Chapter XXXV: Downward Bound

The deep blue, glittering skies of the high altitudes were exchanged for the mist and dulness which have conferred upon SZE CHUAN the name of “The Cloudy Province,” and with the lower levels came mosquitoes and sandflies, and a day shade temperature from 82° to 93°, very little alleviated during the night. I left the capital in a small flat-bottomed _wupan_, drawing four inches of water, with a mat roof, and without doors at either end. Yet my cambric curtains were never lifted, and when I desired it I enjoyed complete privacy at the expense of partial asphyxiation. At that time, May 20, the water was so low that no bigger boat could make the passage, and numbers of small, trim house-boats were aground.

It was the start for a river journey of over 2000 miles, the first thousand of which were accomplished in this and similar boats. It was a delightful and most propitious journey, and introduced me to many new beauties and interests, and to a most attractive area of prosperity. For the first day the boatmen made more use of their shoulders than of their oars, lifting and shoving the boat, which “drave heavily” over sand and shingle and often bumped like a cart over paving stones. For the ascent of the river breast-poles are used by men wading. From Chengtu Fu to Sui Fu the Min is called by the Chinese the Fu, from the three Fu cities on its banks. After Be-dien had shopped for three hours, the result being only a small bag of charcoal, we dropped down under a fine stone bridge of several arches to a pretty village with a pagoda, “a sweet place,” where we tied up for the night.

We joined the main river, not then more than eighty yards wide, below the An-shun Bridge, an antiquated or ancient structure, and spent a long day in battling with the shallows, and with the peasant farmers, who had thrown many dams of shingle in bamboo cages across the river to keep up the water for their own purposes. They refused to open a passage, though this only involved kicking away the stones between the cages and replacing them, demanded 2000 cash as toll, and seized on my boat, and with shod poles and much vociferation barred my progress several times. Native boats were passing through for thirty cash, and some thirty or forty at each dam were smashing against each other for the first turn. Eventually, when forty men got hold of my little _wupan_ and tried to intimidate me, I asked them to show me the paper authorising them to demand this toll, on which they collapsed.

In a number of places there are rows of gigantic waterwheels, four or five together, from thirty to forty-five feet in diameter, by which all the adjacent country is bountifully irrigated. The sleepy hum of these huge wheels, the richness of the cultivation, and the fresh greens of the woodland, in which prosperous-looking villages basked drowsily in the summer sunshine, were all charming. But at times the water was so shallow that the boatmen had to precede my boat to work a channel for her, one of them leading her by the nose, and another pushing her from behind. This dragging, and the quarrels with the peasants about getting through their dams, occupied the first day.

The next day was a rapture. A river locally called the Nan joins the Min at Chiang Ku, about sixteen miles below Chengtu, and after the junction water was abundant. Su-ma-tou, a busy place in lat. 30° 28′ (Baber), is the limit of navigation for large junks. At Peng-shan Hsien the river widens out after the union of all its perplexing subdivisions. Below Meichow, a large and busy place, the country breaks up into picturesque hills of no great height, divided by fertile valleys, through one of which I caught a momentary and only glimpse of the unrivalled majesty of Mount Omi.

Villages embowered in fruit trees, of which the illustration is an average specimen, adorn the banks of the bright river. Young wheat, mustard and beans in blossom, with mulberry trees between the fields, clumps of bamboo, and pines cresting every knoll and hill, made up a lovely picture—a vision of peace, plenty, and prosperity. Indeed, the whole river journey from Chengtu to Chungking consists of a series of beautiful pictures, combined with varied and prosperous industries. It is a lovely part of China, and the white, timbered houses, the vividly red soil, and red sandstone rock, the dark, light, blue, and yellow greens, and the fascination of the smooth, fine lawns, which ofttimes slope down to the sparkling water, have a very special charm. The “Cloudy Province” failed to keep up its character, and if the sky was not very blue, the sunshine was brilliant. The gardenia, often a large shrub, grows profusely on the slopes, and it and the bean gave forth delicious odours. Strings of gardenia blossoms hang up at that season in all houses, every coolie sticks them into his hair, and even the beggars find a place for them among their rags. For a farthing a large basket of them can be bought.

I reached Chia-ling Fu (1070 ft.), where I remained for some days, in eighty hours from Chengtu Fu, including stoppages—the estimated distance being about 130 miles. The approach to this attractive and important city from the north is extremely pretty, indeed beautiful. The country is very hilly, and great, red sandstone bluffs, heavily wooded, with pagodas and temples, and much carving in rock recesses, with scarlet azaleas and gardenia blossoming everywhere, would have riveted my admiration to the left bank had it not been for the overhanging red sandstone cliff and the picturesque houses of the city on the right.

Chia-ling Fu, said to be a city of 50,000 souls, is a place of great importance commercially, as three large rivers—the Min, Ya, and Tatu—there form a junction, and for a brief space the river is like a lake. It is perhaps the greatest centre of sericulture and silk weaving in the province, and is also the eastern boundary of the white wax trade. Its white silks are remarkable for lustre and purity of colour. It is a rich city, and the capital of one of the most fertile and lovely regions on earth. It is besides the starting-point for most of the pilgrims to the temples of Omi-Shan and “The Glory of Buddha.” The city wall is of bright red sandstone, which is finished with a few courses of hard grey brick. The south gate was rigidly closed against the Fire God. A handsome, uphill, residential street, green and peaceful, leads to the west gate, and on this the China Inland Mission and Canadian Methodists have their mission houses. In Mr. Endacott’s garden are some specimens of the singular rock-dwellings so fully described by Mr. Baber in his papers on Western China. Chia-ling trades in opium and timber as well as in silk and white wax. Silk and umbrella shops are conspicuous. Every view from every point is beautiful.

On the face of the cliff on the opposite side of the river is a figure in the rock, cut in very high relief, of Maitreya Buddha—truly colossal, being 380 feet in height. The nose is said to be nearly five feet long, and the head from thirty to forty feet high. Grass is allowed to grow on the head, eyebrows, upper lip, and ears, to represent hair. This figure is unfortunately partly concealed by the redundant vegetation which surrounds it. It is an interesting specimen of the religious art of about a thousand years ago.

Leaving the hospitalities of Chia-ling Fu for a boat journey of 345 miles, in a rather old and leaky little _wu-pan_, which, however, did 133 miles in seventeen hours, I halted several times on the way down to visit some of the remarkable rock dwellings in the cliffs which in many places border the river. They are difficult of access, and besides tearing my stout Chinese dress to pieces, I was considerably bruised and scratched. I took ropes, grippers, and three men with me.[52]

At a farmhouse where I landed near the hamlet of Sing-an, there was a sandstone coffer, seven feet long, used as a cistern. The farmer sold me two axe-heads of a hard, green stone, with a dull polish, which he found along with the coffer while digging a buffalo pond. To the finest of the excavated dwellings that I visited, I descended, holding on to trees and rock projections with hands and grippers, having a rope round my waist. There was a rock platform in front of the opening, not now accessible from below. The face of the rock has been smoothed, and eaves which project two feet have been left. The four times recessed doorway is five feet six inches high. At one side of this, as well as in the doorways of the interior, there are the remains of stone pivots on which doors could be hung. Above the doorway is a frieze as represented in the illustration, eighteen inches in depth, which is repeated over a stone altar against the wall, and again over several recesses, one of which is obviously for a fire, and has a stone shelf above it, and the others were probably beds. Two doorways give access to rooms, one of which is 14 ft. by 12 ft., the other 12 ft. by 12 ft. The former is nine feet high, and has a rounded roof, below which runs a deep and well-executed frieze carved with arabesques and curious human figures, the faces of which are certainly not Mongolian. In this room are both an altar and a stone tank. The outer room measures 30 ft. by 20 ft. 7 in., and is 7 ft. 4 in. in height. In another of these singular excavations there are settees cut into the rock with a fashionable slope of seat and back, the front being actually rounded for comfort! In a third there is a curious arrangement resembling pigeon-holes for letters, and the frieze resembles one figured in Mr. Baber’s paper, and is what is known in heraldry as the “disc-and-label” pattern—a severe but very decorative ornament. In that dwelling there was an arrangement of holes in the doorway, showing that the doors had worked on some description of hinge. Over the lintel of one doorway is the trident symbol. All the dwellings (five) visited by me, had what must have been small sleeping chambers attached to them. The walls of the principal rooms show traces of careful finish, and some have obviously been panelled. There is a stately seemliness about these abodes, which implies that those who constructed and occupied them must have made some advances in civilisation, and have valued privacy.

The finest of them, so far as is known, both in size and decoration, is a day’s journey only from Sui Fu, but the access involves severe climbing, and risks which I did not care to run. These dwellings occur in great numbers, from a point not far above Chia-ling Fu down nearly to Luchow, a distance of fully 220 miles.

The ever broadening and deepening Min, passing through lovely and prosperous country, took me rapidly to Sui Fu (Hsu-chow Fu), a large city with a population, according to the officials, of 150,000. It is well situated on a high, much wooded, rocky promontory between the Min or Fu and the Chin-sha, which there unite to form the great river known by us as the Yangtze, where a temple-crowned point of rock dominates the busy city. On the opposite side of the Min are fantastic mountains with singular rock forms, on one of which is the highly picturesque temple of “The Sleeping Buddha,” approached by steps cut in the rock below.

The Chin-sha is only navigable to Ping-shan, a difficult forty miles above Sui Fu. It was rising fast, and its great volume of turbid water contrasted with the clear bright Min, which kept apart from it in disgust for some time. Sui Fu is a very lively place, being the great entrepôt of the large transit trade between SZE CHUAN and Northern YUNNAN, as well as a considerable distributing point.

Above Ping-shan, the Lolo, tribes which the Chinese have failed to subdue in two thousand years, keep the country in a state of chronic insecurity, fatal to trade routes. Besides the transit trade, Sui Fu does a large business in silk, opium, and sugar. The “residential suburbs” are full of good houses in wooded grounds, extending far up the Min, their owners reaching their pleasure boats by handsome flights of stone stairs. The American Baptists and the China Inland Mission do mission work in Sui-Fu, and a great deal of valuable medical work. Though “child-eating,” as elsewhere, is believed in, the people are not unfriendly, and the mandarin was specially courteous. Before I left he sent round to all the street officers to say that, whether I went through the city in a chair or on foot, there was to be no crowding, following, or staring. He sent four _chai-jen_ in official hats to walk in front of me, and go down with me to Luchow, and two petty officers to see that no one interfered with my camera, on pain of being beaten.

I left Sui Fu on the glorious evening of a blazing day, and once more, after a land journey in SZE CHUAN of nearly 1200 miles, was afloat on the Yangtze—there a deep, broad river, flowing among low, pretty hills, much wooded, and terraced for cultivation.