Chapter III: Through the Great Wall to Peking

It was still another style of train that carried us from Mukden to Shanhaikwan, the first town of China proper. The cars had rounded roofs and were divided into compartments, like the cabins on a ship. The train was packed full of Chinese soldiers, in very faded gray cotton uniforms. They crowded some of the cars so that other passengers could not get on at all, and they even slept on and under the tables in the dining-car. Very few of them had tickets. We were to find this a common thing on all Chinese railways. Many of the soldiers of the different marshals and generals ruling China are not well trained or disciplined; some of them are hardly real soldiers at all. But the trainmen, not being able to do anything against their rifles and bayonets, have to let them ride whether they have any real right to or not.

At Shanhaikwan the Great Wall of China reaches the sea at last, weary from its more than 1500 miles of climbing over the mountains. I passed through the Great Wall in half a dozen different places before I left China, so that it came to be like an old acquaintance. As you perhaps know, it was built nearly two thousand years ago, to keep the wild Mongolian tribes living north and northwest of it from getting into ancient China. Yet they did get in, in spite of this great barrier along the frontier, conquering, and for quite a long time governing, all China.

In July and August, on the way from Mukden to Peking, one finds plenty
of fruit on sale at the railway stations. A springy hickory or
bamboo pole such as this peddler carries may be shifted from one
shoulder to the other and is not burdensome.
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Two views of the Great Wall of China, which clambers over the
mountains for more than 1,500 miles from the desert to the sea.
]

The Great Wall of China has often been called one of the seven wonders of the world. Perhaps you would not think it so wonderful if you merely hurried through one of its gates, or saw a short section of it. Much of it is built of huge bricks or great blocks of cut stone, and it is from twenty to thirty feet high and wide enough for two automobiles to pass on its top. When you stop to think that the people who built the wall had no modern machinery at all, that they had to cut all those stones and make those great bricks by hand, then carry them and lift them to where they were needed without even a wagon or a pulley, you will begin to see that it is a remarkable job. Then if you ride or walk out along the wall and see how it climbs and winds for mile after mile, up hill and down dale, you will marvel still more. Finally, when you have passed through it in half a dozen places, some of them hundreds of miles apart, and found it still climbing on over high mountains, with a big tower for its defenders rising above it every few hundred yards, you will certainly admit that it is one of the greatest works of man.

If the Great Wall of China were laid down on the United States, it would stretch from New York nearly to Omaha, even with all its twists and curves; and if it were straightened out it would reach almost to Denver. It is true that it is not a solid stone wall. When we rode out along it on donkeys behind the round-roofed town of Shanhaikwan, we found that there it is really two brick walls, each about three feet thick, the space between filled with earth and broken stone and the top paved with bricks. These slate colored bricks are huge compared to ours; one of them weighs more than twenty pounds. It is true also that far out on the borders of Tibet, where the Great Wall ends at Kaiyukwan, it becomes merely a high ridge of baked mud. But I am sure no nation to-day would care to build one like it, even with modern machinery. The Chinese, by the way, call the wall the “Wan Li Chang Cheng,” or the Ten-Thousand-Li-Long Wall. As a Chinese _li_ is about one third of our mile, the Chinese exaggerate in calling it more than three thousand miles long. It really is only half that length, but I am sure it seemed even longer to the many thousands of drafted men who built it!

China a Vast Graveyard

There were many Chinese towns, with mobs of rickshaw-men struggling for passengers at the stations, on the all-day ride from Shanhaikwan to Tientsin. Some were large walled cities, where we could catch a glimpse of very narrow streets as packed with people as our train was; and everywhere we were made to realize how overcrowded a country China is. If the living are many, the dead seem still more numerous. The country is dotted with little cone-shaped mounds of earth, most of them about four feet high. They are Chinese graves, very few of them marked by a stone or in any other way.

The Chinese revere their ancestors so deeply that each family preserves its graves for dozens, sometimes even hundreds, of generations. When a man dies, his children go to a geomancer, a kind of wizard, and have him decide where the body should be buried. The geomancer pretends to consult the invisible spirits which most Chinese still believe in, and finally chooses a spot where he claims the dead man can rest well. As the places chosen by geomancers may be anywhere, there are no graveyards in China. Rather one might say that the whole country is a graveyard. We thought the unmarked mounds on the way to Peking were thick, but later I saw millions of them, always thickest near the big cities.

In dry northern China, after a field has been plowed, the clods of
earth are sometimes broken up by dragging a stone roller over them.
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The graves are a great hardship to the people of China. With nearly half a billion population, old China can hardly furnish any one man land enough to grow food for his family. Yet almost every farmer’s little patch of earth is made still smaller by the grave-mounds of his ancestors. He has to plow around these graves every year, and must not plant on them, so that they add to his work and decrease his crops. In olden times the Chinese leveled their graves whenever a new dynasty ascended the throne. But now that there are no more emperors, the graves are left, and it begins to look as if some day there will be nothing else left.

The way to the Ming tombs is lined with figures of camels, elephants,
and other creatures. How large they are may be seen by comparing
with the small boy, who seems to be trying to find out “how the
camel got his hump.” Each figure is carved from a single block of
granite.
]

The rich Chinese have much more elaborate graves than the simple mounds of earth. If a man leaves his descendants money enough, a temple is built to his memory. Here members of his family come, often for hundreds of years afterward, to burn incense and say prayers before his spirit-tablet. The tombs of dead Chinese emperors are still more costly. There are groups of them on the north, east, and west of Peking. Two of the groups may be reached by train, but Tung-ling, or the Eastern Tombs, just north of where we were now traveling, can be reached only on foot or on donkey-back, and this group I found most interesting. There are not a dozen emperors buried at Tung-ling, yet the tombs cover hundreds of acres. Each tomb includes several large buildings, elaborately decorated inside and out, and there is a walled village of caretakers for each tomb.

Imperial Tombs

The people whose business it is to look after the tombs are all Manchus, because only Manchu emperors are buried at Tung-ling. This is true also of Hsi-ling, the Western Tombs, a hundred miles away on the other side of Peking. So closely do the watchers guard the things belonging to the dead rulers that three men with their keys are required to open one tomb-temple. I got permission from the high-caste Manchu head man of one of the villages to visit the tomb of the famous Empress Dowager, the crafty old woman who ruled China for a long time up to the beginning of the present century. One man knelt to unlock a padlock at the bottom of the great door, another man climbed a stepladder to unlock one at the top, while a third man attended to the ordinary lock in the middle. Inside there were chairs covered with silk of bright yellow, the imperial color. Yellow dragons, a symbol of the rulers, climbed the big black pillars supporting the ceiling. The ceiling itself and the walls were painted in colored squares. Food in silver and gold and lacquer dishes had been set before the altar; for the Chinese believe that the spirits of the dead become hungry just as living people do.

The approach to a Chinese imperial tomb is lined with stone images of animals and men. They are nearly always in pairs: two elephants, two camels, two mandarins, two warriors, two horses, two strange beasts that never existed anywhere except in a Chinese imagination. Especially at the tombs of the Mings (who preceded the Manchus) north of Peking, the stone guardians or servants are remarkable. Even the camels and elephants are fully life-size, though they are chiseled out of hard granite. Some of the stone men are so huge that I came barely to their knees. At the Manchu tombs the stone figures are not so large, but the carving is finer.

Great pine forests surround all the imperial tombs, and people are sternly forbidden to cut down a single tree. In fact until recently the mountain range back of Tung-ling could not be touched by the ax or the plow, because it was considered a “shield” against the evil influences from the north that might disturb the dead emperors. But soon after the revolution the government allowed the forests on the “shield” to be cut, so that now the range supplies many fine logs for lumber, and colonists have begun to cultivate the hillsides. It was a queer sight to see men chopping and burning down the forests, and living and planting, here in ancient China, very much as our pioneers and frontiersmen did when America was first being settled.

A Manchu Summer Capital

Over the range behind Tung-ling and outside the Great Wall is a very remarkable place called Jehol which few foreign travelers ever see. It was a summer home of the Manchu emperors, and some of them built magnificent palaces and surprising temples there. One called the Potala is copied after the great temple of the Dalai Lama in Lhasa in Tibet, which very few white men have seen. It clambers in building after building up the hillside. Another temple has inside it a golden figure of Buddha so large that I had to climb to the fourth story to see the face, and many of its dozens of arms were much higher than that. Still another temple has five hundred life-size golden Buddhas, varying in features and attitudes, sitting on either side of long gloomy passageways. These figures we shall find in most large Chinese cities. They are supposed to represent Buddha in all of his moods and tempers.

The scenery of Jehol I found far from ordinary. Among other strange forms in the great circle of mountains about it is a mammoth upright rock shaped like a policeman’s night-stick. The Chinese call it the “clothes-beater,” because to them it resembles the club which Chinese women use in washing their clothes at the edge of a stream or mud-hole. Nearly half a day distant from Jehol by donkey travel I could still see this strange rock standing above the horizon.

Along the railway from Manchuria the territory grows very uninteresting. When large mounds, almost as white as dirty snow, rose on the landscape, we at first took these to be graves, but found that they were salt, shoveled up in the great pans of earth in which sea water is evaporated. Salt is a very important product in China, although there are almost no mines of solid salt, such as we have in America. There are salt “gardens,” owned by the government but managed by foreigners, from which formerly Peking received large revenues. Now most of the money goes to local dictators.

Tientsin, the port for Peking, and the leading port in northern China, is seventy miles above the mouth of the Pei-ho and about the same distance southeast of Peking. It was opened to foreign trade and residence by treaty in 1860. In the foreign settlement, called Tsuchulin, half a dozen European countries own land, and have their own laws and police and government. Yet about the docks even of this foreign part of town we saw many gaunt, hungry-looking coolies who haul wagons of freight along the cobblestone wharves for wages of about six cents a day. We soon left Tientsin behind and sped away toward Peking.