Chapter VIII: Through the Heart of Old China

In October I left my family in Peking and set off on a two months’ journey into the northwest. Yet the first part of this trip took me hundreds of miles south, on the railway from the capital to the Yang-tze River. Again I found the trains crowded with rowdy soldiers whose only tickets were their rifles and bayonets. From the windows I saw, besides millions of grave-mounds, thousands of smaller piles of earth of the same shape. These consisted of rich top-soil that was to be spread over the fields before they were planted again. Men and donkeys were plowing; sometimes a man and a donkey, or a cow and a donkey, were hitched together. Women who sat on tiny stools to spare their bound feet pulled up peanuts and put them in funnel-mouthed baskets. Great quantities of peanuts are grown in China. Some of them are miserably small, but American missionaries introduced the Georgia goober some years ago, and now those excellent peanuts are sold everywhere. I once heard of an American lady who sent her son in China a big bag of peanuts for Christmas. She did not know that peanuts are much more plentiful and far cheaper there than at home, or she might have sent popcorn instead, for there is none of that in China.

Not very far south of Peking I turned westward on a narrow-gauge railway built by the French. On this, soldiers without tickets did not ride, because the ticket-takers were Frenchmen or Belgians who were not afraid of them. This railway runs through a very rocky, mountainous region into the province of Shansi, which means “west of the mountains,” just as Shantung means “east of the mountains.” Most Chinese names for places, which look and sound so queer to us, are just as simple as that when they are translated.

This merchant is engaged in the very serious business of weighing out
a copper’s worth of peanuts. Probably you could buy up his whole
stock for ten cents.
]

The railway into Shansi ends at Taiyuanfu, meaning “great plain.” It is properly named, for all about that provincial capital lies a flat, rich country, growing rye and barley and other crops which we have at home. The land is not well watered, however, for the Chinese have been so foolish as to cut down almost all the trees that once covered northern China; and ground without trees does not hold moisture long. I saw hundreds of men drawing water from wells in the fields. Many of these wells have four windlasses, so that four men, one standing on each side of the well, can all draw up water at the same time.

A “Model Governor”

Shansi is often called the “model province” and the general who rules it the “model governor.” Instead of putting into his own pocket (or into his own account in the foreign banks in Hankow and Shanghai) all the money he gathers in taxes, this governor spends much of it for the good of the people. He has built some fairly good automobile roads, though they are merely made of piled-up earth which sometimes washes away in the rainy season. China still has no good stone or cement or macadam roads; but perhaps those will come also some day, when there are more model governors.

The governor of Shansi had driven almost all the bandits out of his province, and had stopped the growing of poppies, from which opium is made. He had forbidden the smoking of opium, and had provided a place in Taiyuanfu where people could come and be cured of the opium habit. He had forbidden foot binding also, but old customs die hard, and as a fine of a few dollars is the only punishment for parents who bind their daughters’ feet, there are still some, even in Shansi Province, who cling to the practice.

Because it is forbidden in Peking and not much practiced in the coast cities which most foreign travelers see, many people think that foot binding is dying out. But I am sure that during my two years’ wandering in all parts of China three fourths of the women and the girls over eight or ten whom I saw had crippled feet. Many of them could hardly walk at all. Both in the mud-floored houses and in the fields they often knelt at their work, using for protection knee-pads that reminded me of the shin-guards of our football players.

When a Chinese girl is six or seven years old, her mother or her grandmother binds long strips of wet cloth about her feet. The cloth shrinks in drying and squeezes the feet tightly. Every few days new cloths are bound on, until the bones of the feet are broken and the toes are bent back against the heels. By the end of two or three years, the feet have often become so small that they look as if they had been cut off at the ankle. Of course it hurts a great deal to walk on such feet, and perhaps that is why Chinese women are seldom as cheerful and smiling as most Chinese men.

Often girls have to sleep in an outbuilding while their feet are being bound, so that they will not disturb the family with their crying. Yet if their feet are not bound they cry too, for they think that they will never get husbands unless they have “lily feet.” It is said that this custom grew up hundreds of years ago because one of the wives of an emperor had very small feet and the other women copied her style. It should be said, however, that nowadays among the more modern Chinese, girls with bound feet are not desired as wives.

A Dangerous Journey

Much farther south along the main railway line I took another narrow-gauge railroad westward again, this time in the province of Honan. This district was so full of bandits that when we set out from the end of the rails the general who governs that part of China sent a dozen soldiers with us. At one town the heads of two bandits lay in little wooden cages fastened at the upper corners of each city gate. But China is gradually becoming more modern in her forms of punishment, and now criminals are generally executed by being shot. The _cangue_, a great wooden platform fastened about the necks of prisoners, with the story of their crimes written on it, used to be common, but during my two years in China I saw only two prisoners wearing it.

We rode for four days in mule litters, along the strangest roads in the world. In my litter—a kind of cot with a rounded mat roof—I had all my baggage, including even a trunk. It is not hard to read or even to sleep in such a litter, swung between two mules, but it often tips until one expects to fall out. Once, just as we arrived at an inn for the night, my litter did turn over, and spilled everything, even the trunk, upon me.

It is dusty work riding through the loess country in a mule litter
unless you are the first one in a procession, as I was here. Two of
my soldier guard stand at the side of the litter.
]

The roads in this part of China are great ditches, a hundred, sometimes two hundred, feet deep. As the sandy gravel soil, which geologists call loess, washes out easily beneath the rains and blows away in great clouds of dust when it is dry, the travel of many millions along these roads for thousands of years has worn them down into canyons, with walls on either side as perpendicular as those of a skyscraper. If the Chinese had not cut down their forests, the roots of the trees would have held the soil together. Sometimes when mule or camel caravans meet in these deep roads they cannot pass, and one or the other has to turn back until they can find a wider place in the canyon.

Roads grow old in China. This one in the western part of the country
has been worn down, to the depth shown, in solid rock.
]

Beyond the great walled city of Sianfu, capital of Shensi Province and once called the “second capital” of China, we rode on mule back and had two-wheeled carts to carry our baggage, beds, and food, and also our cook and “boy.” There also the road was worn deep into the earth in many places, and to escape the heat and dust we often walked or rode along the edge of the chasm. It was more pleasant to walk, for if you have ever ridden a mule in a mountainous country you know how fond that animal is of the very brink of precipices. Perhaps he thinks he has nine lives, like a cat, or it may be that he likes thrills and danger, as some people do. Once the hind legs of the mule just in front of me, ridden by an American major, went clear over the side of the cliff, with a hundred-foot drop to the road below. Yet nothing serious happened. The animal scrambled like mad for a moment to regain its footing, and then went calmly on again, still just as close as possible to the edge, as if it could learn nothing by experience.

Cave Dwellers

In some places the loess soil of western China is worn to a depth of
one hundred feet or more, where a road has been used for centuries.
]

Often we came upon great square holes in the ground, twenty or thirty feet across and as deep. Ladders went down into them, and showed us that they were the courtyards of houses. Each side of the hole was dug out to form a house, where not only the people but their dogs and chickens and pigs live. On top of the earth above these sunken dwellings, the people thresh their wheat by driving mules or other animals round and round over it as it lies on the hard threshing-floor. They winnow the grain by throwing it up in the wind with a wooden scoop much like a snow-shovel, and what wheat they do not need for themselves they send to market, sometimes many days away, in long brown bags carried on wheelbarrows. We passed trains of as many as fifty of these wheelbarrows loaded with wheat. The faces of the men pushing them were often as twisted and strained as are those of champion runners at the end of a hard race.

Still farther westward there were large towns without a single house in them! The people all live in caves dug in the loess hillsides, a mud-brick wall with a small door in it across the front. This is another punishment for cutting down the forests generations ago, so that there is no wood left either to build with or to burn. Children go out and pick up every straw or twig that can be used as fuel, and even then there is so little to burn that they dare not make a fire to warm themselves, but must keep the precious fuel only for cooking. As it grows colder and colder during winter in the high altitude of western China, the people put on more and more garments padded with cotton. Is it not strange that the Chinese worship ancestors who made them so miserable by cutting down all their forests?

A Chinese girl and her younger brother, in their bright-colored,
cotton-padded winter clothing. You will see that the girl’s feet are
bound.
]

We stopped every night in a Chinese inn, which is very different from our hotels. It consists simply of mud-brick buildings around a yard filled with braying mules and crowing roosters. The only furniture is the _k’ang_, a mud-brick platform covered with a thin reed mat and having a fireplace beneath it. An inn servant would build us a fire under this strange bed if we told him to; but as the only fuel available was straw or small brush, we found that it made more smoke than fire.

The governor of Shensi Province sent his car of state to bring me to a
banquet in honor of my traveling companion and myself. Although
quite handsome, it was after all a “Peking cart” and no more
comfortable than that queer vehicle is when not decorated. On this
cart the tires were made of sharp iron points to prevent skidding.
They hardly improved the surface of a road! An ordinary Peking cart
is shown on page 82.
]

Most Chinese still prefer stone-hard beds and would not sleep in a soft one if they had it. But we carried cots, as all wise foreigners do who go beyond the railways and steamship lines in China. During the last six weeks of that trip into the far northwest it was bitterly cold at night, though the sun blazed all day long. After sunset, as soon as we could set up our cots on top of the _k’ang_, we crawled into our thick sleeping-bags, lined with sheepskin with the wool inside, and did not get out until morning. When the cook had coaxed a dinner for us out of a miserable little mud stove in the inn, the “boy” would set it out on top of our bedclothes, where we could eat by merely putting our arms outside. Then he would roll up inside his own _puk’ai_, the great cotton quilt all Chinese travelers carry with them in winter. At four in the morning he would come to wake us, bringing a hot breakfast. We started every day two hours before daylight and jogged steadily on until dark, seven days a week. This we did in order to finish the long journey in time to spend Christmas with our families in Peking.

In spite of all the hard work our “boy” had to do, he never complained. Nor did we find the people along the way grumbling because of their miserable lot in life. Even small children in this region often wore nothing but a cotton-padded shirt or blouse, as if their parents wished to harden them for the rough life they would always have to lead. The bitter winter weather had chapped many of them with deep cracks from head to foot.