A wandering student in the Far East/Ch'ung-k'ing
CHAPTER V.
CH'UNG-K'ING.
Having conducted the reader to the important treaty port of Ch'ung-k'ing, let me now give him in brief outline a sketch of the remarkable series of negotiations which led up to the opening of the port to trade. A perusal of them will be found to provide much instruction and some little entertainment. When the Chifu Agreement of 1876, arising out of the murder of a consular officer, Mr Augustus Raymond Margary, was drawn up between Great Britain and China, it was decided among other things that while the British Government might send officers to reside at Ch'ung-k'ing to watch the condition of British trade, the port should not be open to British merchants until steamers succeeded in reaching it. As, however, under Article 47 of the Treaty of Tientsin, ships resorting to "ports of trade other than those declared open by this treaty" were with their cargo liable to confiscation, it gradually dawned upon the minds of those concerned that a Chinese puzzle had been propounded about as susceptible of solution as the problem as to which came first, the chicken or the egg?
The British merchant, however, has no time to waste in guessing at Chinese diplomatic conundrums which have no answers, and in 1899 Mr Little built an experimental steamer, the Kuling, with which he proposed ascending the Yang-tsze, and so claiming the opening of the port to trade. Such Alexandrian methods of cutting their Gordian knot were not at all to the liking of the Mandarinate, and a diplomatic wrangle immediately ensued, the Chinese surpassing themselves in fertility of argument when they declared, in an official despatch to Sir John Walsham, that "the monkeys in the Gorges would throw down rocks on the passing steamers, and that then the poor Chinese Government would be held responsible"! The scheme was abandoned and the Kuling sold; but the absurdity of the position seems at last to have occurred to the legation mind, and in the following year the Governments of Great Britain and China, being desirous of settling in an amicable spirit "the divergence of opinion" (sic) which had arisen with respect to the position of Ch'ung-k'ing, agreed that the town should be declared open to trade on the same footing as any other treaty port.[1]
Thus was one anomaly wiped off the slate of Anglo-Chinese diplomacy—only to make room, however, for another almost equally absurd, for it was agreed that when once Chinese steamers carrying cargo ran to Ch'ung-k'ing, then, and not till then, should British steamers have access to the port. Chinese diplomacy had imposed a veto for a second time upon British aspirations. The position of the port and the question of steam navigation on the upper waters of the Yang-tsze were finally settled, as far as diplomacy could settle them, by the Treaty of Shimonoseki between Japan and China in April 1895, by which Ch'ung-k'ing was opened to "the trade, residence, industries, and manufactures of Japanese subjects (and by virtue of the most favoured nation clause to the subjects of other countries) under the same conditions and with the same privileges and facilities as exist at the present open cities, towns, and ports of China"; and steam navigation declared lawful upon the upper waters of the Yang-tsze.
This brief résumé of the steps leading up to the opening of the commercial gate of Western China is of value as an example of the prodigious expenditure of diplomatic energy required in China for so simple a matter as the opening of a port to trade. Let me now descend for a space from the task of chronicling these matters of high state, to the humbler duty of narrating the trivial details of my own progress.
The Chinese clerk who had been entrusted with the duty of drawing up the necessary papers for myself and my companion at Ichang had not found leisure during his short but busy life for studying the peculiarities of British aristocratic titles. It was for this reason no doubt that, when our ship's papers came to be examined, my companion was found to be masquerading under a title as lord Bolt, while I was described as Mr Ronald Shay, though there was added as an afterthought, or perhaps as a sop to my vanity, an explanatory note to the effect that I too was a "British lord." Perhaps, too, in this confusion of description there was an explanation of the fact that we found it necessary to thread our way through so many yards of Imperial Maritime Custom-house red-tape, before being enabled to rid ourselves of our boats and establish ourselves on shore. The points of detail in connection with our identity having been at length satisfactorily disposed of, there remained the boat's crew to be paid and tipped before we were able to call our souls our own. I was satisfied with my crew, and decided to give them a substantial present in the shape of a silver ingot weighing approximately 10 taels, equivalent to about £1, 10s. in English money. To men whose ideas of money are constructed upon a cash basis, some 400 or 500 of which coins go to the shilling, a sum equivalent to about 15,000 cash is a very large one; but the Chinese never loses his head under any circumstances connected with money. "Are they pleased?" I asked of Joe. "They say, sir, that they had expected that you would have given them more," was the laconic reply. This sort of answer is somewhat staggering until one begins to comprehend some of the peculiarities of the Chinese mind.
The streets of Ch'ung-k'ing consist of narrow alleys of steep stone steps which, by reason of the ceaseless journeyings of countless water-carriers, are damp and unspeakably dirty. An attempt to erect water-works proved unsuccessful, and this useful reform was vetoed in order to enable the water-carriers to continue to carry their water-skins to and from the river, earning a few cash, and rendering the streets abominable to the rest of the community. Truly, China is a conservative country.
On the whole, Ch'ung-k'ing frowns rather than smiles upon the stranger, and a leaden sky, which hangs like a pall over the river valley, adds appreciably to the gloom of the whole picture. Indeed, for general unpleasantness the climate would appear to rival that of our own country. Listen to the opinion of those who live there. "The climate of Ch'ung-k'ing is without doubt depressing to a degree to foreigners. The dreary skies and damp mists prevailing between November and March, the fierce heat of summer and practical absence of spring and autumn—meaning a quick change from hot to cold, and vice versa,—are most trying to all; add to this the effects of isolation, residence within the city (and all that it implies), together with want of means for exercise and absence of amusement, and it is plain that everything combines to produce a state of mental and nervous depression, and perhaps a low standard of vitality."[2] Happy foreign residents! Even the Chinese seem to have noticed that there is something abnormal about the murkiness of their climate, for they have a proverb which declares that the dogs of Ssŭch'uan bark when they see the sun. The Ssūch'uan dog is obviously an intelligent and observant creature, for in addition to barking at the sun he also habitually barks at all beggars, tramps, and foreigners.
Such foreign residents, however, as honour Ch'ung-k'ing with their presence are there for business, and not for pleasure. Through Ch'ung-k'ing passes the bulk of the trade of Western China, and those who advocated the opening of the port to trade can point confidently to the returns in justification of their policy. The gross value of the trade of the port coming under cognisance of the Imperial Maritime Customs has trebled since it was opened, having increased from 9,245,737 Hk. Tls. in 1892 to 29,001,410 Hk. Tls., equivalent to £4,773,148, in 1906. It is not surprising, then, that an air of immense activity pervades the town, that the thoroughfares are busy and crowded, and that there are streets of commodious and well-stocked shops. The question of trade, however, will be dealt with as a whole in a subsequent chapter.
It was now my intention to travel to Ch'êngtu, the capital of the province, visiting the celebrated salt wells of Tzu-liu-ching on the way, and I lost little time in making the necessary arrangements for covering the 300 miles that lay before me. A travelling-chair was purchased for 14s., not with any particular view to assisting my physical progress, but with a view to averting the awful fate held up by Colborne Baber before the luckless traveller who is without one. I had no desire to be "thrust aside on the highway, to be kept waiting at ferries, to be relegated to the worst inn's worst room, and generally to be treated with indignity, or, what is sometimes worse, with familiarity as a peddling footpad, unable to gain a living in my own country"; therefore, I say, I indulged in an outlay of 14s. on a sedan-chair. For the baggage coolies were engaged, who guaranteed to carry loads of 133 lb. apiece, and to cover the distance in thirteen marching days, for wages at the rate of 10d. per man per day, and an escort was applied for and provided by the local officials.
The Taotai (the highest civil official) was a charming old gentleman, who supplied me with most valuable information in reply to my many inquiries concerning the province. No regulations, he said, had as yet been put into force for reducing the area of land under the poppy in accordance with the imperial opium edict which had been issued in September, "but," he added, "the people have been exhorted to give up the cultivation of the poppy." It usually requires something more than exhortation to persuade a man to give up the means of supplying himself with his daily bread. An acre of wheat, according to Sir Alexander Hosie, will give an average yield of grain of the value of £4, 5s. 6d., whereas a similar area will produce raw dry opium of the value of £5, 16s. 8d. Query, would polite exhortation be sufficient to persuade the owner of 50 acres to forego a sum of £77, 18s. 4d. a-year—£77, 18s. 4d. being equivalent to 779,000 cash? His answer to my question as to when the much-talked-of Ch'ung-k'ing—Ch'êngtu railway would be begun, was happy if not absolutely illuminating,—"I do not know," he said, "whether it will be next year." I felt that I could safely have enlightened him upon the particular point at which his knowledge apparently failed.
One other matter called for attention before a start could be made—namely, the matter of cash. No amount of ingenuity could succeed in devising anything more calculated to dismay and exasperate the Westerner than the coinage of China. The Mexican dollar, which simplifies matters on the coast, is not recognised in the interior. The only coin that is generally accepted is the cash—a dirty, shapeless disc of brass with a square hole through the centre. These abominations are strung on a string, so many hundreds—the number varying according to the district in which one happens to be—being deemed the equivalent of a tael or ounce of silver. During the earlier stages of my journey I found from 1400 to 1500 cash equivalent to the tael (or roughly, 450 cash to the shilling), but with my onward progress the number steadily decreased, until on the western confines of Yünnan I was seldom lucky enough to get more than 800 for my tael of silver. This system has, of course, given birth to an important class, namely, the money-changers, one or more of whom is a dire necessity in every village. The village money-changer keeps a pair of scales, or rather two pairs of scales, one for buying and one for selling, and having weighed the lump of silver in exchange for which cash are desired, hands over the equivalent number of hundreds, less a few cash by way of commission, to his victim. Pleasing complications are introduced into the pastime of money-changing by the fact that a nominal 100 cash does not as a matter of actual fact consist of 100, but varies from 98 to 33 according to the part of the empire in which you happen to be. "Nowhere does a Chinaman mean 1000 cash when he speaks of 1000 cash"[3] and the only rule which is common to all cash problems throughout the eighteen provinces, and the only rule, therefore, which the traveller need trouble to bear in mind, is the unwritten law which decrees that 100 cash may be any number except 100. In some districts a number, which is more or less constant, is 
A quiet reach of the Yang-tsze.
fixed upon for convenience. In Tientsin, for instance, as Dr Morrison has pointed out, the 100 is any number one can pass except 100, "though by agreement the 100 is usually estimated at 98." Further variations are introduced by the difference in quality of the silver ingots, some qualities being infinitely more valuable than others, the money-changer being of course the self-appointed arbiter as to the quality of the particular piece of silver which he is about to change. The inexhaustible fund of inconvenience provided by such a system will no doubt suggest itself to the reader—such, for instance, as the enormous weight of the silver ingots, and still more of thousands of cash, especially in a country in which the traveller is obliged to rely exclusively upon human porterage for transport; but perhaps the greatest joke connected with the cash system will not have occurred to him. It consists in this, that the intrinsic value of the metal of which the cash are composed is considerably in excess of its face value as a coin. It follows as an inevitable consequence that by melting down the cash and converting them into household utensils you immediately increase its value. It will, of course, be asked how it is, if this be so, that the whole of the cash of the empire has not been melted down long since and converted into kettles, pots, and pans? The difficulty was got over by the enactment of stringent laws, under which the penalty for melting down cash is death. Some effort to improve the currency system is now being made, and a silver dollar for Ssŭch'uan is being minted in Ch'êngtu. It bears on its face a superscription which says that it is equal in value to 72 cents, though for what inscrutable reason the number 72 has been selected, instead of the obvious 100, I am at a loss to understand. So deeply rooted in the Chinese character, however, is the dislike of allowing things to be what they seem, that no one—not even a Chinaman—has so far succeeded in changing one for more than 71 cents.
Needless to say, I did not attempt to compete with the Ch'ung-k'ing money-changers in arriving at a solution of the various calculations which had to be worked out before I could be supplied with the requisite number of cash and silver ingots. I admitted my own immense inferiority in capacity for threading my way through the infinite intricacies of Chinese finance, and pocketed, metaphorically speaking,—it is, of course, quite impossible to literally pocket strings of cash,—whatever sums I was awarded by the generosity and indulgence of the professional financiers.