Chapter XXV: Paoning Fu and Sin-Tien-Tze

Paoning Fu, where I spent a week, is, in spring at least, a very attractive city. There is a pleasant sleepiness about it. Trade is neither so active or so self-asserting as usual. There is obviously a leisured class with time to enjoy itself. Large fortunes are not made; 45,000 taels is looked upon as wealth, and there are no millionaires to overshadow the small traders. Junks of eighteen tons and over can ascend to Paoning during much of the year. There is a considerable coal trade on the Tung river, and the city being in the centre of an important silk region, there is a degree of activity about the silk trade. There are such small industries as dyeing cottons, making wine and vinegar, and the export of pigs’ bristles and hides, but nothing is pursued very energetically. Among the population of about 20,000 there are a small number of Mohammedans, and wherever they exist beef and milk are attainable luxuries. In Paoning they cure and spice an excellent salt beef, which I found an agreeable variation from fowls on my further journey.

Officially, Paoning Fu is an important city, having a _Taotai_, a prefect, and a hsien, and many of its beautiful “suburban villas” are the residences of retired and expectant mandarins. Its suburbs are quite charming, and its suburban roads are densely shaded by large mulberry trees and the _Aleurites cordata_. Farther outside, are several fine temples in large grounds, and the public library. Paoning proper, with the _yamen_ and other official residences, streets of shops, and private dwellings with large wooded gardens, is surrounded by a wall twenty feet high, in good repair, with a flagged walk, ten feet broad, on the top of it. From this the aspect of the city was idealised by a coloured mist of pink and white—peach, plum, apricot, and cherry blossom, flecked with crimson from the double flowers of hardy, decorative peach trees. There are four fine but dilapidated gateways.

One of the gates was securely shut, and all persons who desired to enter or leave the city on that side were compelled to make a long _détour_. This closing of the north gate against the God of Rain is by a ceremonial act of the mandarin. Rain was in excess, and this was a significant hint to the rain god. Elsewhere I had seen the south gates of cities closed in drought against the God of Fire, who can only enter a city from that quarter. Fires are much dreaded during drought, when the timbers of houses are baked into a condition of perilous inflammability.

Outside the walls of Paoning Fu, which supply a delightful walk, are fine clean turf banks, and a turfed trench or moat, and fine trees; and the river front on the west side is truly grand, a terrace twenty-five feet broad being supported by a noble stone wall in twenty-five tiers, with broad stone staircases descending from the terrace to the river, short green turf, clean white sand, and clear green water below.

The finest of the suburban temples is dedicated to Went-zu, the God of Pestilence. I visited this with Mr. Williams. It was not possible to get any point of view on the level, for a photograph, and the chair-bearers suggested my taking one from the stage of an open temple theatre opposite, and brought a ladder to help me up with. In going back, a man of the literary class attacked Mr. Williams for this, and the next day the servants of the missionary ladies begged them not to go outside their house, for nothing was talked of in the streets and tea houses but this “outrage,” and the probable indignation of the gods, and the people were saying they would “kill all the foreigners.” Mr. Williams said that he had never heard such cries of “foreign devil,” and “foreign dog,” as at that time, and that it is observed that these cries and the hatred which prompts them increase the longer foreigners remain in a city.

Paoning, so far as its population goes, is unfriendly to foreigners, and the mission houses were wrecked a year previously, and the missionaries, some of whom were married women with young children, escaped to the _yamen_, where they received shelter and protection for some time, the mandarins then and since having shown much friendliness and desire for their safety. It is a complex situation on both sides.

Paoning is a great centre of China Inland Mission work. The directors of this body, which is undenominational, endeavour so far as is possible to group the missionaries of each ecclesiastical body together, and in this part of SZE CHUAN they all belong to the Church of England. Outside of the “sphere of interest” of the C.I.M. the Church Missionary Society has several mission stations, chiefly to the north and west of Paoning, and altogether in that region there are about sixty Anglican missionaries, several of them being university men, working on much the same lines.

Dr. Cassels, who was one of the pioneers, and formerly well known as an athlete at Cambridge, had recently been consecrated bishop, and came from the splendours of his consecration in Westminster Abbey to take up the old, simple, hardworking life, to wear a queue and Chinese dress, and be simply the “chief pastor.” The native Christians gave him a cordial reception on his return, and presented him with the hat of a Master of Arts and high boots, which make a very seemly addition to the English episcopal dress, giving it the propriety which is necessary in Chinese eyes, and in mine the picturesque aspect of one of the marauding prelates of the Middle Ages, the good bishop having a burly, athletic physique! Since his return, several of the lay missionaries have been ordained deacons.

The church, or cathedral, of which an illustration is given, was built almost entirely with Chinese money and gifts. It is Chinese in style, the chancel windows are “glazed” with coloured paper to simulate stained glass, and it is seated for two hundred. The persons represented as standing outside are Bishop Cassels, Mr. Williams, and the Chinese churchwarden. There are both churchwardens and sidesmen.

I witnessed a Chinese service at which nineteen persons of both sexes who had been confirmed on the previous Sunday received the Holy Communion. At matins, which followed, the church was crammed, and crowds stood outside, where they could both see and hear, this publicity contrasting with the Roman practice. The understanding that all should be silent during worship was adhered to. A Christian, formerly a Mohammedan of some means, and another, who had been a Taoist, read the lessons. The Bible, an Oriental book both in imagery and thought, is enjoyed and understood by Orientals, but I doubt much if it will be possible or even desirable to perpetuate the Prayer Book as it stands. It is so absolutely and intensely Western in its style, conceptions, metaphysic, and language of adoration, and, I think, is partly unintelligible as a manual of devotion. It contains any number of words which not only (as is to be expected) have no equivalents in the Eastern languages, but the ideas they express are unthinkable by the Eastern mind. Already many Eastern Christians are claiming an “Oriental Christ, not a Christ disguised in Western garb”—it may be that they will claim too a form of worship which shall be Oriental both in thought and expression, instead of one which represents to them in their most sacred moments an exotic creed.

The China Inland Mission has some very humble Chinese houses built round two compounds, in which two married couples, three bachelors, and, in the bishop’s house, two ladies were living, and at some distance off there is a ladies’ house, then occupied by five ladies. There are several guest-halls for Chinese visitors, class and school-rooms, porters’ and servants’ rooms. The furniture is all Chinese, and the whitewashed walls are decorated with Chinese scrolls chiefly.

I never saw houses so destitute of privacy, or with such ceaseless coming and going. Life there simply means work, and work spells happiness apparently, for the workers were all cheerful, and even jolly. Studying Chinese, preaching, teaching, advising, helping, guiding, arranging, receiving, sending forth, doctoring, nursing, and befriending make the mission compounds absolute hives of industry. It was a great drawback that medical help was nearly 300 miles off, and that the one trained nurse in the two missions was not ubiquitous. Much needless suffering and risk to life were the results. Happily in one of the beautiful suburbs, a noble Chinese mansion, a palace in size and solidity, was for sale for an old song, the half of which was purchased, and after undergoing alterations was opened a few months after my visit with a mandarin’s procession and great ceremony as the “Henrietta Bird Memorial Hospital”—the men’s department under Dr. Pruen, a physician of ten years’ Chinese experience, and the women’s under Miss Gowers, who also had considerable experience. The other half and a separate courtyard adjoining have been bought for a dwelling for the bishop, where he may carry on his work with fewer interruptions.

The ladies of this mission lead what I should think very hard lives, owing to their painful deference to Chinese etiquette, and their great desire to avoid doing anything which can give offence. As for instance, they never walk out without an elderly Chinese woman with them, or are carried except in closed chairs.

I left this hive of industry, and devoted lives, and glowing hospitalities with Mr. and Mrs. Williams and their children for a few days at Sin-tien-tze, where the China Inland Mission has obtained a large farmhouse for a sanitarium and centre of country work at a height of 2870 feet. Paoning is only 1520. This, in lat. 31° 55′, was my farthest point north on my SZE CHUAN journey.

Shortly after leaving Paoning the road mounts the northern hills, and keeps along a high barren ridge, or _liang-tsu_, for 130 _li_, the air becoming more bracing and delicious every hour. I have observed that in Western China an altitude of 3000 feet is equivalent, in the dryness and bracing qualities of the air, to 7000 feet in Japan.

We stayed for a night in a large, rambling inn in a market-place when it was not market day, and were quiet. Long flights of stairs conduct travellers to the top of the ridge, which is often less than ten feet broad, and falls down in natural rock-supported terraces to the valleys below. At the close of the second day’s journey the cultivation nearly ceased, the hills were bare and rocky, the road a mere straggle; and where two or three ridges meet, on turning a corner round a pine-clothed knoll, we came upon a large, lonely house with a dead, blank wall round it, and were heartily welcomed by its inmates, three ladies, who for some time past have conducted a mission to the scattered houses and hamlets of the neighbourhood with remarkable success.

A great gateway gives admission successively into two courts with their surrounding rooms. The common “sitting-room,” or, to use an Americanism, “living-room,” is extremely tasteful and pretty—pre-eminently a “lady’s room,” furnished with bamboo tables, chairs, a lounge, and foot-stools, and a folding screen covered with blue cotton, on which Christmas cards are prettily arranged. Blue cotton table-cloths, embroidered in white silk, covered the tables. The floor was matted. Chinese red scrolls hung on the whitewashed walls; there were books and flowering plants; and the room combined daintiness with solid comfort. Doors, with elaborate fretwork filled in with tissue paper, take the place of windows. The woodwork of all the rooms is varnished.

I expressed admiration and some wonderment that “at such a distance” (possibly from civilisation) such pretty furniture could be procured. It may be that my hostess thought she read in my remark some hint at “missionary luxury,” for she very kindly offered to enlighten me as to the cost of furnishing in Western China. The substantial and good-looking chairs cost fourpence each, the lounge two-and-sixpence, and the rest in proportion; the whole coming to a trifle under nineteen shillings, and all was produced in the neighbourhood, material and labour costing almost nothing. During my five days’ visit the weather became bitterly cold, and snow fell for the greater part of two days, but did not lie. No efforts brought the temperature of my room up to 40°, which was low for the 21st March, in lat. 31° 55′.