A wandering student in the Far East/Tali Fu
CHAPTER XIV.
TALI FU.
Tali Fu has passed through stirring times. It became the stronghold of the Mohammedan faction during the great rebellion which scourged the province from 1855 to 1873. The last town to hold out against the Imperial forces, it succumbed finally to treachery, being betrayed by the chief Minister of the Mohammedan commander within its gates.
The so-called "Panthay" rebellion began in a riot at a copper mine, and ended in the devastation of a province. The hand of God, indeed, lay heavy upon this corner of the dominions of the "Son of Heaven," for as though seventeen years of relentless civil warfare were not enough, plague and pestilence lit upon the scene, and added remorselessly to the havoc already wrought by the hand of man.
The story of the Mohammedan rising is briefly this. The mandarins in charge of the work at the mines, absorbed after the manner of their kind in the fascinating pastime of lining their own pockets, took no thought for the men slaving under them, but rather assumed the attitude of Pharaoh towards the Israelites when he said unto them, "Ye are idle, ye are idle; go ye, get you straw where ye can find it; yet not ought of your work shall be diminished." The Chinese are the most easily governed people in the world, yet there comes a time when even a Chinaman rebels, and, goaded beyond endurance under the rod of the taskmaster, they rose. The miners were chiefly Mohammedans, or Hui-hui as they were termed in the country itself, and they were soon joined by their coreligionists throughout the province, already exasperated by the partiality of the magistrates, who had been displaying their zeal for 
The southern gateway, Tali Fu.
orthodoxy by deciding a series of quarrels between the pork-sellers and the Mohammedan butchers in favour of the former. This was in 1855.
So quickly did the flame of rebellion spread that the capital was soon threatened, and the Viceroy in alarm patched up a temporary peace. Peace, however, was not to be of long duration. Changsun, the Governor of Ho Ch'ing, in co-operation with the mandarin of Li-chiang and another Chinese official, following the usual Chinese precedent, organised a general massacre of the Mohammedans for a fixed day. The plan may be said to have met with only partial success, for while several hundreds were satisfactorily disposed of, the Mohammedan population as a whole, instead of being cowed into submission, now stood by for war. The Imperial forces were defeated at Tali in 1857, while the Mohammedans at Hailung in the south, after holding on till provisions gave out, cut their way through to their comrades at Kuang-si, which became thenceforward a centre of revolution. The Imperialists soon learned that they had a formidable organisation to deal with. Ma Te Sing, a learned man who had visited Mecca and Constantinople, became Dictator with full powers, and two generals, Ma Hsiu and To Wen Hsiu, took command of the southern and western troops respectively. The successes which they met with aroused no small measure of alarm in the breasts of those entrusted with the governance of the province, and when, in November 1860, the capital fell before the victorious soldiers of Ma Hsiu, it was realised that something definite must be done. The favourite method—ruthless repression by means of massacre and torture—had failed; there was only one alternative conceivable to the Chinese mind—purchase. Ma Hsiu, the captor of Yün-nan Fu, and Ma Te Sing, the Mohammedan Dictator, were approached, and a satisfactory bargain was struck, the former being granted the rank of Chen-t'ai (general of brigade) in the Imperial army, and the latter a pension of 200 taels a-month. With the conclusion of this deal, reports of great victories to the Imperial army were despatched to Peking, and all concerned congratulated themselves on having honourably extricated themselves from an extremely unpleasant situation.
The insurrection, however, was far from being quelled, and fierce risings continued to take place—Ma Hsiu, who now took the name of Ma Ju Lung, becoming the champion of the Imperial forces.
A diversion was also caused about this time among the Imperial forces themselves by Ma Te Sing, who considered the time favourable to the prosecution of his personal ambitions, upsetting the Government and proclaiming himself Viceroy. He was speedily deposed, and order again restored within the ranks of the Imperialist party by his old colleague, Ma Ju Lung; but these happenings were little calculated to bring the real rebellion to a conclusion. With dissension in the ranks of his opponents, success continued to attend the armies of To Wen Hsiu, who now directed the affairs of the Mohammedan faction—so much so that the members of the British mission under Major Sladen, who had penetrated to Momein (T'eng Yüeh) early in 1868, were induced to believe that an independent Mohammedan kingdom was in all truth about to be set up, including in its embrace Yün-nan, and even parts of Ssŭch'uan. "It seemed," wrote Dr Anderson, the chronicler of the mission, "at this period almost certain that Yün-nan would become an independent kingdom, if indeed Ssŭch'uan and the northern provinces were not also formed into a great Mohammedan empire."
We now know that the power of the Mohammedans was more apparent than real, for we have seen how it crumbled and gave way when once a determined attack was made upon it. There is little doubt that the visit of the British mission and its friendly intercourse with the Mohammedan leaders was the spur required to rouse the energy of the somnolent Chinese authorities. The prospect of assistance being given by Great Britain to the insurgents "so alarmed the Chinese Government as to lead them to make a supreme effort to stamp out the rebellion. Certain it is that such effort was successfully made; and it dates from the arrival of Major Sladen's party at Momein and the subsequent despatch of the Sultans son, Hassan, to Europe on a mission to the British Government seeking help."[1]
The turn of the tide came, bringing with it the sword of the avenger. Treachery, atrocity, and outrage accompanied the forces commissioned to restore law and order: vast numbers of Mussulmans, who surrendered on promise of their lives, were ruthlessly slaughtered. The innate brutality of the yellow race was stirred to its muddiest depths, passion in its most hideous guise held high carnival. In 1872 Hsia-kuan, the key to the Tali plain, was betrayed by its commander, Tung Fei Lung. Kuang-si was next taken by treachery, and the two chiefs, Ta T'ou Wu and Ma Min Kuang, who agreed to capitulate, were treacherously seized and bound, rolled on a floor carefully prepared with nails an inch long, and beheaded, their heads being sent to Lin-an to be exposed. In the following year Tali Fu was betrayed by To Wen Hsiu's chief Minister. To Wen Hsiu himself, when taken into the presence of the Imperialist commander, gave vent to what proved to be a dying prayer—"I have nothing to ask but this: spare the people." He had previously taken the precaution of swallowing poison, from which he shortly afterwards expired. The Chinese authorities had no idea of being deterred from such an opportunity of setting an example by any dying supplication, even if it was, as Baber points out, "the most impressive and pathetic ever uttered by a dying patriot," and they proceeded to ensure the example being a thorough one. The chief officials of the city were invited to a banquet, and were assassinated one by one as they passed into the banqueting hall. For the rest, the district was given over to three days massacre, during which thousands are said to have perished. "The streets ran ankle-deep in blood," says Dr Morrison; "of 50,000 inhabitants, 30,000 were butchered. After the massacre twenty-four panniers of human ears were sent to Yün-nan city to convince the people of the capital that they had nothing more to fear from the rebellion."
On the other hand, when Baber visited Tali in 1877, only four years after the fall of the city, he was told by the captain of his escort, who claimed to have been a participator in the events, that "he did not think there could have been more than 500 corpses, or the water would have stunk more."[2] Thus ended the rebellion which had scourged the province for a period of seventeen years, dislocated its industries and commerce, and reduced its population from 16,000,000 to 6,000,000.
The town, like the whole country, still bears traces of these days of strife. The south gateway is imposing, and the main street which runs from it the whole length of the town to the north gate is one continuous jostle—pigs, poultry, clogs, and people vieing with one another to block the way; but for the rest, large spaces within the city walls are unbuilt on, and wear a depressing and poverty-stricken aspect. My arrival coincided with that of the New Year, and not only was I constrained to halt for three days in order that my coolies might take their fill of pork in celebration of the festive season, but also to dispense handfuls of cash all round to better enable them to do so. New Year's eve, February 12th, was rendered odious to myself by reason of the incessant beating of gongs and the letting off of countless thousands of crackers, which lasted far into the night, and indeed into the dawn of the New Year—a form of amusement which appears to give inordinate pleasure to the Chinese. This carouse had an extraordinary effect upon the town the following day: every one was sleeping, every door was closed, and the street, which at all other times hummed with the clatter of many hundreds of wagging tongues, and was so inconveniently crowded with seething humanity as to cease to merit the name of thoroughfare at all, had assumed all of a sudden the appearance of a city of the dead.
A variety of tribes inhabit the country in the vicinity of, and to the north of, Tali Fu, and the commercial event of chief importance as far as the town is concerned—namely, the Yueh-kai, an annual fair held during the third moon—brings together a motley crowd, an epitome of the border peoples of these regions as far as the highlands of Tibet. According to official proclamation, "myriads of merchants from the four quarters of the globe collect together dense as the clouds"; but the author of this document has made use of poetic licence to an unwarrantable degree, 5000 being about the number who now attend the fair.
Tali itself does not appear to have much trade. I found one or two shops stocking foreign goods, and was told on inquiry that some cotton goods bearing the name of Steel & Co. came viâ Mêng-tzŭ. Nevertheless, there is little doubt but that western Yün-nan, with Tali as its centre, is on the whole considerably more populous than the part of Yün-nan served by the Red river route. This was the opinion of Consul Litton, whose personal acquaintance with the province was perhaps unique, and he mentions the Ho Ch'ing valley as an example of possibilities of the western half of the province. "The Ho Ch'ing valley," he says, "may be recommended to the attention of those who would have us believe that Yün-nan is a poverty-stricken wilderness. The plain is 24 miles by 5, and contains about 200 villages, excellently built. The city itself has about 12,000 inhabitants.... The streets are densely crowded every ten days for market."[3] It must be remembered that the buying capacity of the people depends upon the success or failure of the opium and rice crops. The export of opium across the Sino-Burmese frontier is disallowed by treaty, hence the tendency to import foreign goods from other directions—i.e., the direction in which they sell their opium. Other possible exports suggested by Litton are ponies, mules, musk, hemp, straw-braid, rhubarb, drugs consumed by the Chinese, wool and furs from Li-chiang, bristles, and silk from north-west Ssŭch'uan. I am inclined to doubt the value of the mules and ponies of this part of China as an article of export, and if the campaign against opium cultivation is to bear fruit, I see very little prospect of Yün-nan providing an expanding market for foreign goods for many years to come.