Chapter XXXVII: The Journey’s End

Whether Chung-king (altitude 1050 ft.) is approached from above or below, it is a most striking city. It is surprising to find, 1500 miles inland, a town of from 400,000 to 500,000 people, including 2500 Mohammedans, as the commercial capital of Western China, one of the busiest cities of the empire. Its founders chose a site on which there is no room for expansion, and its warehouses, guildhalls, hongs, shops, and the dwellings of rich and poor, are packed upon a steep sandstone reef or peninsula lying between the Yangtze and its great northern tributary, the Chia-ling, and rising from 100 to 400 feet above the winter level of these rivers. As I descended upon it down a somewhat turbulent rapid, which half filled the boat and drowned a fowl, it reminded me of Quebec, and made me think of the packed condition of Edinburgh when it was yet a walled city.

A noble-looking, grey city it is, with towers, pavilions, and temples rising above its massive, irregular, crenelated grey wall, with broad, steep, and crowded flights of stone stairs, twenty feet broad, leading up from the river to the gates, with an amphitheatre of wooded and richly cultivated hills rising steeply 1600 feet from the water for its background; the fleets of big junks, and craft of all descriptions, which lie crowded along its shores and in every adjacent bay and reach, and the life and movement on land and water, combining to form a noble and most striking spectacle. Nor is Chung-king as a city “alone in its glory,” for on the Yangtze, just below its junction with the Chia-ling, which divides it from Chung-king, stands the walled city of Limin-fu, its white houses covering a number of hills and cliffs, and at its feet hundreds of junks. Another city, Kiang-peh, completes the trio. These cities, with their commercial organisation owing nothing to Europe, I think more than all others, gave me an idea of what China _is_ and _must_ be.

Chung-king Fu has often been described in detail, and I will only give a few impressions of it. Passing to the Taiping gate up a flight of stone stairs, always sloppy from the passage of water carriers, and crowded with cotton-laden coolies, I reached the house of the Commissioner of Customs by steep streets cut in the rock. The Customs House, infinitely picturesque, is on a small rock plateau, with only four feet of space between it and the rock behind. The view is ideally picturesque, with the pagoda and gardens of a Guild of Benevolence below the plateau, and the great flood of the Yangtze, then two-thirds of a mile wide, rolling between the city and the fine hills on the further shore. But space is lacking. The Chinese soldiers who guard the Commissioner seemed to block up the little that there is, and trees and trailers there and everywhere in the hot, moist climate of Chung-king, choke up every foot of ground. The mercury stood at 87° during my three days’ visit; there was no sunshine for the dogs to bark at, and the moist air was absolutely still. As compared with many or most, the “grounds” of that house are spacious!

Chung-king was opened as a treaty port in 1891, but the China Inland Mission rented a house there in 1877, and were followed by missionaries of other societies, who, however, all had to fly from a severe riot nine years later. Mr. Archibald Little settled there as a merchant eight years before the opening—a rare instance of mercantile pluck with few imitators, and now, besides the foreigners on the Consular and Customs’ staffs, there are other “venturers,” chiefly “transients,” and about thirty missionaries of different societies, with mission chapels, schools, and hospitals. The English and German steamers, which are to be placed on the route from Ichang next year (1900), will doubtless stimulate foreign settlement, and will bring Chung-king within the globe-trotter’s sphere. If specially-built gunboats can “patrol” the upper Yangtze, outbreaks of hostility to foreigners will doubtless cease, and the quarrels will be among the foreign nationalities, each anxious to circumvent the others in the matter of concessions.

Below the huge reef on which Chung-king stands, is a town of mat and bamboo houses outside the wall. As the Yangtze rises some ninety feet in summer above its winter level, and was rising fast when I arrived on June 1st, this town had mostly disappeared, and the highest remnant was being carried away hurriedly on men’s backs, each hour of removal giving an added dignity to the grand, grey city, looking down on the grand, yellow-ochre flood. In Chung-king, as in many another city of the upper Yangtze, the harmony between man’s work and nature is yet unbroken, and the evil day of foreign inartistic antagonisms, incongruities, and uglinesses has not yet dawned.

This commercial capital has a great present, which we are hoping to improve upon to our advantage.[55] It is connected by water with nearly every considerable town in the province, and wholesale trade is by boat. Exports bound east must pass it, and also the imports brought up to pay for them. For foreign goods it is the sole wholesale market in SZE CHUAN, and is so for provincial trade to a great extent, and the province, it must be repeated, is as large as France, and vastly more populous. To it the merchants and shopkeepers of the whole population of from 55,000,000 to 70,000,000, which includes Tibetan tribes, Lolos, and a few so-called “dog faces,” resort to make their purchases.

(_See also page 177._)

Mr. A. J. Little is the only British merchant resident in Chung-king. The Chinese merchants deal directly with Shanghai through their own men. More than half of the buyers sent down have an interest in the business. They deal with the Chinese importers, and pay ready money in Shanghai, but sell to the provincial merchants on long credit, the rate of interest being 14⅖ per cent. per annum on foreign cotton goods. The seller naturally wishes payment to be deferred, and the buyer desires to hasten it, as he receives the same percentage as discount. Exchange between Chung-king and Shanghai is always in favour of Chung-king, and when the Yangtze is in its summer flood, 1000 taels in Shanghai can often be bought in Chung-king for 880.

The intricacies of Chinese business at Chung-king are appalling. Excessive subtlety and ingenuity characterise all the trade rules and customs, and even the “Blackburn Commission,” aided by the experience of Mr. Bourne, found it a work of much labour to master their complications! It is scarcely wonderful that the average British merchant, who knows nothing better than _Pidgun_, instead of following in the steps of our bold “Merchant Venturers,” sticks at Shanghai.[56]

At Chung-king, more almost than elsewhere, I was impressed with the completeness of Chinese commercial organisation. It may be too complex, and lacking in initiative, to serve our purposes, but it serves their own, and I heard there, as elsewhere, that the high standard of commercial honour and probity which has been worked out, renders dealings with Chinese merchants very satisfactory.

Eight of the other provinces are represented by guilds in this great trading city, with their handsome guildhalls, and rigid laws of association. There are an abundance of exchange banks (banks selling drafts on distant places), seventeen of which are in the hands of men from SHAN-SI, which has a speciality for banking talent, and there are over twenty large _cash_ shops or local banks, which exchange _cash_ against silver and _vice versâ_. These banks do not make advances on goods, but lend on personal security at from ten to twelve per cent. per annum, and employ agents who hang about the business quarter, learning the proceedings of customers, so as to gauge their credit. A bank would lend as much as 200,000 taels to a merchant on personal security only. They have very rigorous methods of ensuring the honesty of _employés_.

It was with great regret that I left Chung-king on my last _wu-pan_ voyage. There were few, if any, small house-boats on the berth, and the big ones would only go down at an enormous price, because of the difficulty and profitlessness of the return. Foreigners of the two services, as well as merchants, regard a _wu-pan_ as we regard a steerage passage, and even my kind host declined to connive at my proceedings, but Mr. Willett, of the China Inland Mission, befriended me; the _wu-pan_ was engaged, and I left Chung-king on a sultry June afternoon, with the mercury at 88°, and never regretted my firmness on the subject of a boat, for I was thoroughly comfortable, could create draughts at will, and my boatmen were quiet and most obliging, and were ready to land me at any place where landing was practicable.

The force and volume of the river, which had then risen about forty-five feet above its winter level, were tremendous. Its low-water width at Chung-king, according to Blakiston, is 800 yards, but it was then about two-thirds of a mile wide, a swirling, leaping, yellow flood, laden with the mud with which it enriches the Great Plain. Caught in its torrent, the _wu-pan_, with two men rowing easily, descended at great speed. When we reached rapids, five men pulled frantically with yells which posed as songs, to keep steerage way on her, and we went down like a flash—down smooth hills of water, where rapids had been obliterated; down leaping races, where they had been created; past hideous whirlpools, where to have been sucked in would have been destruction; past temples, pagodas, and grey cities on heights; past villages gleaming white midst dense greenery; past hill, valley, woodland, garden cultivation, and signs of industry and prosperity; past junks laid up for the summer in quiet reaches, and junks with frantic crews, straining at the sweeps, chanting wildly, bound downwards like ourselves; and still for days the Great River hurried us remorselessly along. There was no time to take in anything. A pagoda or city scarcely appeared before it vanished—a rapid scarcely tossed up its angry crests ahead, before we had left it astern; one fair dissolving view was all too rapidly exchanged for another; and we were tying up among the many hundred junks which fringed the shore of the “Myriad City,” which is as beautiful from above as from below, before I realised that we were half-way thither.

But in this delirious whirl there were episodes of rest, when I landed on green and flowery shores above the submerged boulders, or below picturesque cities and temples, and had leisure either to enjoy detail or to loathe it. The latter was my mental attitude when I landed with my _chai-jen_ (rather an infliction in a small boat) at the important town of Fu-chow, where a clear stream, about 200 yards broad, and navigable for 200 miles, joins the turbid Yangtze. There are many queer crafts on the branches of the Yangtze. The navigation of some of these rivers is so intricate and dangerous, that the owners of these risky constructions are obliged to consent to provide coffins for their crews in case of disaster, and there are colliers built for _one_ down-river voyage, after which they are broken up; but the queerest of all crafts are the _Wai-pi-Ku_—the “twisting stern” junks used for the navigation of the Fu-ling, locally known as the Kung-tan Ho, or “River of the Rapid of Kung.” I saw one of these at Wan, and thought it was a junk which had had a severe accident! The sight of forty or fifty large junks at Fu-chow, each one with her high stern twisted a quarter round, so that the stern deck is at right angles to the quarter deck, was absolutely laughable. The stern deck is nearly perpendicular, and is climbed by rungs. These extraordinary boats are without rudders. My boatmen said that none but “twisted stern” junks could twist through the whirlpools and reefs of the river. It was not very wise for me to enter Fu-chow, and as I was followed by an immense and not over polite crowd I did not dare to use my camera on the _Wai-pi-Ku_.

Fu-chow is perhaps the most picturesque city on the Yangtze, built on ledges of rock, tier above tier, at the head of a reach so enclosed by steep hills as to look like a lake. There is a fine pagoda on a height near it, and it abounds in large temples in commanding positions. The deep gateway in the thick wall is scarcely more than eight feet high. The narrow street into which it leads was thronged, and even women were carrying creels, either loaded with coal dust, or small children. I managed to dodge the fast accumulating crowd, and get on the wall, from which the view up the Fu-ling is magnificent. My visit, however, was rather “a fearful joy.”

The city appears full of temples, literary monuments, and public buildings, but it has an air of neglect and decay, and it and its suburbs are dirty and malodorous. It is a great junk port, and at times, though not, I think, increasingly, the Fu-ling is used for the transit of goods both to Hankow and Canton. The latter city can be reached by this method with only two portages(?). There are large mat and bamboo suburbs below one part of the wall, but very little of them was left, owing to the rapid rise of the river, which also had led to the removal of many of the mat villages of the trackers. Fu-chow again looked glorious from below. A tremendous whirlpool, in which, sometimes, descending junks are caught to their destruction, is formed in summer near the city. We went uncomfortably near its vortex.

I landed also at Shih-pao-chai (“Stone Precious Castle”), a place of pilgrimage. The south-east side of the rock (not given in the illustration) has a nine-storeyed pavilion, resting on a very strikingly decorated temple built against it, through which access to the summit is gained. On the flat top there is a temple of three courts. The pavilion building has curved and decorated roofs, and looks like a magnificent eleven-storeyed pagoda. A large village lies at its feet. My films were spotted with damp, and would have failed anyhow, owing to the overpowering curiosity of the people. This rock and its talus are about 300 feet in height.

A glorious sunset and a morning of crystalline purity in a bay above the “Wind-box Gorge”; a rapid swirl through the solemnity and grandeur of the gorges which I ascended slowly and toilsomely six months before; the Yeh-tan, fierce and perilous; the Hsin-tan, a mere water-slide, down which my _wu-pan_ slipped easily; a lovely walk up the Nan-po glen, and in fifty-six hours from Chung-king, exclusive of stoppages, the boat emerged from the Ichang gorge upon the broad reach of eddying water, on which the pleasant treaty port of Ichang is situated.

After receiving hospitality for a few days at the British Consulate I left Ichang, and found the mirrors, enamel, and gilding of one of the fine river steamers very distasteful after a thousand miles in a _wu-pan_. Hankow, though by no means at its worst, was damp and sultry, with a temperature over 90°, and alive with mosquitoes. Even on the voyage down to Shanghai, which was devoid of any incident,—except that five minutes after leaving Chin-kiang we cut the anchored steamer _Hai-how_, tea-laden for Canton, down to the water’s edge—the damp heat was severe, and even the breeze was hot.

It was the end of June when I reached Shanghai, to find it sweltering in a “hot wave,” sunless and moist. My journey on the whole had been one of extreme variety and interest, and I was truly thankful for the freedom from any serious accident which I had enjoyed, and for the deep and probably abiding interest in China and the Chinese which it had given me, along with new views of the physical characteristics of the country, and of the resourcefulness and energy of its inhabitants.