversion to foreigners, represent the domestic animals.

We were delayed considerably by head winds, involving much tracking and rowing, and thumped a hole in the boat’s bottom for the second time, on which she filled so fast that she had to be run ashore with all despatch, and the miserable attempts at repair delayed us for some hours, as no carpenter would work during the New Year holidays. For the next twenty-eight hours it took four men baling night and day to keep the water down.

At a distance of nearly 1300 miles from its mouth the Yangtze is still a noble river, nobler yet when the summer rise covers the grand confusions of its rocky bed. The “Gorge of the Eight Cliffs,” a singular freak of nature, with perpendicular cliffs fluted like organ pipes, through which the river has cut a channel, said by the boatmen to be fathomless, about six miles long, through a bed of hard grey sandstone, detained us for a long time, and was bitterly cold and draughty. Above in a recess in the rock are carved three divinities in full canonicals, painted and gilded, called “The Three Water Guardians.” It is said that the reason that no boatmen will move in the dark is that these genii only guard the river by day.

Tiresome rapids detained us again, and I climbed a height to look at some queer erections, which are seen at intervals of about three miles, on elevations along the river from Ichang to Chungking, making a goodly show. They are white towers, with a red sun painted on the front of each, and stand five in a row. The boatmen say that they are to mark distances, but, according to better authorities they are _yen-tun_, or “smoke towers,” and have served the purpose of giving alarm in unsettled times by fires of dry combustibles within. Apparently they have not been repaired for many years.

On Ash Wednesday, February 19th, in the afternoon, a fine, white, nine-storeyed pagoda on a bank, and another on a high hill, announced the approach to a city. The river was narrowed by an insignificant gorge, then came a broad expanse of still water resembling a mountain lake, and then Wan appeared. That was one of the unforgettable views in China. The “Myriad City,” for position and appearance, should rank high among the cities of the world. The burst of its beauty as we came round an abrupt corner into the lake-like basin on which it stands, and were confronted with a stately city piled on cliffs and heights, a wall of rock on one side crowded with refuges and temples, with the broad river disappearing among mountains which were dissolving away in a blue mist, was quite overpowering.

Its situation on a sharp bend of the Yangtze, backed at a distance of thirty miles by a range of mountains—built on cliffs, and in clusters round temple and pagoda-crowned hills, and surrounded by precipitous, truncated peaks of sandstone, from 700 to 1500 feet in height, rising out of woods through which torrents flash in foam, and from amidst garden cultivation, and surmounted by the picturesque, fortified refuges which are a feature of the region—is superb and impressive. Wan is the first of the prosperous cities of SZE CHUAN that I saw. It has doubled its population and trade in twenty years, and its fine streets and handsome shops, stately dwellings within large grounds, thriving industries, noble charities, and the fringe of junks for over two miles along its river shore, indicate a growing prosperity which is characteristic of nearly every city in SZE CHUAN which I afterwards visited.

We tied up in a crowd of large junks lying in three tiers. Hundreds of coolies were loading and unloading them, and the noise was deafening. Leaving the furious babel of the boatmen, who were dissatisfied with their “wine money,” I walked the mile up to the China Inland Mission house, partly by a flight of 150 steep stone stairs, and up back streets, and being bareheaded and in Chinese dress, escaped a very great crowd. No European woman had walked up through Wan before, for it and its officials had been notoriously hostile to foreigners, and Dr. Morrison, of the _Times_, had been ill-treated there only six months before. I was much impressed by the good paving and cleanliness, and the substantial stone dwellings _en route_.

Arriving at a fine Chinese gateway, with a porter’s lodge and an outer court, along which are servants’ quarters and cow stables, we passed into what is a truly beautiful paved inner court, one side a roofed-in open space used as a chapel, the other a lofty and handsome Chinese guest-room, as shown in the illustration, with an open front, and the living-rooms of the family. A third side is the women’s guest-room, and on the fourth are various rooms. Projecting upper storeys and balconies, all carving and fretwork, latticed and carved window-frames with paper panes, tall pillars, and irregular tiled roofs, make up a striking _tout ensemble_, in the midst of which Mr. and Mrs. Thompson and three ladies, all in Chinese dress, stood to welcome me. It was all so trim and handsome that there was a distinct unseemliness in bringing in my shabby travelling equipments, much the worse for two years’ hard wear, and I hurried them into retirement as soon as possible.

The house is beautiful inside, the walls, roofs, and pillars of planed, unvarnished wood of a fine grain, all dovetailed or put together with wooden bolts. Downstairs the large fretwork windows, opening on pivots, are above a man’s head. All the furniture, with the exception of some presents, is Chinese, and is at once simple and tasteful. Upstairs are a number of low, irregular, quaint rooms. The one allotted to me was a large one, with a great fretwork window into the court, and another with a superb view of the city and down the river. It had access by a steep step-ladder to an open wooden tower with a pagoda roof and seats for use in the hot weather. This overlooks the houses of many neighbours, and is overlooked. From it are to be seen all the refuges on the surrounding hilltops, the circuit of the city wall, _yamens_, temples, and pagodas, the broad brown fringe of junks, and the gleaming silver of the Great River.

From 9 a.m. till dusk there was a continuous stream of Chinese visitors, the men entering at one door and the women at another, and passing into their guest-rooms, where they were separately received by Mr. Thompson and Miss Ramsay. A Chinese is a dignified and sensitive man, and likes to be master of the situation. He is miserable in a foreign house, with its promiscuous oddities, and has no idea where or on what to sit, what position to take, and to what etiquette he is to conform himself, and has all the discomfort of a fish out of water. In a Chinese guest-room, on the contrary, there is an ordered and rigid stateliness. A few handsome scrolls from the classics or pictures decorate the walls. A handsome carved black wood table stands against the wall opposite the open front, and on both sides of it are ranged heavy black wood chairs, the highest being next the table. Elaborate lamps hang from the roof.

No matter what the position of a Chinese is, whether he be mandarin, merchant, shopkeeper, or writer, he is absolutely certain which chair etiquette entitles him to take, and when tea and pipes are produced he is as serene and comfortable as in his own house.

At that time, though missionaries had been settled at Wan for some years, and had been able to rent this beautiful house, there was not a Christian in the city. The ladies had only lately arrived, as it had been thought not a safe place for them. Even a month before my visit, when a deep well ran dry, a mob assembled outside the mission house threatening to burn it and to kill all the “foreign devils,” for they had tapped the well and had stolen the golden crab which was the “luck” of the city. The mob was eventually compelled to withdraw, but the mandarin, who only left as I was arriving, came to the house with the serious charge that the inmates had killed children in order to get their eyes, and that their bodies were in the tanks at the back!

Mr. Thompson took him to the back, and the tanks were probed with a long pole, but the accusation was not disposed of by the resultlessness of the search, for foreign magic is believed to be equal to anything. The same official concerted the murder of the missionaries with the elders of the city, and Mr. Davies, who was then in Wan, was severely beaten. Compensation, however, was given him, which he bestowed on the local charities. A new chief magistrate had just arrived, with orders to treat the foreigners well, and all was changed. When Mr. Thompson called at the _yamen_ the mandarin conducted him to the seat of honour, escorted him to his chair on leaving, and returned the visit with a large retinue the next day. Of course the Chinese everywhere take their cue from the officials.

So it came about that for several days I was able actually to walk about and to photograph with no worse trouble than the curiosity of the people in masculine crowds of a thousand or more. Four months before I was told that this would have been impossible. My camera would have been smashed, my open chair would have produced a riot, and I should have been stoned or severely beaten.

The streams of visitors to the beautiful guest-halls never ceased by daylight. Miss Ramsay often received forty women at a time. All SZE CHUAN women have bound feet, and all wear trousers very much _en evidence_, those of the lower class women being wrapped round the ankles and tied, those of the upper class being wide and decorated. They asked hordes of questions about domestic and social matters from their own grotesquely different standpoint, and wanted to hear what the “Jesus religion” was like, and were quite unable to understand how people could pray “unless they had a god in the room.” One day Miss Ramsay, who had been for some years in China, explained to her guests various things concerning our Lord’s life and teachings, and an upper class woman, who seemed intelligent and interested, explained it in her way to the others. As she left, Miss R. said, “You’ll not forget what I have told you,” and she said very pleasantly, “Oh, no, I won’t; our gods are made of mud, and yours are made of wood!”

The ignorance which many men of the literary class show is wonderful, and it comes out freely in conversations in the guest-hall. A very grand military mandarin asserted not only that Lin and the Black Flags had driven the Japanese out of Formosa, but that the Straits of Formosa had yawned wide in answer to vows and prayers addressed to the gods by Lin, and that the navies of Russia, England, France, and Japan had perished in a common destruction in the vortex! A picture representing this catastrophe was for sale in Wan.[29]

They think that the Queen of England is tributary to China, that our Minister is in Peking to pay the tribute, and that the presents which the Queen sent to the Empress Dowager on her sixtieth birthday were the special tribute for the occasion.

They also believed that the American commission which had lately been at Chengtu for the purpose of assessing the damage done to the property of Americans in the previous riots was sent to congratulate the new Viceroy on his appointment!

Also many of the _literati_ say—and I had heard the same thing in the north—that outside of China there are five kingdoms united under one emperor, Jesus Christ, who rose from a peasant origin, that one is inhabited by dog-faced people,[30] and that in another, where each woman has two husbands, she has a hole in her chest, and that when they travel the husbands put a pole through it and carry her! They also say that the missionaries come and live in distant places like Wan and Paoning in order to find out the secret of China’s greatness and the way to destroy it by magic arts. A map of Asia hangs in the guest-hall, and Mr. Thompson overheard some of the guests saying to each other at different times, “Look at these ‘foreign devils’” (_yang-kwei-tze_); “they put China small on the map to deceive their god!”

It is impossible to have patience with their ignorance because of their overweening self-conceit. It is passable in Africa, but not in these men with their literary degrees, and their elaborate culture “of sorts,” and two thousand years of civilisation behind them.

Wan Hsien has a very large trade. Its shops are full of goods, native and foreign, and the traffic from the interior, as well as by junk, is enormous, but there are no returns, as it is not an open port. The actual city—_i.e_., the walled city—which contains the _yamens_ and other public buildings, is small, steep, and handsome. It has extended itself into large suburbs five miles in extent, of which the true city is the mere nucleus. They straggle along the river, high up on the cliffs above it, and two miles back, where they are arrested by a rocky barrier at a height in which is excavated and scaffolded a celebrated “Temple of the Three Religions,” at the top of 1570 fine stairs, a great place of pilgrimage. This back country, in which are few level acres, is exquisitely cultivated, and is crossed in several directions by flagged pathways, carried over ascents and descents by good stairs. These usually lead to lovely villages, built irregularly on torrent sides, among a great variety of useful trees.

The city is divided into two parts by a river-bed, then nearly dry, but when I saw it in summer it contained a very respectable stream, which serves as the public laundry. I have never seen so beautiful a bridge as the lofty, single stone arch, with a house at the highest part, which spans the river-bed, and which seems to spring out of the rock without any visible abutments.

Graceful pagodas and three-storeyed pavilions guard the approaches. The Feng Shui of Wan is considered perfect. Rich temples on heights above the river and the handsome temple called Chung-ku-lo (Drum and Bell Lodge), overlooking the small gorge below, with a large stage, under a fine three-storeyed pavilion, for the performance of the religious dramas, show that “The Three Religions” retain their hold on the people. The wealth of vegetation is wonderful. Not a barren or arid spot is to be seen from the water’s edge to the mountain summits which are the limits of vision. The shiny orange foliage, the dark formal cypress, the loquat and pomegranate, the gold of the plumed bamboo, the deep green of sugarcane, the freshness of the advancing grain crops, and the drapery of clematis and maidenhair on trees and rocks all delight the eyes. But the uniqueness of the neighbourhood of Wan consists in the number of its truncated sandstone hills, each bearing on its flat top a picturesque walled white village and fortification, to be a city of refuge in times of rebellion. These, rising out of a mass of greenery, with a look of inaccessibility about them, are a silent reference to unpleasant historic facts which distinguish Wan from other cities.

It is not alone that junks fringe the shores, but they are very largely built at Wan, for the passage of the rapids, of a convenient material—the tough, formal cypress which grows on the adjacent hills. They must be at once light and strong, and more disposed to bend than to break. Many of their fittings have a local origin, and many rich junk builders and junk owners live at Wan.

Foreign goods go up the river to Chungking, the westernmost treaty port, from twelve to twenty days higher up the river, and come down again to Wan. “The Province of the Four Streams” does not produce much cotton; and cotton yarn from Japan and India comes in large quantities into Wan to be woven there. In 1898 there were about 1000 handlooms. The cotton is woven into pieces about thirty feet long and sixteen inches broad, which take a man two days’ labour, from daylight till 9 p.m., to weave. A weaver’s wages with food come to about 600 _cash_, at present about 1_s._ 6_d._ per week of six days. Can Lancashire compete with this in anything but the output?