A wandering student in the Far East/Through the Yang-tsze gorges
CHAPTER III.
THROUGH THE YANG-TSZE GORGES.
The importance of Ichang lies in its being the port of transhipment between the coast and central China on the one hand, and the wide regions of Ssŭch'uan and Yün-nan on the other. "Here the results of modern invention in the shape of steel twin-screw steamers of over 1000 tons burden give place to medieval methods of transport as typified by the wooden junk with an average carrying capacity of 45 tons: here marine insurance begins and ends."[1] Here, too, the traveller will find a faint echo of the industrial activity of Hankow in the shape of a factory for the manufacture of cotton cloth from Chinese yarn, consisting of fifty wooden hand-looms imported from Japan, and superintended by a manager of the same nationality.[2] But for the rest Ichang holds out no great attraction, and we lost little time in stowing our possessions into the two kuadzas, or three-room native passenger junks, kindly engaged for us by the British consul, and effecting a start. "We" consisted of two white men,—Mr F. W. Belt, an Australian who for many years had found wandering in many lands the most satisfactory method of—as he expressed it—killing time, and myself; two Chinese servants picked up by Belt at Hankow; Mr Chou, commonly known as "Joe," my faithful and accomplished interpreter; and Peter, my Chinese cook and body-servant, equipped to a remarkable degree with all the virtues and most of the vices common to his kind.
The passenger junk is a long, narrow, shallow-draught boat fitted with mast and sail. Aft a wooden cabin tilted up over the rudder constitutes the abode of the captain and his family. Immediately in front of this is a more or less open space for the men at the helm; next, in the middle of the boat, a long wooden deck-house divided into three compartments for the traveller; and finally, an open deck forward, which can be roofed over with matting at night, and which forms the scene both of the labours and the repose of the crew. My crew totalled twenty-three men,—the captain, of whom we were hard put to it to decide whether his mind or his language were the stronger; the helmsman, paid at the extravagant rate of 14,000 cash (about 30s.) for the voyage to Ch'ung-k'ing; a tai-wan-ti—i.e., an individual whose duty it was to be ready at all times to jump out of his clothes and into the river to release the tow-rope when obstructed, paid from 6000 to 7000 cash (say 15s.); a ship's cook, who took a hand at the oars when not otherwise engaged; five boatmen always on board to handle the huge sweeps and stave the vessel off rocks with long, iron-shod, bamboo punting-poles; and finally, fourteen trackers, who toiled from dawn to dark with scarcely an interval, and received the handsome reward of 4000 cash (about 8s. 6d.) for the journey, which might occupy anything from three weeks to a month. Could you want a better example of that class of men so common all over China "who are driven by the constant and chronic reappearance of the wolf at their door to spend their life in an everlasting grind"?
Trackers and boatmen alike are endowed with two remarkable characteristics—an invariable cheerfulness and good-humour in spite of their life of unceasing toil, and a colossal and ineradicable superstition. Hence the start on a voyage is celebrated with dramatic rites. The head of a sacrificial cock is ceremoniously removed, the blood is poured in libation over the vessel's bows, and amid the ascending fumes and smoke of many joss-sticks, the detonation of crackers, and the soul-stirring din of the inharmonious gong, the start is duly and propitiously made. Thus we placate the powers of evil that infest the waters of the great river, and set forth for the promised lands of the west.
The fame of the swirling races and majestic 
The passenger junk on the Yang-tsze.
gorges of the Yang-tsze is widespread. A mile or two above Ichang rise the mountain portals giving entrance to the first great gorge, and for ten days on end the traveller is borne through a wonderland of cliffs and towering pinnacles, where in some past geologic era whole mountain-ranges have been twisted and torn asunder by some terrific convulsion in the earth's surface. Nature has here assumed her grandest and most solemn garb. The pent-up waters race between sheer walls of towering rock; each turn in the winding course presents a fresh vista of magic grandeur. For us the sense of awe and gloom was emphasised by heavy masses of storm-cloud brooding over the mountain-tops and blotting out the light, while vegetation, growing wherever it found foothold among the rocks, and just assuming the vivid tints of autumn, gave colour to the scene and added by contrast to the sense of overwhelming immensity.
For the most part we are dragged by brute force against the current by the fourteen trackers at the end of a rope of plaited bamboo. When this is not possible the whole crew scramble on board, throw themselves upon the huge sweeps, ten men to each, and screaming and shouting like pandemonium let loose, drive the boat slowly forward, the wild refrain of their songs harmonising with the stroke of the oars and echoing backwards and forwards between the encircling walls of rock. Sometimes when the trackers are on shore the tow-rope gets entangled in some intervening rock. The mate on deck leaps up and beats a wild tattoo on the ship's drum. The tow-rope immediately slackens, the deck crew, including the ship's cook, who have been perfectly quiet for an hour past absorbed in Buddha-like contemplation, or perhaps in slumber, spring up with a start, and becoming suddenly galvanised into an extravagant vitality, hurl themselves on to the sweeps with frenzied fury. They shout and shriek and stamp, all the while doubling themselves into extraordinary contortions, the cook especially, who by reason of the exaggerated slant of his eyes and eyebrows has a Mephistophelian appearance to start with, rapidly assuming the demoniacal 
We are dragged by brute force against the current.
appearance of a man possessed. When the obstacle which has been the innocent cause of all this disturbance is passed, peace descends once more, and the trackers tighten up the tow-rope and proceed as before.
The monotony of travelling thus for days together is broken by the variety of the scenery and the difficulty encountered in surmounting the rapids. At this time of year, when the water has fallen sufficiently to mitigate the force of the current and not enough to uncover the worst reefs, which are largely responsible for the danger of the rapids, all is more or less plain sailing. It is for this reason, perhaps, that those who have only a bowing acquaintance with the river have been led to underrate the difficulties of steam navigation. I encountered only one rapid that presented any difficulty, namely, the Yeh t'an, and even here we were hauled up easily with the aid of a couple of ropes and an extra fifty or sixty men. The state of the Yeh t'an, however, offered fruitful suggestion as to what the rapids can do, and it is worth noting that Mr Little, whose acquaintance with the river is perhaps unique, affirms that at low water an ordinary kuadza such as I was travelling in would occupy six weeks between Ichang and Ch'ung-k'ing, or very nearly double the time actually taken by myself in November. On this point I shall have more to say in a later chapter. For the moment let me only remark that some insight into the peculiar construction of the Chinese mind may be gained by a careful observance of the immemorial methods of the boating population. I became quite absorbed on one occasion in watching a heavy junk struggling painfully up one of the lesser races, which are of frequent occurrence in certain stretches of the river. A long line had been laid out and hitched to a rock above the race. On deck a dozen men were yelling like fiends as they stumbled, slipped, and staggered in desperate endeavours to haul themselves up by the line. They would all seize hold of it, go through an exaggerated goose-step in execrable time, and as soon as they had a little bit in hand, make a desperate plunge with it to a cross-beam amidships, where they would secure the few inches they had gained. This strenuous performance was then gone through all over again from the beginning, and the motion continued until they had at length dragged themselves to the top of the obstruction. Now the thought that not unnaturally occurred to me was, what a marvellous thing it is that in the whole course of the two or three odd millenniums during which the Chinese have been struggling with the navigation of the Yang-tsze, they have failed to evolve so simple a mechanical contrivance as a windlass! With the most primitive hand-winch a couple of men could have effected all and more than the dozen delirious maniacs in a quarter of the time, and at an expenditure of an infinitesimal fraction of the human force. It would be difficult to find a more striking example of that complete lack of imagination which has doomed China to a perpetual back seat among the competing Powers in the present advanced stage of the progress of humanity.
On the ninth day out from Ichang we reached K'uei Fu, the first town worthy of the name that we had passed, built on the steep hillside of an open valley. Our struggle with the rapids and gorges proper is at an end; henceforth our way will lie along the bottoms of more open valleys, with only an occasional rapid here and there to interrupt our passage. K'uei Fu is of little concern to the British manufacturer. Some cotton yarn and coarse cotton cloth I saw, but the bulk of the shops appeared to be concerned chiefly with joss-sticks, native foodstuffs, a little local silver ware, and pawned goods. The yarn, I was told, came from the mills of Wuchang, and a query from one of my informants as to whether similar goods were produced in my country confirmed me in my opinion that the good people of K'uei Fu are not in the habit of trafficking in foreign goods. No wonder the members of the Blackburn Commercial Mission remarked, "Commerce, the subject of our report, scarcely exists until Wan Hsien is reached." If K'uei Fu does nothing else, it serves to throw a not insignificant light upon some of the 
Nature has here assumed her grandest and most solemn garb.
causes of Chinese official opposition to foreign incursion. In the good old days K'uei Fu grew fat upon the proceeds of taxation imposed upon the river traffic, collecting, it is said, as much as 2000 taels (£300) a-day. With the opening of Ch'ung-k'ing to foreign trade these lucrative exactions were swept away, and ichabod is writ plainly over the dirt and squalor of the once opulent K'uei Fu.
Beyond this the scenery changes somewhat. The defiant rock walls of the gorges give place by degrees to less aggressive mountain slopes. Disintegrated sandstone colours the land with a warm, rich red; well-to-do looking farmsteads with gabled roofs and white-washed walls nestle among clumps of bamboo in pleasant hollows; and bright patches of sugar-cane and a variety of vegetables add to the general air of rural prosperity. All along the banks the poppy is being sown, which later on will cover the countryside with a mass of brilliant colour, showing bright against the background of brick-red earth and the dark-green leaf of the shady banyan.
On Nov. 11th we surmounted without difficulty the "New Glorious Rapid" formed by a landslide in 1896, and though improved by the engineer, still a terror at low water, and the following day drew up at the district town of Wan Hsien. From here there is a road direct to Ch'êng-tu, the capital of Ssŭch'uan, and from here likewise mails are despatched direct to Peking. West to Ch'ung-k'ing, and from there on for another 250 miles to Sui Fu on the Yang-tsze, and on again for 100 miles to Chia-ting Fu on the Min, steam navigation is possible, this stretch of water providing a scene for the activities of his Majesty's gunboats posted at Ch'ung-k'ing. On the latest map of Ssŭch'uan, recently issued by the intelligence branch of the British War Office, Wan Hsien is singled out as an example of an open port. As a matter of fact it is nothing of the sort, and draws its stock of foreign goods almost exclusively from Ch'ung-k'ing. These consist of English shirtings and black and coloured Italians from Manchester, for which I was informed there was a fair demand, and fancy goods from Germany and Japan. Beyond these, and in addition to the usual native wares, the products of local looms were on sale in the shape of cotton cloth and grass cloth for summer wear, and a fair stock of yarn from the mills of Wuchang. "In the town of Wan Hsien there are about 1000 hand-looms. The weavers are paid by the piece—about 30 feet long and 16 inches broad; this it takes an average weaver two days to weave, working from daylight to 9 p.m., and for this he gets 100 to 120 cash (2½d. to 3d.), being provided with food which may cost about 40 cash a-day; so that a weaver's wages may be put at 900 cash (1s. 6d.) per week of six days, in which time he would produce 112½ square feet of cloth."[3] When we take into consideration the difference in the price of labour between Manchester and Wan Hsien, and the heavy freights which Manchester goods are called upon to bear, to say nothing of the risks incurred, we see one of the reasons why the "millions of China," who are not infrequently held up by those whose too great enthusiasm outruns their reason, as the components of a prodigious market for British goods, are not unlikely to continue in the future, as in the past, to adequately supply their own demand.
From Wan Hsien to Ch'ung-k'ing proved a somewhat monotonous journey of ten days, through scenery that varied little in character and presented the same features—red hills terraced for cultivation, bamboos, banyans, wood oil-trees, sugar-cane, and vegetables—throughout. Here and there where outcrops of coal were visible in the hillsides, crude openings like the burrowings of brobdingnagian rabbits were to be seen, calling to mind the extraordinary antiquity of the practice of burning coal in China,—a practice which excited the interest and the admiration of Marco Polo, who informed his astonished readers on his return to Europe that "all over the country of Cathay there is a kind of black stones existing in beds in the mountains which they dig out and burn like firewood; ... and they make such capital fuel that no other is used throughout the country." Examples of the primitive, however, become monotonous in China, and it was not without satisfaction that, on the 22nd of November, I at last beheld the pagodas which herald the approach of a great city, and a little later tied up at the foot of the celebrated river port of Ch'ung-k'ing, romantically situated on a rugged spit of land jutting out between the Yang-tsze and Chia-ling rivers, and faced on the south by a range of wild and picturesque mountains. The first stage of my journey had been completed, and before me rose the steep and narrow thoroughfares and busy buildings of the commercial capital of the west.
- ↑ Diplomatic and Consular Reports, Annual Series, No. 3571: Trade of Ichang for the year 1905.
- ↑ Additional machinery has since been imported from Japan—namely, a 15-horse-power engine, driving 40 looms and 150 foot looms. Japanese ginning machines are also in use, and are said to be finding a ready sale in every part of the country.
- ↑ Report of the Blackburn Commercial Mission.