A wandering student in the Far East/Ch'êngtu
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CHAPTER VIII.
CH'ÊNGTU.
Ch'êngtu is undoubtedly a fine city. Sir Alexander Hosie declares that it is the finest city that he has seen in China, and thinks that neither Peking nor Canton will bear comparison with it. That it has always been a city of great wealth and prosperity may be gathered from a remark let drop by Marco Polo: "Also there stands upon the bridge the Great Kaan's comercque, that is to say, his custom-house, where his toll and tax are levied. And I can tell you that the dues taken on this bridge bring to the lord a thousand pieces of fine gold every day and more." It is not, like Ch'ung-k'ing, a great distributing centre for foreign goods; but there are large and well-stocked shops at which the products of Europe and America are on sale, and there must be a very large local trade. Silk is conspicuous among the local productions, the Ch'êngtu Fu district itself being responsible for an annual production valued at upwards of 3¾ million taels, out of a total production for the whole province of Tls. 15,000,000.
But the commercial interest of Ch'êngtu takes second place to its political interest. It is the capital of the "largest and probably the richest province in the empire." It is the seat of a viceroy who, in addition to administering the internal affairs of his kingdom, has the pleasure of keeping an eye upon the long line of the nebulous, and not infrequently troublous, Tibetan borderland. Here is a fertile field for seed-plots of sedition and intrigue. In truth, the Tibetans have not infrequently treated their Chinese overlords with scant respect. The Abbé Huc gives a delightful picture of the attitude of the Tibetans of Gaya towards the Chinese official who had been deputed to escort him and his colleague, M. Gabet, on their memorable journey from Lhassa to Ssŭch'uan. His demand for the usual transport, supposed to be provided free for the Chinese Government, was met with fine contempt. The mandarin raved and threatened, but the people of Gaya preserved an attitude "deliciously haughty and contemptuous. One of them advanced a step, placed, with a sort of wild dignity, his right hand on the shoulder of Ly-Kouo-Ngan, and after piercing him with his great black eyes, shaded with thick eyebrows, 'Man of China,' said he, 'listen to me; dost thou think that with an inhabitant of the Valley of Gaya there is much difference between cutting off the head of a Chinese and that of a goat? The oulah [i.e., transport] will be ready presently; if you do not take it, and go to-day, to-morrow the price will be doubled."' The stirring description of the adventurous journey of Mr Cooper from Ch'êngtu to the Tibetan frontier in 1868, his imprisonment by the Chinese officials, and his final rescue by native chiefs, gives a vivid picture of the wild and ungoverned condition of the country. Now again, in 1905, a serious rising in the Bathang and Litang districts had taken place against the Chinese. It had occurred to an ambitious and energetic Chinese official, seemingly, that much credit, and perhaps some more tangible gain, would accrue to himself were he to set about reforming the frontier tribes. The reforms inaugurated took the shape of reducing the numbers of, and curtailing the privileges and authority of, the lamas. Such a thing was not to be tolerated, and the Tibetans rose. The offending mandarin suffered the extreme penalty for his temerity; but, unfortunately, Europeans became involved in the upheaval, and more than one French missionary was brutally murdered, while an English botanist, Mr George Forrest, who happened to be collecting plants in the neighbourhood, narrowly escaped with his life, after suffering the most terrible hardships and privations. A punitive expedition was organised, with that deliberation which forms so conspicuous a feature of Chinese administration, and now in the winter of 1906 the troops, said to be 5000 or 6000 in number, had just returned from a crusade of rapine, pillage, and plunder.
Money was required to pay for such an expedition, and the funds of the proposed Ch'êngtu-Hankow railway lay conveniently at hand. I would not, of course, go so far as to say that the whole of the sum abstracted for the purpose found its way to the pockets of those who were supposed to have earned it. History sometimes repeats itself, and it is worth recalling that Mr Cooper found a similar expedition, whose commander remained in Ch'êngtu, occupied in drawing pay at the monthly rate of 14s. a man for a paper army of 40,000 men, consisting of 250 men only, who had accomplished the truly magnificent feat of occupying nearly six months in covering a distance of thirty miles. In China there is always a big element of uncertainty in all official transactions connected with finance, and the only point in the present arrangement which apparently admitted of no doubt, was the abstraction of large sums from the fund specifically collected for the purpose of railway construction. Armed with this knowledge, the local gentry hurled their bolt from the blue into the viceregal yamen, in the shape of a memorial insisting on the restoration to the fund of the sum of 1,000,000 taels unlawfully extracted. In his dilemma the viceroy cast his eyes round, and guided by Heaven(?), they chanced to light upon the high priest of a neighbouring temple who had so far forgotten himself as to take unto himself a wife, and who was actually found to be the father of a family. Could such violation of religious usage be tolerated? Not for a moment. Lands and property were instantly confiscated, and the offending priest paraded in a cangue before the scorn of a righteous population.
The streets in the Chinese city—there is a Tartar city adjoining, occupied by a Manchu garrison—are comparatively broad, and present a scene of lively animation. The gilded signboards which hung over the streets and excited the admiration of Sir Alexander Hosie have, however, largely disappeared, the present police Taotai, a man of progressive ideas, holding the opinion that they encroached unduly upon the thoroughfare. Other reforms of an even more salutary nature have been carried out, the crowds of beggars who formerly encumbered the city having been taken in hand, with the result that they are now to be seen, marshalled in bands and shorn of their pigtails, carrying out useful public works under police supervision.
During my stay in the capital I was received in audience by the Viceroy Hsi Liang. Social intercourse in China, especially among the upper classes, is a science in itself, the complex nature of which is quite beyond the grasp of the average European intellect. To the Chinese versed in all the intricacies of an etiquette which is the product of generations of the most subtle-minded race on earth, every action, every gesture, every carefully-worded phrase, is replete with hidden meaning. The flattered foreigner, complacently accepting at their face value the flowery compliments discharged at him, may, for all he can tell, be the object all the time of biting insult and studied affront. He has probably himself violated, in his ignorance, the most sacred canons of correct behaviour. On one occasion I, in my ignorance, removed my hat on entering the reception-room of an official with whom I desired an interview. My host immediately rose and stripped off his outer garments! I was completely at a loss to understand his behaviour; but I have no doubt, now, that it was to be quits with me for my lack of respect in removing my hat. After this I learned off by heart such details of behaviour as are absolutely necessary, and for the rest trusted to luck not to appear too hopelessly gauche in the eyes of my hosts. When I remembered to shake hands cordially with myself instead of with my host on arrival and departure, to keep my hat fixed firmly upon my head instead of taking it off, to take the cup of tea which he would hand me but on no account to drink it until the moment of leaving, to accept the tit-bit picked out of the dishes on the table and placed on my plate by my host's own long-nailed fingers, and to return the compliment by selecting some particularly dainty-looking morsel to bestow upon him, I felt that I had done all that could be expected of me. So far as I am capable of judging, my interview with his Excellency Hsi Liang passed off without any very grave breach of decorum upon my part, and upon my expressing a desire to inspect the arsenal he gave me a cordial invitation to lunch with him at that institution.
I found the arsenal in a state of change. Enlarged premises were in course of preparation outside the city, and supplies of German machinery were on the way, a German foreman having already reached the capital to supervise the setting up of the new plant. These are the things that at present fire the enthusiasm of young China. The heterogeneous collection of machinery bearing the names of firms from Leeds, Glasgow, Manchester, London, and the United States which I saw, is symbolic of the confusion and lack of method of the past. Five Mauser rifles were being turned out per diem; but the capacity of the new works is to be fifty. The mint, which is in the same compound as the arsenal, likewise reflects the spirit of the times, for here I saw the new Chinese rupee—the first coin upon which the head of any Chinese emperor has ever been struck—being turned out in large numbers. Its origin is due to the fact that considerable numbers of Indian rupees have for many years filtered through from Tibet to Western China. That a coin bearing the features of an alien monarch should find favour with the subjects of the "Son of Heaven" was not to be borne by an official inspired by the new creed, which preaches the practice of modern methods for asserting the ancient doctrine of China for the Chinese. A memorial to the throne met with a favourable reply, and now coins the exact copy of the Indian rupee, but bearing the portrait of the occupant of the Dragon throne, were being despatched to Ta-Chien-lu at the rate of one and three-quarter millions a-year. We lunched sumptuously and at length, dishes from the cookery-books of Europe alternating with bird's-nest soup, sharks' fins, sea-slugs, lotus-seeds in syrup, and other delicacies, the receipts for which remain locked in the bosoms of Celestial cooks.
The college for modern learning, erected in compliance with the peace protocol of 1900, I found in a flourishing condition, with 378 students voraciously seeking the knowledge of the peoples of the West. It started late and badly, a building for the purpose having been reluctantly erected by official orders in 1904, which building had shortly afterwards to be destroyed as unsafe, the contractor having expended upon it only 10,000 out of the 30,000 taels for which he contracted to do the work. Students were not easy to find; but with the tremendous impetus given to innovation in all parts of China as the Russo-Japanese war developed, a change came over the people of Ssŭch'uan, and before long the difficulty of securing students was replaced by the difficulty of accommodating all those who desired to learn.
Before leaving Ch'êngtu I cashed a draft obtained in Shanghai. The ancient banking system of China is in the hands of the men 
In the Tartar city, Ch'êngtu.
of a single province, the province of Shansi, and their code of honour is of the most exacting description. I have already had occasion to remark upon the hopeless inconvenience of Chinese coinage. It is one of the surprises of this extraordinary country that side by side with the most primitive system of coinage should exist a most efficient banking system, spread like a network over the whole of the empire. Surprise gives way to unfeigned astonishment when it is realised that the banking system of China is the oldest in the world, and was the father, in all probability, of the vast credit and exchange system of Europe. The oldest bank-note known to be extant is a Chinese bank-note issued during the reign of Hung Wú in the fourteenth century, 300 years before the issue of bank-notes in Europe, and 600 years after their earliest appearance in Asia. There is, indeed, little doubt that Europe has to thank Asia for the foundations of her modern civilisation. If she suffered grievous affliction at the hands of the invading legions of Asia, she was at any rate amply repaid. For it was thanks in large measure to the intercourse between East and West, which was generated by the clash of nations at the time when the turbulent Mongol hordes thundered at her gates, that Europe acquired the century-old inventions of Asia. Knowledge of the polarity of the lodestone, the art of printing, the rude power of gunpowder,—these were some of the gifts culled from the superior stores of Asian wisdom. "By the shock of nations the darkness of the middle ages was dispersed. Calamities which at first aspect seemed merely destined to afflict mankind, served to arouse it from the lethargy in which it had remained for ages; and the subversion of twenty empires was the price at which Providence accorded to Europe the light of modern civilisation."[1]
When one bears in mind the long start which Asia enjoyed along the road of progress, the backward place which she occupies to-day appears all the more remarkable. The tremendous strides which China will have to take before recovering her place among the competing nations of the world are forced upon the notice of the traveller at every turn. Thus the immense obstacles which stand in the way of even so elementary and so necessary a reform as the construction of railways were brought to light during my stay at Ch'êngtu by the publication, for the first time, of a balance-sheet of the proceeds of three years' enforced contributions and taxation towards a fund for building a line from Ch'êngtu to Hankow. This document, though interesting as a curiosity, was of little value as a statement of accounts, since, as I have already mentioned, a portion at least of the miserably inadequate sum of 4½ million taels—say £677,000—said to be in hand had been abstracted, temporarily at any rate, to pay for the punitive expedition to the borders of Tibet, while it was generally reported that of the remainder the greater part had been commandeered to provide machinery for the arsenal and mints at Ch'êngtu and Ch'ung-k'ing,—a state of affairs which was even hinted at by the balance-sheet itself, in which it was affirmed that the sum of 1½ million taels was "held at interest in the mint of Ch'ung-k'ing." The true inwardness of this admission can only be appreciated by those who, like myself, have seen large portions of the material and machinery intended for the new mint, lying wrecked in various rocky reaches of the Yang-tsze, or by those who may have chanced to notice a significant paragraph in the report of the Commissioner of Customs for Ch'ung-k'ing for 1905, which, after noting that a Taotai had been sent by the Viceroy to establish a mint, went on to say that "dissatisfaction was apparent before long at the rapidity with which money was being spent without much result, and the Taotai was superseded."
It was, of course, a case of the old, old story which appears in every conceivable variation over all official transactions in China, and which is summed up simply and accurately in the one word "squeeze." The stolid, patient Chinese peasant will stand much before expressing his disapproval, but there were not wanting signs that the people of Ssŭch'uan were beginning to think of entering their protest. An ingenious method of raising money had for some time been put into force. A special income tax of 3 per cent was being levied on all who possessed an income of more than ten piculs of rice. In order to make it clear that this tax was levied in the interests of the taxpayer, it was declared that interest at the rate of 4 per cent would be paid on the sum thus raised, and that when any individual taxpayers contribution had amounted to 50 taels he would be awarded a share in the Ch'êngtu-Hankow railway scheme. This magnificent prospect did not appear to excite the enthusiasm among the taxpayers that was hoped for, and at the time of my arrival at the capital inflammatory placards appeared in the neighbourhood, in which it was pointed out that while taxation was increasing, the interests of the people were being neglected, and amiably concluding, in one case, by offering rewards for all foreigners brought in dead or alive, and by appointing a date for a general attack upon the foreign population. This incipient display of discontent was capably dealt with by the Viceroy, a single execution proving effective in nipping disturbance in the bud; but it served to show that further burdens would be resented by the people, and the funds for the construction of the Ssŭch'uan railways will be whistled for for many a day to come. By any one who knows China, the value of her avowal that she can build her own railways without having recourse to foreign loans, will be accurately gauged.[2]