Chapter VII: Shantung, Land of Confucius

One day I took the train back to Tientsin and down to Tzinanfu, capital of the province of Shantung, the land of Confucius. Grave-mounds of all sizes were thick everywhere along the way, for this is one of the oldest and most densely populated parts of crowded old China. Tzinanfu, with its huge city wall surrounded by a moat in which many of the women wash their clothes, is a mixture of very old Chinese ways and some quite modern ones. Two railways come into it and automobiles may be seen in the wide streets of a suburb outside its wall, yet most of the people still travel as they did hundreds of years ago. Many ride on donkeys and many more in “Peking carts.” As these have no springs, they are very painful vehicles on the terrible roads of most of China. Every time a Peking cart strikes a rut or a stone, the side of the box whacks the passenger, so that unless he puts pillows or quilts all about him he will be covered with bruises at the end of the trip. Only the front of the box being open, the traveler by Peking cart can see little unless he kneels and peers out above the mule’s tail. One boy I knew said these strange carriages ought to be called “peek-out carts” instead of “Peking carts.”

A “Peking cart” of the kind used very generally in northern China. In
southern China the roads are seldom wide enough for a two-wheeled
vehicle. Being without springs or axle-grease, the Peking cart gives
one a rough ride, and most of the roads are not so smooth as this
one.
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But the chief Shantung vehicles are wheelbarrows. Hundreds of them go screeching back and forth between the stations and the walled city, some with freight and some with passengers. They are much larger than our wheelbarrows, with a big wooden wheel sometimes as high as a boy ten years old. Different kinds are used in the city and country. The city wheelbarrows have a long benchlike seat with a back on each side of the wheel, and a rest for the feet. They reminded me of an Irish jaunting car. Often I saw one coolie wheeling eight and sometimes ten Chinese women, who, because of their bound feet, could not walk to the factories where they worked. These city wheelbarrows, which are cheaper than rickshaws because more than one person can ride on one, even carry many men passengers.

A Wheelbarrow Journey

Passenger wheelbarrow in Tzinanfu, capital of Shantung Province.
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Once I changed places with the middle coolie of the three who
furnished motive power for my country wheelbarrow in traveling
through Shantung Province. I found the job not so hard as it had
looked from my seat on the barrow.
]

I made a long trip on one of the country wheelbarrows. The American missionary with whom I went weighed nearly two hundred pounds and I weigh about one hundred and seventy. Moreover, we had at least one hundred and fifty pounds of baggage. Yet both of us and all our things rode on one wheelbarrow. The platforms along its sides were so long that we could stretch out on top of our bedding and other baggage and chat as comfortably as if we had been lying in the same bed. One man pushed and steered at the handles behind and another pulled at a pair of handles in front. Each of them had the stout strap fastened to the handles passing over his shoulders. On the way back we had a third coolie, who walked ahead pulling at a rope attached to our primitive vehicle. Sometimes a donkey is hitched to the wheelbarrow in this way, and often the coolie’s sons tug all day at these ropes, from the time they are old enough to be of any use. Occasionally a coolie puts a sail on his wheelbarrow, so that the wind will help him along. Once I changed places with the coolie between the front handles, and found that his work was not quite so hard as it looked. Yet I should hate to have to earn my living as a Shantung wheelbarrow coolie, at about ten or fifteen cents a day.

A country wheelbarrow in Shantung Province, larger than those used in
the cities, on which an American missionary and I made a long
journey. In the background is one of the old towers which were used
for sending messages before the telegraph reached China. A fire was
built on top of such a tower and controlled in such a way that the
signal could be read by watchmen on the next tower. You have perhaps
read that the American Indians used puffs of smoke as signals in a
similar way.
]

One reason the wheelbarrow is used in Shantung and many other parts of China is that the roads are often miserable trails too narrow for a two-wheeled vehicle. China has had terrible roads for thousands of years, because the rich men who rode or were carried or pushed did not care how bad they were, and the poor coolies who were the sufferers had nothing to say about it. Even to-day the roads run on private land and the owner often plows them up every spring in order to plant the ground they are on.

Many a Chinese coolie gets his hair dressed once a month by a
wandering outdoor barber. In this case, a switch is just being
added. It is only in the more backward parts of China that men keep
their queues. Most sell the queue for a few cents and have their
heads shaved all over. Shears were not used even in the days when
the queue flourished.
]

We passed several big towers, built of bricks on the outside and filled with stones and earth within, like China’s walls. These were used, for hundreds if not thousands of years, to send messages across the empire, by building fires on top of one after another. Now that China has a modern telegraph system these towers are not used and are falling, or being torn down for the materials in them.

In most parts of China the queue, or what we sometimes disrespectfully call the “pigtail,” is no longer worn. Although many of the countrymen of Shantung Province still have themselves barbered in that fashion, a great many queues must have been cut off even there since the revolution of 1911, to make millions of hair nets for American and European women. I saw a whole jailful of prisoners making hair nets, but the demand has decreased since bobbed hair became popular in the Western world. If there are any Chinese women who bob their hair I did not see them. But in some cities in China the police cut off and sell the queue of any man caught wearing one. Probably the poor coolies and countrymen who cling to the old custom do not know that the Chinese were ordered to wear their hair in this way as a sign that they had been conquered by the Manchus.

Ancient Shantung

Thousands of years ago what we now call China was divided into dozens of little kingdoms. There were several of them in what is now Shantung. One day, for instance, I traveled for hours among huge grave mounds of the kings of Lao-an, buried long before the time of Christ. One of those ancient kingdoms was called Lu, and in it was born the great Chinese sage Confucius. This famous philosopher is to the Chinese what Mohammed is to the Mohammedans or Moses to the Jews. There is a temple of Confucius in every important city in China and he is worshipped by millions every day in the year, especially during the spring and autumn festivals in his honor.

In a Peking cart I jolted from the railroad to Chufu, where Confucius lived five and a half centuries before the birth of Christ. The village itself was rather a miserable place, with deep mud in the streets and houses that few Americans would live in even for a day. But inside a huge compound shaded by many venerable trees stood the finest temple of Confucius in China, several temples in fact, one behind the other. It would take pages to describe those mammoth and artistic old buildings. In the main one there is a statue of Confucius, larger than life-size, in the costume of those ancient days. All such Chinese statues have the same pose. Huge brass and iron bowls standing before this image and the altar it rests on were filled with the ashes of many thousands of joss-sticks burned by pious pilgrims. In the room behind these is another altar, on which stands an upright stick bearing the name of the wife of Confucius. There is no statue of her, because the Chinese do not think it proper to represent a woman in that way. The carved marble pillars in front of the principal temple are famous all over the world.

An ancient road between two double rows of very aged trees leads from the temple compound to the grave of Confucius. Knowing how fond the Chinese are of colors and elaborate things, it seemed strange to find this grave of their greatest man so simple, just a mound of earth among some trees, with an upright slab of stone bearing his name in three Chinese characters in gold. Long ago as Confucius lived, a direct descendant of his occupies a kind of palace near the temple grounds. He is little more than a boy, the seventy-seventh generation since the sage. It is said that he wishes to go to college in the United States! All over this part of Shantung I found people who bore the family name of Confucius, Kung. Some of them were rich and some were peanut-sellers.

Climbing a Sacred Mountain

Of all the things I did in Shantung I think my climb up Tai-shan was the most interesting. That sacred mountain is the greatest place of pilgrimage in China. I am sure I passed at least ten thousand pilgrims on my way. Rich Chinese and most foreigners who go up Tai-shan ride in chairs, on the backs of coolies. They are queer-looking chairs, little more than a seat on poles, and the coolies carry them up sidewise. The carriers give inexperienced riders a great scare every time they change shoulders, for the path follows the edge of a great precipice.

The stairway to the top of Tai-shan, sacred mountain in the province
of Confucius. I climbed up it on the first of March when snow was
still on the ground. Hundreds of Chinese pilgrims were going up or
coming down. The stairs are really much steeper than they appear in
the picture. In the upper right-hand corner you can just see the
gate at the top of the long climb. It is several miles away.
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I like to make such journeys on my own feet, however, even though, as in this case, one must climb ten miles of stone stairway. Here and there, especially during the first part of the climb, there were level spaces a few yards or a few feet long. A temple and a tea-house under old spreading trees stood beside most of these. But the last half of the climb was like going up steep stairs in a house five miles high. Thousands of beggars lived in holes in the rocks and in grass huts along the sides of the stairway. Pilgrims carried newsboy sacks of brass “cash” for these beggars. The pilgrims believe that anyone who climbs Tai-shan without giving something to each of them will not have his prayers answered when he reaches the top. There were baskets more or less full of “cash” in the middle of almost every step on that ten-mile climb. As the chair-carriers walk on the outside ends of the steps, the passengers can easily drop a coin into each basket as they pass over them. Some of the beggars of Tai-shan are poor cripples or the victims of terrible diseases. But a great many of them looked healthier than the Chinese who live in crowded cities, and some of the beggar children fairly glowed with health.

From the temples (much like any other temples in China) on the cold snowbound top of Tai-shan, I could make out “China’s Sorrow,” as the Hoang Ho or Yellow River is called. It is a kind of vagabond river, changing its course every few years, so that the poor people living along it are constantly worried. Once it ran into the sea in southern Shantung, then suddenly changed its mind and started northward to its present mouth. This was much as if our Potomac were to move to Maine. All the people in its new bed had their homes and farms washed away, and now the old bed is a stretch of rice and wheat fields. The silt that comes down with the Yellow River in its snakelike course across northern China gives the stream its color and its name and clogs the channel until the river is higher than the country about it. Then the Hoang Ho breaks through its dikes again and goes on a new rampage.

Bandits overrun many of the hills and mountains in Shantung Province. Once while I was traveling in what people considered a much more dangerous region, just outside the Great Wall to the north, bandits stopped an express train not far from the birthplace of Confucius and carried off twenty or more foreigners, many of them Americans. Some of the prisoners had to live for more than six weeks in a bandit camp on a hilltop, part of the time under terrible conditions. Partly because there are so many bandits, the Grand Canal from southern China to Peking is now hardly used at all. In olden days this canal brought to the emperors the tribute rice, a kind of tax in produce, from all the country to the southeast. In places it Was dug through high rocky hills, and the Shantung part of it has several locks to lift or lower the boats from one level to another. However, the bandits alone are not responsible for its being abandoned. Silt has been allowed to fill many parts of the canal since the coming of railways.