CHAPTER VI THROUGH RUSSIANIZED CHINA

Previous

The changes which burst suddenly upon the traveler at Changchun would be startling if he were not almost certain to be prepared for them. Unless his memory is short or his age brief he can scarcely be unaware of the fact that the Treaty of Portsmouth on our own New England coast made Changchun the meeting-place of that portion of the Chinese Eastern Railway which remained to the Russians after their trouncing, and that long section of it which their conquerors have made over into the South Manchurian Railway. One steps from what is essentially an American express-train upon the station platform, and from that into an express-train that is European down to its most insignificant details. Cars of the “Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits” offer him the comfort of their separate compartments, brilliantly lighted by frosted bulbs, furnished even with thermometers, roomy with the five-foot gage of Russian railways, on which trains use the right- rather than the left-hand track. The heavy-stacked engine is as different from the one across the platform still panting from its race northward as the densely bearded Russian trainmen are from the alert little brown men of the same calling. Suddenly there were Russians everywhere, and by no means all of them were of a type to make one unduly proud of the white race; some indeed were roustabouts and station hangers-on living by petty graft upon uninformed travelers, such as the latter are never subjected to on the Japanese railways of Manchuria. There was such a mixture of Chinese, Japanese, and Russians at Changchun that one could only surmise who was really in control. It was a Russian who asked me for my passport—and who raised his hat, bowed low, and retired with an almost subservient “Thank you” when I answered that I was American. Booted and spurred Russians in khaki, in woolen trousers and cotton smocks, in the best they could do in the way of an individual uniform, their waists compressed to maidenly slenderness by tight belts, strutted the platforms in long swords with an air that said plainly that they would far rather die than have to work and not be able to strut about in uniform, boots, spurs, and sword. European civilians of both sexes, tow-headed women and children, mere Russian farmers, leaned on station barriers or made their way to and from the third-class coaches. One type in particular was very familiar,—the half-subservient, half-cocky, always vulgar Russian Jew, much assured of himself now, since the new turn things have taken in Russia, but still more or less openly despised by the non-Jewish Russians. In our car was one of the most offensive of these fellows, head of the opium ring of Harbin, who acted as if he had purchased the earth from its original owners and was making it a personal plaything.

The train made incredibly long stops at every station, but excellent speed between them, though it burned wood and thereby saved us from soot and cinders. I had a sense of being in an utterly foreign land, many times more so than among the Japanese. For one thing station names were in Chinese and Russian, equally illegible to those of us who recognize a word only in Roman letters, while from Yokohama to Changchun even the most insignificant stopping-place announces itself in English. Hitherto at least the head trainman was almost certain to have a smattering of my tongue; at worst I could produce a few short but highly valuable phrases of Japanese; but these black-bearded fellows were separated from me by an utterly impenetrable linguistic wall. They might quite as well have been Hottentots or Zulus as far as any possibility of communicating with them either by spoken or written word went. Perhaps it was mainly this sense of strangeness that made the air seem surcharged with something ominous, something akin to hopeless political conditions.

But through it all the endless plains of corn and beans, millet and wheat, beautiful in their deep green, spread as far as the eye could reach in every direction, hour after hour, all afternoon long. The plodding Chinese peasant, who is the mudsill of all the struggles of rival empires to control this vast rich territory, was still toiling here and there when the sun touched the flat western horizon. But at frequent intervals Russian boys in soldierly caps came running out of yellow brick farm-houses surrounded by a kind of Chinese wall. Many more of them lived in villages, some of which might have been lifted bodily out of European Russia. At these, Chinese and tow-headed venders appeared on the off side of stations, until they were chased away by policemen, offering live chickens, ducks, eggs by the basketful. A wonderful land, Manchuria, whether for cultivating or merely for the grazing of stock; no wonder crowded Japan covets this broad, half-wasted region, yet she has already shown that she would exploit rather than people it.

Rain was pouring when we reached Harbin, and seemed to have been for weeks. At least never in all my wanderings have I floundered through worse sloughs of mud than in the droshke which lost itself in the inky blackness and the downpour in what looked for a time like a vain attempt to get me from the station to a hotel. By morning light there seemed no particular reason for this, for though every street was covered at least with slime, there were enough of them roughly stone-paved to carry all the droshkes with which Harbin swarms. Perhaps it was merely an example of the impracticability of the Russians, of which I was to hear so many more before I moved on.

At Harbin, though still well inside China, the traveler finds himself back in Europe. Unless his geography is proof against such deceptions, he might easily believe that he had crossed the line into Russia and brought up in one of its most typical cities. Streets, architecture, customs, inhabitants are all on the Russian model. Instead of rickshaws there are two types of carriages,—the droshke, of barouche effect, drawn in most cases by two horses, the shaft animal under a great arched pole and the off one with its head tied down to a level with its knees and twisted well to the outside, thanks to some time-honored Russian idea of style or efficiency; then there is the amerikanka. The “American woman,” as foreign residents facetiously translate the word, is a two-wheeled cart with a plain open box on top, on a corner of which sits the driver, apparently wholly inured to the jouncing with every step of the horse and every unevenness of the road which the passenger or two beside him seldom gives evidence of enjoying. But the amerikanka is ridiculously cheap by Western standards, and the Russian who manipulates it is almost sure to be cheery and pleasant, filled with naÏve tales of what is and what he believes is going on inside Russia proper, if one chances to have a companion who can act as interpreter, and in any case a relief merely as a Caucasian after months among squint-eyed Orientals. Already, however, the motor-buses which probably have by this time driven most of the leisurely Russian wielders of horse-whips out of business had begun to appear on the streets of Harbin.

The houses have double windows, with a space of two or three feet between the panes of glass; and great cylindrical stoves built into the walls from floor to ceiling, preferably in a corner where they can bulge into two, and even four, rooms, are almost as universal as in Russia. In a July heat which left one drenched after a short stroll, even by moonlight, and which made the briefest interview in any of Harbin’s dungeon-like, double-walled offices a kind of “third degree,” it was hard to believe these evidences of long winters during which, barely four months thence, it would often be forty below zero and the wearing of furs indispensable. To its residents and to most of its visitors Harbin, all Manchuria in fact, is a land of snow and ice and bitter gales; to me, who happened to be there in the very climax of the brief summer, it will always bring back memories of a climate compared to which that of the tropics is mild and invigorating. Nor can I remember meeting in all Japan such battalions of flies as helped to make life miserable in summer-time Harbin, with its brief nights and its interminable days.

I know at last why one’s hat is always snatched from him when he enters a Russian-Jewish restaurant in New York. In Russia, and equally in Harbin, it is an inexcusable discourtesy to go into an office, even for the briefest instant, wearing, or carrying, hat or overcoat. There are always flunkies waiting to take them away from you outside the door, and obviously they expect to be remembered when you leave. I am overcome with grief to think that, in my appalling ignorance, I so long fancied one of the least beloved customs of our metropolis a mere scheme to extort tips, instead of a transplanted refinement from urbane Russia. Equally Russian is the Harbin practice of shaking hands with the entire personnel, from proprietor to errand-boy, of any shop one enters, however slight the purchase one has in view. Indeed, the more genuinely well bred shake hands all around again before they leave.

Several gaudy blue, green, and gold churches of the Russian Orthodox faith rise in fantastic domes and puffed-out, cross-surmounted spires above the general level of Harbin, and religious ceremonies imported direct from pre-Bolshevik Moscow may be seen any day in the week. Funerals, for instance, were of more than daily occurrence. Most often they were those of impoverished refugees, and were brief and inconspicuous; but there were frequent processions of the elaborate, typically Russian character. I passed two such within half an hour one noonday. The first was of the wife of the Russian station-master. He had discharged a Chinese employee for negligence and “squeeze,” and the latter had returned to kill him, his bullet accidentally striking the wife instead. The second was of the head of the Harbin Gymnasium, or upper school, once a colonel and a man of great wealth in Russia, now so impoverished that his wife and children, on foot behind the hearse, as is the Russian custom, were almost in rags and virtually barefoot. Mummers in fantastic costumes, including long, light-colored robes, walked before and on either side of the deceased, who were carried in canopied vehicles gay beyond anything western Europe or the New World has to offer the dead, even the horses draped from ears to fetlocks in flowing white coverlets fancifully embroidered. But the most surprising, not to say repulsive, Russian feature of the ceremony was the public display of the corpse. In each case the heavy lid of the coffin was laid diagonally off to one side, and during all the miles from church to cemetery, with several stops for the burning of incense and priestly blessings on the way, the yellow face of the departed rolled from side to side as the open hearse jolted over the stony pavements.

It is an old saying that to scratch a Russian is to find a Tartar, but I had taken this to be a mere figure of speech until I came to Harbin and northern Manchuria, where the European and the Asiatic Orientals live side by side. The Chinese and the Russians, one quickly realized there, understand each other better than we of the real West can ever hope to understand either. They have the same complicated Oriental way of thinking, a similar point of view in such matters as “squeeze,” not very dissimilar business methods. In a Russian department-store of Harbin the purchaser gets two checks, one of which he pays at the desk under the personal eye of the owner or manager, getting the other stamped and presenting it, not to the clerk who served him, but to another so far away that collusion between them would be difficult, before he is finally handed his purchase. The mere loss of time on both sides no more worries the Russian than it would the Chinese. At every turn I found myself startled to recognize as another Russian trait what I had fancied was characteristic merely of eastern Asia. Every important house in Harbin had its private policeman, usually a Russian ex-soldier, and wherever one attempted to enter a gate watchmen and domestic hangers-on sprang up from all sides as thickly as at the entrance to a Chinese residence or yamen. Perhaps the greatest surprise was the discovery that the Russian uses the abacus or swan-pan for doing his arithmetic, just like the people of Japan, Korea, and China, except that with him the contrivance is much larger, as if his heavier fingers needed wooden balls worthy of their strength. Mental arithmetic seemed to be as impossible to him as to a Chinese shopkeeper or to the subjects of the mikado. On my first visit to a dining-car on the C. E. R., it being two or three hours before dinner-time, I had merely a glass of tea and some Russian form of pastry. The bill of fare announced these as costing 15 and 45 sen respectively—Japanese money is most widely used now in the Russianized zone of Manchuria. The ikon-faced man at his desk in a corner of the car, his mammoth black beard looking like a wig that had fallen from its place on his utterly hairless head, solemnly picked up his counting-board, rattled the balls back and forth for a full minute, and finally wrote down with an air of intellectual triumph the total of the two items on my check before him. No Westerner can ever hope to sandwich himself in between two peoples who prefer the abacus to pencil and paper for their arithmetical problems.

Yet the Russians are white men, and thereby hang certain problems that are sure to thrust themselves upon the visitor to northern Manchuria in the present days of Russian upheaval. It was a distinct pleasure to find myself again where Westerners were not incessantly stared at, even though it was useless to attempt to speak a word with men and women who would have looked perfectly at home on the streets of any large American city. But it was quite otherwise suddenly to realize that some of the weaknesses of our Western civilization are much more conspicuous, or at least more public, than similar flaws in Oriental society. Neither China nor Japan are model lands in many respects, but during all the time I had spent in the Far East I had not seen a fraction of the open indecency, the unashamed vulgarity, the deliberate flaunting of sexual wares that raged in the several conspicuous cafÉ singing-halls of Harbin. It was almost a shock even to see white women again in any number; to find them dressing and behaving as no Japanese geisha, no singsong-girl of Korea or China, would ever think of doing outside her semi-domestic circle, was more impressive, more suggestive of the vices of our civilization, than the average of us would have called to his attention during a lifetime of Western residence. The contrast, added to a little knowledge of the point of view of the Oriental as to the proper place of the sex appeal in life, made such things stand out with the vividness of electric sign-boards. As Westerners we might understand that Harbin, under undefined economic conditions and somewhat chaotic government, with overturned Russia pouring its vices and its hungers down into it, was not a normal sample of the West; to the occasional fat, smug Chinese visitors to these blatant places, and through them to thousands of their race, such parading of our vices could do more to give a false impression of Western life and the Western character than a thousand decent Occidentals, working for years to no other purpose, could correct.

Two decades ago, while I was wandering across Asia during the Japanese-Russian War, an English-speaking Hindu expressed to me his great astonishment that the white world should permit the yellow race to show its superiority over even what seemed just then the most widely disliked branch of the Caucasian family. He realized what at least the untraveled bulk of the Occident does not to this day, that every sign of weakness in any white nation, almost in any white individual, is immediately applied by the average Oriental mind to the whole white race. The effect of Japan’s victory over Russia, working like a leaven through the masses of Asia for a score of years, was quite apparent in certain general changes of attitude toward Westerners, some of them fortunate, many of them quite the contrary. Now, with the second catastrophe of Russia flooding Asia with new examples of Caucasian weaknesses, of white men reduced to a lower level than Asia had ever before seen them, one could not but feel that it behooves the Western world in general to look to the impression Russians in China are making for the Caucasian family as a whole, and to know what their treatment is at the hands of the Chinese. For while we may recognize the Russian as essentially an Oriental, really more closely allied to the Chinese than to ourselves, the latter thinks of him entirely as a Westerner, typical in his faults and his weaknesses of that other side of the earth toward which the Oriental attitude is of growing importance. I do not know whether or not the continued supremacy of the white race is best for the world at large; but I have rather strong personal opinions on that subject, and those who are like-minded would do well to look into the question of the present-day conditions of Russians in China, where at least the respect on which much of that supremacy depends is being gradually eaten away.

Along all the principal thoroughfares of Harbin squatted scores of white beggars, women and children among them, appealing to Chinese as well as to European passers-by. In the market-places of this and of other towns along the C. E. R. I saw many a Russian covered with filth, sores, and a few tattered rags, a noisome receptacle of some kind in his hands, wandering from stall to stall pleading with the sardonic Chinese keepers to give him a half-rotten tomato or a putrid piece of meat. Barefooted refugee children roamed the streets, picking up whatever they could find, including some of the nastiest of Chinese habits. Former officers of the czar, and wives who were once the grace of any drawing-room, speaking French with a faultless accent, lived in miserable pens with only ragged cloth partitions between them and their teeming neighbors, eating the poorest of Chinese coolie food, some of them unable to go out unless they went barefoot. In the so-called thieves’ market every conceivable kind of junk, from useful kitchen utensils to useless bric-À-brac of Russian ancestry, was offered for sale; any morning one might see several hundred Russian men and women shuttling to and fro there, trying to sell an odd pair of boots, an all but worn-out garment, a child’s toy, for the price of a handful of potatoes or a measure of kaoliang, or attempting to exchange something they had at last found they could do without for something their fellow refugees still had that seemed to them indispensable.

The few Americans in Harbin at least were doing what they could to relieve the needy Russians. But it was an even more complicated task than we of the West would suppose, for here again the essential Orientalism of the victims came out. Young men with fine faces, on which the signs of semi-starvation were in plain evidence, would come imploring any kind of assistance, any position that would give them enough to buy bread. “Why,” they would cry, as if they were going the utmost limit in describing their horrible state, “I will even work with my hands!” But this was merely bluff; nothing could make your typical Russian of the class which Bolshevism chased out of the country debase himself to any such degree as that, starve, beg, or steal though he must. With a plethora of hungry, yet still sturdy, Russians of both sexes all about them, it was almost impossible for the American residents to get servants, unless they took Chinese from the native city. They could get innumerable teachers of Russian, almost none of whom had any conception of how to teach, nor the persistence, patience, and punctuality which that calling requires; but when it came to washing dishes and mopping floors chances went begging in the very houses which were being bombarded with frantic appeals for help against incipient starvation. It was not merely that these former well-to-do did not know how to work; they would do anything rather than learn.

Fifteen boys who worked their way across Siberia and were found jobs by the Y. M. C. A. secretary of Harbin all ran away very shortly afterward, taking with them money or clothing, or both, belonging to their employers. One went home all the way across Siberia again to find his mother, discovered no trace of her, was caught by the “Red” army, and finally turned up in Harbin once more with frozen feet and looking like an old man, though he was only seventeen. This same secretary had countless appeals for help and at the same time a job of pumping water at his own house, but he was never able to make the two meet. Time after time he offered some hungry young Russian this task, which meant less than two hours’ work a day, at any time of the day that the worker might choose, the salary to be all the food he could eat and $7.50 “Mex” a month—a very liberal offer in China, even for high-priced Harbin. Invariably each applicant for aid bowed low at this offer, assured the secretary that he had saved his life, thanked him in the deepest Russian manner possible, which might include the kissing of the benefactor’s hands—and invariably never turned up again. One case was so obviously deserving that the secretary dug a good suit of clothes out of the bottom of his trunk, had it dry-cleaned, and gave it to the poor fellow, along with the pumping job, from which he discharged the Chinese boy who had recently been filling it very satisfactorily—and the next day, when his water ran out, he found that the man and the suit had gone to Vladivostok.

American representatives of such organizations as the Red Cross, who were spending money and energy for the betterment of Russian refugees in Harbin, Kirin, and other towns of northern Manchuria, could not get a man among all the big sturdy fellows they were feeding to build a brick stove, to patch a roof, or to dig a trench for their own benefit; Chinese laborers had to be called in to do all such “work with the hands.” Indeed, the refugees expected their benefactors to hire servants to sweep out and keep in order the buildings that had been found for them. There were some well-to-do Russians in Harbin—more C. E. R. officials than there were positions for them to fill lived there in style, and a few families had escaped from Russia early enough to have been able to bring much of their wealth with them, not to mention others who had long been in business in Manchuria. But these were the last people in Harbin to help their unfortunate compatriots. They might flaunt their own comfort and extravagance in the lean faces of the unfortunate; they were even known to “squeeze” some of the poor devils among the refugees of the working-class who found and accepted work; but they were as Oriental as the Chinese in looking callously on while their own people starved about them, or were succored by men from across the sea.

For a time the Y. M. C. A. secretary helped young Russians to immigrate to the United States under the guise of students, there being some special ruling for these in spite of the new immigration restrictions; but so many of them turned out to be men who had helped to start the revolution in Russia and hoped to do the same in America that the plan proved to be unwise. Those who succeeded in finding tasks to the liking of the hand-sparing fugitives had their own troubles. “Hire a Russian and you have to hire another man to watch him,” was the consensus of opinion among all who had had that experience. Russian ideas of honesty were frankly Oriental; moreover they were idealists, dreamers, with no business sense, no conception of economics or economies, no “go,” not a practical trait in their whole make-up, unless they had some German, Swedish, or French blood in their veins, which the few enterprising ones in Harbin did. For all that they were a most likable people, childlike in their manners as well as their irresponsibility, with nothing of the surliness of the Japanese, nor of the Chinese love of ridicule. They gave one the feeling that they were not fitted to cope with the practical every-day world, that they should not be wandering about it without guardians and advisers. One soon ceased to wonder that the trade of Harbin was almost exclusively in the hands of the Jews and the Chinese; a few days in northern Manchuria were enough to explain why the Jews are so powerful and so hated in Russia, why it has been considered necessary to curb them, almost enough to make clear the incredible success of Bolshevism over common sense.

Distinctly a chip of the degenerate old rÉgime was Harbin, inhabited mainly by people whom nothing would drive to manual labor but who were quite ready to spread intrigue and false propaganda against the new rulers in their native land. The Bolsheviks, it seems generally admitted, are at least sincere, wildly impractical as they are in their ideas of human society; these refugees of Harbin, one felt, would be just as bad as ever if once they got back into power, would have learned nothing whatever, thanks to their incapability, their temperamental ineptitude, from their bitter experiences. “Propaganda aside,” said foreign residents who were in a position to know, and who certainly were not friendly to the new order in Russia, “if the bulk of the Russian people were able to vote between the old rÉgime and the present one they would choose the latter as the least of two evils”; and any one who has made even a brief stay in the Russian metropolis of China would probably be inclined to agree with that statement.

The night life of Harbin, even passing over the vicious part of it, was in great contrast to that of Japan and the adjoining lands I had so far visited. Whatever else they might have to do without, the Russian exiles plainly did not propose to deny themselves the gay times, the mingling together in social concourse, the rivalry of dress and public squandering of money, the joys of good music, which had been so important a part of their life at home. Countless anecdotes floated about Harbin of refugees dressing like lords though they had not a crust left at home, of selling necessary things, even of spending money that had been given to keep them from starvation, to get raiment in which they were not ashamed to appear in the frequent social gatherings. In the park of the Railway Club, to which members and their families were admitted free and passing strangers at a goodly price of admission, there was an immense crowd on the evening I spent there, as there is almost any night of the week, so purely European a crowd that it took a distinct mental exertion to realize that one was still in China. Yet in all the big audience that stood and strolled about the huge shell-shaped sounding-board, from within the mouth of which a large orchestra gave an all-Tchaikowsky program that would have been loudly applauded by music lovers anywhere, there was scarcely a visible sign of straitened circumstances, to say nothing of poverty. Ladies as well gowned as at the Paris races strolled with men faultlessly garbed, by European standards, who swung their “sticks” with the haughty grace of aristocrats to whom the lack of an adequate income had never so much as occurred. Men and women sipping iced drinks on the veranda of the club paid their checks and tipped their waiters with as lavish an air as if the World War had never happened. Not a few men were in a kind of combination smock and uniform, with collars buttoning high about the neck; but these looked as much like an exuberance of fashion as like subterfuges to save shirts or cover the lack of them, just as their tightly belted waists were more of a fad than an open admission of the meagerness of their suppers.

It was like such a concert in a Spanish-American plaza, yet in many ways different. The hearers stood during the numbers and walked between them, reversing the usual practice south of the Rio Grande. There was endless hand-shaking; beards were not conspicuously numerous and even mustaches were little in fashion, at least among the younger men, but closely clipped, even shaved, heads seemed to be as much the style as among the modern Chinese, who, now that they are doing away with the pigtail, are doing so with such a vengeance that their scalps show white through the bristles. Short hair was not uncommon among the women, too, though less as a fashion, it was said, than because so many had had typhus during their fugitive days. It was strange to see the women all wearing hats, quite aside from the fact that they were almost all new ones; it was strange to see women openly treated with respect, for that matter, and walking arm in arm with their men; strangest of all was the queer feeling of mingling again with thousands of white people, after months of never having seen more than a dozen of them together. Not a few of the girls and young women were more than good-looking, in form as well as face, a fact which many of them seemed to take care not to conceal, for some of the newest dresses were startlingly thin, and rolled stockings barely covering the ankle were almost the rule among the younger set. But Russians do not appear to be prudish about the display of the human form; during July and August great numbers of both sexes, quite of the decent class, bathe together perfectly naked in the muddy water of Harbin’s uninspiring river.

I was introduced to princesses in simple but very appropriate garb, to people with strange and with sad stories, to men who had run away from Russia and left their wives to follow—if they could—to women who had performed incredible feats and suffered unbelievable hardships to escape from the blighted land or to join such unworthy husbands, and who in some cases still retained their striking beauty and in many their Russian charm. Yet numerous as were the fine faces in the crowd, it hardly needed the experience of foreign residents to call attention to the fact that in so many instances these looked proud and impractical and—well, inefficient in the matter-of-fact things of life. Now and then there passed through the throng that made respectful way for them old generals still wearing their uniforms, blazing from shoulder to shoulder with decorations, and the same haughty expression of men expecting instant obedience as in their bygone days of power and emoluments. I could not quite get the point of view on some Russian prejudices. Not one of that race with whom I spoke during my journey through northern Manchuria lost an opportunity to curse the Jews, whom they always spoke of as synonymous with the new rÉgime in their native land. Yet the leader of this orchestra was a Jew, and he not only got wild applause at the end of almost every number, even from men who left off vilifying his people just long enough to add to it in the heartiest fashion, but when he raised his baton to start the first number the almost entirely Russian orchestra had given him a “rouser” instead, a sudden burst of music entirely different from what they were about to play, which is considered in Russian musical circles the highest honor that can be paid a musical director.

Harbin consists of four towns, each with its individual name. There is the old one where the Russians first settled when they built the Chinese Eastern Railway, now almost deserted but for tillers of the surrounding fields, a makeshift home for orphan refugees, and the like. In Pristan, popularly called “Jew-town,” most of the business is carried on, as well as the far-famed singing-halls. Up the hill from this and separated from it by an open space in which Chinese executions take place is the more commodious railroad town, with important offices, the better-class residences, the garish Russian Orthodox churches which rise like unnaturally gorgeous flowers above the rather drab general level. Lastly, there is Fu-chia-tien, the Chinese city, a mile or more away from the others, as completely Chinese as if there had never been a Russian within a thousand versts of the place. There are many rickshaws in Fu-chia-tien, but not one in all the other three towns, and rarely indeed does a foreigner ride in one, though they are more comfortable on the horrible streets than the droshke, and certainly more so than the excruciating “American women.” The severed heads of bandits hung in cages on several street corners in Chinese Harbin, and many other such touching little details showed that the town clung strictly to its own ways in spite of the many foreign examples so close at hand.

Until the debacle of the czarist rÉgime in Russia, the three Russian towns of Harbin were entirely under their own rule. Even now, since they have formally taken over the jurisdiction of them, the Chinese still let the Russians largely alone in their municipal affairs, but they are more and more prone to “butt in” and gratuitously assert their authority, just as they have in the Chinese Eastern Railway. This now has a Chinese as well as a Russian president and the whole category of Chinese officials down to the last clerk, in addition to Russian duplicates of the same in the greatly over-staffed offices. Some say the Russian railway officials are deliberately selling out to the Chinese; others claim that they are running this important link in world communication into wreckage and bankruptcy while they and the Bolsheviks quarrel, on paper and at a distance, as to whether it belongs to the Russian Government or merely to the Russo-Asiatic Bank. Meanwhile it staggers along under its top-heavy double staff, paying salaries to Chinese who do nothing and to many Russians who do not do much. The latter, old officials cut off for years now from higher authority, avow that they are merely administering the line for the benefit of the czarist rÉgime that appointed them, until such time as this shall recover its rightful place in the world, but in practice they act as if the C. E. R. were the private property of the little clique of reactionary Russians who hold the power and wealth of Harbin. How public-spirited these are is suggested by such actions as their refusing to transport, except at full rates, food and clothing furnished by the Red Cross for the relief of their compatriots in the various towns of northern Manchuria.

At Versailles in 1919 and again at the Washington Conference two years later the Chinese delegates demanded the abrogation of extraterritorial jurisdiction in China, as a derogation of her sovereign status as a nation. The request was denied, but at the second gathering it was decided to appoint a commission to examine on the spot the assertion of the delegates that the administration of justice in the former Celestial Empire has so far improved that foreign jurisdiction may safely be abolished. Since then certain occurrences in China which have not been testimonials in her favor have caused the commission indefinitely to postpone its coming; but in the meanwhile there is considerable evidence at hand in the treatment of the Russians by the Chinese since the former were deprived of their extraterritorial status.

It is probably not necessary to explain that extraterritoriality, as it is familiarly called, consists, briefly, in the right—or is it privilege?—of foreigners in China to be tried only by their own consuls or judges, under the laws of their own countries. Eighty years ago, closely following the Treaty of Nanking, which ended one of her “opium wars” with China, England forced this concession upon the Chinese Government, the Americans and the French quickly followed suit, and soon there were very few foreign residents indeed who were not protected by treaty from Chinese courts and prisons. This state of affairs remained unbroken until about the time of the Washington Conference, when China took advantage of conditions in Russia to repudiate her treaty with the czarist Government, and the many thousands of Russians in China suddenly found themselves on a par, legally, with the Chinese themselves. A new treaty between China and Germany, in which the latter either inadvertently or purposely left out any mention of extraterritoriality, and lack of treaties with some of the other countries on which China declared war at the behest of the Allies has left Germans, Austrians, Bulgarians, and some other nationalities in the same boat with the Russians.

Since then life has not been quite the same in Harbin and the other Russian towns of northern Manchuria. On one hand the change has caused some just retribution. In the olden days Russians kicked the Chinese about almost at will; now when a Chinese carriage driver in Harbin gets a good excuse and opportunity, Russian heads are likely to suffer. Russian railway-men used to throw Chinese passengers back into third class or out on the platform, if they felt in the mood, even though they held first-class tickets; now the minions of Chang Tso-lin suddenly levy a new tax and Chinese soldiers go out and “beat up” Russian farmers to such an extent in some cases that ships lie waiting for cargo in Dairen while crops rot in the fields. Unfortunately things do not often stop with mere retribution. The Chinese along the C. E. R. seem sometimes to go out of their way to be insolent toward any Westerner, to jostle and to annoy him without cause; taxes have been levied on the property of foreigners other than Russian, and men arrested in spite of treaties of extraterritoriality still in existence. An Italian woman who complained that her purse had been stolen by a Chinese pickpocket was taken to jail along with the thief, as openly as was a Russian who tried to get back his fur coat, and the latter at least was imprisoned for weeks. You cannot expect the garden variety of Chinese soldier or policeman to recognize a difference in foreigners, and in a town where 98 per cent of these are Russians we others have to watch our steps. Perhaps this inability of their Chinese comrades to distinguish between foreigners without and those still with extraterritorial status is the reason that there are Russian police in Harbin, splashing through its mud in their heavy boots as if they still had the czar’s authority behind them—until the passing of some supercilious Chinese official causes them to snap to attention and salute.

The grain of the kaoliang, one of the most important crops of North China. It grows from ten to fifteen feet high and makes the finest of hiding-places for bandits

A daily sight in Vladivostok,—a group of youths suspected of opinions contrary to those of the Government, rounded up and trotted off to prison

A refugee Russian priest, of whom there were many in Harbin

Types of this kind swarm along the Chinese Eastern Railway of Manchuria, many of them volunteers in the Chinese army or railway police

Many examples of Chinese oppression of the Russians were common knowledge in Harbin, some of them more serious than others. A young Russian member of the Y. M. C. A. who was putting the shot in a park of the residence town was arrested by the Chinese on the charge of having a bomb in his possession. He spent some hours in jail, finally to be released on bail, the police confiscating what the judge agreed with them was an explosive agent of destruction. The association secretary had to threaten to refer the matter to the American consul before the “bomb” was returned, and when I left Harbin the charge against the “bomb-thrower” had not been dismissed. Then there was the sad case of another member aspiring to athletic prowess, who, in throwing the javelin, hit a dog, though that was complicated by the fact that the injured animal was of Japanese nationality, which made the affair much more serious. Chang and his retainers may have a justifiable scorn for those of us whose governments so habitually turn the other cheek of late in cases of Chinese aggression, but there are several thousand good reasons, all splendidly armed and equipped and right on the spot, why he should respect Japan’s wishes, even if his former lieutenancy and certain allegations of secret allegiances still frequently heard have no weight with him.

These instances, I admit, are not such as nations should go to war over, but they are just as good examples as are many far more serious ones, which any foreign resident of Harbin can cite, of how misunderstandings alone, if there were the very best will and desire to be just, would make it impossible for foreigners to get justice in China once their extraterritorial privileges were taken away from them. Nor was it a particularly agreeable sight to see a line of Russian men and women waiting for hours, if not for days, the good pleasure of haughty Chinese officials and their gutter-snipe-like underlings in order to get passports to go to another town, or out of the country. The court-room I visited in Harbin was an ordinary brick and plaster building, but chasers of evil spirits climbed its eaves, and dragons sat on the roof, their antennÆ waving in the wind. Many Russians were gathered, including a huge lawyer in robes who suggested Gulliver in fear of his life when he bowed and smirked before the diminutive almond-eyed officials. In theory court opened at ten, but there had been fireworks in the Chinese town the night before and his honor was still being patiently awaited at noon. Out in front of the court was a string of bill-boards on which cases were posted in tissue-paper sheets covered with Chinese characters, reminding one that an interpreter to explain what the police had against one would be indispensable under lost extraterritoriality.

The judge did come at last, a boyish-looking fellow who sat in splendid, not to say haughty, isolation in his high chair, singsonging something now and then in a half-audible falsetto, and still more often hawking and spitting on the floor, though there were signs all over the court-room forbidding it. On the desk before him was one tissue-paper bordereau, as the French, who use similar loosely bound collections of papers, would call it; but there were no signs of law-books, and the judge seemed to get his precedents, and his opinions, too, one suspected, from the not too immaculate clerks and hangers-on who frequently came up to whisper in his ear. Meanwhile a gray-bearded Russian was standing respectfully before him at the rail, droning on and on in his own tongue some sort of complaint, testimony, or defense. The case was not a very serious one, it seemed, there being a mere matter of two or three hundred dollars “Mex” involved; but without going any farther into details, let me put it briefly that, though there was in evidence all the machinery of justice which a visiting commission would wish to see, I should very much have regretted the necessity of expecting justice from this soggy-eyed Celestial youth, bending his ear to this and that whisper from his unkempt, shifty-looking attendants.

I visited also the big prison down in Pristan, built by the Russians but now taken over by the Chinese. There were two hundred and seventy-seven Russian prisoners and one German in it, a dozen of them women, among whom was a Jewish member of that sex who had lived for years in “Noo Yoik,” and spoke her fluent English accordingly. The same rules governed the prison as under the Russians, but orders from higher up now came from Chinese, and inmates put their hope, in cases where they had any left, in Chinese courts and officials. Some of the guards were still Russian, but the majority were not, and the sight of white men, clanking with enormous chains, chased about the yard while they cleaned out toilets and did similar menial tasks, by Chinese jailers who openly enjoyed their discomfiture, would not have added to the joy of white nations. Nearly all the prisoners, however, were in groups of six to a dozen in large cells that could be dimly seen through a small slit in each door. Living conditions were those of the old type of Russian prisons, with immense locks, and very thick walls that made the July heat furnace-like; the food was mainly kaoliang and other cheap, coarse grains; there were no shops, or regular work of any kind, and only half an hour’s exercise a day in the open air was allowed, even “in principle.” There were, of course, desperate criminals among the rather pasty-faced but generally big brawny men who peered out the door-slits with expressions uncannily like caged lions and tigers, and from these China must protect herself and those who dwell within her borders. But my American missionary companion, who had lived for some time in Harbin and spoke Russian, knew personally of several men for whose innocence the whole Caucasian community could vouch, who were there merely out of Chinese spite and whose trials had been, or would be, if they ever took place, worse than travesties on justice. The worst hardship of all, according to the misguided lady from “Noo Yoik,” was that no one had the least inkling, nor any possible way of finding out, when the Chinese might deign to bring a prisoner to court and air the charges against him.

Terms up to forty years were inflicted, but “long-timers” had the privilege, at least in theory, of being transferred to the “model prison” in Peking. Thus far no Russians had been executed, “because of the impression this might make among foreign nations,” according to an official Chinese statement. Of course once those nations give up their extraterritorial rights it will not so much matter what impression is made. Not long after our visit, however, when a thin and effeminate-looking little Russian charged with half a dozen murders in the pursuance of his calling as highway robber, and with whom I talked “high-brow stuff” in his tiny private cell, walked calmly out of the court-room and killed two or three of the policemen who pursued him, the announcement was made that in his case at least, if he were ever retaken, this policy would be rescinded. There is little doubt that this particular “bad man” should be done away with; but when Chinese soldiers get to shooting white men as one of their regular duties, what little prestige our race retains in China will soon evaporate. For what those many untraveled Westerners who feel that China should have complete sovereignty within her borders do not realize is the primitive mentality of the Chinese masses, which includes the soldiers, in such matters as the natural fights of others and the assumption of a low estate in those who are not outwardly honored and protected.

Though it is trespassing on the future to mention it here, I visited, months later, that “model prison” of Peking. It is just that, a well built, splendidly arranged penitentiary on the most modern, wheel-shaped lines, out in the southwest corner of the Chinese city. The new section recently built for foreigners—which had room for four times as many inmates as had so far been collected—was quite all it should be, with hot and cold baths, reasonable provisions for heating in winter, a kitchen of its own where foreign food was prepared. The workshops of the entire institution were large, airy, and light; there was a Russian as well as a Chinese chapel in which Taoist, Confucianist, Mohammedan, Christian, even Y. M. C. A. speakers appeared on Sundays; the rÉgime of the place was considerate and enlightened; as a prison, in fact, it should make such a place as Sing Sing faint with shame. I saw other “model prisons” in China, notably that in the capital of Shansi, which has never had a representative from the outside world except a Turk who was caught peddling opium pills. But these few praiseworthy institutions in the more enlightened centers, and toward which the eyes of an investigating commission would, of course, be carefully directed, are as nothing compared to the unspeakable holes all over China into which prisoners are thrown, and where foreigners also would have the privilege of moldering away while provincial authorities slept, if extraterritoriality were abolished.

There is no Chinese code of laws; the fate of most prisoners depends on the often poor judgment, the mood of the moment, the devious political machinations, of the judge himself, not to mention wide-spread bribery and Oriental intricacies of which even old residents have only an inkling. Two separate codes, for foreigners and Chinese, would certainly have to be introduced before extraterritoriality could be surrendered. You cannot justly shoot or lop off the head of a Westerner for stealing a suit of clothes or a sack of grain, however necessary such drastic measures may be among a people desperate with habitual semi-starvation and so inured to hardships that ordinary punishments mean nothing, any more than you can justly arrest a foreign merchant because his overcoat has been stolen, and keep him in jail for weeks as a witness. In Chinese jurisprudence torture is a recognized procedure, and false confessions forced thereby are considered legal proof of guilt. Every prisoner is presumed to be guilty, and must prove his innocence, rather than be convicted by the prosecution, no strange point of view to Latin races, but a topsyturvy one to Anglo-Saxons. Not the least disagreeable of Chinese practices is the “doctrine of responsibility,” which means that in any group, be it village, family, crew, or, if the present status were changed, assemblage of foreigners, some one must be punished for the misdeeds of any individual member of it, so that a perfectly innocent head may be lopped off to save the trouble of hunting out the real criminal. Even though the Chinese were to do their best to treat foreign prisoners justly, the very differences in point of view, in customs, in diet even, would make it impossible. The East and the West are so unlike that an American could die of Chinese food and living conditions while his jailers were priding themselves, in their ignorance of other lands, on giving him the best the world affords. Of course Japan is an example of the abolishing of extraterritoriality; but even there the foreigner by no means gets Western justice, and for all the virtues and likable qualities of the Celestial and the often disagreeable traits of the Nipponese, government in Japan is ideal compared to the corrupt, chaotic travesty on it which rules China.

One of the Russian churches in Harbin, a creamy gray, with green domes and golden crosses, with much gaudy trimming

A policeman of Vladivostok, where shaving is looked down upon

Two former officers in the czar’s army, now bootblacks in the “thieves’” market of Harbin—when they catch any one who can afford to be blacked

Scores of booths in Harbin, Manchuli, and Vladivostok, selling second-hand hardware of every description, suggest why the factories and trains of Bolshevik Russia have difficulty in running

I traveled from end to end of the Chinese Eastern Railway, including the extension of it from Pogranichnaya to Vladivostok, through what was once, like Korea, Chinese territory. Endless steppes, flat as a floor, covered as far as the eye could see with coarse grass, here and there being hayed, was the general aspect north of the Sungari. Great herds of cattle and sheep, carts drawn by six or eight horses over roads which in the rainy season could not have been passable at all, millions of acres of potential wheat-fields, a great granary of everything, including sturdy youths for Chang Tso-lin’s armies, formed the outstanding features of Hai-lung-chiang, northernmost and largest of China’s provinces. South-bound freight-trains were not only crowded with Chinese soldiers, gambling amid the chaotic messiness that surrounded them in their roofed cars, but the uncovered flat-cars loaded with their paraphernalia, with car-wheels and rusted machinery, were crowded with Russian women and children sleeping on makeshift nests in sunshine or heavy rain. There were cattle-cars with barefooted Russian men tending them, little European box-cars fitted up as homes, sometimes with a still aristocratic-looking young woman suckling a babe in the center of it, impertinent Chinese soldiers looking on. There is no way of computing how many pretty Russian girls, with nothing to live on but the sale of their charms, there were along the C. E. R. from Manchuli to Vladivostok, like the little end of the funnel down through which the miseries of Russia had been oozing for years.

For all the rumors of degeneration of that line, however, the through express was an excellent train, though even more leisurely than that on the branch from Harbin southward, halting interminably at every station, apparently to let the crew talk to the girls who decorated every platform. It had all the comforts of compartment-divided sleeping-cars, with Russian attendants; the dining-car, with its ikon and its abacus, had a boarding-house table the entire length of it, and comely young Russian waitresses, who rolled their socks.

When I awoke in the morning beyond Tsitsihar, the landscape was silvery with white birches. Large and often pretty towns appeared every now and then among the low green hills or on the broad prairies of this most arctic of the “Eastern Three Provinces,” decidedly Russian towns, with wide unpaved streets, discordantly colored half-Oriental churches of the Greek Orthodox faith rising high above all else, against backgrounds that gave above all a sense of vast, wide-open spaces. The Russians have about twelve square miles at each station, and a strip of territory on either side of the railway, where they can rent land for about eighty years, as against only eighteen for foreigners in the rest of China, where none but Chinese can own land, with certain exceptions in favor of missionaries. There were far more Russians than Chinese at the stations of these frontier towns, reminiscent of those of the Dakotas, where every one came down to see the daily train go through. Most of the peasant women were barefoot; in town the girls all rolled their stockings, or went without them entirely. But huge bearskin coats and big fur caps hung out on lines, airing. Hot water was furnished at all the important stations, and bushels of eggs, all manner of food, especially just at this season most magnificent raspberries, were for sale by robust Russian women, often in a substantial booth built for the purpose. But long lines of Chinese soldiers with drawn bayonets still slouched along every platform, besides no end of Russians in uniforms of every swaggering description, as if the dregs of a dozen routed armies had been scattered along the line. Many of these strutting fellows wore swords, and some carried firearms, members evidently of some sort of local or railway police, as the unarmed majority were probably men who had no other garments left. The constant swashbuckling, the incessant parading of deadly weapons, got on the nerves; quite aside from the decided economic loss of so many men withdrawn from production, there was an ominous something about these thousands of young fellows, who had not been old enough to get into the war, now strutting about in its aftermath as if looking for a chance to make up for lost opportunities. The Russians saluted all Chinese officials, even those in civilian dress, raising their hats to them obsequiously if they themselves were not in uniform. At one station a drunken Russian went around forcing Chinese ragamuffins to shake hands with him.

All northern Manchuria was much troubled by bandits, hung-hu-tze, or “red beards,” they were called, who had devastated far and wide, even attacking the trains and station towns. There were at least a few renegade Russians among some of the bands. The public shooting of hung-hu-tze, in an open space between Pristan and the railway town, was one of the frequent sights of Harbin. But the real curse of Manchuria, as we were to find it of almost all China, were the soldiers. The bandits often paid for what they took, but the soldiers looted openly and carried off their plunder by the train-load within plain sight of every one. When they wished to move, away from the railroad, they forced farmers to let their crops go to waste and furnish them transportation for ten-day journeys, feeding the drivers and their animals along the way, but leaving them to find their way home as best they could. If there were no other carts to be had at the end of the ten days, the old ones must go on, twenty, thirty days, and even more. One man I heard of had been away a year, and still could not get back. A few hundred hand-picked, well paid soldiers, perhaps with a few Russians among them to give them starch, could, according to competent opinion, put a stop to banditry in Manchuria. But such coolies in uniform as swarm up and down the C. E. R. accomplish nothing to that end, even when they are not in actual collusion with the bandits. The hung-hu-tze rout whole barracks of them, and prey on the Chinese and the Russian population alike. Yet the Government clings to the fiction that they afford sufficient protection, and will not allow the Russians to go armed, unless they hold some kind of military position under the Chinese. Soldiers and bandits alike abuse all the inhabitants of northern Manchuria, except the Japanese, who have their own troops on the spot.

Manchuli, on the edge of Siberia and almost on the fiftieth parallel, is a large, prairie-like town of much more Russian than Chinese aspect. Many of its houses are built of logs, yet are not unhomelike; sod hovels like caves half below and half above ground shelter some of the population, among which were many down-and-outs. Cossacks in their big caps, with curiously liquid eyes, roam the wide, if dusty, streets. Russians and Chinese sit joking together; both ride the small sturdy horses of the region; many of the Chinese wear the long, soft, black boots so general among their neighbors, but there seemed to be very few mixtures of the two races. Sturdy fellows indeed were these bearded Caucasian farmers from the north and west, but for that matter the far-northern Chinese, with enough to eat and room to live in, are big and strong, too, real pioneers, used to a different environment than are their overcrowded compatriots farther south, in touch with and more sympathetic toward European civilization. Now and again one of the Chinese spoke to me in Russian and, when I could not answer, announced to his companions that I was a yang gwei, though without any thought of insult in the term, Russians evidently being so numerous and familiar that they are no longer ranked as “foreign devils.” A market-place of scores of makeshift shanties was stocked with enough second-hand hardware to supply half Manchuria. Like those in Harbin and, I found later, Vladivostok, these marts were crammed with everything from railroad equipment to hinges, from factory machinery to crooked nails, all more or less rusted, broken, and out of order. It was as if every Russian who had fled before the “Reds” had torn loose and brought with him anything he could lay his hands on, and here was another explanation of why the factories and trains of Soviet Russia have difficulty in running.

From Manchuli one can easily look across into Bolshevik territory; but that was not China, and the traveler must turn back somewhere. An ancient engine and the most rattletrap collection of cars that ever masqueraded under the name of train was preparing to set out for Chita, wretched-looking women and gaunt, hungry babies among the passengers who occupied the dirty, miserably dilapidated compartments that were lighted only by the candles travelers brought with them. Even those of us for whom hardships have a certain zest could hardly regret that the way lay back the comfortable way we had come.

From Mukden on to Peking one has a feeling of being in the real China at last. Silver dollars take the place of convenient bank-notes; the chaotic rough and tumble of Chinese crowds unchecked by foreign discipline pervades stations and trains, both swarming with unsoldierly men and boys in faded, ill fitting, gray cotton uniforms, who pack even the dining-car to impassability; here and there a bullet-hole through wall or window of the stuffy coupÉs into which the half-breed American-European cars, with certain curious native characteristics, are divided reminds one of recent history in the once Celestial Empire. Endless fields, enormous seas, of kaoliang, enough to hide all the bandits in China, flank the way. For that matter the towns as well as brigands hide in it, for the slightly oval-roofed houses of stone and baked mud are barely as high as this tall grain, and as the roofs themselves are often covered with grass, places of considerable size easily escape the eye entirely. In other seasons it is quite different, for once they are denuded the fields are mere wind-swept stretches of bare earth protesting against the habitual scarcity of moisture in North China by sending frequent swirling clouds of dust to envelop any one and anything within reach. Walled towns far from the stations that serve them, iron-riveted cart-wheels hub-deep in the “roads” through which rural transportation laboriously flounders its way, Chinese in long cloaks, almost universally denim-blue in color, naked children and ragged, diseased adults begging abjectly wherever the train halts, were but a few of the details that somehow we had always associated with China. Even the towns hidden in the grain seemed to be overrun with soldiers, yet about all pretentious properties were big stone walls that suggested bandits in perpetuity. All these things we saw hazily, through a veil, as it were, for some pseudo-genius has had the unhappy thought of lining nearly all the railways of China with willow-trees, which flash constantly past with exasperating persistence, combining with the inadequate little windows of the stuffy compartments still further to reduce the visibility.

At Shanhaikwan, where the Great Wall clambers down to the sea at last, weary with its three thousand miles over the mountains, soldiers were much less numerous than in towns not so important to the north and south of it. For the warring factions had declared a neutral zone on either side of the colossal ancient rampart, which had become again, after nearly three centuries of no real importance, the dividing-line between what threatens to be an independent Manchuria and China proper. On the beach at Shanhaikwan, or neighboring Pei-tai-ho, where half the foreign residents of North China spend the summer, with turbaned Hindus, white and black soldiers of France, an Italian gunboat, and other reminders of their protective home governments to discount rumors of being in danger, the heat was still too scorching to make an immediate entry into still hotter Peking inviting, though August was well on the wane. Even a week later, when much of the landscape was flooded with the brief rainy season, a cool breath of air night or day was as rare as a Chinese field without a grave. Within the Great Wall, beyond which seems to be considered outer darkness for such purposes, these bare, untended mounds, without even the grass which beautifies those of Korea, dotted the country like spatters of raindrops on a placid yellow sea. As we neared Taku, at the mouth of the river that gives Tientsin its importance and all but washes the walls of Peking, higher, newer conical heaps of earth suggested that many men of importance, or wealth, had recently been buried there. But these turned out to be salt-fields, where the surface soil of a great sea-flooded region is thrown up in mounds and rectangular heaps which gradually wash down from earthy brown to the white piles that are sacred to the government salt monopoly.

The traveler who lets his friends rush him about the foreign concession of Tientsin by trolley or automobile will get an impression of a comfortable Western community in an Oriental land, but he will carry off very little idea of the real China, or even of the real Tientsin, which is a swarming Chinese city, none the less so for having had its wall reduced to a street of boulevard width as a punishment for the Boxer uprising. To those for whom commerce and modern efficiency are everything of importance, the Concession at Tientsin is of more consequence than a whole province of interior China, but I found myself more interested in any one of the ten Mohammedan mosques within the native city, or in the former home of Li Hung-chang, now a tomb in which he is worshiped by his descendants quite like any other prominent bygone Chinese from Confucius to Yuan Shih-kai, than in the whole length of Victoria Road.

A foreign concession in China, while it serves its purpose of making life more livable and business more possible to the foreign merchants who inhabit it, is altogether too convenient a refuge for the Chinese crooks who choose to make it one. How many of China’s ex-ministers of finance or of communications, how many former office-holders of every graft-collecting grade, have retired to the protection of foreign jurisdiction at Tientsin alone, living in luxury on their loot of office, and how much of this might have been recovered by the Chinese people to whom it rightfully belongs were there no such safety-zones of easy access, is suggested by the magnificent establishments many of these rogues maintain there. Yet the gaunt human horses who toil past them tugging at heavy carts piled high with imports and exports get barely six cents a day in our money, which they wolf in scanty, unwholesome food copper by copper as fast as their tally-sticks amount to one. As mere passers-by we could not but be thankful that, after a brief following of the example of other nations, the United States decided that concessions on Chinese soil were not in keeping with our national policy. The Russians and the Germans and the Austrians have lost theirs now, as they have their extraterritoriality, and it would not be strange if this recovery of sovereignty taken from them for the misdeeds of the Boxers gives hope to the people of China of chasing us all out before the century has grown much older. Where a bare score of Italians can hold a large tract of Chinese territory under their jurisdiction, trafficking in arms and munitions from it with the various factions that are doing their best to make China a continual battle-field, and selling at almost any price they wish to ask what is virtually the protection of their flag to Chinese rascals, it is not to be wondered at if enmity toward “foreign devils” in general does not show rapid strides toward oblivion. Jealousies among the various nationalities which still keep their holdings also make a queer story. Thus as many police forces and fire departments are maintained as there are concessions, and one miserable little bridge connects the principal foreign quarter with the rest of China, when getting together would make really efficient substitutions. Tientsin is perhaps a pleasant dwelling-place for those who like it, but we left it without regret one morning soon after our arrival and by noon were rumbling along under the massive walls of Peking, which was to be our home for the unprecedented length of nine months that will not soon be forgotten.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Clyx.com


Top of Page
Top of Page