Harry Alverson Franck

From the moment that it enters the province of Kansu, the most westerly of China proper, the ancient route from Sian-fu to Lanchow is lined by huge old willows, supplanted here and there by a sturdy poplar. A heritage from some far-seeing ruler of the province under the old dynasty, these flank with four rows, and occasionally with six, the wide strip of land on which a road might long since have been built, had it not been in China. But though there seems to be some strong sentiment, probably with fear as its main ingredient, against cutting them down, not a few of the trees are missing; and the many more that stand with their roots indecently exposed explain what befell those that are gone. For how can a tree live to ripe old age in a loess region where the earth is constantly dropping away or blowing out from under it?

Yet this unusual bit of Chinese forethought arouses a grateful feeling in the passing traveler. In cloudless summer the shade must be a godsend; and though the November sun was so welcome that travelers had already worn paths along the edge of the winter wheat on the south side of the shaded route, the long rows of waving branches were a joy merely to look upon in a region where one may journey for days at a time without catching sight of another tree, or even the slightest living thing of the vegetable kingdom, as far as the eye can reach on either hand. Magpies and crows build great stick nests in these branches, but it was noticeable that boys who will struggle for the possession of a twig or the most unseemly substitute for fuel on the ground below never climb up after the abandoned nests that would make such a fine haul. The reason is probably simple: they are afraid; for while his Western contemporary is constantly risking his neck in hazardous feats which have no economic value, the Chinese boy displays that timidity which habitually remains with him as a man, even in the face of material rewards for a bit of courage.

We found it 430 li from Sian-fu to the border, and crossed it at the village of Yao-tien early on the fifth morning. By this time we were up on the plateau which, gradually rolling higher and higher, culminates in the lofty land of Tibet; and though here it may not be more than three or four thousand feet above the sea, this was enough to give appreciable aid to advancing winter. All that day there was a wind fit to blow us off the map, with every promise of a snow-storm to come, and everywhere women and children, and not a few men, were out gleaning the little dead willow branches as they fell, almost in showers. With the sun gone it was bitter cold now, and we were forced to walk almost as much as we rode. It was on this fifth day that we met two Russian Jews with long beards, and a string of carts the first of which flew a makeshift white flag bearing some Chinese characters and the assertion, “Belong Americun firm from New Jork.” Possibly, the misspelling aside, it did, but in these days allegiances are often quickly made by those foreigners in China who would otherwise lose their rights of extraterritoriality and the greater protection for their persons and their belongings which goes with it.

Some sage has asserted, in the face of ample proof to the contrary, that it never rains but it pours, and on that day at least we were inclined to agree with him. For barely an hour afterward, while we sat eating a cold lunch on the cold k’ang of a miserable little inn, with only hot tea to improve the situation, two more foreigners walked in upon us. They were big sturdy Catholic priests, Hollanders and twin brothers, also in great forests of beards, and wearing cassock-like Chinese gowns that showed signs of long and arduous travel. One had been for thirty years, and the other for three, in Sinkiang, or Chinese Turkestan, and having been ordered to another post in northern China, they had set out in August and been already three months on the road. The natural route to their new station would have been northward from Lanchow, down or along the Yellow River, but bandits were said to be so active along it that they had struck eastward instead. It would be unjust to assume another reason which may not have existed; but personally, if I had lived for thirty years, or even for three, in Sinkiang, I should have gone a little out of my way, bandits or no bandits, to travel on railways and see at least Peking and get a little bit in touch again with the Western world before burying myself once more in the far interior of China. The animation of the padres during our brief conversation in English and French and an occasional word of Chinese proved that they had not grown indifferent to Caucasian intercourse for all their long exile; indeed, they somewhat resembled in manner college boys who have just reached home after a freshman year without vacations. The new pope, they said, and we had confirmations of the statement on our western trip, was filling all the posts in a large area of central Asia with German priests, and moving the former incumbents, among whom Belgians predominate, to less strategic positions.

In all the sixteen days between the capitals of Shensi and Kansu we did not, unless my memory fails me, meet another traveling foreigner; hence our astonishment at seeing four in one morning. There was, indeed, appreciably less native travel in the new province, though great chunks of coal were still coming out on donkey-back, and wheelbarrows were creaking under all sorts of loads, particularly of huge pears for which the province is famous, and which, persimmons growing rare, constituted our chief dessert all the rest of the journey.

Several wandering trails that kept us out of the chasm—though on the plain above the unhampered wind threatened at any moment to lift us from the saddle—came to agreement at last with the road, and we went down a mighty descent, which toward the end was rudely stone-paved, into the populous town of Kingchow. Here the earthquake of two years before, greater reminders of which we were to see farther on, had among other feats neatly broken in two both a high hill and the temple that stood upon it, so that a score of heathen idols in intense discordant colors and devilish postures stood out only half protected from the cold windy world. A church steeple rather incongruously broke the sky-line of the lower town, and in the neat compound beneath it we found hospitality for the first time with those Scandinavian-American missionaries scattered all along our western route. The sturdy couple—sturdiness is an all but necessary asset for inland China mission-fields—who had been cultivating this not too promising human garden since the days of their youth, had had their share of adversities; but the one that came most nearly shaking their faith had happened within the last two years. After decades of struggle with contributors at home and workmen and contractors on the spot, they had at last reached the proud day when their imposing black brick church was not only completed but relieved of its mortgage. While his wife and coworker superintended important operations in the kitchen and dining-room, the pastor sat down to write the glorious news to his religious constituents in America. “At last, dear brethren,” he began, “our church, center of a vast district that has no other, is fin——” “Brrrrum!” came a sudden roaring and cracking of walls and ceiling, apparently even of the ground itself, while pictures swung to and fro from their pegs, and the furniture danced a sort of improvised Virginia reel. It was all over before the missionaries had wholly realized that a great earthquake had occurred, but when they went out to look at it the new church was cracked and split and broken, an all but useless ruin.

The threat of snow was gone next morning, which was calm and bright, with hardly a breeze where the raging wind had been. The route lay up a river valley all the way to Pingliang, and fully half the populace along the way, it seemed, was out sweeping up with their crude bundle-of-sticks brooms the last vestige of leaves and twigs from under the willow-trees. In this all but fuel-less land there is an added meaning to the old adage beginning with something about an ill wind. There were countless half-ruined mud-wall compounds along the valley, from the edge of which sprang the inevitable piles of terraced fields. Strings of donkeys, each with two huge yellow-brown glazed jars filled with smaller ones in straw, looked at a little distance like some curious type of land-crab. We had scarcely seen a soldier since leaving Sian-fu, but now we began meeting long lines of them again, whole armies, at least as the word is used in China, moving eastward in carts, on horses, and on mules, and once or twice on long strings of camels. They were dark, rather surly-looking fellows, I fancied, though this may have been only fancy, or the effect of an outdoor life on men with the higher bridged noses that suggested a considerable strain of Arab blood. In Shensi Moslems are not recruited as soldiers; but in Kansu, the stronghold of the Chinese Mohammedans, there are many thousands of them in uniform; and here they marched freely over the winter wheat, an inch high, with that complete indifference to the rights of the laborious peasants along the way which is typical of bandits and soldiers alike throughout China.

Yet our hosts of the night before had assured us that the soldiers of Kansu were well disciplined; for instance, they cited, they always took off their hats when they entered a church—perhaps, I reflected, as they would expect us to take off our shoes in their places of worship—and let down their cues. For it is as great a discourtesy to come indoors with the cue tied around the head as it is in the old-fashioned parts of China to speak to an equal or a superior without removing the eye-glasses.

The Chinese coolie gets his hair dressed about once a month by the itinerant barber. This one is just in the act of adding a switch. Note the wooden comb at the back of the head

The town where we made our midday halt was denim blue with market-day. There were big, upstanding six-foot men whom America would hardly have recognized as Chinese; and some of them, from back in the hills, though they had heard of white people before, had never seen them. These and their hardy, red-cheeked boys timidly crowded nearer and nearer the knock-kneed table which Chang had somehow found and placed for us in a wind-sheltered, sun-flooded corner of the inn-yard, retreating in a pell-mell mass if we rose to our feet or looked fixedly at them. In China market-day is usually a fixed institution, frequently recurring in most towns. Then the wooden-box bellows with a stick handle manipulated by a boy or a coolie, which is indispensable to craftsman or cook reduced to a mainly dung fuel, may be heard thumping by scores or hundreds along the thronged street. The shallow eating-shops, which thrust their customers out of doors to squat on raised strips of board or on their own haunches, steaming bowl and chop-sticks in hand, are so busy that they almost cease to shout for clients. The outdoor hair-dressers for men may sometimes not move their portable paraphernalia from a chosen spot all day long, and take in what to them is a small fortune, though their charges would by no means keep an American barber in soap. Wielding a razor suggestive of a carpenter’s draw-shave, a wooden comb which the maker across the way saws out by hand with a dozen or a score of others from a single round block, and carrying a most scanty supply of other essentials, they all but transform the hirsute countrymen who fall into their hands. For they are not satisfied with mere shaving as we understand it, but wipe out everything the broad blade encounters—down the upper cheek, a stray hair on the nose, the eyebrows, the hair itself, leaving the victim a striking resemblance to a boiled onion, unless he calls a halt with the information that he still considers the cue essential to his beauty and well-being. Even then, they say, the barber sometimes talks him out of the old-fashioned notion—though it is hardly that in Kansu—and he joins the growing ranks of Chinese men, who, having recognized the pigtail as a badge of servitude rather than an honorable adornment, go as far to the opposite extreme as is consistent with a whole—no, often a sadly gashed—scalp. But if the client’s taste is not to be changed by preaching or example, the last rite is the combing out of his often magnificent black tresses, reduced of course in area to about the size of a saucer, and the making of them into a braid which may perhaps not be undone again for two or three moons.

But our carts perhaps are creaking out again through the inn-yard gate, and we must ride after them, leaving the hundred other scenes of market-day for some other place, for they are constantly repeated everywhere. Caves and terraces and caÑon roads continue; the afternoon is June-like, the leaves of the willows and rare poplars hardly beginning to turn, though November is stepping on. Down in the river valley the soil is somewhat harder, so that for a little time we move without being enveloped in a cloud of dust; but the air is so dry that cigars and lips suffer. Passing coolies carry their money in strings of “cash,” a thousand to each string, broken up into hundreds by knots and the ends tied together to make carrying easy. We would hardly call it that, however, if in addition to already mighty burdens we had to plod our way across a thirsty country with ten pounds of money worth less than an American quarter; for in this region the exchange averaged twenty-three hundred “cash” to the “Mex” dollar. This does not, of course, reduce the perforated brass coin of China to anything like the low estate of the Russian ruble or the German mark, but those are of paper and may be printed in any denomination, while the “cash” always remains the single coin, both in weight and bulk. I do not recall offhand any commodity that represents the value of a “cash”; I might say it is worth about one peanut, but that would be true only in China, and only in certain regions during the most plentiful peanut season, certainly never in America, for it takes fully forty “cash” to make an American cent. Perhaps a match comes most nearly being an even exchange, and then the wonder comes up that they do not use those instead, and save weight and some of the difficulties of reckoning, and always have something of real immediate value as well as a nominal and fictitious one. But your Chinese coolie, once out of gunshot of the big cities at least, and even the merchants up to a surprising grade, prefers his money in “cash,” irrespective of weight and all its other drawbacks.

In Peking and the treaty-ports small transactions are usually in coppers, which are worth a whole fourth of an American cent each; and silver ten-, twenty-, and fifty-cent pieces, unknown and unacceptable in Shensi and Kansu, are as frequent there as the “Mex” dollar of which they are fractions. It is no uncommon thing, indeed, for Peking coolies to accept bank-notes, if they are sure of the giver and if the issuing bank is not Chinese but foreign, with a local branch. But, after all, a copper is not much lighter than ten “cash,” and less convenient, having no hole for stringing, and next above that in the west comes the dollar, which is more than many a coolie ever owns at one time, and may turn out to be false anyway; while, as to bank-notes, they are no more current in the interior than Confederate shinplasters are in New York. Our own funds, by the way, we carried in the form of letters of credit issued by the Chinese post-office in Peking and payable by the postal commissioner at the several large cities we visited, in which he was either a foreigner or the graduate of a foreign school. But even our cartmen, who were well above the coolie status, lugged strings of “cash,” usually about their persons, and every morning and every noon they unfailingly engaged in a loud and heated controversy with the innkeeper and all his functionaries, down to the ragged fellow who drew water, over the amount that should be transferred from the traveling strings to those that remained behind. Only in a few cases was there a grooved measuring-board to obviate the laborious task of counting the miserable bits of poor brass one by one. For of course no one could take it for granted that there were a hundred “cash” between each knot; and usually he would have been swindled if he did. Aside from the all but universal Chinese custom of short-changing wherever it is possible, in many regions accepted fictions in money matters reign, so that in one town a “hundred cash” is really only ninety, and if you are informed that six walnuts cost a copper you hand over nine “cash”; and perhaps in the next place a string of “cash” is nominally a thousand but really nine hundred and forty, and “nine coppers is ten coppers here, master, only if it is in ‘cash’ it is nine and then a little bit, and so....” And so, while we might have been able to get along without Chang, or the cook either, for that matter, so far as mere eating and the like go, he became indispensable in saving us from insanity in the handling of money.

Pingliang was the largest city on our route between Sian-fu and Lanchow. In a way it was the most picturesque, too; at least there were few such pictures as that down its swarming, shop- and hawker-crowded thoroughfare seen through the outer gate with the inner one in the middle distance. I reached it somewhat ahead of the others, and as I was worming my way through the second barrier, leading my mule and showing every evidence of having been on the road for a week, a man in the human stream bound in the same direction addressed me. It was not until his second remark that I realized that he was speaking English, and even then I took him to be some inn-runner who was trying to induce me to patronize his miserable establishment. We had looked forward to being spared that fate in Pingliang, for several sets of Protestant missionaries had made us promise to look up their co-workers there. I replied, therefore, still giving my attention to the picturesque chaos about me rather than to the speaker, that I expected to stop with foreigners at the Fu-ying-tong. How should I have known that I, suddenly bursting into town in the guise of anything but a reputable person, was informing a total stranger that I expected him to take me in as a guest as soon I could find his house? For it was the first time in my life that I had met a foreigner parading the streets in Chinese garb; besides, the Swedish-American head of the Protestant work in Pingliang happens to be of a physical size not inclined to make him conspicuous in a Chinese crowd.

Before the days of the republic, I learned later, when in spite of my barbarism we were comfortably installed in his home with the glorious prospect of a hot bath in the offing, he had sported even a blond pigtail, like many of the inland missionaries. I need hardly add that this was removed when, on rare occasions, he visited the “home church” in Ruggles Street, Boston. His son also wore native garb and, being born in Pingliang, could not be distinguished from a Chinaman in the dark, as a native policeman once discovered to his discomfiture. On second thought, when one had recovered from the slight shock involved, of course native dress is the thing to wear in such cases. For one thing, it is many times more economical than foreign garb, which would have to be individually imported. Chinese clothing is much better adapted to Chinese living conditions; and not the least of the advantages in cities of the interior where only two or three foreigners live is that they can go about their business unnoticed in the throng, instead of becoming the center of a gaping, jostling mob whenever they halt for a moment.

I cannot, naturally, give any testimony as to the efficacy or value of the missionary work of a host of barely twenty-four hours, though I can speak very highly of his hospitality and of the spick and span efficiency of whatever we saw in his two compounds. In one the church was reached through the hospital, which seemed a fitting and sensible arrangement. Pingliang is not well supplied with curative facilities, and naturally the mission hospital is overworked to a point where even charitable foreigners unconsciously grow more or less callous to mere human suffering. Chinese strolling into the place in what to us seemed horrible conditions were such commonplace sights to those who had spent a generation among them that they showed little more feeling over them than over a cut finger. “Oh, been in a fight, I suppose,” was the sum total reply to my anxious inquiry about a man whose face and chest were cut into ribbons and who seemed to be half groping, half stumbling his way toward the hospital. With beggars of both sexes and all ages wandering the town and sleeping out of doors all winter in a few fluttering rags that expose far more skin than they cover, their cadaverous faces blue yellow with starvation, it is hardly to be expected that a young man born amid such scenes should lose much sleep over them.

Pingliang, I discovered in a stroll about its wall, is not so large as the first impression suggests, being long and narrow, with nearly all its movement in that busy main street by which we passed through it. The suburbs were so crowded, we found, because no Mohammedan is allowed to live within the walls. The soldiers of the local dictator had just been paid, and many of them were sauntering about town with six or eight strings of “cash” over their shoulders, pricing this and that. One had a full ten thousand looped about his neck, a veritable millstone, yet his weighty wealth only amounted to about $2.30 in real money. I have said that interior China has no paper money; hence I must apologize for the oversight. For there are paper “cash” by the millions. Boys were stamping them out of great sheets of a kind of tissue-paper, piled twenty or more thick, so that each blow of the die accomplished something worth while; and great cylinders of the finished coins, still loosely held together, hung shivering in the breeze along the busiest street of Pingliang. But this is dead man’s money, to be burned at his grave along with paper horses and servants and perhaps a “Peking cart” of the same material, so that he shall not find himself penniless and unattended in the next world. The mere living must be content with solid brass.

The soldiers, we noticed, actually paid for what they purchased. Not until they got a day or two out of town, our hosts said, did they dare give only what they chose or drop the word “pay” from their vocabulary entirely. In theory Pingliang and its district are governed from Lanchow, as the latter is from Peking. But the local general had his own soldiers and obeyed the Tuchun ten days westward about as absolutely as the Tuchun did the alleged Central Government. Lanchow had sent out orders to stop the growing of opium. The dictator of Pingliang passed the order on, in the form of a public proclamation, and at a same time issued secret instructions—in so far as anything can be secret in China—to his district rulers to encourage the planting of poppies, to compel it if necessary, since he needed the money to be derived from the traffic. An honest mandarin in Kingchow, refusing to obey secret instructions, effectively put an end to the planting in his district—and barely escaped in the night across the river and through the mountains to Lanchow, disguised as a coolie. In a region west of Pingliang, we learned when we reached it, the orders from opposite directions had been so nicely balanced that no one dared either to plant or not to plant, whereupon nature took upon itself the decision and grew nothing. Yet in these very regions poor peasants have been put in cages and left to starve because they dared to let the poppy beautify their fields, and perhaps the very next year some neighbor was prodded into chronic invalidism by soldiers’ bayonets because he had not planted poppies. Thus things go on throughout a large part of China, and opium is probably produced in fully as large quantities as ever, all the noisy demonstrations of burning, in a few of the larger cities, piles of opium-pipes and confiscated opium to the contrary notwithstanding. One large section of Kansu through which we passed was threatened with a famine because Shensi grew opium on the fields where she should grow wheat, and then offered such high prices for Kansu wheat that it all flowed eastward, as we had seen, and left the region that grew it to starve. But China’s many autonomous military rulers must have money, for without money they cannot keep soldiers, and without soldiers they cannot hold sway over their chosen territories; and of all their few scanty sources of revenue the tax on opium is the most remunerative. Naturally few if any of them openly permit the planting of poppies or openly tax the product. Has not China’s Government guaranteed to suppress the opium traffic, and must not even an all but independent Tuchun of the far interior take care what rumors reach that outside country from which protest and pressure and sometimes even military intervention come? The Chinese temperament is always for finesse as compared with boldness or force. In each provincial capital, and in other large centers, there is an Anti-Opium Office, the ostensible business of which is to stamp out the traffic. But the head of it is either appointed by the military ruler or subject to his influence; and if the latter issues secret orders undermining his public proclamations, the Anti-Opium Office collects the taxes and sets them down as fines, and there you are. There are, in fact, many districts where opium taxes are collected for years in advance, and as they are high the peasants have no choice but to plant poppies to recoup themselves.

A day’s journey beyond Pingliang there is a range 2350 meters high, crossed by roads so steep that one marvels how the clumsy two-wheeled carts get over it. Were the animals not hitched in tandem they never would, and even if we had not by this time made concessions to what at first strikes most Westerners as the “idiotic” Chinese way of doing their hauling, we must certainly have done so here. Pheasants almost as tame as chickens fed in the kind of heather and brown grass covering the lower slopes by which we approached. Terraces and caves had for a time died out; sure-footed men came down sheer paths with bundles of dry brush that would be an unusual and a welcome addition to the straw and dung fuel of the region. The range itself was made up of bare hills without a sign of bush or tree except the rows of now somewhat stunted willows which still escorted the wildly zigzagging road. There were many short cuts, heart breaking if your mule was so small or so tired that the carrying of the empty saddle up such a slope seemed work enough for him. On foot it was a stiff climb of some two hours’ duration which brought back memories of my Andean days that were not unpleasant. But here there was a constant sense of security, not to say of self-indulgence, in the knowledge that I was closely followed by ample food and a cook, and best of all, by a bed.

Donkey-loads of joss-sticks in two big square packs to each animal carefully picked their way down from the summit. The view from this showed a gashed and gnarled, a haphazard and truly chaotic world, monotonously yet beautifully light brown in color, to the faint edges of the far horizon. Over the top, coolies carrying whole chests of drawers on the ends of their balancing poles came swinging up the swift descent almost as if it were level ground. Once or twice before we had met the “fast mail” hurrying eastward, and now we came upon it again, jog-trotting over the mountains. Two men in the early prime of physical life, with a bundle of mail-bags at each end of the poles over their shoulders and a square glass lantern lashed on somewhere, are all this consists of in interior China. They carry some eighty pounds each in relays of twenty to thirty miles made at surprisingly good speed and on the second day return with a similar load, all for ten or twelve dollars “Mex” a month, depending on their length of service. Few postal systems are more reliable than that of China; and even though its high officials are mainly Europeans (this time the word is not meant to include Americans) no small credit should be given to the poorly paid coolies who are the chief links in the service in many parts of the country. Letters mailed in Peking a week after we left there were awaiting us when we reached Lanchow—for the coolie “fast mail” travels night and day; and the loss of anything posted is perhaps the rarest complaint heard even from those foreign residents who have developed into chronic grumblers against anything Chinese. Other mail-matter, up to a limited weight, may also be sent by letter-post, at increased postage; the bulk of it goes by long trains of pack-mules, such as we had already several times passed, at an average of twenty-five to thirty miles a day.

There were a few patches of snow, and a region somewhat more prosperous-looking, in the Chinese sense, over the range, with a more solid, reddish soil, though all was dreary brown and utterly bare with autumn now. Cattle, horses, mules, donkeys, fat-tailed sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens, not to mention blue clouds of pigeons, were everywhere. Yet the people seemed to live as miserably as ever, wholly without cleanliness, comfort, or plenty; and before long we found ourselves surrounded again by broken, swirling loess. Such regions confirmed the theory that man is made of dust; the children looked as if they had just been finished, and not yet polished off.

The dreariness, the dismal lifelong existence of the great mass of Chinese seemed only emphasized by such scenes as a pair of blind minstrels entertaining a village by beating together resonant sticks and singsonging endless national ballads or ancient legends. Nothing whatever of the myriad simple enjoyments of more fortunate peoples, not even grass to sit on and trees to sit under, lightens their bare-earth-dwelling lot. Yet few peoples show themselves more contented with what they have, perhaps because discontent increases with possessions and possibilities. Lofty philosophers there are who, though nothing could induce them to spend a night out of reach of a hot bath, commend to us the contentment with little, the patience under deficiencies, of the Chinese. These are virtues, no doubt, up to a certain point; beyond it the traveler far afield in China comes to the conclusion they become a curse, and the Chinese surely have in many things passed this limit.

Two blind minstrels entertaining a village by singsonging interminable national ballads and legends, to which they keep time by beating together resonant sticks of hard wood