Chapter XXXVI: Luchow to Chung-King Fu

On the brilliant afternoon of the day after leaving Sui Fu, I reached Luchow, an important trading city, with a reputed population of 130,000. It is prettily situated on rising ground at the confluence of the Yangtze and To rivers. The latter drains a considerable area, and by it and its connections cargo boats of about fifteen tons can reach the Great River from Kuan Hsien. Luchow appears to be a quiet, fairly well governed, busy city. One great industry is the making of umbrellas, and it has a large trade in sugar and other SZE CHUAN products. According to its own officials, eighty per cent. of its male population are opium smokers. In good shops, there and elsewhere, opium pipes are supplied gratuitously to customers in back rooms, just as cups of tea are in Japan. The China Inland Mission has both men’s and women’s work in Luchow, and I was hospitably received in the mission house. The mercury was 93°, and no one could sleep at night.

The people are not what would be called hostile, yet they curse Mr. James, the missionary, in the streets, and believe that all the five are “child-eaters,” and that the comeliness of the ladies is preserved by the use of children’s brains! This scandalous accusation is current everywhere in SZE CHUAN. Even at quiet Chia-ling Fu, when two beggar boys were brought into the compound to be photographed, the report spread like wildfire through the city that they been taken in for the purpose of being fatted for eating! The hostility to foreigners has increased rapidly in many parts of the province. Mr. A. J. Little, writing from SZE CHUAN some years ago, mentions that the phrase “Foreign devil,” and other opprobrious epithets applied to foreigners elsewhere, were unknown, and other travellers have mentioned the same thing. Now, a language rich in abominable terms is ransacked for the worst, to hurl at the foreigner.

I left Luchow on May 30th in great heat, and contrary to custom, travelled till nine o’clock, making fast to a snag in a broad reach or bay of shallow water. The mercury stood at 91° at four p.m., and the men suffered from the heat. I have observed that sunstroke is far more to be dreaded in damp than in dry climates. It is common in SZE CHUAN among the Chinese. The boatmen called it _lei-su_, “death from exhaustion.” They feared it, and well they might, for their shaven heads were only protected by small towels. The blue turban, much worn in the province, may have originated in an instinct of defence. The Chinese suffer greatly from mosquitoes. I have seen curtains of a heavy, green canvas even in poor men’s houses, but men as poor as my boatmen have no protection, and, being compelled by the heat to sleep naked, their bodies are covered with inflamed lumps from mosquito bites. They are very patient. They suffered so much from this cause that in the stifling twilights, when thousands of these pests were abroad, I almost grudged myself the immunity gained by sitting under a mosquito net made by attaching a net roof and curtains to a Chinese umbrella frame.

The men fanned themselves as long as they could keep awake. As the heat increased the use of the fan became universal among men. Coolies fanned themselves at the treadmill pump, bearers as they ran along with chairs, porters with loads, travellers on horseback and on foot, men working and resting, shopkeepers at their doors, mandarins in their chairs and on the judgment-seat, and sentries on guard. Soldiers marching to meet an enemy fan themselves on the march, as I saw in Manchuria during the Japanese war, and the bloody field of Phyong-yang was strewn with the fans of the dead and dying Chinese. Fan-making is one of the great industries of China. Nearly 2,000,000 fans were imported into Chung-king in 1897.

Except for the heat, the downward journey was quite delightful; the country is so fertile and beautiful, and has such an air of prosperity. So long as we were in motion there was a draught, as the boat was quite open, but the still nights were stifling, specially with the curtains down. The boatmen were harmless, good-natured, obliging fellows. They tied up whenever I wanted to land if it were at all possible, and though they were obliged to pass from bow to stern through my “room,” they always asked leave to do so if the curtains were down. The lovely country was a very great charm. The variety of scenery, trees, flowers, and cultivated plants was endless, and new industries were constantly becoming prominent. The only matter for regret was that the rush of the fast-rising river carried us all too swiftly past much that was worthy of observation.

A visit to a coal-mine interested me greatly. The mine was in a hillside, three miles from the river, and employed eighty men. The manager said that the output was the equivalent of forty tons daily. The men got sevenpence per day, with rice, broad beans, cucumbers, and tea. Each hewer and carrier (in pairs) must deliver at the pit’s mouth daily the equivalent of a ton. The pay with food comes to tenpence per day, and the actual cost in labour of a ton is twentypence. The mine is extremely well ventilated by three revolving fans, which drive the air into it through bamboo tubing. The men work in two shifts of twelve hours per day of twenty-four hours, eating their rice in the mine three times daily. Every tenth day is pay-day and a holiday. Each carrier burns nine ounces of Tung oil daily, and each hewer six, the lamps being attached to the brow by a band round the head. There was a bath for the miners, which in the dim light appeared to be a stone coffer, supplied with hot water. The tunnel by which the workings are reached, and down which the coal is carried in wheeled baskets running on a wooden tramway, is six feet high, and about six hundred feet long. I could do no more than glance at the workings. The coal seam was about four feet thick, the galleries very low, and the hewers lay on their sides and hacked the coal sidewise. It appeared to be a fairly hard bituminous coal, and there is a great demand for it at the town of Peh-Shi, where, after land and river transit, it sells at seven shillings per ton. The manager, an intelligent and fairly polite man, told me that hard coal is also found in the neighbourhood, but is much more expensive to work. This coal-mine appeared well appointed, and the miners well fed and cheery. They seemed to have less consideration for the Dragon’s back than those on the Paoning route!

The night after leaving Luchow, while tied up to a snag in a broad and shallow reach, all in my boat were wakened out of a sound sleep by what might have been the “crack of doom.” There was a sound as if all the cannon of the universe had been fired close to the _wu-pan_ on either side, accompanied by a hiss in the water, a glare of blue light, a gust which lifted the boat, and stripped off some of the mats of the roof, and then a torrent of rain. By the next morning the Yangtze had risen twelve feet, and our snag had “gone under,” forcing us to seek the familiar protection of the shore.

Among many storms, one only, at St. Paul, Minnesota, has fixed itself in my memory. That was in a hotel lighted by gas and full of people. This was out in a lonely place in “darkness which could be felt,” among men of another race and speech, in a frail craft. The thunder, not rolling, but bursting like explosions; the ceaselessness and vividness of the forked lightning; the otherwise pitch darkness of the night; the hot and mephitic atmosphere; the occasional terrific gusts of wind, threatening to blow the half-unroofed boat to pieces; the roar of the rain, the loneliness and mystery of our position; the silence from human movement and speech; the hours it all lasted; the surprise after every tremendous explosion to find myself alive, and the fear that some of the men were killed, made that night an awful memory.

During the whole storm no one spoke or moved hand or foot. I felt paralysed, a sensation, as I afterwards found, common to all Europeans who passed through the same experience. The boatmen, who were lying in the water, never stirred. When the explosion gave place to magnificent rolls, and the rain moderated, the men spent an hour in baling the boat. All the matches were afloat and much else, and our food was mostly spoiled. A thousand waterfalls tumbled down the hillsides, the stony or sandy river banks were no more, of a few riverine villages the roofs alone were to be seen, fields in numbers with their growing crops had slid bodily down the slopes, leaving great patches of naked rock behind, and the Yangtze, a broad, turbid, terra-cotta flood, was rioting over the submerged confusions of its rocky bed in swirls and violent eddies.

After hurrying through a less beautiful and much devastated region, landing only at Shih-men, on the left bank, where there is a fine temple with five green-tiled roofs, and much fishing is done, the scenery again changed, and for four hundred miles is a succession of indescribably beautiful pictures, combining hill and valley, rock and woodland, with a greenery and fertility of which no word-painting could give any idea. Towns and villages, piled on knolls, looked out from among fruit trees; and temples and pagodas on heights lent their infinite picturesqueness.

One of the most beautifully situated towns is the unwalled town of Peh-Shih, with a (reputed) population of 11,000. Timbered white houses run steeply up diverging limestone cliffs; every outline is broken by the configuration of the ground; the ornamental and economic trees are superb; the density of their foliage was phenomenal. The centre of the town, which has no room for expansion, is picturesquely crowded with striking temples and guildhalls, much enriched with gold and colour. The great industry of the town is “wine” making. Wine is exported on a large scale in forty-gallon jars, which come down on bamboo rafts from Lu-chien, where they are made, and these afterwards take the wine up the Ya and other turbulent rivers. A fleet of these quaint constructions and a great number of junks lay along the shore, and there was an air of prosperous business about the town.

The roof of my boat had to be refitted with mats, some of which had been blown off in the storm, and I took a long inland walk, and without molestation! The cultivation was marvellous. I have no space to dwell upon the infinite variety of the crops or on the trees of all climates which were flourishing in juxtaposition,[53] or upon the striking fact that there, 1600 miles up the river, the social and commercial organisation, and the arrangements for what the Chinese regard as comfort and convenience, were as complete as in Che-kiang. A little later it might have occurred to me that this beautiful and prosperous region is claimed as in the British “sphere of influence.” Carefulness and thrift were shown by what was to me a novelty. All along the river shore people were fishing from rocks with nets, for straws, twigs, and bits of wood to use for their cooking fires.

I reached Chung-king, the westernmost of the treaty ports, and the commercial metropolis of SZE CHUAN early the next morning (June 1st), after coming slightly to grief in a rapid above it, and remained there during three grey, steamy, misty days, in which the mercury was almost steady at 87°. Between Chung-king and Sui Fu, if not higher, steam navigation at that season appeared perfectly practicable. The junk and raft traffic is very large. Coal and lime are found in abundance near Chung-king, and at Pa-Ko-Shan, five miles below Sui Fu, and also twenty miles above it. Specimens of this coal brought to England have been pronounced to be suitable for steam purposes.[54]