Chapter XXIII: Siao-Kiao to Hsieh-Tien-Tze

The whole country is an undulating sea of green, patterned with red—in truth, rather monotonous for five days of journeying. The mud was abominable all the time, but with straw shoes and grippers I managed to do a good deal of walking. On several days my well-paid chairmen travelled “like gentlemen,” for labour is so abundant and cheap that they found plenty of coolies to carry my chair for forty _cash_ for four miles (about a penny), and even for less! Every house has its opium field, its bamboo and palm groves, fruit trees and cedars, while the _Rhus vernicifera_, or varnish tree, the _Aleurites cordata_, or oil tree, and the _Cupressus funebris_, which it is impossible to avoid calling “the Noah’s ark tree,” abound. The cultivation, except the ploughing for rice, is entirely by hand, and is so careful that it is easy to see that most of the indigenous plants have become extinct. Violas, fumitories, and the _anemone Japonica_, all of which grow profusely, but solely along the margins of the roads, were all that then or later I saw in the Red Basin; in fact, husbandry has made a clean sweep of “weeds.”

The farmhouses in that region are of mud, with thatched roofs, and look poor. Straw plaiting and the making of the very large straw hats which the coolies wear in summer are the great industries. Bad, nay infamous, roads and small _cash_ for three days showed their power of crippling trade. Small villages were numerous, but on a journey of 185 _li_ the picturesque little town of King-mien-sze, on the rocky, picturesque, non-navigable King-Ho, which I ferried, was the only approach to a centre of population.

When I reached the small town of Siao-kiao I found it greatly crowded with traders, and the innkeepers so unwilling to receive a foreigner that I had to urge my treaty rights, and then was only grudgingly accommodated. There was a very ugly rush, and then a riot, which lasted an hour and a half, at the very beginning of which my _chai-jen_ ran away. My door was broken down with much noise and yells of “Foreign devil!” “Horse-racer!” “Child-eater!” but an official arriving in the nick of time, prevented further damage. He ought to have appeared an hour and a half before. These rows are repulsive and unbearably fatiguing after a day’s journey, and always delayed my dinner unconscionably, which, as it was practically my only meal in the day, was trying. The entry in my diary for that evening was, “Wretched evening; riotous crowd; everything anxious and odious; noises; too cold to sleep.” My lamp sputtered and went out, and my matches were too damp to strike. It is objectionable to be in the dark, you know not where, with walls absolutely precarious, and in the midst of the coarse shouts of rough men to hear a feeble accompaniment of rats eating one’s few things. I object strongly to a mixed crowd blocking up my doorway or breaking in my door, for every one of the crowd knows better; even the most ignorant coolie knows well that to intrude into a woman’s room or in any way violate the privacy which is hers by immemorial usage and rigid etiquette is an outrage for which there is no forgiveness, judging from a Chinese standpoint.

The mannerless, brutal, coarse, insolent, conceited, cowardly roughs of the Chinese towns, ignorant beyond all description, live in a state of filth which is indescribable and incredible, in an inconceivable beastliness of dirt, among odours which no existing words can describe, and actually call Japanese “_barbarian_ dwarfs”! I wondered daily more at the goodness of people who are missionaries to the Chinese in the interior cities, not at their coming out the first time, but at their _coming back, knowing what they come to_. The village people are quite different, and doubtless have attractive qualities; and it must be admitted that Christianity does produce an external refinement among those who receive it, which is very noticeable. Having relieved my hoarded disgusts by these remarks, I will proceed with my narrative.

The days, though cold and very wet, were a great rest. There was not even the guiding a horse and preventing him from fighting, to distract the thoughts from dwelling on any topic I chose to concentrate them upon. My possessions, except my camera and plates, had been spoilt long ago, so there was nothing to be anxious about; and a few rolls more or less in the red mud did not matter, for my clothes were thickly plastered days before. I could not fare worse than I had done, so I was not anxious about the night’s halt; so during the day I revelled in freedom, leisure, and solitude; but when night came, and I sat shivering in some fœtid hole, not fit for a decent beast, with only a bamboo railing between it and the pigsty, I often thought Chinese travelling an utter abomination![41]

Even the most monotonous part of the route had many interests and some novelties. It is a marvel how the intense homogeneity of China, its apparent inflexibility, and its actual grooviness, are incessantly disturbed by local custom. The race, it is true, is always the same, and the general features of the costume; every Chinese not a convict has a shaven head and a long queue, and every woman hobbles on deformed feet; but when it comes to environments they differ from day to day, and sometimes from hour to hour. Here in SZE CHUAN house architecture varies almost from day to day; each river has its own form of boat; in one district all loads are slung from the bamboo over the shoulder; in another they are carried in wicker creels fitted on wooden pack-saddles on human backs. In one prefecture the purse is a skin bag attached to the waist; in another it is a stout wooden cylinder tapering at both ends carried across the back, and so with many other things. Food varies with the locality, and crops with the soil. One district rejects large _cash_, and others small, while some use a mixture. Headgear varies greatly. Blue turbans are much worn. The shape of the straw hat indicates the district from which the wearer comes, and local fashion tyrannises even over baggage coolies. I wanted to give to each of mine one of the noble straw hats made near Kiao, but they “could not” wear them in Wan Hsien and its neighbourhood, any more than a fashionable English girl “could” wear a last season’s hat.

In bridges the varieties are endless, and in _pai fangs_ and temple fronts. This ceaseless diversity in unity is very attractive in Chinese travelling, but it has its drawbacks, for on many occasions when, owing to weather or hurry or some other tyranny, I did not photograph some striking peculiarity I never met with it again. It also exposes the veracity of travellers to suspicion. One may describe some peculiarity which is universal in one region, such as the graceful circular or pointed arches of its bridges, while another, whose sole idea of a Chinese bridge is stone uprights carrying flat stone slabs such as the huge lumbering structure “which, with its wearisome but needful length, bestrides” the Min at Foo-chow, accuses him of having drawn upon his imagination for his facts.

For three days of cold, grim, drizzly, or incredibly damp weather, in which natural terraces gave way to artificial, and hills to rolls, and roads occasionally disappeared altogether, and the dull green of the sugarcane at times overspread the country, and the scarcity of rice lands now and then involved a corresponding scarcity of people, we travelled so awful a road that it mattered little when it was altogether lost. It had long since degenerated into the slimy top of a rice dyke a few inches wide, with a flagstone tipping up now and then to show what it once claimed to be. The bad weather put a stop to traffic. The only chair we met in three days came to grief close to us. The bearers fell, the chair was smashed into matchwood, and its occupant, a somewhat pompous-looking merchant, was deposited in three feet of slush alive with frogs, a disaster which afforded my men cause for unbounded hilarity for the rest of the day.

The road is so narrow because the farmers grudge every inch taken from their fields. As one is carried along, the chair hangs over the flooded rice land on either side, and when anyone is seen in the distance he is warned by a series of simultaneous yells to turn off on an intersecting dyke. On one of these days nearly eleven hours of hard travel only produced a result of eighteen miles! My men, though always wet to the skin and often falling as well as slipping, never flagged or grumbled, and trudged along joking and laughing, splendid “raw material”!

The people were not hostile in this country region, and the rain repressed the curiosity which I found specially irksome during the hour I spent twice daily sitting in a village street while my men breakfasted and dined. I became daily more convinced that the mandarins have it in their power to repress any overt expression of anti-foreign feeling. At Kiao, when I left the inn yard where the riot occurred the evening before, though it was crowded, the people were perfectly orderly, and though the long, narrow street was lined with men standing three and four deep on each side, just leaving room for the chair to pass, no one spoke or moved.

That same day the _chai-jen_ were changed at the neat little city of Ying-san Hsien, in the centre of a region where the chief industries are making bamboo baskets, and straw plait for hats, and I sat for an hour near the _yamen_ entrance, considering the extraordinary amount of business which custom imposes on a Chinese mandarin.

We have a habit, partly warrantable—for the official class in China is the worst of “the classes”—of speaking of “the mandarins” as we might speak of “the wolves” or “the vultures,” a rough classification which, like similar methods, is by no means trustworthy. Mandarins are good and bad. The system under which they hold office has a strong tendency to make them bad. Nevertheless there are some good, just, honest men among them, who do the best they can for their districts during their terms of office, earn the esteem and gratitude of the people, and leave office as poor as they entered it. With regard to the bad, their opportunities for squeezing and oppressing are not so enormous as is often supposed, being limited by what I am inclined to call _the right of rebellion_. When an appeal to law comes to involve wholesale bribery, and taxation becomes grinding, then a local rebellion on a small or large scale occurs, the offending mandarin is driven out, the Throne quietly appoints a successor, and peace prevails once more.

A system in which official salaries are not a “living wage” opens the door to large peculation, but withal China is not a heavily taxed country, and the people are anything but helpless in official hands. In spite of all the monstrous corruption which exists, general security and good order prevail, and China has been increasing in wealth and population for nearly two centuries.

What we call mandarins (_kuans_) are all the magistrates subordinate through the intendants of circuits (_Taotai_) to the _Tsung-tuh_ of a province or provinces, the Governor-General, whom we call a Viceroy. They are prefects or head magistrates of departments, and magistrates for the subdivisions of departments. Under these, but not known as _kuans_, are mandarins’ secretaries, often very powerful persons, clerks, registrars, and an army of subordinates, for whom their superiors are responsible. The Chinese call the last “rats under the altar,” and fear them greatly. Indeed, it is said that the dread of getting into their clutches has a more deterrent effect on evil-doers than any prospect of punishment. Every mandarin, down to the smallest magistrate, has office secretaries for investigating cases, recording evidence, keeping accounts, filing papers, writing and transmitting despatches, and other formal functions.

Theoretically the relation between magistrate and people is strictly paternal. Some degree of what we call corruption is inseparable from Oriental officialism, and when kept within moderate bounds does not disturb the filial feeling. The whole of a mandarin’s time is nominally at the service of the people of his district. Of some, perhaps of a goodly number throughout China, this devotion to local interests may be literally true. Access to his tribunal may ensure a fair trial, and probably in a majority of cases little injustice is done when a case once comes before him.

A gong was hung up at the _yamen_ gate, where I have so long kept my readers shivering in the damp east wind. I am told that such a one hangs up at every similar gate, and that on hearing it the magistrate is bound to come out and attend to the complaint. But in practice a man has to bribe his way from the gate to the judgment-seat, and from the gatekeeper to the private secretary, and would be likely to be beaten if he touched the gong. Though the mandarin may be willing to decide justly, the underlings through whom alone approach to the judicial chair is possible do not share his scruples. A man who can afford to grease copiously the palms of runners, clerks, and secretaries, men unpaid or underpaid, is sure to see his petition on the top of the pile on the magistrate’s table, while the poorer litigant finds his delayed _sine die_.

It is chiefly on the underpaid and hard-worked magistracy of China that the existence of government depends. No men in mercantile positions work so hard as these officials, and if they are conscientious, all the worse for them. Their duties are most multifarious, and are both defined and undefined, executive, fiscal, judicial, and at times even military. They are responsible, not only for the taxes of their districts, but for their order and quietness, depending for much on subordinates whom they cannot trust, and during war, rebellion, and the floods and famines which occur with painful frequency are compelled to an almost sleepless vigilance, lest anything should go wrong, and they should be reported to the Throne. It is said truly that on the Hsien or Fu magistrate the work of at least six men devolves. He is at once tax commissioner, civil and criminal judge, coroner, treasurer, sheriff, and much besides, and he is supposed to have an exhaustive knowledge of everything within his bounds. And withal he must so dexterously regulate his squeezes as that it shall be possible for him to exist, for on his salary, attenuated as it is by forfeitures, he cannot.

Into the midst of this amount of responsibility, multifarious duties, and overwork, comes the foreigner with his treaty rights, a new and difficult element to deal with, and who may be an arrogant, bullying, and ignorant person. I am not apologising for the crimes of mandarins. I have suffered much from the violence of Chinese mobs, permitted, as I believe, if not instigated, by officialism. But I have on several occasions declined to make a formal complaint and hamper a magistrate because of my sympathy with his difficulties. On the one side there are orders from Peking sent down through the Viceroy that foreigners travelling are to be protected, and that their rights under the treaties are to be secured to them; on the other there is the anti-foreign feeling which has been inflamed for years past by agitators, certain of the secret societies, and what are known as the “Hunan Tracts,” and which may be provoked into an explosion by any unintentional indiscretion of a foreigner, or, as in my case, by such an outrage on custom as travelling in an open chair! The riot occurs; the foreigner suffers in his person or goods; he lodges a complaint, is backed up by his consul; and the mandarin, who may have been miles away from the scene of the occurrence, is held responsible, and is possibly degraded. The large number of European and American missionaries who have become residents in SZE CHUAN during the last twelve years have also increased the evil considerably. So far as I saw and learned, these men and women, with a very few exceptions, are slaves to the scrupulosity of their observance of Chinese custom and etiquette so far as they know them, and to their anxiety to avoid giving offence in the country in which they live.

But, to begin with, they are foreigners, “foreign devils”; their eyes, their complexions, their ways of sitting and carrying their hands are repulsive, and the belief, sometimes piteous, that they are “child-eaters,” and use the eyes and hearts of children in medicine, is now spread universally. Then they have come, if not, as many believe, as spies and political agents, to teach a foreign and Western religion, which is to subvert Chinese nationality, to wreck the venerated social order introduced by Confucius, to destroy the reverence and purity of domestic life and the loyalty to ancestors, and to introduce abominable customs.

This is, I think, a faithful view of missionary aims from a Chinese standpoint, and, bearing in mind the extreme ignorance and intense conservatism of the Chinese, it is not wonderful that there should be continual small disturbances, or that these should have culminated in the great anti-missionary riots in SZE CHUAN in 1895, in which a large number of the missionaries had to fly, and many more owed their lives to the protection given them by the mandarins in their _yamens_.

_I_ would not hold the mandarins responsible for the whole of these outbreaks, though they are and must be held so, but the difficulties of their position are much complicated by the presence within their jurisdictions of aliens whose aims are obnoxious to the majority of the people, and who are slowly creating, under the protection of treaties, societies with views at variance with established custom.

Yet so great is the potency of a word from headquarters that I believe the SZE CHUAN mandarins are now doing their best to protect the missionaries, and wherever I went, and very specially at Paoning Fu, I heard of efficient protection given, even where the means at the magistrates’ disposal were very limited, and of consideration and friendliness shown, far in excess of any claims which could be made, and which went to the extreme verge of a prudent regard for official position.

Some of my readers and friends will consider that in the above remarks I have played in another than the Vatican sense the part of “devil’s advocate.” So be it. I intended, as a matter of honesty and fair play, to “give the devil his due.” I am fully aware of the manifold iniquities of the mandarins, and regard the official system as the greatest curse of China, if for no other reason than that it makes it nearly impossible for an official to walk on a straight path. But I wished to note briefly a few extenuating circumstances, and to protest against that rough-and-ready and very misleading system of classification which lumps all mandarins together as an irredeemably bad lot. The system is infamous, but a traveller who has spent some years in travelling in Turkey, Persia, Kashmir, and Korea, is astonished to find that the Chinese are very far from being an oppressed people, and that even under this system they enjoy light taxation in spite of squeezes, security for the gains of labour, and a considerable amount of rational liberty. It is when a Chinese, either through his own fault or that of another, becomes a litigant that his misfortunes begin.

In the hour I spent at the entrance of the _yamen_ of Ying-san Hsien 407 people came and went—men of all sorts, many in chairs, but most on foot, and nearly all well dressed. All carried papers, and some big _dossiers_. Within, secretaries, clerks, and writers crossed and recrossed the courtyard rapidly and ceaselessly, and _chai-jen_, or messengers, bearing papers, were continually despatched. Much business, and that of all kinds, was undoubtedly transacted. There was nothing of the lazy loafing of a horde of dirty officials which distinguishes a Korean _yamen_. I was quite unmolested. Successive coolie crowds stood for a time regarding me with an apathetic stare, said nothing, and moved silently away. At last a very splendid person in brocaded silks and satins came out and handed me my passport, and we were able to proceed.

One among my reasons for not making the regular stages was that in town inns a woman-traveller must shut herself up rigidly in her room from arrival until departure unless she desires to provoke a row, while in the small villages and hamlets, where I was frequently the only guest, when the coolies had had their supper I was able to spend an hour in the “house place” with the family, and at a very small expense become friendly with them, and the village headman and one or two more often dropped in, and, under the influence of tea and tobacco and the sight of some of the nearest local photographs, became quite conversational. Be-dien, whose knowledge of English was very fair, improved daily, and was, I think, painstaking; at all events, I made him so!

On such evenings I heard a good deal about mandarins, taxes, industries, prices, carriage of goods, foreigners, missionaries, and other things, all purely local. Occasionally the consensus of opinion about a mandarin was that he was a very bad man, took bribes, exacted more than the “legitimate squeeze” in tax-collecting, decided cases always in favour of the rich, etc. Such must have been very bad cases on which all had reason to be agreed, or the men, owing to the strong distrust and suspicion of each other which prevail, would not have dared to speak out before each other. This is an element which must always be taken into consideration in judging of the probabilities of the accuracy of any statement which is made. On the whole, however, there were not many complaints uttered, and these were usually of the delays of law. Some mandarins were spoken of with something akin to enthusiasm. One had built a bridge, another had made a good road, a third had restored a temple, a fourth was “very charitable to the poor,” and in the last scarcity had diminished the luxury of his own table by a half that he might feed the poor, and so on.

Anything like an enlightened idea on a subject not local was not to be hoped for. Few of these headmen had heard of the war, or of the peace of Shimonoseki, and those who had, believed that the “barbarian rebels” had been driven into the sea or into fiery holes in the ground. The immense indemnity paid to the Roman Catholics for their losses in “the riots” touched them more closely, and I heard a good deal said regarding the Roman missions which I will not repeat, and I will also “keep dark” the various criticisms, some of them most trenchant and amusing, which were made on our own missionaries, only wishing that

“The giftie were gi’ed us
To see ourselves as others see us.”

The attempt to hammer out facts on these evenings was fatiguing and often disheartening, as, for instance, to decide which of six varying statements on one matter had the greatest aspect of probability, and was worth stowing away in my memory, but the interest of mixing in any fashion with the people far outweighed the discomfort of peasant accommodation, even when it was pretty bad. One night Be-dien, after surveying the inside of a very poor hovel, came out looking rueful, and said, “You won’t like your room to-night, Mrs. Bishop; _it’s the pigs’ room!_” and truly seven pigs occupied a depression railed off in one corner of it.

The second day after leaving Kiao we had heavy rain all day, and the road, which was a barely legible track, mostly on slippery mud hills, was so infamous that, as the bearers were constantly slipping and even falling, I had to do a good deal of being hauled and lifted along; walking it was not, for my feet slipped from under me at nearly every step. We passed through one vacant, forlorn city of refuge, and spent most of the day in a desolate, treeless, sparsely inhabited, red region, slithering along the side of a high, bleak, mountain ridge, the summit of which (an altitude of 2140 feet) we gained at dark to find a small and most miserable hamlet astride on the top of it. The houses were all shut, and the pouring rain kept everyone indoors. No wonder! The slush was over my ankles, and very cold.

A broad gleam fell across the road, and we made our way to it, as wet as it was possible to be, and took, rather than asked, shelter in a big shed with a loft or platform at one side, fitfully lighted as well as filled with smoke by some branches which were being burned in a great clay furnace, apparently used for the making of iron pots. Several men were shovelling coal into the same, and there was a prospect of warmth. This shed was the front of the mouth and workings of a coal-pit. I was guided into some workings which appeared disused, where there were some pigs, a sunk water-trough in the sloppy clay floor, and an excavation two feet six inches wide by six feet long, into which my stretcher, six feet six inches long, was backed, and projected six inches outside! After a hot supper, I rolled myself, in my wet clothes, in a dry rug, and slept soundly till the torrent of rain slacked off at eight the following morning, when we got on the road again.