Chapter IX: The Great Mohammedan Province

One morning nearly two weeks after we had left the end of the railroad we entered the province of Kansu. This forms the far northwest of China proper, much like Washington and Oregon combined into one state, except that instead of being bordered on the west by the ocean it runs up into the lofty mountain ranges of Tibet. The great road, which is really not much more than a very wide trail, to Lanchow, capital of the province, was lined with double rows of huge old willow trees from the very boundary of the province. A viceroy who once ruled Kansu for the Manchu emperors planted those trees, and if a man was caught cutting one of them down his head was cut off. Yet quite a few of them were missing! In certain places the loess soil had blown or washed away until a tree had fallen. But it was plain that some of the willows had been cut down. The Chinese are so eager for wood that they will risk a great deal to get it.

That day, after a great wind-storm, we saw women and children and a few men sweeping up fallen twigs and leaves. Except for that avenue of huge willows along the ancient route to its capital, Kansu is just as bare and treeless as the rest of northern China, and any kind of fuel is very precious.

We still had a soldier guard in some places, because the Chinese officials were afraid bandits or robbers might attack us. Often the keepers of the inns where we spent the nights told us of people being held up and robbed along this road. But for some reason we were never troubled in this way during the journey.

This is not a “Texas hots” stand, though it looks a little like that
American institution. It is a traveling restaurant, by the side of
the great willow-lined highway leading to the capital of Kansu. When
he lacks customers, the proprietor picks up his restaurant and trots
on in search of business. In the background is a camel caravan.
]

Now and then we passed long soldier trains, whole regiments of soldiers traveling eastward, perhaps to take part in a civil war in some other part of China. They traveled in mule-carts or horse-carts, on foot, on long strings of camels, and in even stranger ways, and did not at all look like our well organized armies of the West when moving from one place to another. At the head of each soldier train was a huge homemade flag with the name of the general on it in enormous Chinese characters; and at the top a very tiny Chinese flag. This was so symbolical of present conditions in China that it always made us smile.

“Ships of the Desert”

We passed long camel trains, though none of them quite so long as the one of thirty-six dozen camels I had seen in crossing Mongolia. Every ten or a dozen of these stately two-humped animals were fastened together by ropes running from the tail of one camel to a stick through the nose of the one behind. The camels usually traveled at night and grazed or lay down in the daytime. The drivers were swarthy, rough looking men, with Mongolian features, and dressed in long dirty sheepskin coats, much like those of the Gobi. Therefore it looked strange to see many of them spinning yarn and some knitting socks and other garments as they plodded along behind their beasts. Later some one told us that American and British missionaries had taught the people of Kansu to spin and knit. They must have forgotten to mention that to Western eyes only women and girls look well doing such work.

Though they were perhaps the first to make silk, and have used cotton for a great many centuries, the Chinese formerly had few if any woven wool garments. They have long used wool clothing, especially up on this cold plateau of Kansu, but made it of sheepskins with the wool still on them. Some authorities claim that the Chinese never wove wool until taught by Westerners; but I have been informed that “sheep’s hair blankets” were known in very early times. The art of weaving such blankets may have been brought into China from Turkestan by the Huns.

Queer Winter Clothing

Even here, where there are so many sheep, the great majority of the people dress in the thickly cotton-padded garments, much like our quilts, that are used in China wherever it becomes cold. Many of the men and boys along the way in this cold province wore earlaps embroidered with flowers or birds or other things in very gay colors. These are made by the women, who, because they all have long hair, do not need earlaps themselves. Most of the men, however, had the same kind of Chinese knitted wool caps as we wore. If it is warm enough, these can be rolled up about the top of the head; when it is very cold they can be pulled clear down to the shoulders, a hole being left for the eyes.

Chinese winter garments are so much warmer than ours that most of the few foreigners we met in Kansu wore Chinese clothing. They were nearly all British missionaries. Formerly they, and many Americans doing mission work, let their hair grow long and braided it in queues, like the Chinese. Now there are no foreign men in China with long hair. Yet most of the countrymen in this province still wore “pigtails.” We saw many peasants and coolies squatting on the ground, or on the little narrow sawhorses the country people of China use as chairs, while the village barbers attended to them.

An outdoor blacksmith shop in a village of northwest China. The owner
can pick up his entire equipment when he is ready, and trot away
with it on a shoulder pole.
]

Many of these barbers carried their shops on the ends of a shoulder-pole, and went about looking for customers. They used no shears but only big awkward razors. With one of these they shaved the face (sometimes even the eyebrows) and clear around the head, leaving the hair long on top. Then they braided the queue, which often reached to the man’s thighs. Once I saw a barber adding a hair-switch to a coolie’s queue, so perhaps many of them wore more hair than grew on their heads, just as some American women do. Chinese barbers always carry long sticks like slender pencils, because customers expect to have their ears cleaned out. Their work is crude, but they do not charge one tenth as much as our barbers do for a hair-cut.

Walled Towns

We passed through one big city, named Pingliang, and many smaller towns. All of them were surrounded by great walls. There was always a road around the city close to the wall, so that travelers who preferred not to go inside need not do so. We usually went inside, for we wished to see all the cities, and it was likely to be time to eat dinner or find an inn for the night. The elbow-shaped gates and the narrow streets were often so crowded that we had as hard a time getting through as an automobile does on Fifth Avenue, so we did not wonder that many caravans went around the outside of the walls.

Another reason for caravans staying outside is that those which carry foods or produce have to pay taxes whenever they enter a city gate. For a great many years China has had these local taxes, called _likin_. When the Constitution of the United States was written, not only duties on exports were forbidden, but it was forbidden to levy duties on goods shipped from state to state. If we had the Chinese system, there would be customs duties not only on things coming into the country but on those going out also; and goods shipped from New York to New Orleans, for instance, would have to pay taxes perhaps a hundred times along the way, at every town or river-post or military barrier. Treaties with foreign countries do not allow the Chinese to collect _likin_ on foreign goods, but now some of the military dictators ignore the treaties made in Peking under the Manchus and require that all goods pay duties.

A Land of Peddlers

Even in this far interior of the country there were many peddlers along the roads. As it is very difficult for the women, because of their bound feet, to go to town to shop, there is plenty of trade for peddlers. On that two months’ trip I saw only one girl whose feet were natural, and she was an orphan and slave-girl whom no one had taken the trouble to “make beautiful” for a future husband. She had little hope of ever getting a husband, and the Chinese consider it disgraceful for a woman not to be married.

There were not only peddlers but even traveling restaurants! Each “restaurant” consisted of a coolie who trotted along carrying two big baskets of food warmed by little clay stoves. Most of the country people of Kansu live on wheat or Indian corn or _kaoliang_. They grind the grains between big millstones, the bottom one stationary and the top one turned by hand. Often we saw two women or girls marching round and round these mills on their crippled feet, and sometimes a blind man or boy who did nothing else all day long, without even a Sunday off. But the Chinese, from babyhood, are hardened to comfortless and laborious lives, and no one ever seems to complain of hardships.

We could buy chickens and eggs, mutton and sometimes beef, and vegetables and fruit along the way. Of course there was also plenty of pork, the favorite Chinese meat. But most foreigners do not eat Chinese pork, because the pigs live on all sorts of garbage. The Chinese seldom drink milk, and they do not make butter or cheese. We could get tea anywhere, but no coffee or cocoa. So we found that of the trunkful of tinned things we had brought along, the canned milk, cocoa, oatmeal, sugar, butter, jam, cheese, and fish were very useful. As most of the native food is good and nourishing, we could have lived without any of our own things. We might even have gotten along without our cook and “boy.” But we preferred to see to the preparing of our own meals, for the cooks in most Chinese inns have very little idea of cleanliness.

A Chinese mother and her baby in winter clothing. The baby wears a
string of “cash” (money) as an ornament, and perhaps in the hope
that it will keep evil spirits away. The child’s clothes have much
red in them. To the Chinese, red stands for happiness.
]

There was much game along the way. The American major who traveled with me shot pheasants as pretty as any you ever saw in a zoological garden, and plenty of pigeons, wild ducks, and wild geese. Under the Manchus the people of China were not allowed to own guns, so that even where nearly all the inhabitants looked hungry, as in Kansu, they could not shoot the plentiful game. In every town there were great quantities of persimmons, much better than those of our southern states. They looked like huge tomatoes and tasted best of all after they had been frozen. We ate them with spoons and found them as good as ice cream. But the Chinese pears, also very plentiful, were much poorer than ours. They were hard as rocks, not a bit sweet, and had no more taste than a raw potato.

Almost every hill or mountain along the way was terraced in great shelves of earth, to the very top. When we saw them they were quite bare, making the whole landscape a dreary yellowish brown. But with spring a great change would come. Then all the terrace-fields would be green, and if the traveler looked down upon them from above, all the earth about him would seem green. Yet if he were down in one of the sunken roads, looking up, he would get quite a different impression, for then he would see only the wall-like sides of the terraces, and they would still be bare and brown.

Sons of Han

Millions of the Chinese are Mohammedans or Moslems. There are nine mosques even in Tientsin, on the eastern edge of the country, and every large town has at least one mosque. But in the great northwestern province of Kansu fully half the people are followers of Mohammed. The other Chinese call themselves Han-ren or “sons of Han.” The Mohammedans who conquered much of Asia and a part of Europe more than a thousand years ago made their way through Sinkiang, which we call Chinese Turkestan, into Kansu, but did not travel clear across China.

Some of the soldiers remained, and took Chinese wives. This explains why many of the Mohammedans of this great northwestern province look more Arabic or Turkish than Chinese. Most Chinese Mohammedans, however, look just like the other Celestials, except that the men and boys usually wear a white cap. That is because their ancestors were not soldiers from the west but Han-ren who were converted, or compelled to turn Moslem or be killed.

Mohammedans do not eat pork, and where there are more of them than of Han-ren in a Kansu town no one is allowed to keep pigs. We often stopped at Mohammedan inns, and the proprietor always told our cook that he must not use any lard or cook any pork on his premises. Yet we noticed before long that we were getting bacon for breakfast every morning, and asked the “boy” about it.

“Oh, Hwei-hwei no catchee know bacon allee same pork,” he answered in the pidgin-English that he had learned in Peking.

By that he meant that the Mohammedan inn-keepers did not know that the bacon we had brought along in tin cans or glass jars was a form of pork; and he went on to say that the cook told the inn-keepers it was “foreign-style” beef. We asked the cook not to play that trick any more, for travelers should not do anything to offend the people they are among.

A donkey-load of water buckets made of bamboo splints woven as if for
a basket. Such buckets are not entirely water-tight, but they do
very well.
]

In many cities and towns where there are more Han-ren than Moslems the latter have to live outside the walls. Several times there have been great Mohammedan rebellions in China, and some people think there will be another one. But the Mohammedans are better treated now than they were under the Manchus. There are Mohammedan soldiers in Kansu and in some other parts of China, and some Hwei-hwei have even become generals. When China took the name of Chinese Republic, it changed its flag from the big yellow Manchu banner bearing a dragon, to a flag of five stripes, one color to represent each kind of people in the old empire. The yellow stripe stands for the Han-ren, or ordinary Chinese, the blue for the Manchus, the black for the Tibetans, the red for the Mongolians, and the white for the Mohammedans.

Good Mohammedans Do Not Drink Wine

Most Mohammedans, obeying the rules of their religion, do not drink wine or other intoxicating liquors, and will not allow themselves to be photographed. But the Chinese Moslems do not seem to know their Koran (the Mohammedan Bible) very well. Some of them get intoxicated on Chinese rice-wine, and even the mullahs, or Moslem priests, allowed me to take their pictures and, still more strange, to photograph the interiors of their mosques.

They were very simple interiors compared to those of ordinary Chinese temples. There were no gaudy pictures or painted gods or demons. The floor was covered with straw mats and always the western wall contained an Arabian niche. When a Chinese Mohammedan prays, as he is expected to do five times a day, he must bow down with his face toward the west, for Mecca, the holy city of his faith, lies in that direction.

All the Mohammedan men come to the mosques on Fridays, but no women are allowed inside. There are washing-vats outside every mosque, because the men must wash themselves before entering. They are even supposed to change their clothes, though many of those in Kansu are too poor to have a change. In each mosque is kept a coffin having a false bottom. In this Chinese Mohammedans carry their dead to the grave. There they leave the body and bring the coffin back again. The Chinese of other faiths, who bury their dead in huge wooden coffins, think this very stingy and disgraceful.