Chapter XII: A Trip Into Rural China

I can't get over (and I hope I never shall) my boyish interest in the great strange animals that walk along behind the steam piano in the circus parades. And the animals that I like to see most, I believe, are the elephants and the camels. The elephant has about him such quiet, titanic, unboasting strength, such ponderous and sleepy-eyed majesty, as to excite my admiration, but the camel has almost an equal place in my interest and esteem.

He is a funny-looking beast, is the camel, and he always reminds me of Henry Cates' story of the very little boy who started making a mud man in the spring branch, but before he got the second arm on, a storm came up, and when he came back his man had mysteriously disappeared. But when Johnny went to town next day and for the first time in his life saw a one-armed man, the whole mystery cleared, and rushing up, he demanded: "Why didn't you wait for me to finish you?" Somehow the camel, like Johnny's mud man, always looks to me as if he got away before he was finished. He is either a preliminary rough sketch accidentally turned loose on the world, or else he got warped somehow in the drying process--great, quiet, shaggy, awkward, serene, goose-necked, saddle-backed Old Slow and Steady!

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The destruction of China's mountain forests has made deserts of vast
areas that were once fair and fruitful. The lower picture, showing
Chinese pumping water by human treadmill, furnishes another
illustration of the Orient's waste of labor.

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The camels that come down from Mongolia and wind their unhurried way
from Chien Men Gate to the Gate of the Heavenly Peace form one of
the most picturesque of the many picturesque sights in fascinating
old Peking. The right-hand picture shows the author utilizing the
most rapid means of transit in the mountains north of Peking.

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Let me confess, therefore, that hardly anything else on my entire tour has given me more pleasure than the sight of the camel trains about Peking and all the way to the end of the Nankou Pass in the mountains north of the ancient Chinese {119} capital. At the Pass this morning I saw three such camel trains coming down from Mongolia and the Desert of Gobi: long, slow-moving, romantic caravans that made me feel as if I had become a character in the Arabian Nights or a contemporary of Kublai-Khan. One of the trains was the longest I have yet seen--twenty-five or thirty camels, I should say, treading Indian-file with their usual unostentatious stateliness, a wooden pin through each camel's nostrils from which a cord bound him to the camel next ahead, a few strangely dressed drivers guiding the odd Oriental procession.

Nor were the camels the only strange travellers encountered by my party, a young Frenchman, the German, and myself, as we rode our little donkeys mile after mile of rocky way from Nankou village through the Pass. To begin with, we were ourselves funny-looking enough, for my donkey was so small that he could almost walk under the belly of my saddle-horse at home, and my feet almost touched the ground. The donkeys ridden by my friends were but little larger, and altogether we looked very much like three clowns riding trick mules-- an effect somewhat heightened when the Frenchman's donkey dropped him twice in the mud! It was our clothing, however, our ordinary American and European trousers, coats, overcoats and hats, and the fact that we wore no queues down our backs, that made us objects of curiosity to the Mongolian and Manchurian camel-drivers, shepherds, horse-traders, and mule-pack drivers whom we met on the way, just as we were interested in the sheepskin overcoats, strange hats, etc., which we found them wearing along with the usual cotton-padded garments. These cotton-padded clothes are much like those heavily padded bed-quilts ineptly called "comforts," and as the poor Chinese in the colder sections of the empire cannot afford much fire in winter, they add one layer of cotton padding after another until it is difficult for them to waddle along.

On the whole, the life and travel we found on our donkey-ride over the rough roads of Nankou Pass were Biblical in their {120} very simplicity and primitiveness. Most of the men we meet come from away up in Mongolia, where no railroad has yet gone, and the camels and the donkeys (the donkeys in most cases larger than those we rode) bring down on their backs the Mongolian products--wool, hides, grain, etc.--and carry back coal, clothing, and the other simple supplies demanded by the rude peasantry of Mongolia. We met several pack trains of donkeys, sometimes twenty-five or forty, I suppose, each carrying a heavy load of sacks on his back, or perhaps big, well-packed baskets or goods-boxes carefully balanced. A horse over here will tote about as much as a horse at home would pull. Then there were several immense droves of sheep: in one drove two or three thousand, I estimated, and every sheep with a black face and a white body, so that the general effect was not unlike seeing a big bin of black-eyed peas. The Chinese raise immense numbers of long-eared black hogs, too, and drive them to market loose in the same way that they drive their sheep. We also met two or three droves of mountain horses, a hundred or more to the drove.

But it would have been well worth while to make the trip if we had gotten nothing else but the view of and from the Great Wall at the end of the journey. About two thousand miles of stone and brick, twenty-seven feet high, and wide enough on top for two carriages to drive abreast, this great structure, begun two thousand years ago to keep the wild barbarian Northern tribes out of China, is truly "the largest building on earth," and one of the world's greatest wonders. It would be amazing if it wound only over plains and lowlands, but where we saw it this morning it climbed one mountain height after another until the topmost point towered far above us, dizzy, stupendous, magnificent. By what means the thousands and thousands of tons of rock and brick were ever carried up the sheer steep mountainsides is a question that must excite every traveller's wonder. Certainly no one who has walked on top of the great wall, climbing among the clouds from one {121} misty eminence to another, as we did to-day, can ever forget the experience.

Perhaps it was well enough, too, that the weather was not clear. The mists that hung about the mountain-peaks below and around us; the roaring wind that shepherded the clouds, now driving them swiftly before it and leaving in clear view for a minute peak after peak and valley after valley, the next minute brushing great fog-masses over wall and landscape and concealing all from view--all this lent an element of mystery and majesty to the experience not out of keeping with our thought of the long centuries through which this strange guard has kept watch around earth's oldest empire. Dead, long dead and crumbled into dust, even when our Christian era began, were the hands that fashioned these earlier brick and laid them in the mortar, and for many generations thereafter watchmen armed with bows and arrows rode along the battlements and towers, straining their eyes for sight of whatever enemy might be bold enough to try to cross the mighty barrier.

However unwise the spirit in which the wall was built, we cannot but admire the almost matchless daring of the conception and the almost unparalleled industry of the execution. Beside it the digging of our Panama Canal with modern machinery, engines, steam power and electricity, considered simply as a feat of Herculean labor, is no longer a subject for boasting. To my mind, the very fact that the Chinese people had the courage to conceive and attempt so colossal an enterprise is proof enough of genuine greatness. No feeble folk could even have planned such an undertaking.

On this trip into the heart of China, however, I have noticed a number of things of decidedly practical value in addition to the merely curious things I have just reported. In the first place, I have been simply amazed to find that these Chinese farmers around Peking, Nankou, and Tien-tsin are far ahead of some of our farmers in the matter of horsepower help in plowing.

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Coming up from Peking to Nankou, I found farmers in almost every field busy with their fall plowing or late grain sowing, and while there were dozens and dozens of three-horsepower plows, I saw only one or two one-horsepower plows on the whole trip. This is all the more surprising in view of the fact that labor is so cheap over here--15 cents a day American money would be a good wage for farm hands--but evidently the farmers realize that although plow hands are cheap, they must have two or three horses in order to get the best results from the soil itself. One-horse plows do not put the land in good condition. With two, three, or four horses or donkeys (they use large donkeys for plowing, even if small ones for riding) they get the land in good condition in spite of the fact that they cannot get the good plows that any American farmer may buy. I rode donkey-back through some farming country yesterday and watched the work rather closely. The plows, like those in Korea, have only one handle, but are much better in workmanship. Here they are made by the village carpenter-blacksmith, and have a large steel moldboard in front, and below it a long, sharp, broad, almost horizontal point.

The Chinese farmers, it should also be observed in passing, fully realize the importance of land rolling and harrowing. It is no uncommon sight to see a man driving a three-horse harrow. It is also said that for hundreds of years the Chinese have practised a suitable rotation of crops and have known the value of leguminous plants.

Nankou Pass, China.

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