Chapter XIX: Sze Chuan Travelling

The following day was misty, grey, and grim, and several of its successors were much like it. One of the local names of SZE CHUAN is “The Cloudy Province.” Kind, capable Mr. Thompson returned to Wan after giving the coolies various instructions intended for my benefit; and from thenceforth I depended on myself. The great event of the day was the complete change in Be-dien as soon as I was bereft of Europeans. His pride and temper always remained, and were liable to flare up, or die down into a mephitic state of sullenness, but from that morning till I left China he was active and attentive, was never without leave out of hearing of my whistle, was always at hand to help me over slippery and difficult places, showed great pluck, never grumbled, arranged and packed up my things, interpreted carefully, improved daily in English, always contrived to get hot water and food for me, and on the whole made a tolerable travelling servant.

The travelling was without fatigue. I walked when it suited me, and for the rest might have been in an easy-chair in a drawing-room. The chair-bearers were energetic, and their “boss,” a great wag, kept them constantly laughing. Their good-nature never failed. One day when, to relieve them, I walked up a long flight of stairs over a pass, they asked, “Does the foreign woman think we are not strong enough to carry her?” The idea of a wish to be kind to them never entered their heads, yet we gradually came to understand each other a little; and I found my cloak put over my shoulders for me, a wooden stool brought for my feet, sundry little comforts attended to, and a growing interest in photography, reaching the extent of pointing out objects at times “to make pictures of”! By the end of the second day they had all shaken into my “ways,” and things went very smoothly.

The day’s routine was a cup of tea and some flour stirabout at seven; but, though I was always ready and eager to start at eight, it was usually half-past, and often nine, before we got off. The coolies’ first breakfast was often late, and there was the haggling about the bill, neither side liking to give in. It was only a shilling for the board and lodging for myself and my servant! This included his supper and breakfast, my rice, and a room to myself, his share of the coolies’ room, an iron lamp fixed on the wall, with an oil well and a wick in a spout encrusted with the soot and grime of years, and if I had a charcoal brazier, the charge was a farthing more. My other travelling expenses came to 4_s._ 6_d._ a day; 5_s._ 6_d._ covered everything, including a fowl for curry every third day.

My bearers trudged along at an even pace, stopping two or three times for a drink and smoke at tea shops where others congregated, until the halt for dinner at a restaurant of more pretensions, outside of which I sat in my chair in the village street, the unwilling centre of a large and very dirty crowd, which had leisure to stand round me for an hour, staring, making remarks, laughing at my peculiarities, pressing closer and closer till there was hardly air to breathe, taking out my hairpins, and passing my gloves round and putting them on their dirty hands, on two occasions abstracting my spoon and slipping it into their sleeves, being in no wise abashed when they were detected. For at first I ate a little cold rice, but wearying of being a spectacle, and being convinced that as a general rule our insular habit is to eat too much, I gave up this moderate lunch, and contented myself with a morsel of chocolate eaten surreptitiously. On the rare occasions when the villagers wearied of their entertainment, even of gloves, which they thought were worn to conceal some desperate skin disease, and dropped off, small black pigs, with upright rows of bristles on their lean, curved spines, timidly took their place with expectations which were not realised, picking about, even under the poles of the chair, for fragments which they did not find, and even nibbling my straw shoes, and ancient and long-legged poultry were as odiously familiar.

When they had fed and smoked, the men shouldered their burdens, and trudged on till about sunset, stopping, as in the morning, for smokes and drinks, I walking and photographing as it suited me. Sometimes we put up at a wayside inn, without even the privacy of a yard; this was in very small places, where the curiosity was not so overwhelming.

In towns the case was different. The inn yard was often enclosed by planking and a wide door, within which there might be one, two, or three courts, possibly with flowers in pots and a little gaudy paint. Some of these inns accommodate over 200 travellers, with their baggage. Every room is full, and between money-changing, eating, “sing-song,” and gambling, and half-naked waiters rushing about with small trays, and numbers of men all shouting together, it is pretty lively. At the extreme end of the establishment is the “_kuan’s_ room,” with one for attendants on each side. The crowd which always gathered during my passage down the street rolled in at the doorway, blocking up the yard, shouting, ofttimes hooting, and fighting each other for a look at the foreigner. Fortunately doors in Chinese inns have strong wooden bolts, and when my baggage and I were once ensconced I was secure from intrusion, unless a few men and boys had run on ahead to take possession of the room before I entered it, or forced themselves in behind Be-dien when he brought my dinner. If it were merely a boarded wall, a row of patient eyes usually watched me for an hour, and with much gratification, for these rooms are dark with the door shut, and my candle revealed my barbarian proceedings.

But worse than this was the slow scraping of holes in the plaster partition, when there was one, between my room and the next, accompanied by the peculiarly irritating sound of whispering, and eventually by the application of a succession of eyes to the hole, more whispering, and some giggling. It was always a temptation to apply the muzzle of a revolver or a syringe to the opening! Occasionally a big piece of plaster fell into my room and revealed the operators, who were more frequently well-dressed travellers than ignorant coolies. I used to whistle for Be-dien to hang up a curtain over the holes, after which there was peace for a time, and then the scraping and whispering began again, and often on both sides, till, tired and irritated, I used to put out the candle and lie down, frequently awaking in the morning to find myself in my travelling dress still, clutching my interrupted diary. When one arrived tired after being stared at and pressed upon several times in the day, beginning with the early morning, the fearful hubbub in the courtyard, lasting an hour or more, followed by these grating and rasping processes, was exhausting and exasperating.

Also the landlord’s wife, and often a bevy of women with her, used to come in and pick over my things, which fortunately were few, and ask questions, beginning with, “What is your honourable age?” “Have you many sons?” When I confessed that I had none they expressed pity, and a contempt which Be-dien did not scruple to translate. “Why have you left your honourable country?” etc. But they soon tired of the trouble of interrogating me and talked to Be-dien, and when I asked what they were saying, I heard such remarks as these: “What ugly eyes she has, and straight eyebrows!” “Yes, but they see into the ground and where the gold is hid.” “Has she come for gold?” “What big feet she has!” (Their own were about three inches long.) “Why is her hair like wool?” and so on.

These people had never seen lead pencils or fountain pens, and everywhere these and the foreign writing, and the fact that a woman could write, (for the gazers were more or less illiterate) attracted great attention. A pronged fork, which they thought must “prick the mouth and make it bleed,” was in their eyes a barbarism. I wore straw sandals over English tan shoes to avoid slipping, and this they regarded as a confession of foreign inferiority. I was wearing a Chinese woman’s dress with a Japanese _kurumaya’s_ hat, the one perfect travelling hat, and English gloves and shoes, and this _olla podrida_ was an annoyance to them. Their questions were very trivial, and their curiosity appeared singularly unintelligent, contrasting, in this respect, with that of the Japanese. It showed prodigious apathy for adults to spend hour after hour in focussing a stolid stare upon a person whose occupations offered no novelty or variety, being limited to eating and writing. The curiosity of the common people, though boorish, was not rude, but that of the class above them, and above all of men of the literary class, was brutal and insulting, and generally tended to excite hostility against the foreigner.

I developed my negatives in my room at night, as it was almost always a perfect “dark room,” and the greatest of my annoyances was when a flash of white light showed that my neighbours had successfully worked a hole in the wall, and that my precious negative was hopelessly “fogged.”

The indispensable _yamen_ runners are changed at every prefecture, and the passports are examined and copied. These runners are a queer lot. For this duty they get their travelling expenses and something over, and the _douceur_ which the traveller bestows. A formal official letter is their warrant. But on many occasions I found myself not with the escort I left the prefecture with, which truly was shabby enough, but with a couple of ragged beggars, to whom the letter with its advantages had been sold by the runners, who thus saved themselves a journey. Occasionally these substitutes strutted in front of my chair down a street waving the magistrate’s letter, the wind blowing their rags aside, showing the neglected and repulsive sores by which they excite the compassion of the charitable. The only useful purpose which the _yamen_ runners served was occasionally when it was growing late to run on ahead and engage “rooms,” and always to take the passport to the _yamen_. I write “the passport” because it deserved the definite article from its size, the grandeur of its seals, and the consideration it claimed for me, besides which it allowed of unlimited travel in the eighteen provinces, as well as in Mongolia and Manchuria, and was of such a nature as to produce an immediate change of manner in every official who read it! Besides this I had a correct and prosaic consular passport issued at Hankow, which I only once had occasion to use.

The compulsory _chai-jen_ are, I think, a speciality of SZE CHUAN, and the compulsion rose out of unpleasant circumstances. I never learned that they forced the innkeepers to take less than the usual payment; indeed, I think that Chinese innkeepers are far too independent a class to be forced, nor, though they have the reputation of being brutal and truculent, did I see them maltreat anyone, but I much objected to being sold to the beggars and to being deserted on critical occasions. When soldiers were sent, and any trouble was threatened, they usually slipped off their brilliant coat cloaks and disappeared, and in reply to my subsequent remonstrances said, “What are four against two thousand?” a specious way of excusing themselves, for the mandarin’s letter is all-powerful even in a beggar’s hand.

Money annoyances began early, and never ceased. Before leaving Wan Hsien I bought 10,000 _cash_, brass coins, about the size of a halfpenny, inscribed with Chinese characters, and with a square hole in the middle. By this they are threaded a hundred at a time on a piece of straw twist, and at that time (for the exchange fluctuates daily) the equivalent of two shillings weighed eight pounds! The eighteen shillings in _cash_ with which I started weighed seventy-two pounds, and this had to be distributed among the coolies, the boss, or _fu-tou_, being responsible for the whole. But no reliance is to be placed on the _cash_ shop. There may be _cash_ wanting, small _cash_, spurious _cash_; consequently every string must be counted, and this operation frequently took more than an hour. A few _cash_ in each hundred are claimed for the “string.” On nearly every string small _cash_ used to be found, and the haggling and the counting occupied one of the best morning hours. This process, in common with everything which has to do with money, is intensely interesting to every Chinese, and the dullest wits are bright on the subject. Some villages would only receive small _cash_; others rejected it altogether.

The silver was a greater nuisance than the brass. The silver shoes I got in Hankow had been broken up into four pieces each, but even then they were unmanageably big and had to be chopped again, usually by the village blacksmith with his heavy tools, and weighed again to make sure that all had been returned. Then the man to whom you pay over a fragment of your broken _sycee_, for which the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank was responsible, puts it first into the palm of one hand, then into the other, looks at it askance, and then says the “touch” is bad, it is inferior silver, and so on. This is after you have agreed to pay a certain weight in silver for an article, say half an ounce. Then it appears that not only is the “touch” inferior, but the ounce of that town is a heavier ounce than the ounce of the last, and that your scale is a bad one, and that the silver must be weighed in a “good scale,” _i.e._, the seller’s own; and between the “touch” and the varying weights, and the differing values of taels, and the charges for breaking and weighing and possibly for assaying the _sycee_, the bewildered traveller, who has three things always to think of—the number of _cash_ to the tael, the quality of the silver, and the weight of the tael—would gladly compound by paying a much larger percentage than all this botheration really costs. One of the greatest aggravations is when the _cash_ strings break just as one is starting, and a thousand _cash_ roll over the inn yard and lose themselves in heaps and holes. Then the innkeeper exerts himself and clears the yard of the crowd, and a diligent search is instituted. It is useless to say “Never mind if a few are left behind,” for it is a point of honour with the _fu-tou_, who is responsible for everything, that not a _cash_ shall be missing.

In this chapter I have endeavoured to glance at the most salient features of SZE CHUAN travel, leaving others to emerge _en route_.