Across China on Foot, Edwin John Dingle [ebook pc reader TXT] 📗

course of self-sufficient isolation, is plunging into the flood of international progress, determined to acquire all the knowledge she can, and thus win for herself a place among the Powers.

But I am in Yün-nan, and things move slowly here.

All this does not mean that my presence is desired, or that fear of me, the foreigner, has ceased. On the contrary, it signifies that I am more greatly to be feared. The European is not wanted in China, no matter how absurd it may seem to the student of international politics, who sits and devours all the newspaper copy—good, bad and indifferent—which filters through regarding China becoming the El Dorado of the Westerner. He is wanted for no other reason than that of teaching the Chinese to foreignize as much as he can, teaching the leaders of the people to strive to modify national life, and to raise public conduct and administration to the best standards of the West.

When China is capable of looking after herself, and able to maintain the position she is securing by the aid of the foreigner in her provinces, following her present mode of thought and action, the foreigner may go back again. But it is to be hoped that the evolution of the country will be different.

Another feature impressed upon me was the emptiness of the lives of the people. Education was rare, and any education they had was confined to the Chinese classics.

Neither of the three men I had with me could read or write. The thoughts of these people are circumscribed by the narrow world in which they live, and only a chance traveler such as myself allows them a glimpse of other places. Each man, with rare exception, lives and labors and dies where he is born—that is his ambition; and in the midst of a people whose whole outlook of life is so contracted, I find difficulty in believing that progress such as Japan made in her memorable fifty-year forward movement will be made by the Chinese of Yün-nan in two hundred years. Everything one can see around him here, at this town of Anning-cheo, seems to make against it. In my dealings with Chinese in their own country—I speak broadly—I have found that they "know everything." I erected a printing-press in Tong-ch'uan-fu some months ago—a type of the old flat handpress not unlike that first used by Caxton. It was a part of the equipment of the Ai Kueh Hsieh Tang (Love of Country School), and I was invited by the gentry to erect it. Now the thing had not been up an hour before all the old fossils in the place knew all about it. Printing to them was easy—a child could do it. It is always, "O ren teh, o ren teh" ("I know, I know"). These men, dressed in their best, stood with arms behind them, and smiled stupidly as I labored with my coat off fixing their primitive machinery. Yet they did not know, and now, within a few months, not a sheet has been printed, and the whole plant is going to rack and ruin.

This is the difference between the Chinese and the tribespeople of Yün-nan. Here we see the god of the missionary again, quite apart from any religious basis. The tribesman comes and lays himself at the feet of the missionary, and says at once, "I do not know. Tell me, and I will follow you. I want to learn." That is why it is that the Chinese stand open-eyed and open-mouthed when they see the Miao making strides altogether impossible to themselves, in proportion to their standard of civilization, and this position of things will not be altered, unless they cease to deceive themselves. I have seen a Miao boy of nine who never in his life had seen a Chinese character, who did not know that school existed and, whose only tutoring depended on the week's visit of the missionary twice a year. I have seen this youngster read off a sheet of Chinese characters no Chinese boy of his age in the whole city would succeed in. I have not been brought into contact with any other tribe as I have with the Hua Miao.[1]

But if the progress this once-despised people are making is maintained, the Yün-nanese will very soon be left behind in the matter of practical scholarship. These Miao live the simplest of simple lives, but they wish to become better—to live purer lives, to become civilized, to be uplifted; and therefore they are most humble, most approachable, and are slowly evolving into a happy position of proud independence. Education among the Hua Miao is not lost: among the Chinese much of the labor put forward in endeavors to educate them is lost, or seems to bear no immediate fruit. The Miao are living by confidence and hope that turns towards the future; the Yün-nanese are content with their confidence in the past. The Miao, however, were not like this always—but a few years ago they were not heard of outside China.

The coming emancipation of their women, demands some attention. The few Europeans who have lived among the multitudes in Central China would not associate beds of roses with the lives of the women anywhere.

The daughter is seldom happy, and unless the wife present her husband with sons, who will perpetuate the father's name and burn incense at his tablet after his death, her life is more often than not made absolutely unbearable—a fact more than any other one thing responsible for the numerous suicides. She is the drudge, the slave of the man. And the popular belief is that all the women of the Middle Kingdom are essentially Chinese; but little is heard of the tribespeople—more numerous probably than in any other given area in all the world—whose womankind are as far removed from the Chinese in language, habits and customs as English ladies of to-day are removed from Grecians. A decade or so ago no one heard of the Miao women: they were the lowest of the low, having no status. They were far worse off than their Chinese sisters, who, no matter what they had to endure after marriage, were certainly safeguarded by law and etiquette allowing them to enter the married state with respectability; but no social laws, no social ties protect the Miao women.

Until a few years ago their "club" was a common brothel, too horrible to describe in the English language. As soon as a girl gave birth to her first child she came down on the father to keep her. In many cases, it is only fair to say, they lived together faithfully as man and wife, although such cases were not by any means in the majority. The poor creatures herded together in their unspeakable vice and infamy, with no shame or common modesty, fighting for the wherewithal to live, and only by chance living regularly with one man, and then only just so long as he wished. Little girls of ten and over regularly attended these awful hovels, and children grew out of their childhood with no other vision than that of entering into the disgraceful life as early as Nature would allow them. It meant little less than that practically the whole of the population was illegitimate, viewed from a Western standpoint. No such thing as marriage existed. Men and women cohabited in this horrible orgy of existence, with the result that murder, disease and pestilence were rife among them. It was only a battle of the survival of the fittest to pursue so terrible a life. Nearly all the people were diseased by the transgression of Nature's laws.

After a time, however, through the instrumentality of Protestant missionaries, these wretched people began to see the light of civilization. Gradually, and of their own free will, the girls gave up their accursed dens of misery and shame, and the men lived more in accord with social law and order.

The Miao, too, had hitherto been dependent for their literature upon the Chinese character, which only a few could understand. Soon they had literature in their own language,[AE] and a great social reform set in. They showed a desire for Western learning such as has seldom been seen among any people in China—these were people lowest down in the social scale; and now the latest phase is the establishment of bethrothal and marriage laws, calculated to revolutionize the community and to introduce what in China is the equivalent for home life.

Betrothal among the Chinese is a matter with which the parties most deeply concerned have little to do. Their parents engage a go-between or match-maker, and another point is that there is no age limit. Not so now with the Christian Miao. No paid go-between is engaged, and brides are to be at a minimum age of eighteen years, and bridegrooms twenty. The establishment of these laws will, it is hoped, make for the emancipation from a life of the most dreadful misery of thousands of women in one of the darkest countries of the earth.[AF]

But now the Miao is pressing forward under his burdens, to guide himself in the struggle, to retrieve his falls and his failures; and in the future lies his hope—the indomitable hope upon which the interest of humanity is based—and he has in addition the grand expectation of escaping despair even in death. It is all the praiseworthy work of our fellow-countrymen, living isolated lives among the people, building up a worthy Christian structure upon Miao simplicity and humble fidelity to the foreigner.

But I digress from my travel.

Little out of the ordinary marked my travels to Lao-ya-kwan (6,800 feet), an easy stage. My meager tiffin at an insignificant mountain village was, as usual, an educational lesson to the natives. Each tin that came from my food basket—one's servant delighted to lay out the whole business—underwent the severest criticism tempered with unmeaning eulogy, picked up and put down by perhaps a score of people, who did not mean to be rude. When I used their chopsticks—dirty little pieces of bamboo—in a manner very far removed from their natural method, they were proud of me. Outrageously panegyric references were made when an old man, scratching at his disagreeable itch-sores under my nose, clipped a youngster's ear for hazarding my age to be less than that of any of the bystanders, the length of my moustache and a three-day growth on my chin giving them the opinion that I was certainly over sixty.[AG]

I entered Lao-ya-kwan under an inauspicious star. No accommodation was to be had, all the inns were literally overrun with sedan chairs and filled with well-dressed officials, already busy with the "hsi-lien" (wash basin). In my dirty khaki clothes, out at knee and elbow, looking musty and mean and dusty, with my topee botched and battered, I presented a most unhappy contrast as I led my pony down the street under the sarcastic stare of bystanding scrutineers. The nights were cold, and in the private house where I stayed, mercifully overlooked by a trio of protesting effigies with visages grotesque and gruesome, rats ran fearlessly over the room's mud floor, and at night I buried my head in my rugs to prevent total disappearance of my ears by nibbling. Not so my men. They slept a few feet from me, three on one bench, two on another. Bedding was not to be had, and so among the dirty straw they huddled together as closely as possible to preserve what bodily heat they had. Snow fell heavily. In the early morning sunlight on January 13th the undulating valley, with its grand untrodden carpet of white, looked magnificently beautiful as I picked out the road shown me by a poor fellow whose ears had got frost-nipped.

No easy work was it climbing tediously up the narrow footway in a sharp spur rising some 1,000 feet in a ribbed