Chapter XXVII: Tze-Tung Hsien to Kuan Hsien

An hour after leaving the great temples of Ta-miao, with their throngs of pilgrims and the remarkable friendliness of the people, we came upon the walls, gates, and towers of Tze-tung Hsien, the approach to which is denoted by a graceful eleven-storeyed pagoda on a neighbouring hill. I had not been through a large walled city since the riot at Liang-shan, and I had to brace myself up for entering this one, which has a reputed population of 27,000 people. The inhabitants were very orderly however, and though the streets were greatly crowded, the people looked pleasant. The Liang-shan riot is known to all the mandarins, and obviously they have no wish for a repetition of it, and I adhere to my belief that they are in most, if not in all cases, able to prevent attacks on foreigners.

Tze-tung Hsien is a clean and prosperous-looking city, with wide streets lined by good shops, in which the goods are more displayed than is usual. It is surrounded with well-cultivated country, and good country houses, and trades in vegetable oils, cottons, and raw and spun silk, some of the strong, coarse “oak silk” being brought in for manufacture. Oil is made from the seeds of the _aleurites cordata_, rape seed, pea nuts, and opium seed. Opium oil bears the highest price. The town has a stirring aspect, and its walls and gateways are in good repair. Outside, the Fou River is crossed by a noble stone bridge of nine arches with fine stone balustrades, carrying a flagged roadway eighteen feet broad. The centre arch is thirty feet high. It is the finest bridge that I had then seen in China. A grand temple outside the walls, and an elaborately carved triple-storeyed _pai-fang_, complete the attractions of this thriving city.

On the western route from Tze-tung Hsien the country becomes increasingly fertile, and the road more dilapidated. The cedars have disappeared, and the pavement is only four feet in width. The traffic in oil, cotton, and tobacco was great, and crowds of pilgrims, very respectable looking, with gongs, incense tables, and offerings, were trudging to the Ta-miao temples. They said that they were making offerings to the God of War for having driven the “barbarian rebels” into the sea! There were funerals, too, and a train of twelve led horses, each carrying a red flag, with on it a mandarin’s name and official titles. These were heavily laden with luggage, and in front there was the mandarin’s coffin, with a live cock upon it, carried by forty men.

The prevalent impression left by this great road is that of toil and poverty. Rice had risen considerably in the previous three weeks, which meant to many millions that they would never get a full meal. The region I had entered is one of the most crowded parts of the Red Basin and of China, and I often asked myself, “Why are there so many Chinese?” They seem to come into the world just to bury their fathers. That night again I slept in a room with a huge coffin, which had been waiting interment for some years, and incense was regularly burned before it.

On March 28th I reached Mien-chow, a city of about 60,000 souls, the largest that I had yet seen in SZE CHUAN. The journey from Paoning Fu had been most propitious in all respects, and the fine weather had come at last. I entered the city by a bridge of boats over the Fou, a great tributary of the Chia-ling. Mien-chow has a curious geographical situation. The Fou basin, in which it stands, though north of Chengtu and nearer the water parting, is on a lower level than the basin of the Min, from which it is divided by a low ridge. So Mien-chow is actually 250 feet below Chengtu, its altitude being 1350 feet.

It is a well-built and clean town, with a fine wall, and a river front well protected by a handsome bund of cobbles and concrete, with eight slanting faces. The Fou is navigable, and when the water is high, boats can descend to Chungking in six or seven days. There is an enormous wheelbarrow traffic from Mien-chow to the capital, principally of sugar and tobacco. The busy and crowded streets are lined with shops, in which every conceivable article in iron is displayed, from surgical instruments, to spades, ploughshares, and articles in wrought iron. There are fully half a mile of such shops. The great trade of Mien-chow, however, is in silk, and much cotton is woven in its neighbourhood. The shops display German and Japanese knick-knacks, foreign yarns, and printed cottons, besides Kansuh furs, brocades, silks, temple furniture, and drugs. The shops, with their varied, and in many cases costly, contents show that the neighbourhood has great purchasing power.

The passage through the thronged streets took nearly an hour, but all was quiet. I was not allowed to go to an inn, but was most kindly received at the Church Mission House, a dark and not agreeably situated house in a crowded Chinese quarter, inhabited by the two ladies who, after four years of patience and difficulties, have effected a permanent lodgment in what is well known as a hostile city. They spent the first two years at an inn, and so little were they thought of, that the mandarin, when urged to take some action against them, replied, “What does it matter? they are only women!”

During this time all their attempts to rent a house failed, because the officials threatened to beat and imprison anyone letting a house to a foreigner; but a fortnight before my visit a man ruined by opium smoking let them have for ten years the place into which they had just moved, close to the great temple of Confucius. Access to it is through an area inhabited by Chinese—a forlorn, dirty yard—and through an inner yard full of Chinese, who seemed to be always gambling or smoking opium, a third yard being the newly-acquired property, from which some of the Chinese had not yet cleared out. The two last courts are rented by the Church Missionary Society, and have subsequently been improved and made habitable, and “The Emily Clayton Memorial,” a dispensary with a surgical ward under Dr. Squibb, a qualified English doctor, has been opened in the outer of the two compounds.

It was interesting to see what missionaries in China have to undergo in the initial stage of residence in a Chinese city. The house was utterly out of repair—dirty, broken—half the paper torn off the windows, and the eaves so deep and low that daylight could scarcely enter. There was an open guest-hall in the middle used constantly for classes and services; endless parties of Chinese passed in and out all day long, poking holes in the remaining windows, opening every door that was not locked, taking everything they could lay hands on; and the noise was only stilled from four to six a.m.—men shouting, babies screaming, dogs barking, squibs and crackers going off, temple bells, gongs, and drums beating—no rest, quiet, or privacy.

There were two services in the guest-hall on Sunday, conducted by Mr. Heywood Horsburgh, the superintendent of the Mission, and several classes for women also, but all in a distracting babel—men playing cards outside the throng, men and women sitting for a few minutes, some laughing scornfully, others talking in loud tones, some lighting their pipes, and a very few really interested. This is not the work which many who go out as missionaries on a wave of enthusiasm expect, but this is what these good people undergo day after day and month after month.

The place where the two ladies spent two years, consisted of a guest-room at an inn in one of the most crowded of the city streets, a living-room through it, a kitchen through that, and for a sleeping-room, a loft above the living-room, reached by a ladder, just under the unlined tiles. There was no light in any room, except from a paper window, into the semi-dark passage. The floors were mud; wood, water, charcoal, and all things had to be carried in and out through the living-room; no privacy was possible; the temperature hung at about 100° for weeks in summer; there were the ceaseless visits of crowds of ill-bred Chinese women, staying for hours at a time; and without and in the inn, seldom pausing, there was the unimaginable din of a big Chinese city. Under these circumstances their love and patience had won twelve women to be Christians.

Mr. and Mrs. Cormack, of the China Inland Mission, and a thirteen months’ baby, arrived before I left, he very ill of malarial fever. They were swept out of Chengtu in the riots, losing all their possessions, and with this infant had been moving for seven months, having lastly been driven out of Kansuh by the Mohammedan rebellion. During the whole seven months they had never been in one place more than twelve days. It is a grave question whether married men and married women ought to be placed in regions of precarious security. Mr. Heywood Horsburgh’s house at Kuan Hsien had just been attacked and bored into by a number of burglars, and between the terror caused by this, and the hostile cries in the streets, which they understood too well, his delicate, sensitive young daughters, one of them twelve years old, had become so thoroughly nervous that the only possible cure was to take them home. I saw several ladies in Western China who, after escaping from mobs with their young children, were affected in the same way.

Mr. and Mrs. Horsburgh and I left Mien-chow on March 31st, a grey, dull day, but clear. We left the Ta-lu and travelled by infamous roads, often only a few inches wide, frequently on the top of rice dykes. Great mountains, snow-crested, spurs of the Tibetan ranges, loomed through the clouds to the north-west, while we journeyed through the eastern portion of the great Chengtu plain, the rich, well-watered soil green with barley and opium, and beautiful with miles of rape, largely grown for oil, rolling in canary yellow waves before a pleasant breeze. Large farmhouses had reappeared, farming hamlets, and big temples, all surrounded by fine trees. There are frequent water-mills of a very peculiar construction, said by experts to be the oldest form in the world, the wheel being placed horizontally just above the lower level of the water.

Before we left the Ta-lu, the great highway to the capital, the wheelbarrow traffic was enormous. These “machines,” with a big wooden wheel placed so near the centre of gravity as to throw the weight of the load as little as possible on the driver’s shoulders, carry goods on platforms on either side and behind the wheel, which is solid. One man can propel five hundredweight. Heavy loads have one man to propel and another to drag them. They move in long files, their not altogether unmelodious creak being heard afar off, and the stone road is deeply grooved by their incessant passage.

After two pleasant days’ journey we reached Mien-chuh Hsien, a town of 50,000 people, according to the statement of the magistrate’s secretary. It is not a handsome town, but it has a beautiful modern bridge over a branch of the Fou, of six stone arches, a fine roof, iron balustrades, and a central roofed tower. It is a busy and prosperous city, with many fine temples and grand mountain views. The production of paper, especially coloured paper, is its speciality, but it also manufactures largely wood and horn combs, indigo, and fine wheaten flour. Much salt is made in the neighbourhood, and in the hills thirty _li_ off there are coal mines, producing coal which burns with a clear white flame, and little ash. There, as elsewhere, the missionaries have introduced English articles of utility, which have “caught on” among the Chinese.

A cordial welcome awaited us at the Church Missionary Society’s house. The initial stage, as I saw it at Mien-chow, was passed, and we were received into as trim a little home as one could see anywhere, or wish to see. Turning from the street, where the people did not molest even by curiosity, down a narrow alley and through a door, down a passage on one side of which is the guest-hall, we entered a small and very bright compound, cheery with pots of primulas and chrysanthemums, with five small cottage rooms round it, with paper windows, but light, cheerful, and homelike, with simple daintinesses, and a bright coal fire in a quaint corner fire-place. The place is just a few Chinese cottages, formerly used as a gambling den. Mr. and Mrs. Phillips, who have transmogrified it chiefly by their own handiwork, had only lately been able to rent it owing to the opposition of the mandarins, who can bring many threats and much pressure to bear on persons who would otherwise be willing to lease property to foreigners.

The anti-Christian element everywhere seems a feeble one in the opposition. It is to foreigners, simply as such, that the objection is made, as “child-eaters” pre-eminently; and in Mien-chuh the people said that the missionaries wanted the houses for hellish purposes, and that they would dig under them and make a way to England, and that foreign soldiers would come by it and take their lands, and that they wanted lock-up rooms in which to hide the golden cocks which they dug out of the mountains by night!

I left Mien-chuh with Mrs. Horsburgh on a somewhat unlucky journey, still travelling over the Chengtu plain in a westerly direction. The time of year for theatricals, which are a great passion with the Chinese, had begun. There is a large temple outside Mien-chuh, with the usual adjunct of a stage, richly decorated, with a massive canopy roof, for the “religious drama.” But on this day, being the festival of the god to whom the temple is dedicated, this was supplemented by temporary theatres and booths covering fully half an acre of the temple grounds, and the great court was crammed with a closely-wedged mass of Chinese, and the adjacent grounds and the road were such a crush of people that our chairs could hardly get through. There must have been from twelve to fifteen thousand present.

These plays are got up by the priests, who send the neophytes round with a subscription paper, afterwards pasting the names of the donors, inscribed on red sheets, on the walls of the temple. The priests let the purlieus for the occasion for the sale of refreshments, and also for gambling tables and other evil purposes, and usually make a profit out of what is professedly a religious celebration. When the subscription list has been filled up, the priests engage the best talent that their funds will allow of.

Theatrical companies in China retain their original strolling character, and there are few permanent theatres, the erection of the great sheds, in which several thousand can be accommodated, being a separate branch of the carpenter’s trade. A play usually lasts for three days, and the periods for sleeping and eating are wonderfully minimised. Business is suspended in the neighbourhood, and the people act as if the drama were the only thing worth living for. It is not etiquette for women of the upper classes to frequent the theatre, and private theatrical performances are given in rich men’s houses, but women of the lower classes, generally carrying babies, attend in large numbers and usually sit in the galleries. Lads perform the female parts, with grotesque success, transforming their feet into excellent representations of “golden lilies,” and hobbling and tottering to perfection.

I have only been present at two Chinese plays. They interest me greatly, and it is on the stage alone that the gorgeous costumes of brocaded and embroidered silk of former dynasties are to be seen. The scenery is simple and imperfect. The orchestra fills up all pauses vigorously, and strikes a crashing noise at intervals during the play to add energy or fury to the performance. Ghosts or demons appear from a trap-door in the stage. The scenes are not divided by a curtain, and the play proceeds on its lengthened course with only intervals for sleep and eating. The imperfect scenery makes it necessary for the actor to state what part he is performing, and what the person he represents has been doing while off the stage. There are comic actors who have only to appear on the boards to convulse an audience with laughter, and tragic actors who are equally successful in making men (or women) weep. There is no applause in a Chinese theatre. Admiration is expressed by a loud and prolonged sigh, as if indicating that the tension had been too great, or by an utterance between a sigh and a groan. A crowd absorbed with theatricals is usually peaceable, and the police are always at hand, but in country places a play is apt to assemble the roughs of the neighbourhood, as I learned the next day to my cost.

Chinese theatricals are very clever, for without anything which can be called scenery, and without a curtain, and with my own complete ignorance of the language, the actors by their admirable acting presented to my mind very distinct stories, in the one case of political intrigue, and in the other of military patriotism and self-sacrifice. The morals of the Chinese stage, so far as the sentiments of the plays are concerned, are said by severe critics to be good; the acting was quite unobjectionable when I was present, but I have understood that it is not invariably so. The earnestness of attention, and the delight on a sea of yellow faces at one of these theatrical representations are most interesting.

As we journeyed westwards, the plain became more and more luxuriant, and the aspect of wealth and comfort more pronounced. The great farmhouses are enclosed by high walls, and are shaded by cedars or cypresses, bamboo groves and fruit trees, the latter in early April in all the beauty of blossom. Groves of superb timber failed to conceal the gold and colour of grand temples. There were water-mills, canalised streams with many branches,—from which everywhere peasants, with fans and umbrellas, were pumping water by the contrivance shown in the illustration on next page—and rivers with broad winter beds, two of them spanned by very fine roofed bridges, rafters and supports lacquered red, and decorated with tablets in black and red lacquer, bearing the names incised in gold of the public-spirited men who had restored them.

In the afternoon an incident occurred which goes to show that the Chinese need a gospel of civilisation as well as of salvation. The road had left the rich and populous part of the plain, and had reached a broad and completely dry river-bed, full of round water-worn stones, crossed by a long covered bridge leading into the small town of Lo-kia-chan, at which, at the top of the sloping shingle bed of the river, a theatrical performance was proceeding before a crowd of some six thousand people. Mrs. Horsburgh proposed that we should not cross the bridge into the town, but should continue along the river bank opposite to it and cross the bed lower down. My idea usually is, and was then, to take “the bull by the horns,” but I deferred to her long experience, and she went on at some distance in front in a closed chair and in scrupulously accurate Chinese dress, I following in my open chair and in my _olla podrida_ costume—Chinese dress, European shoes, and a Japanese hat.

The crowd caught sight of my open chair, which, being a novelty, was an abomination, and fully two thousand men rushed down one shingle bank and up the other, brandishing sticks and porters’ poles, yelling, hooting, crying “Foreign devil,” and “Child-eater,” telling the bearers to put the chair down. In the distance I saw my runners proving their right to their name. When I afterwards remonstrated with them, they replied, “What could two men do against two thousand?” but a resource of power lay in the magistrate’s letter. Then there were stones thrown, ammunition being handy. Some hit the chair and bearers, and one knocked off my hat. The yells of “Foreign devil,” and “Foreign dog,” were tremendous. Volleys of stones hailed on the chair, and a big one hit me a severe blow at the back of my ear, knocking me forwards and stunning me.

Be-dien said that I was insensible for “some time,” during which a “reason talker” harangued the crowd, saying it had done enough, and if it killed me, though I was only a woman, foreign soldiers would come and burn their houses and destroy their crops, and worse. This sapient reasoning had its effect. When I recovered my senses, the chair was set down in the midst of the crowd, which was still hooting and shouting, but no further violence was offered, and as the bearers carried me on, the crowd gradually thinned. I had a violent pain in my head, and the symptoms of concussion of the brain, and felt a mortifying inclination to cry. The cowards, as usual, attacked from behind.

After three very painful hours, in which I should have been glad to lie down by the roadside, we reached the great, walled, district city of Peng Hsien, with wide, clean streets, fine shops, temples, and guildhalls, a flagged roadway curved in the centre, and stone sidewalks, and what is regarded as a great curiosity, a lofty pagoda riven in twain, each half standing up perfect. The city, the population of which is officially stated at 28,000, manufactures brass and iron goods, iron being mined in the neighbourhood, and coal not far off.

Here, again, there was a display of rowdyism. “The city ran together,” and for half a mile I was the subject of insult, though not of actual violence. The street was nearly impassable from the crowds beating on my chair with sticks, hooting, yelling “Foreign devil,” “Foreign dog,” “Child-eater,” and worse, yelling into my ear, kicking the chair, and spitting. We were carried into a very fine inn, which ran very far back, its courtyards ending in a guest-hall, with oranges and lilies in pots in the middle, and a mandarin’s room of much pretension beyond.

A masculine crowd filling the courts surged in after us, keeping up a frightful clamour. The innkeeper put me into the mandarin’s room, and begged me not to show myself; and Be-dien went to the _yamen_ to make a complaint regarding the outrage at Lo-kia-chan. As soon as he left, the crowd began to hoot and yell and thump the door. I got up and barricaded it with the heaviest furniture I could drag. Then they got a spade, or wedge, and began to force it open. I deplored my helpless condition—faint, giddy, and with a cracking headache, and an unmannerly crowd of men ready to burst in. The bolt and barricade were on the verge of yielding, when the mandarin’s secretary and another official arrived, and at once produced order.

They interviewed Mrs. Horsburgh, who was really able to tell very little, and then I was unearthed, and gave my evidence with a bandaged head and a sense of unutterable confusion in my brain. The mandarin sent an apology for the rudeness in Peng Hsien, but partly excused the people, as they, he said, had never seen an open chair or a foreign hat before. The secretary said that they had sent to arrest the ringleaders of the disturbance at Lo-kia-chan, which I did not believe, but was glad of his courtesy. It was difficult for him to understand that I could be so severely hurt when there was no effusion of blood. Soldiers were posted in the courtyard for the night, and in the morning, besides runners, there were four soldiers at my door, who marched, two before and two behind my chair for the day’s journey to Kuan Hsien. I had a very bad night, and felt very ill the next day, with everything wavering before my eyes. I suffered much for a long time from this blow and the brain disturbance which followed, but I will dismiss the unpleasant subject from these pages by saying that I did not get over the effects for a year, and that it was my last experience of violence in China.

Perfect quiet prevailed in the crowded street of Peng Hsien. The Chengtu plain grew richer and richer, the plumed bamboo and the cedars and _cupressus funebris_ round the great farmhouses grander, and towards afternoon snow-peaks, atmospherically uplifted to a colossal height, appeared above the clouds in the north, with craggy and wooded spurs below them, descending abruptly to the magnificent plain. Everywhere living waters in their musical rush echoed the name of the great man who before the Christian era turned the vast plain into a paradise. There was a covered bridge over a wide rushing river; a dirty, narrow suburban street, a narrow alley, and then a cheerful compound, in which a brown spotted _dendrobium_ was blooming profusely, shared by three Scotch missionaries of the China Inland Mission, and six of the Church Missionary Society, women predominating.

At the back of the house the clear, sparkling Min, just released from its long imprisonment in the mountains, sweeps past with a windy rush, and the mountain views are magnificent, specially where the early sun tinges the snow-peaks with pink. Why should I not go on, I asked myself, and see Tibetans, yaks, and aboriginal tribes, rope bridges, and colossal mountains, and break away from the narrow highways and the crowds, and curiosity, and oppressive grooviness of China proper?