Harry Alverson Franck

High up above the plain of Lanchow, on the topmost hillock of the partly terraced mountains that bound it on the south, stands a new pagoda. It was built by the wife of the former Tuchun, but as neither he nor she, nor her particular brand of Buddhism, were popular favorites, the people say that their prosperity departed on the day it was completed. Conspicuous as it is from many li away, no one seems to visit it. At least there was not another footstep in the snow that had fallen some days before when I climbed to it one morning, and its three stories, open to all the world, showed not a single recent human trace. The mere fact that it took three hours of steady and not easy climbing, first by a mountain trail to some distant village, then at random up and across terraces where the feet floundered in snow and loose earth, could hardly have accounted for this abandonment; for no holy place in the Orient is too difficult of access for an occasional zealot. No, the pagoda of the Tuchun’s wife was plainly not a welcome addition to the landscape.

It was unsurpassed, however, for its bird’s-eye view of Lanchow and its environs; though, to be sure, a steam-heated lounging-room would have improved it at this season. While the capital of China’s most western province is on the thirty-sixth parallel, like Memphis, Tennessee, it is five thousand feet above sea-level, and the wind-swept pagoda was much more so. The snow had now laid the dust that swirled so easily when we rode into the city, but it had not fallen deep enough to hide any important features of the great oval plain stretching from the foot of this southern barrier to the Yellow River, beyond which the world piled itself up again in what would have been the familiar brown, utterly barren tumbled hills of northwestern China but for its light mantle of winter white. The plain was not a mighty checker-board, for the myriad divisions into which the little low mud barriers between its fields marked it were altogether too numerous and fantastic in shape. But as a whole it gave that impression, or, still more exactly, it resembled a mammoth pane of glass that had been shattered into many more than a thousand pieces, and then laid together again on a flat surface by some artist in Chinese puzzles.

When we had first ridden across this oasis many slender, misformed trees caught the eye, but from this height these barely relieved the vast expanse of an appearance of total treelessness. On that day we had noticed many fields of gray, a color so out of keeping with an autumn Kansu landscape that we were eager with curiosity until we found that acres after acres had been carefully covered, apparently by hand, with small stones. This was a method of keeping the precious moisture in the ground, which, our host explained, was common to all this region; when the fields are tilled or planted the stones are merely raked away from a small space at a time and then quickly replaced. We resolved to tell the next group of New England farmers we met that there are people who purposely cover their fields with stones.

The snow of course had obliterated these mere variations in color, though it had not disguised the fact that by far the greater part of this fertile flat-land was wasted in graves. Under the thin white layer thousands upon thousands of the little cones of earth that serve as tombstones to the garden variety of Chinese looked like peas, or, let us say, mustard-seeds under a sheet, while the p’ai-lous and stone monuments scattered among these would of themselves have filled a very large graveyard. The huge barracks which had oozed and absorbed soldiers incessantly when we passed it lay half-way or more toward the eastern end of the plain, where we had descended upon it out of the last loess caÑon. In the other direction, the eye, sweeping hastily across Lanchow itself, hurdling several clusters of temples and many nondescript heaps of mud buildings, fell at length upon the four big round forts erected on the crests of the ridge shutting in the valley on the southwest, against the next Mohammedan rebellion. During the several uprisings of the Moslem Chinese Lanchow itself has never been taken, but it was at least once so long and closely besieged that cannibalism is said to have flourished within its walls. After the last revolt the defenders saw the wisdom of fortifying this high ridge, from which the city had been so easily bombarded, and which is the last barrier between it and Hochow, the “Mohammedan capital,” only two hundred li away.

An ahong, or Chinese Mohammedan mullah of Lanchow

From the height of the despised pagoda the several walls of Lanchow, enclosing even its extensive suburbs, look like the graphic design on some large scale of relief-map of an over-ambitious draftsman; for not even those of Peking have as many sections and certainly no such angular afterthoughts. But the city lies well out on the further edge of the valley, as close as possible to the Yellow River, and to get anything more than a general view of it one must come down again from the pagoda. The south gate, nearest this, is the one by which all luck comes into the city, so that no coffin or corpse is ever allowed to pass through it. High up over the portal itself, in the most conspicuous place, is one of those huge wooden placards with a few large characters, bringing to any one who can read them the astonishing information, “Ten thousand li of Golden Soup.” This has no reference, as the first dozen incredibly naked and gaunt yellow beggars to accost the stranger will show, to any unusual abundance of nourishment; it is merely a poetic reference to the river close under the north wall, which one with a poet’s license might find golden, and which easily covers the distance mentioned in its vagrancy from the highlands of Tibet to the gulf of Chihli. Nor is it any great stretch of the imagination to call it soup, here in Lanchow, where every one, rich or poor, native or foreign, drinks it every day of his life.

Within the gate one plunges into the chaos of any large Chinese city. Outside the brilliant sunshine floods everything; within is mud and ice and gloom, and only rarely, in the narrow streets, the briefest glimpse of the low winter sun. The Yellow River is incessantly being carried to its consumers in two-bucket lots over the shoulders of tireless coolies, and these perpetually slop street, alley, and noisome lanes with delightful impartiality. The chief north gate of Lanchow, paved at a slight slope with big slabs of stone rounded off by the centuries, is impassable for animals and carts, and almost for pedestrians, during midwinter; for the water-carriers find it their easiest entrance and keep the pavement constantly sheeted with new ice. With Peking in mind the almost total absence of rickshaws would be astounding, had they not already been half forgotten in the long journey across the province in which they are virtually unknown. Bright red “Peking carts” hooded with the omnipresent blue denim and drawn by big sleek mules jolt the well-to-do about town. Officials still use the gaily colored sedan-chairs of viceregal days; some inhabitants bestride native ponies or occasionally a donkey; but the great rank and file, of course, ride shanks’ mare. The streets offer myriad Chinese sights, sounds, and smells, yet little that may not be seen, heard, and smelled in other Chinese cities, so alike have the centuries left this wide-spread race, so different is the land of Confucius from its neighbor, India, where districts a hundred miles apart are often quite diverse. The Chinese themselves assert that “every ten li has new customs,” but they refer to minor inconspicuous things which easily escape the attention of the most leisurely traveler.

Lanchow already boasted the rudiments of electric light and telephone systems which may in time improve beyond the exclusive, embryonic stage. Far more prominent were walking corpses who crawled into garbage-barrels by night and begged by day—before the winter was over Lanchow was throwing these into open trenches in the outskirts as they starved to death—precious padlocked boys, and the dull thump-thump of feng-hsiang, “wind-boxes” serving as bellows for cooks and craftsmen along every important street. The better-class women wore their feet only half bound, which was at least the beginning of an improvement. Manchu girls, we were informed, could be bought for eight ounces of silver each, which would be less than six American dollars; but there were no outward signs whatever of the profligacy which this appalling depreciation in human flesh must surely have abetted, for superficial decorum in some matters is the most outstanding of Chinese traits.

Many shops had closed, residents told us, because of the dreadful condition of the local currency. To our Western eyes there seemed plenty of them left, and the rattling of the “coppers” which had been forced upon the district made the narrow soggy streets sound like endless chain-lockers overwhelmed by an unprecedented run of business. The former Tuchun had printed paper notes and compelled the people to accept them at par, but the moment he left these had dropped to eight cents on the dollar and were gone now to the limbo of such things. The silver dollar was so rare as almost to be out of circulation, and besides the miserable molded brass and sand impositions of the present lord of the province—or of as much of it as he could reach with his own soldiers—there was nothing whatever but the tael, so that every one handling money must have scales in which to weigh out the irregular chunks of silver, throwing in bits of it resembling buck-shot to make the balance exact. Even then, of course, there were innumerable opportunities for disputes, for it would not be Chinese to have one system of weights, or scales which agreed, or which there was no easy way of manipulating according to whether the owner was buying or selling; and silver of course varies greatly in purity. Thus the people of Lanchow were able to indulge to their hearts’ content in the beloved Chinese pastime of squabbling over money matters, but it was a mystery how merchants could carry on at all.

Truly the money problem is fantastic in this western country. Our host had to send two hundred taels (about $143 in U. S. currency) to pay a week’s wages to the workmen who were building, with the remnant of American earthquake-relief funds, the bridge forty li to the eastward, and as the money had to be in “Lanchow coppers” it required eight pack-mules to get it there. When the great ditch for draining the largest lake we had seen in the earthquake district was being dug, seven tons of “cash” were required on every pay-day for the three thousand workmen.

However, what did all this matter to a mere visitor who could spend his time idly strolling the town? As in Sian-fu, access to its great wall was forbidden; but unlike my experience there, where a lieutenant-colonel and a large military escort was furnished me with the Tuchun’s permission to make the circuit of it, which “face” therefore obliged me to do on horseback, Lanchow’s entire “foreign office,” in the person of a gentleman of delightfully uncertain English, made the stroll with me on a brilliant Sunday morning. Half a dozen temples rose in artistic little open-work structures above the general level, two or three of them the minarets of mosques from which at certain hours sounded the voice of the muezzin, hardly to be distinguished from those of street-hawkers. Dyers had enlivened the scene with great strips of drying cloth, overwhelmingly coolie blue in color; on some of the roofs sat huge jars filled with some local delicacy made of pickled vegetables. We were high enough to look across the crest of the ridge on which stand the round forts against revolting Moslems, and to see these apparently unoccupied, though surrounded by a wilderness of cone-topped graves as far as the eye could be certain of what it saw. At regular intervals we passed the little stone and mud houses to be found on any important Chinese city wall, each with two or three soldiers napping or amusing themselves within. Whistling pigeons, familiar even to the residents of Peking, filled the transparent air with a wailing sound, ebbing or increasing as the flocks behind the whistlers circled back and forth over the city, now flashing white and almost invisible, now suddenly changing again to the blue of shimmering silk as the whole swirl of birds turned their backs upon us. The whistle is a feather-weight one of cylindrical shape, and is fastened to the pigeon in such a way that the wind, rushing through it as he flies, makes him and his few whistle-bearing companions a perpetual orchestra. The Chinese purpose in all this seems to be partly musical and partly to gather other pigeons, which flock about the whistlers like children about the Pied Piper. Perhaps the birds are eventually used as food, but this seems rather to be an example of that Chinese love for feathered pets which so often sends staid old gentlemen out for a stroll, cage in hand, in order to give birdie an airing.

A score or more of big gates tower above the general level of the several-walled city. In the northern and more Mohammedan section we looked down upon a great sheet of blood-pink ice, covering a pond where the Moslems are for ever washing newly slaughtered sheep. The circuit brought us at length to the northern wall, which falls sheer into the Yellow River. The American bridge thrown across this a decade ago, the only one in the west, or, I believe, with the exception of the two on the railways south from Peking, throughout the whole rambling course of “China’s Sorrow,” still looks incongruous against the background of the old walled city or of the heaped-up suburb terminating in a golden-brown pagoda on the further bank. Now and then a train of camels or a herd of wild half-yak come streaming across it, increasing the incongruity. Huddled together in that little perpendicular outskirt at the northern end of the bridge are several mosques and a Moslem school, temples dedicated to Confucius, Lao-tze, and Buddha, nearly a dozen of them piled up the hill at regular intervals as stations on the pilgrimage to the pagoda; and not far beyond these is a memorial hospital bearing the family name of the best known brand of American condensed milk! Not that this is all, of course, for there are also gambling-dens and assorted shops, inn-yards dusty with rolling mules, craftsmen busily engaged in the din of their trades, peddlers of everything shrieking their wares, water-carriers slopping the steep streets with ice, and higher up among the beautiful bare hills that vary with every mood of the unclouded sun one can trace the ruined walls of what was once a Tartar city, long before Lanchow itself was founded many centuries ago. To-day three thousand soldiers were escorting a bright new sedan-chair out along this further bank to meet an emissary of Wu Pei-fu who had journeyed to Lanchow by the northern route, and banners of many colors waved in the breeze that brought the snorting of many bugles to our ears.

Rafts made of blown-up goatskins and a wooden framework come floating down the Yellow River to Lanchow, bringing wheat from the borders of Tibet and travelers from Sining; often a whole stack of hay or straw, which seems to be sitting serenely on the surface of the water itself, glides past. Vegetable oils from hundreds of miles up the stream are landed at the low spot near Lanchow’s picturesque camel-back bridge in big bullock- or half-yak hides, still covered with their long hair, which on land quiver at a touch, like living animals. Down in the perpetual shadow of the north wall one of the goatskin rafts on which Kansu does much of its down-stream traveling in warmer seasons was being tied together for a belated trip, and a cluster or two of logs from the Tibetan slopes was being readjusted before continuing its long cold journey, which would not end until the winter was over, to the coffin-shops of eastern China. A great wooden water-wheel at the edge of the river added another medieval touch to the scene; and at length our stroll was brought to a temporary halt at the locked and soldier-guarded gate beyond which the city wall belongs to the Tuchun’s private grounds. I had already seen these, with their rows of barracks, their gardens and artificial-stone grottos, the two pet Kansu wapiti that bugled so fiercely when a foreigner paused to look at them, and the score of buildings that eventually gave way to the main entrance, with its huge devil-screen and gaudy painted demons, opening on the swarming second-hand market.

In the long open space before the Tuchun’s “yamen”—as they still call it in Lanchow, for all China’s conversion to republicanism—there stand to this day the four high poles, daubed with red and each bearing a kind of seaman’s “crow’s-nest,” which were the symbols of the Manchu viceroy who ruled northwestern China in the old imperial days. From these the military governor still flies four great banners, and it would not be difficult to forget that any change of rÉgime has come over this distant province. The rectangle of public domain between the entrance to the yamen and its farthest devil-screen outpost is the busiest market-place of Lanchow, and swarms from dawn to sunset with as dense a throng of ragamuffins as can be found in one collection anywhere in northern China. For it is made up of the buyers and sellers of all manner of second-hand junk, stuff which in America would be entirely thrown away, of the owners and the clients of outdoor portable restaurants in which the whole menu does not cost more than two or three real cents, of all the odds and ends of Chinese society, among whom Lanchow’s incredibly starved and ragged beggars and her rafts of thieves probably predominate.

Both these latter callings are banded together into gilds, as in most of China. Our host had known well the former head of the thieves’ gild, not because he made a practice of keeping such company, or had any hope of bringing him into the Christian fold, but because all owners of important property found it essential to their peace and prosperity to come to some understanding with him. Though he was strictly Chinese, this clever old rascal had been the accepted ruler even of the Mohammedan “three-hand men,” who flourish in great numbers, and who now obeyed the not yet widely advertised chieftain who had recently inherited his power and unfailing emoluments. Among the Moslem Chinese in particular there is as much pride in belonging to this adventurous calling as to any which the country has to offer, though in the nature of the case this pride may not be as freely shouted from the housetops. Mohammedan children are given long and careful training for it, and the fathers in whose footsteps they usually follow show a justifiable delight in any extraordinary professional feat accomplished by their offspring. It is not difficult to understand, therefore, why persons of property find it better to make an agreement with the thieves through their chief than to depend for protection upon officials and police not very distantly related to them. I need scarcely go into details as to how the members of this romantic gild are not only induced to let certain properties alone but to protect them against any outsider, any “scab” thief who does not belong to the union. A single example will be quite sufficient. The innkeeper who held the contract for carrying the government mails in and out of Lanchow paid fifteen dollars a month to the head of the thieves’ gild—through the police at their main station!—and these mails were never molested even in the most desolate parts of the country.

One little tale, too, will suffice to show how expert thieves belonging to the union must become before they can look for praise within their own ranks. If at any instant during the telling the suspicion of exaggeration should raise its head, let it be borne in mind that the host from whom I have it is both a Britisher and a missionary of the highest standing, and the son of a highly respected gentleman to whom the same statements may be equally applied.

A thief who was approaching old age decided to mend his ways before the time came to meet Allah face to face. He opened a mutton-shop on one of the less frequented streets. Next door to him was the large compound of a very wealthy Chinese merchant. One day, as he was separating the carcass of a fat-tailed sheep into its component parts, the ex-thief noticed several young Mohammedans grouped closely together across the way and furtively eying the rich man’s gateway. He recognized these fellows at once as belonging to the organization from which he had recently resigned, and their movements were a plain indication to a man of his experience that they were planning to rob his wealthy neighbor that very night. When he closed shop, therefore, he asked permission of the gate-keeper to speak with the prospective victim, whom he told all he knew, even of his own experience in his former profession.

“But what shall I do?” demanded the man of wealth, as one suddenly stricken might ask for expert advice from a gray-haired lawyer or a septuagenarian physician.

“That is easy,” replied the ex-thief. “The simplest way of breaking into your compound is for a small and supple man to crawl under your gate, where you have not recently taken the trouble to do any repairing. Hide yourself in the darkness beside this, and when the man’s head appears inside put a brick under his chin and go away.”

The merchant conducted himself exactly as his expert neighbor had advised. When the thieves outside found it impossible to rescue their bricked comrade, and dared wait no longer, they severed his body at the neck and carried it away. In the morning the rich man came to the mutton-shop early and in great agitation.

“See what a pretty plight you have got me into!” he cried. “When I came out to the gate before daylight to see if there was anything the gateman should not see, what did I find but the head of a man, and the blood that had flowed from him when he lost it! Now the police——”

“Do not distress yourself, sir,” replied the mutton-seller. “I will take care of the head, and when your k’an-men-ti speaks to me about the blood, as he is sure to do, I will tell him a newly killed sheep was left there by mistake. As to the gang starting any inquiries about their lost companion, that is the last thing they would dare or wish to do.”

All went as the ex-thief had outlined it, but that afternoon, as he was drumming on his chopping-block with a cleaver in the hope of attracting customers for the last morsels of mutton, whom should he see across the way but the same band of ruffians, minus, of course, one of those who had gathered the day before. Their heads were together again, but this time their furtive glances seemed to be turned not so much toward the rich man’s gate as upon the mutton-seller.

“Aha!” thought the latter, for he was inordinately clever in reading the gestures and glances of his former brethren-in-arms, “they suspect me of thwarting their plans and have decided to kill me.”

Therefore that night, when it was time for him to stretch out on his k’ang, he placed upon it, instead, a sheepskin that he had blown full of air and covered it over with some old clothes. Then he hid himself in the darkness outside.

It was exactly as he had suspected. Hardly had he begun to long for a cigarette when several forms slunk past him and entered his hovel. There came the dull sounds of as many blows as each thrust his knife into the sheepskin, followed by an escape of air resembling the pouring forth of blood; then the assassins disappeared again into the night.

Next day, after the briskness of trade had been succeeded by the apathy of the first Chinese meal-hour—for no profession which works by night can be expected to get up early—the former thief saw the same group huddled together across the way, staring at him as at a ghost. At length they straggled over to him, with a contrite and respectful, not to say admiring, air, and a spokesman addressed him with the highest honorifics of which such unschooled fellows are capable.

“Oh, Great Teacher,” he said, “we recognize in you, our revered Elder Brother, a very clever man, a man much more clever than ourselves. Will you not, therefore, become our leader, for with your cleverness and our agility how could we fail in any undertaking?”

“Your agility!” sneered the mutton-seller, meanwhile insultingly continuing his work. “Where have you picked up that false impression? I don’t believe you know the first rudiments of your profession, that you can even climb through the open window of a foreign devil and escape with his watch and wallet without being heard. I, forsooth, become the leader of a gang of clumsy, untrained louts who cannot so much as move a brick with their Adam’s apple! Away with you!”

Lanchow has been called the meeting-place of central Asia. This seemed to us something of an exaggeration, for to be worthy of such a title surely a city must have something more to show than sporadic examples of Oriental tribes and customs all but lost in a great sea of Chinese. But, for one thing, they told us, this was not the season of great markets, to which even princes of Tibet were attracted, and which brought samples of almost everything in the human line that the elder brother among continents has to offer. As it was, I ran across Tibetans, Mongols, Buriats, Kirghiz, and several other individuals who plainly belonged to none of these divisions, merely in strolling the streets. Then there were of course Russian refugees, and Cossacks, and single chance visitors from far-off countries not often represented, such as we Americans, for instance. Two or three Russian officers of the old rÉgime were in the employ of the Tuchun, who had fished them from the stream that had been spasmodically flowing down through Kansu for the past four years, and who strutted the soft streets of Lanchow in all the glory of their pre-war uniforms and their disdainful, rather childlike demeanor. Our host and his fellow-missionaries, the active little Belgian who had grown more than gray in superintending the salt monopoly in two provinces, the densely bearded Catholic priest of similar origin, the over-conscientious, English-speaking postal commissioner from Canton, the Tuchun himself, and all the higher officials were constantly being appealed to in behalf of poverty-stricken aristocrats or of pitiful cases of suffering among mere ordinary human beings who had drifted down from the northwest and hoped to better their lot by pushing on to Peking or Shanghai. Just what impression such cases made on the Tuchun, who probably distinguished almost as little between different kinds of Caucasians as do the rank and file of Chinese, the handful of foreign residents were never quite sure; but they did know that he often gave money to Russian refugees—though their real benefactor was the Belgian salt official—and that the provincial Government furnished transportation to the next province for those incapable of making their own way. In fact, almost the only important duty of the “foreign office,” who had discoursed to me more or less in my own tongue on the unworthiness of Lanchow from its wall, was to adjust matters between muleteers and cartmen who did not feel that the Government should force them to carry penniless foreign devils—though of course they did not openly speak of them as such—for the mere pittance it offered.

One morning while we were still at breakfast, a little hollow-eyed foreigner in a strange uniform was brought in by the gate-keeper. He was a Polish captain who had once before escaped capture in some brush with the Soviet troops by making his way overland through Asia and back to Poland, only to be forced to repeat the experience. At least, that was what we gathered from a long conversation, in which we could not muster among us more than scattered single words that were mutually understood, and during which both sides were forced to resort mainly to gestures and intuitions. The captain and his wife, he said, were living in a Chinese inn, without money and with no other clothes than those they were wearing. That same day word drifted to our ears of a Russian lady who was offering for sale the carriage and horses in which she had reached Lanchow, and which might possibly do for our return journey. I found her a frail, visibly suffering woman probably still really in the thirties, speaking perfect French, and by no means stripped of that air of distinction which generations of well supplied leisure give. She was living in the mud room of an ordinary Chinese inn, facing upon the usual barnyard-and-worse courtyard, and evidently found it difficult even to pay for these accommodations, for the Chinese about the place had a surliness which could scarcely have been due to anything but disappointments in the matter of money. Her husband, a general once high in the czar’s armies, had, during the journey, died of typhus in the very coach that she was offering for sale. There was still with her an adult son in a shock of pale yellow hair, whose manner suggested more haughtiness than ordinary horse sense; and half a dozen Cossacks—at least she called them that—were left from the retinue with which the general had begun his flight. It was not uninteresting to see how these sturdy, peasant-faced fellows in worn and badly assorted civilian clothing snapped to attention when the general’s widow addressed them, and fell over one another in carrying out her order to show me carriage, harness, and horses. But the horses were not visibly different from the Chinese ponies for sale in the gully below the “thieves’ market”; the harness was more massive and intricately Russian than in good preservation; and the carriage would have taken first prize at any American fair as an example of the impossible contrivances which “furriners” inexplicably build for themselves. It was four-wheeled, which alone would have barred it from continuing any further eastward and aroused astonishment that it had been dragged this far; it had all those Russian conveniences which to any other race seem quite the opposite, such as a great yoke over the off horse and a roof which, if it had been repainted some brighter color, would not have looked greatly out of place on a Chinese temple; while the seats had been taken out by the roots, so that the interior of the coach was nothing but a bare wooden floor some six feet long and four wide. Two of us could stretch out on this, with our bedding under us, very comfortably, the lady said, as she and the general had done. The local Government was furnishing “Peking carts” for her party, but she was too ill to travel in those and was holding out for a mule-litter, hoping meanwhile to get together a little money for the long journey still ahead by selling her personal rolling-stock. I regretted that by no stretch of the imagination could we see ourselves making our way back to civilization spread out on the floor of what looked painfully like a hearse and which most certainly could not have been operated on the hundreds of miles of no roads that lay before us without a plentiful supply of Russian profanity.

Fully a thousand such cases a year, said our host, pass through Lanchow; but, like the scattered samples of central Asia to be seen in the streets, they are as nothing in the old familiar thronging Chinese crowd, in filthy quilted garments, hands thrust in sleeves in lieu of mittens, and cold, bluish running noses. It was hard to realize the fact, when some reddish-bearded Moslem, wholly free from Chinese features yet wearing Chinese uniform, came down from those distant regions and directed attention to it, that, far west as Lanchow is, China stretches for many weeks’ travel still farther westward, in a great tongue of land which at length opens out into the broad reaches of Sinkiang, or Chinese Turkestan, even though her assertion of total suzerainty of Mongolia and Tibet be disallowed.

The people of Lanchow struck me as less courteous than those of Peking, but still by no means deliberately unkind to foreigners. They seemed to be but slightly informed on anything more than their own immediate problems, at which of course there was no reason to wonder. For the whole vast province has no newspaper except one flimsy sheet of “official lies” spasmodically published in Lanchow; no students are sent abroad from this province, “because,” to quote a Chinese, “officials are more interested in filling their pockets”; and the “heathen” schools even in the provincial capital are so bad, in spite of some recent improvements, that missionaries feel they must have Christian schools for their converts, quite aside from any question of mere religious faith. There is no discipline left in Chinese schools since the revolution, they assert, and every one, from Tuchun to servants, is more avid for “squeeze” than before the republic was established. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the population knows nothing more of the word “republic” than its pronunciation, and “voting” is so frankly a farce that ballot-boxes are calmly filled by order of the authorities days before and brought to “polling-places” from which soldiers exclude all citizens on “election day”; or the boxes are stuffed then and there by the soldiers, under orders from headquarters. Though the respect for foreigners or the fear of them is still so great among the rank and file that the little Belgian chief of the Salt Gabelle had more than once confiscated whole camel-caravans of smuggled salt which he came upon in his travels, it was not so easy to make officials honor either foreign rights or treaties. The Belgian, for instance, had deposited in the official bank six hundred thousand dollars income from the salt monopoly, which is designated by treaty for use in paying off China’s foreign indebtedness—and the next thing he knew it had been replaced with promissory notes of the provincial Government; in other words, with worthless paper. Peking has no real power in these back provinces, and even if provincial officials cannot connive with bank employees to their hearts’ content, all the Tuchun, or some Mohammedan general, or any official with audacity enough, has to do is to ask Peking to instruct the “salt man” to give them money, and neither he nor Peking can refuse. In a way China is more militaristic to-day than ever Germany was, but the Chinese are not a fighting race, depending rather upon the subtleties of graft and “squeeze” than upon force. Were they not so docile and passive and so lacking in community spirit, it would not be so easy for military governors, almost always coming from other provinces than the one they rule, to get rich quickly by all manner of tricks and then go home, or, if their peculations have been too notorious, to some foreign concession in the coast cities, where even a strong Central Government could not touch them.

There are few outward signs of disagreement between the two divisions of Lanchow’s population, but old residents say that the feeling is far deeper than appears to the casual observer. The Mohammedans also have much of the Chinese temperament, or at least of the Chinese outward attitude, and are inclined to temporize longer before they will fight than do their brethren farther west. They are particularly gentle when they are in a minority, as they are in many towns even of Kansu. But they are more progressive, more interested in outside news, than the mere Chinese, and they stick together, like most minorities. I heard of only one Christian convert from among them, and even the missionaries were not at all sure of him. After a long period of repression the Chinese Mohammedans have to a large extent shaken off the Chinese yoke in Kansu and, being better fighters, there is little doubt that they will win still more from their former oppressors, who are hopelessly divided. Already not only the orthodox headquarters of Hochow but other districts are virtually self-governing, and certain Mohammedan generals rule their sections much as they see fit. The “Hwei-Hwei” have long felt that the province of Kansu is their special domain and that they should be allowed to govern it, either as a part of China with a Tuchun of their own faith, as an independent state, or by joining hands with Sinkiang, its congenial neighbor on the west. During one of their rebellions Yakub Beg ruled the Chinese Mohammedans for ten years, until he was put down by troops sent from Peking. In the opinion, at least, of most foreign residents, the Chinese have been stupid in their handling of the Kansu problem, so that whereas, by just and generous treatment when they were powerful, they might have had a strong Moslem province as a more or less autonomous buffer-state on the west, yet still loyal to the rest of the country, now that they are weak they may easily lose a large part of the Mohammedan region.

Yet though one listens one is not so easily convinced. There comes to mind the unfailing suppression of “Hwei-Hwei” rebellions in the past, lighted up by the knowledge, sure to be picked up by any inquiring traveler, that there is much internal friction, not to say combustion, among the Moslems of Kansu themselves. Were they as strictly united as they pretend to be, they could probably now throw off the Chinese yoke entirely. But there are “Turk,” Arab, and Mongol “Hwei-Hwei,” not to mention the still greater number perhaps of purely Chinese Mohammedans, many of whom were “converted” during the rebellions of the last sixty years; some still adhere strictly to the Koran, while new sects hold later traditions or have incorporated elements of Buddhism and Christianity. In fact, all the big Mohammedan rebellions have been due to Chinese interference in “Hwei-Hwei” sect quarrels; that of 1895–96 began over the dispute as to whether or not a man under forty should be allowed to grow a beard! It is the old story of the champion of a beaten wife being fallen upon by both husband and consort. The day may not be far distant, whatever the casual traveler may conclude, when the world will wake up to find on its breakfast-table the news of the founding of a new Moslem nation, in which Chinese features will be in the majority. Meanwhile the “Hwei-Hwei” keep in form by fighting each other and by drubbing the Tibetan tribes along the Kansu border, from whom much of the metal was taken that has reappeared in the miserable “money” which the people have had forced upon them.

Turks and Arabs can talk with many of the Chinese Moslems without difficulty; which is the chief reason that our host was asked in 1914 by his home Government to sit where he was and keep his eyes and ears open instead of hotfooting it for Flanders. Mysterious delegations of Germans and Ottomans were constantly passing through Kansu while the war was on, and there are certain indications that their aborted plans were bold and carefully laid. But all that is over now, and such interesting similarities of tongue have become again merely of philological interest.

Up to the time of the republic even Mohammedans high in the government service could only live in the suburbs of Lanchow—whence its many walls. But to-day there is a more tolerant spirit on both sides, at least in every-day, peace-time intercourse. Some of the more reasonable and educated “Hwei-Hwei” make friendships irrespective of faith. There was “Mr. Donkey,” for instance, who was one of our host’s most frequent visitors, though he never sat down at his table. Like so many of his coreligionists, he bore the family name of “Ma,” which is derived from Mohammed, but which also is the Chinese word for “horse”; and, there being a distinct stratum of humor in our host’s make-up in spite of his calling, he had taken a slight liberty with natural history when his Moslem friend asked for the English version of his name. The joke had long since been shared with the victim, but he was still likely to startle foreigners to whom he was being introduced by displaying his entire knowledge of the English language at one fell swoop with, “Sir, I am Mr. Donkey.”

“Mr. Donkey” and a certain Taoist priest were bosom friends and were given to periodic sprees, in which they were now and then joined by a “Living Buddha.” Occasionally this convivial trio had irrupted into the mission compound during the small hours, in the hope that their good friend of still another faith might for once forget his little idiosyncrasies of doctrine and join them. Once news had come to the ears of our host that a “Britisher” had been confined in the Chinese jail; and, being the chief example, if not the official representative, of the British nation in Kansu, he could not of course permit this violation of extraterritoriality to continue. He demanded the immediate release of the prisoner, which his good friend the provincial governor granted at once—and turned over to him an Afghan. What was more natural than that he should have sent this fellow-national, for whom he had made himself responsible, to stay with “Mr. Donkey,” a fellow-Moslem? Being a good host, Mr. Ma promptly brought out a bottle of whisky, whereupon the Afghan, being a good Mohammedan who still took his Koran literally, walloped him severely on the jaw. The Chinese Moslems are more easy-going in these little matters. Many of them drink, and smoke not only tobacco but opium. The one rule to which they cling most fiercely—though even that, it is said, many of them will break if there are no coreligionists to tell on them—is the prohibition against eating pork. They never speak of a pig by its real name unless they are volubly cursing or shriveling up an enemy with an impromptu description of his family tree. If there is no avoiding mention of the unclean creature in polite intercourse, it is referred to as a “black sheep.” When the Moslem population of a Kansu town is in the majority, no one in it is allowed to keep or bring in pigs, which naturally tends to a further decrease of the minority. Chinese may eat in a Mohammedan’s house, but the latter cannot accept a return invitation, for fear not so much of being purposely insulted by being offered pork, as of being fed in dishes which have at some time or other been contaminated with pork or lard. The Chinese, when things come to the point where it is worth the risk, tell the “Hwei-Hwei” that their dislike of pork is merely a dread of eating their ancestors; and then the knives come out.

“Mr. Donkey” took me to an important mosque in which posters, depicting the Kaaba and similar scenes, and covered with Arabic text, had been pasted in and about the prayer niche. Pilgrims had brought them from Mecca, and the last little “Hwei-Hwei” in the group about me knew what these symbols represented. Yet in all our journey through the northwest I never saw a man bowing down in prayer toward Mecca, though others tell me that this was mere accident. Certainly no such accident would continue throughout a two months’ trip among the Moslems of the Near East. Only once, too, did I see a woman veiled; her face was completely covered with a thin black cloth, a curiously embroidered old-fashioned skirt hid what were no doubt her bound feet; and a small boy was seated close behind her on the donkey she rode, which a man on foot was urging across the country at unusual speed. There are Mohammedan as well as Christian schools in Lanchow, and they seem to rival each other in some of their superiorities to those of the Chinese, though the Moslem ones copy these in hours and uproar. I have seen Moslem children gathering before the sun was above the horizon, and have come upon roomfuls of boys loudly chanting in Chinese, though there was no evidence of a teacher still in attendance, when darkness was creeping over the mosque that raised its flare-roofed minaret above them. A certain amount of “Alabi” is taught in “Hwei-Hwei” schools, and any man who can read the Koran—which it is forbidden to have translated—is highly honored as an ahong, though many know only the sounds of the words they are reading and not their meaning.

“Hwei-Hwei” and Chinese customs are particularly at variance in the matter of burials. The former believe in a decent interment for all, while the Chinese see no reason why the bodies of mere girls and unmarried women should not simply be thrown out on a garbage-heap or into some convenient gully. Among the non-Moslems actual difficulties are often placed in the way of the proper burial of a still-born child or of a mother dying in childbirth, even if the family is willing to go to the expense and trouble. Yet the Chinese consider the “Hwei-Hwei” custom of disposing of their dead the height of barbarism, particularly in the case of male parents. In each mosque is kept one elaborately decorated coffin—without a bottom. When a “Hwei-Hwei” dies the body is bathed at the home, swathed in white cloth on which are written Arabic characters, carried to the grave in the coffin—and buried without it. Naturally such a custom is shocking to a people who are addicted to ancestor-worship and whose massive coffins are the chief cause of an advance of deforestation that is already well beyond the Tibetan frontier. In fact, though wolf, dog, otter, lynx, squirrel, fox, bear, leopard and snow-leopard, deer, and several other skins come down in considerable quantities from Tibet into Kansu and flow on into the rest of China, probably the Chinese resentment at England for abetting the Tibetans in throwing off the rule of Peking is due as much as anything to the fear of the rank and file that their forests will cease to furnish the coffins without which no genuine Chinese can either live or die. During the fighting in Shensi Province in 1911, it was a very common thing to see strings of pack-mules each carrying a frozen “Hwei-Hwei” corpse on either side, wending their way back to Hochow, the Chinese Mecca; but once the corpse has been taken home for burial there seems to be none of the Chinese desire to preserve it as long as possible.

At a genuine “Hwei-Hwei” wedding every one comes on horseback to the bride’s home for the ceremony by an ahong, and then the whole cavalcade gallops back to the house of the groom. There is said to be less infant mortality among the Mohammedans than among their neighbors, not only because girls are perhaps a little less unwelcome, but because of the greater consumption of mutton and milk. “Hwei-Hwei” boys of fifteen often turn muleteers and tramp twenty to thirty miles a day over the mountains and spend much of the night feeding their animals, months on end, while they steadily grow into sturdy men to whom almost any hardship is not even recognized as such.

A Kansu vista near Lanchow, where the hills are no longer terraced, but where towns are numerous and much alike