Across China on Foot by Edwin John Dingle (spiritual books to read .TXT) 📕

This is what I wrote sitting on the top of a mountain during my tour across China. But it will be seen in other parts of this book that Western ideas and methods of progress in accord more with European standards are being adopted—and in some places with considerable energy—even in the "backward province." In travel anywhere in the world, one becomes absorbed more or less with one's own immediate surroundings, and there is a tendency to form opinions on the limitations of those surroundings. In many countries this would not lead one far astray, but in China it is different. Most of my opinion of the real Chinese is formed in Yün-nan, and it is not to be denied that in all the other seventeen provinces, although a good many of them may be more forward in the trend of national evolution and progress, the same squalidness among the people, and every condition antagonistic to the Westerner's education so often referred to, are to be found. But China has four hundred and thirty millions of people, so that what one writes of one particular province—in the main right, perhaps—may not necessarily hold good in another province, separated by thousands of miles, where climatic conditions have been responsible for differences in general life. With its great area and its great population, it does not need the mind of a Spencer to see that it will take generations before every acre and every man will be gathered into the stream of national progress.

The European traveler in China cannot perhaps deny himself the pleasure of dwelling upon the absurdities and oddities of the life as they strike him, but there is also another side to the question. Our own civilization, presenting so many features so extremely removed from his own ancient ideas and preconceived notion of things in general, probably looks quite as ridiculous from the standpoint of the Chinese. The East and the West each have lessons to offer the other. The West is offering them to the East, and they are being absorbed. And perhaps were we to learn the lessons to which we now close our eyes and ears, but which are being put before us in the characteristics of Oriental civilization, we may in years to come, sooner than we expect, rejoice to think that we have something in return for what we have given; it may save us a rude awakening. It does not strike the average European, who has never been to China, and who knows no more about the country than the telegrams which filter through when massacres of our own compatriots occur, that Europe and America are not the only territories on this little round ball where the inhabitants have been left with a glorious heritage.

But I was speaking of my men delaying on the road to Kwang-tung-hsien, when they laughed at my impatience.

"Ih dien mien, ih dien mien," shouted one, as he held out a huge blue bowl of white wormlike strings and a couple of chopsticks. "Mien," it should be said, is something like vermicelli. A tremendous amount of it is eaten; and in Singapore, without exception, it is dried over the city's drains, hung from pole to pole after the rope-maker's fashion. Its slipperiness renders the long boneless strings most difficult of efficient adjustment, and the recollection of the entertainment my comrades received as I struggled to get a decent mouthful sticks to me still.

After that I hurried on, got off the "ta lu," and suffered a nasty experience for my foolishness. When nearing the city, inquiring whether my men had gone on inside the walls, a manure coolie, liar that he was, told me that they had. I strode on again, encountering the crowds who blocked the roadway as market progressed, who stared in a suspicious manner at the generally disreputable, tired, and dirty foreigner. Each moment I expected the escort to arrive. I could not sit down and drink tea, for I had not a single cash on my person. I could speak none of the language, and could merely push on, with ragtags at my heels, becoming more and more embarrassed by the pointing and staring public. I turned, but could see none of my men. I managed to get to the outer gate, and there sat down on the grass, with five score of gaping idiots in front of me. Seeing this vulgar-looking intruder among them, who would not answer their simplest queries, or give any reason for being there, suspicion grew worse; they naturally wanted to know what it was, and what it wanted. Some thought I might be deaf, and raved questions in my ear at the top of their voices. Even then I remained impotently dumb. Two policemen came and said something. At their invitation I followed them, and found myself later in a small police box, the street lined with people, facing an officer.

The man hailed me in speech uncivil. He was huge as the hyperborean bear, and cruel looking, and with a sort of apologetic petitionary growl I sidled off; but it was anything but comfortable, and I should not have been surprised had I found myself being led off to the yamen. After a nerve-trying half-hour, I was thankful to see the form of my men appearing at the moment when I was vehemently expressing indignation at not being understood.

A bumptious official. Ignominious contrasts of two travelers. Diminishing respect for foreigners in the Far East. Where the European fails. His maltreatment of Orientals. Convicts on the way to death. At Ch'u-hsiony-fu. Buffaloes and children. Exasperating repetition met in Chinese home life. Unæsthetic womanhood. Quarrymen and careless tactics. Scope for the physiologist. Interesting unit of the city's humanity. Signs of decay in the countryside. Carrying the dead to eternal rest. At Chennan-chou. Public kotowing ceremony and its aftermath. Chinese ignorance of distance.

All-round idyllic peace did not reign at Kwang-tung-hsien, where I rested over Sunday. Contacts in social conditions gave rise inevitably to causes for conflicts.

Arriving early, my men were able to secure the best room and soon after, with much imposing pomp and show, a "gwan"[AH] arrived, disgusted that he had to take a lower room. I bowed politely to him as he came in. He did not return it, however, but stood with a contemptuous grin upon his face as he took in the situation. I do not know who the person was, neither have a wish to trace his ancestry, but his bumptiousness and general misbehavior, utterly in antagonism to national etiquette, made me hate the sight of the fellow. Pride has been said to make a man a hedgehog. I do not say that this man was a hedgehog altogether, but he certainly seemed to wound everyone he touched. He had with him a great retinue, an extravagant equipage, fine clothes, and presumably a great fortune; but none of this offended me—it was his contempt which hurt. He seemed to splash me with mud as he passed, and was altogether badly disposed. In his every act he heaped humiliation upon me, and insulted me silently and gratuitously with unbearable disdain. Luckily, be it said to the credit of the Chinese Government, one does not often meet officials of this kind; such an atmosphere would nurture the worst feeling. It is, of course, possible that had I been traveling with many men and in a style necessary for representatives of foreign Governments, this hog might have been more polite; but the fact that I had little with me, and made a poor sort of a show, allowed him to come out in his true colors and display his unveneered feeling towards the foreigner. That he had no knowledge of the man crossing China on foot was evident. He was great and rich—that was the sentiment he breathed out to everyone—and the foreigner was humble. There is no wrong in enjoying a large superfluity, but it was not indispensable to have displayed it, to have wounded the eyes of him who lacked it, to have flaunted his magnificence at the door of my commonplace.

Had I been able to speak, I should have pointed out to this fellow that to know how to be rich is an art difficult to master, and that he had not mastered it; that as an official his first duty in exercising power was to learn that of humility; and that it is the irritating authority of such very lofty and imperious beings as himself, who say, "I am the law," that provokes insurrection. However, I was dumb, and could only return his contemptuous glance now and again.

To him I could have said, as I would here say also to every foreigner in the employ of the Chinese Government, "The only true distinction is superior worth." If foreigners in China are to have social and official rank respected, they must begin to be worthy of their rank, otherwise they help to bring it into hatred and contempt. It is a pity some native officials have to learn the same lesson.

In several years of residence in the Far East I have noticed respect for the foreigner unhappily diminishing. The root of the evil is in the mistaken idea that high station exempts him who holds it from observing the common obligations of life. It comes about—so often have I seen it in the Straits Settlements and in various parts of India—that those who demand the most homage make the least effort to merit that homage they demand. That is chiefly why respect for the foreigner in the Orient is diminishing, and I have no hesitancy in asserting that the average European in the East and Far East does not treat the Oriental with respect. He considers that the Chinese, the Malay, the Burman, the Indian is there to do the donkey work only. The newcomer generally discovers in himself an astounding personal omnipotence, and even before he can talk the language is so obsessed with it that as he grows older, his sense of it broadens and deepens. And in China—of the Chinese this is true to-day as in other spheres of the Far East—the native is there to do the donkey work, and does it contentedly and for the most part cheerfully. But he will not always be so content and so cheerful. He will not always suffer a leathering from a man whom he knows he dare not now hit back.[AI] Some day he may hit back. We have seen it before, how at some moment, by some interior force making a way to the light, an explosion takes place: there is an upheaval, all sorts of grave disorders, and because some Europeans are killed the Celestial Government is called upon to pay, and to pay heavily. Indemnities are given, but the Chinese pride still feels the smart.

[1 Pulling away up the sides of barren, sandy hills in my lonely pilgrimage, I could see wide, fertile plains sheltered in the undulating hollows of mountains, over which in arduous toil I vanished and re-appeared, how or where I could hardly calculate. Suddenly, rounding an awkward corner, a magnificent panorama broke upon the view in a rolling valley watered by many streams below, all green with growing wheat. A high spur about midway up the rolling mountain forms a capital spot for wayfarers to stop and exchange travelers' notes. A couple of convicts were here, their feet manacled and their white cotton clothing branded with the seal of death; by the side were the crude wooden cages in which they were carried by four men, with whom they mixed freely and manufactured coarse jokes. In six days bang would fall the knife, and their heads would roll at the feet of the executioners at Yün-nan-fu.

Coming into Ch'u-hsiong-fu