The change from Korea to China is not merely abrupt, it is instantaneous. In the exact middle of the big bridge over the Yalu, across which rickshaws trot and pedestrians of all degrees shuttle in two constant, almost silent-footed streams on either side of rumbling trains, stand a Japanese guard and a Chinese soldier, as strikingly unlike as two men of the same profession and rather similar background could well be; and they are typical of the wide differences in customs and costumes, in all the details, if not the essentials, of life on the two shores of the famous river. White gives way to blue denim as the garb of crowds and individuals—for in China, as in Japan, the former is the color of mourning. Pigtails take the place of topknots; tiny bound feet, which the traveler perhaps has never before seen, instantly become general among women of all ages and classes; uncovered breasts die out as suddenly as does the silly horsehair pretense of a hat. Instead of stallions there are geldings; wheelbarrows and oscillating shoulder-poles replace the back-rack known as a jiggy; the Chinese sense of humor, or racial cheerfulness, comes at once to the fore—there was more laughing in an hour in Antung than in a day in Korea or a week in Japan. One could not but be struck by the size of the Chinese as compared even with the Koreans, to say nothing of the dwarfish Japanese, and by their more common-sense air and dress—and at the same time by the horrible sloughs of mud that passed for streets, the diseased beggars wallowing up and down them, the truly putrid conditions of life in the native city.

There is a paved and well built Japanese fore-city about the railway station, but even this was essentially Chinese in its human aspects, in spite of the big mat-covered arena that had been hastily thrown up to house the paunchy second-rate Japanese wrestlers who strutted the streets in loin-cloths and fluttering kimonos. The low and ancient “victorias,” that rattled to and from the station, jerked rather than drawn by an emaciated horse or two streaked with mud and perspiration, and loaded to the gunwales often with a full dozen Chinese besides the heartless driver, seemed strangely in keeping with the north bank of the Yalu. All trains halt for an hour or more at Antung for the lenient examination of baggage, so that there is time to see all this, as well as the great log rafts floating down the river as its upper reaches are denuded and their forests turned into Chinese coffins. Nor will it be an unusual experience if the traveler is approached by a Japanese gendarme asking to see his passport, to which the proper reply of course is as gentle a reminder as is consistent with the brazen courtesy and one’s individual temperament that China has not yet been internationally recognized as a Japanese colony.

A few miles northward a serrated range rises close on the right, and there are other groups of hills on the way to Mukden, two or three of them strikingly crowned by ancient temples. But broad rolling fields of corn and millet and kaoliang are the chief impression of this ten-hour journey. There is an atmosphere reminiscent of pioneer America in these broad reaches of Manchuria, so unlike the little diked and flooded paddy-fields of Korea and Japan. Only rarely is there a human being in sight, now and then a lone man in a pigtail and blue denim hoeing corn, or plowing with a thin red ox or a cow. The few houses are as miserable as the huts of Korea, otherwise quite different, being plain and square, thatched with corn- or kaoliang-stalks instead of the hair-smooth rice-straw, and without a suggestion of the picturesque about them. In the midsummer season the landscape is a deep, almost unbroken green, for the few houses are so low that they are all but hidden among the tall crops, and there is the slightly denser green of scrub timber on the constant succession of fair-sized hills. Willows abound; in fact, it would not be difficult to imagine oneself in the hillier parts of Pennsylvania, did not the visibly splendid fertility of the country contrast so strongly with the lack of real houses or any indication of prosperity and comfort. At length high terraced hills become more populous; then the country grows deadly flat, with the soya-bean, king of Manchurian products, lording it over all other crops as one approaches Mukden.

The Russian name for the capital of China’s “Eastern Three Provinces” bids fair to persist in Western speech, though to the Japanese it is Hoten and the Chinese themselves now call it Feng-tien. That constant fight for a livelihood, for bare escape from starvation, which becomes in time an accepted feature of life in China, is in evidence even this far north and east, for all the spaciousness of Manchuria. There is a swarming of rickshaws like men set on the mark ready to race to any exit where there is the shadow of a promised fare, blocking the way if one attempts to set out on foot, trailing the stroller until walking ceases to be a pleasure. Carriages with a suggestion of Russian ancestry completely surround the man who gives the slightest hint that he may at some time want one, and escape is hardly possible without the vigorous wielding of at least as deadly a weapon as a cane, which leaves the average American handicapped. Both rickshaw-men and drivers are deathly afraid of even the most insignificant Japanese bell-boy, however, and as there is no way of alighting in Mukden except from the west without passing through a cordon of these, assistance may be had against the first fierce onslaught of the over-numerous means of transportation. There are rows of “Peking carts” also, ready to crowd half a dozen hardy and unhurried travelers beneath their blue-denim hoods, and finally, if one chances to be as fond of local odors as of local color, there are the horse-cars, which may conceivably strike some of the more aged visitors from the Occident as vaguely familiar. Just how many years back it is that these same cars jogged up and down Third Avenue in medieval New York I have not the requisite data to say, but they spent quite a number of them earning their livelihood in Tokyo, and there are rumors that their jaunt into the Orient has not yet reached its termination.

There is almost nothing Chinese, except these things and those who patronize them, about the red-brick Japanese city with its wide, often well paved streets in diagonal patterns, its typically Japanese monuments and its little khaki-clad gendarmes in blood-red cap-bands, where the traveler by train usually alights in Mukden. But Feng-tien proper is quite thoroughly Chinese, when one does at last reach it by one of the many available but all leisurely means of transportation. There is not merely a massive inner wall surrounding what was the capital of the Manchus before they spread over China and took up their headquarters in Peking, but a mud wall of careless and irregular shape encloses the entire city, down to the last suburb hovel, less as a protection against earthly enemies than to shut out those omnipresent evil spirits of the fervid Chinese imagination. Inside, there is what Spanish Americans would call mucho movimiento, interminable movement, a dodging to and fro of more rickshaws than there are taxicabs in New York, a constant passing of myriads of men and boys, even of women and girls, these often in the fantastic Manchu head-dress, an ever moving multitude on business, pleasure, or nothing whatever bent. Shops offering everything from steamed bread to rolls of copper coins, from red paper banners to pulverized deerhorns, line the way thickly, in dense succession. Venders of anything which native Mukden is in the habit of consuming, or of keeping unconsumed, weave their way in and out of the throngs, the muddy side streets, the tight little alleyways, announcing their wares by strange cries or mechanical noises that have come to be accepted for what they purport to be. Yet for all the bustle there is an atmosphere of Chinese calm. Shopkeepers may be eager for trade, but they will not be hurried out of a fitting deportment merely to please clients from the breathless West; hawkers move through the streets and carry on their bargaining as if the commodity we know as time had no appreciable value to them, though they keep industriously at their allotted task of announcing and disposing of as many of their wares as the fates decree. Above all the katydids or crickets singing in their crude little woven-reed cages suspended before house- and shop-door give a sense of bucolic calm that neutralizes any hint of haste in the incessant swarming to and fro of every type of Chinese.

Hawkers of this curious breed of Chinese singing-bird wander all the streets of Feng-tien, a score or more of the little cages at the ends of their shoulder-poles, one or two of the green insects, resembling “grasshoppers,” in each cage, and beside them sprigs of grass to feed upon until their support devolves upon a purchaser. We bought one for the diminutive member of our family, cage and all for twenty coppers, which seemed to be about a nickel, though it goes without saying that both as strangers and foreigners we were no doubt grossly swindled. Nor would the captive sing for us, at least long enough to be worth the price, during the day or two we kept him, gay and melodious as he and his companions were in Chinese captivity. Possibly he missed the mellifluous odors of the native city and was drooping with homesickness. When his little alien owner set him free in the park of the Japanese city, there was no great hope that he would enjoy his liberty long, for Chinese urchins were slinking about with a furtive air and an alert demeanor which boded ill for singing insects—unless, as we half suspected, those of China prefer to hang before a shop and chant keepers and clients into harmonious understanding.

The mere “sights” of Mukden in the tourist sense all date back at least three hundred years. There is the Manchu palace within the real city wall, its many structures still impressive in their roofs of imperial yellow tiles for all the dust-covered wrecks they are fast becoming under caretakers interested only in the size of their gratuities. An hour’s churning by Mukden’s Russian type of carriage over what the Chinese regard as a road is not too high a price to pay for a stroll through the capacious grounds of the Pei-ling, or Northern Tombs, where the second and last emperor to occupy the palaces in the city lies with his consort under the usual artificial hillock behind elaborate structures roofed also in imperial yellow. For though one is sure to see as many tombs of the famous and infamous in China as cathedrals in Europe, this is by no means the least imposing of them. It takes a bit more courage to jolt out to Tung-ling, the Eastern Mausoleum, a generation older and twice as far away; but there pine-clad hills and rather gentle yet impressive scenery make up for the somewhat less expansive tombs. Then, too, those whose interests are not entirely in the past may wish to run out on the branch line to Fushun, where the Japanese are taking out—by the use of economical Chinese muscle—vast quantities of coal from an open cut that goes down into the earth in steps, like a dry-dock prepared for some mammoth ship many times larger than any sea has ever floated.

It was at Mukden that we first came into personal contact with the swarms of soldiers—“coolies in uniform” might be a more exact term—with which all China is cursed under its putative republican rÉgime. Chang Tso-lin, the war lord of Manchuria, had just been thwarted in his plan to get control of Peking, and his troops in their muddy-gray cotton uniforms were still pouring back into the city by the train-load. Wagon-trains of ammunition, useful another year, were rumbling through the narrow streets, hauled by dust-caked mules. Troops were stowed away everywhere, in every big yard or semi-public compound, in unsuspected corners, in barracks outside the town. Nowhere could one open the eyes without seeing soldiers, lounging in unmilitary attitude before guarded gates, lolling about the streets and bazaars with the air of conquerors to whom nothing could be denied, drawn in endless files through the Japanese city on their way to the railway station stretched out at ease in rickshaws among their bed-stuffed possessions and grasping in one hand the rifle with the butt of which the great majority of them probably paid the perspiring coolies so incessantly trotting back and forth with them. How much more picturesque life would be with us if our soldiers mobilized in taxicabs, and booted the driver out of the way if he dared to call attention to the taximeter.

Scholarly-looking little Chang Tso-lin, in his ugly French-chÂteau style of dwelling that seems so inexcusable an intruder among the graceful palaces of China, is an enigma, at least to those who have merely met rather than learned to know him. How this outwardly almost insignificant man can hold a great territory in the hollow of his hand, baffling all the cross-currents of intrigue which sweep incessantly up and down the “Eastern Three Provinces,” was a query worth pondering. Virtually a bandit in his younger days, then a lieutenant in the Japanese army during the war with Russia, Chang gathered somewhere the power to rule which made him an autocrat over his own people and won him even among many of the foreigners who breathe the Manchurian atmosphere the reputation of being the “strong man” of China. His methods are drastic and prompt; he is said to depend more on intuition, on “hunches,” than on ordered reflection. Keys to the leg-irons of serious criminals he kept in his own possession, so that they could not buy off in the time-honored Chinese fashion. Just before we reached Mukden two of his generals had been detected in the not unprecedented Chinese feat of putting into their own pockets a few cents a day from each soldier’s pay. Chang had them up on the carpet only after he had undeniable proof of their guilt, and there was nothing left for them to do but to confess and plead for mercy. A curt order to have them taken to the execution-ground beyond the outer city wall closed the incident. On the same day two common soldiers who had indulged in looting in outlying districts were found in the possession of the extraordinary sum of five hundred dollars each, and for three days their bodies were left lying out in front of the Chinese railway station as a hint to others whose plans might be taking similar shape. Cynics, and those foreign residents whose pet among the “strong men” of China is some one else, lay such personal disasters to the simple fact that Chang himself did not get his share of the “squeeze,” but the consensus of opinion seemed to be otherwise.

Two ladies in the station waiting-room of Antung, just across the Yalu from Korea, proudly comparing the relative inadequacy of their crippled feet