Chapter C: W. Kinder, a Briton, of the Kaiping mines, built the first (5)

Culture, learning, fashion and fools have often mixed in the drawing-rooms which face Legation, Meridian and Great Wall Streets. In dignity, the National Customs Service, managed by foreigners, takes its way somewhat apart on Koulan Street. With the British Legal, it is the best civil service in the Far East, the other legations depending in various degrees upon missionaries for their knowledge of Chinese. The American legation in recent years has equipped its staff with student interpreters. Foreigners learn attachment for the life, as their wits are kept at work. It has been a wonderful capital in exciting life, as it is in physical appearance. Foreign press bureaus have vied with one another in sending out men fitted to obtain privileged information. In summer, the working Pekingese throws away all the clothes that the law will allow; in winter, he puts on so many cotton-wadded coats that he looks like a balloon ready to ascend, if he were not weighted with a charcoal brazier tucked under his coat or up his sleeve. He has a stone or brick kang (stove), but he must lie close to it to get its meager warmth. He, therefore, uses it for a bed, and so does the whole insect race, who make it warm for him, even if the brick stove does not. When the schoolboy wrote his ambiguous essay that “crowded China is too thickly populated to be comfortable”, he may, therefore, have referred to other inhabitants than the men and women. The furs of Peking are famous, and many black chow-dog farms have been started in Mongolia to supply the foreign fur markets. Peking has been so looted by war and by collectors of its ceramic prizes that the shops and potteries of Liu Li Street contain less that is valuable than the museums of America and Europe. For the ordinary traveler who wants something beautiful, even if it is not old, there are thousands of shops and bazaar tables that display their tempting wares. As China reforms, and art is not sweated out of the provinces by grasping officials and courtiers, the traveler will be able to follow his quest back to the many old centers of production in the central and southern provinces; and this will be better for art, and better for the traveler. The whole nation used to tremble when an official, dowager, baby emperor, prince, regent, etc., had a birthday or one of their various anniversaries, because it meant that jade, jewels, costly furniture, tapestries, porcelain, etc., must prove the sincerity of congratulations, and as we fill the papier-mâché rabbit with candies on Easter Day the vase had to be filled with coins of worth. These presents were no sooner received than they were pawned by the indigent Manchus to the shopkeepers of Peking, or they were stolen and sold by the palace eunuchs. The Chinese system of keeping art in drawers instead of in glassed cabinets, in view, aided this thievery, for the rascally eunuchs were not soon found out.

Many wonderful stories are told of the mysterious ceremonies of the Manchu court at night; how soldiers suddenly lined Meridian Street, and no Chinese could leave his house but on pain of death. Then the Wu Men gate of the Forbidden City was thrown open under the smoking torches, and the pale Emperor Kwang Hsu was carried forth, robed in yellow, and his courtiers in red, gold and blue. Down Meridian Street they noiselessly marched southward, the soldiers turning _volte-face_ along the street. The Chien Men gate into the Chinese city was thrown open, and through its Meridian Street the procession continued south for two miles to the temples and the open altar of Heaven, where midnight sacrifices of a black bullock, burned silk, grain and wine were made; a worship as old and as simple as that of the patriarchial days of Abraham. It was the worship of the ancestral Chou clan, which Confucius chronicled and the Manchu adopted so as to keep himself in veneration; and this right of sacrifice he has maintained in his abdication. The Pope Mikado has also retained his right to make similar sacrifices. Surely if the main hold on eastern peoples is to be a superstitious one, it is not so strong a hold as the republicans of China intend to set up in the minds and hearts of the new nation. God’s name was simply called “Tien”; i. e., heaven or sky. Then the procession hurried back long before the non-Manchus were awake. Other mysterious things happened in the night. The Wu Men gate was opened, and all courtiers and ministers then alone had their audience with the screened crown head. During the long regency of the Dowager Empress Tse Hsi and her predecessors, China was a land ruled by midnight decisions, and justice was as dark as the muffled and mysterious hour. Executions of the prominent were held at night on the common Meridian Road, which had been blocked off by soldiers. You never know at Peking when your passenger cart is standing over the altar of a life which was persecuted and sacrificed for opinion’s sake. No wonder that the Chinese, like other long-suffering reformers, are saying under their breath: “We have had enough of ‘plants’ and deeds done in darkness; let there be light.”

This wonderful walled capital of Mongol, Ming and Manchu dynasties, is not so old as the Great Wall of China, for it has been rebuilt several times, the imperial portion being about 1,000 years older than the inferior Chinese section to the south. It was as though the Chinese traders camped before the southern Chien Men gate to supply the Manchu court, and the Emperor Kia Tsing rose up and said: “Let us now take thought, and throw a wide wall around our purveyors’ bazaars also.” There is only one good thing about absolutism; i. e., to say is to do, and it was done. Peking has had many rivals as the capital of China: Nanking, the southern capital of the Mings, in particular; Hangchow, of the Sungs; and Canton, Wuchang, Chingtu and Shanghai have all put in their claims and maintained their flag in the breeze for a regal season. Geographically and strategically, Chingtu would be the proper capital of a united nation, and Wuchang would be almost as central and afford better trading facilities, a London of China, but it would not be so strong a strategic center. From a Chinese republican point of view, Canton, Nanking and Shanghai are foremost in their claims. Peking is weak because it is always within striking distance of Russia’s and Japan’s mighty armies. Almost alone of the world’s capitals, it is not at the water’s edge.

There are temples to nearly everything in Peking, a “Brooklyn of Churches”, but most of the altars this time are heathen: temples to Buddhas, sleeping in Nirvana, recumbent in Cingalese style; a splendid Lama Temple with wonderful carvings in wood and stone; God of War; Confucian; Taoist; Catholic Cathedral; Evangelical of every denomination of the three Protestant nations; Mohammedan mosques; God of Literature; God of Fox; Russian Greek Church; Portuguese Church; shrines over Buddha’s skin, teeth and a score of other things; Ancestral temples; Altars of the Sun, Moon, and Gods of Grain and Rain; temples to Buddha’s mother, and Gods of Success, and “World Peace” (not the recent invention of an armed peace!); Gods of Title Deeds, Dragons, Wind and Water, the North Star; Gods of Dead Elephants and Strong Tigers, etc. When the jolly men of Canton and another southern city heard of all this, glorious humorists that they are, they said they could “go it one better”. They erected with a rush a “Temple to Ten Thousand Gods”, all of whom look alike, even the images named for Marco Polo and “Chinese” Gordon. Chided with all this, a humorous Cantonese retorted: “Well, haven’t you Occidentals an Eden Musée and Madame Tussaud’s wax works; don’t take our idols as seriously as you do the Indian ones.” There are superbly carved marble dagobas in the Lama and Pi-Un-Se Temples. The Peking Lama is second in authority in the Buddhist world, and since General Chao Ehr Feng drove the Dalai Lama out of Tibet into India, the Peking Lama has now probably most power in the Buddhist world. The Pali Chuan pagoda outside the west wall is the most ornate in China. Burmese Buddhists brought their art influence thus far north, and under patronage of the Ming emperors cast it up like a pearl wrecked upon a barren shore; for the Manchu, who succeeded in the dynasty, is not an architect nor an artist. He has had to call in Chinese, Indian, Persian, Mohammedan and Jesuit architects from time to time to adorn his capitals and his graveyards at Mukden and Peking. There are towering, priceless bronze censers; stone and metal tablets; delightful octagonal marble mausoleums with circular second stories, topped with conic fluted roof, which is copied from the perfect act of the incomparable blue Temple of Heaven, and like the second story of the divinely beautiful choragic monument of Lysicrates at Athens. In his book, _The Chinese_, the author has referred to many other similarities between Greek and Chinese art and architecture, which are as wonderful as the dissimilarities. The ponderous gate forts, Manchu Drum and Ming Bell towers, with the largest bells in the world, sixteen feet high and nine inches thick, and the delightful compound or palace gates, are notable. The Buddhists have bell and statue foundries in the Tartar city, and there are potteries for dainty cloisonné. There are said to be some lost Jewish Chinese at Peking, as at Kaifong. They are now butchers, and worship with the Mohammedans, having lost nearly all their religious, if not their phrenological distinction long ago. What proof is stronger that the phylacteries of any conviction should be worn day and night on the forehead, as well as engraven on the heart, “lest we forget”. The trees and lakes of the city and suburbs are conspicuous, because all Chinese buildings, except pagodas, are not over two stories in height, and do not dwarf the lovely landscape.

There is one dead foreign city in China, Cathay’s “Deserted Village”, immortal Port Arthur. Where are now the streets of palatial Renaissance palaces which eight years ago nestled under Golden Hill and lined the bund of the Eastern Port? Where are the massed battalions of Alexeieff’s troops, white-capped, white-tunicated and high-booted, which used to dress ranks on the broad parade ground behind Golden Hill? What stilled forever the music of the ringing glasses, drained of their sweet Roederer by gold-braided arms that lifted them quickly to harsh lips in Saratoff’s gay restaurant on the sunny bund? What hushed the song of the musée and Odessa ballet girls on the small stage in smoky Nicobadza’s Café in the New Town? Over the breakers that lash the Tiger’s Tail Peninsula do the ghosts of Admiral Makharov, the court painter, Verestchagin, and seven hundred and fifty others of the mine-sunk _Petropavlovsk_ battleship still whisper their mournful names like a dirge of St. Andrew, as on that sad gray morning of April 4, 1904? Where are the battleships _Sevastopol_, _Peresviet_, _Poltava_ and _Nicolai_, which used to lie safely under Golden Hill, while terrific war harmlessly hurled fire and shell from Kikwan Hill, Pigeon Bay, where we used to shoot snipe, and Wolf’s Hill? Surely they are not the salvaged and transformed _Sagami_, _Tango_, _Iki_, etc., flying now the rayed, red sun instead of the white, blue and red flag of St. Andrew. On second view, they certainly are; there are the high freeboard of a Baltic-built vessel of the Kronstadt navy-yard.

We search in vain for the newspaper office of Alexeieff’s official organ, the _Novo Krai_, and we miss from the gay bund the dashing team of the richest Chinese compradore army-purveyor, Chih Fun Tai, Esquire. The naval dockyard across the harbor from Golden Hill is, however, developed better than ever, though you can not get near it because of the watchful Japanese picket, unless you wish to be incarcerated under the international spy act! The fine white hospital buildings to the west of the inner harbor are also improved. The wrecking crews are still working with derricks and drags at the narrow harbor entrance only two hundred yards wide upon the rock-filled hulls which Captain Hirose, the Hobson of Japan, sank there at the cost of his life, under the fire of Golden Hill on a hazy morning in April, 1904, so as to cork up the navy of Russia and allow Togo to scour the seas with his British naval preceptor at his side on the bridge, instead of being held in blockading leash. Around the harbor tower the great forts of strategically essential 203 Metre Hill, stubborn North Hill, Kikwan Hill, Ehr Lung (Two Dragons) Hill, Sun Shu Hill, “H” fort, Palung Hill, and Wan Tai. Not a large tree waves on them, though some stubby firs for masking purposes are being set out stealthily. Everywhere is desolation; choked tunnels and saps underground, filled war galleries above ground, broken gun carriages, burst Krupp and Armstrong guns piled up in titanic wreckage. Heroic Kondrachenko and gallant Stoessel on one side, and Grant-like Nogi on the other, sowed the hundred valleys and hillsides hereabout with rusting bayonets, belt buckles, medals of glory and skulls of death. Thousands and thousands of men, known not by their names but by their number tag, like prisoners, dropped before the ruthless and fame-obliterating fire of range-fixed guns operating behind searchlights. It was the steady mowing of the grim reaper himself, until Nogi determined to reach Kondrachenko, and North and 203 Metre forts, underground instead of by bombardment and assault. Nickel-nosed bullets, soft-nosed spreaders, broken sabers, rusted buttons, bleaching bones, water cans, leather knapsack bottles, slowly rotting walnut rifle stocks, four-inch and eight-inch shells, camp-fire equipments, pots, match-boxes, frames that held sweetheart’s picture next the heart, star orders of the heathen emperor and cross decorations of the Holy Tsar of Peace (!), numbers that were tagged on the neck to take the place of the name of a man, breeches of quick-firing guns, barrels of Gatlings and Nordenfeldts, cartridge cases, porcelain saki bottles, metal clasps of Y. M. C. A. Bibles, all fill up these powder-upheaved furrows of Death, where not a Chinese building stands of the once beautiful Chinese suburbs.

Out of the historical hills and valleys wind the long parallel ribbons of the railway around the horseshoe bend of the Kwang Tung Peninsula, but no commercial traffic is now brought lower down than Dalny. A destroyed city indeed, a precious ice-free port of commerce and a sunny bund of society, deserted by force of arms, a secret base and a masked fort yet being silently strengthened. The fleet that holds the Pacific holds Port Arthur at its will, and the hand that holds Port Arthur can hold all China north of the Yangtze and up to the Amur River in its iron grasp, if there is a will and an exchequer to launch the force. Russia allowed commerce, travel and society to come with war to Port Arthur. Japan only allows war to mark time here. True, the Yamato Hotel is there yet, but it is exclusively for the garrison artillery life of the little brown men who by edict of government have given up sitting on mats that their legs may grow as tall as their minds and ambitions, despite Matthew 6:27. Whether there are Anglo-Japanese, Anglo-American, Sino-American, American-Japanese, Russo-Germanic, Anglo-French, or Four-Nation alliances or entente cordiales, this question will always come up: “Well, what about the deserted, shell-swept city of the Far East, the masked and granite fort, Port Arthur?”

What happened to Port Arthur can happen to any city of China north of Hongkong, unless China is put on her feet and has an army of defense. Under whose tutelage shall that force arise? Not a true man lives who wants to see another Dead City of the East. There this one stands, terrible to-day as eight years ago, the most terrific, oppressively silent, shell-blown, mine-scarred, tunnel-cut, war-cursed, sap-seared, skeleton-grinning, warped, agonized, Luciferian monument of bloody war that the world exhibits. Tuck it away in the toe of the Tiger’s Tail in far-away China, and let busy altruistic mankind, yellow and white, forget it. Forget it! Yes! but I hear the hammering and riveting, the cranking of the siege guns, the piling of the ammunition, the digging and blasting of the deep docks still going on. In the midst of peace and life we are yet in the midst of war and death. Yet the Dead City of the Far East, in dying, won something for progress; it checked the Russianization of China and the obliteration of China’s best son, Japan; it prevented the clash of Britain and Russia, and the eventual clash of America and Russia perhaps in the Philippines and Manchuria. It loosened a little the ruthless hand of the Russian oligarchy upon the neck of Dumas, and the Ochrana detectivization of the people. In dying, it brought some dangers, too, that a not sufficiently representative Japan would take the place of Russia in greed, and bring altruistic America upon her fleet; for the American people, loving freedom for all, and now writing text-books on that subject, are committed by John Hay’s “non-partition of China” policy to seeing that Japan stops her imperialistic expansion with the absorption of Korea, and that China, the Mother of the East, is left to pursue her new glorious destiny in peace, with no more of her sacred territory imperiled, until she can put liberty in free stride from the hot Tonquin border to the Amur’s ice-fringed rapids.

Newchwang, which means “ox depot”, is on the Liao River fifteen miles from the sea, Jinkow being its port. The bar permits of eighteen-foot draught, but could be dredged deeper. The river is icebound from November till April. The exports are beans, bean cake, bean oil, gold, silver, silk, black oxen, mutton, wool, wheat, kaoliang, little millet, pulse, spirits, tobacco, paper, lumber, furs. Coal and iron would be a heavy export if there was not railway discrimination on the part of the Japanese. The imports are flour, machinery, cotton, etc. There is an important foreign settlement, and foreign hongs should move their advance posts here for the attack on Manchurian trade. The city was invested by the Russians in 1898 and 1900, and the Japanese to-day are almost as active, having linked the city by railway with their Dalny line. They have established a Japanese settlement on the water-front, with hotels, hospitals, tea-houses, banks, etc. The Chinese national railways give a direct service north and south via Kinchow. Newchwang’s commerce is fed by the immense fleet of 20,000 junks of the Liao River, which gather cargo even north of Mukden. Perhaps the most celebrated British consul and diplomatist who has been stationed here is the author, A. H. Hosie. In the Japan-China War of 1894 a great battle was fought at Newchwang.

Mukden, the home city of the Manchu race, lies one hundred miles northeast of Newchang on the Shin River, a branch of the Liao River. It has connection with the Japanese and Chinese railway systems, and northward it connects with the Russian system. The stone and brick-walled inner city is one mile across; the outer wall, with eight double gates, is fourteen miles around, and there are important suburbs. It is a smaller Peking in plan. East of Mukden there are walled tombs of the Manchu emperors, and of Shun Chih and Narachu, the founders of the dynasty, which tombs suffered in the Russo-Japan War. A plain mound, with a growing tree upon it, covers the founder’s tomb. Winged griffins guard the southern gateway, which is so stern in architecture as hardly to suggest the Orient. There are the usual pailoo memorial arches, rising on the backs of tortoises, and two unique pillars with lions on top, which design is copied from the Ming emperors, whose throne the Manchus ravaged. The north gate oddly is single, and not triple in Chinese style, and is guarded by a plain, two-roofed pagoda. The court is stone laid. The main avenue of the tomb is guarded by monster statues of lions, camels, horses, elephants and warriors. The ancestral temple contains a tortoise which bears the tablets. Mourning houses, temples, stone screens and vases add to the ensemble.

The old Chung Cheng yellow-tiled palace is at the south gate of the city, and has been tenanted by notable and progressive viceroys, one of whom attempted to reconcile the Eastern and Western religions. The imperial palace, Wen So Ko, has the imperial library of 7,000 cases. Its rich museum of priceless bronzes, vases, tapestries, etc., was largely looted by the Manchu princes, who sold the treasures to the curio collectors who flocked like vultures to Peking in the financial troubles of the revolution. The Fei Lung Ko treasury is on the east side and the Hsiang Feng Ko treasury is on the west side. There is a modern Chinese commercial museum; the Yamato Hotel in the extensive Japanese section; a Japanese railway medical college; an Astor Hotel; a Chinese medical college; and the medical college of the Scotch Presbyterians outside the east gate, with which the noted author, Doctor J. Ross, is connected. Doctor Christie, of Mukden, was another hero of the terrific pneumonic plague in Manchuria in 1910–11. The usual favorite Fox Temple of the Manchu race is to be seen. There is a Taoist Temple of Hell, with horrible statues. The Temple to the God of Literature is the most beautiful in bare Manchuria, because of the artistic proportion of its walls, galleries, roofs and stairs; but the temple has little independent meaning, because the Manchus have absolutely no original literature, possessing in their perpendicular Syriac-like script only copies of Chinese literature.

Not only the Japanese are conspicuously in evidence; Russian droshkes are pulled at the gallop and trot along the Meridian Street of the Drum Tower. The unique tall shop signs are carved on pole and capital not unlike Alaskan totem poles. Differently from the cities of South China, many ponies and mules are seen on the street, and man is not here, as in Middle and South China, the beast of burden. The best frozen game, pork and mutton, and fish shops of China are in Mukden. Outside each angle of the walls is a Lama monument. Mukden is famous for its black pigs, many of which, frozen, are shipped to Liverpool and London markets. The Japanese have erected fine railway, administration, bank, school, etc., buildings in their settlement. The city has telephone, telegraph, electric light, mail and water service. Wen Hsiang, the most enlightened Manchu prince connected with international dealings with China at Peking in the Victorian age, was a Mukden man, and is buried near the east gate. The foreign settlement has the usual clubs and churches, a brewery, and a large modern concrete factory of the British-American Tobacco Company, for when opium went out the cigarette came in, in disgusted Cathay! The Chinese hotel is the Hai Tien Chun, near the entrance to the west gate. There are horse-tram railways, electric trams, a Chinese provincial mint, and great fur, skin and coal markets. Mukden will yet be a leading center for land, mine, agricultural, machinery, food and clothing interchange of the world, for rich, black-earth Manchuria is destined to be the granary of more soil-impoverished countries of the Pacific than China.

XXII

NATIVE CITIES OF CHINA

Singan or Sian (meaning “Chinese”), the capital of Shensi province, dates back to the twelfth century, B.C. The whole valley is full of the monuments, mounds and relics of kings of many ancient dynasties. As its name appropriately shows, Singan was the original capital of China, when the tribes first united in mutual recognition of kinship, and it is a shrine, therefore, appealing to antiquarians. Out on the plain the Emperor Tsin, builder of the Great Wall, “burned the books” of China, and buried the scholars under mounds of contumely. The most remarkable pyramidal pagoda in China lies beyond the south wall. It has seven stories, surmounted with a turban, and temple buildings with rich screens are attached. To this city the Empress Dowager Tse Hsi retreated from Peking in a springless cart over sunken loess roads before the march of the European allies and the American column in 1900. Its walls and large forts, filled with ports, are the oldest and best preserved of all Chinese cities.

The Bankers’ Guild building is famous for its many-pinnacled roof and ornate tiling. Its monuments relate the intellectual communion of China and India in the seventh century A. D. Very old buildings exhibit a four-leaf clover design in stone screens, and the fish-scale design in wooden and bamboo balustrades. There are wonderful gardens with pavilions and wavy stone bridges. Pailoos, bearing legends, are built over the entrance stairs to temples and guild houses. The square space within the walls is six miles long each way. One reason for its strong fortification is that it is in the Mohammedan section of China, and the Mohammedans are always rebelling. It withstood a Mohammedan siege of two years in 1870–1.

If Russia aimed to cut off eastern from western China, she would strike at Singan, as it is the strategic base which holds Turkestan, Tibet and Szechuen to the empire. Its trade is vast and various. From a religious and antiquarian point of view, hardly any Chinese city equals it in the interest of Occidentals, for here the famous Nestorian Tablet, dated 781 A.D., stands in the park of a heathen temple. This tablet records the communion of the earliest Chinese Christians. A copy of this supremely venerable and artistic stone was placed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1909. The National Library, Paris, has had a replica since 1850. The Pei Lin Park contains a library cut in 1,300 stone tablets; the “Stone Forest”, it is called. The city lies in a plain, and presents a striking appearance from the limestone and loess hills which surround it. In these hills, to the northwest, are cut the cave dwellings, temples and statues of prehistoric and early civilizations. In one cave temple is the sandstone and gilt colossal Ta-Fu-Tsze Buddha, fifty-six feet high, the largest statue in China, showing the tremendous zeal of the Buddhist movement in the brilliant Tang dynasty in the seventh century, when our Europe was in intellectual darkness. Two colossal statues of Buddha’s pupils are also in this temple.

The city presents a brilliant kaleidoscope of nationalities: Mohammedans with red turbans, Tartars wearing red panels; Mongols with blue turbans; high-booted, bewhiskered Russians; booted Tibetans; blue-gowned Chinese; yellow-robed Lamas; now and then a top-knotted aborigine; robed Manchus; and descendants of the original Tsin and Chou tribes of Chinese who came east to China from the cradle of the race, seated in the saddle of pioneer conquerors; and with the Hebrews, these Singan men can probably boast that they bring down the purest blood from the dispersion of Ararat. Descendants of kings and generals of many a dynasty now plough farms on the plain, and they will tell you: “Yes, I am the son of a king.” Near here the builder of the Great Wall, infinitely the greatest mason and military commander of history, the Emperor Tsin, 220 B. C., had his capital at Hsien Yang. His huge pyramidal mound, and other burial mounds, are among the world’s greatest curiosities. On the plain are the two unique marble arches, with four roofs, erected by Governor Lu to the memory of his mother and wife, in the China where some writers say women meet with no honor. A stone bridge of seventy arches over the Pa River, and the hot sulphur springs of Lin Tung, are notable. The round, instead of square stone piers, are unique in China, and show Moslem influence. Not all Chinese cities were without attention from the sanitary engineer. Old culverts and drains constructed by the ancient kings of the north exist in Singan and elsewhere, and some of the southern cities have drainage canals, sewage canals not being considered necessary, as the night-soil is collected for fertilization. China, however, is going to drain her cities so as to carry off expectoration and decaying matter. The smells which the tourist revolts at are not as dangerous as they seem, as opium, peculiar incense, and vegetable cooking oils, such as sesamum, peanut, bean, etc., contribute the most malodorous portion.

Chingtu stands in a wide plain in the heart of the vast empire. The walls are fifteen miles around, and the gates of these walls are never opened at night, except to the “chi” (government messengers). Either Chingtu or the Hankau cities will be the capital of the nation eventually. It is an intellectual center, and there are many publishing shops. Two rivers, the Min and To, border the plain, and are broken up into the widest system of irrigation canals that the world shows. No garden of the earth is so rich as this warm moist Eden. Every tree, herb and plant of the tropics and sub-tropics is raised, and more men are supported here to the acre than anywhere else in the world. It is the earth’s model school of intensive farming, and would delight the professors of the specializing University of Wisconsin! In the sandstone and loess hills are the cliff dwellings of prehistoric man. There are hundreds of bridges and ferries, many temples, arches, cemeteries and villages, the latter often populated by one family clan. The great walled city of a million inhabitants has the widest streets of any native city except Peking. There is a Tartar walled city within the Chinese city. The forts over the gates are of three stories. The loyal General Chao Ehr Feng, the hero of the Tibet campaign in 1910, held Chingtu for many months against the republicans in the fall of 1911.

The Provincial Assembly proclaimed reform in September, 1911, from a wonderful, circular, double-roofed temple in Chingtu. There is a large Mohammedan population, and mosques are therefore conspicuous. Marco Polo was a traveler here. There are wide Tartar parade grounds and rifle butts. The markets and fairs held in the temple grounds (religion and business being partners in China as in that Boston church that uses its basement for stores!) are the best in the empire. It is the splendid capital of the largest and richest province; a center of independent provincials who are crying “China for the Chinese.” It has a modern union university, which teaches English, science and Chinese; trade, military and girls’ schools; musk, silk, brass, salt, horn-lantern, oil, fur, spice, lace, porcelain, cotton and wool shops; a few iron shops; decorated yamen and guild halls. Its traveling kitchens, its porters and wheelbarrow brotherhoods are unique. One temple, erected to the Sheep-god in particular, is remarkable for two reasons: first, that it is a Taoist and not a Buddhist monastery: and second, that it is one of the finest examples of architecture in the empire. It is the beautiful Ching Yang Kung (Temple of the Golden Sheep) monastery outside the south gate. The Chu Ko Liang monastery, with its circular doors, is another chef-d’œuvre.

Many nations and faiths have missions here, and their medical schools and hospitals have won the hearts of the Chinese even ahead of their excellent schools. Chingtu is one of the centers that the Canadian missions have selected for special work. One meets many foreign engineers, and there are also native engineers. The climate is far more endurable for foreigners than that of South China at the seacoast. Many Lolo and Miaotse aborigine mountaineers, with their hair worn in a top-knot, are seen on the busy streets. Rice and wheat mills are being erected, and furniture, florist, book, bronze and picture stores abound. Chingtu will be the center of the commercial attack on rich Southeast Tibet, as the main pass of Ta Chien is not far away. Britain plans to link Chingtu to her Burmese and Indian railways by loaning the Chinese the necessary money. The Chingtu gentry started a railway to Ichang on the Yangtze River, and differences with the Peking authorities over the nationalization of this railway in September precipitated the October, 1911, rebellion at the Hankau cities. There is an arsenal, a mint, a military school and police barracks, the police being uniformed in modern style, with the addition of arms. The French are also in evidence at Chingtu, as they would like to run their railway up from Yunnan City. Railways are planned to run north to Singan, east to Ichang through exceedingly difficult country, south to Chungking, and west to Batang and Burma. Politically the Chingtu people are progressive and fearless like the men of Hupeh province, whence they came, as in 1644 Chang Hsien Chang depopulated Chingtu.

Chungking, the second city of vast Szechuen province, is a riverine port with a great future as a railway, boat, trading and manufacturing center; a future Pittsburgh, perhaps. It is built on a rocky peninsula just like Macao, the Yangtze and Kialing Rivers forming two sides, and a wall the third side of a triangle. From the hills outside the wall, the graves of the ages look down on the busy scene, as the carriers set out on the long stone road toward the capital, Chingtu. Chungking is famous for its water-gates, overhanging buildings propped over the rock with long poles. Some of its streets are exceptionally clean, wide and well paved. It is called the “piled-up” city, like the lower part of rocky Hongkong, the roof of one row of buildings being part of the street of the tier of buildings above. There is a great parade ground, and a military school by the land wall. The city is a center for fitting up expeditions which are bound for the prosperous capital in the north, the rich hilly south, or the wild west. Drugs, vegetable and mineral oils, water-proof paper, salt, coal, furs, iron, tea, lanterns, cement, agricultural products including sugar, bamboo, silk in particular, boat builders’ and chandlers’ supplies, placer and quartz gold, are all specialties of the district. Fine pagodas, with beautiful, up-curling galleries, overlook the river, and there are excellent “Li Pais” or mission compounds, and modern educational institutions. There are fine guilds, as one could expect of the Hupeh and Hunan province merchants, and the Ho Gai Monastery reveals a delightful touch of the old times. Beautiful pailoo arches span the roads. The Guild of Benevolence is famous for its extremely beautiful pavilions and terraces. As at all the riverine ports of the Yangtze, the great flights of wet stone stairs are characteristic. Chungking was once the second worst opium hell in the kingdom, but the people awoke to their danger in a wonderfully surprising way, and in the years from 1908–11 largely threw off the curse.

In Chungking the rebels of 1911 recruited many of their first patriots, and the first attacks were planned from here. The people are an earnest-looking set, yet the place for centuries, like its great winter mists which float down from Tibet, was the center of sorcery, superstition, fortune-telling and folk-lore. It was just the place to raise soothsayers, poets and astrologers. The only man who had a stronger wand like Aaron’s which swallowed up all the rest, was the American or British medical missionary, who by 1910 grew to be heartily beloved, so much so that every foreigner was welcomed by rich and poor, and implored to “come in here, see my art treasures, and (incidentally!) before you go won’t you please heal my child, my beloved and my old parent?” It was enough to make every traveler swear that if he returned home safely he would at once study medicine and come back to China as a physician of the body first, and the soul and economic state afterward. The boat people of the port are famous for their courage and skill, and the mountain coolies are noted for their endurance. Much of the blood of the race is from Hupeh, which means a strong strain of “China for the Chinese”. The city is surrounded with hills and ranges, and there are many mountain health resorts used by natives and foreigners, which are exceedingly welcome in the moist hot summer. There is the Golden Buddha range to the south, with its fine temples and many aborigine dwellers. Ho Ih Shan Mountain is to the north. The Gong Gorge is a scenic spot of great beauty. The British have a palatial consulate at Chungking, with a bungalow adjunct in the hills so as to afford escape from the terrific summer. This is the policy that the Hongkong Bank long ago instituted in China; mess quarters over the bank for winter occupancy, and airy bungalow quarters on Hongkong peak for summer occupancy. There are many Mohammedans in Chungking, and four of the industries which they control are bakeries, butcher shops, inns and common carrying.

Wuhu, on the Yangtze, half-way up to Hankau, is recovering from the blow dealt it by the Taipings in the 60’s. It will take a prominent place in the coming industrial China because of riches in land, mine, silk, tea and bamboo near it. It is one of the new strongholds in education and medicine under American and European auspices. It has a foreign colony in the hills. The Hwangchi River brings grain and produce down to its marts, and the great Yangtze sweeps by its harbor bund. Game, such as pheasant, quail and duck, abounds. There are very fine pagodas, and in particular a Buddhist rock temple with the figures of men, animals and birds cut solidly out of, or in relief on the solid rock, the shrubbery and grass serving for hair and beard in a startling way. Excursions can be made to the Chin Shan and San Shan hills, temples, lily lakes and flowery restaurants. The town is full of the festival spirit, and the beauty of lanterns, arches, flags and matting shelter is often delightfully exhibited. Wuhu early went over to the rebel movement of October, 1911. Wuhu is a great sufferer from floods. They were so deep in August, 1911, that Lion Hill became an island. The Yangtze, instead of mounting willingly up to Nanking, tries at Wuhu to break across country for Shanghai. The result is deplorable flood and resultant famine, involving millions of people.

Tai Yuen is the walled capital of the great coal, iron and loess province of Shansi, which is as large as England. It is the richest in minerals of all the provinces. The famous Ping Ting coal and iron mines are near. The city lies in a great plain 3,000 feet above the sea on the Fen River, and has railway connection with Peking and all the east and south. It is to have connection with the capital of Kansu province, and all the great northwest for thousands of miles. Mills will arise, for stone, clay, iron and coal are available in this province as nowhere else. Though the air of the city is exhilarating and there is little consumption, skin diseases and diseases due to poor water are prevalent. With irrigation in operation, fertilization of this loess province would be unnecessary, so that Tai Yuen will yet be a great wheat and millet center. Her grain, stock and wool merchants will be taking contracts to feed and clothe America and Britain when our fields are impoverished and overrun with people. It will be a financial center, for Shansi’s wealth in China’s new industrial era can not be computed. Even now the Shansi bankers are the best known, their guild houses being in every city of the land. The railway, electric light, post, telegraph and telephone have arrived, and so has the printing press, raying out reform. The railway has brought progress to quaint Tai Yuen. There are match factories, police department, a public band, modern schools of all sorts, an agricultural and military school, modern roads and a street-cleaning department, a modern jail which aims to teach instead of confirming in despair. Confucius fled here to the Wei State, when his own state persecuted him, and this province is the home of the original clan of Chinese, the Chou, who instituted ancestor worship and the rule of princes at the beginning of history. The great Shansi University was established here in 1901 by the British with indemnity funds restored to the Chinese at the request of British missions, which was a singularly Samaritan act; for on July 9, 1900, at the yamen in Tai Yuen, all the missionaries, their wives and children, were put to a brutal death by the infamous “Boxer,” the Luciferian brute, Governor Yu Hsien, whose name is hated by the progressive Chinese as much as we hate it, and the Manchu officials who took their “tip” from the dowager empress, Tse Hsi. Doctor Timothy Richard, promoter of the successful Red Cross in China, was the first president of this institution, and W. E. Soothill was its second president. Both these gentlemen lead in Britain’s educational influence in China. English, of course, is taught. Like all the northern cities, Tai Yuen is cursed in fall with the penetrating loess and sand-storms. The blue-roofed and blue-walled Temple of Heaven is beautiful, with its magnificent eaves, carved terminals, colored frieze, columns, statues, scrolls, paintings and theater. There are also Confucian, Manchu-Fox, Buddhist and Taoist temples and pagodas, and a Mohammedan mosque, for this is the first city, going west, where we meet this last sect, whose sphere extends right on to the far northwest. There is a notable four-storied fort over the Romanesque south gate.

Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Treeless mountains of South China, Kwangtung province. Modern road
broken down from the disintegrated granite; stone houses of
farmers; rice cultivation with water-buffalo.
]

Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Sport in South China, Kwangtung province. Dragon-boat racing in
June. Crews sometimes number a hundred paddlers to a boat. There
is frequently great loss of life. This photograph disproves two
statements: that the Chinese are phlegmatic and dislike sport.
]

Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Pechili province merchants ready for a trip into cold Mongolia.
They are the class which is calling for more railways. Woolen
clothing is taking the place of the padded cotton garments shown,
and leather shoes are rapidly coming into use.
]

The Manchus have their own Tartar or military city, which will now become the administrative headquarters. Many furs are brought down from the Mohammedan and Mongolian plains in the west and north. There are mission schools and hospitals, a military parade ground, and an arsenal. The twin pagodas of thirteen stories, with narrow galleries, are famous. The pailoo memorial arches are distinct from the open southern type, the Shansi type being a solid top-heavy tower. More ponies are to be seen here than in most of the cities, and the horsemanship of the Mongols is daring, as we should expect from the descendants of Kublai Khan’s hordes, whom Marco Polo praised in that famous memorial that was dictated in a prison of Europe more terrible to him than all the dangers of Far Cathay.

Yunnan, the capital of the great copper and tin province, is five hundred miles from the Gulf of Tonquin, with which a French narrow gage railway, completed at awful cost of men and money, now connects it. The city is in a plain five thousand feet high, at the foot of the Tibetan Mountains. A great lake, the Tanklu, near by, is connected by canal with the city. It is the center of a warmer art than the other provinces, the architecture showing the elaborate Burmese influence, which relies on ornament and color more than line and proportion. Some of the pagodas are square, peculiar to Yunnan, and have nine to thirteen stories, and galleries, as compared with seven to nine stories elsewhere. The gate forts are ornate, though the roofs do not curl up as fantastically and richly as in the east of China. The British and French are fighting it out for chief foreign influence, with the latter ahead as yet, because the railway from Mandalay has not been run through. There are fine French stores where you can purchase madame’s millinery, confection or perfumery, a French hospital and a palatial French consulate; but the Chinese have far greater trust in the Americans and British, for French designs on Chinese territory are feared. Yunnan does not want to follow Tonquin. There are many Mohammedans, and their round mosque towers are in evidence.

Great rebellions and massacres have occurred, as in those bloody years 1857–73 when General Tsen made a name for ruthlessness which still strikes terror throughout China. The city, with a splendid division of the modern army, went over to the rebels on November 3, 1911. Outside the walls are two interesting temples. The Golden Heaven Temple is in the northeastern hills. Part of it is made of gilt copper, and shows Burmese influence. The stairs, terraces, openwork balustrades, tiling, roofs and scrolls are very fine. The Buddhist temple cut in the rock over the lake is a noble work, even extra niches being cut for the statues. It is not likely that this costly work will ever again be done in China, for “the god has lost his grip,” the devotee having found out that he was hollow! The bald monks are scratching their heads and thinking what new thing they can devise to bolster up the system. Many of them have gone in the hotel and teaching business! The flags of the temples have bells attached to them, and bells are hung under the eaves. Every breeze in Yunnan is laden with silver and gold, therefore. There are temples and shrines to the goddess Kwan Yun, who is said to give good luck to travelers. It is proper ritual to roll the prayer paper on your tongue, and in a ball shoot it toward the statue, where, if it sticks, it means fortune for you, as the goddess will certainly be unable to forget you. There are beautiful pavilions at the lake, and Yunnan can now be considered a health resort for Southern and French China. It is a center of engineering, and the headquarters of the inventors of the stone-and-chain suspension bridges which are peculiar to this province of gorges. The piers and pier houses are very artistic, and stand unique in the world’s architecture.

Yunnan has modern schools, colleges, hotels, hospitals; a mint, post-office and telegraph station; splendid modern barracks, a fine parade ground, etc. The university is a modern domed brick building on a hill in the center of the city. Its dormitories are lighted by electricity and the equipment is wonderful compared to what used to be. There is a museum, and English, Japanese, French, science, music, agriculture and sericulture are among the branches taught. The best trade school, however, is the modern jail, which is very popular! When you hire a mechanic in Yunnan you are reasonably sure that you have a former jailbird, just as in Peking, if you have a good clerk you are sure he is a Manchu prince incognito, for pensions have been stopped of late! One sees here the famous Yunnan yellow pigs, and peculiar white and black fowl, whose bones and skin are black, probably on account of iron and copper in what they eat. Boys are driving water buffaloes to the rice and maize fields, which have superseded the poppy plantations. The stores exhibit the famous jade and the Yunnan (Tali) landscape-veined marble which is used in the tops of tables, the seats of chairs and panels of cabinets and screens. Peculiar bamboo and paper toys in which the figures move by the heat of a candle, are made, which is another proof that the Chinese love children more than they are said to do in many books of travel! The city is famous for its copper and bronze work. The copper smelting by charcoal up to 1911 was an imperial government monopoly, the ingots being sent overland to Peking by pack animals, which took the route via Sui-fu and Chungking. At the Peking mint it was used in the heavy “cash” coinage. Yunnan is noted for its cloth dyers, who as yet use the famous indigo of the province, instead of analine dye. The tin, iron, pewter and furniture shops are noted, and foreign models are being copied with success.

The city is noted for its modern prison, with model workshops, the best in China. The police corps, uniformed in knee boots, tight tunics and German caps, and wearing swords, is a model gendarmerie. Yunnan, the farthest removed city of the empire from the capital, Peking, has been the foremost in these startling reforms since the French railway came through from the coast in 1910. Many Hongkong Chinese, who at once visited the place, are largely responsible for this reform leaven, but the chief credit is due to the progressive governor, Li Chin Hsi, who, remote as he was from headquarters, preserved order during the exciting months of 1911–12. In the streets the chair coolies rush along, with the right of way, shouting “Pei Ha” (We’ll poke you in the back). It was once the king town of opium, where a whole city walked for years in a sleep, but the government has largely stamped out both poppy field and opium joint. On the parade ground on a fall day of 1909, with military honors, the governor amusingly burned in public hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of opium and ivory pipes. On account of magnesian limestone and minerals in the water, awful-looking victims of goitre are constantly met. The poppy fields are now being used by a wide-awake people for the cultivation of mustard, rice, maize, sugar, banana, orange, pomegranates, bamboo, walnuts, etc.

Many peculiar races and varied costumes are to be seen in this Museum of Languages: Shans with high black head-dress and a red band across their foreheads; Mohammedans with green turbans; Lolos without queues and hair piled on the head like men who have a perpetual nightmare; Tibetan women driving their pack trains to their mountain home, the “Roof of the World,” and driving their husbands, too! Burmese with combs in their hair, though they are not women! Kilted Kachins, carrying their long, two-handed dha-swords on their shoulders, and their women wearing bamboo sticks through their ears and chains of river shells and colored stones on their necks; Annamese in gorgeous gold silk, embroidered as though they were on their way to claim a throne; daring, dirty Bhamo muleteers, who dare to be full of polyglot oaths, for they wear nothing worth throwing mud at; women riding ponies, donkeys and mules, and trying to evade the thrust of one another’s pin-filled hair as though they were on tourney; aboriginal Miaos and Lolos with figured yellow cloaks like circus clowns, and wide hats whose rims are stayed down to their shoulders with strings; French surveyors in white duck and kettle helmets, and exhausting themselves with the vivacious volubility that you listen to on Marseilles’ Cannabiere; British in khaki, Calcutta topey-helmets and putties, and as “cool as cucumbers” both in tongue and temperature, men who “get there”; yellow-gowned bonzes wondering where their religion has flown of late; black-gowned Roman priests and flat-hatted _frères_ of the Missions d’Etrangeres, wearing Chinese soutanes; gray-gowned Taoists who are satisfied with their incomes, because while religion has flown in China, superstition still sticks; blue-gowned Chinese; flame-robed Tibetan lamas; pink-gowned Buddhists, who are thinking of opening hotels instead of temples, in which latter there has been a “slump”; and occasionally an American in a Sabutan hat and a Shangtung silk suit, ready for anything, and showing the mood in his eyes and laughter.

The district is gorgeous with flowers, camellias, mustard, poppies, magnolia, indigo, olive, jasmine, and every kind of fern, bush and vine. Yunnan is rich in animals, including the tiger and black panther, and fine skins, and some ivory are to be obtained. Beautiful cranes and duck are to be seen on the lake. It is also rich in valuable lumber, and therefore its furniture stores are notable. Coal, iron, zinc, copper and salt are produced in abundance, and there is much gold, silver, nickel and quicksilver. The tin mines of Kuo Chia produce 13,000,000 pounds of tin a year. There are also beds of precious stones, rubies, garnets, sapphires, amethysts, etc. No district of the empire has so many varied metals as Yunnan. The many races keep the province more disjointed than any other. An authority on these aboriginal races is the British consul at Tongyueh, Yunnan, whose exhaustive articles have appeared in the London _Geographical Magazine_. In natural scenery Yunnan presents the most sublime panorama in the world.