Sidelights on Chinese Life Part 19

But a mighty change is even now working in this old Empire, and men are beginning to realize that the system of education that has so far been in existence is a radically defective one, and must be displaced by those that are more in a line with the ones that have raised the West to such a high pitch of learning in so many departments of study. There is just now a tremendous thirst for Western education, and the nation seems prepared to abandon the old conservative systems that have been such a hindrance to the advance of thought in the past.

CHAPTER XIII

THE MANDARIN

Mandarins' great power--Ambition of every father that son should be a mandarin--A famous Prime Minister--Description of a mandarin of a county--His three t.i.tles--Clever method of squeezing complainant and defendant--A typical case--Crime not noticed until officially brought before the notice of the mandarin--Violations of law by mandarins for the purpose of squeezing--Methods of judicial procedure--Torture used to cause confession--Mandarins allowed large discretionary powers in their decisions--Two typical instances.

Any man who is in office under the Government is called a mandarin. It must be understood, however, that he is actually in its service to get this honourable t.i.tle for whilst many, through courtesy, are addressed as mandarins, it is only those who are in the _bona fide_ employment of the country that really can be considered as such.

The mandarins as a cla.s.s are the privileged men of the Empire. They have large and extensive powers. In the exercise of their functions a wide discretion is allowed them, and in their decisions as magistrates, whilst they have to keep themselves within certain general laws recognized as the statutes of the dynasty, they are left very much to their own wit and common-sense as to how they shall reach the conclusions they may finally come to. In addition to the above, the mandarins have almost unlimited opportunities of making money and of enriching themselves and their families.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ENTRANCE GATE (NANKIN).]

This latter has a fascination for the Chinaman, which explains the intense longing that every youth, who has any ambitions for the future, has to some day become a mandarin. I presume there is hardly a son born in this wide Empire, about whom the father does not at once begin to have his dreams. He pictures to himself the time when the little fellow whose cries are awakening new echoes in the home shall have taken his degree and have qualified himself for some Government appointment. His visions widen and he sees him advanced from one post to another, and growing in power and in wealth, until he finally returns to his ancestral home to build a magnificent mansion and to enrich every member of it.

As the mandarins all spring from the people, without any reference to cla.s.s or social position, the dreams that the parents often have about their sons are not the fairy creations of fancy like those of Aladdin's wonderful lamp, but in countless instances are real romances that are more marvellous than any writer of fiction has ever conceived. In one of my travels in the interior of China in pa.s.sing along a great thoroughfare, I came upon a magnificent grave. I saw at once it was the tomb of a man that had been a great mandarin, for only such could possibly have had such a splendid monument erected in connection with his last resting place.

The tomb, that stood high and conspicuous far back from the highway along which a constant stream of travellers pa.s.sed to and fro, was situated at the end of a great avenue flanked on both sides by huge stone figures larger than life. The whole was intended to represent the official residence and court of a high mandarin. There were stone lions guarding the approaches to where the great official was supposed to be visiting, and granite horses with their riders waiting patiently for the coming of their lord, and stone footmen who had been standing for more than a century for one whose footsteps would never again be heard by human ears.

There was quite a romantic story connected with this grave. Nearly two hundred years ago, the ground occupied by it was a poor little farm, cultivated by a family who could barely get enough out of it to keep body and soul together. A son was born, and as the lad grew up, the parents seeing that he was a child of uncommon natural abilities, determined that he should be a scholar, and that he should retrieve the glories of his house which tradition declared had in former years been most conspicuous, and should bring back the good fortune which had been vanis.h.i.+ng slowly from their home.

He was accordingly kept at school when he should have been helping on the farm or going out as a labourer to earn a few cash to ease the poverty that held the family within its grip. To do this meant a struggle for them all, and ceaseless self-denial both for the parents and for the young scholar himself, but after years of a stern struggle to keep the wolf from the door, the faith and patience of them all were rewarded by the success of the son.

He pa.s.sed his examinations with such brilliant success, that he was soon made a mandarin, and he was appointed to the control of a rich county where he had ample opportunities of showing the Government how well fitted he was to rule. From this time the shadow that had rested on his home lifted, for he was now in a position to send sufficient money to his parents to enable them to live in luxury. The old house, battered by the weather and falling into decay, was rebuilt and enlarged. Fresh fields were bought and added to the farm, and servants and field hands were employed to gather in the harvests that filled their home with abundance.

In the meanwhile the son had been advanced from one post to another, until finally he was summoned to the capital by the Emperor and made Prime Minister. During these years his wealth had been acc.u.mulating, until now he had a large fortune at his command, which, true to Chinese nature and to Chinese traditions, he had sent to his old home, and which he had spent largely in the purchase of lands which he added to his own, and of farms which he let out to farmers, who had lost their own, to cultivate for him.

At length the time came for him to die, and with the strong pa.s.sion for his home where he was reared that supplies the place of patriotism to the Chinese, he made arrangements that his body should be carried to the place where he was born, and should be buried in one of the fields in sight of his old home, where his grave could be cared for, and where his spirit could be sacrificed to by the members of his own family.

This meant a journey of over a thousand miles, over great plains and up and down hills and mountains, and across wide rivers, and months of steady journeying for a large retinue that would have to follow the dead statesman in a kind of triumphal march across the Empire.

At length the great procession reached the place where the ill.u.s.trious dead was to be laid. The whole country round had gathered to witness the proceedings, for never before, in this region at least, had such a magnificent funeral been witnessed by any one. There were civil mandarins of various ranks, dressed in their official robes, with their retinues and attendants and gorgeous sedan chairs. There were also the highest military mandarins of the province, with long lines of soldiers, that had been ordered by imperial edict to do honour to the dead by their presence.

And now the coffin was lowered into the grave amid the blare of trumpets and the loud wailing of the mourners dressed in sackcloth, whilst crowds gazed on the scene from every little rising ground, and the proud and haughty officials pondered with solemn faces upon the honour that had been done that day to a man who had risen from such a humble condition in life.

One would have imagined that as the mandarins, or rulers of the country, are all recruited from the ranks of the people, they would naturally be in sympathy with them, and would do their utmost to deliver them from the tyranny and oppression from which they too often suffer, but this is not the case. The fact is the mandarins, as a whole, are the great curse of the nation. They are rapacious and exacting. They have no regard for justice or mercy, when these conflict with their own self-interests, and they are the bitter opponents of any plans of reform, knowing that the carrying out of such would endanger their own vested interests, and deprive them of the arbitrary powers they now possess.

In order to give the reader some practical idea of what are the duties and responsibilities of a mandarin, I propose to select one and describe him as graphically as I can, so that one may have a picture of him before the mind's eye. For this purpose, I shall take the "County Mandarin," for though there are many others that are superior to him in rank, there is not one whose duties are so multifarious, or who is so responsible for the order and good government of his district as he is.

He has three t.i.tles by which he is equally well known throughout the whole of the Empire. The first of these is the "County Mandarin," because he is the chief official in it, and his authority is the predominant one throughout the whole of the county. Even in cases where his immediate superior wishes any action to be carried out within his jurisdiction, he has to request the county mandarin to see it executed. The second of his t.i.tles is "The man that knows the County," from the fact that it is a.s.sumed that he is so intimately acquainted with everything that goes on within his district that nothing can possibly happen in it without his being thoroughly cognizant of it. This a.s.sumption of course is an utterly ridiculous one, as it would be manifestly absurd to suppose that any mortal man could know what is happening by day or night throughout a large county. The t.i.tle, however, which has come down from the past, and which the man accepted when he took office, serves to make him responsible for all that goes on within his jurisdiction. The theory of the Chinese Government that every one in some way or other is responsible for what may take place in society, enables it to at once put its finger on the person who has to be dealt with in the case of any infraction of the law, though he himself may not be the individual who has committed the offence.

A murder, for example, is committed during the darkness of the night. It was done in some alleyway and there is no trace of those who killed the man. The bailiff of the ward is summoned to appear before the local mandarin, and he is asked if he has apprehended the murderer. He makes the excuse that the whole thing happened during the night when the whole city was asleep, and therefore he could not possibly be cognizant of what all the scamps and ruffians were doing when honest men were in their beds and were fast asleep.

That excuse, which would at once be accepted in England, would be laughed at in China, and the bailiff would be reminded that it was his business to know everything that went on in his ward, and very likely he would receive a hundred blows to refresh his memory, and the promise of as many more if the culprit were not captured within a certain limited time. By this same doctrine of responsibility, "The man that knows the County" is held by the Government to be one that must bear on his shoulders the consequences of whatever may happen in any part of the county over which he rules.

A third t.i.tle that is given to the official I am describing is, "The mandarin that is the Father and Mother of the People." This term is a very pretty one and is given to no other official. It is intended to indicate the very intimate relations.h.i.+p that exists between him and his people, and the tender concern that he ought to have for their welfare. As the child runs to its mother in time of trouble and gets comfort from her sympathy, so the people of a county turn to this mandarin, when they are threatened with injustice or oppression, and so he, in the spirit of a father when he sees his own son in distress, bends all his energies to protect and comfort them. This is a beautiful theory, which the ancient legislators of this country in some moment of inspiration conceived, but the actual fact is that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, instead of being a father or a mother, he is more like a hungry tiger that desires to dig its claws into the flesh of a lamb, to satisfy its appet.i.te upon it.

The mandarin whom I am describing has just received an appointment to the county, say, of "Eternal Spring," for which he has paid the modest sum of a thousand pounds to the high official who had the disposal of the office.

He is an ambitious man, and his great aim is not only speedily to recoup himself this initial outlay, but also to lay by a considerable sum to carry with him to his ancestral home and enable him to live in easy circ.u.mstances for some years to come. As his term of office lasts only three years and his salary is not more than three hundred a year, it would seem that he would require to be a conjuror to accomplish these two objects in the limited time at his command.

That he can do, and in the great majority of cases actually does perform, such remarkable financial legerdemain is a fact that is entirely due to the vicious system on which the whole civil service in China is based. It is perfectly understood by the Government that when a mandarin is appointed to any official position under it, the squeezes he has to pay for it, and the inadequate salary he will receive for his services, are all to be met and supplemented by what he can wring out of the people.

This system is as old as the nation, and has become so inwrought and worked into its very fibre, that a new creation of national life would seem to be essential before it could be eradicated from the body politic.

When the mandarin arrives at his Yamen, which is his residence and the place where all the official business of the county is transacted, he is met by the whole staff of men who are to a.s.sist him in the arduous duties that fall to him as the chief magistrate in the large district he has been appointed to rule. These consist of a private secretary, an interpreter, a number of writers who write dispatches and conduct any correspondence that may arise, a large body of policemen, or runners as they are generally called in the East, and a dozen disreputable-looking men who form the retinue of the mandarin, when he is called out to settle disturbances in any part of his large field, or adjudicate on cases that have to be tried on the spot.

Nominally he is responsible for all the salaries that this great crowd of men receive, and one wonders how he manages to pay them all out of his three hundred a year. The real fact of the case is, the only man that receives any salary from him is his private secretary. All the rest purchase the privilege of being employed in his service, and give the whole of their time free simply for being permitted to extract out of the people who come to engage in lawsuits, or from those who have fallen within the grip of the law, fees and squeezes and perquisites enough to give them a very good permanent income.

It is very interesting to watch the way in which these gentry carry on their official work, and how as ministers of justice in executing the decisions of the mandarin their one aim seems to be to extract as much out of the pockets of the people they are operating on as it is possible for them to do.

A farmer, for example, comes one day into the Yamen to lay a complaint against a rich neighbour who has taken forcible possession of some of his fields. He produces the deeds of his lands, and shows how they have been in his family for several generations and that they have never been alienated either by sale or by mortgage. The rich man has simply taken forcible possession of them because he belongs to a formidable clan, he declares, and not because he has any right to the fields.

The runners are delighted with this case, for the fact that there is a rich man in it makes it certain that some of his dollars will be transferred to their pockets. The complaint is formally accepted by the mandarin, and the court fees having been paid, a warrant is issued for the arrest of the man who has been accused.

The runners or policemen start out on their journey with light and joyous hearts. The road that leads away from the main thoroughfare takes them through rice fields, and skirts the foothills, and runs through villages, until at last it brings them by a narrow pathway to the house of the rich man they have come to arrest.

The whole village is excited by the arrival of these messengers of the law, for they are always a sign of ill omen, and the only man that can face them without being terrified is the man who knows that he has the means to satisfy their cupidity and to thus avoid being roughly handled by them. A crowd as if by magic silently gathers round the open door through which the runners have entered, and the women from the neighbouring houses collect in excited knots, and with flushed faces discuss the wonderful news of their village life.

The rich man, with as calm and as indifferent a manner as he can a.s.sume, though his heart is beating fast, comes out into the courtyard where the runners are standing and politely asks them what is their business with him. They tell him they have a warrant for his arrest for seizing some fields that belong to one of his neighbours, and the mandarin has ordered them to bring him to his court to be tried for the offence.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A POLICEMAN.

_To face p. 280._]

Whilst the warrant is being read, the accused has had time to collect his wits. He of course denies the accusation, and politely asks the men to be seated. At the same time he calls the cook, and declaring that they must be tired and hungry after their long walk, he orders him to at once get dinner ready for them, and in a whisper he gives him a hint that he does not wish him to spare any expense in providing such a meal as will put them in the best humour possible.

The runners freely protest that they have no time to delay, that their orders are imperative, and that the "Father and Mother of his People" is impatiently awaiting their return. This of course is all put on, for dinner is just the one thing they have been looking forward to; so pretending to yield to the entreaties of their host, they at once make themselves at home. They smoke their pipes and then laugh and chat with the members of the household, just as though they had been invited guests, and not policemen who had come to carry off the head of it to prison.

After a time, when they have got into a comfortable humour with each other, the rich man takes the head runner aside, and after a few minutes of earnest conversation and the slipping of a few dollars into his hand, an air of increased geniality seems to have suddenly sprung up between him and his uninvited guests. They are now most polite and deferential to him, and the swaggering, bullying manner natural to them is replaced by a childlike gentleness that is really most touching. Dinner over, instead of incontinently grabbing him by the tail and hauling him along the road as their instinct would prompt them in the case of any of the common people, they part from him with smiles and bows and high-flown compliments, whilst the culprit actually stands at his door, and ostentatiously, for the benefit of the man who has accused him of stealing his fields, entreats them not to leave him too soon, and a.s.sures them that his heart will be desolated if they do not come quickly and pay him another visit.

When they reach the Yamen, the "Man that knows the County" demands of them where their prisoner is. They have their story all ready, and they explain that when they reached his home they could find no trace of him, and that without any explanation to his friends he had disappeared and they could not find him. They declare, however, that they are keeping an eye upon the family, who they are convinced are hiding his movements, and that before long they will be able to arrest him and bring him before the magistrate.

There is no doubt but that both the "Man that knows the County" and these scamps whose faces are dyed with the opium hue, all had their tongues in their cheeks whilst this fable was being rehea.r.s.ed. Both sides know that the whole thing is a farce, but seeing that the original idea was devised by the thinkers and humorists that lived when the history of the nation was in twilight, it would not do for their far-off descendants to give the show away, and so with solemn faces they play out the thing, as though a tragedy and not a comedy were being enacted.

The runners have scarcely left the house, when the rich man hastens, as fast as he can hurry, to the city, and enters his reply to the accusation that has been laid against him. He denies that _in toto_, and produces deeds, that have been so deftly manufactured that they have the impress of a hundred years upon them, and which he declares prove decisively that the fields in question belong to him, and have come to him in proper legal succession from his forefathers.

He is careful, however, after he has put in his plea, to find out some relatives of the "Father and Mother of the People" who have followed him from his distant home for occasions like this, with whom he confers. An earnest but not an unduly prolonged conversation takes place, when a certain sum of money changes hands, which is destined to find its way into the pocket of the mandarin, and whose purpose is to give him such a clear and profound grasp of the case that he will have no difficulty in deciding that the accusation against the rich man has been a trumped-up one.

Ten days go by and no further proceedings have been taken. The complainant, well aware of the cause of this, sc.r.a.pes together as large a sum as he can possibly afford, and by the same underground method sends it to the "Man that knows the County," with the hope that he will be able to see the justice of his case and give him back his fields. At the same time he enters what in legal phraseology is called a hurrying pet.i.tion, the object of which is to hasten the action of the mandarin so as to finish up the case without delay.

Upon the receipt of this, an order is issued to the runners to go and arrest the accused with all possible dispatch and bring him to the Yamen so that he may be tried. The previous farce such as I have already described is once more gone through. The runners are received with lavish hospitality and a certain number of dollars are transferred to their pockets, that put a smile on their features that lights them all up and that spreads away to the back of their necks, till it finally vanishes down their tails into thin air. On their return to the Yamen they report that the man is still away from home, and though they have made diligent inquiries they have not yet been able to trace his whereabouts.

And so the case goes on, bribes being paid by both sides that go to swell the gains of the "Father and Mother of his People," whilst fees also are squeezed out of them by the runners, who, as in some difficult cases in Chancery in England, grow fat upon the spoils that they extract out of both the complainant and defendant. Finally, after many months of vexatious delays, when the whole hungry tribe in the Yamen see that no more money can be got out of either side, the case is tried, when some compromise is suggested and the parties leave the court fully convinced that there is no such thing as justice in China.

The mandarins in this land take a very Oriental idea of what their duty is in regard to crime. They act upon the principle that unless it is legally brought before them, and a complaint is entered in their court, they will take no cognizance of it. Two large and wealthy villages have a quarrel, a very common thing in China. The feud grows and the pa.s.sions become excited till finally they determine to take up arms and settle the case by a fight. To get the aid of the supernatural on their behalf, each side appeals to the village G.o.d, that is the patron of the clan, to know whether it approves of the taking up of arms. Almost invariably the idol does so, and in addition promises to give their side victory in the coming struggle.

All the old rusty jingals are brought out and furbished up; gunpowder is bought, and spears and cruel-looking p.r.o.nged instruments that have been hidden away when there was no occasion for them, are thrown into the common stock and are served out to the young bloods who have been getting blue-mouldy for want of a beating.