Wandering in Northern China :: CHAPTER XIV A JAUNT INTO PEACEFUL SHANSI

CHAPTER XIV A JAUNT INTO PEACEFUL SHANSI

It is a simple matter to visit Hsi Ling, the Western Tomb, where all the Manchu emperors not at Tung Ling are buried. A short branch of the Peking-Hankow line sets the traveler down, four leisurely hours from the capital, within strolling distance of the newest of them, housing the remains of the hapless Kuang HsÜ. This is quite as extensive and sumptuous as if the imprisoned puppet had been a real ruler, but it is still glaringly new, the trees that will some day form a forest about it barely head-high, for it is only fifteen years since this effigy of an emperor and the powerful Dowager who manipulated him simultaneously made way for the present occupant of the Forbidden City. No doubt he is glad to be so far away from the oppressive old lady at last.

Bare hills lie between the older tombs, their roofs of imperial yellow hidden in venerable evergreen forests that seem to know nothing of bustling modern times. Yung Cheng, third Manchu emperor of China, sent men to choose this spot for him in 1730. When his successor, Ch’ien Lung, came to die, however, he expressed a preference for the Eastern Tombs, saying that if he, too, were buried in the west it might become a habit and the first two emperors of the dynasty would remain in gloomy solitude. He instructed his successors to alternate between the two places, and all of them did so except Tao Kuang, who refused to be separated from his father even in death. Five emperors, three dowager-empresses, many fei, or imperial concubines—whose tombs are blue rather than yellow, because they never had royal title—and a host of princesses in clusters within single tombs, lie scattered through the forests of Hsi Ling. Like all royal burial-places in China the site backs up against the mountains, here the Hsi Shan, the Western Hills, which stretch far to the north and south in rugged, clear-cut ranges close behind the tombs. Delightful paths wander through the evergreen woods, where here and there ill fed Manchus forage for firewood to keep the kettles boiling in their dilapidated caretakers’ villages. There are crowds of loafers guarding each tomb, as at Tung Ling, quick enough to offer a visitor the ceremonious cup of tea under conditions, invisible to them, which force him to decline it, but too lazy to open all the doors even when their unsoaped palms are crossed with silver, to say nothing of lifting a hand to repair the ravages of time or to cut the weeds and grass that grow everywhere between the flagstones. After all, it is better that way; any suggestion of real care would be out of keeping with the pastoral Chinese setting, and there are sheep and goats enough to keep the places from becoming impassable jungles.

One may spend all day roaming from forest-buried tomb to mountain-backed mausoleum; the most mammoth solid stone monuments on turtle bases I have ever seen in China stand side by side in the main entrance pavilion—the exit of most visitors; and the other sides of this square are formed by three p’ai-lous, any of which is almost the equal of the famous single one at the Ming Tombs. But I prefer Tung Ling to its more accessible alternative, if only because its caretakers see too few tourists to acquire the manner of street-urchins.

I stopped off at Paoting, long the capital of Chihli Province and recently the unofficial capital of North China, to see Tsao Kun. But his secretary brought word that the problems of China had given him a headache which had sent him to bed—it was at the height of one of the bandit outrages against foreigners. Those who know this illiterate sword-shaker and how much he cares about China as distinguished from his own gains, will appreciate the unconscious humor of the answer. Before his yamen stood viceregal poles, of cement instead of wood, a hint perhaps of the fancied permanence of his position. Besides this manipulator of the puppets of Peking there is nothing especially worth seeing in Paoting. A few superficial improvements, such as a new garden for the town to stroll and gamble in, to impress the people with their lord’s importance and his love for them, are all that distinguish this from any large old Chinese walled city.

The chief impression of the broad flatlands of Chihli in May is the windlassing of water for irrigation out of wells dotting the landscape everywhere, by a man or two with bare brown torso or by a blindfolded mule. The railway cuts ruthlessly across graveyards, perhaps because if it did not it could find no place to run at all; old sunken roads have been turned into gardens, and new ones are wearing themselves down into the pulverous soil. The narrow-gage line that strikes westward from Shihkiachuang into Shansi climbs all morning the bed of a clear little river harnessed for work in many little straw-built mills on the banks or astride the channels into which the crowded people have divided it. There is plenty of stone here. Whole towns are made entirely of it; little fields that can produce at most a peck of wheat are held up by stone walls at least as extensive as they. Crows and other destructive birds are as numerous and ravenous as the human population, who paint scarecrows crudely on the stone walls of the terraces, and hang up straw ones that look ludicrously like Taoist priests. Perhaps these are more effective over such evil spirits than laymen scarecrows. In the mountains well-sweeps instead of windlasses aid the irrigators. Seen on a level these terraced hills looked horribly dry and arid, a dreary yellow and brown. But that is the face of the terraces; from above, the fields are countless patches of spring green, so that the effect from the constantly rising train was like those street-signs that change face completely when they are seen at a new angle.

No longer ago than the time of the Mings, history says, the mountains between Chihli and Shansi were so covered with trees that “birds could not fly through them.” To-day there is not a sprig of wood left, and the patient peasants till every terraced peak to the very top. Faintly the passenger can make out to the north, through occasional openings in the ranges close at hand, one of the five sacred mountains of China, the Wu-t’ai-shan. The whole cluster is shaped like a maple-leaf and resembles the Diamond Mountains of Korea, if not in scenic splendors at least in the temples and monasteries scattered among them. For many centuries that region has been a Buddhist sanctuary, both of the black-robed Chinese monks and the yellow-robed lamas, even the latter more often natives of Chihli or Shansi than Mongols or Tibetans. Emperors used to come to Wu-t’ai-shan, and the Dalai Lama himself was once there.

Beyond the summit of the line, one of the famous passes of China, the narrow but efficient train snaked its way downward through many tunnels, past busy villages and towns of stone, between long irregular rows of cave-dwellings dug in the porous hills, with many a striking view up terraced gorges which unwooded centuries have given fantastic formations. On the whole it was a dreary landscape, but the train was good. These side-lines are better than the principal railroads of China because they are still under foreign management. Frenchmen and Belgians operate this one to the Shansi capital, not merely by giving orders from a central office but by riding the trains to see that these orders are obeyed. No dead-heads escaped the sharp eyes of the European inspectors who examined tickets at frequent intervals; the Chinese employees took care not to honor the rules in the breach instead of in the observance. One third-class coach had a compartment marked “Dames seules.” On the main lines this would have been filled with anything but members of the sex for which it was reserved; here the man who dared sit down in it was speedily invited to move on.

A Chinese train, on the trunk-lines subject to the Ministry of Communications, is China in petto,—crowded confusion in the third class that makes up nearly all of it, the second only fairly filled, the first almost empty, except for the pass-holders, influential loafers, and important nonentities who congregate there. Petty anarchy reigns, and “squeeze” rears its slimy head everywhere. The passenger is taxed for the loading of his checked baggage, and then virtually required to tip the porters who load it. It is common knowledge that station-masters consider their salaries their least important source of income. Particularly are the trains, like the country, overrun with useless soldiers. They pack the better coaches until the legitimate traveler often can barely find standing-room; they stretch out everywhere, like a Chinese type of hobo, on the floors of the passageways as well as of the compartments; they fill the so-called dining-car to impassability, lying among their noisome bundles on the tables, the seats, the floors, even about the kitchen stove, like sewage that has seeped in through every opening. In theory they have their generals’ permission to travel, and pay half-fare; in practice the soldier who has a ticket at all, let alone one of the class in which he is traveling, is the exception. They not only ride on their uniforms but rent these out to hucksters and coolies who wish to make a journey. Whole flocks of railway officials in pompous garb come through the trains, but exert themselves only against the uninfluential. Soldiers without tickets are sometimes gently instructed to go back into third class, but no one has the moral courage to insist that they do so, and they ride on hour after hour, sometimes day after day. Police with a brass wheel on their arms are in constant evidence, yet control at the stations is almost unknown. Those getting on, and swarms of coolies hoping for a job of carrying baggage, sweep like a tidal wave into the trains before those getting off can escape; the battle for places is a screaming riot. In winter a car never gets comfortably warm before the overdressed Chinese throw open the windows. The cheap joker who mutilated the standardized sign to read, “Passengers are requested to report to the Traffic Manager any cases of cleanliness that come to their notice,” replaced an impossible task by a very easy one. The train that is on time is something to write home about, though now and then one sticks surprisingly close to schedule.

At Peking and the principal terminals the traveler often finds every compartment “Reserved.” Officially this cannot in most cases be done, but any one who knows the ropes can “fix it up,” merely for a tip to the fixer. Door after door down the corridor bears such signs as “Chi Wan-tao and Party,” or “Reserved, Member of Parliament,” and even foreign women may be left to stand in the passageway. Later, if the traveler is sharp eyed enough to see one of these doors unlocked, he will find one or two fat Chinese stretched out in the two seats which placards announce “shall be occupied by eight persons,” and unless he is by nature aggressive this condition may continue during the whole twenty-four-hour journey. At the end of the overcrowded train there is very likely to be a private car surrounded by a respectful throng of soldiers and railway police, which one learns upon inquiry is occupied, to give a single example, by a “minister” to some provincial city, who is “more higher than a station-master.” A sample of the Chinese way of doing things is the announcement in a time-table in French that has appeared in the foreign-language newspapers daily for years that certain “expresses” on one of the most important lines carry first-class, sleeping-, and dining-cars, whereas the best accommodations the unsuspecting traveler who takes this statement seriously can discover is two or three second-class compartments with two bare wooden benches and not a suggestion of heat. The only salvation of the civilized traveler is the daily and biweekly expresses respectively on the two lines between Peking and central China, on which, thanks to foreign pressure, neither passes, uniforms, nor influence can take the place of tickets. Even on these, rumor has it, the militarist overlords have of late found ways to accommodate their henchmen without producing actual money.

It is a relief, therefore, to get off on one of these side-lines which the Chinese do not yet pretend to have taken over, and which are still run like railroads. Shansi has her soldiers, too, but they do not spend their time riding in and out of the province. The simple expedient of requiring every coolie baggage-carrier to pay six coppers for a platform-ticket before he can pass the gates makes an astonishing improvement in the life of the traveler on this sprightly TaiyÜanfu line; at the frontier two of the governor’s “model police” board the train in spotless khaki and with soldierly bearing escort it on into the capital.

A few of the 508 Buddhas in one of the lama temples of Jehol

The youngest, but most important—since she has borne him a son—of the wives of a Manchu chief of one of the tomb-tending towns of Tung Ling

Interior of the notorious Empress Dowager’s tomb at Tung Ling, with her cloth-covered chair of state and colors to dazzle the stoutest eye

The PotalÁ of Jehol, said to be a copy, even in details, of that of Lhasa; the windows are false and the great building at the top is merely a roofless one enclosing the chief temple

Long before the end of the journey the traveler is reminded that Shansi is one of the world’s greatest deposits of coal, perhaps of iron. From the train could be seen coal-mines, mere surface diggings, but producing splendid anthracite in big chunks large as a strong man could lift. One of these broken in two made a donkey-load, two gave a mule his quota, and long trains of these animals picked their ways down the treeless defiles. Here and there a string of coolies, each with a lump of coal on his back, trailed over the steeper hills. A European who made a diligent investigation of the question reported that the province of Shansi alone has coal enough to supply the world for a thousand years. Thus far it has scarcely begun to be exploited, in the real sense of the word, like so many of the great natural resources, other than agricultural, of China. For one thing, some of the old superstitions that made delving in the earth so unpopular still prevail. Evil spirits guarding these hidden treasures will wreak vengeance on the men who dare to disturb them—and, what is worse, on the entire community. Dragons are still known to spit death-dealing fire upon those who dig too deeply for coal; in other words, there have been cases of fire-damp explosions. According to popular Chinese fancy, dragons, snakes, and tortoises produce pearls, and many of the miners themselves still think that coal will grow again in an empty shaft within thirty years, and iron and gold in longer periods.

We came out in mid-afternoon upon the broad plain of Shansi, “West of the Mountains,” two or three thousand feet above sea-level and thickly dotted everywhere with toiling peasants. Here the windlassing of water for irrigation again seemed to be the chief occupation, and this time there were often four men at as many handles over a single well-drum. YÜtze swarmed with travelers, for there nearly all the traffic for the south of the province leaves the train, or enters it to return to the capital, toward which the railroad turns as much north as westward. Less than an hour later the twin pagodas of TaiyÜanfu rose close at hand on the ridged landscape, and we were set down well outside the walls of the Shansi capital.

The police stopped every traveler at the city gate to ask his name, his errand, and other pertinent questions. But there was a courteous atmosphere about the interrogatory which made it seem the precaution of a careful ruler rather than the espionage of a tyrant. Inside, the streets were on the whole in better condition, modern improvements in general more numerous, than in most provincial capitals. Yet somehow this was not yet the model city much hearing about it had caused the imagination to picture. The pace of life, too, was noticeably slow, surprisingly so for the capital of one of China’s most important provinces, almost the cradle of the Chinese race and for centuries the home of its great bankers. What was perhaps most exasperating of all to the passing traveler was to find the rickshaw-men the poorest in China, so slow and so untrained for their tasks that it was almost faster and certainly more comfortable to walk. Possibly the altitude of nearly three thousand feet was the explanation, though not the excuse, of their snail-like habits, and their awkwardness could be largely due to the fact that many of them are peasants from the surrounding villages who make rickshaw-pulling a slack-time avocation instead of a profession. But the impression survived that they were merely outstanding examples of the provincial leisureliness of life back here behind the mountains. Residents did not seem to realize that their rickshaw-runners resemble lame turtles, any more than they were aware of the incessant unnecessary racket they create. Custom or some local ordinance has fitted the right shaft of all TaiyÜan rickshaws with a kind of automobile horn, and not merely do the runners blow these beyond all reason when in action but amuse themselves like the adult children they are by constant honking while waiting or wandering for fares, so that night and day are an unbroken charivari.

TaiyÜan—its name means “great plain,” and the “fu” so often tacked on to the names of second-grade Chinese cities is as out-of-date now as the word “yamen,” though both survive in popular speech—and the province it governs still retain some of the traits and customs of olden times, long ago abandoned, if not forgotten, in other provinces. Though there is a good modern police force, night-watchmen of the old rÉgime go their rounds every two hours beating a gong to warn thieves of their coming. Surely the origin of this aged custom, whatever tradition may allege, is rooted in the inherent timidity, not to call it cowardice, of the Chinese. Pushed beyond a certain point they can die more easily than Westerners; but the fear of a mere slap, the sight of a stick that would not frighten a normal American boy, is terrifying to the great mass of them. Naturally the night-watchman would rather warn the thieves to move on, or to lay aside their activities until he has passed, than to come to blows with them. A thousand Chinese staring fixedly with their little monkey-like eyes were likely to surround the foreigner who does, or has about him, anything suggestive of the unusual, though foreign residents are neither rare nor new. No one has ever succeeded in sounding the depths of Chinese curiosity. When I called inopportunely on the fellow-countryman who was destined to become my host in TaiyÜan, he left a class of Y. M. C. A. students of university age, long used to foreigners and their ways, in charge of one of their number while he stepped out to have a word with me; and seven of the fifteen young men left the class and followed him down-stairs to see what he was doing.

The foreign atmosphere of TaiyÜan is almost entirely British. Such American missionaries as work in this province are not stationed in the capital, and England assigned the indemnity exacted for the killing of a large group of her nationals here in Boxer days to education in the province, as we did for the whole country. For ten years Shansi youths were distributed among English universities and technical schools, and now that the preparatory school in which they were groomed for the journey has reverted to the Chinese and become the University of TaiyÜan, there are many returned students among the faculty and in important official positions, some of them with English wives. The good and the trivial points of British university life came back with them. They seem to have lost, for instance, the Chinese virtue of early rising. TaiyÜan labors under the handicap of three kinds of time,—“railway,” “gun,” and “university” time. The last is considerably slower than either the station clock or the governor’s noon-gun, and rumor has it that it gradually became so because the curriculum included a number of eight-o’clock classes which certain of the most influential faculty members could never quite reach.

Yen Hsi-shan, both military and civil governor of Shansi, is known in China as the “model governor.” The mere fact that he has held his position ever since the revolution, while the rest of the country has been like a seething mass, a boiling kettle, of officials of all grades, in which the scum has all too often come to the top, is enough to have given him that title. But he has done more than that to warrant it. Under his rule a number of motor roads have radiated from the capital, and now carry a considerable motor-bus traffic. It is true that these roads are largely due to American famine relief funds under missionary management, and that the principal highway runs about two hundred li northward exactly to the governor’s native village. But they are unusually well kept roads for China, with guards enough to keep the sharp-wheeled carts off them, and a species of peon caminero at regular distances whose permanent task it is to keep them in repair. Besides, a branch of that north road goes on, as a kind of afterthought, to a gate of the inner Great Wall, which crosses northern Shansi. Governor Yen has done much toward the establishment of village schools, with the accent wisely on primary and general instead of higher and class education; he has made a certain amount of schooling compulsory for both sexes, though even he would scarcely assert that such an innovation is already effective throughout the province, for after all Shansi is still China. He has actually and visibly taken the beggars off the streets of TaiyÜan; and has established a school of trades for them. He has improved outdoor recreation facilities for the people, and has had erected in conspicuous places about town, and in the province, long boards bearing the thousand characters which he thinks every one should learn to read and, if possible, to write. Bandits have been unknown in Shansi for years; the opium which it used to grow more widely than any other province has almost if not completely disappeared. Both these curses of China have been chased over the provincial boundaries. TaiyÜan boasts a beginning of an opium-consumers’ refuge, with free keep and treatment for the indigent. Just beyond it, to be sure, there is what the Japanese call a yoshiwara, an officially protected restricted district two by four blocks large, with five hundred women; but every one of the identical courtyards within is in a condition to suggest unusually good sanitary conditions, and a high wall surrounds the entire district, so that no one can be in doubt as to what he is entering. The governor, by the way, was a student in Japan for four years, and both he and his policies bear various reminders of that fact.

Behind Tung Ling the great forest reserve which once “protected” the tombs from the evil spirits that always come from the north was recently opened to settlers, and frontier conditions long since forgotten in the rest of China prevail

Much of the plowing in the newly opened tract is done in this primitive fashion

The face of the mammoth Buddha of Jehol, forty-three feet high and with forty-two hands. It fills a four-story building, and is the largest in China proper, being identical, according to the lamas, with those of Urga and Lhasa

A Chinese inn, with its heated k’ang, may not be the last word in comfort, but it is many degrees in advance of the earth floors of Indian huts along the Andes

The governor received me one Sunday morning, with his civil secretary, the British-educated dean of the engineering department of the university, as interpreter. It seemed almost strange to walk so peacefully into his yamen through the same now rather tumble-down entrance at which more than twoscore foreigners were massacred by Boxer-influenced mobs in 1900. The governor prides himself on being a plain man and does not believe in surrounding himself with magnificence or formality. With the single exception of the “Christian General,” Feng YÜ-hsiang, he has retained, at least in his audiences with foreigners, fewer of the useless, time-squandering forms of old-fashioned Chinese etiquette than any of the high officials I have met in China. Yet the essential Chinese courtesies were still there; there was no suggestion of a general surrender to Western bruskness. A solid-looking man, in physical as well as the other sense, with a somewhat genial face sunburned with evidence of his personal attention to his outdoor activities, met us with no appreciable delay in a semi-private part of the yamen that was tasteful in the Chinese sense, yet which made no efforts at magnificence in the hope of increasing the impression of the occupant’s importance. Rather a man of plain common sense and perseverance than of brilliancy, a brief acquaintance with the governor suggested; and Heaven knows China needs this type just now much more than the other. His garments were of cotton, not silk, and the simplicity of life this symbolizes has its effect upon his subordinates, at least in his presence. Officials having an audience with him usually also put on cotton clothing for the occasion, lest the governor say, as he has more than once: “Ah, I see you are making lots of money out of your post. Now, there is a famine down in the southwest corner of the province, and ...” He talked freely, yet certainly not boastfully, of his various policies, plain, common-sense policies, like the man himself, but which do not suggest themselves to the Chinese as readily as one might expect. Later I had opportunity to compare actual results with verbal intentions.

His laws against opium and bound feet would be better enforced, Yen Hsi-shan’s friendly critics agree, if the officials under him were really in favor of such reforms. One man alone cannot cure a whole province, larger than most of our States, of the bad habits of generations. At first the governor was very assiduous on these points. Traffickers in, as well as growers of, the drug were fined and imprisoned, and life made as miserable as possible for those who persisted in consuming it. Inspectors examined the feet of women and assessed a fine of five dollars a year against those who had not unbound them, or who bound those of their daughters. Not a severe penalty from the Western point of view; but this is much money to the average Chinese countryman, and bound feet are most persistent in the rural districts. But the governor’s lee high (severity) is dying out, the people say, and little girls with bound feet may be seen near and even in TaiyÜan. The stoutest reformer would be likely to lose heart before the unrivaled passive resistance of the Chinese against even their own best welfare; it needs unbroken generations of radicals to get permanent results. At least the pigtail has virtually disappeared from Shansi!

The “model governor” comes fairly near being a practical man in the Occidental sense. The forty automobiles in the government garages include huge streetcar-like buses that make good use of his new roads, and trucks that are run mainly by steam. Gasolene is expensive in Shansi, and coal is cheap. Much of the city is taken up by what resembles immense barracks, and the public is chased many blocks roundabout by the long mud walls enclosing them. But if this gives the appearance of a ruler who considers the capital his private property, it makes possible a great normal school for all the province, where handcrafts are given proper attention, up-to-date soldiers’ workshops, in which everything needed by the army is made, a model prison, and other spacious institutions on quite modern lines. Besides, there was evidently ample room inside the city. The old wall of TaiyÜan is in a ruinous state, and any one can climb it, almost anywhere inside and with no great difficulty from without, as if the governor realized that such picturesque defenses are useless against modern attacks, and feels able to cope in the open with the bandits against which city walls still offer a certain amount of protection in many parts of China. There are lakes and broad sheep pastures, and many acres of cultivated fields, within the walls, and only one suburb of any size outside them, without a single smoking chimney except those of the big extramural arsenal standing forth against the distant low hills that half surround TaiyÜan. In fact, one whole corner of the city is used as a rifle-range, with the ruined wall as a back-stop, and the soldiers still find plenty of room to throw their dummy hand-grenades and practise their modified goose-step. All this hardly means a prosperous city, were it not for the practical activities of a good governor. His soldiers, by the way, get six “Mex” dollars a month, which is the rate throughout most of China, and his “snappy” model police nine; but unlike so many of his colleagues Governor Yen actually pays his troops, which is one of the great secrets of his success. Unpaid soldiers not only do not drive brigands over the frontier, but they are prone to sell them ammunition and even to join them.

It was evident that the governor’s progressive administration includes one particular pet scheme, which he is working out as rapidly as possible, quite ready to admit that it takes time to make changes in China. He is gradually introducing a village military system, a kind of National Guard on a provincial scale. Instead of having military parasites from other provinces come to exploit the people or turn bandits among them, he is organizing militia companies for local protection. The chief advantages he expects are that it will thus be easier to maintain peace and repel outside invaders, as village soldiers will naturally do their best to protect their own homes; it should eliminate the danger of becoming an offensive force against neighboring provinces, since these soldiers are not riffraff and loafers recruited wherever they can be had but ordinary citizens with proper occupations, who will not care to sacrifice their peaceful living for the sake of a few ambitious militarists; and it does not take them away from their fields or their usual tasks, except for brief periods of training each year. It is not exactly an original plan, at least to the world at large, but self-evident things are not always so to the Chinese, and Governor Yen may be on the track of the very thing to wipe out rapacious militarism and its twin sister, banditry.

The mass of the people of Shansi are convinced that the governor loves them like a father, which is a very essential thing in China even for a virtual dictator, if he wishes to hold out. Yet Yen is a rich man, one of the richest men in China, some say, and he was not born that way. Only the uninformed masses think that he sacrifices everything to their welfare. Any land with China’s pressure of population, family system, and centuries-old, almost universal political corruption from top to bottom would need at least a demigod of which to make a ruler who actually thought of nothing but the public good. Yen Hsi-shan, it is said almost openly, has kept his position so long largely by preserving a strict neutrality even in the payment of “squeeze” toward those high up who might have taken his job away from him. It is almost publicly known that he gave one million two hundred thousand dollars each to Chang Tso-lin and Tsao Kun in the “Anfu” days as “military assistance.” But at least he has made the province he has ruled for twelve unbroken years a better place to live in; his worst enemies do not hesitate to admit that. Perhaps he is, as many Chinese who use their minds assert, a great governor only as a small hill is a mountain on a flat plain; the fact remains that he has some ideas and the will to carry them out, ideas which, if introduced into the other provinces would put the people of China in a much better position to solve some of those pressing problems that seem to be driving them to national destruction. With a score of Governors Yen the dismantled old Celestial Empire might still be no paradise, but the anxious visitor can sweep the country almost in vain for a glimpse of any other force that promises prompt and effectual resistance to the misfortunes that threaten to overwhelm her entirely.

All up and down the province the happy results of good rule are apparent. Village girls, like the boys who come to the various barrack-institutions in the capital, are taught what they are really likely to need in the life that in all probability lies before them, not the often useless stuff of an ideal but imaginary life, to which even American mission schools are somewhat prone. There are still such adversities as famine in Shansi Province, and numbers of its men migrate northward to Mongolia and Manchuria in search of the livelihood their ancestral homes deny them. But even a civil and military governor combined cannot make rain fall. More than one Tuchun of other provinces still thinks he can, and leads his people in processions to the temples of the god of rain, or helps them to plant that delinquent deity, in a brand-new coat of paint as a counter-inducement, out in the blazing sunshine, in the hope that he will think better of the cruel neglect of his duties. One suspects, however, that Governor Yen’s more up-to-date methods are likelier in the end to bring real results. But, alas! safety and modern improvements are not what most beguile the random wanderer with a strong penchant for the picturesque, and a longer stay in the “model province” promised little to make up for the exciting things that might still be in store for me in other parts of the country.

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