XXI FOREIGN CITIES OF CHINA

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At all the great treaty port cities and colonies, such as Hongkong, Shanghai, Canton, Macao, Tientsin, etc., the stranger is accosted by crowds of rickshaw coolies, venders, fortune-tellers, flower sellers, etc., urging his patronage. Efforts are being made to limit this noise, which is at present like the reception that a football hero gets when he wins a game. The Chinese think we like the attention, because so many of us smile, and if one looks cross, a native wit will call out: “Don’t ask Honorable Sad-Face to ride; he has just lost his white mother-in-law, and must demurely walk behind her ghost.”

The first motor-car used in China was brought to Hongkong by an American dentist in 1900. It was a storage electric vehicle, as the authorities prohibited for a while the use of gasoline on account of the fire risk. Gasoline cars and launches are now used throughout the treaty ports, but kerosene engines are preferred in motor-boats. Kerosene can be procured anywhere in China, but gasoline is procurable only within a limited area.

As a foreign steamer enters a port, a fleet of sanpans throw out hooks and grapple with the ship. This picturesque nuisance the authorities are trying to stop, on account of the danger to life which is involved. The hotel runners, gamblers, and venders desire to be over the rail before any passengers leave. The health authorities desire to stop the irrepressible boarders as much as the harbor masters do. The boarders shout out to their countrymen: “You there! Throw over a fastened rope; we want to kotow to you on board, and leave you some of our money in a little game.” Over the rope goes, despite the frantic mate, who is a white man, and like ants, the agile Chinese clamber up the sides of the big trans-Pacific or Suez liner.

Peking, Haukau, Tientsin, Shanghai, Ningpo, Hongkong and other cities of China all have fine race courses, club-houses and stables. In hot Hongkong the racing, gymkana and polo meets occur from September to April. Szechuen and Mongolian ponies, Australian and Indian horses are used, but few American or British, the cost and insurance risk for the latter being too great. Every white man, singly or in clubs, goes in for the “king of sports”, and from a military point of view this interest in racing is very advantageous. The betting is generally on the French method of Paris Mutuels, where those who bet on the winning animal divide the pool, less eight per cent. for club expenses. The Chinese are beginning to understand the horse, and mafoo-jockeys and trainers are being developed. Up and down the China coast the owners ship their champion racers, and the interport rivalries are keen in this, and every other sport. The main ambition is for the owner to ride his horse as a “gentleman-jockey” in the crowning Derby event, and quite a few Hebrew and Parsee owners enter their horses in a widening sporting fraternity, which not long ago was limited to Saxons, and which may yet include Chinese gentry. The stocky Mongolian pony, weighing fifteen hundred pounds, only covers the mile in two minutes and eight seconds, and being hard of mouth and stubborn, he is as likely as not to cover the mile the opposite way to that which has been prescribed by the stewards! Not only has Hongkong two very fine golf courses, but Canton, Macao, Hankau, Shanghai, Peking, Tientsin, and other treaty ports have excellent courses famous for their novel bunkers of tombstones, etc., and club-houses. During most of the year at Hongkong the game is played on the Wong Nei Chong course shortly after daylight, as after eight o’clock the overhead sun is too hot for that exercise which is essential if one expects to keep “fit” in the Orient.

Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

The mountain palaces of Hongkong; clouds almost cover the great peaks. Note gate house, covered chairs; extensive verandas. Hongkong’s architecture dominates the New China; it is a heavy adaptation of the Renaissance, with massive verandas added.

Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Race meet at the Jockey Club, Wong Nei Chong Valley, Hongkong. The cosmopolitan crowd: Hindus, Portuguese, Britons, Americans, Japanese, Chinese, Parsees, etc. Note the famous mat-shed for the “Hoi Polloi” in the background. These immense structures are erected overnight, with matting and bamboo.

Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

The railway breaking through the wall of Peking. The immense new railway development of China has been put under the direction of the Honorable Sun Yat Sen.

Many have asked what was the organization of the crown colony of Hongkong Island, where 3,000 white troops, a navy, 2,000 Indian troops, and 500 British, Indian and Chinese police guard and rule 3,000 white men and 500,000 Chinese so successfully that after paying her own expenses, Hongkong continues, what she was the first colony to offer, to pay to the British government a large sum for military and naval expenses. The government is organized under the Home Colonial Office, as follows: a governor, the general of British troops in China, a local colonial secretary, an attorney-general, a colonial treasurer, a director of public works, a registrar-general, a superintendent of police, a clerk of councils, four white civilians, and two Chinese civilians, the six latter serving mainly for the honor. The famous Sanitary Board serves as a separate commission. Almost every one will admit that this is a compact, graftless, powerful and very economical organization, and it has more than answered expectations in a worldwide fame, both for Britain and China. The able newspapers of the ports are the Opposition, and keep the government up to efficiency. There is only one flaw, which may soon be remedied. There should be a director of education, for the purpose of honoring education, and not because education is backward in the progressive colony, which has had so many hero governors and cultured heads of department. Their great deeds would fill volumes as yet unwritten, for the many authors who have lived and served at Hongkong have not written of themselves. In modestia magnus! Hongkong has had some famous regiments in its garrison, musical and sporting life. After the South African War the Royal Welsh, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire regiments came. In 1911 the noted Yorkshire Light Infantry were in garrison. Their fine bands, often massed with the Indian regiments’ bands, are the feature in the musical life of the royal colony. The Yorkshires served in garrisoning the foreign settlement on Shameen Island, Canton, when, following the revolution of 1911, the pirate chief Luk seized the forts around Canton. Over at Kowloon, the mainland section of the colony in 1860, was mobilized the army of Sir Hope Grant’s 13,000 British troops and Baron Gros’ 6,000 French troops for the Taku-Peking campaign, and though the existence of their nation was at stake, the southern Chinese did not make a protest against this mobilization on what was then China’s territory.

The municipal organization at Amoy is seven councilmen, two of whom are a clergyman and a physician. They employ a captain-superintendent, and a judge who sits in a “Mixed Court” with a Chinese mandarin. American naval officers were given warm receptions by the Chinese of Amoy when the battleship fleet went round the world in 1908. The island-dotted and hill-surrounded harbor is one of the finest and most beautiful in China, and there is a great future before the port. At one time it was the largest tea port in China. The foreign settlement is on the hilly Kulangsu Island. The streets to see are Likin, Temple, Bootmaker, etc. The native Chamber of Commerce entertained the visiting members of the American Chambers of Commerce in 1910 in the Nan Pu Tu Temple. There are notable clubs and theaters; the Kwan Tai and other temples. The scenery is famous for the Valley of 10,000 Boulders, a sort of “Garden of the Gods”, in which the Deified Rock is worshiped. Many of the boulders are engraved by nature-worshipers. Note should be taken of the dainty architecture of the White Stag Temple and gates. The London Mission at the boat landing has partially adopted the Chinese style of architecture in the up-curling cornices. Forts which have seen hard service are placed on the hills. The foreign race course and jockey club is under the hill where the noted Lampotah Temple stands. Amoy is particularly famous for the best oysters, coolie oranges, pumeloes (grapefruit), fish, game, sugar, ginger and grasscloth in China. At Amoy stone buildings are seen everywhere, and extend southward through Fukien and Kwangtung provinces. The natives, who have a little Arab blood, and who often wear turbans as well as hats, are tall, turbulent, humorous and curious. There is much infanticide, because the small farms are only able to support sons. Amoy is connected by railway with Changchow on the Lung (Dragon) River, and it is planned to have a coast railway connecting all these cities from Shanghai to Canton. There is almost daily steamship connection with Hongkong. Native Amoy City is on a large island. The walls, which climb straight up the hills, are about eight miles around. The city was taken by the republicans on November 12, 1911, and there were many subsequent engagements with pirates when American marines from the Monterey had to be landed. Centuries ago the people of this province offered the most stubborn resistance to the Manchus when that dynasty conquered China. The dialect is the most isolated in China, showing that the northern ruling Chinese influenced the people very slightly. To instance:

In Fukien In Mandarin
Hokchiu Fuchau
Amoy Hsia-men
Quemoy Chinmen

Though the port was formally opened to foreign trade in 1842, the East India Company had hongs here as early as 1661 and up to 1730.

There is much for the antiquarian to trace as he follows the traditions of Arab visits in centuries preceding the Portugese discovery, at Canton. We hear reports that St. Thomas, the disciple, and Mohammed’s uncle journeyed here, taking the route none ever has since, across Persia, India and Burma. The tourist should not fail to visit the noble park of thousands of examination stalls, where the old classical learning held rule from Confucius’ time until recently. There is evidence enough that the state has grasped the new educational conditions recommended by the great Emperor Kwang Hsu, and the Cantonese reformers, in the splendid Kwangtung normal college, which consists of two wings and a tower building in the style of the University of New York. A noble stucco wall, pierced with portholes, surrounds the college. There is also the Canton Christian College, established in the fine Martin Hall. It is supported by Americans. American statesmanship and philanthropy will miss their glorious opportunity if they do not soon erect at Canton the preparatory department of a comprehensive American-Chinese university, the higher classes to be at Peking or Nanking. Trace should also be made of the factory of Milner & Bull, of New York, which sheltered Robert Morrison in 1807, when he was preparing for his immortal translations and dictionary. This was the time when American tradesmen of New York, Philadelphia and Boston showed keen sympathy with statesmanship and learning. Olyphant & Company, of New York and Canton, backed the printing of the priceless Chinese Repository, and brought fifty missionaries free from New York in their famous clipper ships. The Boston merchants who ran regular lines in those days to Canton, and had factories there, were Forbes, Perkins, Cabot, Sturgis, Russell, Cushing and Coolidge.

The morbid will want to see the execution ground in the Thirteen Factories section. It has no rival as the bloodiest spot on this earth. Governor Yeh, of Kwangtung, during the Taiping rebellion in October, 1856, beheaded 100,000 rebels here, and during the pirates’ attack under Luk, at Canton, in March, 1912, executions were part of each day’s work here. The ground is small and insignificant looking, and when not legally in use is used for spreading pottery in the sun. This Thirteen Factories section is in rather bad odor as an entertainer of opium smugglers and counterfeiters. Confucius’ temple near the Examination Park should not be missed, not for its beauty, but for its significance in the national ethics of so many centuries of one uninterrupted idea. The Parade Ground, under the eastern wall of the old city, should be visited, for here the nucleus of China’s new army, which we will some day hear much of, is training. China must learn to marry martial force and productive mechanics to, what through the long ages she has been preeminent in, literature, agriculture and art. In the western suburbs, the looms of the silk weavers, the native hospital, the Temple of Longevity, and the Temple of Five Hundred Genii are of exceeding interest, and if one can go as far as the White Cloud Hills there is the historic spot to see, where Morrison baptized, in 1804, Tsai Ah Ko, the first Protestant convert in China.

Various other places of interest are Tsiang Lan Kiai (Physic Street), which is protected from the sun with matting; Ma An Street, where the shoe shops are; Book Store and Jade Streets, with their tea saloons; the Hall of Green Tea Merchants radiant in porcelain; the Pok Chai native hospital; and the public gardens which were confiscated from the rich salt merchant, Pun Shih Cheng, because he evaded the law by smuggling, etc. China first prophesied that restitutionary besides prohibitive laws will yet be adopted world-wide to straighten out the economic tangle. Many modern improvements have come to Canton, such as a wide modern bund, electric cars and light, water, sanitary buildings, hospitals, etc. The University of Pennsylvania and the American Presbyterian Women have notable medical establishments at Canton, which city is connected with the early life of Doctor Sun Yat Sen, who has become immortal by formulating the republican Chinese rebellion and nation. Canton is already a railroad center, having rails east to Hongkong, south to medieval Macao, and north toward Hankau, and she proposes to link up west by running a railroad to Nanning and Yunnan. There is a vast steamer and launch traffic to Hongkong and up the West (Si) and North (Pe) Rivers, and along the iron-bound coast. Canton is the largest and most representative city of ethnical, republican and commercial China. Its stores and small factories are decidedly the most notable, efficient and varied in the wide land. The foreign settlement on Shameen Island in the Pearl River has every luxury in the way of modern clubs, hotels and residences, and in the native city there are clubs where the foreigner and native gentleman are trying to approach nearer to each other. Canton has two dialects, the Cantonese and the Hakka, and I know of no better authority on them than my old friend, Dyer Ball, the veteran author and linguist of Hongkong, though Canton has had many famous foreign students among her foreign residents in exile. The curious Hakka tribe composes one-third of the inhabitants of Canton. They can be distinguished by vivacity, by the flat hat with valance, worn by the women, and by their love of jewelry. The sanpan, junk, slipper boat and launch people, the most distinctive feature of Canton’s life, are largely Hakka. For further information regarding this tribe, which is also largely in evidence at Hongkong, Amoy and Swatow, I would recommend Dyer Ball’s authoritative books. Dutch Folly Island commemorates an early settlement of trading Hollanders.

The writer in his book, The Chinese, dealt at length with the oldest foreign settlement in China, the Portugese city of Macao, and its famous author, Camoens, who wrote The Lusiads. Authors who have written on quaint medieval Macao are Doctor Eitel, Norton Kyshe, Montalto de Jesus, Kutschera, Ljungstedt, the famous Sir John Bowring and the immortal Camoens himself. The largest library on the subject is to be found in the National Libraries of Lisbon, Coimbra, and other educational centers of old Portugal. The first American consuls lived at Macao, as did also the noted Jesuit explorer AbbÉ Huc, in 1840, in the seminary here. The British artist, Chinnery, lived and painted at Macao, as did the lovely Chinese colorist, Nam Cheong. Edmund Roberts, the first American ambassador of the United States “to Siam, Cochin and Muscat” died of bubonic plague here on June 12, 1836. In a study of Macao the old volume of the Chinese Repository should not be left unsearched. In a temple at Wang Hiya, beyond the quaint Porto Cerco gate, the first commercial treaty between America and China was signed respectively by Cushing, Daniel Webster’s son Fletcher, and Ki Ying. The remarkable miniature garden at the governor’s summer palace on the Monte Road should be seen, and rather amusing miniature photo statues are to be seen in the cemeteries. The largest cement factory in China (British owned) is on Green Island, which is connected by a causeway with Macao. The silted up harbor is being dredged in an effort to bring the long lost shipping back to old Macao. There is to be railway connection with Canton, and there is palatial steamer connection with Hongkong and Canton. The modern hotels, such as the Boa Vista and the Hing Kee, are excellent, the former occupying an unusually scenic site. The drives and Praya Grande are delightful. Macao is famous for its medieval carnivals and processions. It has an ambitious Chinese population whose leading spirits are the progressive Ho Sui Tin and Fong families. Its gambling houses are possibly notorious, and its opium farm, now somewhat restricted, was once a great thorn in international and hygienic matters.

Off the three-mile limit at Kowhowyang anchorage, the smuggling steamers occasionally lie. The trouble between Japan and China over the “Tatsu Maru” incident, and the subsequent severe trade boycott, which nearly bankrupted a Japanese trans-Pacific steamship and coastal line, will be recalled. The Chinese and Portuguese are constantly at swords’ points over harbor questions and the inclusion of the large islands of Lapa, Joao and Taipa in the beautiful colony, which would have been rushed long ago by the Chinese but for fear of Britain which supports Portugal “for auld acquaintance’ sake” and the memories of Wellington’s peninsular campaign when Portugal assisted Britain in her need. Chinese and Portuguese gunboats are always watching each other in the rather turbulent waters.

Lovely flowery Macao, of fast and festival, is the favorite health resort of Hongkong, because of its sou-west monsoon in the summer months. The wave of the Portuguese republican revolution took a month to reach Indian Goa and Cathayan Macao. The newspapers were read by the soldiers in the two beautiful barracks which stand high over Cape Sao Francisco and beneath Monte Fort. They were then loaned to the sailors on the gunboat Patria which rose and fell on the yellow tide in the offing. On November 29, 1910, the sailors of the Patria landed, marched to the square where the Senato Leal stands on high ground on Rua Central in the center of the closely built city. There three volleys were fired as a signal to the troops who, a mile away, broke into the armories and armed with ball cartridge ready for liberty’s business! The Legionaires Regiment first proceeded to the Santa Clara Convent, drove the nuns to the steamboats lying in the inner harbor, and forced them to sail for Hongkong, forty miles away, the objection to the long intrenched religious orders being that they successfully compete with business by not paying taxes. Then the revolutionists, dragging cannon, marched to the artistic government “Palais” on the picturesque Praya Grande, where the governor and representatives of the Senato Leal were forced at the bayonet’s point to agree to the expulsion of favored religious orders, the establishment of a republic in Portugal and her colonies, the suppression of the oligarchic and religious organ, Vida Nova, and similar reforms obtained by the republicans in Portugal. Most wonderful to relate, as a new sign on the horizon of the twentieth century, the Chinese viceroy of Kwangtung province brought up his Chinese army to stand by and see that order elsewhere was maintained while European revolutionists, European monarchists and reactionary Catholics fought out questions of representative and popular government in a corner of the sacred soil of old China. Correctly speaking then, it was little historic Portugal, and not ancient China, that first established a republic on Chinese soil, and Portugal’s republican influence, multum in parvo, as well as America’s and France’s, has been influential with Chinese reformers.

Fuchau, the capital of turbulent Fukien province, is situated twenty-five miles from the coast on one of the most romantic rivers of China, the Min. “Fu” means happy, and is the most used word in superstitious China, if we except perhaps a “strange oath” or two, and the family name Chang, which almost half of the Chinese carry. This city lies in a river plain surrounded by a glorious amphitheater of hills. With Hongkong, Fuchau joins as the two most scenic ports of China. The wide walls are thirty feet high, ten miles around, and up a mountain on one side, and there are seven fort gates, the most notable being the North Tower, with its curious spirit shrines. The most noted temples are those to the goddess Kwan Yun, the God of War, and Ching Hwang Temple. The seven-storied White Pagoda is famous. It has Romanesque doors and stunted galleries with railings. It is more ponderous than beautiful, and is remarkable for its great antiquity. The city is a noted educational center, missionary and native, It was a reform center even back into the Dowager Empress Tse Hsi’s day in 1897 and 1898, and produced its martyr, young Lin, who fell a victim of that reactionary Jezebel. Six miles south of the city on Ku-Shan, 1,700 feet high, is the noted Bubbling Well Monastery. The chair ride there affords a wonderful view. Fuchau is a health resort, as it has many hot springs. The Pacific Coast Chamber of Commerce was entertained by the city guilds at the Nan Pu Tu Temple in October, 1910. The valley of boulders is notable, as are also the rich pumelo groves. Fuchau used to be a great tea port. The trade declined from 1898 to 1907, but it is picking up again with the increased demand for China teas. Pagoda Island exhibits a severely plain and ancient pagoda and some remarkable Pai Piku (white stern) junks of the olden time. An ancient bridge nine centuries old, with sixty arches, on which are many overhanging shops, propped from the piers, connects one of the islands.

Fuchau went over to the rebel provisional government in October, 1911, but the Manchu city was not captured until a month later. There is a naval arsenal here, a dock, navy school, mint and a foreign settlement on Nan Tai Island. The climate is extremely trying.

Many unique costumes and turbans are to be seen. Fukien province people have some Arab blood in them, though the Mohammedan religion has been lost. They boast that they have never been conquered, and that many of the notorious pirates are Fuchau men. Their women wear a head-dress that looks like the model of an air-ship. There are excellent Methodist and Congregational schools, an American hospital, and a fine London mission which has done what missions should do in architecture. It has adopted to a degree the characteristic and beautiful Chinese style. All the missions and foreign trade buildings should strive to retain this wonderful art instead of daring to bring square ugliness or Greek coldness of column to artistic China, where it does not fit well in so warm a land. Down at the seaside bamboos are placed in the beds so that the oysters may cling to them. There are factories for glass filigree lamps. Trips should be made to the Yuan Fu Monastery, built on props on Wu Hu (Five Tiger) range, and up to which five hundred steps have been cut; the Paeling tea hills, fifteen miles north; the olive and orange groves; and the hot mineral springs. Fuchau is to have railway connection north and south. With Soochow, Fuchau is the center of the lacquer art, and old specimens are highly prized. In 1885 the French fleet under Admiral Courbet sailed into Fuchau and battered at the forts and the city, virtually compelling the Chinese for the time to cede the great province to Tonquin. This is what the Chinese call the “Sacrilege of Fuchau”. The city is also the center of tinfoil workers, their product being used in great quantities in making the gold and silver models which are burned at the graves. Beautiful heavy wall paper is also made. The noted sinologue, Professor Parker, of Manchester University, the witty author of John Chinaman, etc., was once British consul at Fuchau.

Ningpo (Peaceful Wave) in friendly Buddhist Chekiang province, could be called the Azalea City, and is one of the most delightful and picturesque cities of China. It is the second oldest in its relations with Europe, the Portuguese having founded a trading settlement here in 1522. The city is moated, and the walls are broken with six gates. Old Krupp cannons lie about on the parapet. The best wood carvers, masons, and varnish makers of the kingdom work here, and their services are sought for all over China. Its artists also are famous. Ningpo lies twelve miles from the sea at the head of the Tatsieh River. Three streams branch out into the hills, which lie spread around in a most picturesque panorama, including valleys, canals and lakes. It is a great fishing center, and its sailors are venturesome. The fast river slipper boats of Ningpo are noted far and wide. The inhabitants do not disdain the use of such a modern thing as ice, as the many straw-covered, peaked ice houses show. Much tea and silk are produced. Excellent stone carving is done, as witness that gem of architecture, the Fukien men’s Guild Hall, with its carved dragon-entwined columns, comical stone lions, and splendid, up-curving tiled roofs. The screens and bronze urns at the many temples are also a delight in this center of culture, the new rights of women, engineering and commerce. There are successfully run native cotton mills, and the district produces fine matting, rice, oils, varnish, sepia, bamboo, lumber, tea, game, flowers, rape, barley, tallow trees, etc. There is a curious street covered with pailoo arches to widows who would not remarry, to scholars, children, etc. There is a foreign quarter with its splendid bund, race course, house boats, clubs, churches, hill bungalows, etc.

No Chinese city affords more delightful excursions to the hills, waterfalls, rapids like the Wenchow, and the wonderful Buddhist monasteries like the noted Tien Dong and the Shih To. The trips to the Ta Lang and Snowy Valleys are exceedingly beautiful. Outside the city the temple to the sailor’s patron goddess, Ma Tsu Pu, at the east gate, is particularly fine in lines, proportion, dignity and rich detail. It was erected in 1680 by sailors of Fukien, the neighboring province. These precious old temples are the last precious gems of a great age in art. The new times in learning, religion, politics and commerce are bringing in an ugly architecture. Ningpo is strongly influenced in Buddhism by the nearness of Phu Tho Island of the Chusan group. There is a quaint pontoon bridge over one of the streams. It has shops upon it, and is the center of a fair. The women of Ningpo are known for their fine needlework, and the old schools were celebrated for their men of letters among the literati officials. The old Tien Fung pentagonal pagoda is perhaps the oldest in China, dating back 1,200 years. Its gold and white tiles have fallen, and the brick and mortar work of the seven stories is exposed.

Politically, Ningpo is progressive. It went over to the “Han Republic” rebels on November 5, 1911. In the early days of the Portuguese at this port, the Ningpo men rose up, destroyed thirty-five Portuguese ships, and slaughtered eight hundred of the crews, because they claimed the foreigners had gone inland and captured Chinese women on the Sabine plan. The city was captured by the Taiping rebels in 1862. Off Ningpo a fierce engagement between the Chinese and English fleets took place in October, 1841. Nimrod Bay, near Ningpo, is to be the central base for the new Chinese navy. In the turmoil of 1898, when the nations of Europe were striving to partition China, despite the protests of America and Britain, the French, on July 16th, landed marines at Ningpo and tried to take a temple graveyard for a settlement, incidentally adding twenty Chinese to the number to be buried in the graveyard! Ningpo is soon to have a railway connection with the west and south.

Hangchow, the capital of Chekiang province, is famous as the city of the Roaring Tidal Bore. The walls are twelve miles around. The bore is best seen at Haining pagoda, east of the city. The tourist should go at moonlight to see the unforgettable white specter riding in on the wheels of the night. The legend is that the Wu prince, Tse Hsu, committed suicide, and the Chinese go to the bore to see him sweeping by in his fury. The stone-faced river wall has stone cradles built for junks to outride the terrific main bore. The city has railway and canal connection, and launch tows are now much used instead of sail. The Golden King Hill is in the center of the city by the lake side. It is crowned with a Buddhist temple. The lake has a causeway, lake temples and pagodas. The city is famous for its beautiful waterscapes, like the view of Western Lake (Si Hu), and the view from Thundering Peak Tower (Lui Fung Tah). This tower is without the usual ornate galleries, and shows the Arab influence which crept up the coast in the old days, and established itself at Hangchow in mosques, etc. Three separate attempts were made to capture China for Mohammedanism; they were made in Kansu, Yunnan and Chekiang provinces. The Red Imperial Palace at the lake side was once the center of the cultured Sung dynasty, thirteenth century. Marco Polo visited and praised the beautiful ancient city as follows: “Beyond dispute, it is the finest and noblest city in the world.” It is now a center of the silk, wine, fan, lantern, tea, tinfoil, camphor, hardware, book, vegetable oil, etc., trade. The city was captured by the republicans on November 5, 1911, the Tartar city strongly resisting. With Soochow, it is called the most fashionable city, and the home of the best dressed women of China. Doctor Main’s model leper hospital is here. The American Presbyterians have erected on a lovely hillside over the water a number of buildings of the important new Hangchow University. The Tartar walled city is on the northwest. There are a governor’s yamen, many pailoo honorary arches, the massive Great Peace Bridge, canals, famous temples, shops and fine residences, for the Chinese of this section seem to have a civic pride. The rolling suburbs of Hangchow are the most beautiful in China, reminding one perhaps of England’s lake country. The modern parliament buildings of the province of Chekiang are erected at Hangchow. There is also a native university and normal school.

Nanking, the largest walled city of the Ming emperors and Taiping rebels, and the first republican capital and assembly headquarters, is very dear to the hearts of the Chinese race. It is the center of the classic Mandarin pronunciation used by the north and the cultivated of all China. The name translated means southern capital. The great Yangtze River sweeps beneath the walls, and the city has canal and railway connection of the finest. The city, as was discovered when General Chang defended it, is commanded by the peaks of Purple Mountain on the north. There are fortified hills within the city, and great avenues down which run modern electric cars. Ruins of the last pure Chinese dynasty remain: the Ming palace, the picturesque tombs, and an avenue lined with wonderful gigantic camels, lions, elephants, etc., similar to the Ming Avenue at Nankow on the Great Wall above Peking. Emperor Hung Wu’s monument is a stone monolith, erected on a gigantic turtle’s back. The tomb itself is square. In the same manner that the Japanese and Russians unavoidably pounded the Manchu tombs at Mukden with shot, the imperialists and republicans pounded these revered Ming tombs in 1911. Bloody General Chang’s slaughter of the republicans and non-combatants at Nanking in November, 1911, will be hissed at in history forever. Viceroy Chang Jen held the first Chinese exhibition at Nanking in 1910. He established water, electric and gas works, and broad roads, and was in many ways a most enlightened leader. The foreign settlement is in part on Siakwan Island. Across the river on the north at Pukow, a British railway goes to Tientsin and Kiaochou, and south to Shanghai runs the splendid Shanghai-Nanking British railway, the best built road in China. As usual, the city is divided into Tartar and Chinese sections. There are military and naval colleges, a native provincial university and an arsenal. Nanking Union University of the Methodists and Presbyterians is famous, and is discussed in another chapter. The students have adopted athletics and propose to send a team to Olympic games. The city has famous pagodas and temples, like the Pi-Che-Ko, the Buddhist Temple of Ten Thousand Gilded Gods, the White Star Temple, etc. The Taipings burned the famous yellow and white porcelain pagoda which once stood here, and which was the most ornate pagoda in China. Some of the tiles are in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. American firms have established themselves, and consulates, churches, clubs and all that goes with foreign life will now come up to the favorite city of republican China, whose ancient culture hangs like a golden cloud over its memories. There are newspapers, paper mills, silk and satin filatures, fan and cotton factories, shoemakers, tailors, porcelain kilns, etc. The city gave its name to the shiny cotton, “Nankeen”, used throughout China and Europe. Ink, flower, bath, vase, tile, book and jewel makers abound. Its artists are skilled. In the days of the old-style examinations, thousands of candidates used to gather in the great park of brick stalls. Nanking became a viceregal city when it ceased to be the southern capital. Its guilds and boards of trade are famous and progressive; each has its fine hall. Industry, learning, politics, foreign trade and medicine will henceforward take a mighty hold at Nanking, where the first provisional president of China, the world-wanderer, Doctor Sun Yat Sen, bowed to a modern representative assembly on January 1, 1912.

Shanghai is the queen of middle China, the ruler of the Yangtze River, at whose gates she sits. It is often called the “Paris of the Far East”, which remark refers to its social life, for it is not nearly so picturesque as its rival, Hongkong, or that queen of beauty, Fuchau. The fine black sand, once yellow loess, and saturated clay bed under Shanghai is four hundred and fifty feet thick. For the large modern buildings, it is necessary to sink a heavy girder-reinforced concrete raft, and build the structures on that. Even these buildings sink five inches as compared with the foot that ordinary pile and brick buildings sink. Life is in a whirl at Shanghai. The river bund is crowded, and so is the long, winding Bubbling Well Road. The concessions are splendidly managed from a foreign point of view, and vie with each other in public spirit. The Chinese, however, feel greater warmth for Hongkong, which gives them representation on the council. In Shanghai there are mixed courts, consular courts, an American Superior Court, and Chinese courts. The Chinese are planning for the day when they will try all Chinese offenders. There is an imposing cathedral, and a modern Venetian style railway station. Good libraries, magnificent clubs, theaters, hotels of all nations, taxicabs, electric trams and rickshaws are among the conveniences. The separate post-offices of all nations are somewhat confusing. All the sports,—racing, golf, tennis, shooting, house-boating, swimming, etc.,—may be enjoyed, and the military enthusiast has almost the same opportunity that he has at proud brave Hongkong. The Shanghai settlements protect themselves with the Municipal Volunteer Guard, in which a special corps of Europeanized Chinese can be enrolled. Secret societies, both foreign and native, have their temples. Shanghai has been the chief center of the native reform newspapers which agitated from the time of the coup d’État of 1898 to the rebellion of October 10, 1911, and at Shanghai the peace conferences between the south and the north were held in January, 1912. Outside of iron and coal, one can see here almost all of China’s efforts to equal the Occidental in industrial activity in modern mills. The Japanese are in strong evidence at Shanghai in ownership of Chinese cotton manufacturing. In speculating, no city can approach Shanghai. The awful rubber collapse of 1910 mowed down Chinese as well as foreigners. A military band plays in the public gardens and in the hotels. The musical and literary life of the colony is well developed. On North Honan Road is the immense plant of the Commercial Press which translated a million dollars’ worth of text-books last year for China’s schools. Its president is Chang Yuan Chi. The English newspapers of the port are known world wide for their scholarliness, and the Chinese press is making a mark for its patriotism and progress. The Bubbling Well Road cemetery and the Pahsien (Catholic) cemetery contain many melancholy monuments of famous foreign pioneers. In meteorological science, the Sicawei Observatory, under the control of the Jesuits, is facile princeps; indeed in this field this order has led in China and in the Philippines since the eighteenth century. Shanghai shares with Hankau the title of head of the railway system; that is to say one is the New York and the other the Chicago of the land. There is no computing what the future trade will be at Shanghai. The climate is not much improved on the damp sea-level misery which one experiences at Hongkong, Canton, and Amoy, but there are brave hearts in Shanghai, and the noblest of women who will endure any physical torture so long as they know that they are doing their duty in not deserting the advanced firing line of civilization and philanthropy.

The leading educational institution is St. John’s University, managed by the American Episcopalians. Nothing but praise can be accorded to it, and its future will be great. Already great men in China, such as Alfred S.K. Sze, once named as minister to Washington, and Doctor W.W. Yen, once secretary of the Foreign Board, are saying: “I am a St. John’s alumnus.” The university is five miles from the bund landing. Other missionary and native educational and medical institutions, like the Nan Yang University, are of a high order. The intellectual life is advanced, for at Shanghai live most of the Occidentalized Chinese and retired officials.

A great arsenal is located here. There is some abandon in the French quarter, which tolerates perhaps the lowest opium joints in the world, and the Foochow Road exhibits its brothel life the most brazenly of any street in the world. The dives of native Shanghai have been notorious the world over for disappearance of victims.

There are wonderful silk shops on Nanking and Foochow Roads; luxurious tea gardens, fine temples like the Pan Tuck Ih and the Kwang Sang Kee; splendid furniture shops; guild halls like that of the Shansi Bankers; the Yu Yuen gardens, etc. The Hong Ku market should be visited early in the morning, and the wonderful products of a rich district, intensively farmed, will surprise a stranger. The place is famous for its houseboat trips. The boat people are called Tankas, the tribe coming from Kiangsu province. They are related to the old Hongkong Hakka tribe. Wonderful farms can be studied on Tsun Ming Island. Interesting pagodas, like the Ta Kong, are to be seen. It is the theatric custom of the Germans to erect over the earth monuments to their dead who have fallen when in conflict with other races; this explains the “Iltis” monument. Shanghai, soon to be the center of a vast railway development, was the first apostle of railways for China, the noted old Jardine firm building a railway to Woosung, twelve miles away, as far back as the 60’s. The Manchus, who have always been reactionaries at heart, promptly tore it up and stacked it to rust out in distant Formosa Island. The native city is not large, nor are the moated walls substantial, brick instead of stone being used. There are six double gates of iron. Manila was the first city of the Far East to tear down part of its walls and Shanghai will probably be the second. The Taiping rebels of the 60’s captured the city, and the population went over to the revolution in November, 1911, thus depriving the effective Admiral Sah of the Manchu navy of his ammunition, which Shanghai arsenal had furnished up to that time. As Shanghai grows she will probably extend toward her port, Woosung, twelve miles away, and a Conservancy Board must arrange for vast expenditures to prepare for a large steamship tonnage now that the Pacific ocean is narrowing because of faster steamers being put on the route. Imported goods for China are mainly stacked in Shanghai’s godowns, not even subsidiary stocks being held at ports as far away as Newchwang. This practise must change somewhat and Shanghai take particular care of the Yangtze valley, which is a kingdom of 150,000,000 people in itself.

The quaint Kiangsu junks are disappearing, and vast fleets of launches and mere cargo junks have come into use. To see the picturesque old life on the waters, one must now go farther inland. Shanghai is famous for its peony, chrysanthemum and lily gardens. It is a florist’s paradise, because it lies in the valley of the sun. Its dress show on the bund and Bubbling Well Road, Hong Kew Park, Public Gardens and Jockey Club grounds, almost rivals in silk the floral creations of nature. Some of the costumes are amusing. A tall Sikh, “bearded like the pard”, and wearing an immense red turban, comes along the road with never a look to right nor left and never a smile on his eager face. His gown looks like a loose white nightshirt, over which he has forced a small tight vest of bright colors and flashy buttons. The nightshirt is gathered in about his legs, which are bare below the knee. On his feet he wears Punjab slippers, which curve up at the points like a gondola. So he fareth forth into the perpetual comedy of the Shanghai streets and maloos! The London “bobby” looks at him but does not arrest him, because on official occasions this same Sikh is the bobby’s partner on police duty, when, however, he buttons himself within a decent blue tunic and dons long trousers, though the turban is maintained to him for tradition’s sake.

All the foreign banks, the Hongkong bank, and the Chinese National and Shansi banks, have branches here, and it is proposed to have branches of large Chinese-American banks and steamship companies. Fault must be found with the modern native as well as the European architecture of Shanghai, that they are not perpetuating and adapting the extremely beautiful Chinese style in roof, screen, portals, columns, terminal ornaments, panels, pavilions and approaches. We of the Occident are barbarians to intrude in any land and debauch its beautiful architecture in the way we are universally doing. All praise to some of the missionary societies, that as usual they are the first to do right in a beautiful way by building in the Chinese manner in China. A Grecian building like Boone University, at Wuchang; a top-heavy German building like those at Kiaochou; a New York cave building like some at Tientsin; a British barn like some on the praya at Hongkong, even an Italian Renaissance like some on the Shanghai bund, are a trespass unto architectural sacrilege in artistic China. Let us keep to the galleries, the curved lines, the rich roof, the colored panels, the enameled tiles of pagoda and temple as we raise stone on stone in glorious old China, for she is the mother of the arts, and has sat longest at the fountain of beauty, if not at the anvil of arms. The extension of the American post-office to Shanghai, whereby a letter can be sent from Shanghai to New York for two cents gold is a remarkable achievement, and speaks much for the generosity of the Chinese Revenue Board in permitting this heavy competition. Many of the other nations have post-offices, but the rates are higher. The great international Opium Commission, its chairman the American, Bishop Brent, which did the impossible by disenthralling a hundred million habituÉs from the pythonic toils of opium in two years, sat in Shanghai in February, 1909, in its most memorable conference. The chief credit is due to America for leadership in the altruistic sentiment, and to China, Britain, India and Hongkong for the immense altruistic sacrifice of revenue. Now that the pipe and the poppy fields have been wiped nearly out, it remains for the nations to stamp out morphia, the hypodermic syringe and the drugged cigarette. And poor China is not the maker of these infernal tools. Shanghai has a modern water, an electric and street making plants, which are being copied through China as fast as funds can be collected by the municipalities.

For a long time it was impossible to escape quickly from the deadly summer climate, but railways and steamships have placed the inland mountain resorts of Kuling, at Kowkiang, 3,000 feet high, and at Mokan Mountain within easy reach. Phutho, the famous Buddhist mountain island, is also near enough for quick steamship service. Every debilitated Shanghai dweller used to go to far Japan at great cost to recuperate, but this expense will be less necessary, as these nearer resorts are opened up by a fast developing transportation service. Kuling Mountain is a missionary resort. Before it was discovered broken-down workers had to be sent to Japan or home on a furlough if they were able to stand the long voyage and the boards were able to stand the expense. The work of missionaries is the hardest under dangerous pioneer conditions, and Kuling Mountain is enabling the missionary quickly to restore herself or himself to efficiency without leaving China. The waters around Shanghai, including Seven Mile Lake, afford excellent facilities for house-boating. The municipality uses tall, red-turbanned Sikh police from India, as well as native Chinese lukongs, all under foreign officers. The docks, ways and engine shops of Shanghai, both foreign and native owned, are equipping the waters of Central China with small steamboats, though there is a strong competition from Hongkong, Japan and Britain, and some competition from Manila. Shanghai can not set out thousands of lanterns on a dozen hills 1,800 feet up in the night skies, as gorgeous Hongkong can, yet her more intimate garden and house illuminations are famous in China. The poet may justly rave and sigh:

Even the shop signs are lanterns. China is the home of that nonsputtering, cold vegetable tallow that makes the only perfect lantern candles. The silver shops rival those of Hongkong, Nanking and Soochow, but beware of the German and Japanese machine-made imitation. The artist only can put his soul and a luck message for you into what he makes slowly by hand; anything else is not an objet d’art. There are very fine bronze statues in Shanghai, and the pottery stores are a delight. The market stalls are a mine of yellow, red and pink in all shades, for these sub-tropics are a hothouse of fruit: pumeloes, persimmons, mangostines, lichees, oranges, bananas and nuts. The grape and pear country is much farther north, even to Shangtung province.

There have been famous consuls at Shanghai, like Sir Harry Parkes, whose statue is erected on the bund. He became British minister, and did much for British diplomacy and world trade in Chinese wars. The first government of the rebellion of October, 1911, opened in Shanghai, with Wu Ting Fang as foreign minister. Shanghai, like Tientsin and other river ports, has its great conservancy question in the matter of keeping the channel free from loess and sand silt. Dredging is infinitely too expensive, and the wit of man has to be matched against the will of tide and stream. At Shanghai the course seems to be to keep an immense tidal basin above the port, as at Seven Mile Reach, ready to assist the ebb tide with a flushing flow. A Department of Rivers and Harbors will yet be the busiest and have the largest budget in China. At present, Conservancy Boards, assisted by loans and government help, take care of the expensive and difficult work as best they are able. The foreign engineers employed are exceedingly able men.

Suchow, a walled city of ten miles in circumference, the Venice of China, lies on the Grand Canal, northwest of Shanghai. It is the center of a population of several millions. The city is intersected with canals, and has, among its gates, six unique water gates. Hills surround the wide plain, which is picturesquely marked also with canals and camel’s-back bridges. The city has long been famous for its culture, the beauty of its women, the rich designs of its imperial silk looms, its artists, its luxurious gardens and its boat life. Foreign settlements are both within the walls and in the suburbs. The shops on Kwei Tsze, Dragon, Peach and other streets, manufacture paper, wall-paper, lacquer, horn, glass, porcelain, furniture, ivory, cotton, linen, iron, copper, etc. The city has launch connection with the Yangtze ports and railway connection west to Nanking, north to Tientsin, and south to Shanghai and Hangchow. In addition to the wonderful sunken gardens in Shu Park, there are also public gardens, libraries, modern schools, a governor’s palace, a famous monster octagonal pagoda overlooking a picturesque, sinuous, bridged canal, a massive customs bridge, the South Horse bridge, twin Burmese pagodas, and in contrast with their richness, near by, a square Ink pagoda, a provincial university, a Confucian temple, the very artistic South Gate pagoda, statues in Tsang Lang pavilion, Mohammedan and Buddhist cemeteries. Modern architecture is represented by the American Methodist University, which has what the new Chinese particularly appreciate, a fine clock tower. It is a sign of the times in China, for the old Chinese ignored exact time. The American Presbyterians have a most important publishing and translating department in Suchow, which had much to do with germinating the wonderful New China, which in Suchow particularly was ready for the seed. Modern medicine is represented by Blake Hospital. The city was sacked by the Taipings and captured by General Gordon, whose victorious legions thundered through the east gate. So great an authority as the Japanese Marquis Ito declared that the West never should have supported the Manchu against the Taiping revolution; that the reforms of 1911 could have been effected in 1863. I humbly differ with this opinion, as Hung and Yang were very different leaders from Sun Yat Sen and General Li Yuan Heng of the immortal revolution of October 10, 1911.

At Hankau, the first battlefield of the October, 1911, revolution, the finest-developed foreign concession, running along the Yangtze River, is owned by Britain, but many of the lessees of the palatial homes are Russian tea merchants. All nationalities are admitted to the municipal council of these model British settlements. Next to the British comes a Russian settlement, with French, German and Japanese settlements following. The Americans, as usual, club with the British settlement, which is generally called “The Settlement”. These concessions were granted by the treaty of Peking and following treaties. Hankau has railway connection with Peking, and it will be linked up with the other great centers west and south. The river connects it with the east, and a riverine railroad will eventually be run from Nanking, which is already railed up with Shanghai. The burned native city of Hankau is to be reconstructed as the model city of China. Wide parallel avenues are to run north and south and wide boulevards east and west. All blocks and squares are to be geometrical. This is an astonishing departure from the pig-path streets of the other native cities. The three cities at the junction of the Han and Yangtze Rivers, Hankau, Hanyang and Wuchang, are one metropolitan district, as are Brooklyn, New York and Jersey City. At Wuchang, in the barracks of the Eighth Division, the revolution actually broke out in force, as far as the regular army was concerned, on October 10, 1911, before it extended to Hankau. Wuchang was the headquarters of the famous Viceroy Chang Chih Tung, the first of the conservative progressives, and one of the three viceroy props of the Dowager Tse Hsi’s throne for thirty-five years. He was the most honorable old-style mandarin that ever ruled the provinces of China. The city is walled and is divided by Serpent Hill, which will be tunneled. It has long been an educational center, the provincial native university and modern schools being located here. Bishop Roots, of the Ohio Episcopalians, founded the noted Boone University at Wuchang, and the New York Episcopalians have St. Hilda’s Girls’ School. Stokes and Thomas Hall, of Boone University, have Ionic Greek porticoes, which look out of place in ornate warm China. The university draws its pay pupils from the rich merchants and officials of Hankau. There is also the Griffith John College of the London Mission, a normal school of the American Baptists, a Swedish college; and Lord Cecil and Oxford and Cambridge Universities propose to start their great university here. It is a garrison and arsenal city, and is famous for its bronzes and pagodas. On Flower Hill stands the famous three-story pagoda. The German firm of Carlowitz has established an antimony smelter, and there are extensive cotton mills, some of them now owned by Japanese bankers. This red earth province is famous for its minerals, silk, tea, cotton, paper, wax and particularly for the political independence of its inhabitants, as the Eighth Division has immortally recorded in history.

Hanyang, a mile across the river, has the famous steel plant established by Chang Chih Tung. It is becoming one of the most important steel plants in the world, and Japan and Western America will not call upon it in vain, as they are indeed now doing. Dock yards will doubtless be established also. The American Baptists have a large hospital at Hanyang. Hanyang has an arms manufactory, a cannon foundry and a powder mill.

Much of Hankau was burned by those firebrands, the Imperial Third Division, under General Feng, in November, 1911, a deed which the south will never forget, if they ever forgive, as it was entirely unnecessary. Many millions of property were destroyed in a land which economically can not well afford the loss of one cent. The great city, which numbered over a million inhabitants, will be rebuilt on the high banks sixty feet above winter level of the two rivers. The river rises over forty feet in summer. The Anglicans have established the church of St. John the Evangelist, and the American Episcopalians have St. Paul’s and St. Peter’s churches. There are fine clubs, a race and a golf course, a foreign volunteer organization which has seen much active service. There is also an English newspaper, the Central China Post, and many native papers. The Russians are prominent because of their tea trade. The steamship service is steadily growing, Hankau being at the head of steamship navigation. Lighter boats are taken for Ichang. The railway connects with Peking, and soon railways will run south, east and west, and a bridge will cross the Yangtze River on the road to Canton and Singapore. The Deutsche-Asiatische Bank, the Russo-Asiatique Bank, other foreign banks, consulates and foreign traders, are housed palatially. The great walled city is the most famous in China for its trade and provincial guilds. As in old London, the trades have gathered on one street, or in one district. Hankau is and will be the trade and industrial hub, the Chicago of China, and here foreign firms should locate without delay. The pioneer names connected with Hankau are Bishop Ingle, whose splendid tomb can be seen in the foreign cemetery, and Archibald Little, the explorer, author, tea trader, and the first foreigner to run a steamer from Hankau to Chungking through the terrific rapids of the glorious gorges between Ichang and Wan Hsien.

Ichang is the advance post on the Yangtze for the commercial attack on the Chingtu, Chungking and far western trade. It is at the head of navigation, and is sending out its railway to conquer the gorges and rapids. There is a walled riverine city up seventy feet of stairs; a foreign settlement; golf course, to be sure; Episcopal trade schools; clubs; consulates; Established Church of Scotland Mission; interesting temples and pagodas. Ichang has for immemorial years been the headquarters of perhaps the bravest boatmen in the world, the Hupeh trackers and sailors of the gorges. Read a hundred books of travel and you have their story. Here also is the headquarters of China’s red life-boat service, an effective and daring company of men. Hupeh can point with pride to such material in brawn and courage, on which to build a provincial parliament or assembly. There are notable guilds in Ichang.

Chifu, on the gulf of Pechili, is a noted bathing resort for foreigners from all over the Far East. There is a splendid foreign quarter, with a well-appointed club, churches and hotels. The view of the many cone-shaped purple hills, the bluest of seas and yellowest of sands, will not quickly be forgotten. There are islands which invite boating, such as Temple and Lighthouse Islands. The finest fruit in China, such as grapes, pears and apples, is grown at Chifu. The stock was brought from America by Doctor Nevius and other missionaries in the 80’s. There is also a tree-cranberry, the Red Fruit (Hung Kwo). Worms, fed on oak leaves, produce the famous tough Chifu silk, which is as popular in China as abroad. Chifu was known for its blockade runners in the Russian-Japan War of 1904–5. In the famous engagement of August, 1904, several Russian warships from Port Arthur broke through Admiral Togo’s iron-bound investiture, and reached Chifu, but the Japanese broke in, and despite international law, abducted the Russian torpedo boat destroyer Reshitelni. The other Russian vessels they torpedoed in the Chinese harbor. Chifu has a naval college of modern equipment. The district produces straw braid in great quantities for the hats of the fashionable women of the world, and her other products of beans, peanuts and vegetable oils are well known. Gold and coal are found near by, and many vessels call for coaling. Missionary societies are active, and have a wide opportunity, for this is the home province of Confucius and Mencius, and the inhabitants have a literary, political and inquiring turn of mind. The Chinese of Chifu are noted for their height, as compared with the busy little men of the southern provinces, whom we know in America and Britain. Many of them emigrated to South Africa in 1904 for a six years’ indenture, when they were all returned. Chifu is to have railway connection with the German and Chinese roads to the south and west. The city went over to the revolutionists on November 10, 1911, and a republican column, reinforced by the republican navy, operated from here against the imperialists at the capital, Tsinan. Not far from Chifu, at Wei Hai Wei, the British keep a strong garrison on China’s soil.

Tsingtau, in Shangtung province, is a German port, and a colonial experiment which has attracted much attention because of the experiment of Henry George’s “single-tax-on-land” plan, in its effort to attract improvers of land, and spread out, instead of congest cities. In 1898 the Germans forced a lease of it at the same time that Russia occupied Manchuria. The Japanese drove the Russians out of Manchuria, which they have largely occupied themselves, treaties notwithstanding, but no one has driven the Germans out of Shangtung, the most sacred of the provinces of China. It was largely this German seizure that precipitated the “Boxer” massacres in 1900 under the secret instigation of the Empress Tse Hsi. The port and main colony is two hundred square miles in area, but the most remarkable (the only one of its kind except that of the Japanese in southern Manchuria) concession is that of sixty miles wide and two hundred and fifty miles long from the port back inland to Tsinan, the illustrious capital of the province, which dates back to 1100 B.C. Through this land the Germans have built a strategic railway, by which they could cut off communication between the northern and southern provinces. The Chinese have never forgiven and will never forgive this affront. It is therefore one of China’s many unsettled questions. The bay is fifteen miles long by fifteen miles wide, surrounded by hills from 1,500 to 3,000 feet high, on which the Germans have planted forests in fine style. The ocean boulevard is one of the five most scenic roads in the East, the others being Hongkong’s Jubilee Road, Macao’s Cacilhas Bay Boulevard and the Manila Luneta and Baguio Roads in the Philippines. The entrance to the commercial harbor at Ta Pu Tao is two miles wide. Fortifications, docks, godowns, railways with patented iron sleepers, hotels, banks, hospitals, statues, magnificent homes, educational institutions for both Germans and Chinese, have all been set out in characteristic German methods. It was by this railway that the imperial troops were provisioned in November, 1911, when the revolutionists had cut off their ammunition at Shanghai, Hanyang and Nanking arsenals, and the Chinese have not forgotten this, claiming that with all their criticism of the “Yellow Peril” the German foreign office, at the beginning of the revolution, was at heart pro-Manchu. The port was made a free port on the pattern of Hongkong, and while a larger trade has developed, Tientsin (with her port, Taku) holds her place in the competition. Without the railway to Tsinan, Tsingtau could not hold her own as a shipping center.

Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Spirited photograph of the turning tide, Pearl River, Canton. Speedy slipper boats, sanpans, junks; modern steam launch. These launches are rapidly transforming China’s transportation in the south.

Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Wider maloos, or roads, are being broken through the cities by tearing down the shops on one side of the way.

Copyright, American Episcopal Church, Foreign Board, N.Y.

A vigorous game of Association football at Boone (American) University, Wuchang, Central China. Note the interested crowds.

The sympathy between the natives and the foreigner which exists at Newchwang, Tientsin, Shanghai and Hongkong, is lacking at stern, military, exotic Tsingtau. Yet the Germans have set a splendid object lesson in the precision and strength of the Tsingtau municipal establishment. The fine German navy is always in evidence, and the finer German army is everywhere. Many German industries have been established, and are run with as grim a determination, being backed by the “syndicates”, when they are losing money as when they are making it. German merchants seem to thrive better, and prefer to keep their stocks at the many international settlements, where trade has followed natural channels. The coal wealth at Poshan and elsewhere, which the German railway has developed, is enormous, but the Chinese are bitter that the profits, on the principle of “all the traffic will bear”, all go to Germany and not to China. It is noticeable, in contrast with the British occupation of Hongkong and other colonies, that the Germans have not kept the Chinese names for the hills and bays. Tsingtau has splendid rail and ship connection north and south. Among the exports to Europe are the famous silk and straw braid of the province, egg products, black pigs, coal, wheat, millet, sorghum, maize, beans in particular, peas, hemp, copper, iron, antimony, asbestos, silver, sulphur, gold, rugs, the famous liu-li vitreous crockery of wonderful colors, castor oil, peanuts, fruit of excellent quality, etc. Years ago the German gunboat Iltis was lost in a typhoon while trying to make this port, where the Germans were later to establish themselves in a rivalry with Russia’s aggression in Manchuria.

Tientsin, the great port of Peking, is another concession city, where the various nations keep their civilizations and military and naval forces bright for the inspection of the Chinese, who live contiguous in a walled city, where Li Hung Chang and his protÉgÉ, Yuan Shi Kai, made their names famous as viceroys and intermediaries between Orient and Occident. The city is at the head of the historic Grand Canal. Its river, the Pei Ho, runs up toward Peking. It has splendid railway connection west, south and north. The national railways of North China are managed here under the direction of Jeme Tien, Doctor Wang and Chang Kee, with foreign advisers like Mr. Kinder and Mr. Pope available. Rich coal mines, especially the famous old Kaiping, are near, and there is a vast export of this product, as well as of carpet wool, camel’s hair, camel’s-hair rugs, jujube preserves, etc., for the world. As it is a most important banking center, a great amount of gold is handled. Concessionaires have flocked here, eager for privileges, and the game has opened anew. Foreign troops have grounded their arms here more than at any international port in China.

On account of its flat surroundings, Tientsin is the least picturesque city of China. There is a recreation ground, Victoria Gardens, native gardens, a race course around a graveyard, a jockey club, much society, naval and military life, theatricals, and facilities for the many athletic, swimming, boating and skating clubs. Except in summer the climate is charmingly dry; the wind and sand storms are greatly feared, however. The loess dust is as penetrating as the alkali dust of Arizona. A British military cemetery has many melancholy monuments of the foreigner’s occupation of an alien land, where disease and the casualties of many famous bombardments have mowed down their costly toll. There are electric cars, electric light, gas and water plants, fine clubs, churches, consulates, missions, a Y.M.C.A., the magnificent Gordon Hall, science and military colleges of the best, hospitals, native and foreign schools of all grades, excellent roads like the bund and Tai Ku, fine fur, silk and pottery shops. The English newspapers like the Times and China Critic are important, and many Chinese papers like the Ching Wei Po are very influential in the coming New China. There is much foreign military music, and the natives are learning the delightful art, the viceroy’s band already being clever. Many Chinese have made their names here under foreign tutorship, Yuan Shih Kai and Tang Shao Yi, for instance; and Li Hung Chang held forth here in his yamen on the river bank in his most influential days. The Pei Yang University is the best native modern university in China. The medical school trains with foreign help, what China needs most at the moment, native physicians and nurses. The port, more than any other, has for many years had a restraining influence on the Manchus. Without it, no one knows what the reactionary dynasty would have promulgated in the way of edicts. Tientsin is interesting for its wonderful colored clay images, its excellent rugs, its salt heaps, its fish-pies and hot potato pedlers, who shout their goods along “Eternal Prosperity” and other native streets. There is interesting French life on the Tai Ku Road in the French settlement. The native walled city is a model in Chinese municipal government, as far as activity and order, but not so far as beauty is concerned. Among the many steamship lines, the native China Merchants (a government line) has a branch here. A Conservancy Board has much work cut out for it by the Pei Ho bar which hampers the growing shipping. The National Chinese Posts and Telegraphs have branches. There are native temples, and mosques for the Mohammedan Chinese, who have absorbed the old Honan Jewish Chinese. Tientsin is very hot, and the summer resort for bathing is up the coast of Pechili Gulf at Pei-Tai-Ho, where the Great Wall meets the sea. This is the water resort also for the Pekingese foreigner and foreignized native.

There is much industrial activity, and Tientsin, with its million of inhabitants, will be a great center for the import of machinery for the rich provinces of Pechili and Shansi and the vast territory of Mongolia, as it will also be the port for the mining and agricultural wealth of those rich provinces, including chilled meats, millet, sugar, flour, wheat, beans, fruit, nuts, skins, furs, vegetable oils, ores, etc. In some respects the possible new ports of Chin Wang Tao, Chung How So, and Jinkow, on the Gulf of Pechili, could compete with Tientsin. The Peking (British) Syndicate, of Shansi, and the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company, of Pechili, with their immense capitalization of $6,000,000 and $5,000,000, respectively, operate and make loans from Tientsin, and, as in all the ports, there are many land, coal, iron and milling companies, in which Chinese have shares. The tendency is to grant fewer franchises to foreigners, and let the Chinese exploit their own wealth in mines, transportation and public service, buying only from the foreigner the necessary machinery, and paying only to the foreigner a proper interest for loans, instead of the immense bonuses and concessions that have often been obtained. The tendency to water the stock of public service corporations and monopolies so as to hide the immense earnings from an overcharged public is creeping into China, and will be attacked by a courageous and indefatigable government. Tientsin is one of the two places (Peking being the other) from which it is most convenient for tourists to set out to see the Great Wall of China, the world’s grandest monument. The railway takes the tourist about one hundred and twenty miles along the Pechili coast to Shan Hai Kwan, where the wall meets the sea, and turning back climbs the vast mountain ranges, to the speechless wonder of the sightseer. One of the Chinese proverbs on this subject is: “Those who have seen least, stare most!” There are more Jews (not the lost colonies of Chinese Jews absorbed by the Chinese Mohammedans of Honan, Kwangtung and Kansu provinces) in business at Tientsin than at any port in China, not excepting Hongkong. In the warehouse of the American Trading Company, at Tientsin, six hundred men of the Fifteenth United States Infantry were quartered in the stormy days of the first months of 1912.

Peking stands at the end of the great seacoast plain as you go up from Tientsin by railway or by boat. Beyond rise the Hsi Shan (Western Mountains) and the Mongolian plateau and mountains. It is the most expansive city in the republic, because it is more built up than spacious Nanking; a court, a legation, a trading, an art, an educational, a health center in autumn, a military, but not a manufacturing center as yet, though it will be. It is more Mongolian and Manchu, perhaps, than pure Han Chinese. It is splendidly laid out, and with drainage and paved roads will attract fine equipages and even greater wealth than now resorts there. It has a water system, electric light, telephone, telegraph and railway service, wireless connection with the coast, a modern railway station at the famous Chien Men gate. Its fine Gothic Pe-Tang Cathedral, strangely within the purple imperial city, with its spires, looks as though it had been transported from France. Its porcelain temples are centers of wealth, if not of zeal and history. Its monuments, especially the city wall and gates, are the noblest. Its pavilions, like those in the late emperor’s garden, are the most artistic in the land. It is comparatively modern among the cities and capitals of China, going back only to 1150 A.D. as a provincial and national center. Coleridge has sung of the city. Kublai Khan, Marco Polo’s protector, was its first great emperor. The creator of Ming monuments, the artistic Yung Lo, is its next greatest emperor, and it was he who gave the present stamp to Peking. Its most illustrious Manchu emperor was Kang Hi, the potter, to whom Louis XIV. of France, signed himself as “your most dear and good friend, Louis.” The city is laid out on the plan of an immense Mongol camp of the plains, defense line within defense line three times, and not unlike CÆsar’s plans when on the march. The trading section of the city is filled with an immense gathering of camel, mule and pony trains, and the new railways bring coal from east and south. A master hand could turn the great camp into a hive of modern industry. Some day, perhaps soon, that will occur. The Peking market is well supplied by the Mongols of the plateau and the farmers of the Pechili plain, not to speak of what railways, canals and roads bring in from all points. More races and varied costumes are seen at Peking than at any other city, and the teak-barred shops are treasure houses. The Tartar city faces the north and in its center is the Forbidden, or Purple City, of the old Manchu court. Between the wall of the latter and the south wall of the Tartar city are the Wai Wu (Foreign Office), legations, hotels, railway station, banks, churches, missions, universities, hospitals, clubs, newspaper offices, shops, etc., all saying, according to the conservative Hanlin Chinese, in the words of our Belle of New York, “Of course you can never be like me, but be as like me as you’re able to be”. The union of Protestant medical missions at Peking, so as to form a hospital, medical college and nurses’ school of wide scope, has attracted nation-wide and world-wide attention. The beginning of the unifying of Protestants thus takes place effectively in the capital of oldest China, instead of at Geneva, Berlin, London or New York.

How much of the modern and the old, the Oriental and the Occidental, are mixed up in this wonderful city? There are modern steam rollers; donkey and camel trains, blue-turbaned couriers on Mongol ponies; springless, hooded Peking carts, the mule wearing a velvet cloth; bouncing mule litters; camel trains swaying up and down like the billows of the Yellow Sea; modern water tanks borne by steel towers; a modern zoo with a dragon-carved gate; automobiles; victorias drawn by swift Mongol or black Szechuen ponies; Russian droshkes drawn by three ponies going different paces; men tugging single-axle carts by long ropes and harness; coolies with baskets and boxes balanced from the bamboos on their sweating shoulders; wheelbarrow men transporting huge bags of millet or salt; men throwing water on the streets with big wooden spoons; rickshaws, and passenger chairs with ventilators and windows. There is a great military camp outside the walls. In the Portuguese cemetery outside of the west gate lie the famous Jesuits who nearly made the Manchu dynasty Catholic in Kang Hi’s day. In the revered British cemetery lie the bodies of the famous pioneers of our race, who, during the centuries, have fought forward the most advanced line of our civilization. Many of the graves and memorials, the trees and walls were desecrated in the “Boxer” outrages of 1900. There is a cemetery for that notorious tribe of palace eunuchs in the northwest of the Tartar city, and sons had to be bought, or “forged” for them so as to pay the necessary grave worship of Confucianism. There is the new Peking Club, the second in cost in the Far East; the Tsung Hua College, which trains students who are to go to America and England; and where the old examination stalls and the Hanlin College stood under the ancient “literati” system, are the modern parliament buildings (Tzu Cheng Yuan); also National University, and the Wai Wu Pu (Foreign Office) halls, where Yuan Shih Kai had his headquarters in the exciting days of 1911–12. Towering over the Tartar city are the Gothic towers of the French Pe Tang Cathedral, which was successfully defended by Bishop Favier during the 1900 siege. The white marble pailoo arch to the German ambassador, who was assassinated in 1900, is notable, as are also numerous other marble, porcelain and painted arches, and marble bridges, balustrades and statues of lions. The statue to the German was erected under foreign compulsion and is hated. The wonderful street bazaars of Chien Men gate, Lung Fu Temple Street, wide Kaiser Street; the important Methodist and Union Hospitals of Hatamen Street; Legation, Tsung Pu, Tung Tan, Liu Li, Koulan, Butcher, Fan Tan, Lantern, Jadestone, Bamboo, Meridian and other leading streets should be visited. There is a Peking Tiffany; the firm name is Hsing Lung Tien. The city’s kilns and weavers are famous for their porcelain, cloisonnÉ and tapestries. Pedlers, however, bring almost everything, from the cheapest to the costliest, to one’s door. There are many native papers like the influential Chun Kuo Pao.

Some of the legations have been rebuilt since the 1900 siege, the Americans in particular occupying near the Chien Men gate a series of costly, but not architecturally proper buildings for artistic China. The British legation near the Wu Men gate is notable for two reasons: because it occupies Duke Liang’s Chinese palace, and because its compound was the center of the foreigners’ quarters in the Peking siege of 1900. The French legation rented Duke Tsin’s palace. In the sacred urns in the Temple Park in the south of the Chinese city, the bodies of the Sikh soldiers, who died or were killed in the 1900 siege, were cremated. The Art Gallery in the imperial city is of particular interest. The Lama (Tibet Buddhist) Temple, with its ornate pailoo arch, should be seen. The priests wear orthodox yellow robes and hats, and a red cloak with squares, which represent the rags of poverty as realistically as art cares to go. There is an immense statue of Buddha, and some small obscene statues which have been draped by the request of the legations, to the great and joyful surprise of the priests, who have discovered that they are now able to make more money in fees than when the statues were undraped, so perverse is tourist curiosity! A walk on the walls should not be neglected, especially where, between the Chien Men and Hata Men gates the American, British and other foreigners made their long stand in 1900. The ponderous fort-temples on the walls, with their interesting exhibit of columns and galleries, are characteristic. Red is the color of the Chinese, yellow and green the color of the Manchus, and the tiling of the roofs indicates where each predominates.

Peking has its many military memories. In 1900 the Ninth and Fourteenth Infantry, the Sixth Cavalry and the Marines of the cruiser Newark of the Americans fought their way here from the coast in General Gaselee’s union column of relief. The Wei-Hai-Wei Regiment of British Chinese in blue and white, came, too, with quotas from the forces of France, Germany, Russia and Japan. The Sun Wui Club brings leading Chinese and Occidentals together; that is, those Occidentals who have a maximum of good sense and national ambition and a minimum of out-of-date, insular “snobbery”. We once had a similar international club in Canton, which did good work in destroying difference and welding approximation. The Russian Mission in the Pei Kwan section of Peking is almost the only effort of the vast Greek Church to missionize China. Good music is now available, for both the National Customs and native armies, and all the foreign legations have trained bands, and there are some orchestras. The Union Medical College and Hospital on Hatamen Street is most notable, not only because of its effectiveness, but because the various evangelical denominations have first united in far away China. Some writers, like Lord Salisbury’s son, Lord Cecil, think this is the forerunner of union elsewhere. The example has been copied generally in China, as at Nanking, Tsinan, Canton, etc., and before long all medical, hospital and teaching work will be on the union plan in all the large centers. The Chinese are eager to assist, and join in with a whole heart. Reform started in Peking in 1898, when Kang Yu Wei and other Cantonese, trained at Hongkong, got the ear of the Manchu emperor, Kwang Hsu, and induced him to issue the famous reform edicts.

The peony gardens are notable, and the courts and gardens of the many temples, inside and outside of the walls, exhibit many horticultural treasures, but Northern China in general is more notable for wild flowers than hothouse products. There are Manchu tombs, and the Manchu palaces and gardens of Yuan Ming, Wan Shou and Ih Ho to the northwest to visit, and temples in the western hills, where the foreigners resort during the blazing summer of the plains, if they do not care to take the railway down to the bathing resort of Pei Tai Ho, or Chifu. The scenic railway running north takes one to the glorious Nankou pass in the Great Wall and to the Ming tombs. The station is at Liu Tsin outside the walls. To the northwest are the villages where the Manchu pensioners or bannermen were kept in idleness, which was one cause of the 1911 rebellion. As in many of the Chinese cities, there is a clepsydra water clock to be seen. Mints, banks, engraving plants, printing presses, electricity, modern water-works; primary, intermediate, trade and high schools, have all come to the reforming capital. There have been large hoards of bullion in the imperial city. The empress dowager, Tse Hsi, left many millions of silver, which were used to run the government for weeks during the rebellion in 1911–12. This money was collected by the eunuchs, compelling every official to pay for his daylight audience and honors, and crimes were “planted” on officials so as to have the excuse of fining them and thus adding to the Manchus’ imperial reserve. Great granaries exist where the tribute rice from the southern provinces was stored for a million or more subsidized Manchu soldiers and hangers-on. This rice formerly came to Tientsin and Peking by the Grand Canal and Pei Ho River. It was later brought north, through Li Hung Chang’s intervention, by the China Merchants’ Steamship Company, in which the government held the majority of the shares. The history of spying, intriguing, concession-hunting and diplomatic contests swells its largest at Peking, and old Legation Street and the Wai Wu Pu have heard perhaps more secret stories than any other diplomatic quarter of the world. Men of all nations, Manchus and Chinese, eunuchs, women, human parrots, dictographs secretly placed, waste-paper baskets, keys to private codes, the kitchen cabinet, keyhole sentinels, tapped telephone wires, field-glasses masked behind curtains, letter sweaters and those adders in the bosom, society detectives, have all had their part in the old Peking game of intrigue. Foreign trusts have come over the water to battle with local distrusts! Understanding has not always honestly wooed misunderstanding. Evasion has alternately successfully and unsuccessfully battled with invasion. “When is a promise not a promise” has been answered by, “At Peking, on both sides of the ethnological pale”.

Culture, learning, fashion and fools have often mixed in the drawing-rooms which face Legation, Meridian and Great Wall Streets. In dignity, the National Customs Service, managed by foreigners, takes its way somewhat apart on Koulan Street. With the British Legal, it is the best civil service in the Far East, the other legations depending in various degrees upon missionaries for their knowledge of Chinese. The American legation in recent years has equipped its staff with student interpreters. Foreigners learn attachment for the life, as their wits are kept at work. It has been a wonderful capital in exciting life, as it is in physical appearance. Foreign press bureaus have vied with one another in sending out men fitted to obtain privileged information. In summer, the working Pekingese throws away all the clothes that the law will allow; in winter, he puts on so many cotton-wadded coats that he looks like a balloon ready to ascend, if he were not weighted with a charcoal brazier tucked under his coat or up his sleeve. He has a stone or brick kang (stove), but he must lie close to it to get its meager warmth. He, therefore, uses it for a bed, and so does the whole insect race, who make it warm for him, even if the brick stove does not. When the schoolboy wrote his ambiguous essay that “crowded China is too thickly populated to be comfortable”, he may, therefore, have referred to other inhabitants than the men and women. The furs of Peking are famous, and many black chow-dog farms have been started in Mongolia to supply the foreign fur markets. Peking has been so looted by war and by collectors of its ceramic prizes that the shops and potteries of Liu Li Street contain less that is valuable than the museums of America and Europe. For the ordinary traveler who wants something beautiful, even if it is not old, there are thousands of shops and bazaar tables that display their tempting wares. As China reforms, and art is not sweated out of the provinces by grasping officials and courtiers, the traveler will be able to follow his quest back to the many old centers of production in the central and southern provinces; and this will be better for art, and better for the traveler. The whole nation used to tremble when an official, dowager, baby emperor, prince, regent, etc., had a birthday or one of their various anniversaries, because it meant that jade, jewels, costly furniture, tapestries, porcelain, etc., must prove the sincerity of congratulations, and as we fill the papier-mÂchÉ rabbit with candies on Easter Day the vase had to be filled with coins of worth. These presents were no sooner received than they were pawned by the indigent Manchus to the shopkeepers of Peking, or they were stolen and sold by the palace eunuchs. The Chinese system of keeping art in drawers instead of in glassed cabinets, in view, aided this thievery, for the rascally eunuchs were not soon found out.

Many wonderful stories are told of the mysterious ceremonies of the Manchu court at night; how soldiers suddenly lined Meridian Street, and no Chinese could leave his house but on pain of death. Then the Wu Men gate of the Forbidden City was thrown open under the smoking torches, and the pale Emperor Kwang Hsu was carried forth, robed in yellow, and his courtiers in red, gold and blue. Down Meridian Street they noiselessly marched southward, the soldiers turning volte-face along the street. The Chien Men gate into the Chinese city was thrown open, and through its Meridian Street the procession continued south for two miles to the temples and the open altar of Heaven, where midnight sacrifices of a black bullock, burned silk, grain and wine were made; a worship as old and as simple as that of the patriarchial days of Abraham. It was the worship of the ancestral Chou clan, which Confucius chronicled and the Manchu adopted so as to keep himself in veneration; and this right of sacrifice he has maintained in his abdication. The Pope Mikado has also retained his right to make similar sacrifices. Surely if the main hold on eastern peoples is to be a superstitious one, it is not so strong a hold as the republicans of China intend to set up in the minds and hearts of the new nation. God’s name was simply called “Tien”; i.e., heaven or sky. Then the procession hurried back long before the non-Manchus were awake. Other mysterious things happened in the night. The Wu Men gate was opened, and all courtiers and ministers then alone had their audience with the screened crown head. During the long regency of the Dowager Empress Tse Hsi and her predecessors, China was a land ruled by midnight decisions, and justice was as dark as the muffled and mysterious hour. Executions of the prominent were held at night on the common Meridian Road, which had been blocked off by soldiers. You never know at Peking when your passenger cart is standing over the altar of a life which was persecuted and sacrificed for opinion’s sake. No wonder that the Chinese, like other long-suffering reformers, are saying under their breath: “We have had enough of ‘plants’ and deeds done in darkness; let there be light.”

This wonderful walled capital of Mongol, Ming and Manchu dynasties, is not so old as the Great Wall of China, for it has been rebuilt several times, the imperial portion being about 1,000 years older than the inferior Chinese section to the south. It was as though the Chinese traders camped before the southern Chien Men gate to supply the Manchu court, and the Emperor Kia Tsing rose up and said: “Let us now take thought, and throw a wide wall around our purveyors’ bazaars also.” There is only one good thing about absolutism; i.e., to say is to do, and it was done. Peking has had many rivals as the capital of China: Nanking, the southern capital of the Mings, in particular; Hangchow, of the Sungs; and Canton, Wuchang, Chingtu and Shanghai have all put in their claims and maintained their flag in the breeze for a regal season. Geographically and strategically, Chingtu would be the proper capital of a united nation, and Wuchang would be almost as central and afford better trading facilities, a London of China, but it would not be so strong a strategic center. From a Chinese republican point of view, Canton, Nanking and Shanghai are foremost in their claims. Peking is weak because it is always within striking distance of Russia’s and Japan’s mighty armies. Almost alone of the world’s capitals, it is not at the water’s edge.

There are temples to nearly everything in Peking, a “Brooklyn of Churches”, but most of the altars this time are heathen: temples to Buddhas, sleeping in Nirvana, recumbent in Cingalese style; a splendid Lama Temple with wonderful carvings in wood and stone; God of War; Confucian; Taoist; Catholic Cathedral; Evangelical of every denomination of the three Protestant nations; Mohammedan mosques; God of Literature; God of Fox; Russian Greek Church; Portuguese Church; shrines over Buddha’s skin, teeth and a score of other things; Ancestral temples; Altars of the Sun, Moon, and Gods of Grain and Rain; temples to Buddha’s mother, and Gods of Success, and “World Peace” (not the recent invention of an armed peace!); Gods of Title Deeds, Dragons, Wind and Water, the North Star; Gods of Dead Elephants and Strong Tigers, etc. When the jolly men of Canton and another southern city heard of all this, glorious humorists that they are, they said they could “go it one better”. They erected with a rush a “Temple to Ten Thousand Gods”, all of whom look alike, even the images named for Marco Polo and “Chinese” Gordon. Chided with all this, a humorous Cantonese retorted: “Well, haven’t you Occidentals an Eden MusÉe and Madame Tussaud’s wax works; don’t take our idols as seriously as you do the Indian ones.” There are superbly carved marble dagobas in the Lama and Pi-Un-Se Temples. The Peking Lama is second in authority in the Buddhist world, and since General Chao Ehr Feng drove the Dalai Lama out of Tibet into India, the Peking Lama has now probably most power in the Buddhist world. The Pali Chuan pagoda outside the west wall is the most ornate in China. Burmese Buddhists brought their art influence thus far north, and under patronage of the Ming emperors cast it up like a pearl wrecked upon a barren shore; for the Manchu, who succeeded in the dynasty, is not an architect nor an artist. He has had to call in Chinese, Indian, Persian, Mohammedan and Jesuit architects from time to time to adorn his capitals and his graveyards at Mukden and Peking. There are towering, priceless bronze censers; stone and metal tablets; delightful octagonal marble mausoleums with circular second stories, topped with conic fluted roof, which is copied from the perfect act of the incomparable blue Temple of Heaven, and like the second story of the divinely beautiful choragic monument of Lysicrates at Athens. In his book, The Chinese, the author has referred to many other similarities between Greek and Chinese art and architecture, which are as wonderful as the dissimilarities. The ponderous gate forts, Manchu Drum and Ming Bell towers, with the largest bells in the world, sixteen feet high and nine inches thick, and the delightful compound or palace gates, are notable. The Buddhists have bell and statue foundries in the Tartar city, and there are potteries for dainty cloisonnÉ. There are said to be some lost Jewish Chinese at Peking, as at Kaifong. They are now butchers, and worship with the Mohammedans, having lost nearly all their religious, if not their phrenological distinction long ago. What proof is stronger that the phylacteries of any conviction should be worn day and night on the forehead, as well as engraven on the heart, “lest we forget”. The trees and lakes of the city and suburbs are conspicuous, because all Chinese buildings, except pagodas, are not over two stories in height, and do not dwarf the lovely landscape.

There is one dead foreign city in China, Cathay’s “Deserted Village”, immortal Port Arthur. Where are now the streets of palatial Renaissance palaces which eight years ago nestled under Golden Hill and lined the bund of the Eastern Port? Where are the massed battalions of Alexeieff’s troops, white-capped, white-tunicated and high-booted, which used to dress ranks on the broad parade ground behind Golden Hill? What stilled forever the music of the ringing glasses, drained of their sweet Roederer by gold-braided arms that lifted them quickly to harsh lips in Saratoff’s gay restaurant on the sunny bund? What hushed the song of the musÉe and Odessa ballet girls on the small stage in smoky Nicobadza’s CafÉ in the New Town? Over the breakers that lash the Tiger’s Tail Peninsula do the ghosts of Admiral Makharov, the court painter, Verestchagin, and seven hundred and fifty others of the mine-sunk Petropavlovsk battleship still whisper their mournful names like a dirge of St. Andrew, as on that sad gray morning of April 4, 1904? Where are the battleships Sevastopol, Peresviet, Poltava and Nicolai, which used to lie safely under Golden Hill, while terrific war harmlessly hurled fire and shell from Kikwan Hill, Pigeon Bay, where we used to shoot snipe, and Wolf’s Hill? Surely they are not the salvaged and transformed Sagami, Tango, Iki, etc., flying now the rayed, red sun instead of the white, blue and red flag of St. Andrew. On second view, they certainly are; there are the high freeboard of a Baltic-built vessel of the Kronstadt navy-yard.

We search in vain for the newspaper office of Alexeieff’s official organ, the Novo Krai, and we miss from the gay bund the dashing team of the richest Chinese compradore army-purveyor, Chih Fun Tai, Esquire. The naval dockyard across the harbor from Golden Hill is, however, developed better than ever, though you can not get near it because of the watchful Japanese picket, unless you wish to be incarcerated under the international spy act! The fine white hospital buildings to the west of the inner harbor are also improved. The wrecking crews are still working with derricks and drags at the narrow harbor entrance only two hundred yards wide upon the rock-filled hulls which Captain Hirose, the Hobson of Japan, sank there at the cost of his life, under the fire of Golden Hill on a hazy morning in April, 1904, so as to cork up the navy of Russia and allow Togo to scour the seas with his British naval preceptor at his side on the bridge, instead of being held in blockading leash. Around the harbor tower the great forts of strategically essential 203 Metre Hill, stubborn North Hill, Kikwan Hill, Ehr Lung (Two Dragons) Hill, Sun Shu Hill, “H” fort, Palung Hill, and Wan Tai. Not a large tree waves on them, though some stubby firs for masking purposes are being set out stealthily. Everywhere is desolation; choked tunnels and saps underground, filled war galleries above ground, broken gun carriages, burst Krupp and Armstrong guns piled up in titanic wreckage. Heroic Kondrachenko and gallant Stoessel on one side, and Grant-like Nogi on the other, sowed the hundred valleys and hillsides hereabout with rusting bayonets, belt buckles, medals of glory and skulls of death. Thousands and thousands of men, known not by their names but by their number tag, like prisoners, dropped before the ruthless and fame-obliterating fire of range-fixed guns operating behind searchlights. It was the steady mowing of the grim reaper himself, until Nogi determined to reach Kondrachenko, and North and 203 Metre forts, underground instead of by bombardment and assault. Nickel-nosed bullets, soft-nosed spreaders, broken sabers, rusted buttons, bleaching bones, water cans, leather knapsack bottles, slowly rotting walnut rifle stocks, four-inch and eight-inch shells, camp-fire equipments, pots, match-boxes, frames that held sweetheart’s picture next the heart, star orders of the heathen emperor and cross decorations of the Holy Tsar of Peace (!), numbers that were tagged on the neck to take the place of the name of a man, breeches of quick-firing guns, barrels of Gatlings and Nordenfeldts, cartridge cases, porcelain saki bottles, metal clasps of Y.M.C.A. Bibles, all fill up these powder-upheaved furrows of Death, where not a Chinese building stands of the once beautiful Chinese suburbs.

Out of the historical hills and valleys wind the long parallel ribbons of the railway around the horseshoe bend of the Kwang Tung Peninsula, but no commercial traffic is now brought lower down than Dalny. A destroyed city indeed, a precious ice-free port of commerce and a sunny bund of society, deserted by force of arms, a secret base and a masked fort yet being silently strengthened. The fleet that holds the Pacific holds Port Arthur at its will, and the hand that holds Port Arthur can hold all China north of the Yangtze and up to the Amur River in its iron grasp, if there is a will and an exchequer to launch the force. Russia allowed commerce, travel and society to come with war to Port Arthur. Japan only allows war to mark time here. True, the Yamato Hotel is there yet, but it is exclusively for the garrison artillery life of the little brown men who by edict of government have given up sitting on mats that their legs may grow as tall as their minds and ambitions, despite Matthew 6:27. Whether there are Anglo-Japanese, Anglo-American, Sino-American, American-Japanese, Russo-Germanic, Anglo-French, or Four-Nation alliances or entente cordiales, this question will always come up: “Well, what about the deserted, shell-swept city of the Far East, the masked and granite fort, Port Arthur?”

What happened to Port Arthur can happen to any city of China north of Hongkong, unless China is put on her feet and has an army of defense. Under whose tutelage shall that force arise? Not a true man lives who wants to see another Dead City of the East. There this one stands, terrible to-day as eight years ago, the most terrific, oppressively silent, shell-blown, mine-scarred, tunnel-cut, war-cursed, sap-seared, skeleton-grinning, warped, agonized, Luciferian monument of bloody war that the world exhibits. Tuck it away in the toe of the Tiger’s Tail in far-away China, and let busy altruistic mankind, yellow and white, forget it. Forget it! Yes! but I hear the hammering and riveting, the cranking of the siege guns, the piling of the ammunition, the digging and blasting of the deep docks still going on. In the midst of peace and life we are yet in the midst of war and death. Yet the Dead City of the Far East, in dying, won something for progress; it checked the Russianization of China and the obliteration of China’s best son, Japan; it prevented the clash of Britain and Russia, and the eventual clash of America and Russia perhaps in the Philippines and Manchuria. It loosened a little the ruthless hand of the Russian oligarchy upon the neck of Dumas, and the Ochrana detectivization of the people. In dying, it brought some dangers, too, that a not sufficiently representative Japan would take the place of Russia in greed, and bring altruistic America upon her fleet; for the American people, loving freedom for all, and now writing text-books on that subject, are committed by John Hay’s “non-partition of China” policy to seeing that Japan stops her imperialistic expansion with the absorption of Korea, and that China, the Mother of the East, is left to pursue her new glorious destiny in peace, with no more of her sacred territory imperiled, until she can put liberty in free stride from the hot Tonquin border to the Amur’s ice-fringed rapids.

Newchwang, which means “ox depot”, is on the Liao River fifteen miles from the sea, Jinkow being its port. The bar permits of eighteen-foot draught, but could be dredged deeper. The river is icebound from November till April. The exports are beans, bean cake, bean oil, gold, silver, silk, black oxen, mutton, wool, wheat, kaoliang, little millet, pulse, spirits, tobacco, paper, lumber, furs. Coal and iron would be a heavy export if there was not railway discrimination on the part of the Japanese. The imports are flour, machinery, cotton, etc. There is an important foreign settlement, and foreign hongs should move their advance posts here for the attack on Manchurian trade. The city was invested by the Russians in 1898 and 1900, and the Japanese to-day are almost as active, having linked the city by railway with their Dalny line. They have established a Japanese settlement on the water-front, with hotels, hospitals, tea-houses, banks, etc. The Chinese national railways give a direct service north and south via Kinchow. Newchwang’s commerce is fed by the immense fleet of 20,000 junks of the Liao River, which gather cargo even north of Mukden. Perhaps the most celebrated British consul and diplomatist who has been stationed here is the author, A.H. Hosie. In the Japan-China War of 1894 a great battle was fought at Newchwang.

Mukden, the home city of the Manchu race, lies one hundred miles northeast of Newchang on the Shin River, a branch of the Liao River. It has connection with the Japanese and Chinese railway systems, and northward it connects with the Russian system. The stone and brick-walled inner city is one mile across; the outer wall, with eight double gates, is fourteen miles around, and there are important suburbs. It is a smaller Peking in plan. East of Mukden there are walled tombs of the Manchu emperors, and of Shun Chih and Narachu, the founders of the dynasty, which tombs suffered in the Russo-Japan War. A plain mound, with a growing tree upon it, covers the founder’s tomb. Winged griffins guard the southern gateway, which is so stern in architecture as hardly to suggest the Orient. There are the usual pailoo memorial arches, rising on the backs of tortoises, and two unique pillars with lions on top, which design is copied from the Ming emperors, whose throne the Manchus ravaged. The north gate oddly is single, and not triple in Chinese style, and is guarded by a plain, two-roofed pagoda. The court is stone laid. The main avenue of the tomb is guarded by monster statues of lions, camels, horses, elephants and warriors. The ancestral temple contains a tortoise which bears the tablets. Mourning houses, temples, stone screens and vases add to the ensemble.

The old Chung Cheng yellow-tiled palace is at the south gate of the city, and has been tenanted by notable and progressive viceroys, one of whom attempted to reconcile the Eastern and Western religions. The imperial palace, Wen So Ko, has the imperial library of 7,000 cases. Its rich museum of priceless bronzes, vases, tapestries, etc., was largely looted by the Manchu princes, who sold the treasures to the curio collectors who flocked like vultures to Peking in the financial troubles of the revolution. The Fei Lung Ko treasury is on the east side and the Hsiang Feng Ko treasury is on the west side. There is a modern Chinese commercial museum; the Yamato Hotel in the extensive Japanese section; a Japanese railway medical college; an Astor Hotel; a Chinese medical college; and the medical college of the Scotch Presbyterians outside the east gate, with which the noted author, Doctor J. Ross, is connected. Doctor Christie, of Mukden, was another hero of the terrific pneumonic plague in Manchuria in 1910–11. The usual favorite Fox Temple of the Manchu race is to be seen. There is a Taoist Temple of Hell, with horrible statues. The Temple to the God of Literature is the most beautiful in bare Manchuria, because of the artistic proportion of its walls, galleries, roofs and stairs; but the temple has little independent meaning, because the Manchus have absolutely no original literature, possessing in their perpendicular Syriac-like script only copies of Chinese literature.

Not only the Japanese are conspicuously in evidence; Russian droshkes are pulled at the gallop and trot along the Meridian Street of the Drum Tower. The unique tall shop signs are carved on pole and capital not unlike Alaskan totem poles. Differently from the cities of South China, many ponies and mules are seen on the street, and man is not here, as in Middle and South China, the beast of burden. The best frozen game, pork and mutton, and fish shops of China are in Mukden. Outside each angle of the walls is a Lama monument. Mukden is famous for its black pigs, many of which, frozen, are shipped to Liverpool and London markets. The Japanese have erected fine railway, administration, bank, school, etc., buildings in their settlement. The city has telephone, telegraph, electric light, mail and water service. Wen Hsiang, the most enlightened Manchu prince connected with international dealings with China at Peking in the Victorian age, was a Mukden man, and is buried near the east gate. The foreign settlement has the usual clubs and churches, a brewery, and a large modern concrete factory of the British-American Tobacco Company, for when opium went out the cigarette came in, in disgusted Cathay! The Chinese hotel is the Hai Tien Chun, near the entrance to the west gate. There are horse-tram railways, electric trams, a Chinese provincial mint, and great fur, skin and coal markets. Mukden will yet be a leading center for land, mine, agricultural, machinery, food and clothing interchange of the world, for rich, black-earth Manchuria is destined to be the granary of more soil-impoverished countries of the Pacific than China.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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