Chapter X: Where the Fish Wagged Its Tail

A few years ago there was a great earthquake in Kansu. As the soil is almost sandy, with no tree-roots to hold it together, this did much damage. Millions of the people live in caves, and thousands were killed by being buried in these underground houses. We passed many places where the great road to Lanchow had been covered deep under the mountain-sides that had slid down when the earth shook. In others the whole road, with its four rows of willows and even the mule-paths in it, had been carried nearly half a mile or turned at right angles to its former course. The new road was a trail that climbed over the new hills wherever the first travelers after the earthquake had been able to get through.

One Chinese name for the earthquake is “Where the Earth Walked.” The landscape looked as if the earth had been boiled, leaving a ruined world, a world wearing away. There were places where all the population, all the terraced fields, all the villages had been wiped out. Elsewhere other people had come in, or those who had escaped the earthquake had rebuilt their towns. Most of mankind seem to be optimistic. People come back to live where such a calamity has happened, as if it could never be repeated.

Some of the sides of hills that fell off during the earthquake dammed up little streams and made big lakes where there had never been a lake before. There was so much danger that some of these would overflow and drown towns or villages below them that a great deal of work had to be done to cut channels for draining these lakes. Many thousands of dollars subscribed by Americans were spent in this work.

Most Chinese still think the earth is flat and held up by a turtle or a huge fish. Even our mule-driver, who was just as sensible in most things as an American workman, believed the earthquake was caused by this great fish’s wagging its tail!

The Chinese “Fast Mail”

Almost every day we met the Chinese “fast mail.” This consisted of a coolie who carried across his shoulder a pole with some mail-bags at either end of it. On his blouse big Chinese characters warning people not to disturb him were painted or sewed. Such men carry about eighty pounds, and they trot nearly fifteen miles before they turn the bags over to another coolie. Their monthly pay is only about nine American dollars, yet they are very loyal in their work. Sometimes they are robbed and even killed, and many of them have an iron point on the shoulder-pole to use as a weapon.

Of course where there are railroads or steamers or other modern forms of travel the mails are carried as they are in our country. But all China has fewer miles of railway than many of our single states. About half of the eighteen provinces have never heard a train-whistle, and some of the others have only one short rail line. Until the fighting between rival generals stops there will probably be no more railroads and very few highways built. For this reason most of the mail must continue to be carried on men’s shoulders, or on the backs of pack-animals.

One of the sturdy and loyal coolies who are the “fast mail” in
interior China. They can trot fifteen miles with eighty pounds of
first-class mail on their shoulders. Each wears characters on his
blouse telling that he is a postman and must not be delayed or
molested.
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We now and then met a long pack-train wending its way across the broken country with many loads of parcel-post packages. In other parts of western China I met caravans of more than a hundred coolies toiling painfully along under cruel loads of this heavier mail. Many people say that the Chinese postal system is so good because the men at the head of it are foreigners. They point to the very poor telegraph system as proof that the Chinese cannot do such things properly for themselves. But anyone who has traveled in the far interior will give much of the credit to the hard-working and poorly clad coolie mail-carriers who trot night and day over the difficult trails.

Curiosity about Foreigners

The Chinese seem to have more curiosity than any other people on earth. Or it may be that this appears to be so, because among them staring is not considered bad manners. Even in cities where there are many foreigners, gaping crowds often gather about one.

Way out in Kansu, and in most other parts of the country, enormous mobs crowd about a foreigner the moment he appears in the street. Often on this trip almost all the men and boys and many of the girls in town left whatever they had been doing and packed themselves so closely about me that it was hard to breathe, especially as great clouds of dust were raised by their feet shuffling on the unpaved street.

I never found one of these mobs unfriendly, though some foreigners have even been killed by them. I always saw far more smiles than scowls. If I could think of enough Chinese words to make a joke, the whole crowd roared with laughter. If I started to go away, they made an opening for me much more quickly than most American crowds would. They had merely come to see the “strange looking person” and watch his “queer” doings. If I wrote in my notebook, they stared and laughed at what they considered my funny way of writing. As they write from top to bottom and from the right-hand side of the page toward the left, and use a camel’s hair brush to make marks like chicken-tracks, my fountain-pen and the marks I made with it seemed very amusing to them. If I read a book, they thought it queer that I did not begin at what we call the last page, as they do. Almost everything the foreigner does seems strange to Chinese who have not met many foreigners.

In some of those Kansu villages people told us they had never seen a foreigner before. Most of the people of interior China cannot tell one kind of foreigner from another. I was often asked if I were a Japanese, though I hardly think I look like one. Any person not Chinese is a _wai-kuo-ren_, an “outside-country-man,” to most Chinese, and many of them think there are only two kinds of people in the world—themselves and those who live in the other country which they think makes up the rest of the earth.

A Difficult Language

I had learned to speak some Chinese by this time, and I learned more before my travels in China were over. But if you have ever been in a country where you do not speak the language well you have probably found that many people think they can make you understand by shouting their strange words louder and louder. I have even known Americans who tried in this way to make foreigners understand.

Sometimes it became rather painful to have a great mob crowded about me and one or several men shrieking in my ears. However, I found a way to cure those shriekers. I would put my lips very close to the ear of the man who had just shouted a question at me as if I were stone-deaf, and shout back at him in English some such words as “You don’t say so?” He would go away rubbing his ear but laughing with the rest of the crowd, for the Chinese are very quick to appreciate a joke even on themselves. The story would travel so far ahead of me that it might be several days before another crowd would think it was my ears that were weak rather than my understanding.

Money Strung about the Neck

In many of these far-away parts of old China the money still consists of the little brass coins, with a square hole in the center, which foreigners call “cash.” They are strung on strings, usually a thousand to a string. A knot is tied to mark off each hundred coins, and the ends of the strings are tied together. One “string” of “cash” weighs about eight pounds, yet it is hardly worth twenty-five cents in our money.

Can you imagine carrying a dollar that weighs thirty-two pounds? Yet we saw many men in Kansu with as many as six “strings” on their shoulders. They were usually soldiers or workmen or carrying-coolies who had just been paid off; and you can see how lucky they are that their wages are only about a dollar a week! Our mule-driver paid fifty or a hundred “cash” for a bowl of rice, and coolies who carried my things on their shoulders in other parts of China would often lug also an additional eight or sixteen pounds in change with which to buy their food and lodging and tobacco.

A Chinese coolie with his week’s wages, worth about a dollar, and
weighing forty pounds or more in strings of “cash.”
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Not very long ago the only money in China, besides the strings of “cash,” consisted in silver lumps often called “shoes” by foreigners, because they were shaped somewhat like a shoe. Each shopkeeper had a scale like one of our steelyards but made of wood, and when a customer bought something the silver to pay for it was weighed out. If one “shoe” was too much, out came a little saw or ax to cut it in two. We saw people using this kind of money in Kansu, sometimes adding a little silver BB shot to complete the weight. But now most of China uses big copper coins, worth ten or twenty, and in some places even fifty “cash,” and for bigger transactions the silver dollar.

Silver Dollars Introduced

When foreigners began to trade with China about a hundred years ago, they did not want “cash” in payment for their goods, and they did not like the lumps of silver. So they introduced into China the dollars that the Spanish used in Mexico and other Latin-American countries. Now the Chinese mint their own “Mex” dollars, which are just as big as ours but worth only about half as much. They call them _E quai ch’ien_, or “one piece money.”

There is paper money like ours in Peking and the large coast cities, usually issued by foreign banks, but this is seldom accepted in any other city, and it is of no use in the country districts. On this trip into Kansu, and many other journeys that I made in other parts of China, I had to carry long rolls of silver dollars wrapped in paper. The governor of that province had melted up all the “cash” and coppers that came into his treasury and made new coins by pouring the metal mixed with sand into moulds. These coins we could break in two with our fingers, and they were worth so little that merchants had to send donkey-loads of them from town to town in payment of new goods. We often met these donkeys, their bags of coin rattling like a junk-shop in a cyclone. Even in the capital of the province the money poured out on shop counters sounded like coal rolling down an iron chute.

A Great Walled City

Lanchow, the capital of Kansu, is a great walled city in a little valley on the Yellow River, way up where the stream is neither yellow nor very large. It has several walls, dividing it into sections. Many of the inhabitants are Mohammedans. Those men who wore thick skull-caps of natural white wool and kept mutton-shops we knew at once to be Moslems, as we did the _ahong_, or mullahs, who went up to the top of the mosques five times a day and called the Moslems to prayer with words meaning “Allah is great.” The Chinese Mohammedans are not allowed to translate the Koran into their own language. They must read it in the original Arabic even if they do not understand the words they are pronouncing.

Inside its walls China’s most northwestern city was much like other Chinese cities. Swarms of people poured back and forth through the narrow streets, along with donkeys, mules, horses, and camels. Coolies carried every kind of thing, clean and dirty, and shouted and bumped their way along as they do all over China. Hundreds of them were engaged in carrying two big buckets of water apiece from the river to all parts of town. People who wanted water paid these men about a cent a bucket.

Now, in December, it was bitterly cold and though there is much coal in northwestern China few of the people could afford to burn it. There were many almost-naked beggars wandering the streets of Lanchow. They slept in any hole they could find, like the hungry homeless mongrel dogs that roamed about looking for scraps of food.

In Lanchow I saw these Mohammedan schoolgirls, whose garments were a
riot of color.
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There are no rickshaws in Lanchow, nor in all Kansu Province. High officials rode in the picturesque old sedan-chairs once used all over China. One of those officials was a European, head of the Salt Monopoly office in Kansu, and to see him come rushing home after dark carried by six shouting men swinging great Chinese lanterns in front of them was a very interesting sight. Like a great many other Chinese cities, Lanchow has no street-lights, except those which people set up or carry themselves.

A Midwinter Journey Back to Peking

These very handsome boots are the kind worn by a tribe living on the
borders of Tibet.
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Over the mountains not far from Lanchow is Hochow, a sort of capital of the Mohammedans. From there we might have gone on to Sinkiang and the Kokonor, or Blue Lake, region of Tibet. Tibetans, and in fact people of all the races of central Asia, were to be seen in the streets of Lanchow. We should have liked to go on to all the places they had come from, but the traveler soon finds that it is as hard to go everywhere during one lifetime as it would be to take all the courses in a great university in four years.

Most people returning from Lanchow float down the Yellow River on rafts made of goat-skins filled with air. But the river was full of ice now, and in some places frozen solid. So we bought horses and hired two more mule-carts to carry our things and our servants, and set off one morning across an American-built bridge. That three weeks’ journey northeastward was interesting, but not so much so as the route we had come by. Often the only building we saw all day was the government inn for travelers where we spent the night. So much of the land was covered with ice that we wished we had skates.

Our party coming back from Lanchow. I am in the middle; the American
major on my right (as we stood facing the camera); our cook on my
left; our “boy” on the major’s right; and our three mule drivers at
the ends of the row. You can see that we seem to have been well
supplied with clothing, yet we were often cold. It was December and
we were several thousand feet above sea level.
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One cold morning we passed through the Great Wall, but away out there it was merely a big mud ridge. For two days we waded through sand dunes like those at the southern end of Lake Michigan, and if it had not been so cold we might have imagined ourselves in the Sahara. Some of the towns were ruled by Mohammedans and others by European Catholic priests.

Nearly every day we heard rumors of bandits who might fall upon us along the lonely road. But we reached the end of the railroad through Kalgan safely, and twenty-four hours later stepped off the train in Peking. As we had always started long before daylight every morning, when it seemed as cold as the North Pole, we had not shaved for weeks. My beard must have made me look like a Bolshevik, for my small son wept when he met me at the station.

I didn’t look like “Daddy.”
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