Edwin John Dingle

“ It is those who remain behind—those widows with the hungry, half-clad or naked children, homeless, foodless, friendless, with no roof above them at night but the cold, steely sky—these are the ones who suffer. The whole countryside, with its homeless and foodless people, its ruined, burnt-out hamlets and family homesteads, its ruined rice-crops, its cruel waste so wantonly forced upon it by the Imperialists, cried aloud in its weary desolation for peace. ”

“ Babies in Yün-nan, for the great majority, are not coaxed, not tossed up and down and petted, not soothed, not humored. There are none to kiss away their tears, they never have toys, and dream no young dreams, but are brought straight into the iron realities of life. They are reared in smoke and physical and moral filth, and become men and women when they should be children: they haggle and envy, and swear and murmur. When in Yün-nan—or even in the whole of China—will there be the innocence and beauty of childhood as we of the West are blessed with? ”

“ Enjoying all the advantages which have come naturally to her, China, we must remember, is as old as all history. One sees the legend of age repeated again and again in the hard enduring things of time, and equally as much in the great conflict that had China in its grip for many months. Every symbol of the common life, every action of the common people, everything in the land points with powerful significance to fundamental enduring things. ”

“ On shore, far ahead, I can see the trackers—struggling forms of men and women, touching each other, grasping each other, wrestling furiously and mightily, straining on all fours, now gripping a boulder to aid them forward, now to the right, now to the left, always fighting for one more inch, and engaged in a task which to one seeing it for the first time looks as if it were quite beyond human effort. Fagged and famished beings are these trackers, whose life day after day, week in week out, is harder than that of the average costermonger's donkey. ”

“ One felt that he was touching the bedrock of humanity, had come into grips with a people who with one set purpose were going forward day by day to accomplish the true work of winning back China for the Chinese. As one passed through the streets, around the forts, in and out among the men who were with their lives prepared to buy freedom for Manchu-ridden China, one realised that this part of the Chinese nation, hitherto as silent as some great sleeping monster, had suddenly found its voice, and had set out determinedly to tell the world what it meant to do. ”

“ In places bridges had fallen in, nobody had attempted to put them into a decent state of repair—though this is never done in China—and one of the features of every day was the wonderful fashion in which the mountain ponies picked their way over the broken route; they are as sure-footed as goats.
As I gazed admiringly along the miles and miles of ripening wheat and golden rape, pink-flowering beans, interspersed everywhere with the inevitable poppy, swaying gently as in a sea of all the dainty colors of the rainbow, I did not wonder that Szech'wan had been called the Garden of China. ”

“ But the scenery later in the day, though monotonously so, was grand. The earth was literally the color of deep-red blood, the crimson paths intertwining the darker landscape bore to one's imagination a vision of some bloody battle—veritable rivers of human blood. To cheer the traveler in his desolation, the sun struggled vainly to pierce with its genial rays through the heavy, angry clouds rolling lazily upwards from the black valleys, and enveloping the earth in a deep infinity of severest gloom. ”

“ Wrapped intertwiningly into the private and the national life of the Chinese, this Dragon has reigned supreme over a make-believe, a show of things, and innate insincerity and hollowness unparalleled anywhere among civilised peoples. The Chinese has, because of the Dragon, cramped himself into strange shapes all down through history, and the world has not known what to do with him, so foreign has been his aspect. But now the Revolution tells us that China and hundreds of millions of her people have changed irretrievably—so much must be taken for granted. ”

“ But how beautiful to those of us, and there are many, who love less the man-made comforts of our own small life than the entrancing wonders of the God-made world in spots where nothing has changed. Gladly did I quit the dust and din of Western life, the artificialities of dress, and the unnumbered futile affectations of our own maybe not misnamed civilization, to go and breathe freely and peacefully in those far-off nooks of the silent mountain-tops where solitude was broken only by the lulling or the roaring of the winds of heaven. ”

“ Can you imagine in that great dancing prairie fire that you have seen thousands of housetops, minarets, temple spires, roofs of all heights, sizes, and shapes—can you? Can you imagine those wild flames, fanned strongly to one side, and see that mighty belt of flame galloping furiously onward, then drawing back, then galloping on again and gaining ground, then settling finally down as if it had its luckless enemy in its most deadly grasp, slowly to torture it and cruelly to draw from it its last gasp of life? ”

“ As far as the eye could reach the blue-clad throng heaved restlessly to and fro under the blaze of the brilliant sun which harassed everyone in the valley, and, moving slowly and majestically in the midst of them all, came the foreigner. As they caught sight of me, my sandalled feet, and the retinue following on wearily in the wake, the populace set up an ecstatic yell of ferocious applause and turned their faces towards the inn, in the doorway of which one of my soldier-men was holding forth on points of more or less delicacy respecting my good or bad nature and my British connection. ”

“ To China the sweeping into eternity of thousands of fellow-mortals is for the benefit of those who remain, and the destruction of property in their national hysteria matters not a moment of passing thought. So to those of us who know China, and who cannot believe that all that we see and hear is true of the bewildering reform that is alleged to have caught the country and its people into its arms, it was not a great surprise to see the Imperialists carrying out their threat to burn the city to ashes. ”

“ Meantime Lao Chang brought tea, and sallied forth immediately to fraternize among old friends. As I drank my tea, after having invited them one by one to join me, slowly and with a fitting dignity, the empty stare, destitute of sense or sincerity, of these six upstanding Chinese gentry, sucking at tobacco-pipes as long as their own overfed bodies, forced upon me a sense of my unfitness for the unknown conditions of the life of the place, a sense of loneliness and social unshelteredness in the sterile waste of their fashionable life. ”

“ Yet it brought the Chinese politics a new force to be reckoned with—the foreigner, with his law of extra-territoriality. The awakening of China began with the utter defeat of the Imperial forces by the troops of Japan, and a craving to know the reason of it all obsessed the nation's mind. "Let us go to school with the foreigner; let us study his books" became the nation's watchword. Then there began to dawn in China the thought that far too much national wealth and power and prestige had been handed over to foreign control. There was alarm, suspicion, bitter animosity—and the Boxer movement. ”

“ It has been said that the world of imagination is the world of eternity, and as of eternity, so of the Gorges—they cannot be adequately described. As I write now in the Ichang Gorge, I seem veritably to have reached eternity. I seem to have arrived at the bosom of an after-life, where one's body has ceased to vegetate, and where, in an infinite and eternal world of imagination, one's soul expands with fullest freedom. There seems to exist in this eternal world of unending rock and invulnerable precipice permanent realities which stand from eternity to eternity. ”

“ Every one who saw him daily, looked upon a man, definite to a degree in aim and purpose, free from self-aggrandisement and selfishness in any form. His aim first and last was to uplift his country, to win the throne for the Han people, and to work with all his might for the downfall of Manchu rule, for by that alone, he believed, could China forge ahead as such a mighty nation deserved and as her brightest sons desired that she should. ”

“ And the patches of wooded slopes, alternating with the red earth and more fertile green plots through which streams flow, with rolling waterfalls, picturesque nooks and winding pathways, make pictures to which only the gifted artist's brush could do justice. Often, gazing over the sunlit landscape, in this land "South of the Clouds," one is held spellbound by the intense beauty of this little-known province, and one wonders what all this grand scenery, untouched and unmarred by the hand of man, would become were it in the center of a continent covered by the ubiquitous globe-trotter. ”