Chapter XXII: Hsai-Shan-Po to Siao-Kiao

It was partly to get Sunday’s rest in peace and quietness that I put up at this mountain hamlet. I could see to read and write without opening the door, and could move round my bed, and the smells were not so awful as usual. The central shed was full all day, and occasionally the women who came sent a polite request that I would exhibit myself to them, to which I always cheerfully responded.

The “enormous size” of my feet, though my shoes are only threes, interested them greatly. I was much surprised to find that in SZE CHUAN, except among the Manchu or Tartar women and those of a degraded class, foot-binding is universal, and that the shoe of even the poorest and most hard-worked peasant woman does not exceed four inches in length. Though in walking these “golden lilies” look like hoofs, and the women hobble on their heels, I have seen them walk thirty _li_ in a day, and some have told me that they can walk sixty easily! Two women came to Hsia-shan-po from a village twenty-seven mountain _li_ away, merely out of curiosity to see me, and returned the same afternoon. The hobble looks as if it must be very painful, and is a sort of waddle also.

So great an authority as Dr. Wells Williams writes, “The practice ... is more an inconvenient than a dangerous custom,” but I have never seen a hospital in China without some case or cases not only of extreme danger to the foot or great toe, but of ulcers or gangrene, involving absolute loss by amputation. It is fashion, of course. Hitherto a Chinese woman with “big feet” is either denationalised or vile; a girl with unbound feet would have no chance of marriage, and a bridegroom finding that his bride had large feet when he expected small ones, would be abundantly justified by public opinion in returning her at once to her parents.[39] It is essentially a native Chinese custom of extreme antiquity, and it is remarkable that the Manchu conquerors, who successfully imposed the “pigtail” and narrow sleeves on the conquered, have totally failed even to modify this barbarous custom.

There is no definite age for beginning to bind the feet, but rich people’s girls usually have it done between four and five years, and poor people’s either at betrothal or between seven and nine years, according to local custom. The process is very much more painful at the latter age, and the treatment of the big toe is different. In the case of the younger child, four of the toes are doubled under the foot, the big toe is laid on the top, and the deformity is then tightly bandaged. In both cases in adult life, when the process is complete, there is a deep cleft across the sole of the foot between the heel and toes, which are forced close together. If skilfully bound, this cleft ought to be deep and narrow enough to hold a Mexican dollar. The foot-binding process is too well known to need any description.

I saw the initial stage both at Canton and Hsia-shan-po. In the last case the girl was nearly ten, and was just betrothed to an elderly rich man. She suffered agonies, the toes were violently bent under the foot and bandaged in that position, and from the sounds I think that some of the tendons were ruptured. Yet both she and a small child at Canton consented willingly in order to get “rich husbands.” The lot of the women of the lower class is rough and severe, and it is not surprising that girls long to escape from it by making rich marriages, even though the escape be by such a path of pain. Then again the weak feminine nature desires to secure the admiration which in poetry, prose, and common speech is bestowed on the “golden lilies.”

A woman has to bandage her feet every day of her life, or the “beauty” of the shape is lost, and the whole process of deforming them is carried out by carefully regulated bandaging. The Chinese women greatly object to show their uncovered feet. I have only twice seen them. They are very painful objects and the leg, the development of the muscles of the calf having been checked, tapers from the knee to the foot, and there are folds of superfluous skin. The bandages are not covered by stockings. The shoes worn are very soft, and where possible are of embroidered silk, with soles of stitched leather. The women make their own, and the peasant women sit outside their houses in the evenings stitching or embroidering them.

As a set-off against the miseries of foot-binding is the extreme comfort of a Chinese woman’s dress in all classes, no corsets or waist-bands, or constraints of any kind, and possibly the full development of the figure which it allows mitigates or obviates the evils which we should think would result from altering its position on the lower limbs. So comfortable is Chinese costume, and such freedom does it give, that since I wore it in Manchuria and on this journey, I have not been able to take kindly to European dress.

But in SZE CHUAN it varies from women’s dress, either Manchu or Chinese, as I had previously seen it worn. All Chinese women wear trousers, but they show very little, often not at all, below the neat petticoat, with its plain back and front and full kilted sides. But in SZE CHUAN (and it may be elsewhere) the feminine skirt is discarded, and the trousers, either of a sailor cut, or full and tightly swathed round what should be ankles, are worn with only the ordinary loose, wide-sleeved garment fastening at the side, reaching only to the knees above them. It is a hideous dress. The petticoat is only worn by outcasts, and this has compelled some of the missionary ladies, who wear Chinese dress, to adopt the wide trousers. I never became reconciled to them. The loose upper garment and half jacket, half sleeved cloak, is most convenient, as for changes of seasons only easily carried changes of underclothing are needed.

After the disturbance at Liang-shan I took my revolver, which I had previously carried in the well of my chair, “into common wear,” putting it into a very pacific looking cotton bag, and attached it to my belt under this capacious garment, hoping devoutly that its six ball cartridges might always repose peacefully in their chambers. It is most unwise to let firearms be seen in Chinese travelling.

From Hsia-shan-po onwards the country is less romantic. We had previously left the main road, and encountered Chinese roads at their worst, narrow dykes passing through flooded rice-fields, or through farms where the farmers gradually nibble the road away, or convey it tortuously through their own farmyards, or in a few cases absorb it altogether. The mud for days was deep. It was impossible to walk unless equipped with an arrangement which attached three spikes to the heel of the boot or sandal. The width of the road was usually twelve inches, enough for single file, but when two strings of men carrying chairs or burdens met, the difficulties were great, as there was always the risk of slipping off the road into two feet of chilly water and slime. So when my chair-bearers saw another chair in the distance they yelled as loud as they could, expecting the other chair to give place, and edge off where the strip of _terra firma_ happened to widen a little.

On one occasion, however, we met a portly man in a closed chair, travelling with only two bearers, and, in spite of yells, he came straight on till our poles were nearly touching. The clamour was tremendous, my seven men and his two all shouting and screaming at once, as if in a perfect fury, while he sat in supercilious calm, I achieving the calm, but not the superciliousness. In the midst of the _fracas_ his chair and its bearers went over into the water. The noise was indescribable, and my bearers, whom I cannot acquit of having had something to do with the disaster, went off at a run with yells and peals of laughter, leaving the traveller floundering in the mire, not breathing, but roaring execrations.

There are roads “of sorts” to every village and hamlet. The one I was travelling on was called by courtesy a main road. There was nothing “main” about it but the bridges, which were always in good repair, and four or five times its width. Had it been reduced to its present dimensions by successful nibblings, or were the bridges built in a glowing prophetic instinct, I wonder? The magistrate of the district is nominally responsible for keeping the roads in order, but responsibility is an elastic term in China. As in Korea, he has the power to order men out to work at repairs, but he rarely does so unless he gets notice of a forthcoming visit of a high official, for the people hate work without pay, and he avoids this method of becoming unpopular.

Nothing could be worse than the road which I travelled for some days. To walk was to slide, wade, slip, and fall in the deep mud; to “ride” gave me the unpleasing spectacle of my coolies doing the same, exposing me to sundry abrupt changes of position, and the difficulty of passing chairs and laden porters on the road made progress slow and tiresome. Yet much produce was on the move, giving the impression that traffic would increase largely if there were better means of communication. One of the many needs of China is good roads. There are many rivers in SZE CHUAN, but its physical configuration usually prevents the linking of these by canals, as in the level eastern provinces, and these infamous roads hamper trade very considerably.

Raw, cold, drizzling hours succeeded Hsia-shan-po. The country is less peopled, and the dwellings decidedly poorer; the corries with their large farmhouses disappeared, and there was even a stretch of gravelly, desolate scenery. Wherever the land is unfitted for rice culture the population becomes thin, as the price of this staff of life is so much enhanced by land carriage as to render it unattainable.

I crossed the pretty pass of Kyin-pan-si, and ferried the Kiu Ho, a clear, bright stream. There is very much opium grown in that region, and some sugarcane, as well as all the usual cereals and root crops. “Small _cash_” appeared, and continued for three days the currency of the region, increasing the exasperation of all transactions. The Kiu Ho is navigable for fair-sized junks considerably above the point at which I crossed it, and there was much traffic in coal at Kiu Hsien, a prefectural city finely situated on the cliffs and hills above it.

Incredible filth, indescribable odours, which ought to receive a strong Anglo-Saxon name, grime, forlornness, bustle, business, and discordant noises characterise Chinese cities, and the din of Kiu Hsien was deafening. I was carried from the river up a fine, new, broad flight of stone stairs, at the top of which a great crowd was in readiness to receive me, but the _chai-jen_, whose rags hardly covered them, and who turned out to be beggars to whom the right of escorting me had been sold, cleared the way, and turning aside at the deep, dark city gate, along a narrow street running under the wall, I was landed among the crowds and horrors of the yard of a Chinese city inn by no means of the first class. However, I got a room, which, though small, dirty, and tumbling to pieces, had an opening upon the roof of a lean-to, used for the malodorous purpose of drying vegetables, overhanging the river, and as I had both air and light I felt in Elysium.

While I was eating my curry, as usual from a piece of millboard on my lap, with a Jaeger sheet pinned round my shoulders—for it was very cold—two _yamen_ officials, in rich brocaded silks and satins, entered, and asked to see my passport, which they copied, using my camp bed for a table. Be-dien was much offended, for it is outrageous, according to Chinese etiquette, for men to enter a woman’s room. They asked me why my passport gave me “rank,” and made me “equal to the consuls,” and how a woman could “belong to the _literati_,” to which questions, as at that time I was ignorant of the contents of the document, I could give no intelligent replies.

They told me that Kiu Hsien has 100 schools (in China numbers are always round), and is the centre of a large trade in opium, tobacco, packing paper, and straw hats.

Rooms in Chinese inns usually have good bolts, but this had none, and after dismissing Be-dien it cost me much time and labour to barricade the door. There was an instance of superstition on the day’s journey. I got out of the chair the wrong way, and the bearers were scared. They said it would cause them to die within a year, and they offered incense sticks at the next shrine to avert the calamity. In the morning I was in the family room at the inn when the morning devotions were performed to some gilded strips of paper inscribed with characters. The householder put before them some lighted incense sticks, and bowed three times.

The circumstances of the next day’s journey were decidedly unfavourable. We had ten hours of an infamous road in a torrent of rain with a very cold wind. I could scarcely ease the bearers at all, for my leather shoes slipped so badly on the mud, that, even with a stout stick and Be-dien’s help, I could not keep on my feet. The road, which was a dyke between flooded rice-fields, never reached two feet in width. It had once been flagged, but some of the stones had disappeared altogether, some were tilted up, and others were tilted down, and it was truly horrible. The Chinese hate rain, and, above all, getting their feet wet, and I admired the jolly, manly way in which my poor fellows in their two thin cotton garments trudged through the driving rain and slippery slush till they had done twenty-two miles. When they reached at dusk, quite exhausted, the wretched village of Ching-sze-yao, there was no inn, and it was only after I had sat in the rain in the village roadway for an hour that the _chai-jen_ induced a man to take us into a deplorable place.

Shelter it was not. The roof dripped from fifty points, and the walls, having shrunk from the joists, let in the cold wind all round. There was no fire but the fire-pots used for cooking, for the use of which there was much squabbling, and no light, except from a clay saucer of oil, over the rim of which some rush pith projected. I was wet to the knees, my canvas bed was soaked, and all else, from the spoiling of waterproof bags and covers by the hot sun of the two previous summers, but when I saw the coolies lying on damp straw in their undried garments, each with a fire-pot between his knees, and not a quilt to cover him, I felt very Mark Tapleyish, specially when the house-_frau_ brought me a fire-pot with which to warm my hands. The poverty and discomfort of this house typified the condition in which thousands of the Chinese peasantry live. They were good-natured people, not over-curious, and the children, who were eaten up by skin diseases, were gentle and docile.

The next day, March 4th, was one of clear, grey twilight, without either wind or rain. In the last fifty miles the country had changed very considerably, and for the worse. The passes over the mountain ranges had brought us into the “Red Basin” of Richthofen, which is estimated as embracing about two-thirds of the province in extent, and, perhaps, eight or nine tenths of its wealth and population. It is supposed to have an area of about 100,000 square miles, and a population of from 40,000,000 to 54,000,000. The soil everywhere is of a deep, bright, rich, red colour, and contrasts with the charm of the varied greenery which, in the absence of winter, the “Red Basin” produces during the whole year.

Probably no part of China supports so large a population to the acre, and it is increasing so fast that thousands of men by unremitting toil only keep themselves and their families a little above starvation point, coolie labour being so redundant as to depress wages to the lowest level. The soil is most carefully cultivated, the soft, red rock being easily crumbled down by the peasants’ simple implements, and the whole surface is treated by the methods which we term “garden cultivation,” which in that beneficent climate, and with the Chinese habit of carefully preserving the refuse of towns and villages and spreading it on the land, so that the whole, both from plant and animal life, is returned to the soil, two, three, and sometimes even four crops are produced within the year!

Within a few days’ journey lie the depopulated but fertile valleys of YUNNAN, a noble field for SZE CHUAN emigration; but it has not occurred to the Government to bear the considerable expense of deporting a few millions of the toilers of the “Red Basin” to the good lands calling for population, supplying them with seed, and supporting them for six months! The move would tax the resources of a better-organised administration.

SZE CHUAN is a rich and superb province of boundless resources, and I believe, from what I saw and heard, that the trading and farming classes are very well off, and are able to afford many luxuries, but I certainly saw several overcrowded regions of the “Red Basin,” where the condition of the people deeply moved my sympathy and pity, for a docile, cheerful, industrious, harmless population, free, as rural poverty is apt to be, from crime and gross vice, is giving the utmost of its strength for a wage which never permits to man, wife, or child the comfortable sensation of satiety, and which when rice rises in price changes the habitual short commons into starvation.

There were no more grand porcelain-fronted temples, large country mansions, and rich farmhouses, and instead of parallel ranges cleft by fine passes in the grey limestone, there is a singular formation, red sandstone hills and hummocks all more or less naturally terraced, as are also the sides of the many pear-shaped dells which lie among them; red cliffs, one above another, from fifteen to thirty feet high, supporting narrow strips of red soil about two feet deep; circular hills, also of some height, diminishing into truncated cones, with natural circular terraces, more or less aided by art, running regularly round them, and usually a single tree, tops what one is tempted to call the “erection.” There is a fatiguing conventionality about that part of the Red Basin.

One may, indeed, regard the whole of this vast basin as a mass of low terraced hills and valleys of no width, destitute of any plains but the great Chengtu plain, free from floods owing to its configuration, and drained by fine navigable rivers, with many navigable ramifications, while coal, both hard and soft, is believed to underlie the whole. Salt, petroleum, and iron abound, and copper, silver, gold, and lead are found on the western border, as well as enormous quantities of nitrate of soda and sulphur.

This great depression may be regarded as a sort of winter garden, over much of which the mercury rarely falls below 45°, and a canopy of clouds hanging over it all the winter keeps in the moist heat.[40] It is said that winter sunshine is so rare in Chungking that the dogs bark at the sun when they see it. For all the rich productions of this Red Basin, which have kept the balance of trade for years in favour of SZE CHUAN, there is, let me repeat, but the one outlet: the Yangtze.