A wandering student in the Far East/Sui Fu to Yün-nan Fu
CHAPTER X.
SUI FU TO YÜN-NAN FU.
Thanks to the kindness of Mr Faers, my preparations for resuming the road once more were soon completed. The smiling hills and valleys of Ssŭch'uan, with its teeming population, its enormously developed agricultural wealth, its vast neglected mineral resources, and its magnificent waterways, lay behind: before me stretched a different land—the rugged gorges and plateaux of Yün-nan, sparsely populated, ill-developed, a land the despair alike of the merchant and the engineer, yet a land which, on account of its geographical position, has succeeded in setting England and France bidding for the privilege of building railways across its rugged surface and striving to build up trade upon its ungracious soil.
From here on, until I reached Burma and civilisation, I proposed to proceed on foot, and on December 26th my party of coolies, chair-bearers, soldiers, and servants—a motley crowd of forty souls in all—moved out of Sui Fu. The first eighteen miles took us up the left bank of the Yang-tsze to the village of An-pien, whence a five days' tramp, during which we followed, as far as the exigencies of gorge and precipice would allow, the turbulent torrent of a tributary from the south, the Ta-kuan Ho, brought us to Lao-wa-t'an, the Customs barrier between Ssŭch'uan and Yün-nan. The road, which perhaps scarcely deserves the unmeasured condemnation which it appears to have called forth from such travellers as have covered it, is a stony, but tolerable, mountain track, which swarmed with coolies carrying skins, hides, copper, and lead from Yün-nan, and salt and cottons from Ssŭch'uan. Large cases of cartridges, too, from Kynoch of Birmingham, were being carried painfully along on the backs of bent and stunted coolies, destined for the troops of Yün-nan Fu. Let those whose enthusiasm has led them to pit schemes for land communication from Burma cheerfully and without due consideration of all the circumstances against the natural inlet into Western China provided by the Yang-tsze, take note of this.
On the fourth day we crossed the boundary between the two provinces. The Ta-kuan river bored its way through crumpled gorges, cultivation appeared only in tiny patches, and steep slopes of cactus and rank grass took the place of the terraced hillsides of Ssŭch'uan. The district was said to be infested by robbers, who find this wild borderland of three provinces—Ssŭch'uan, Yün-nan and Kuei-chow—a convenient field for carrying on their predatory occupation. And as if to confirm the rumours with which we were regaled, there in front of us, on rounding a corner, appeared three brigands in the flesh, heavily chained and travelling under escort of three rugged soldiers to the little town of Ta-kuan, where, so we were informed, several executions had already taken place.
Lao-wa-t'an consists simply of a long straggling street, at the end of which the route crosses the river by a fair bridge. It would be difficult to find a better situation for a Customs barrier, for the valley up which the road lies is so narrow and the mountainsides so precipitous that it would be wellnigh impossible for laden coolies to travel by any other route. The distance from Sui Fu may be taken as not more than 76 miles,—an estimate which I arrived at by allowing an average of 3 miles to the hour as my speed while actually walking. Mr Little, who travelled over this road in 1904, makes the distance 80 miles; Consul Bourne, in his section of the report of the Blackburn Commercial Mission, 111 miles; and Messrs Neville and Bell, in their section of the same report, 137 miles. One does not look for mathematical accuracy in Western China, but there would seem to be a quite inexcusable difference of opinion here. The probability is that the members of the Mission translated the Chinese li into miles, a li in this part of China being generally considered to be the equivalent of a quarter of an English mile. But this method is productive of incorrect results, because, as every one who has travelled in Western China ought to know, the li is not bound by the limitations of the ordinary standard of linear measurement, but is affected to no small extent by the nature of the ground which it purports to measure. Thus, though it may be 3000 li from Lao-wa-t'an to Sui Fu, it does not in the least follow that it is 3000 li from Sui Fu to Lao-wa-t'an, the explanation of this apparent mathematical contradiction being provided by the fact that it is up-hill one way and down-hill the other. Time as well as distance has a direct bearing on the nature of the li, and since it takes longer to travel up-hill from A to B than it does to travel down-hill from B to A, there must obviously be a greater number of li between A and B than there are between B and A. Quod erat demonstrandum.
On New Year's day 1907 I left the temple at Lao-wa-t'an, which had seemed to be a degree less dirty than the inn, and which I had consequently occupied for the night, and crossing the suspension bridge climbed to the summit of a mountain spur over which the track passes, in order to avoid the extra distance caused by a big bend in the river. Henceforth pack-ponies competed with coolies, and not far from the summit of the pass towards which we were climbing, an unwary animal with a load of copper lost his footing on the stone-paved track, which was rendered as slippery as ice by mist and rain, and crashed head foremost down the hillside. A descent on the far side, similar to the ascent, brought us back to the Ta-kuan river, and to the little hamlet of Tou-sha-kuan, where I spent the night. All round, grey-blue limestone rose in sharp fantastic peaks, closing in the valley and defying even a Chinaman to cultivate their slopes. There is, indeed, little to appeal to the casual traveller along this route, and for four more days I experienced the monotony of the barren defiles of the Ta-kuan river, halting for the nights at the villages of Chi-li-pu, Ta-wan-tzu, and Ta-kuan Ting.
About ten miles beyond Ta-kuan Ting we were confronted with a steep hillside, walling in the end of the valley, at the foot of which the river issued from a subterranean passage. At the summit of this natural barrier we were at last clear of the prison valley of the Ta-kuan Ho, and on the rim of the great central plateau of Yün-nan. The sun shone from a clear sky, and behind and below us we looked back upon the grey pall of cloud which broods over the lower regions of Ssŭch'uan. We were, in all truth, at last in Yün-nan—the land "south of the clouds." Two miles over a flat, peaty, grass-covered tableland, hedged in between ranges of mountains, brought us to the tiny village of Wu-chai, 6000 feet above the sea. From here, a march of about twenty-two miles over a level plain, except for one mountain-ridge of no very great height, brought me on the morrow to Chao-t'ung Fu, a moderate-sized town situated in the centre of an agricultural plain. I made the distance from Sui Fu 160 miles—but 160 miles of gaping chasm and frowning precipice, which it had taken us twelve days to cover. Here I was hospitably entertained by Dr and Mrs Savin of the Bible Christian Mission, and right glad I was to find myself for a brief space enjoying the comfort and cleanliness of an English home and the pleasant society of fellow-countrymen.
The country all round looks bare and brown, plough land, some of which is irrigated, covering the plain. On all sides, filling in the distance, rise mountains of a ruddy- coloured soil. Maize is the chief grain produced, and as soon as it is harvested, poppy is sown. This is, of course, by far the most valuable crop which the province produces, Yün-nan opium having a particularly good name; and the farmers were said to be in a state of nervous irritation owing to a belief on their part that the authorities were actually thinking of taking steps to reduce the cultivation of the poppy, in accordance with the recently issued proclamation at Peking. Nor was this reflex of the anti-opium movement—of which more anon—the only symptom of that curious, indefinable, yet palpable process of change which is making itself apparent even in the most remote corners of the Chinese empire, and which promises "nothing short of the complete renovation of the oldest, most populous, and most conservative of empires."[1] For pamphlets, compiled by Yün-nan students who had studied in Japan, had been recently distributed exhorting their fellow-countrymen to treat strangers and foreigners with all respect, but at the same time to make themselves strong, and to resist strenuously encroachments upon their province from without. France, it was pointed out, was a dangerous neighbour, who was even now constructing a railway into the heart of Yūn-nan. Let them see to it that no more such concessions were granted to foreign Powers.
I was obliged to spend a day at Chao-t'ung Fu bargaining with my men. A thousand mule-loads of ammunition were being sent through to the capital, with the result that transport was scarce and prices high. Eventually I came to terms with the men who had accompanied me from Sui Fu to take me to Yün-nan Fu, 5 taels—roughly 15s.—being the price agreed upon for the chair-bearers, and a trifle less for the ordinary coolies, for the thirteen days' march.
On January 8th, a short fifteen miles across level plain brought me to the hamlet of Tao Yuan, or "the spring among the peach-trees,"—an attractive but singularly delusive title. Indications of famine, which had recently laid a heavy hand upon the province, were to be seen in a series of proclamations which warned the people, under pain of severe punishment, to save up their grain, and not to waste it in the making of spirit.
I had now travelled for two days over the so-called Yün-nan plateau, and for these two whole days I was happy in my belief that the journey before me was to consist of a succession of pleasant marches over a comparatively level table-land, with an average altitude of from 6000 to 7000 feet. It was on January 9th that this illusion began to be dispelled. During the morning we climbed steadily up-hill to the summit of a pass 8000 feet above sea-level, and then dropped headlong some 3600 feet to the bottom of a wild and desolate valley, along which brawled and bubbled the Niu-lan river on its way to join the Yang-tsze to the north-west,—a rise and 
Coolie transport in Yün-nan.
fall of between 5000 and 6000 feet in sixteen miles. Moreover, rising in rugged defiance in front of us was another range, the lowest point in which touched upwards of 7000 feet. "Talk of railways by this route," ejaculated Sir Alexander Hosie when he reached the valley of the Niu-lan twenty years before; "as well talk of railways to the moon "—and I felt moved to agree with him.
At the summit of the pass looking down upon the Niu-lan river, where two or three miserable hovels stood huddled together, were posted imperial proclamations, in accordance with the Chifu Agreement arising out of the murder of Mr Margary in 1875, adjuring the people to be civil and friendly to foreigners. The people of Chiang-ti, the village on the precipitous banks of the Niu-lan at which I was to halt for the night, showed their friendship for me by refusing the messenger, whom I had sent on, accommodation, and intimating that they wished to have no truck with the "foreign devil." The official at Chao-t'ung Fu, either by accident or by design, had omitted to send me the customary escort, and without this material manifestation of authority to awe the populace I was constrained to put up with such quarters as I could get, and to spend a disturbed night in the midst of a crowd of brawling and quarrelsome coolies and muleteers, who gambled and fought by turn until finally lulled to slumber by the soothing fumes of the opium-pipe.
At 7000 feet we reached the summit of the range on the south side of the Niu-lan river, and then dropped again into an open, flat-bottomed valley, well cultivated, at the end of which stands the village of I-che-hsun, where I spent the night. For the next two days we picked our way through a tumbled labyrinth of brick-red mountains, patched with pine, walnut, and the "wax-tree." Sometimes we descended abruptly hundreds of feet to flat-bottomed valleys possessing neither entrance nor exit, with the result that we had almost immediately to climb hundreds of feet up again in order to get out on the other side. This is the country of "alternating bare, wind-swept downs and precipitous canons," an inhospitable land, miles upon miles of which may be traversed with not so much as a house to be seen, through which the Blackburn Commercial Mission passed in 1897. Their comment is pathetic: "On March 31st, we travelled twenty-five miles without seeing a village. And there was no work for us to do—a commercial mission in the Sahara. In truth, from Lao-wa-t'an to K'ung-shan the country is at present of no possible value for commerce. The people are very poor, and clad exclusively—when clad at all—in Sha-shih cotton cloth; but they can scarcely afford sufficient clothing." It was a relief to drop, on January 12th, from a high range to the long and well-cultivated valley in which lies the city of Tung-ch'uan Fu, the second place worthy of the name of town between Sui Fu and Yün-nan Fu. The distance between Chao-t'ung Fu and Tung-ch'uan Fu is mentioned by Morrison as 110 miles; but my own estimate was 83 miles. The valley wore quite an air of prosperity after the bleak uplands over which we had been travelling. Wild-blossom gave the land an appearance of approaching spring, irrigated fields filled the valley bottom, wild-duck circled overhead, and cranes stood demurely and contentedly in the soaking paddy-fields.
Once again I found myself indebted to the members of the Bible Christian Mission, for I received a warm welcome and a cordial invitation from Mr and Mrs Dymond. There was no great stock of foreign goods to be seen in the town, Indian yarn constituting the chief article of consumption in this category, a good deal of weaving being carried on in the district. Here, too, as at Chao-t'ung, the spirit of reform stalked abroad. Celebrations had been held at the time of the edict promising a Constitution, and political speeches had been made. The humiliating treatment of the Chinese in America was graphically, if not too accurately, described, and one young student, fresh from the modern college at Yün-nan Fu, roundly denounced the corruption of the local yamen! Verily the old order changeth.
On the 13th I left Tung-ch'uan Fu and marched for twenty miles over fairly level ground to the foot of a high range to the south. In front of us lay the highest pass on the route, and we halted for the night with the prospect of a climb to 10,000 feet on the morrow. A sharp frost gave a bite to the air as we started, but when the sun broke through the thick white mist which hung over the earth it was pleasant enough.
Both my chair-bearers and the coolies made slow headway up the steep mountain track, and in company with a yamen-runner, who had been sent to escort me by the magistrate at Tung-ch'uan Fu, I was soon far ahead. I had travelled, so far, with little trouble for some hundreds of miles in innermost China, but at length the monotony of my daily and uneventful progress was to be rudely interrupted. I was struggling and panting in the thin dry air, when the yamen-runner, who had dropped behind, came running up gesticulating wildly. Here was a predicament. The man appeared to be rapidly going mad in his wild endeavours to make me understand something—but what? I stood gazing at him in blank astonishment when one of my chair-bearers appeared upon the scene covered with dust and perspiration. Things were beginning to get exciting, and it began to dawn upon me from his pantomime that all was not well. Back down the hill I reluctantly turned,—not altogether, be it admitted, without an uneasy feeling of misgiving,—when he seized me by the arm and pointed down below. I whipped out my glasses, and there, half a mile away, an angry crowd of men, among whom I saw my chair swaying unsteadily to and fro on the very brink of a precipice, were indubitably engaged in fierce altercation. Sticks were being plied, and stones were flying, and I stood wondering what to do when chair-bearer number two came struggling up towards us. With a look of understanding and a muttered word, both men took to their heels and incontinently fled. I seized my only remaining companion by the arm, and after explaining as forcibly as I could by sign and gesture, freely intermingled with good sound English adjuration, that he stood for the material expression of law and order, despatched him to deal with the mob below, and decided to await eventualities where I was. Exhaustion on the part of the men, combined with the sudden appearance upon the scene of the yamen-runner in official uniform, produced a salutary effect, and before long my own men, followed by the yamen-runner with a number of strangers in tow, came slowly and rather shamefacedly up the hill. With the arrival a little later of Joe, I soon got a general idea of what had occurred. On the track a string of primitive bullock-carts, consisting of two solid wooden wheels upon the axle of which a rough wooden framework was superimposed, were slowly wending their way. These unwieldy conveyances completely blocked the way, and by no means short of actual force, it appeared, could their owners be made to understand that my party wished to pass by. Result: force was resorted to, my men pushing their way past, and thereby upsetting one of the carts, which crashed down the precipice into a chasm several hundreds of feet below. The next minute a general mêlée ensued, the only weapons handy—sticks and stones—being made free use of.
The case was seemingly simple, and was not necessarily due to anti-foreign feeling as I had at first feared might be the case, and I immediately decided to hold an extemporised court of justice there and then. Seating myself, with Joe at my side, on a slight eminence, I motioned to the contending parties to come round. Needless to say, this gathering was soon swelled by every fresh traveller upon the road, until there was a very respectable concourse. As I had not seen the accident myself, and both sides vociferously declared their innocence, I had to assume that blame was evenly distributed. On demanding the value of a cart, and being informed by the carter that a new one would cost him at least a tael and a half—i.e., between 4s. and 5s.—I delivered judgment, translated sentence by sentence by Joe.
"I should present the man with Tls. 1½ to cover the loss which he had sustained. But, I could not have my servants beaten and maltreated on the highroad, therefore I would take the names, places of residence, and destination of the offenders. On this occasion I would say no more of their conduct; but as they, like myself, were travelling to Yün-nan Fu, I should have ample opportunity of watching their conduct for the remainder of the way, and if I noticed the slightest attempt at similar misconduct I should have the offenders delivered up at the first magisterial yamen for condign punishment." Having delivered this harangue and taken the names of the offenders, I handed Tls. 1½ to the owner of the lost cart, and declared the case dismissed. I congratulated myself on having successfully administered British justice under somewhat trying circumstances, and finding the day passing, took lunch where I was. What was my surprise to find the decision I had come to entirely upset by the refusal of the carter to accept the money. A dozen times I handed it to him, and as many times I received it back. All he begged was that I would consider the case closed. It subsequently transpired that the man had been advised by his friends to accept no compensation for his cart, lest afterwards he should be charged with robbery at the yamen. Truly an instructive sidelight on the methods of the upper classes in China! So my attempt at British justice had after all miscarried: they feared the foreign devil—et dona ferentem.
For the rest of the day I toiled over range after range of brick-red mountain, relieved from complete desolation by scrub and pine-woods. The two chair-bearers who had fled earlier in the day turned up in the afternoon, and just as I was upbraiding them for their cowardice, a tremendous holloaing came echoing across the elevated plain over which I was travelling. Excitement number two! This time, however, the explanation was not a disagreeable one. As I looked up to see what was the matter, two great wolves came bounding over the plain not a hundred yards from where I stood. In hot pursuit came a dog, while just beyond was a shepherd with his flock, yelling like mad, in which he was joined cheerfully and vociferously by every one in sight. The wolves, however, had the legs of their pursuer, and were soon out of sight over a neighbouring hilltop. We spent the night at the village of Lai-tou-p'o.
Two more days we travelled over endless mountains, but on the third emerged on to something more nearly approaching to a plateau—i.e., a fairly level high land with an elevation of something over 6000 feet. Cultivation increased steadily as we approached the wide plain in the midst of which the capital stands, villages became more frequent, and farmsteads were to be seen dotted about in favourable localities. From the village of Yang-kai, where we had spent the night of the 17th, we left the track, and striking across a well-irrigated and well-cultivated plain in a south-eastern direction, joined the main road from Wei-ning Chou to the capital. From Yang-lin, our stage of the 18th, a march of sixteen miles over a heath-like country of red soil covered with pine and scrub brought me to the village of Ta-pan Chiao, whence an easy march of twelve miles brought me to the capital on the 20th.
I was at last at the end of my wearisome journey over the main road from Ssŭch'uan and the Upper Yang-tsze to the capital of Yün-nan—a journey which had occupied a period of twenty-six days, out of which I had actually been marching twenty-five, and which had taken me over a route which may undoubtedly claim the distinction of being the most difficult and the most inhospitable of all the routes which serve as the main lines of communication in this part of China. Until the mineral wealth which it possesses is properly and systematically developed, this portion of Yün-nan can be of no commercial value, nor can I imagine any line of country less likely to excite the enthusiasm of the railway engineer. Indeed, such lines as have been suggested avoid altogether that part of the route over which I travelled which lies between Chao-t'ung Fu and Yün-nan Fu, a more feasible though still very difficult alignment between the two places lying east by Chu-tsing, Süan Wei, and Wei-ning Chou. The most buoyant report of which I have knowledge is that of an Italian engineer, who talks of a line of 650 kilometres, with a gradient, except in the case of two colls, of only 15 in 1000, and at the two mentioned colls of 25 in 1000, to be constructed at an estimated cost of £10,000 a kilometre. M. Doumer, late Governor-General of Indo-China, the vastness of whose ambitions was only equalled by the magnificent flights of his imagination, declared, as the result of a hurried survey by the officers of his Public Works Department in 1899, that "there were serious reasons for thinking that in seeking to attain first of all Sui Fu, in preference to Ch'ung-k'ing, his engineers had chosen the most convenient route, and, perhaps, the only one that was practicable." The members of the Yün-nan Company's Commission selected the route from Yün-nan Fu viâ Chu-tsing, Süan Wei, and Wei-ning Chou, whence viâ Chao-t'ung Fu to Sui Fu, or viâ Pitsie and Yung-ning to Na-ch'i, though neither alternative, it was admitted, could be described as anything but difficult. While the rival engineers of Europe were thus pondering sorrowfully upon the difficulties of a Yün-nan-Ssŭch'uan railway, an element of humour was introduced by the Chinese, who calmly declared that they intended surveying and building the line themselves, with which object in view they opened an office in 1905. Money was to be subscribed by private individuals taking shares, by increasing the selling price of Government salt, by raising the land-tax, and by the institution of lotteries. Strange to say, this proposition does not seem to have been taken very seriously by any one except the Chinese themselves, and in the summer of 1906 an Anglo-French Association came into being with the object of constructing a series of lines—viz., Canton-Hankow, Hankow-Ch'êngtu, and Ch'êngtu-Yün-nan Fu. For myself, I am not inclined to envy the shareholders in any future Yün-nan-Ssŭch'uan railway. The members of the Blackburn Commercial Mission doubted whether a railway "that would be able to transport goods or minerals at a lower rate than the pack-animal could be constructed through a country presenting so many obstacles to the engineer as does this." Even if it could, where is it going to find the goods to transport? Enthusiasts have pointed triumphantly to the long strings of coolies and pack-ponies that they have encountered on the road; but how many pack-ponies go to one train? And where the pack-ponies take from three weeks to a month, a train would cover the distance in from two to three days; and assuming that the present system of transport meets the demand, what is the train to carry during the remainder of the month? The fact is, that such schemes have been put forward on the assumption that the products of Ssŭch'uan would pour along a railway over the whole length of Yün-nan, instead of following, as they always have done, the natural line of communication provided by the Yang-tsze river,—an assumption which appears to me to be likely to prove singularly incorrect. But with the question of railways as a whole I propose to deal in a separate chapter.
- ↑ 'The Awakening of China'—Dr Martin.