Chapter XI: Hanoï and the Tonkin

Hanoï, northern capital of French Indo-China, is somewhat larger and less obviously tropical than its southern rival, Saïgon. It is quite a city, with expensive modern buildings, electric street-cars—found nowhere else in the colony—railways in four directions, many automobiles, both of the taxicab and private limousine variety, several excellent hotels; in short, it is a little Paris of the tropics, with some advantages that even Paris does not have. Those hotels were a constant surprise, though I had seen almost their equal in other parts of the colony. Not only were they all you could expect of the French themselves, but their rates were surprisingly reasonable for these exorbitant times. Though I am getting ahead of my story again, we had later on two large rooms with bath, electric fan thrown in, excellent French food and plenty of ice, for three adults and two small children at 250 piastres a month. True, there were cobwebs visible in the corners of the high ceiling, bright little lizards paraded the walls, and the plumbing might have been more strictly up-to-date, but he is an inexperienced traveler who expects perfection anywhere.

In the very heart of Hanoï, with the principal foreign streets on some sides of it and the native city on the other, is a large lake, delightfully blue and restful, bordered by a stone-faced embankment spaced with huge old trees. Out in it rise two little islands, one reached by a causeway, the other needing a boat, bearing respectively a famous old temple and a kind of pagoda. The beautiful, lazily tropical view across this broad deep lake in the heart of a city is one of the sights of the Far East, and gives Hanoï quite a distinctive atmosphere. In a well shaded corner on its shores there is, especially on Sunday mornings, a flower-market very similar to the one near the Madeleine in Paris, except that this one lasts the whole year round, and in place of the _bouquetières_ of Paris boulevards the sellers are black-toothed _congaïe_ in long cinnamon-brown coats, their swollen lips reddened with betel-nut, yet quite as commercially skillful and in their Oriental way just as coquettish as their Parisian counterparts.

Rue Paul Bert, named for a former French commander, is to Hanoï what the Rue Catinat is to Saïgon. Along it are some very up-to-date government and private buildings, well stocked stores, and cafés overrunning the sidewalks. The tram-cars across this lead along the lake and through the native town to even larger government structures in a great park of the outskirts, now admittedly the headquarters of the governor-general, though even he hardly dares openly admit this down in Saïgon. There are other parks, one with a big stone water-tower that looks like a medieval dungeon, many streets of good foreign houses, most of them gay in Buddhist-yellow stucco, a big museum left over from a former exposition, and all the other adjuncts of French civilization. As in Saïgon, there is an imposing municipal opera-house, where a company subsidized by the government, at the cost of the natives, comes to sing each “winter” for the French residents, not to be outdone by that other Paris on the opposite side of the earth in any of the cultural things of life just because their lot happens to be cast so far afield. Most of the year the municipal theater stands idle, however, with a welcoming air toward anything that promises to be a relief from the monotony of the silvered-screen nonsense offered in another part of town. On my second visit to Hanoï its pretentious façade was adorned with the paper of an “Oriental Magician,” whose performance was as worthy of the solemn throng in full dress that filled the house as would have been those of his rivals elsewhere. The very atrociousness with which he massacred the bit of French needed to accompany his tricks had about it a tang of the occult East unable to express itself in our crude Western medium—which was strange in an Italian who called Newton, Massachusetts, home, and whose ultra-Oriental wife and chief stage assistant admitted in unofficial moments that she was born in Kansas.

The rush and swirl of street life in Hanoï was even more nearly incessant than that of hotter Saïgon. Hawkers, improvised restaurants, hundreds of rickshaws, most of them thumping their wooden wheels on the ill-fitting axle, queer carriages, wheelbarrows again for the first time since leaving China, man-drawn freight-carts, automobiles bellowing their demanding way through flocks and shoals of pedestrians, all bore testimony to the importance of the northern capital. Superficially everything was French, down to the tiny bottles containing those _pierres à briquet_ required for the gasoline-driven cigarette-lighters of France, which one saw in the display-windows of native as well as French shops. The big department-store across the street from our hotel opened at dawn and closed from eleven until two, like almost everything else, so that its reassembling force was constantly breaking short both our night’s sleep and our afternoon siesta. But the red tape of buying there was as entangling as in France, with the added difficulty that prices quoted in francs and paid in piastres had to be figured according to the daily rate of exchange—often to our decided advantage. There seemed to be a general taste for French bread, and bottles by the coolie-load were so cheap and plentiful, in contrast to China, that every possible thing was made out of whole or broken ones—walls, garden borders, sidewalk edges, playhouses. But there did not seem to be much Frenchifying of native life except in these external details, and even with those the millions of the masses have little to do.

Late January in Hanoï was cloudless, almost as hot as in Saïgon, more than ten degrees farther south, so that even in white again I was none too comfortably cool. By night it was often too hot to sleep well even stark naked under a languid electric fan, and one’s dozing was made all the more fitful by the rattling hubs of the _pousses-choléra_, those iron-tired, almost springless rickshaws of the masses, and of the larger coolie-pulled baggage and vegetable carts, that made a hubbub beneath our windows all night long like the passing of a regiment of lumber-wagons. Sometimes there might be a lull from about two until four in the morning, corresponding somewhat to the daytime siesta, but even then the streets were by no means so nearly deserted as they were around noonday. Plenty of good rickshaws, with wire wheels on large pneumatic tires and ample springs, as noiseless and comfortable conveyances as those of Peking and far better than the ones to be found in Canton and southern China in general, plied the streets of Hanoï. But they were used almost exclusively by foreigners, one European each, while the bone-breakers in which even mandarins were glad to save an Indo-China nickel served the natives.

The rickshaw-men of Indo-China are so hungry for work that they always know, whether they understand him or not, where a possible client wishes to go. A score of times I had the same experience; all foreigners in Indo-China have had it: a mob of rickshaw pullers, seeing me come out of a hotel, a shop, a government office, the home of the lone Protestant missionary couple in Hanoï or of the customs officer turned novelist, rose up like a battling mob along the sidewalk, each vociferously offering his little seat on wheels, those behind thumping the others with their shafts, so common a trick that none of them show anger at it, as if it were all a part of the day’s work, of the eternal struggle for rice for their thin bodies and the many dependent upon them. “Rue de la Soie!” I cry to the uproar. All begin to shriek, to howl in chorus: “Moï connaître! Moï connaître!” I step into one of the vehicles at random. The others give a little smirk as of amusement to cover their chagrin, to save face by pretending that they were not keen for the job after all, while the lucky fellow speeds away straight before him, as if he knew the way perfectly. But he goes too straight ahead; the way to an Asiatic goal cannot be so direct as that, even in this less labyrinthine part of the Orient. I begin to grow suspicious; at the end of several full-speed minutes I stop him with “Mais, ce n’est pas—this is not the way to the Rue de la Soie, is it?” He has no idea what I am saying, longer experience will show me; all he understands is that I have said something. So he turns around and flees as rapidly in the direction from which we have come. I call out again, and though he still does not understand, he pretends to, and feeling that he must do something to satisfy me he forks off at random, to the right, to the left, no matter which, and continues to trot, now and then turning his head to look at me more or less surreptitiously, like a clever old horse, as if to gather from my expression some notion of where I wish to go.

All very well for the old resident, who knows his way about town and is well aware that the two-legged horse between his shafts does not know a word of the French he so glibly pretends to understand. But it is hard on the new-comer, who has neither of these advantages, who does not know one street from another until he can read the signs on their corners, who speaks no Annamese, particularly so on the naïve American accustomed to put his faith in the truthfulness of the human kind. After he is lost completely he appeals perhaps to a native policeman, only to find that the officer knows even less French, and so, he discovers one by one, do the natives round about, even those in full European tropical dress. So that unless he happens to run across a French official or resident, which is unlikely in many parts of town or anywhere at certain hours, he is in for it. Perhaps, if he is lucky, he can make his more or less human horse understand that he wishes to be taken back to the place from which he started, or to a police station, where at least he can telephone for assistance, if central happens to have a smattering of French. Besides, it is no pleasure to drive these poor fellows far, with their thin chests heaving and their bare brown backs gleaming with sweat. Yet it is perspiring work to walk; the trams go only along a fixed route, and automobiles are expensive.

The very next day I would find the same coolie, or one looking exactly like him, shrieking with the same effrontery, “Moï connaître!” if I asked him to take me to the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street; and at the end of the run, wherever that might be, he would stand holding out both hands cup-fashion in that engaging Annamese manner, as if he expected a fortune for the job. It is only a poor ruse to earn a few cents, for these _pousse-pousses_ are the most miserable and the least astute of the Annamese who serve the French and such few white foreigners as come to Indo-China. The “boys” who work for us are much brighter and know far smarter tricks. Certainly they are ingenious, if somewhat less so than their Chinese counterparts, capable of serving a ten-course dinner without cook-stove, dishes, or cutlery; but they are so artful, so cunning and sly for all their outward servility, that even he who tries to be continually on his guard is sure to be periodically duped.

Though the streets in their own section of Hanoï bear the names of French heroes and politicians, the rulers from the West have not forgotten that it is after all a Tonkinese city. In the native town on the farther side of the lake—which is nothing like a native town in the Chinese sense of the word—the streets are also named in French, but not for the French. Instead, they have preserved as much of the old atmosphere as is compatible with sanitary requirements, including the ancient street names. The blue and white metal placards on each corner bear literal translations of the old Chinese-Tonkinese names for the trades once, and in many cases still, practised in them—for after the fashion of the East, those craftsmen or merchants carrying on the same work gathered in a single street or piece of street, instead of scattering to various parts of town.

Thus the traveler can wander for interesting hours through the indigenous quarter intersected by the trolley, into the sweetish-scented Rue des Sucres, through the Rue des Cercueils, lined with heavy wooden coffins in the Chinese style—for the wealthy, massive sarcophagi richly carved, lacquered, gilded, or painted, each bearing the Chinese character for longevity; for the poor, thin bare boxes. The Rue des Médicaments is full of the ancient type of medicine-shops, its air pungent with the odors of dried barks, herbs, deer-horns, roots, plants, magic powders, tiger bones, talismans, all the somber and mysterious pharmacopœia of China, everything with which to combat the evil spirits, influences, fatal breaths of the Black Kingdom. In Furniture Street the tools of long ago are still in use; crude planes fly; saws sing; a chisel cuts its way through brass; a center-bit, still run by a string wound about it, creaks; files set the teeth on edge; chips and shavings dance madly about among unfinished pieces of furniture on the bare floors of open booths from which escapes a dry odor of varnish. Here and beyond are the shops of the inlaid mother-of-pearl things, from tables to jewel-boxes, for which the Annamese are famous—things to which steam-heat is so fatal, as the gatherer of souvenirs discovers soon after arriving home, though they stand the steaming heat of the tropics well enough. The people of Annam and Tonkin are good carvers and designers in the old models, but they are plainly not originators; there is more than a suggestion of the Chinese in all their work. Silk merchants carry on in the Rue de la Soie as they did centuries ago; Copper Street, a block long, is strident with workers in copper and brass; the Street of the Forgers—in the honorable sense of the word—teems with workers in heavy metals; there is the Street of Rice, of Veils, of Iron, of Flax, of the Cantonese, a street with shop after shop full of the gay paper things used in funerals, a street of workers in lacquer—for the Annamese lacquer other things besides their teeth—and so on, as long as the hardiest wanderer would care to stroll in such a climate.

The trolley goes on, through the Rue du Grand Buddha, past the temple of a great statue that is small compared to similar figures in China, Mongolia, and Tibet, on along a shore of the big lake, as distinguished from the _petit lac_ in the heart of the city, to the Village du Papier, where native paper is made of bamboo shavings or of bark. The brown outside of the bamboo gives second-grade paper, the white inside first-quality, and most of it is turned into false money to be burned at funerals and graves. The raw product is cooked to a pulp and then pounded in a granite mortar with a stone pestle. Women, standing before the vats in which the pulp floats, swirl the water and lift out on bamboo slats the film that form on top, then lay each sheet on a soggy pile that would seem to defy taking apart after stacks of them have been pressed to squeeze out the water.

On one side Hanoï is bounded by a wide boulevard on a high dike along the Red River, which comes down out of China and spreads its fertility in a long straight streak diagonally clear across Tonkin, a dike not high enough, however, for sometimes it lets the river into the city. Here one may muse upon the contrast between East and West while gazing at the telescopic perspective of the longest bridge in the Orient—as the French, if not the Tonkinese themselves, will proudly tell you—a bridge which in one sense is very ugly and in another almost beautiful. Eight hundred and ten meters from end to end, it carries across the Red River all the railway trains leaving the city except the daily one to and from Vinh to the southward; and just then it was being widened to carry automobiles also, so that no longer would motorists be forced to go down a steep and often slimy bank to a miserable _bac_.

One train across the bridge follows the Red River northwestward to Laokay and goes on two days farther into China by a line marvelously engineered through magnificent mountains, to Yünnanfu, whence the French have now and then had hopes of pushing their trains clear to the upper Yang-tze. Across it, too, goes the branch-line to Langson and the “South Gate” of China, by which I left Tonkin on my way back down the West River of Kwangsi to Canton, up which the defeated Tai fled centuries ago before the conquering Chinese. We were soon in uncultivated jungle, as north of Saïgon, though the undergrowth was much thinner here, with brown fields and slopes of wild hay now and then, and stations that consisted of a sign-board and a woodpile. But every little while there were a few huts and some cultivation. Then came mountains covered with trees and underbrush, more and more abrupt rocky mountains, and the sun, so long imperious, suddenly disappeared for good and all the seventeen days back to Canton. Though the altitude was not great, within an hour it grew so cold, in contrast to the month behind me, that I changed to my heaviest clothing, thereby reducing my baggage by half. At the end of the train a special car carried a lone general, with whom, though I did not then suspect it, I was to lunch at the _Résidence_ at Langson. As I alone graced the first-class division of the three-part car, one might have thought that a simple way of cutting down expenses and paying French debts would have been to let the general share the compartment with me, particularly if we were to sit down to the same _déjeuner_. But the French cannot treat their great men in that simple fashion.

The world had become little more than low mountains punctuated with forts on rocky eminences when I reached the place from where the little Peugeot of the _résident_ was to carry me over the border into suddenly and totally un-Tonkinese scenes. The Foreign Legion serves in these picturesque strongholds along the Chinese frontier, a picturesque crew themselves, whom the French find it safer to confine to such isolated posts than to turn loose on Hanoï and other cities. Though no German travelers were allowed to land in the colony, there was a whole company of Germans among these guardians of the frontier, as well as many Russians and sprinklings of at least a dozen other nationalities, adventurers, down-and-outers, fugitives from justice—for there is no extradition from the Foreign Legion—above all men who do not care a tinker’s damn so long as life remains interesting and as free as possible from dangerless monotony.

The usual route for those from the outside world who visit Hanoï is by rail or automobile from Haïphong, or rather, vice versa, also across the great bridge. There were always the same scenes on these journeys through Tonkin, but one never seemed to tire of them—broad endless stretches of rice-fields, women in long copper-colored coats and grindstone-shaped hats skimming along good roads under shoulder-pole loads, boys and sometimes girls loafing on the backs of water-buffaloes grazing among flocks of white ducks, others of these ponderous animals plowing belly-deep in slime, still others in their glory, with only eyes and nostrils protruding, beautiful gates into low temples, banyan-trees of four or five trunks, with little vases of lime and often a few tombs under them, villages of huts among the feathery bamboo groves, a tomb with a flat-topped tree over it, a boat with a sail moving through a rice-field, though no waterway is visible, two women watering a field by means of a basket between them in the middle of a long rope, graves of different shapes dotting the dead-level country near-by, cactus hedges, almost naked countrymen washing their legs beside the track, a girl toiling with a hoe almost as big as she, a man who owns no buffalo plowing in deep water with his cow, a little hut thatched with straw surrounded by a grove of very green trees, still larger groves in the distance with white buildings peeping out of them, a beautiful tree spread like an open umbrella, its branches almost touching the ground, roofs coyly curling up their corners, still another apparatus, like a huge corn-popper hung on three poles, for lifting water from one field to another, sometimes a big wooden spoon manipulated by one man, still more likely by one woman, two pagoda-shaped pillars at the entrance to a tomb, implying that the deceased was a scholar if not a gentleman, a coolie laboriously making his way through the rice-fields by a dike-top path not wide enough for the rickshaw he is dragging behind him, other such vehicles with two, even three people in them, scampering across the flat country behind small runners, dim mountains forever in the distance—and there ahead lies Haïphong, an important city and port now, the first houses of which sprang up about the barracks of the French cantonment in the days when France and China disagreed as to the “protection” of Tonkin.

I had heard so much of the Bay of Along among the French colonials, confirmed by what I had seen of the terrestrial part of it from Tourane to Nanning, that I realized the foolishness of leaving Indo-China without spending a few days cruising about it. That would have been impossible, there being no regular service and I still unable, for all my more than a quarter century of toil, to buy a yacht or even charter a steamer, if the French authorities had not been so proud of their famous bay that they would not hear of my turning my back on the Far East until I had given them my unbiased opinion of it. So they lent us the _Tuyen Quang_, a comfortable floating chalet in the customs service, with a picturesque Corsican captain whose French outdid our own in foreign accent. I say “us,” for this time I took along not only the family I had brought from Canton but Thi-ba, lacquer-toothed Tonkinese nurse-maid of our children.

We steamed away one sunny morning before the heat and humidity became unbearable, down the river by which steamers from China and the rest of the outside world come to Haïphong, and within two or three hours found ourselves in the midst of the justly famed, or rather, the most unjustly little known, fairy-land of Along. It was like roaming among mountain-tops at sea. The rock formations were unlimited, fantastic, incredible—round rocks springing sheer out of the bluest sea on earth, rocks like mushrooms, the waves having worn them away about the base until they seemed to stand on stems, rocks that looked as if they were floating, or were upheld by pedestals incredibly small for such massive things, rock islands of the most fantastic shapes to which islands can aspire, some with holes washed clear through them, some looking supernatural where gashes of white rock met the black shadows thrown by them, cliffs, precipices, palisades, with vertical, horizontal, diagonal, zigzag strata—the sheerness was so remarkable that we could scrape the sides of them with our large steamer and be in so little danger of striking the bottom that the sailors were not even told to heave the sounding-lead.

How many thousands of these rocky islands there are floating on the blue waters of the Bay of Along only the architect of the universe knows; the human mind could not count them. Yet never were there two of the same shape. With every hundred yards forward we found ourselves looking through another narrow vista upon row after row of pointed rocks, always varying in size and form, in distance and color, new ones with every new opening, though one would have thought Nature had already rung all the changes possible, used all the models and molds in her factory. Each was of some unique configuration we had never seen before, as if they were all parties to a masked ball every member of which had succeeded in getting himself up in some novel way to surprise and delight the beholder. Morning, noonday, or evening, when the sun rose or when it set, great vistas of them stretched as far as the most piercing eye could see in any direction we chose to look. Calcareous rocks washed down during the centuries to the hard basis of which they were made, broken by weather, water, and time, with windows, arches, doorways, now a tree standing forth in silhouette in one of these, here an island depicting a whole cock, from comb to tail, another looking like a group of black monkeys made of stone, some veritable mountains of stone slabs laid together like huge bricks, some with tiny crescent beaches, whole horizons of fantastic peaks, monuments of every possible form—and beyond, more vistas of heaped-up rock through every narrow opening. Magnificent as they were, they seemed at times rather pathetic too, standing, floating, here for so many centuries in their unrivaled beauty, yet unknown to almost all the world that prizes so highly many a vastly inferior scene, unknown even to most of that European nation to whom they “belong.” An endless wilderness of rocks so poignantly beautiful in their stillness, their solemn isolation, their majesty.... The far famed Inland Sea of Japan hardly seems worthy of a place on the same hemisphere.

Many of those steeple-pointed islands are as bare as the sea itself, but vegetation covers them wherever it can grow, so that some are green as a spring meadow. On the larger and less impressive ones there was sometimes a complete cover of bush, with plenty of small game, the captain said, where they are not too sheer. But ordinary trees cannot get foothold on most of those gigantic needles; only some contorted cypresses, intertwisted lianas, represent the forest, wild pineapple here and there humping its wicked backs. On one of them is a little cemetery of Frenchmen who died of fever or dysentery far from their native land.

There are grottoes and tunnels in many of these floating mountain-tops. We took a life-boat one afternoon nearly two miles through one of them. It was dark as a Paris sewer, the bottom, clearly seen beneath a flickering torch, covered with millions of oysters half an inch thick that recalled the sand-dollars on the coast of Maine. The grottoes, too, were reached by small boat, then by climbing steep stairways of stones roughly piled up or carved in the rock. The greatest of these led first into a sort of reception-hall, beyond which opened a narrow tortuous corridor, its walls perpetually sweating. Though two solemn Annamese sailors with sizzling torches of waste or rags in an iron cage at the end of a pole, on which they occasionally poured thick oil, preceded us, we advanced by feeling with our fingers, the smoke pricking our eyes and suffocating us, our elbows tight against our sides. Then suddenly at a turn came the sight that gives this cave its name of Grotte de la Surprise. A vast amphitheater of tumbled rocks, into which streaks of daylight fell as sheer as at the bottom of a crater, yawned at our feet. The light of the torches wavered capriciously on rock walls striped with green, with purple, with violet, a setting and lighting as fantastic as that of any Broadway musical review. Stalactites flowed down from the great vaulted roof like a cataract of stone, nay, of pure marble, stalagmites large as century-old tree-trunks climbing to meet them, some already forming great pillars that gave the place the aspect of a mighty cathedral. Misty shafts of light played on pulpits carved by nature, on pillars almost as symmetrical as man could have fashioned, on great shimmering heaps of stone with the same semi-glossy sheen one sees on pure-camphor piles in Formosa. Certain columns seemed to be formed of millions of shells piled up as if by some prehuman, pigmy bricklayers; others were like the trunks of massive trees, their stone roots twisting themselves into the stone soil like those searching for nourishment among the ruins of Angkor. Here hung a colossal stone beard, there a marble veil with a gleaming white fringe; in places the cold water dripping forever down through the centuries had made stone things that looked like mammoth frogs, a monkey, a turtle with a scaly back; in certain vistas the grotto suggested the interior of a vast tobacco-barn in the drying-season. Maidenhair ferns had crept in as far as they dared; now and then, doubled, quadrupled, by the echo, sounded the piercing cry of a bird of which we saw nothing, except the gigantic shadow of its wings.

This endless forest of floating stone islands is a fisherman’s paradise. Each evening and sometimes oftener my wife and I dived into the incredibly blue sea—though the Corsican captain, to say nothing of the Annamese crew, evidently thought us mad—and saw between us and the bottom, hundreds of feet down yet seeming so near that we felt in danger of striking our heads, fish of every kind and color, pinkish fish of the tint of the albino water-buffalo, red, purple, green, white fish. Natives in henna brown peered forth from some of the smaller grottoes; more of them were at home in their fishing-boats, square golden-brown sails of which often broke the deep blue surface. Whole clans of fisher-folk spawn, live, and die among these calcareous rocks, satisfied to leave this, their native land, only now and then to sell their fish and buy the few things they need that cannot be found here among these clustered sea-bound spires. Our steamer now and then called in, by three short blasts of the whistle, all the sampans and sailing-craft within hearing, and examined their papers. Finding these in order, and neither opium nor girls in their holds, we bought fish and sea-monsters of them for the next Parisian dinner and parted, outwardly at least, friends. It seems that with its thousands of hiding-places for malefactors, the Bay of Along has been notorious for two crimes: the smuggling in of Chinese opium, and the smuggling out of Annamese girls. Old women still lure girls away and deliver them somewhere in the bay to Chinese junks, which sell them in the open market farther east. Enticed, drugged, kidnapped, hidden among the islands and in the grottoes, these girls have supplied a trade between wicked Annamese and Chinese men of the pirate family that has flourished for centuries, and even the French have not yet been able to do away with it entirely. When pursuit grows too warm the miscreants slit open the bellies of the girls so that they will sink quickly, and by the time the pursuers overhaul them all traces of blood may have disappeared in the blue waters.

Three heavenly days we cruised about the Bay of Along in our private yacht, and we might have gone on for thirty and found something new every hour among the floating rocks of every shape stretching clear to the Kwangtung coast of China. The French authorities, and certainly the Corsican captain, did not seem to care how long we stayed. But all things must have an end. We turned back much against our will, and by noonday there was steaming hot Haïphong in the offing again.