An Australian in China, George Ernest Morrison [best free e book reader txt] 📗

on our way. Comparatively few coolies now met us, and the majority of those who did were travelling empty-handed; but there were many ponies and mules coming from the capital, laden with tea and with blocks of white salt like marble. Every here and there a rude shelter was erected by the wayside, where a dish of cabbage and herbs could be obtained, which you ate out of cracked dishes at an improvised bench made from a coffin board resting on two stones. Towards sundown we entered the village of Kong-shan, a pretty place on the hill slope, with views across a fertile hollow that was pleasant to see. Here we found an excellent inn with good quarters. Our day's journey was thirty-seven miles, of which I walked fifteen miles and rode twenty-two miles. We were travelling quickly. Distances in China are, at first, very confusing. They differ from ours in a very important particular: they are not fixed quantities; they vary in length according to the nature of the ground passed over. Inequalities increase the distance; thus it by no means follows that the distance from A to B is equal to the distance from B to A—it may be fifty per cent. or one hundred per cent. longer. The explanation is simple. Distance is estimated by time, and, speaking roughly, ten li (3-1/3 miles) is the unit of distance equivalent to an hour's journey. "Sixty li still to go" means six hours' journey before you; it may be uphill all the way. If you are returning downhill you need not be surprised to learn that the distance by the same road is only thirty li.

To-night before turning in I looked in to see how my mule was faring. He was standing in a crib at the foot of some underground stairs, with a huge horse trough before him, the size and shape of a Chinese coffin. He was peaceful and meditative. When he saw me he looked reproachfully at the cut straw heaped untidily in the trough, and then at me, and asked as clearly as he could if that was a reasonable ration for a high-spirited mule, who had carried my honourable person up hill and down dale over steep rocks and by tortuous paths, a long spring day in a warm sun. Alas, I had nothing else to offer him, unless I gave him the uncut straw that was stitched into our paillasses. What straw was before him was Chinese chaff, cut into three-inch lengths, by a long knife worked on a pivot and board, like the tobacco knife of civilisation. And he had to be content with that or nothing.

Next day we had an early start soon after sunrise. It was a lovely day with a gentle breeze blowing and a cloudless sky. The village of Kong-shan was a very pretty place. It was built chiefly on two sides of a main road which was as rugged as the dry bed of a mountain creek. The houses were better and the inns were again provided with heaps of bedding at the doorways. Advertisement bills in blue and red were displayed on the lintels and doorposts, while fierce door-gods guarded against the admission of evil spirits. Brave indeed must be the spirits who venture within reach of such fierce bearded monsters, armed with such desperate weapons, as were here represented. I stood on the edge of the town overlooking the valley while my mule was being saddled. Patches of wheat and beans were scattered among fields of white-flowered poppy. Coolies carrying double buckets of water were winding up the sinuous path from the border of the garden where "a pebbled brook laughs upon its way." Boys were shouting to frighten away the sparrows from the newly-sown rice beds; while women were moving on their little feet among the poppies, scoring anew the capsules and gathering the juice that had exuded since yesterday. Down the road coolies were filing laden with their heavy burdens—a long day's toil before them; rude carts were lumbering past me drawn by oxen and jolting on wheels that were solid but not circular. Then the mule was brought to me, and we went on through an avenue of trees that were half hidden in showers of white roses, by hedges of roses in full bloom and wayside flowers, daisies and violets, dandelions and forget-me-nots, a pretty sight all fresh and sparkling in the morning sun.

We went on in single file, my two coolies first with their light loads that swung easily from their shoulders, then myself on the mule, and last my stalwart attendant Laohwan with his superior dress, his huge sun hat, his long pipe, and umbrella. A man of unusual endurance was Laohwan. The day's journey done—he always arrived the freshest of the party—he had to get ready my supper, make my bed, and look after my mule. He was always the last to bed and the first to rise. Long before daybreak he was about again, attending to the mule and preparing my porridge and eggs for breakfast. He thought I liked my eggs hard, and each morning construed my look of remonstrance into one of approbation. It is very true of the Chinaman that precedent determines his action. The first morning Laohwan boiled the eggs hard and I could not reprove him. Afterwards of course he made a point of serving me the eggs every morning in the same way. I could say in Chinese "I don't like them," but the morning I said so Laohwan applied my dislike to the eggs not to their condition of cooking, and saying in Chinese "good, good," he obligingly ate them for me.

Leaving the valley we ascended the red incline to an open tableland, where the soil is arid, and yields but a reluctant and scanty harvest. Nothing obstructs the view, and you can see long distances over the downs, which are bereft of all timber except an occasional clump of pines that the axe has spared because of the beneficial influence the geomancers declare they exercise over the neighbourhood. The roadway in places is cut deeply into the ground; for the path worn by the attrition of countless feet soon becomes a waterchannel, and the roadway in the rains is often the bed of a rapid stream. At short intervals are vast numbers of grave mounds with tablets and arched gables of well dressed stone. No habitations of the living are within miles of them, a forcible illustration of the devastation that has ravaged the district. This was still the famine district. In the open uncultivated fields women were searching for weeds and herbs to save them from starvation till the ingathering of the winter harvest. Their children it was pitiful to see. It is rare for Australians to see children dying of hunger. These poor creatures, with their pinched faces and fleshless bones, were like the patient with typhoid fever who has long been hovering between life and death. There were no beggars. All the beggars were dead long ago. All through the famine district we were not once solicited for either food or money, but those who were still living were crying for alms with silent voices a hundred times more appealing. When we rested to have tea the poor children gathered round to see us, skeletons dressed in skins and rags, yet meekly independent and friendly. Their parents were covered with ragged garments that hardly held together. Many wore over their shoulders rude grass cloths made from pine fibre that appear to be identical with the native petticoats worn by the women of New Guinea.

Leaving the poor upland behind us, we descended to a broad and fertile plain where the travelling was easy, and passed the night in a large Moslem inn in the town of Iangkai.

All next day we pursued our way through fertile fields flanked by pretty hills, which it was hard to realise were the peaks of mountains 10,000 to 11,000 feet above sea-level. Before sundown we reached the prosperous market town of Yanglin, where I had a clean upstairs room in an excellent inn. The wall of my bedroom was scrawled over in Chinese characters with what I was told were facetious remarks by Chinese tourists on the quality of the fare.

In the evening my mule was sick, Laohwan said, and a veterinary surgeon had to be sent for. He came with unbecoming expedition. Then in the same way that I have seen the Chinese doctors in Australia diagnose the ailments of their human patients of the same great family, he examined the poor mule with the inscrutable air of one to whom are unveiled the mysteries of futurity, and he retired with his fee. The medicine came later in a large basket, and consisted of an assortment of herbs so varied that one at least might be expected to hit the mark. My Laohwan paid the mule doctor, so he said, for advice and medicine 360 cash (ninepence), an exorbitant charge as prices are in China.

On Friday, April 13th, we had another pleasant day in open country, leading to the low rim of hills that border the plain and lake of Yunnan city. Ruins everywhere testify to the march of the rebellion of thirty years ago—triumphal arches in fragments, broken temples, battered idols destroyed by Mohammedan iconoclasts. Districts destitute of habitations, where a thriving population once lived, attest that suppression of a rebellion in China spells extermination to the rebels.

On the road I met a case of goitre, and by-and-by others, till I counted twenty or more, and then remembered that I was now entering on a district of Asia extending over Western Yunnan into Thibet, Burma, the Shan States, and Siam, the prevailing deformity of whose people is goitre.