Life and sport in China Part 13

the last is perhaps the most interesting and in many ways the most comfortable, for it is possible to take a magnificent mail steamer at an English port and remain on board, surrounded by as much comfort and luxury as is to be found in a first-cla.s.s hotel, until you land in either Hongkong or Shanghai.

The finest of these vessels are veritable floating palaces, the saloons of which are gilded and decorated regardless of expense, richly carpeted, illuminated with electric light, cooled by electric fans, and where meals are served which would not demean any restaurant in London or Paris. Music-room, library, smoking-room and bar, laundry, barber's shop and delightful marble baths all find place.

On the crack German boats a band plays at frequent intervals, while I have actually seen cold stoves in some of the cabins, so that when pa.s.sing through great heat in the Red Sea or elsewhere you could close your cabin door, draw up your chair and have a good cool.

I am not sure how these stoves are worked, but believe they are connected in some way with the refrigerator, which makes ice for use on board and provides cold storage for meat and fruits, and that a current of ether or cold air is pumped through them.

In appearance they resemble a French porcelain furnace, ab.u.t.ting on one side of the cabin, and by means of a regulator you are able to reduce the temperature almost to freezing point. Although undoubtedly very pleasant during intense heat, and invaluable for hospital purposes, I question if they will come into anything like general use, for it seems to me that instantaneous changes from a temperature of perhaps one hundred degrees on deck to say sixty degrees in the cabin cannot fail to produce bad effects on the health.

Travelling by the easterly route you meet the sun, which causes each day to be shortened. By the westerly route you go with the sun, which causes each day to be lengthened.

During the journey round the world the aggregate of these shortenings or lengthenings will amount to twenty-four hours, so that on arriving again in England by the easterly route you will have gained a day, and instead of its being Wednesday, as you might think, it would be Tuesday, wherefore you would be obliged to have two Wednesdays in one week. By the westerly route, on the contrary, you would lose a day, so that returning on a Wednesday by your reckoning you would find everyone else calling it Thursday, and the following morning you would be obliged to recognise as Friday.

To avoid such confusion the date is always regulated when crossing the Pacific.

Going east, the captain notifies that there will be two consecutive Mondays, or two Thursdays, as the case be, in order to use up the extra day.

Going west, on the other hand, one of the days in a week must be omitted, there being no time for it if you are to arrive in port on the proper date.

A common story told in this connection is that on a certain voyage from Vancouver to Hongkong some missionary pa.s.sengers settled to hold service in the saloon at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, and posted up a notice to that effect in the usual place at the head of the saloon stairs, but omitted to previously consult the captain or ask his permission.

The captain, having no desire to be ignored, even unintentionally, aboard his own s.h.i.+p, quietly regulated dates, the pa.s.sengers next morning finding an official notice posted up immediately over that of the missionaries, saying that it would be Sunday until 10 a.m., after which it would be Monday, so that missionaries, Sunday and divine service were all simultaneously suppressed.

The most comfortable and the most restful travelling in the world that I know of is on board the large river steamers running up the Yangtse for six hundred miles from Shanghai to Hankow, and then trans.h.i.+pping to somewhat smaller vessels, for the additional four hundred miles to Ichang.

Scrupulously clean, good table, jovial captains, excellent Chinese stewards, electric light, luxurious saloons, state-rooms double the size of cabins on even the finest ocean liners, few pa.s.sengers, no noise and no sea-sickness, you glide on day and night over calm waters in a dream-like peace, broken only for a short time every few hours by the necessary stopping at ports of call to work cargo, and at riverside stations for Chinese pa.s.sengers, who, however, do not mingle with the Europeans, but have saloons set apart for their own exclusive use. Some of these boats were built in the golden days of the early sixties, upon American models, and were fitted up on a scale considerably reduced in newer vessels.

The large bathrooms on these older boats are a great feature of comfort, and so numerous as to be almost bewildering to strangers; in fact, I have heard that a nervous young man fresh from home was the victim of an untoward mishap by mistaking the captain's bathroom for the one belonging to his own cabin, when on das.h.i.+ng in, the door having evidently been insecurely fastened on the inside, he found himself face to face with the captain's wife in her bath. Retreat was naturally instantaneous, but the position was so serious that his only course was to at once seek the captain and explain. This awkward task he started to perform, though in considerable trepidation, and found the husband reading in his cabin, and who, after listening calmly to a recital of the details, laconically remarked, "Ah, she has a beautiful figure, has she not?"

And the incident was closed.

The compa.s.s has been known for many centuries to the Chinese, but in accordance with their strange habit of doing so many things in an exactly contrary manner to Europeans, they "box" it the reverse way to ourselves, speaking of an east-north or a west-south breeze, and so on.

The expressions "to the right" and "to the left" I have never heard, for it is the custom to say "go to the east-south" or to the "west-north," as the case may be. Even in cities, when asking your way, the natives will direct you by the points of the compa.s.s rather than by the names of the streets.

Chinese screws turn from right to left, which is the opposite way to our own, and of this I had a practical demonstration when, on returning one morning from the mountains, a chair-coolie surrept.i.tiously abstracted my flask from the tiffin-basket and tried to unscrew the stopper to get at the whisky, but being ignorant of the different method, he in reality screwed it on tighter, till at last it broke off, and when some hours later, on board the steamer, I discovered my ruined flask, an array of teeth-marks deeply imbedded in the metal plainly told the guilty tale.

At Peking, when studying Chinese, my teacher would often come after dinner during the long winter evenings, when seated by a roaring fire we discussed for practice in talking any subjects of interest. Amongst many curious things which I thus heard the following has always puzzled me with the conjecture, "Can there possibly be any truth in it?"

I had that day purchased some fur rugs of no particular value, and not being sure whether they were of dog-skin or goat-skin, asked the teacher his opinion. What his reply was I do not remember, but the conversation having turned on the subject of furs in general, he told me that some rare wolf-skins were exceedingly costly from the fact that the wolves, after being caught by Mongol hunters, had been skinned alive and the skins dressed in a particular manner. Rugs made of these, he declared, on the approach to the house of wild animals, robbers or of any threatening danger, would bristle up as if still on the back of the live animal when angered, and so give timely warning to the inmates; for which reason they were so highly valued.

I have never seen what purposed to be such a skin, but repeat the story if only for its Oriental weirdness.

Water buffaloes are a striking feature in Chinese rural life, more especially in the central and southern provinces. With a carcase almost as large and devoid of hair as that of an elephant, they have very short legs, and are consequently but little taller than the ordinary ox. Carrying on their heavy skulls enormous, semi-circular horns, they have a ferocious aspect, but strangely enough are exceedingly timid and docile. In summer, for the sake of coolness and to avoid mosquitoes, they plunge into streams or mud-holes, and lie there for hours with only their muzzles and eyes above water. It is rather a pleasing sight to see one of these unwieldy, dangerous-looking brutes being led quietly along, by means of a thin string attached to its nose, by a wee native girl, who, when tired of walking, stops the animal, draws its head down by the string, places her tiny foot on the ma.s.sive horn and is slowly raised from the ground by the buffalo and placed gently on his back, which is so broad that she can kneel and play about on it while her charge is grazing. These buffaloes are chiefly employed in the cultivation of rice, and as the flesh of oxen is but rarely eaten by the Chinese, they usually die of old age.

On one occasion I saw a large family of natives returning mournfully to their village from a neighbouring meadow, and on making inquiries was told that they had been to bury their water buffalo, which had just died after a faithful service of more than twenty years.

When on a shooting trip far up the River Han I saw a large buffalo with four boys on his back, grazing by the side of a water-ditch, which lay between him and a steep bank some ten feet high. The gra.s.s being very soft, my close approach was un.o.bserved, until a hare getting up I fired off my gun. Instantly the buffalo dashed through the ditch and up the bank, when the boys, having nothing to hold on to except one another, were shot off backwards into the water, where they formed a perfect heap of struggling arms and legs, to my great amus.e.m.e.nt.

Chinese farm-houses are very different from the substantial, comfortable dwellings obtaining in this country, being primitive clay hovels with no upper storeys, having tile roofs, windows of oiled paper, and mud floors, while the furniture is home-made and of the roughest description. No walks or gardens surround the house, which stands in the centre of the farm-yard, outbuildings and cesspools, with the thres.h.i.+ng-floor, as a rule, immediately outside the front door. Pigs, dogs, fowls and goats roam at will through the dwelling and about the premises, while the two or three buffaloes and oxen used for ploughing and thres.h.i.+ng are tethered to neighbouring trees.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A TYPICAL FARM-HOUSE.

_To face page 177._]

Although wheat, maize, barley and millet are largely cultivated in the north, rice is the princ.i.p.al crop wherever it can be grown, much water being necessary. It is first sown in quite a small, dry patch, to be subsequently transplanted, and comes up as thick as gra.s.s and of a most brilliant green. The fields, which rarely exceed half an acre, and are generally very much less, are now tilled. First, they are flooded by a careful system of irrigation to a depth of three or four inches, and when sufficiently soft turned over with a primitive, wooden plough, shod with a small iron blade or tip, and drawn by one water buffalo. After this they are harrowed, the farmer standing on the harrow and driving the buffalo as it wades along, until they are ma.s.ses of rich, liquid mud. The young plants are now p.r.i.c.ked out by hand, about six inches apart, and the fields kept just flooded by a constant stream of running water. When ripe the crop stands about two and a half feet in height, and the water having been cut off some time previously, reaping commences with the sickle.

Into the harvest-field is often brought a large wooden tub about four feet in diameter by three feet high, and the reaper, having cut an armful of rice, takes it by the straw end and threshes the ears five or six times with great force over the side, so that the grain falls into the tub, which, when thus filled, is replaced by an empty one and taken to the thres.h.i.+ng-floor, where the contents are thrown up by shovels-full into the air, the breeze blowing the chaff to one side and the winnowed rice falling in a heap by itself. When the crop is not thus threshed in the harvest-field it is stacked at the farm, and sometimes in the low forks of large trees to remove it from the danger of possible floods, subsequently to be trodden out by oxen on the thres.h.i.+ng-floor or beaten out by the farmer and his family with light basket-work flails on bamboo shafts.

In villages and small towns where many houses adjoin, it is a common practice to paint or dye young chickens as soon as they are hatched, so that each housewife may know her own. One woman will colour hers a bright red, another will use blue, another green, and so on, the appearance of these strikingly-coloured little creatures intermingled in the streets being exceedingly droll and novel to Europeans.

Amongst all cla.s.ses of Chinese, from beggars to Academicians, belief in ghosts, dreams and the supernatural generally is absolute and unshakable.

If you express doubt or scepticism they will readily agree with you from a certain nervousness of being thought ridiculous, as well as from a feeling of the futility of any attempt to persuade Europeans of the soundness of such convictions.

In the autumn of 1899, when at Shasi, which is an unthriving town nine hundred miles up the Yangtse, and where another Englishman and I were the then only Europeans residing amongst a dense, hostile population, which only a few weeks previously had burnt down all foreign houses and forced the inmates to flee for their lives in small boats, two of the most remarkable cases of this universal superst.i.tion came directly under my notice.

At that time one of those rebellions which are a chronic feature of Chinese Society was in full bloom in the neighbouring province of Szechwan, where an individual named Yu Man-tze was heading a crusade against Christians and foreign influence, when at least one French father was slain and another held in prolonged captivity, despite all efforts of the local officials to effect his release.

The doings of this redoubtable brigand were naturally our chief topic of daily conversation, and a very intelligent and highly-educated Chinese gentleman, who kept me informed of local events, said that the natives generally credited him with mystic powers. "Of course," he added, eyeing me suspiciously, "it cannot be true, still, it is current gossip in all the tea-shops."

After a short pause I informed him confidentially that whatever other foreigners might or might not believe, I personally had considerable doubts as to the non-existence of supernatural agencies.

Without looking up I could feel that his eyes were critically scanning my face in search of ridicule or sarcasm, but I managed to preserve a stolid demeanour, and purposely dropping further discussion of the matter, went in search of cigars and stimulants to help us while away the afternoon. At length he again broached the subject, which I could see was of great interest to him, and warming to his theme under the influence of a sympathetic listener and good cheer, he finally told me in a burst of confidence and with low, excited voice, the following _fact_ relative to Yu Man-tze.

At the outset of his lawless career this supernaturally gifted desperado, having collected a band of followers, fastened round their ankles such heavy weights that they were at first totally unable to move; but, as the fruit of continual exertions, they by-and-by managed to creep a few paces, later on they were able to walk easily, and finally even to run with their loaded feet.

The time for action having come, Yu Man-tze removed the weights, when his disciples were so buoyant that they could all _fly_, and so were able to pa.s.s rapidly between places far apart, and to successfully avoid all attempts at capture.

For those unacquainted with the East it is doubtless well-nigh impossible to credit that such rubbish as this could be implicitly believed by any considerable number of people, yet such was the case, and the fact that the Chinese government eventually bribed Yu Man-tze with official rank and a large sum of money to desist from his evil ways by no means tended to diminish the illusion.

For several weeks we were continually threatened with a visitation from some predatory band of Yu Man-tze's followers, so that when one stormy night two large fires simultaneously broke out in different parts of the town we thought trouble was at hand. Our antic.i.p.ations, however, were happily unfulfilled, the storm having prevented the rebels from descending the river as intended, though the fires, which evidently had been previously planned and timed, were ignited.

Next morning my compatriot brought in word that he had visited the scenes of the conflagrations, and that three victims, who had been fearfully burnt, were lying in the street covered with straw mats, but still alive. Being without medical comforts of any description I was powerless to render a.s.sistance, so refrained from even quitting the house.

An hour later my countryman again rushed in, followed by two or three Chinese, to say that relatives of the sufferers had brought them to a piece of waste ground hard by, had heaped wood round them, had poured petroleum over them, and were now burning them as a sacrifice to the G.o.d of fire, he having already established his claim over them.

What could be done in the face of such horrifying circ.u.mstances?

Nothing, for the poor wretches were already beyond any human aid, and to have interfered would have brought on us instant vengeance from the excited mob, but never, to the end of my days, shall I forget that sickening feeling of enforced inaction.

I especially record this incident as it is the only one of so extreme a nature that I have ever heard of as taking place amongst the Chinese, although it is a matter of common knowledge that they frequently refuse to rescue drowning persons for fear of displeasing the river G.o.d.

We subsequently learnt with much satisfaction that the rebels, to the number of two or three hundred, on being turned aside by the storm, crossed the border into the province of Hunan, and there, after murdering an official, his women-folk and some servants, were surrounded in a swamp on the sh.o.r.es of the Tongting lake by Government troops and butchered to a man.

Native breeds of swine are very coa.r.s.e and always coal black, so that when a French friend of mine imported for the first time into Peking two white, foreign-bred pigs, they were objects of immense curiosity to the local Chinese, who thought them exceedingly uncanny, and considered it far from improbable that the departed spirits of former friends might well have migrated into forms so pa.s.sing fair.

After they had been carefully fattened, a kiddier was sent for to give them the happy dispatch, but no sooner had he set eyes on his quarry than he scuttled off in alarm, and nothing would induce him to return, nor could any other butcher be prevailed upon to officiate, so that, my friend declared, he was obliged to roll up his sleeves and perform the gruesome, though necessary operation himself.

"Old custom" is almost a religion with the celestials, to subvert which requires great caution, persistency and strength. If anything can be justified by old custom, or even precedent, it is considered to be una.s.sailable, no matter how harmful or irrational it may be.