A wandering student in the Far East/Ch'ung-k'ing to Tzu-liu-ching
CHAPTER VI.
CH'UNG-K'IN TO TZU-LIU-CHING.
I left Ch'ung-k'ing on November 27, dismounting from the confinement of my chair as soon as the city gates were passed. The roads of Ssŭch'uan are of their kind the best in all probability in China, but they are not ideal from any point of view. They are narrow ways paved with stone, which in mountainous districts become stone staircases. This at once puts the possibility of wheeled transport out of court and accounts for the prevalence of chairs throughout the province. The hardness of the stone is apt to produce foot-soreness in the pedestrian, while riding on such material is but a poor amusement.
Stone Staircases.
pretty, hilly country, cultivated minutely in terraces to the summits of the hills. Large numbers of memorial arches spanned the way, erected by an admiring posterity, and with the gracious consent of a paternal emperor, to the memory of those virtuous and constant widows who had preferred to spend life single after the decease of their husbands, to taking a second ticket in the matrimonial lottery.
For the whole of the day our paved way wound among rounded hills dotted here and there with bamboos, cypresses, mulberries, banyans, and other evergreens. In the lower parts the land presented a patchwork of terraced enclosures under water, while on the hillsides were growing indigo, tobacco, wheat (a winter crop here), beans, turnips, and poppy quite recently sown. The quantity and variety of vegetables to be seen growing all over the country is, indeed, astonishing; the people themselves are enormously fond of a vegetable diet, and "indulge fearlessly in almost everything green, from clover to the young spring shoots of trees."
We did a short march of sixty li, or roughly fifteen miles, and halted for the night at the inn in the village of Pai-shih-yi.
To any one who has travelled in the interior of China the word "inn" does not conjure up those visions of delight which excited the enthusiasm of Dr Samuel Johnson. "There is nothing," he declared, "which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn." It would probably be nearer the mark to say that "there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much unhappiness is produced as by a Chinese tavern or inn!" The assertion of Marco Polo that at every twenty or thirty miles there is "a large and handsome building" in which all the rooms are to be found "furnished with fine beds and all other necessary articles in rich silk," and where everything that can be wanted is provided, so that "if even a king were to arrive at one of these he would find himself well lodged," does not apply to the present day. For the next three months and a half I lodged almost nightly in a Chinese inn of some sort or another, and for plain unadulterated truth give me the description of the admirable Abbé Hue, who found "the effect of the scene, dimly exhibited by an imperfect wick floating amid thick, dirty, stinking oil, whose receptacle is ordinarily a broken tea-cup, to be fantastic, and to the stranger fearful"!
The "everything that can be wanted" of Marco Polo is summed up by a wooden trestle-bed and a wisp of straw, a wooden table and stool, boiled rice and hot water. The rooms open on to a stone or mud courtyard, which is a receptacle for the accumulated filth of the establishment; the windows and doors are of paper, pasted on to a wooden framework, square feet of which are usually missing, and on all sides arises what Trinculo would describe as "a very ancient and a fishlike smell."
At night the inn becomes a scene of lively animation. The coolies troop in by degrees, and after disposing of their loads, shout noisily for food and hot water. To the European, whose organs appear to be more highly developed than those of the Ssŭch'uan coolie, this terrific shouting becomes the source of intense irritation. A. Ssŭch'uan coolie may not be more than a foot away from the individual whom he wishes to address, but that makes no difference, and he bawls at him at the top of his voice, as if he were half a mile away instead of standing at his elbow. When some thirty or forty men confined within the four walls of the inn's courtyard are engaged in this harmonious occupation simultaneously, the effect on the auricular nerves may be imagined. It is only when his food has been put away, and when the fumes of the opium-pipe, which my coolies invariably carried, have begun to work, that peace and comparative quiet descend upon the building.
On the following day we tramped about twenty-three miles to Ma-fang Chiao. The populous nature of this part of Ssŭch'uan is proclaimed on all sides by the infinite care with which every inch of ground is cultivated. Moreover, there was much traffic along the narrow stone-paved way, and many coolies and ponies carrying great bundles of cotton yarn, which has travelled all the way from the 
Coolie transport in Ssŭch'uan.
mills of Bombay, to be woven into the common cloth which clothes the bulk of the province's 45,000,000 inhabitants, by the housewives of Ssŭch'uan. Numerous small towns are scattered along the road, their streets providing a common playground for children, dogs, pigs, and poultry, except when a market is being held, which is usually the case every fifth day, when they become choked with people from the districts round.
The population, which at a modest estimate is placed at 45,000,000 to-day, has increased rapidly during the past two centuries, for a census taken in the year 1710 gave a return of only 144,154 souls. This surprisingly small population in a province nearly three times the size of Great Britain was not, however, due to natural causes, but to a rebellion headed by three desperadoes, Li Tzu-ch'eng, Chang Hsien-chung, and Wang San-huai, in the declining years of the Ming dynasty. The most remarkable and, as Colborne Baber points out, ultimately almost the only figure in the story was Chang, whose taste for slaughter amounted almost to a passion. Some of the reforms carried out by him have been collected by Baber from De Mailla's history of China, and are summarised as follows:—
| Massacred | 32,310 undergraduates. |
| 3000 eunuchs. | |
| 2000 of his own troops. | |
| 27,000 Buddhist priests. | |
| 600,000 inhabitants of Ch'êngtu. | |
| 280 of his own concubines. | |
| 400,000 wives of his troops. | |
| Everybody else in the province. | |
| Destroyed | Every building in the province. |
| Burnt | Everything inflammable. |
Besides cotton yarn, children and young pigs carried in baskets at the end of a carrying-pole, and a little salt, were the only other commodities at all noticeable. I looked anxiously among the small shops and market-stalls for goods of European make, but the nearest approach to foreign articles were matches. These, however, on closer acquaintance, proved to have been made in two local match factories near Ch'ung-k'ing, started in 1894, and given a monopoly in the province for twenty-five years, and were being sold at a few cash a-box of seventy matches. It is interesting as illustrative of the extreme frugality of the Chinese character to note that before laying out the sum of three cash—say the fourteenth part of a penny—upon a box, the purchaser may be seen counting the number of matches in the box, in order to assure himself that he is receiving full value for his money, and to enable him to discard any matches found without heads before finally concluding his bargain. Even the ubiquitous Japanese match is unable to compete on these terms, and if the Japanese match cannot, it is difficult to see how any other could. The Ch'ung-k'ing match is quite the lowest in the scale, and smells horribly, though to the sons and daughters of China the smell of burning sulphur is doubtless a pleasing variation from the usual all-pervading perfume of a Chinese home.
Another two days' march brought us to Yung Chang Hsien, a town of some size and importance. It is celebrated locally for the manufacture of a cloth from the ramie fibre, which is said to be much worn in the hot weather, though according to Sir Alexander Hosie "it will not bear comparison with Canton grass-cloth, which is the finest and most expensive in China."[1] The most conspicuous feature in the textile line, however, here, as in all the towns and villages that I subsequently visited, was provided by bundles of coarse, loosely-woven, narrow-width, native-made cotton cloth, dyed red and green with German aniline dye, which is fast taking a hold upon the market, as well as plain grey shirting and the more ordinary blue. A few shops stocked Manchester goods, grey shirting and cotton Italians, for which there appears to be a growing demand.
The man of China is not an easy individual to extract information from. He will talk volubly, but always vaguely and generally irrelevantly. "How much of this do you sell in a year?" I asked of a cloth merchant, pointing to a roll of black Italians. "Oh, several tens of pieces," he replied after a few minutes of profound thought. "But how many tens?" I persisted. "A few tens," was the laconic reply. I had been reading Dr Smith on Chinese disregard of accuracy, and I felt that I could endorse his prognostication that "the first generation of Chinese chemists will probably lose many of its number as a result of the process of mixing 'a few tens of grains' of something with 'several tens of grains' of something else, the consequence being an unanticipated earthquake"—and the thought made me feel almost happy. Conversation by question and answer becomes a sort of game. If you desire information upon any particular subject, you have to ask a question upon some other topic. The difficulty of hitting upon the right one is obvious. Over and over again, when putting a question through Joe, I would get an answer which could by no possible ingenuity be made to relate in any way to the question. "What is the name of this village?" I would ask. After a few moments of profound thought would come the reply, "Yes, that is a rice field," or any other equally useless and irrelevant reply. Joe gave up translating answers of this kind after he had been in my service for a short time, realising that information of this kind merely served to exasperate me. This particular Chinese characteristic is, of course, a very well-known one. Baber, who talked Chinese fluently, tells how he once stopped to inquire of two men who were hoeing a field, what was the purpose of a mound hard by. "After listening with evident interest to my question, and without making any reply, one of them remarked to the other, "How much the language, of these foreigners resembles ours!"
Excellent-looking coal was being brought in by coolies in baskets from a mine at Ta-sung-sü, said to be distant about ten miles.
We halted at Lung Chang Hsien on the night of December 1st, and on the following day left the main road to Ch'êngtu, keeping west for Tzu-liu-ching. The soil here appeared to be rather poorer than that through which we had hitherto travelled, and pines grew in scanty earth on the hill-tops. For the rest, our road wound unevenly among low rounded hills, covered for the most part with innumerable brakes of sugar-cane. The inevitable bean protruded on such space as was not occupied by other vegetables, and there was, as usual, a good deal of rice land and some poppy. Sugar-cane, however, was the crop par excellence throughout the day; and for several days to come we passed through many miles of cane-brake. "Sugar is a great industry of Ssŭch'uan, and is largely exported eastwards," but the process of manufacture is primitive, and the taste is, to my mind, exceedingly nasty. Peter was right when he complained to me that the "sugar was very sour"; but acidity is not the quality one looks for in sugar.
I had not been much troubled with Chinese curiosity so far, but I was treated to an example of it to-day. I had halted for lunch as usual at a small town, and finding no regular inn, seated myself at an empty table in the principal eating-house, open as usual on to the street. The news of my strange presence spread like wildfire, and in an incredibly short time the population had turned out—men, women, and children—to see the foreigner eat. Joe had not turned up, and as they crowded round while my modest repast was being set out, I was constrained to address them in plain king's English, pointing out that they would all have a better chance of seeing me eat if they stood back a little and so widened the circle round me. They chose to interpret my remarks as an invitation, and pressed so close that I had scarcely elbow-room. There is something peculiar about the stolid, vacuous stare of a Chinese crowd. It affects one variously according to one's own particular mood; but I have never found it anything but unpleasant. It generally irritates. You feel a wild desire to rush in and hit out right and left, and chance the consequences. Nothing will move it when once it has made up its mind that it wishes to place you under its observation. It just stares with an exasperating, unblinking, vacuous stare. How often when gazing at the empty expressionless features of a Chinese face have I recalled the half-humorous query which a French diplomatist once put to a French bishop apostolic in China: "Et croyez-vous vraiement que les Chinois ont une âme?" On this occasion I innocently let fall an empty tin which had once contained potted meat. The effect among the juvenile portion of the audience was instantaneous; but when the air cleared after the struggle which ensued, I noticed that the prize had fallen to an elderly, and, judging by his attenuated moustache and grizzly beard, venerable grandfather. On leaving I found that as long as I walked, the town was all for accompanying me indefinitely on my way, so I took to my chair till the sightseers had dropped behind, and then walked on to Niu-fu-tu, where I halted for the night. An inconvenient crowd here was dispersed by an ingenious member of my escort, who procured a bucket of water and sprinkled the onlookers liberally from the vantage-ground of the inn roof. One more day brought us to Tzu-liu-ching, where I called a day's halt with a view to inspecting the brine wells.
- ↑ Report on the province of Ssŭch'uan.