Chapter XVII: In the Province of Kwangtung

Kwangtung, the province in which Canton is located, is as big as some of our largest states, and rich and important. From Sze Yap, the Four Districts, on the western side of the Canton delta, come nearly all the Chinese laundrymen and restaurant-keepers and other Chinese who live in the United States. In fact a large proportion of the Chinese in all other parts of the world are from Sze Yap. If you ask them they may say they are from Canton. But that is either because they know by experience that you have never heard of Sze Yap and that you may know of Canton, or because they mean by that name the province of Kwangtung.

On the junk that carried me from the Bund in Canton to Kongmoon, principal port of the Four Districts, my cabin was much like a piano-box turned on its side, and the queerly shaped boat was piled with Chinese cargo until it looked like a haystack floating down the river. First we went upstream a little way, towed by a launch that showered sparks and cinders on us, and steered by half a dozen men who walked back and forth along a cleated board at the stern, pushing an enormous oar that stuck out behind. When we wished to warn another boat, a man beat with a hammer on a hanging piece of iron. Roosters among the cargo did their part in helping to keep us awake nearly all night.

The queer cargo boat in which I went from Canton (seen in the
background) to Kongmoon in the Four Districts.
]

A Visit to Sze Yap

There is a railroad more than a hundred miles long from Kongmoon on into Sze Yap. It is an interesting railroad because it was built by a Chinese who came to the United States when he was seventeen and later was a foreman during the construction of one of our great transcontinental railways. He had worked in California as a laundryman and a fruit-picker, but finally grew rich. He still owns a big store in Seattle. He decided to spend his money for the good of his home district, so he came back and built this railroad. He was more than eighty years old when I spent a night with him at his railroad headquarters at Sunning, but he was still president and general manager and superintendent as well as owner of the line.

Making brown paper of rice straw. The chopped straw is soaked in water
and pressed out into sheets. The wet sheets are pulled off one at a
time and put on the mud walls to dry.
]

Almost every day I met Chinese men in Sze Yap who had been in the United States and spoke more or less English. That was lucky, for the people of the Four Districts do not speak real Chinese. This is the reason that the Chinese we have in America cannot talk to those from other parts of China. One evening I spent with a Mr. Lee who, with his brothers, owns a Chinese restaurant in Cleveland. He took me to a restaurant in Kung-yik where I had a real American meal. Another man I met was dressed like an American high school student, and spoke English so perfectly that I did not know he was Chinese until I had looked closely at his face. As a matter of fact, he could not speak Chinese, for he had been born and educated in Oregon. His name was Fred Hang. He had come home to be married, so that his family line would not die out, and soon after the wedding was over he was going back to the university of his native state. He acted as if he were very homesick for America, and he must have found it stupid not to be able to talk to his Chinese relatives.

Palm-leaf fans are made of the young leaves of a low palm, which are
fastened to sticks so as to be kept open and are laid out to dry.
The ground here is covered with drying fans.
]

One of the curious facts about Sze Yap is that the millions of Chinese palm-leaf fans come from one little section of it, around the old town of Sunwei. The very short palm-trees or bushes from which these fans are made do not seem to grow well in any other place. When they are large enough, the leaves are cut and piled up in stacks. Then they are spread open with a stick and laid out to dry. After that, old women cut the ends off and sew a cloth border around them. These women earn about ten cents a day, and the fans are so cheap in China that almost every coolie in the south carries one. The tops of the leaves are made into raincoats.

Dangerous Pirates

There are a great many pirates in the lower Canton delta, as there have been for hundreds of years. They capture people and hold them for ransom, tying them to stakes and leaving them to die if someone does not pay to have them freed. They have better boats and better weapons than the government itself, and now and then they capture and loot foreign steamers. The English captains of two boats I traveled on were killed soon afterward by pirates, and one night a band of them stole one of the big steam launches that ferry people across Hong Kong Harbor, carrying it off, passengers and all. Yet two American missionaries who are working among the lepers on an island in the delta can go anywhere among the pirates and are treated like old friends. The pirates watch for Chinese returning from America and other foreign countries and often rob them of all they have earned. I met one old man who had only an old silver watch left when he got back to the town he had emigrated from when he was a boy.

From the Yang-tze to Canton

Once I went overland from the Yang-tze to Canton. The northern part of the province was very mountainous, and the mountains were dotted with the whitewashed stone-heaps that are the graves of that region. Cement graves of horseshoe shape and of all sizes, some of them as big as a house, are common in other parts of Kwangtung and in Fukien. The ranges of high hills about Sunwei are dotted with graves as far as one can see, and Paak Wan Shan, or White Cloud Mountain, near Canton is covered with thousands of them.

Part of that trip from the Yang-tze was down the North River of Canton, and the last 140 miles of it was on a railroad built by Americans. This was intended to run all the way from Canton to Hankow, where one can take a train for Peking. Some day, if the Chinese ever stop fighting among themselves, that important line will be finished, and then Peking and Canton will perhaps become better friends. The trains on that railroad and on the one in Sze Yap were crowded with soldiers, most of whom had no tickets. Two other railroads enter Canton, but I found that the one from Hong Kong had been broken by the armies of rival Chinese generals who used this region as a battle-field.

China’s Largest Island

From Canton I went to Hainan (“South of the Sea”), China’s largest island. It also belongs to Kwangtung Province, and some day it will probably be joined to the peninsula stretching toward it from the mainland, for the channel becomes more shallow every year, and ship captains always dread the passage through the Straits of Hainan. We saw the wrecks of several steamers on our way to Hoihow, the principal port of Hainan. There is no real harbor, and passengers have to climb down rope ladders into sailboats that are often dancing wildly in the waves. Sometimes, when the tide is out, they have to wade the last half mile to shore.

“Field women” and girls lifting water into the rice fields by means of
sluiceways with a chain of paddles such as are used in many parts of
southern China.
]

Kiungchow, the chief city, and much of the northern part of Hainan, are not very different from the rest of China. But in the interior there are great valleys of palm-trees, from which copra, or coconut-meat, is exported. The climate and landscape remind the traveler that he is not very far from the Philippines.

A tribe called the Loi lives in the mountainous center of the island, especially about the beautiful peaks called the Five Finger Mountains. The woods are thick, and travelers there are always much troubled by leeches. The Loi have their own headmen and are not governed by Chinese law. In harvesting rice, they cut off the upper six inches and bundle it, hanging the bundles head-down over poles and threshing it as they need rice to eat. Rattan, to gather which is painful work since it grows among masses of thorns, is sold to Chinese who export it.

Hainan is particularly noted for its pigs. On the way inland I met thousands of coolies _carrying_ pigs—the pigs seem to prefer this to being driven, and the Chinese humor them. If the pigs are small, a man carries one at either end of his shoulder-pole. If they are large, two men carry one on a pole between them. Every steamer that passes Hoihow east-bound takes a load of pigs. They are piled up on the deck like cordwood, sometimes six or eight layers deep, each in the kind of basket-net in which they are brought from the interior. You may imagine what such a ship smells like!

The Valuable Bamboo

Bamboo is another important Hainan product. It would take at least a whole page even to mention all the things the Chinese make out of that very valuable plant. It is not properly called a tree, though sometimes it reaches fifty feet in height, and shoots up so fast that one can almost see it growing. The rivers of Hainan have enormous water-wheels made of bamboo, so large that you wonder how a people without pulleys or other modern contrivances can raise them. Dozens of sections of the hollow bamboo are set at an angle on the outside of the wheel, and as the wheel turns, these dip up the water, pouring it into troughs that carry it away into the fields. When the river is too low to run a water-wheel, the farmer has to walk along the top of his wheel all day long.

This little pig really went to market, and he was carried there too.
In China pigs won’t walk to market, and as they are the most
important product of Hainan Island they have to be transported
somehow.
]

Another way of raising water in rice-growing southern China is by a wooden sluice that has an endless chain of upright boards running through it. Men, women (since Hainan women do not have bound feet) and children trot up and down all day on the kind of treadmills that keep such sluices working. Sometimes the sluices are run by hand, with two handles like the pedals of a bicycle. The Chinese have invented all sorts of primitive devices to raise water for their irrigation, but they never seem to have thought of windmills. The treadmill is useful in various ways in a country where there is plenty of cheap labor. Some of the boats on Canton’s river are propelled by a big stern-wheel turned by many coolies climbing forever up a treadmill inside.

Down the West River

The last time I came back to Canton I traveled the whole length of the Si-kiang, or West River, through the province of Kwangsi. The little Chinese steamers were so crowded with passengers that men slept even on the floor under my cot. Most of them smoked opium, and the sweetish odor of that destructive drug was in my nostrils during the entire two weeks’ journey. Although it is against the law in China to grow poppies and transport the opium made from them, nearly every steamer down the Si-kiang carries tons of it. The rival generals make much money out of it, and no one dares interfere with them. Some of the boats fly the flag of the United States, because a rascal who pretends to own them gets them registered as American ships and no Chinese can interfere with a boat flying our flag. There are very few of our countrymen, however, who take such mean advantage, and our consuls are gradually driving out of the country those who do.

An attempt on the part of China to stop the importation of opium from India resulted in a war with Great Britain in 1840, and in China’s being forced to open certain ports to opium or anything else that Western nations chose to send. However, in 1907 an agreement was made between Great Britain and China by which the Indian Government was to reduce gradually the opium exportation to China.

Kwangsi is much poorer than Kwangtung, because so much of its land is rocky. Along the upper part of the West River stand queerly shaped rock hills like rows of fantastic skyscrapers. Many have caves in them, sometimes a hundred feet up, and bandits often use these as their headquarters. In the Bay of Along, at the western end of Kwangtung Province, there are thousands of these rocky peaks that seem to float on the blue sea. I do not know a more beautiful place than this bay anywhere in the world.

A Chinese who had been cook for the British customs commissioner at Nanning, capital of Kwangsi Province, opened a foreign restaurant. But there are few foreigners in Nanning, and those have their own homes, cooks and all. So the enterprising Chinese did not get much trade until he began serving the favorite Chinese dish in those parts. It is a mixture of cat and snake meat, and Chinese who have eaten it say it is very “sweet” and good. I did not try it.

At Kachek in the island of Hainan I saw a man roasting dogs in a pit he had dug in the ground. People who were attending a fair and theatrical entertainment near by sometimes came to him for a feast of dog-meat. Dried rats may occasionally be seen hanging before shops in southern China. Yet it would not be fair to say that the Chinese in general eat cats, rats, dogs, and snakes. In a few parts of the country they do, especially in times of famine. It is claimed by some Chinese that wherever any of these animals are used as food, it is because of certain medicinal qualities that they are supposed to possess. For instance, the snake meat is said to be a remedy for a kind of leprous ailment; and the Chinese say that the “rats” are not really rats as Americans know them, but a sort of field mice which feed on the rice plant.