Chapter IX: Ichang

Unlike Sha-shih, the first view of Ichang, opened to foreign trade in 1887, is very attractive. At low water it stands high on the river bank, on a conglomerate cliff above a great level sandbank, but in summer it loses whatever dignity it gains by height, and is nearly on the river level. A walled city of 35,000 people, gate towers, and temple roofs rise above the battlements and the mass of houses. Between the city and the river is a straggling suburb fairly clean, composed of small retail shops. On the river bank are the buildings and godowns of the Imperial Customs, including the Commissioner’s house and large garden, dainty dwellings for the staff of twelve Europeans, and a tennis ground, with a fine bund and broad flight of stone stairs in front. Near these are the large houses of the Scotch Church Mission, and beyond a new plain building put up by the China Inland Mission. The Roman Catholic buildings are the first to attract attention from the water. There are a few foreign hongs and godowns, and a customs pontoon moored in the stream. Behind the British Consulate, a substantial new building with a tennis lawn used for weekly hospitalities, breezy hills, much covered with grave mounds, roll up towards a mountainous region, and below, the Yangtze, with its perpetual rush and current, swirls in a superb flood half a mile wide.

At the time of my first visit a British gunboat, a wholesome and not unneeded influence, lay at anchor opposite the town.

The imposing feature of Ichang to my thinking is its multitude of junks of every build and size, lying closely packed along its shore for a mile and a half, their high castellated sterns making a goodly show. There lay in hundreds big SZE CHUAN junks, strongly built for the rapids, their stained and oiled woodwork looking like varnished pine, the junks bound up the river with their masts erect, the masts of those which had come down lashed along their sides. Big passenger boats there were too, for all passengers, as well as cargo, bound up the Yangtze must “change” at Ichang.

On the opposite side are cliffs along the river front, backed by hills and fine mountains, among which are fantastic peaks and pyramids, one of them known as Pyramid Hill, exactly resembling the Great Pyramid in shape, and said to have the same height and area as its prototype. Its peculiar position and form were supposed or believed by the local geomancers to interfere with that mystery of mysteries the FUNG SHUI, and thus to act injuriously on the prosperity of Ichang, so the powers that were, it is said, built a monastery opposite, on the Ichang side of the river, at great expense, the priests of which have as their special business to pray that the disastrous influences of Pyramid Hill may be warded off from the city.

The dead who people the hillsides far outnumber the living, and their abodes having the aspect of exaggerated mole-hills, lack the frequent stateliness of Chinese places of interment in some of the other provinces, being mostly circular mounds of earth and sod kept together by stones rudely built into them.

Just before I arrived many of these stones had served a sinister purpose, and had been used as ammunition. On entering the house of Mr. Schjöltz, the Commissioner of Customs, who was my host at Ichang and later at Chungking, I was surprised to see cairns of stones which were nearly as big as a human head both in the hall and outside it, which had been collected in the dining and drawing-rooms after their windows had been smashed in an anti-foreign riot a few days before. During some festivities the Chinese cook of the gunboat _Esk_ accidentally shot a very popular Chinese officer. On this there was naturally a great ebullition of fury, specially as the cook was not given up to the Chinese authorities when they demanded him. The Customs buildings were guarded by Chinese soldiers, but the staff, who are all efficiently drilled, did sentry duty at night. This was the least serious of the many riots which have occurred in the treaty ports on the Yangtze in recent years.

There are now about forty-five foreigners in Ichang, about twenty of them being missionaries. It is to be supposed that all of these have a sufficiency of serious occupation. Their amusements consist chiefly in tennis, shooting, and boating picnics to some of the picturesque ravines and rock temples off the main river, and to the Ichang gorge. The British Consul, Mr. Holland, and Mr. Woodruff, the Commissioner of Customs, throw their spacious gardens open constantly, and by the exercise of much hospitality do their best to alleviate what, it must be confessed, is the great monotony of life in a small and isolated foreign community.

Unless people are students or specialists or hobbyists of some description, as I think every man and woman should be who goes to live in so very foreign a country as China, amusements are apt to pall. The winter evenings are long and dull, and those of summer hot and mosquito-infested. People soon gauge the mental and social possibilities of new-comers, and know exactly what their neighbours think on every subject which can arise, and have sounded their intellectual depths and _shallows_, and the arrival of a stranger and of the mail boat and the changes in the customs staff are the chief varieties in life. That this and several other of these small communities “get on” with little apparent friction is surely much to their credit. Some say that it is because they are chiefly masculine!

In summer large vessels can make fast under the bund, but at low water they anchor in mid-stream, and how to get goods with due regard to economy from the steamers to the godowns when there is an average difference of forty feet between the summer and winter levels of the river is somewhat of a problem. Though in itself only a comparatively poor town in a mountainous country, the total value of the trade of Ichang for 1898 amounted to £2,298,437. All goods going west have to be transhipped at this port, and nearly all goods bound east, so that it is one of the busiest places on the river. It is a curious fact that, with enormous coal-fields only three or four days away, the river steamers 1000 miles from the sea are burning Japanese coal!

Ichang is the headquarters of a large Roman mission. Its head, Bishop Benjamin, with whom I had the pleasure of spending one afternoon, has been sixteen years in his present position without even a visit to Shanghai. His large, lofty room, though furnished with all absolute necessaries, is bare and severe, and contains nothing on which the eye can pleasurably rest. The Bishop is a most genial elderly man, with much charm of manner, thick iron-grey hair, and an unclerical moustache. As we walked down the lanes to the orphanage numbers of Chinese children, unmistakably delighted to see him, ran up to him, kissing his hands and struggling for positions in which they could hold on to his robe.

With him I visited the orphanage and hospital, both under the charge of French and Belgian sisters, comely women with much grace and geniality of manner, in which the loving, all-embracing maternal instinct finds its winning expression. The hospital, which is on the ground floor, was crowded, indeed overcrowded, and, as is usual in Roman hospitals in China, the doctor and much of the medical treatment were Chinese, the aid of the foreign doctor (a medical missionary) being called in in surgical cases.

The orphanage is a large building, with very lofty, well-ventilated rooms, constructed for four hundred, but there were only eighteen girls in it, who are instructed in the Christian faith, and in embroidery and other industrial occupations. The Bishop told me that the Chinese do not, as formerly, bring orphans and foundlings in numbers to their keeping; indeed, I gathered that in Ichang at least the day for this is past. I can only hazard a guess at the reasons. These may be the anti-foreign spirit which has been laboriously stirred up recently; the increasing competition of orphanages founded by charitable Chinese; the partial disappointment with the temporal results of conversion; and perhaps, above all, the excessive mortality which prevails in these institutions, very much owing to the fact that the infants are brought to them in great numbers either dying or suffering from disease, or in such a feeble and emaciated state that they are unable to assimilate their food. This mortality seems a matter of thankfulness rather than regret to the pious sisters, one of whom elsewhere, in speaking to me of a mortality of 1600 in the late summer, said with emotion, “So many, thank God, safe.”

Besides the Bishop and his priest secretary there are French and Chinese fathers, a French professor, and a seminary with eight students, who study the Chinese classics and philosophy for ten years and theology for seven. These Roman missionaries appear to rely for the conversion of adults chiefly on native agency. A Belgian priest, who called on me, claimed 3000 converts in a region above the gorges, where he had worked for eleven years. It is well known that one cause of the successes of the Roman missionaries is the assistance given by them to litigants, and the pressure brought to bear upon magistrates at the instance of the French Minister in Peking in legal cases in which his co-religionists are concerned. This Catholic priest mentioned to me, as among the many trials of his missionary vocation, the case of a village in which nearly all the inhabitants placed themselves under Christian instruction with a view to baptism. These villagers had a suit against another village in which the possession of a certain piece of land was the point in dispute. French influence was brought to bear, and they gained their case, let us believe justly, after which they returned _en masse_ to their idolatrous practices.

My Belgian visitor, in very vivid language, depicted the sufferings of educated men from the deprivations of their lives, and specially from the absolute solitude in which he and others are placed, living in one room of low-class Chinese houses. He was obviously a man of much culture and refinement, and felt the whole life acutely—the dark and filthy houses, the dirty food, the unceasing noisy talk in a foreign tongue, the lack of real privacy and quiet, the ingratitude of the Chinese, and, more than all, his own failure to love them. This, though my first, was not my last glimpse of the anguish of loneliness which these Roman missionaries endure. “Madness would be the certain result,” my visitor said, “but for the sustaining power of God, and the certainty that one is doing His work.”

As I shall not return to the subject of Roman missions, I will refer briefly to four of the causes, in my opinion, of their undoubtedly growing unpopularity in SZE CHUAN and elsewhere, in spite of the assistance given to Christian litigants previously referred to.

1. The exorbitant indemnity, out of all proportion to the losses sustained, demanded and obtained by M. Gerard, then French Minister at Peking, for damage done to mission property during the riots in SZE CHUAN in 1895.

2. The claim of the Roman hierarchy [now conceded] to be placed on a level in position with the higher mandarins as to the number of their chair-bearers, etc., and the amount of personal reverence exacted by the clergy from a people essentially democratic.

3. The non-admission of the heathen into Roman churches during the celebration of mass and other services, while the secrecy which attends the administration of the last rites of the Church is undoubtedly obnoxious to the lower orders among the Chinese, who have no conception of privacy.

4. The opposite methods pursued by the Protestants of all denominations since their settlement in the far west a few years ago are doubtless working against the practices of the Roman missionaries.

On the other hand, it is but just to say that the Chinese appreciate the celibacy, poverty, and asceticism of the Roman clergy. Every religious teacher, with one notable exception, who has made his mark in the East has been an ascetic, and when Orientals begin to seek after righteousness, rigid self-mortification is the method by which they hope to attain it.

Wherever I have met with Roman missionaries I have found them living either like Bishop Benjamin and Bishop Meitel of Seoul, and like the sisters in Seoul, Peking, Ichang, and elsewhere, in bare, whitewashed rooms, with just enough tables and wooden chairs for use, or in the dirt, noise, and innumerable discomforts of native houses of the lower class, personally attending on the sick, and in China, Chinese in life, dress, style, and ways, rarely speaking their own language, knowing the ins and outs of the districts in which they live, their peculiarities of trade, and their political and social condition. Lonely men, having broken with friends and all home ties for the furtherance of Christianity, they live lives of isolation and self-sacrifice, forget all but the people by whom they are surrounded, identify themselves with their interests, and have no other expectation but that of living and dying among them.

It must be admitted that the Chinese contrast this life of self-surrender with that of large numbers of Protestant missionaries living in comfortable, and what seem to them wealthy, homes in the treaty ports, surrounded by as many of the amenities of life as are usual in the simpler homes in foreign settlements, and with wives, children, friends, and society, not very often, as in the case of the Wesleyan missionaries at Hankow, living in the native cities among the Chinese, and going home with their families for a year or more once in five or seven years.[22]

While admiring the self-denial and devotion of the Roman missionary priests, I do not express any opinion as to rival methods and merits, but only state facts which are forced upon every traveller, and purpose to return to the subject of Protestant missions later.