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

"Yes, yes; morning, morning—he-e-e-e-e."

He then made for the door, not the least abashed. Later he came back, and invited me to speak Chinese, probably thinking that I was wondering why he had made such an absolute fool of himself. I learned that this august gentleman possessed a name in happy correspondence with a fowl ("Chi"). He pointed contemptuously to a member of that feather tribe as he told me. Whether he could speak Chinese when he was or was not at Chen-tu, or whether he had a son whose knowledge of my language was vast, and who was at that moment at Chen-tu, I could not quite fathom, and he could not explain. He had a look at my caravan generally, and then turned his scrutiny upon my common tweeds, informing me that the quality bore no comparison with his own. He could travel in a four-man chair; I had to walk. It was all very "pub hao."

After some time he cleared out with much empty swagger, and I followed leisurely on behind, feeling—yes, why not publish it?—pleased that this bolt from the blue had not been a lady.

This young fellow—a mere slip of a boy—wore every indication of perfect self-confidence, borne out in a multitude of ways common to his class. He, I presumed, was one of the fledglings who undertake responsibilities far beyond them, or I should not be surprised if he had been one of the army of young men who, having the merest smattering of English, wholly unable to converse, set up as teachers of English. I have found this quite common among the rising classes in Yün-nan. The cool assumption of unblushing superiority evinced in discussing intellectual and philosophic problems is remarkable. The Chinese, in the area I speak of, are little people with little brain: this was a specimen. Yet, to be fair, in China to-day the work of reform is mainly the work of young men, who although but only partly equipped for their work, approach it with perfect confidence and considerable energy, not knowing sufficient to realize the difficulties they are undertaking. In Japan the same thing was done. The young men there undertook to dispute and doubt everything which came in the way of national reorganization, setting aside—as China must do if she is to take her place alongside the ideal she has set up for herself, Japan—parental teaching, ancestral authority, the customs of centuries. A large proportion of the population of China has a passion for reform and progress. This young fellow was a typical example. In the west of China, however, to conform with the spirit of reform and real progress—not the make-believe, which is satisfying them at the present moment—they must needs change their ways.

Seventeen memorial plates were passed at the entrance to Chao-chow, a particularly modern-looking place, as one approaches it from the hill.

A remarkably ungainly individual, with a hole in the top of his skull and his body one mass of sores, came to me here, addressed me as "Sien seng," and then commenced an oration to the effect that he was a Szech'wanese, that he had known the missionaries down by the Yangtze, and that he knew he would be welcome to accompany me to Hsiakwan.[AT] He switched himself on the main line of my caravan. Here was a man who had been brought in contact with the missionary away down in another province, and he knew he was welcome. I liked that. In all my journeyings in Yün-nan I was increasingly impressed with the value of the missionary, that man who of all men in the Far East is the most subject to malicious criticism, and generally, be it said, from those persons who know little or nothing about his work. You cannot measure the missionary's work by conversions, by mere statistics. I venture to assert that it is through the missionary that the West applied pressure and supplied China with political ideas, and put within her reach the material and instruments which would enable her to carry such ideas into practice—this apart from religious teaching. More particularly is this the case in respect to popular education, perhaps, by means of which the transformation of Old China into New China will be a less long and difficult process. The people may not want the missionary—I do not for a moment say that they do—but they need to know the secret of his power and the power of his kind, and they must study his language, his science, his machinery, his steamboats, his army, his Dreadnaughts. They realize that the foreigner is useful not for what he can do, but for what he can teach—therefore they tolerate the missionary. This is virtually the national policy of China towards foreigners, a policy gaining the acceptance of the people with remarkable quickness.

After having set aside all considerations of national prejudice and patriotism, it is interesting to ask whether it is actually a fact that the Chinese, as a race, are inferior to the peoples of the West? Much has been said on the subject. I give my opinion flatly that the Chinese is not inferior, and the longer I live with him the more numerous become the lessons which he teaches me.

"The question, when we examine it closely, has really very little to do with political strength or military efficiency, or (pace Mr. Benjamin Kidd) relative standards of living, or even the usual material accompaniments of what we call an advanced civilization; it is a question for the trained anthropologist and the craniologist rather than for the casual observer of men and manners. The Japanese people are now much more highly civilized—according to western notions—than they were half a century ago, but it would be ludicrously erroneous to say that they are now a higher race, from the evolutionary point of view, than they were then. Evolution does not work quite so rapidly as that even in these days of 'hustle.' The Japanese have advanced, not because their brains have suddenly become larger, or their moral and intellectual capabilities have all at once made a leap forward, but because their intercourse with Western nations, after centuries of isolated seclusion, showed them that certain characteristic features of European civilization would be of great use in strengthening and enriching their own country, developing its resources, and giving it the power to resist aggression. If the Japanese were as members of the homo sapiens inferior to us fifty years ago, they are inferior to us now. If they are our equals to-day—and the burden of proof certainly now rests on him who wishes to show that they are not—our knowledge of the origin and history of Eastern peoples, scanty though it is, should certainly tend to assure us that the Chinese are our equals, too. There is no valid reason for supposing that the Chinese people are ethnically inferior to the Japanese. They have preserved their isolated seclusion longer than the Japanese, because until very recently it was less urgently necessary for them to come out of it. They have taken a longer time to appreciate the value of Western science and certain features of Western civilization, because new ideas take longer to permeate a very large country than a small one, and because China was rich within her own borders of all the necessaries of life."[AU]

And the West, too, must learn that the peace of Europe depends upon the integrity of China. For the time is coming—not in the lives of any who read these lines, but coming inevitably—when China will, by her might, by her immense numbers of trained men, by her developed naval and military strength, be able to say to the nations of the earth, "There must be no more war." And she will be strong enough to be able to enforce it.

As with individuals, so with nations, and a people who are marked by such rare physical vitality, such remarkable powers of endurance against great odds, are surely designed for some nobler purpose than merely to bear with fortitude the ills of life and the misery of starvation. It is the easiest thing in the world to criticise—the West criticises the Chinese because he is a heathen, because they do not understand him. Hundreds of millions of the Chinese race hate and fear the man of the West for exactly the same reason as would cause us to hate the Chinese were the situation reversed.

I do not need to go into history from the days when the Chinese first began to show their suspicion, contempt, and fear of foreigners, and their interpretation of the motives and purposes which took them to the Celestial Empire; it would take too much space. But if we of the West did our part to-day, as we rub up against the Chinese everywhere, in charitably taking him at his best, things would alter much more speedily that they are doing. Because the Chinese bristles with contradictions and seemingly unanswerable conundrums, we immediately dub him a barbarian, do not endeavor to understand him, do not understand enough of his language to listen to him and learn his point of view. However, it is all slowly passing—so very slowly, too. But still China is progressing, and now this oldest man in the world is becoming again the youngest, but has all the accumulations and advantages of age in all countries to lean upon and learn from.

Chao-chow gave me a very decent inn, the top room in front of which was provided with a well-paved courtyard, with every convenience for the traveler—that is, for China.

The inn cook and water-carrier was out playing on the street when we put in an early appearance. My men lost their temper, ground their teeth, foamed at the mouth, and got desperate. The only man on the premises was a poor old fellow, who foolishly bumped his uncovered head on the ground on which I stood, as an act of great servility and a secret sign that I should throw him a few cash, and then resumed his occupation in the sun of wiping his already inflamed eyes with the one unwashed garment which covered him. I pitied him; he knew it, and traded upon my pity until I invoked a few choice words from Lao Chang to fall upon him. When the cook did put in an appearance, he and everybody dead and living placed anywhere near his genealogical tree underwent a rough quarter of an hour from the anathematical tongues of my companions. The Old Man—by virtue of the growth on my chin, this epithet of respect was commonly used towards me—wanted to wash his face and drink his tea. He was tired with walking. He was a foreign mandarin. Did the blank, blank, blank cook, the worm and no man, not know that a foreigner was among them? And then they fell to piling up the ignominy again and placing to the cook's dishonor various degrees of lowliest origin common among the Chinese proletariat, which, thank Heaven, I did not quite understand.

That evening all Chao-chow came to honor me in my room, and to admire and ask to be given all I had in my boxes. That it was all a huge revelation to many who came and inquired who I might be, and whence I might have come, was quite evident. One fellow, dressed gaudily in expensive silks and satins—probably borrowed—came with pomp and pride; and disappointment was writ large upon his ugly face when he learned that I could not, or would not, speak with him. He mentioned that he was one of the cultured of the city. But the Chinese are all more or less cultured. My own coolies, although not knowing a character, are really "cultured"—they are the most polite men I have ever traveled with. The culture, at any rate, although more apparent than real, has a universality in China