Harry Alverson Franck

Early on the fourth day we climbed up out of a great road caÑon to a mammoth stone archway that marks the boundary between Honan and Shensi provinces, and immediately pitched down again into another chasm of equal depth. Nor was there any improvement in the fragile soil, in the endless lines of coolies going and coming, or in the mangy beggars who squatted, loudly lamenting, in the dust here and there along the sunken road all the way into strongly walled Tungkwan. This important outpost of Shensi Province lies just over the Honan border, on the Hoang Ho, yellow river indeed here at this shallow season, across which one may see the loess hills of the province of Shansi, just then suffering acutely from drouth. The world had worn away from about the massive wall that surrounds the town, as it does from about even a mud shrine in the loess country, so that we had to climb again, rather stiffly, to reach the imposing city gate that admitted us.

In strict duty, no doubt, the soldiers straggling about it should have demanded our passports, which the Wai-chiao-pu in Peking, whose privilege it is to look after “outside-country people,” had smeared with half an acre of red-ink-stamped characters purporting to be permission to visit five specified provinces, after which they must, officially at least, be returned to Peking for further desecration. But all the soldiers said was “Pien-tze,” and the Chinese visiting-cards we produced in answer to that laconic request were evidently all they wanted as proof of our identity. Since the major’s name chances to begin with Ph, forcing him also to pass as Mr. Fei in Chinese, we were at once taken for brothers, even in the face of decided facial proof to the contrary, and passed on our way unquestioned.

The native pastor of the Fu-ying-tong, as the Chinese call a Protestant mission, was not in town. But in the interior of China any Caucasian passes at face value, at least until he has definitely been proved a counterfeit, and we were soon installed in several dusty, slightly furnished rooms of the rambling, temple-like compound, while Chang and the cook explored the kitchen with the caretaker. Had we arrived an hour earlier we might perhaps have gone on at once and reached Sian-fu that same night. For, strange as it sounded, there was a motor-bus line running more or less daily half-way across “Hidden Shensi,” from Tungkwan to the capital. But the buses started early in the morning; moreover, with all our dunnage we should probably need a special car, and there was just then none in town. If we really wished to go on next day, it would be best, they told us, if the major in his official capacity should wire the Tuchun at Sian-fu, to whom this little venture in less sluggish transportation personally belonged. Meanwhile, there was the matter of settling with our muleteers, and deciding how much cumshaw—without which no transaction in China is considered properly closed—we cared to give them. Tungkwan, too, was large and interesting enough, with a wall which clambered for a long way along the crest of a ridge high above us; but there is much sameness to most Chinese cities, and this one seemed to offer nothing unique. But at least there was something of that quality in a leisurely half-day for the ablutions, razor-wieldings, resorting, and repose of which we were in arrears.

It did indeed require a special car for all our expedition, and even at that I was forced to banish to the running-board the chauffeur’s assistant, who habitually fills out the front seat of any public conveyance of this sort in China. His duties seemed to be to crank the car, to attend the wants of a perpetually parched radiator, to tinker with the engine whenever there was the slightest chance to do so, and in general to help the imported chauffeur to reduce the exiled vehicle from a movable to an immovable object as soon as possible. The driver had been brought all the way from Tientsin to grace Shensi’s new enterprise, having been chosen evidently because of what he did not know about automobile engines and their proper manipulation, and therefore sure to be free from prejudice. If we understood rightly, the conveyance had been carried piecemeal through the loess caÑons on mule-back, and no doubt some of the parts had been assigned tasks for which they had never been trained. But it is axiomatic that nothing short of total dissolution will prevent a Ford truck from functioning, and less than two hours after this one had been requested to start we were staggering in spasmodic jerks out through the western city gate.

It is 290 li from Tungkwan to Sian-fu, almost exactly the same distance as we had made in mule-litters in more than three days; so that though we never attained breathless speed the journey felt rapid by comparison. Once through the massive stone archway that separated city from country, the going did not at first seem to be appreciably better than the alleged road behind us; one gasped at the temerity of any one, especially the timid Chinese, actually setting out on so ideal a route for an obstacle race with the expectation of really reaching a destination nearly a hundred miles away. But in time we came to realize that it was what the Chinese consider an unusually fine road. Loess had for the most part given way to a somewhat more cohesive soil, and there were no real caÑons. When he was Tuchun of the province, the “Christian general” had built, mainly with soldier labor—the two words seem incompatible in China—this raised highway beside the old haphazard route all the way from the frontier to the capital. His intentions had been excellent; but his funds were limited, the soil available contains not a hint of stone or gravel, and public coÖperation was of course wholly lacking. The general had done his best to replace this last un-Chinese asset by board signs set up at frequent intervals along the way, with a warning that the highroad was reserved for automobiles only, and that any other use of it would be severely punished. His successor had evidently tried to keep in force this unprecedented interference with Chinese freedom of individual action, and his authority was certainly considerable, as witness the fact that only here and there had the sign-boards even yet been turned into fuel. But the Tuchun could scarcely be expected to patrol the famous highway personally, and even at that he could not have kept an eye on all parts of it at once. Therefore it was much more densely thronged than the typical Chinese road down below it. Donkeys, mules, pack-cattle, rickshaws—these often run the eighty-seven miles in less than two and a half days, and make the round trip in five, at a cost to the passenger of about two American dollars—innumerable wheelbarrows, especially coolies in never ending procession, prefer to ignore the sign-boards, if indeed even the slight minority who can read them consider the prohibition as really meant. Worst of all, whole regiments of the Tuchun’s own soldiers were moving eastward, evidently in order to be more immediately available to their real commander-in-chief, Wu Pei-fu, and more than half the carts that carried these and their helter-skelter paraphernalia were themselves frankly disobeying the placarded order. These sharp-tired, two-wheeled contrivances are magnificently designed for ruining a road, particularly one built merely of earth, in the shortest possible time, and the result of the trespassing of even the few thousand we passed during the one day can readily be imagined. Then there were many spots where the Chinese genius for never repairing anything until repair is absolutely unavoidable manifested itself, and here and there some farmer had frankly chopped the highway in two to make a passage for his irrigation-ditch, a privilege as time-honored as China’s written language.

An old tablet in the compound of the chief mosque at Sian-fu, purely Chinese in form, except that the base has lost its likeness to a turtle and the writing is in Arabic

There was a certain satisfaction in seeing Nemesis, in the form of our staggering, stuttering truck and the regular bus we sometimes passed, sometimes dropped behind, overtake these lawbreakers whom neither authority nor public opinion was able to curb. There are few automobiles in Shensi Province, probably never more than ten, and few of the throng along even its most nearly modern road are in a frame of mind to meet one without what the “movie” world calls “registering astonishment.” Most of them register a very exaggerated form of it, which not only affects all the muscles of the body but often manifests itself even in their domestic animals. With their creaking wheelbarrows and a heavy head wind to hamper their hearing, many permitted us almost to step on their heels before they showed any inclination to give us the right of way; but this selfish attitude was more than offset by the alacrity with which they did so when once their minds were made up. At times the road immediately ahead was so crowded with coolies and mule-drivers fleeing wild-eyed at cross-purposes that we were forced to pause and even to halt until the atmosphere had cleared itself sufficiently to make out the ruts again. The conventional line of action was to abandon wheelbarrow, animals, or pole-slung burdens at once and to go, quite irrespective of destination. The road being from six to ten feet above the surrounding country, barely wide enough in most places for one car to run comfortably, with sheer sides and often a deep trench on either hand, the punishment which overtook many of the trespassers almost fitted the crime.

The coolies invariably grinned broadly or laughed aloud at their own discomfiture, with that quick and genuine sense of humor which transforms their rude, comfortless lives into a kind of perpetual game and makes them, for all their many less agreeable qualities, almost lovable. The few travelers of the haughtier classes, however, strove to preserve the dignified deportment due their high standing, even in the face of this ridiculous contrivance of inhuman speed from the barbarous outside world. But they did not always succeed in upholding all the precepts of Confucius. Among scores, probably hundreds, who performed extraordinary feats of agility for our beguilement during that day, the prize should be awarded to a man we passed less than two hours out of Tungkwan. He was unusually well dressed, as if of the wealthier merchant class, and was also bound westward, seated high above his stout mule on the pile of bedding and baggage in cloth saddle-bags which the well-to-do Chinese long-distance traveler carries between himself and his saddle. The mule under him was jogging comfortably along on the edge of his own side of the road—which in most of China is the left—though not on his own road, leaving us room to pass without more than the hazard to which the brink-loving chauffeur habitually put us. The animal showed every evidence of self-control and the ability to handle the situation without mishap, but he reckoned without his merely human master. We were perhaps ten yards behind them when the man’s ears and brain coÖrdinated and he looked around. His first impulse was evidently to snatch the reins and attempt to better the already perfect behavior of his mount, but the un-Confucian speed with which we were lessening the already slight distance between us confirmed him in the impression that it would be safer to dismount with all seemly haste and leave the animal to its own fate. Without losing an iota of his poise or dignity, or even his position for that matter, the haughty gentleman calmly slipped off his high seat on the ostensibly safe side, still in the right-angled attitude of a sitting person—and admirably maintained that pose until he disappeared, seat first, into a cross between a swamp and a lake which unfortunately bordered the road at that particular place. The chauffeur and I had the exclusive benefit of this portion of the performance; the rest was reserved for those bouncing on our baggage in the truck itself. When the major first became aware of the existence of the haughty trespasser, it was in the form of a mere head, topped by a dripping Chinese skull-cap, protruding from the body of water alongside, and his last view of him as he receded into the horizon was of a water-gushing figure clinging to the edge of the road and shaking his open hand after the disappearing truck in the gesture which the Chinese substitute for shaking the fist, while the mule stood just where he had been abandoned, patiently awaiting the good will of his temperamental master.

With the end of October it had turned distinctly colder, which was fortunate; for the heat of Honan would have made the exertions often required of us much less of a pastime than they were. Though it had been smilingly new when it reached the province three months before, our poor old truck resembled some maltreated, ill fed donkey which even its heartless Chinese owner must soon turn out to die, yet which faithfully toiled on to the very best of its ability. So long as it hobbled along beneath him, the alleged chauffeur had not a worry in the world; but whenever the slightest hill or sand a bit deeper than usual brought us to a halt he was as helpless as a Hottentot with an airplane. Having roared the engine almost out from under its hood, as the only antidote suggesting itself to him, he sat supinely back in his seat, at the end of his resources, and waited for some one else to do something about it. Luckily there are always plenty of coolies within call on any important route in China; but their natural timidity increased in the presence of the strange snorting monster that most of them had only seen hastily from a distance, and it required the force of example to get them to approach and exert themselves. Thus it came about that, though we had paid rather generously for the transporting of our expedition from the boundary to the capital of the province, we furnished the motive-power ourselves for a considerable fraction of the journey.

For one short distance there were a few rocks and trees; but we were soon in swirling loess again, dust so thick that it covered our faces as with a white mask. Now and again we passed a high-walled town, usually through the inevitable extramural suburb, a long line of ramshackle mud huts, with men crowded together under the thatch awnings, eating all manner of strange and unsavory-looking native dishes. Even in the rare cases when we entered the city itself there was nothing much more imposing. All morning long Hwa-shan, second only to Tai-shan among the five sacred mountains of China, walled off the southern horizon with its series of jagged ranges, shaped not unlike a mammoth sleeping elephant, their sunless northern slopes like a great perpendicular wall of beautiful blue-gray color, topped by a wonderfully fantastic sky-line. About 2200 B.C. an early emperor of what was China in those days, with this region as a nucleus, used to go to Hwa-shan to offer sacrifices and to give audiences to his subjects, and the range has been sacred in Chinese eyes ever since.

One might have fancied that a world war was on again, so often were we held up by endless east-bound trains of soldiers, most of them lounging in straw-roofed carts of two wheels, red banners with white characters flying. It was noticeable that no one but the soldiers had horses, of which most of China has been drained by her swarming, autonomous militarists. Companies, even battalions, were busily drilling here and there; two or three times we passed large military camps in tents of wigwam shape, with a modernity about them that looked incongruous against such backgrounds as a great medieval, anachronistic city wall blackened by the centuries. Twice we passed mule-carts laboring east or westward with the mails; all day long a distorted line of telegraph-poles bearing a sagging wire or two stretched haphazard into the distance.

The country grew a bit more rolling, with even less suggestion of loess, as we neared Sian-fu. For miles the way was lined with countless graves, ranging from dilapidated little cones of mud to immense mounds. Bygone glories lay all over the landscape, monument upon turtle-borne monument, so much more important from the Chinese point of view than passable roads. At length the great east gate of Shensi’s capital rose above the horizon, like some huge isolated apartment-house, and just as the last daylight of October flickered out we roared our jerky way up its broad main street to our destination.

To say that I was disappointed in Sian-fu would be somewhat overstating the case. But as nearly as I can recall the preconceived picture, always so swiftly melting away in the glaring sunshine of reality, I expected something more “wild and woolly,” something a bit less like an abridged edition of Peking. Surely the city that was for centuries the chief Manchu stronghold of the west, almost their second capital, which had welcomed the cantankerous old dowager fleeing before the justifiable wrath of the Western world, which had seen such cruel and unnecessary bloodshed during the birth of the republic, which had so often been the outpost on the edge of a great Mohammedan rebellion, might at least have had some faint thrill, some little hint of hidden danger, left to cheer up the jaded wanderer. Instead, there was the same flat, placid city partly within and partly without a mighty stone wall, swarming with the harmless pullulations of petty traders, cheerfully enduring all the time-honored discomforts of China, quite like those which lie scattered like unto the sands of the sea in number over all the vast land that so long gave Peking its undivided allegiance.

One stepped out of the big post-office compound where most English-speaking foreigners find hospitality, upon that surprisingly broad main street, to find it paved with something that has long since lost the smoothness essential to comfortable rickshaw riding, and lined for much of its length with houses unusual in northern China, being of two stories. Along this one may come upon wood-turners quite like those of Damascus in their methods—a little shallow, frontless shop, a kind of Indian bow with a loose string for lathe, a sometimes toe-supported chisel. Perhaps a householder would find more interesting the long rows of wheelbarrows, filled with huge chunks of that splendid anthracite so abundant and so cheap in northwestern China, backed up against the curb and patiently awaiting purchasers. But at the big bell-tower marking the center of the city this broad street contracts to squeeze its way through the resounding, dungeon-like arch, and never again regains its lost breath. Here the paving is of big flagstones, worn so convex that riding is not merely uncomfortable but well nigh impossible, except to those who are inured by generations of such experiences, or to whom the loss of “face” would be fatal. Others, at least new-comers, may rather welcome this unspoken invitation to dismount and stroll. For though there may be nothing in it not to be seen in a hundred other places in China, “sights” are as compact in this busiest street of Sian-fu as if they had purposely been gathered together here as into a museum.

This main thoroughfare, and the one crossing it at right angles beneath the bell-tower, cut the Shensi capital into its definite quarters. The one on the right hand, as one comes in from the east, is, or rather was, the Manchu city, given over now largely to great open spaces; for here hundreds of the then ruling class jumped into wells or otherwise violently did away with themselves, or were violently done away with, to a number popularly estimated at more than five thousand, when China last threw off an alien yoke and announced itself a republic. Mere mud walls, with the brick or stone facings gone to serve in some other capacity, mark most of the compounds of what were perhaps for centuries Manchu palaces. Of the palaces themselves there are few traces; dust and bare earth are much more in evidence, though trees have survived to an extent almost suggestive of Peking. Beyond this, filling the northwest quarter, is the Mohammedan section, much more crowded and with few open spaces—with none, perhaps, except they be public or private courtyards. There are towns in western China where Moslems must live outside the walls; but Sian-fu has been more charitable toward her unabsorbable minority, and even during the great rebellion they retained their intramural quarter, suffering little more than constant surveillance, and no doubt occasional reviling. Whether or not they would be driven back into it again if the worshipers of Allah chose to live in some other part of town matters not, for custom is as strong a bond with them as with their fellow-Chinese, and whatever is Moslem about Sian-fu will be found in this quarter, at least when bedtime comes. Here are all the mosques; here are women who have scarcely stepped outside their compounds in a generation, not even with covered faces; from here set forth each morning the water-carriers, the muleteers, the common porters who profess the faith of Medina. Outwardly the stroller through this quarter may find it scarcely at all different from that Chinese half of the city which lies to the south of its main thoroughfare. He may note that the skullcaps of men and boys are more likely to be white than black, that he sees only the most poverty-stricken class of women, and not many of those, that many of the passers-by have liquid black eyes and a very trifle more self-assertion, a slightly less lamb-like expression than the common run of Chinese. Possibly it will occur to him, too, that more of the little mutton-shop restaurants wide-opening on the pulsating main street are on the north side of it, and that the men who tend and patronize them also favor white skullcaps and have something intangibly redolent of the Near East in features and manners. But his eye is likely to be caught by more conspicuous things along the stone-hard thoroughfare,—big whitish loaves of bread nearly two feet in diameter and only two or three inches thick, the splashes of color of myriad heaps of ripe persimmons, an occasional woman with natural feet, relics not of Mohammedan but of Manchu custom. There live half a million people within the city walls and as many more in the environs, say unofficial guessers, and about one in ten of these are Moslems and a bare two thousand Manchus, the latter now mainly servants and recognizable to the others by their Peking dialect and the somewhat different dress of the women.

I picked up a man of standing in the Moslem faith one morning and strolled out to the chief mosque. Outwardly there was nothing to distinguish it from any Chinese compound, enclosing perhaps a temple, to judge by the typical tile roofs and the tree-tops rising above it. Indeed, the courtyard itself, beautiful with its old trees and buildings, filled with the twitter of birds, which seemed to make it a kind of sanctuary, restful and peace-loving in atmosphere, would not easily have been recognized as containing anything but the usual promiscuous mixture of the Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian beliefs. There were the same wooden tablets bearing two or three big Chinese characters leaning out from under the eaves; the same curious little figures adorned the upturned gables; there had been a genuinely Chinese indifference about cleaning up after the birds. But closer inspection brought out the underlying Mohammedanism. Not far from the entrance stood a big stone tablet, purely Chinese in form, even to the top-heavy dragon carvings; but the text that covered it was not Chinese but Arabic. Here and there were other stone-cut bits of that same tongue; “Yalabi” the not inhospitable group that had gathered about me called it, though one or two murmured something sounding like “Toorkee.” The beautiful little three-story tower of pillar-borne roofs turned out to be the minaret from which a Chinese muezzin singsongs the faithful to prayer. Certainly it was leaving Chinese custom behind to be required, however courteously, to leave my shoes at the door of the mosque itself before I could step through the cloth-hung opening of a building which up to that moment might have been anywhere in China. But inside we had at last left China entirely behind. Not a suggestion was to be seen of those myriad fantastic and demoniacal figures which clutter up the interior of Chinese temples; the Koran’s prohibition of graven images had been obeyed to the letter, and the final sanctuary itself, where the men of Sian-fu’s northwest quarter gather each Friday to turn their faces westward toward Mecca and pray, was as severely beautiful in its Arabic style as if it had been directly copied from the Alhambra.

The Islamites of China, or at least of Sian-fu, seem to have lost that fierce inhospitality toward the unbeliever which makes it impossible for those not of the faith even to enter many a famous mosque farther west. Centuries of dwelling among them has given even the intolerant Mussulmans much of the tolerance, or at least of the easy-going, almost indifferent attitude, toward their religious paraphernalia, which is so characteristic of the Chinese. There was no objection, so long as I removed my shoes, to my wandering at will in every part of the mosque, to stepping within the niche in the west wall which takes on much of the sanctity of Mecca, not even to my photographing it. The Chinese Moslems, indeed, seem never to have heard of the Prophet’s implied injunction against permitting one’s likeness to be transferred to paper; any refusal to stand before my kodak among the group that trailed me about the compound was probably due to mere Chinese superstitions, coupled with that dread of giving their fellow-men the faintest opening for ridicule which is one of the strongest traits in the Chinese character. For these fellows were essentially Chinese, for all their religion, their swarthier complexions and more Semitic noses; even the few among them whose features would not have been conspicuous in a throng of Turks or Arabs had all the little mannerisms, and to all appearances the identical point of view, except in their alien faith, of their fellow-countrymen.

Though there is no intermarriage between the Chinese Mohammedans and their neighbors, the blood that runs in their veins is largely the same. When the militant faith of Islam swept in upon China from the west, at the time when it was spreading in all directions, and was halted in our own only by the activity of Charles Martel in France, the surest way of escaping the sword was to embrace the new faith; and no one moves more quickly under the inspiration of fear than the Chinese. Then, too, the conquerors needed wives, or at least women, and took them from among the conquered. Perhaps its greatest gains were during the inflow of trade following the victories of Kublai Khan. For a long time it was, and probably still is, the custom to adopt Chinese children into Mohammedan homes. Thus the Turkish or Arabic features of the invaders have been greatly modified, and even the few who have a trace of these left seem to be greatly outnumbered by the purely Chinese descendants of those who embraced the faith under compulsion, so that even within a mosque compound it is often only by inference, or the catching of some slight detail of custom or costume, that the stranger can recognize a “Hwei-Hwei.” Foreigners resident where the Mohammedans are numerous claim to be able to tell one at sight, if only by a faintly more stiff-necked attitude toward the rest of the world, a drawing of the line, beyond which he refuses to be imposed upon, just a trifle closer to his own rights than do his pacific Chinese fellows. Step into a temple at any time, and you will receive nothing but profound courtesies from the Chinese, however unwelcome you may be at that moment, say these experienced Westerners; enter a mosque when a service is in progress, however, and while the customary outward politenesses may not be lacking, the atmosphere will be charged with something that says as distinctly as a placard, “This is not the time to call.” I had a little hint of this myself just before taking my departure. A high dignitary, what we might call a bishop, wearing a strange blue costume and supported as he tottered along by two lesser officials, issued from an inner court on his way to perform some ceremony in a private family. My request to photograph him was declined, not discourteously, but very definitely and very promptly, as if, being a hadji who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, he was well aware of the ban which the Prophet put on the making of likenesses, whatever might be the general ignorance of it about him; and something gave me the feeling that if I had attempted to act contrary to his wishes the smiling group of his coreligionists about me would have found some unviolent Chinese way of preventing me.

The non-believers among whom they live have, of course, other terms than “Hwei-Hwei” for the Moslem minority, some of them so far from complimentary as to be out of usage in any but the lowest society. One of the less unkindly ones is “Pu-chih-jew-roe-ren,” the don’t-eat-meat people. The Mohammedans have a name or two for themselves and their religion so respectful and self-complacent that their fellows decline to use them, so that the middle ground of “Hwei-Hwei” is the one on which the two sections of the community commonly meet. This term means something roughly corresponding to “the associated people,” the single character for hwei meaning, approximately, “association.” The Y. M. C. A. which functioned—under a boyhood friend of the major, from Maine, it turned out—in the quarter of Sian-fu opposite to that of the mosques was known as the “Ching-Nien-Hwei,” which is quite the same as our own abbreviation, except that our third letter, with all that it stands for, is left out. This does not of course mean that the religious element is lacking in the organization as it exists in Sian-fu—quite the contrary seemed to be the case; but to stroll into the purely Chinese compound, with its Chinese buildings, its board placards covered with only Chinese characters, was also not to realize at once that one had entered the precincts of another alien religion. The “Hwei-Hwei” establishments looked outwardly pure Chinese partly because of the fear of persecution in the past; the “Ching-Nien-Hwei,” I believe I am safe in saying, did so mainly because it had been forced to house itself in such quarters as it found attainable.

It would, by the way, be unfair to the score of men and women, a few of them our fellow-countrymen, who are giving their best efforts to educational, medical, and, not disproportionately, I trust, to denominational matters in the several Christian missions scattered in and about the Shensi capital, not to make mention of them, even though they may not vie, in the minds of those of us from the West, in picturesqueness and local color with the mutton-sellers in the market-place. They live unmolested, even befriended now by most of the rank and file and by nearly all the higher officials, and in a comfort befitting modest human beings; but the time is not so far distant as to be by any means forgotten when they came nearly all to being martyrs to their cause. The man who stood all night to his neck in a pond, holding his baby girl in his arms while the rest of his family was murdered by the mob that circled for hours around him, is still there at his post, with a new family to certify that he still has faith in those to whom he has chosen to give his life’s work. Lest neither side forget entirely, however, there is a modern brick Memorial School in the western suburbs, with its bronze tablet in memory of the victims,—one mother, one young man, and six children ranging from eight to fifteen. It was no antiforeign feeling, in the accepted use of that phrase, which gave the missionaries of Sian-fu their most dreadful experience; that is, they were not attacked either as missionaries or as Westerners. The revolution that was to bring the republic had come; the hated Manchus were fair prey at last; and while some of the rougher element no doubt took full advantage of their sudden brief opportunity, there was honestly no distinction in the minds of the uneducated masses between Manchus and any other “outside-country people.”

The temple of Confucius out near the south wall was as peaceful, as soothing a spot as could have been come upon within sound of human voices, with that aloofness from the world so befitting the philosophy of the great sage. But here, too, there was something beneath the surface not inherent in the ancient architecture or the rook-encircled tree-tops. A modern touch had been introduced; one suspected the hand, or at least the influence, of Feng YÜ Hsiang, the “Christian General,” who had only lately ceased to be Tuchun of Shensi to become that of Honan. Feng’s penchant for anything, ancient or ultra-modern, which will bring the results he seeks is well known. The Confucian Hall had several walls covered with very up-to-date placards in colors, ranging all the way from illustrations of the awful depredations of the fly—it was hard to imagine the Chinese worrying about a little thing like that—to the graphically pictured assassination of CÆsar and such scenes as the Nativity; for Confucius, of course, has nothing of the intolerance conspicuous in Christianity or Mohammedanism. In another section there were portraits of many famous foreigners, Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin being the only Americans among some forty. There is surely nothing reprehensible, though something more than incongruous, in trying to make Confucius a modern teacher and his temple a place of propaganda against the merely physical ills.

So near the temple of Confucius as to be dully audible from it all day long is the famous “Forest of Monuments.” Centuries ago, you will remember, a Chinese emperor ordered all the classical books to be burned. In order that such a catastrophe should never be possible again, all the important texts in those classics, gathered together from odd volumes that had escaped the flames, or from the memories of old scholars, were carved on scores of stone monuments—hundreds, I believe one might safely say, after wandering through the several long temple-sheds or shed-temples in which they stand close together in long rows. There all day long, from the end of the New Year’s debauch of loafing until the New Year comes around again, stand dozens of men taking rubbings of the famous texts. The head-high monuments are covered over with big sheets of what is almost tissue-paper, and coolies and boys, perhaps not one among whom can read a single character of the many thousands about them, pound and pound with wooden mallets until copies, covered with a kind of lamp-black except where the indented characters have left them white, are ready to be added to the stock of shopkeepers near the entrance to the grounds. The consumption of these flimsy facsimiles throughout the Far East is evidently enormous, for the dullish rap-a-rap of many mallets is seldom if ever silent from sun to sun.

Off by itself in a conspicuous spot stands the Nestorian Tablet, most famous of them all, at least to those from the Western world. For on it is carved the story of the first coming of Christianity to China, long before even the Jesuits included that land in their field of operations. To the ignorant Occidental eye it looks quite like any other turtle-borne stone carved with upright rows of intricate characters, except that above them there is cut a well defined Greek cross. The Nestorian Tablet, I believe, was not considered much of a find when it was first dug up out of a field in the neighborhood of Sian-fu; but the fame of that jet-black slab has since grown so great that the not over-distinct characters are likely to become even less so with the constant taking of rubbings.

No less ebony black is the stone at the far rear of the same compound on which a few thin white lines sketch what is widely reputed to be the only authentic portrait of Confucius. The austere simplicity of the execution and the not unkindly severity of the portrayed face are at once a contrast and a rebuke to the silly gaudiness of demonology that clutters almost all Chinese temples. Then, before Sian-fu can be left behind, there are the famous stone horses, mere bas-reliefs of galloping steeds done centuries ago, yet so full of life and action as to be the despair of any living sculptor. These race low along the outdoor wall of a corridor in the local museum, and imperfectly now, for a vandal all but destroyed them. He was a Frenchman, and the love of art was so strong within him that he resolved to steal the famous horses of Sian-fu and carry them off to his native land. The big stone slabs were impossible to transport entire; the art-loving Gaul broke each of them into several pieces, of course with the connivance of bribed Chinese, and the carts bearing them were already many miles on their way when they were overtaken. It is such little adventures as this, justly distributed throughout China, which make it strange that “outside-country people” are so generally treated with respect by nearly all the four hundred million, and only very rarely as “foreign devils.”

Perhaps the major would have been detected through his incognito of a man on a purely personal jaunt anyway, but it was that wire from Tungkwan concerning motor transportation that gave the game away entirely. We had barely begun to deplore with our host in Sian-fu the difficulties of filling portable zinc bath-tubs with hot water that must be purchased and carried in from the outside, when two Chinese officials called. One was merely a magistrate, but the other was high up in the “foreign office” of the province, as well as no less fluent in our tongue than in his own. He had come at once to pay his respects, to welcome us to the province, and to bring the startling information that we were expected to lodge in some yamen or palace which the Tuchun’s soldiers had spent all day in preparing in a manner befitting the American military official who was unexpectedly honoring Shensi with his presence. I was not grieved that the delicate task of declining these accommodations fell upon the major’s broad shoulders. We could not, of course, put the Tuchun to any such trouble; we were already installed in the capacious dwelling of the postal commissioner, who not only was British but had innumerable other qualifications to recommend him, who was keeping bachelor hall and was entitled to company, who was a very old friend—the major did have, I believe, a note of introduction to him—and who from time immemorial had been the accepted host of any visitor to Sian-fu whose native tongue was English and whose evolution had passed the eat-with-your-knife stage. There was no necessity of divulging such further facts as the fear that even the Tuchun’s ideas of supreme hospitality would probably include wooden-floored beds, unswept corners, and a perpetual crowding by curious and irrepressible retainers, and that civilized toilet-facilities, effective heating-arrangements, and freedom to come and go without formality were quite as sure to be lacking. The chief emissary, being versed in foreign ways, probably knew that all these thoughts were none the less existent for remaining unspoken, and accepted our declination in what seemed to be good spirit after far less than half the usual number of repetitions required by full-blooded Chinese courtesy.

But that did not prevent us from being overwhelmed with official formalities during our stay in Sian-fu. Formality is fully as sturdy and omnipresent a crone in China as in Latin America. It would have been the height of discourtesy, of course, not to make a formal call upon the Tuchun soon after our arrival; this, in the case of so distinguished a visitor as the major, a fellow in arms, had to be returned; there was old precedent for giving us an official feast, which could only properly be reciprocated by getting our host to invite the Tuchun to an elaborate luncheon; the civil governor and the corpulent head of the “foreign office” must at least be honored with a call, which we must be prepared to have retaliated; it would have been discourteous not to return the kindness of our first two callers, even though the magistrate was so low in rank that we could not remain with him more than five minutes; each group of missionaries in town expected us to dinner, or lunch, or tea, or, if worse came to worst, to breakfast; the Chamber of Commerce and other bodies of important citizens expected speeches—fortunately some engagements hopelessly conflicted—and, not to go particularly into details, there was a complete round of farewell calls that could not under any circumstances be omitted. Looking back upon it, I am amazed to realize that we spent only three full days in Sian-fu, and even at that managed to see most of its worth-while “sights”; and that we left it still in tolerably good health in spite of the fact that we accomplished as many as five incredibly heavy meals, not to call them “banquets,” in a single day.

This feat was made possible by the fact that Chinese feasts come at about eleven in the morning or four in the afternoon. Thus we could stagger away from either of these just in time to sit down with a deceptive smirk of pleasure at the repast prepared by some of the foreign groups with a special view to assuaging our ravenous road appetites. In anything concerned with the Tuchun at least, we were obliged to save “face” both for him and for ourselves by bumping about town in a “Peking cart” such as all Sian-fu residents of standing regard as one of their most indispensable possessions. In fact, the Tuchun sent his own for us. There were two of them, gleamingly new, but nicely graded as to caste in details invisible to us, yet as plainly publishing to the Chinese the distinction between a great foreign official like the major and a mere traveler like myself as if their blue cloth sides had been daubed with red characters. A huge, well groomed mule drew each of them; they were upholstered, padded, and cushioned not only within but on the sort of veranda where those of lower caste may sit, while the two wheels were magnificent examples of that universal to-hell-with-the-public attitude of China which dictates great sharp iron-toothed tires that would destroy any road in record time, yet which have absolutely no justification except swank—and perhaps the fear of skidding on wet corners during the three-mile-an-hour dashes about town.

In calling upon a Chinese official one first sends one’s Chinese card over by a retainer, in order that the great man may be prepared. Within half an hour or so one may follow, presenting another card to some underling who will be found waiting where, in the case of a Tuchun, one might otherwise be casually run through with the naked bayonets which the swarms of soldiers about such a place so generously display. The underling disappears for some time, because the great man is sure to hold forth in the far interior of the flock of buildings filling his long compound, where he could be reached only with difficulty by an unauthorized visitor, even though he knew its devious passages well. In time he returns, and marching before the visitors and holding their cards above his head spread out fan fashion, names to the rear, like a hand at poker, he conducts the way. Gradually more important functionaries take up his task, until the callers are invited to seat themselves in a sort of ante-guest-room by a man who may even be of high enough rank to dare to open conversation with them. This anteroom is usually furnished with a platform built into one wall and upholstered into a divan littered with red cushions, with a somewhat raised space, or a foot-high table, in the center. Tuchuns, however, even of the far interior, have in most cases adopted a foreign style in this as in military uniforms, and one finds oneself instead in a larger and very commonplace room furnished with a long, cloth-laid table surrounded by chairs, with at most a Chinese scroll or two on the walls as the only hints of local color. But a flock of servants and orderlies, setting a little handleless cup of tea before each guest and under no circumstances permitting him to empty it, keep him reminded of his latitude and longitude. If he is of any importance, he is also furnished a cigarette—by having a single one laid on the cloth in front of him—which, if he shows any tendency to consume it, some one lights for him before he realizes it. If he is a man of extraordinarily high rank, such as a military attachÉ from “Mei-guo” on the other side of the earth, the principal flunky offers him a cigar. This invariably is of some sad Manila brand—the Chinese word for cigar is “LÜÜsung-yen,” or “Philippine tobacco”—this time in the box, and usually a full box, whether in the hope that he will not be so bold as to disturb the symmetry of the precious contents or because cigar-smokers are so rare in China that the box seldom loses its pristine fullness. At length the great man himself appears from behind a blue cloth door reverently lifted by several soldiers; there is a general uprising about the table; the host and his guests each fervently shake hands with themselves and bow times innumerable, like automatons hinged only at the waist; and at a graceful gesture of the Tuchun’s hand the gathering finally subsides into the chairs and proceeds to converse on things of no importance as fluently as the guests’ command of Chinese or the ministrations of an interpreter permit. If the call is nothing more than that, it ends in the anteroom where it began. After another long series of bows the guests are accompanied to the door, and as much beyond it as befits their rank. This is one of the most delicate points of Chinese etiquette, the one on which the foreigner, at least if he is newly established in the country, is most apt to stumble. For there is an intricate gradation of ranks in society even in “republican” China, with many factors modifying each under different circumstances; and not to see one’s guest far enough is as serious a social blunder as to accompany him beyond the point to which his caste entitles him. In a Tuchun’s yamen—in theory they call such a place gung-shu, or “people’s house,” since the rise of the republic—there may be nearly a dozen doors or openings of some sort between the inner depths and the front p’ai-lou, and at each of them courtesy requires much “you first” stuff and pretended protests from the guest against his host’s going any farther, so that when the final leave-taking is far out on the threshold of the last gate, as in the case of an official representative of great America, a glance at a watch is likely to be startling when one finally does at last break away.

Our first call on the Tuchun of Shensi was at his military headquarters in the ex-Manchu quarter of town. Here his predecessor, Feng YÜ Hsiang, had turned the largest available open space within the city walls into a drill-field with long rows of modern brick barracks. On the big stone-and-mud wall enclosing all this there were painted at frequent intervals huge Chinese characters. But these are not the shoe and tobacco advertisements the resemblance to a baseball-field might lead the uninformed stranger to conclude; they are some of those moral precepts with which the “Christian General” is famous for surrounding his soldiers. Much of the material for wall and barracks, by the way, was said to have come from the palaces in which the Dowager Empress of sinister memory lived with her pet eunuch during the year following her flight from Peking in 1900. The former military governor saw no good reason to keep up this imperial establishment under a republican rÉgime, and now there remains but little more than a field scattered with broken stones where less than a year before our visit there had been something mildly resembling the Forbidden City in Peking. Speaking of the crafty old shrew in question, we no longer wondered so much at her cantankerous disposition when we realized that she rode all the way from Peking to Sian-fu in a “Peking cart,” eating the dust of the loess caÑons, and spending her nights at the odoriferous inns along the way, some of which still boast of that fact by their names or decorations.

The Tuchun’s dinner in the major’s honor was an exact replica, except in location, of the call of respect we had made the day before—up to the time when we had begun to take our departure on that occasion. This time the whole party began about five o’clock to drift toward the “banquet-hall” at another end of the compound, with as much contention at every portal along the way as if each had been a dead-line upon which a nest of machine-guns had its muzzles trained. The guests included all the foreigners in town—that is, adults of the male gender—even to a Japanese official who had come to collect an indemnity from the province for the killing of a stray cotton merchant from Nippon; and the flock of Chinese officials mingled with them lacked no one worth while in the political circles of Sian-fu. The three provincial military chieftains with whom we dined during our western journey all go in for foreign-style dinners on official occasions, and attain their intentions in this respect as far as local information and the extraneous learning of their cooks can carry them. The result is an entertaining gustatory hybrid resembling its alien parent perhaps a bit more than its Chinese. Of the irrepressible swarming of persistent flies over all the sumptuousness of that lengthy table I really should have said nothing, for it is surely not the duty of a Tuchun to squander his military genius against such insignificant enemies. That the soldiers flocking almost as thickly about us should have passed slices of bread in their hands instead of using a plate was as genuinely Chinese as were their several other minor faux pas, and merely improved the local color. At least the great Oriental institution of gam-bay-ing held its unaltered own, even in the presence of half a dozen Protestant missionaries and a chief guest of honor who lamentably failed to hold up his end of that pastime.

The east gate of Sian-fu, by which we entered the capital of Shensi, rises like an apartment-house above the flat horizon