A wandering student in the Far East/Tali Fu to T'eng Yüeh
CHAPTER XV.
TALI FU TO T'ENG YÜEH.
It is a weary struggle of twelve days from Tali Fu to T'eng Yüeh. The magnificence of the scenery does not always compensate the traveller for the fact that immense ranges of mountains, separated by correspondingly deep valleys, have to be crossed with monotonous regularity in the course of each successive day's march. From Hsia-kuan the track follows a stream draining from the south-west corner of the Tali lake to the little village of Yang-pi on the river of the same name, dropping 1500 feet in doing so. A fine suspension-bridge stretches across the river, and on the far side the path zigzags up the wall of mountains which hems in the valley of the Yang-pi on the west. The range is well wooded, and from the summit a magnificent view is obtained of the Yang-pi valley and the snow-clad line of mountains which fills in the view to the north-east. Descending slightly, and then running along a spur at right angles to the range just crossed at a considerable height above a valley running east and west, the track provided a charming walk, shaded by a multitude of forest trees, conspicuous among which were magnificent rhododendron-trees ablaze with crimson flower. A tiny mountain hamlet, T'ai-p'ing-p'u, provides a halting-place for the night on the evening of the third day out from Tali Fu.
The road a little west of Hsia-kuan.
no less than three T'ai-p'ing-p'u eggs, and you come and tell me that I must be taken ill with great pain?" "Sir, this story a very funny story—I don't think it can be true story." It fortunately proved to be false as far as I was concerned, but I spent a day in gloomy anticipation of what each succeeding moment might bring forth.
We dropped hurriedly to the valley of the Shun-pi after leaving T'ai-p'ing-p'u, and crossing that river by a good suspension-bridge, followed along its right bank to its junction with the Shuang-cha Ho. A short distance up the left bank of this river brought us to the village of Huang-lien-pu. The usual formidable range faced us on the far side, and from 7.30 A.M. the day following until 10 A.M. I climbed doggedly and without a halt. From the summit we travelled on for some miles at a considerable altitude, through lovely wooded scenery, till towards evening, when we descended abruptly down barer hills covered with withered grass, which must flourish luxuriantly in the wet season. Below us, running at right angles to our course, lay the valley of the Yung-ping, a broad, flat-bottomed expanse densely cultivated—the first cultivation of any consequence met with since leaving Tali. Crossing the Yung-ping—evidently at some seasons of the year a broad expanse of water, but now reduced to two or three shallow streams flowing along the depressions of what looked like a broad riverbed—we reached the small town of Chu-tung. This valley is undoubtedly well populated, a number of small towns, or rather large villages, being visible along its length. During the evening I had a visitor in the shape of a Chinese student, a bearer of the second classical degree. He evidently hankered after better things, in the shape of more practical knowledge, and asked me to write down in English a statement of his desires, that he might present it, if opportunity offered, on reaching Burma, to which country he intended making his way.
Towards the end of a long march on February 19th I observed below me, at the foot of some steep hills, white "Cabul" tents and Indian camp-followers. This proved to be the encampment of Mr Lilley, an engineer despatched by the Government of India to examine the country with a view to determining the practicability or otherwise of railway construction in this part of China. The results of the survey completed by Mr Lilley and his party during the early summer of 1907 are likely to have a modifying effect upon prevalent ideas, founded upon the witty criticisms of Colborne Baber, with regard to trade routes in this quarter. The whole question of railways in Western China is dealt with in a later chapter, but it may not be amiss to explain here the origin of existing prejudice against the T'eng Yüeh-Tali Fu line as a possible route for a railway from Burma.
It is based chiefly upon certain remarks of Colborne Baber, who travelled over this route as a member of the Grosvenor Mission in 1877. The science of mountain railway construction was less advanced thirty years ago than it is now, and it is perhaps because it has not been generally recognised how great have been the strides which have been made, during recent years, in this particular branch of the engineering profession, that the conclusions arrived at then by one who was, after all, possessed of no expert engineering knowledge, have been generally accepted as conclusive ever since. His declaration in a Government paper, China, No. 3, 1878, that "We feel at liberty to say that if British trade ever adopts this track, we shall be delighted and astounded in about equal proportions," has been quoted ad nauseam, and is generally held to have settled for all time the pretensions of the Tali Fu-T'eng Yüeh route as an avenue of ingress for British trade. The quotation given above is supported by others in the same paper. "The trade route from Yün-nan Fu to T'eng Yüeh is the worst possible route with the least conceivable trade," he declares; and further on, "I do not mean that it would be absolutely impossible to construct a railway.... By piercing half a dozen Mont Cenis tunnels and erecting a few Menai bridges, the road from Burma to Yün-nan Fu could, doubtless, be much improved."
Twenty years later engineers in the employ of the Yün-nan Company, accepting the conclusions above quoted, were in search of a railway route to the south, the Kung-long Ferry, on the Burmese frontier, being selected as the starting-point. Major Davies, whose splendid geographical work in Yün-nan cannot be too highly spoken of, finds in Baber's utterances support for the Kung-long Ferry scheme. Referring to the extracts above quoted, he declared at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society that he quite agreed with the truth of these remarks of Baber. "The only thing is," he went on to say, "they do not apply to the railway at all; they refer to the road which goes westward from T'eng Yüeh to Tali Fu, whereas the present proposed railway comes into Yün-nan from quite a different direction. Indeed, only half a page lower down Baber himself recommends as a probable line for a railway the very route which has now been adopted."[1] The recommendation by Baber here referred to is that "the object should be to attain some town of importance south of Yung-ch'ang and Tali Fu, such as Shun-ning, from which both these cities could be reached by ascending the valleys, instead of crossing all the mountain-ranges as must be done if the T'eng Yüeh route is selected."[2] Similar views were expressed by Sir George Scott, speaking at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in 1905. "The whole question of a railway from Burma has been prejudiced by Colborne Baber, who said that a railway there would have to be a series of bridges and tunnels. Well, if you start from Bhamo, ... you would have to build these bridges and tunnels. But ... there is a way round. Nature has provided us with a geological fault;... in one place, directly in a line with Mandalay, there is a curious fault—the line of rocks run due east and west, and up this from Mandalay a railway has been built.... The railway, so far, stops at Lashio, and if it goes no farther it will never pay; but if we carry it along this geological fault to China or into China, it will be a success. The fault leads us not only to the Salwin river, but it gives us a route up the Nam Ting river to the Mekong river watershed."[3] Even more emphatic is another authority, Captain Ryder: "When we come, however, to consider the question of a line from the Kung-long Ferry up the Nam Ting valley, we once more enter the regions of possibility.... And this line, which Captain Watt Jones
followed through up to Tali Fu and so on to Yün-nan Fu, is the only through line into China from Burma that can ever be constructed."[4]
Here we have a fair representation of prevalent opinion upon the question of a railway route from Burma into Yün-nan. Summed up, it amounts to this. The possibility of a railway ever being constructed along the Bhamo-Tali Fu route was ridiculed by a Consular officer thirty years ago. The conclusions then arrived at were accepted as valid by engineers examining the country with a special view to discovering possible railway routes in the years 1898-1900, and a line from the Kung-long Ferry on the Burmese frontier viê the Nam Ting river to Tali Fu and Yün-nan Fu was declared by them to be "the only through line into China from Burma that can ever be constructed." The importance, therefore, of the conclusions arrived at by Mr Lilley is considerable, since they invalidate all the premisses upon which the question of railway construction in western Yün-nan has been based. For they have definitely ascertained that there is no insuperable obstacle to the construction of a metre-gauge railway from Bhamo to Tali Fu.
On February 20th I climbed a range of mountains to gaze down from their summit upon the waters of a great river, flowing deep[5] and silent between towering walls of rock, and spanned by a bridge which hung like a cord between perpendicular cliffs on either side. Here at last was the famous Mekong, at once the delight and the despair of Francis Garnier,—the magnet which has irresistibly drawn to its rugged course the flower of the explorers of France, a vast volume of water speeding eternally from the frozen highlands of Tibet, and travelling for 2800 miles through the tumbled mountain labyrinths of Yün-nan, on through the Shan States and Laos, adding to its volume at each stride forward in its course, to find the ocean at last through the mazes of its delta on the southern shores of Cochin China.
The pathetic persistence with which a whole 
Bridge over the Mekong.
series of French explorers fought to establish the practicability of the Mekong as an artery of communication from their sea-board to the heart of China, provides a chapter of engrossing interest in the story of the exploration of Asia. With indefatigable zeal steam launches were forced up 1600 miles of hostile river; but the enterprise proved of no practical value. "Even below Luang Prabang the navigation of the river is fraught with immense difficulty; above that point it is excessively dangerous; and therefore it may safely be averred that there is little probability of the trade of the Hinterland of Indo-China being diverted from its ancient channels by means of a steam flotilla plying upon the waters of the Mekong."[6]
That part of the Mekong which stood athwart my course must be considered, as M. Vivien St Martin points out, "not as a trade route, but as a barrier to commerce, since each crossing of the river necessitates a descent and an ascent of from 3300 feet to 4400 feet each." Having negotiated the descent and the ascent, I sought shelter and repose at the village of Shui Chai, built on the edge of a small cultivated basin high up on the range west of the river. The shelter was of the usual kind, and my repose was rudely interrupted by the village mummers, who continued to salute the New Year with jarring noises on drums and gongs. On the following day we dropped into a large, level, well-cultivated, and apparently prosperous plain, in which is situated the town of Yung Chang, the largest town between Tali Fu and T'eng Yüeh. It has an evil reputation for rowdyism, though I did not experience any discourtesy at the hands of its people myself. In the principal inns I found merchants importing cotton yarn from Burma, and by no means adverse to seeing a railway built from Bhamo.
From Yung Chang one travels in four days to T'eng Yüeh. The journey is a trying one by reason of the high ranges dividing the Salwin and Shweli, which have to be crossed. At the village of Pupiao, where I halted for the first night out from Yung Chang, I encountered a white man, engaged upon the task of walking round the world for a wager. The amount involved, he informed me in confidence, approximated £32,000, in addition to 1,000,000 francs offered by some Continental walking club; but as he had four years in which to complete his circum-perambulation of the globe, and had so far only been going for four months, I agreed with him that much might happen before he found himself the proud possessor of the wagered money. He incidentally dropped a remark which led me to understand that the terms of his wager prevented him from asking for financial assistance while on his tour, though he had been offered quite voluntary contributions from time to time. He seemed quite surprised when I asked to be allowed to offer a small but quite voluntary contribution to his modest reserve fund. Before we parted I learned that a provincial newspaper in the north of England had been fortunate enough to secure his services as a correspondent, and I was favoured with the contents of an article destined to instruct the "people at home." It described a performance in Western China by village mummers in celebration of the New Year, and commented upon the appearance of the village lasses who took part. In the interests of the "people at home," for whose instruction this article was composed, I felt impelled to point out that in China women never took part in such performances, and that the individuals whom he had mistaken for the village lasses were, in point of fact, the village lads. He thought the point was a small one, but would be glad to make the alteration.
My sojourn at Pupiao is further stamped on my mind because of a wild and yelling mob who broke into the inn courtyard in the dead of night. I was roused from slumber by shouts and a great hammering upon the courtyard gates. The gates gave way with a crash at the moment that I scrambled out of bed and grasped my revolver. It fortunately proved to be, not an anti-foreign riot as I feared, but merely a gambling dispute between my coolies and the villagers, and after two or three men on either side had been severely mauled, the worst offenders were successfully ejected and comparative quiet descended upon the inn once more.
From Pupiao we crossed a mountain-range and then descended into the valley of the Salwin. Terraces of paddy-fields covered the lower slopes of the valley, which is wider than that of the Mekong; vegetation assumed a semi-tropical character, and the atmosphere became heavy and oppressive. There are probably good grounds for the bad name which the valley has among the natives for its unhealthy climate. The country in the vicinity was described by Marco Polo as being "full of great woods and mountains which 'tis impossible to pass, the air in summer is so impure and bad; and any foreigners attempting it would die for certain." This must be read in the light of his explanatory remarks in the prologue of his historic work,—"and we shall set down things seen as seen, and things heard as heard only, so that no jot of falsehood may mar the truth of our Book, and that all who shall read it or hear it read may put full faith in the truth of all its contents." The atmosphere is, no doubt, vitiated with malaria at certain seasons of the year, but it is doubtful whether even in this respect the valleys of western Yün-nan are as unhealthy as the valley of the Red river in the south.
The accommodation from the Salwin on to T'eng Yüeh—a two days' journey—is abominable, even judged by the standards of Yün-nan. The night is spent at a hovel a short distance up the mountain-range which rises on the west of the Shweli river, called Kan-lan-chan, which holds out no sufficient attraction even to a Yün-nan coolie to encourage him to hasten his jaded steps towards the end of a tiring march. Even the members of my escort, who had found an inexhaustible source of amusement during the previous days in snapping off percussion-caps with the hammers of their rusty muskets, lost heart and plodded silently and wearily up the steep ascent from the Shweli river. I asked them what kind of drill they were taught? "Oh," they replied, "we have no time to learn drill!" The motto emblazoned on their blouses was "fear established"—i.e., in the enemy. The muskets, however, of these Terrorists are rusty, and the Terrorists themselves of little use. Major Davies tells a story which throws an illuminating light upon military matters in these parts of China. In the Ning-yüan valley he met a Lolo chief, who had got up a small rebellion the year before against the Chinese. On condition of his changing his allegiance and joining the Chinese forces against the independent Lolos, he was granted a full pardon. He and his irregulars were then sent to the front because, as the Chinese cynically remarked, "they are stupid men who are not afraid of dying." The chief's army act was inscribed on a red placard and carried by an advance guard, and read as follows:—
| For not obeying bugle calls | decapitation. |
| For losing arms or ammunition | decapitation.„ |
| For destroying property of civilians | decapitation.„ |
| For being drunk and fighting | the stocks. |
| For taking a wrong rifle | the stocks.„ |
| &c. | &c. |
A new military spirit is unquestionably being born among the Chinese of the eastern and northern provinces, but it has not yet permeated the western provinces.
On February 25th I gazed down from the summit of the "Momein pass" of Margary upon a large flat-bottomed basin covered with paddy-fields, and a little later passed through the city gates of T'eng Yüeh.
- ↑ 'Journal of the Royal Geographical Society,' Feb. 1903, p. 120.
- ↑ 'Supplementary Papers of the Royal Geographical Society,' vol. i. p. 185.
- ↑ 'Journal of the Royal Geographical Society,' June 1905, p. 618. For the benefit of those who are closely interested in the controversy over the Kung-long Ferry route, I may add that Sir George Scott disagreed with Major Davies as to the exact route to be followed. "The proper route," he declared, "would be to cross southwards from the Nam Ting to the Nam Hsung, down which the Mekong could easily be approached.... If once the railway could be got across the Mekong to Ching-tung, then there is no difficulty whatever in going north towards Tali Fu, or better still, to a point halfway between Tali and Yün-nan Fu, whence there is an easy approach to the Yang-tsze." To this view Major Davies objected. "The line which he proposes," he wrote in the 'Journal of the Royal Geographical Society' for August 1905, is to cross southwards from the Nam Ting to the Nam Hsung. I can only suppose that he means to follow the Nam Ting up to about latitude 23° 45′ or higher, and then bend round southward, passing perhaps near Keng-ma and reaching the Nam Hsung at Möng-Hsung. The range which divides the Nam Ting from the Nam Hsung has nowhere been found as low as 7000 feet. As the Nam Ting valley is here not much over 2000 feet, the difficulties of getting the railway from one valley to the other are likely to be considerable." And further on, "Even if a railway could be got to Ching-tung Ting, the difficulties are by no means over. There is a pass of 6800 feet between the valley of the Black river (in which Ching-tung Ting is situated) and that of the Red river, in which lies Meng-hua Ting, and another pass of 8800 feet between the Meng-hua Ting plain and the Tali Fu plain. Another line from Ching-tung Ting that Sir George Scott suggests is to a point half-way between Tali Fu and Yün-nan Fu. By this he probably means Yün-nan Hsien. But this place is not in the valley of the Black river, but in that of the Red river, so that yet another high range of hills has to be crossed to reach it." From this point Major Davies admits that a practicable line for a railway could be found to the Yang-tsze at Chin-chiang-kai; but this he points out is 500 miles from Sui Fu, at which point navigation practically ceases. "These 500 miles of extremely difficult construction through an absolutely unprofitable country would render such a line quite impracticable." The line from Kung-long to Yün-nan Hsien, followed by Captain Watt Jones under Major Davies's directions, is described briefly by Major Davies as follows: "It would follow up the Nam Ting from Kung-long, continuing northwards over a range 5600 feet to Yun Chou. From here down the Nan Chiao Ho to the Mekong, up this river for thirty miles, and then by an easy ascent up a small side stream past Kung Lang, and over another watershed 7200 feet to the Red river valley. Both the Black river and the Wei-yuan Chiang are avoided altogether by going round their sources." When the Government of India were called upon to consider the Kung-long Ferry route, they formed the opinion that the best-known route from the Kung-long Ferry onwards was not only an extremely difficult one, but one which passed through a sparsely populated and unproductive part of the country, and they decided that little was to be gained by sinking vast sums of money in so unprofitable and unnecessary an enterprise.
- ↑ 'Journal of the Royal Geographical Society,' Feb. 1903, p. 112.
- ↑ The depth here at low water proved to be 48 feet.
- ↑ Hugh Clifford in 'Further India.'