Chapter XXVIII: Kuan Hsien and Chengtu

Kuan Hsien (2347 feet, Gill) is one of the best-placed cities in China, at the north-west corner of the Chengtu plain, immediately below the mountains which wall it in on the north, and, indeed, scrambling over their spurs just at the fine gorge of the Couching Dragon, from whence the liberated Min bursts in strength to gladden the whole plain. The Mien-chuh road has not a fine entrance into the city—the Chengtu road, which I travelled three times, approaches Kuan under six fine _pai-fangs_, elaborately, and, indeed, beautifully decorated with carvings in high relief in a soft grey sandstone.

Apart from its situation, it is an unattractive town, with narrow, dirty streets, small lifeless-looking shops, and a tendency to produce on all occasions a dirty crowd, which hangs on to a foreigner, and which on my arrival greeted me with—“Here’s another child-eater.” It has an outpost air, as if there were little beyond, and this is partly true. It has a possible population of 22,000. It is not a rich city, and its suburbs do not abound in rich men’s houses. But it is distinguished, first for being the starting point of the oldest and, perhaps, the most important engineering works in China; and secondly, as being a great emporium of the trade with Northern Tibet, which is at its height during the winter, when as many as five hundred Tibetans, with their yaks, are encamped outside its walls. The Tibetans exchange wool, furs, hides, musk, hartshorn, rhubarb, and many other drugs for tea, brass ware, and small quantities of silk and cotton. Tibetan drugs are famous all over China. The Tibetans, as I learned from personal observation in Western Tibet, are enormous tea drinkers. The tea churn is always in requisition, and Tibet takes annually from China 22,000,000 pounds. The wool, which helps largely to pay for the tea, and which is so abominably dirty that fifteen per cent. of it has to be washed away, comes from pasturages from 9000 to 12,000 feet in altitude.

Musk is a most lucrative import. The small deer (_cervus moschus_), of which it is a secretion, is said to roam in large herds over the plains surrounding the Koko Nor. A single deer only produces a third of an ounce, and it sells for eighteen times its weight in silver at Chung-king, and is largely smuggled. Chengtu reeks with its intensely pungent odour. Rhubarb, the best quality of which grows not lower than 9000 feet, is also a very valuable import, and other drugs are estimated at £95,000 annually, and are quintupled in value before they reach the central and eastern provinces. Aconite, a root largely used for poisoning in Western Tibet, is imported into China as a medicine, singular to say, criminal poisoning being very little known. Deer horns in the velvet, for medicinal uses, are also largely imported.

Much of the trade is done at Matang, in the mountains, a savage hamlet which I afterwards visited, in the month of August; and very much more comes down from Sung-pan ting, about 570 _li_ to the north of Kuan, where it is chiefly in the hands of Mohammedan merchants, who act as go-betweens. Wool brought from Sung-pan to Chung-king has to pass six _likin_ barriers; so I understood from Mr. Grainger, of the China Inland Mission at Kuan Hsien, to whom I am much indebted for carefully gathered information on this and other local points of interest.

The glory of Kuan is the temple in honour of Li Ping, a prefect in the aboriginal kingdom of Shu, the ancient SZE CHUAN, the great engineer, and his son, whose work has redeemed the noble plain of Chengtu from drought and flood for two thousand years. Just above Kuan Hsien there is a romantic gorge with lofty grey cliffs, down which one branch of the Min, a cold, crystal stream, rushes wildly; but still, rafts and boats, carrying lime and coal from above, make the passage, often to their own destruction. On the right bank, high on the cliff, is a picturesque temple in a romantic situation, with a beautiful roof of glazed, green tiles, erected in honour of Li Ping or his son, whose name has been so completely lost out of history that he is known only as “The Second Gentleman.”

Above this perilous gorge the Min is about two hundred yards wide, with more or less mountainous banks heavily wooded, and at the point where the Tibetan road crosses it, on a very fine bamboo suspension bridge about 200 paces long, the grandest temple in China stands, on a wooded height finely terraced, and adorned with stately lines of cryptomeria and other exotic trees, one teak-tree in a courtyard being eighteen feet in circumference. These noble shrines, with their fine courtyards and the exquisitely beautiful pavilions and minarets which climb the cliff behind the temple, and are lost among the cryptomerias of the summit, are the most beautiful group of buildings that I saw in the far East, combining the grace and decorative witchery of the shrines of the Japanese Shoguns at Nikko, with a grandeur and stateliness of their own.

This noble temple is scrupulously clean and in perfect repair. Magnificent objects of art, as well as tanks surrounded with exotic ferns, decorate its courtyards; living waters descend from the hill through the mouths of serpents carved in stone; noble flights of stone stairs lead to the grand entrance and from terrace to terrace; thirty Taoist priests keep lamps and incense ever burning before the shrines; an Imperial envoy from Peking visits the temple every year with gifts; and tens of thousands of pilgrims, from every part of the plain and beyond, bring their offerings and homage to these altars.

The temple left on my memory an impression of beauty and majesty, which nature and art have combined to produce. Outside, glorious trees in whose dense leafage the lesser architectural beauties lose themselves, gurgling waters, flowering shrubs with heavy odours floating on the damp, still air, elaborately carved pinnacles and figures on the roofs, even the screens in front of the doors decorated with elaborate tracery; while the beauty of the interior is past description: columns of highly polished black lacquer, a roof, a perfect marvel of carving and lacquer, all available space occupied with honorary tablets, the gift of past viceroys, while the shrines are literally ablaze with gorgeously coloured lacquer and painting, and the banners presented by the emperors wave in front. The galleries facing the effigies of the great engineer and his son are carved most delicately with lacquered fretwork; and on pillars, galleries, and everywhere, where space admits of its decorative use, is Li Ping’s motto incised or inscribed in gold, “_Shen tao t’an ti tso yen_”—“Dig the bed deep, keep the banks low.”

Although there is a shrine to Li Ping in this splendid “Erh-Wang” temple, it was possibly erected in honour of “The Second Gentleman,” the temple to the father being (believed by Mr. Grainger) the more recent erection above the gorge of the Couching Dragon. Every Chinese Emperor, from the Tsin dynasty, 246 B.C., downwards, has conferred the posthumous title of _Wang_, or Prince, upon Li Ping and his son. A stone tablet in one of the temples records the story, which I learn from Mr. Grainger, who has translated the inscription.

The Chengtu plain, which these deservedly honoured engineers may be said to have created, is the richest plain in China, and possibly in the world. It may be about 100 miles by seventy or eighty, with an area of about 2500 square miles. It produces three and even four crops a year. Its chief products are rice, silk, opium, tobacco, sugar, sweet potatoes, indigo, the paper mulberry, rape and other oils, maize, and cotton, along with roots and fruits of all kinds, both musk and water-melons being produced in fabulous quantities. From any height the plain looks like a forest of fruit trees, while clumps of cypress, cedar, and bamboo denote the whereabouts of the great temples and fine farmhouses with which it is studded.

It has an estimated population of 4,000,000, and is sprinkled with cities, and flourishing marts, and large villages, Chengtu, the capital, having at least 400,000 people. Along the main roads the population may be said to constitute a prolonged village. The abundance of water power produces any number of flour and oil mills, the plain is intersected in all directions with roads which are thronged with traffic, and boats can reach the Yangtze from Kuan Hsien, Chengtu, and Chiang Kou.

Oranges reappear in splendid groves, mixed up with the vivid foliage of the persimmon; mulberry trees are allowed to grow to their full height and amplitude; spinning and weaving are going on everywhere; the soil, absolutely destitute of weeds, looks as if it were cultivated with trowels and rakes, “tilled,” as Emerson felicitously said of England, “with a pencil instead of a plough.” There are frequent small temples, or rather shrines, to the God of the Soil, of solid masonry, the image being enclosed by open fretwork, in front of which the incense sticks smoulder ceaselessly, the long-drawn creak of the wheelbarrow is never silent during the daylight hours, agricultural energy and activity prevail, and the plain is a singular and, perhaps, unrivalled picture of rustic peace and security.

This population of four millions depends not only for its prosperity, but for its existence, on the irrigation works of Li Ping and “The Second Gentleman,” carried out long before the Christian era. Without these, as has been truly said, “the east and west of the plain would be a marsh, and the north a waterless desert,” and this great area with its boundless fertility and wealth, and its immunity from drought and flood for two thousand years, is the monument to the engineering genius of these two men, whose motto, “_Dig the bed deep, keep the banks low_,” had it been applied universally to rivers of insubordinate habits, would have saved the world from much desolation and loss.

With a faithfulness rare in China, Li Ping’s motto has been carried out for twenty-one centuries. The stone-bunded dykes are kept low and in repair, and in March the bed of the artificial Min, created by Li Ping, by cutting a gorge a hundred feet deep through the hard rock of the cliff above Kuan Hsien, and which has been closed by a barrier since the previous November, with its subsidiary channels, is carefully dug out, till the workmen reach two iron cylinders, sunk in the bed of the stream, which mark its proper level. The silt of the year, which is from five to six feet thick, is then removed. The whole plain contributes to this expensive work, and a high official, the _Shui Li Fu_, or “Prefect of the Waterways,” is responsible for it.

In late March, or early April, there is a grand ceremony, sometimes attended by the Viceroy, when the winter dam is cut, and the strong torrent of the Min, seized upon by human skill, is divided and subdivided, twisted, curbed by dams and stone revetments, and is sent into innumerable canals and streams, till, aided by a fall of twelve feet to the mile, there is not a field which has not a continual supply, or an acre of the Chengtu plain in which the musical gurgle of the bright waters of the Tibetan uplands is not heard—waters so abundant that though drought may exist all round, this vast oasis remains a paradise of fertility and beauty.

At Kuan Hsien, where I spent some little time recovering from the assault at Lo-kia-chan, and in projecting a further journey, the feeling of the people towards foreigners was definitely hostile. It had been originally opened to Christian teaching by a lady, who, after living alone there for a considerable time (but that was before “the riots,” the modern landmark in SZE CHUAN history), left for England during my visit, much regretted; but since the riots “the Jesus religion” had made very slow progress. Slanders against the missionaries were circulated and believed, and the special one that they stole and ate infants, or used their eyes and hearts for medicines, was disagreeably current in Kuan Hsien.

The foreign ladies, four of whom had been hidden for eleven weeks of the hottest part of the previous summer, during the disturbances, in a room without a window, were very nervous, as was natural, starting when shouting was heard, not knowing what it might mean, and even those men who were hampered by wives and young families, at times looked anxious. No one who has heard the howling of a Chinese mob can forget it—it seems to come up direct from the bottomless pit! One of these young wives, during the disturbances, escaped through a window with her three infants to a ledge above the river while her husband kept the mob at bay.

So when I left for Sin-tu Hsien and Chengtu I escorted a lady, whose nerves had received such a shock in the riots that she was afraid to travel alone. My escort was of little value, for the people of the villages were lavish of their infamous epithets, pulled away the blinds of her chair, pulled out her hairpins and terrified her, while I was ignored.

It was a very long day, and when we reached Sing-fang Hsien, a busy town, long after dark, we had a pilgrimage from inn to inn, finding them all full, and the people hooted us all along the street till we found refuge in a hostel by no means “first-class.” The heat had set in fiercely, and the mercury was 83° in the shade. The following day, after a short journey in intense heat over the glorious and busy plain, we reached the house of Mr. Callum of the Church Missionary Society, at Sin-tu Hsien, a thriving town of about 15,000 people, with a pleasant promenade on its walls, and a very fine temple just outside them. The industry of this town, as of Kuan Hsien, is chiefly the making of straw sandals.

The third day’s journey with Mr. and Mrs. Callum was still over the glorious plain, which became yet richer and more densely populated as we neared Chengtu, the restaurants, always crowded with coolies and travellers, almost lining the road, and the wheelbarrows making a nearly ceaseless procession.

If one could disabuse oneself of the belief that opium is the curse of China and is likely to sap the persistent vitality of the race, there could have been nothing but unstinted admiration for the wonderful beauty of the crop in blossom, as I saw it in its glory on that sunny April day on the Chengtu plain, which in some places seemed to have no _raison d’être_ but its growth. The season had been without a drawback, and every leaf and flower had attained to its full maturity of loveliness. The blossoms were white—white fringed with rose-pink, white with white fringes, ruby-red, carmine, dark purple, pale mauve, and rose-pink. Waves of colour on slope and plain rolled before the breeze. Houses were almost submerged by the coloured billows. Far and near, along roads and streams, round stately temples and prosperous farmhouses, rippled and surged these millions of corollas, in all the glory of their brief and passionate existence—the April pulse of Nature throbbing through them most vigorously,—the poppy truly in the ascendant.

There is a remarkably fine stone bridge on that route to Chengtu, with dragons surmounting each pier, and very emphatic abutments. I had heard very much of Chengtu as being among the finest cities, “a second Peking,” etc. On entering it by the west gate, and the gates are very imposing, green glades lead into the Tartar quarter, a region of large, walled gardens, well wooded, and good-sized houses, frequently much decayed. In a street of shops several of the signs are written in Manchu. In this quarter it was refreshing to see the tall, healthy-looking women with “big feet,” long outer garments, and roses in their hair, as in Manchuria, standing at their doorways talking to their friends, both male and female, with something of the ease and freedom of Englishwomen.

It was some distance along wide cleanly streets and through charming “residential suburbs,” as I must call them, though they are within the walls, to the “palatial residence” in which the members of the China Inland Mission have been quartered by the Viceroy at a low rent since the absolutely complete destruction of the mission premises in the riots, a destruction which was also complete in the case of the houses and hospitals of the various other missions, even the bricks of which the buildings were constructed being carried away. This house, in which I was most hospitably received, had been assigned by the Government to the American Commission which came from Peking to assess the losses incurred by their “nationals,” and there was glass in the windows and matting on the floors, and dainty muslin blinds and curtains everywhere.

There is a large Romish mission, and American and Canadian missions besides the China Inland Mission, the Protestant missionaries living and working in much harmony, though in some respects, chiefly externals, on differing lines. Things had never settled down comfortably since the riots, and the official class at least was much embittered by the enormous damages claimed and obtained by the Roman mission. Stories of child-eating were current, and I am sure that the people believe that it is practised by the missionaries, for in going through Chengtu on later occasions I observed that when we foreigners entered one of the poorer streets many of the people picked up their infants and hurried with them into the houses; also there were children with red crosses on green patches stitched on the back of their clothing, this precaution being taken in the belief that foreigners respect the cross too much to do any harm to children wearing the emblem.

I see little or no resemblance to Peking in Chengtu. Without emphasising the other essential points of difference, Chengtu is neat and clean, and a comparison of its odours with those of Peking is impossible, for those of musk overpower all else! Indeed, along with the tea, silk, opium, and cotton, which it imports from the rest of the province, its great trade is in the numerous wild products of Tibet—rhubarb, drugs, furs, and above all, musk.

It is a very prepossessing city; and its noble wall in admirable repair, the successor of one built in the third century B.C., is about fourteen miles in circuit, sixty-six feet broad at the base, forty at the top, and thirty-five feet high, while what may be regarded as a somewhat formidable “earthwork”—an inner embankment almost the width of the wall—supports it along almost its whole circuit. This structure, the top of which is a superb promenade, is faced with hard and very fine brick, and has eight bastions, which are pierced by four fine gates, rigorously guarded, for the purpose of exacting the native customs and _likin_, which are very hard on foreign imports.

A stream, banked by stone revetments, runs through Chengtu from east to west, frequently bridged, and in one place spanned by three stone bridges, each of a single arch, close together. There are many moats and broad pieces of water, and the main river, about a hundred yards wide, is crossed by many bridges, one of them roofed, and lined on both sides by the stalls of hucksters; but the great stone bridge, half a mile long, with “a richly painted roof supported on marble pillars,” described by Marco Polo, has ceased to exist! Canals and streams abound, and are crowded with shipping of small size, chiefly plying to Chung-king and the ports west of it, cargo and passage junks, and _wupans_ with hooped bamboo roofs, in one of which I afterwards made the downward passage, and _sampans_. The waters were very low, and the craft much jammed together.

The city has wide, well-paved streets, crossing each other at right angles, and the handsome shops make far more display than is usual in China, the jewellers’ shops specially, with their fine work in filigree silver, and even rich silk brocades are seen gleaming in the shadow in the handsome silk shops, as well as _pongees_, both of local manufacture, and costly furs, and the snowy Tibetan lambskin can be seen from the streets exposed for sale. Within, respectable, richly-dressed shopkeepers await customers, and serve them with due dignity, but make no attempt to ensnare them. Farther back, in the obscurity, is the representation on a large scale, frequently taking up the whole end of the shop, of _Dzai-zen-pusa_, the God of Wealth, the Japanese _Daikoku_, and the British Mammon, with an altar and incense before him. To him, as the “luck of the shop,” the merchant, his apprentices, and all his employees must offer worship morning and evening, and no cult is so universal.

Chengtu has many scent shops, and most articles of Chinese manufacture are exposed at the shop fronts, but there was a very small display of foreign goods.

The strange, wild figures of the trading Tibetans in the streets, the splendour of the trains of officials and _literati_, who ride horses almost concealed by expensive trappings, or are carried at a rapid run in carved and gilded sedans, with poles bent up high in the middle, so as to raise the magnate above the heads of the plebeian herd, and the air of prosperous business which pervades the streets, are all noteworthy. It is a city which owes absolutely nothing to European influence. The commercial arrangements by which its business arrangements are run, its posts, banks, and systems of transferring money are all solely Chinese. There, without difficulty, I cashed the draft I brought from a Chinese merchant at Hankow. Chengtu owes nothing to Europe, except a grudge for the excessive indemnity she has had to pay for indulging in the luxury of riots.

The Viceroy, or Governor-General, is a very important official, and lives in great state, with a large military force at his disposal, as befits a man who represents Imperial power in a province as large as France and more populous, and who coerces or administers all Tibetan countries, and the wild borderland which I afterwards visited, which is neither Chinese nor Tibetan—and even the decennial tribute mission from distant Nepaul is allowed or forbidden to go on to Peking much at the Viceroy’s pleasure. A request was made to this great man for a letter which would further my journey, and it was promised by a fixed time, but I never got it.

The crowded, busy streets of Chengtu fringe off into truly charming intra-mural suburbs, green and quiet, where deep gateways admit into beautiful gardens bright with flowers and shady with orange and other fruit trees. There are tanks full of water-plants brightened by the gleam of goldfish; the cool drip of falling water is heard; trellis-work, green with creepers or bright with the blossoms of scarlet-runners, shades the pathway; the scent of tea-roses floats on the sunny air; and all these groups of pleasant residences tell of affluent ease and the security in which it is enjoyed.

The view from the city wall of the plain, with its beauty and fertility, with suggestions of snow peaks far away, is very striking. Some of the temples are very fine, specially the Wen-shu-yuan (literary college), situated near the north gate.[46]

This grand building, dating at the latest from the thirteenth century (A.D.), has been rebuilt by several dynasties, and has gone on increasing in wealth and magnificence till its priests and monks are justly proud of its splendours, of which the severe heat, even in the green shades of its grandly timbered surroundings, on the day of my visit prevented me from seeing more than a half. They may be proud of its exquisite cleanliness, too. By the time I reached Chengtu I had come to think that Chinese temples are much maligned on this score, but certainly the Wen-shu-yuan and the “Prince’s Temple” above Kuan Hsien excel them all in this virtue, which is said to approach so closely to godliness. All the more remarkable is it here, because the temple is a “theological college” as well as a monastery, a large number of students for the priesthood bringing up the number of the inmates to one hundred and fifty.

All the interstices between the smooth and well-laid flagstones of the courtyards are kept clean and free from grass; stonework, woodwork, gilding, paint and lacquer are all in perfect repair, and the fine roof is kept from the injuries caused by sparrows by a man who walks about the court with a cross-bow. The refectory opening from the court, with twenty-five tables set with tea, vegetables, and rice bowls for six each, for the vegetarian community, is as clean as all the rest; the wooden tables, chopsticks, and bowls all having that attractive look of well-scrubbed wood which we associate with an old-fashioned English farmhouse.

It is not possible to say whether the course of study and devotion prescribed for both priests and students produces equal purity of soul. In the Chapel of Meditations, resembling those which I saw in the monasteries of Western Tibet, both orders must spend some hours of every day in front of the Buddhist images, striving by all means known to them to reach a state of holy ecstasy, in which they are blind to all impressions from the seen. It may be possible that the prolonged watching of the curling and ascending clouds of incense produces a condition approaching hypnotism.

Severe guest-rooms, furnished according to the most rigid Chinese etiquette, chapels, some filled with costly gifts and curiosities, or with tablets to munificent donors, resplendent in gold on black lacquer, libraries of the religious classics, and picture galleries containing portraits of the deceased abbots, vestries for vestments, and dormitories occupy this fine pile of buildings. In the entrance portico, the idol photographed as an illustration recalled me to the fact that China is a stronghold of idolatry. On the other side the divinity looks like a douce, respectable English squire of the days of George III.