Edwin John Dingle

“ 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. ”

“ We must seek the opinion of those people who were confined within the walls of Chao-t'ong city—the silence of their own homes broken up by the distant uproar of a frantic chorus of yells and angry disputations, sounding, as it were, their very death-knell, as if they were to form a manacled procession dragging their chains of martyrdom to their own slow doom—before we show contempt for the opinion of those who would tell the truth. There is more of Boxerism in the far-away interior parts of China than we know of. ”

“ Some of the larger villages had the arrogant look of old feudal fortresses, and up the paths leading to them, cut out in a defile in the vertical cliffs, we passed with difficulty coolies carrying on their backs the enormous loads, which are the wonder of all who have seen them, their backs straining under the boomerang-shaped frames to which the merchandise was lashed. Hundreds passed us on their toilsome journey with tea, lamp-oil, skins, hides, copper, lead, coal and white wax from Yün-nan, and with salt, English cotton, Chinese porcelain, fans and so on from Szech'wan. ”

“ To have our souls tuned to this silent eloquence of Nature, to catch the sweetness of those wind-swept, heaven-directed mountains, to understand the unspoken messages of those rushing rivers and those gigantic gorges, to feel the heart-beat of Nature and her beauty in perfect harmony with all that is best within us, we must be silent, undisturbed, preferably alone. This is not flowery sentiment—it is what every true lover of old and lovely Nature would feel in Western China, yet still unspoiled by the taint of man's absorbing stream of civilization. ”

“ No furniture brings confusion to their rooms, no machinery distresses the ear with its groaning or the eye with its unsightliness, no factories belch out smoke and blacken the beauty of the sky, no trains screech to disturb sleepers and frighten babies. The simplest of simple beds—in most cases merely a few boards with a straw mattress placed thereon—the straw sandal on the foot, wooden chopsticks in place of knives and forks, the small variety of foods and of cooking utensils, the simple homespun cotton clothing—much of this finds favor in the eye of the English traveler. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But if China, from the highest to the lowest, will only embrace truth and love her for her own sake, so that she will not abate one jot of allegiance to her; if China will let truth run down through the arteries of everyday commercial, social, and political life as do the waterways through her marvelous country; if China will kill her retardative conservatism, and in its place erect honesty and conscience; if China will let her moral life be quickened—then her transition period, from end to end of the Empire, will soon end. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the labor and all its fatiguing arduousness are nothing when one gets to the top, for one beholds here one of the most magnificent mountain panoramas in all West China. Far away, just peeping prettily from the silvered edges of the bursting clouds, are the giant peaks which separate Tali-fu from Yang-pi—white giants with rugged, cruel edges pointing upwards, piercing the clouds asunder as a ship's bow pierces the billows of the deep ”

“ But I remember that I am coming into Burma, into the real East, where the tangle and the topsy-turvydom, the crooked vision and the distorted travesty of the truth, which result from judging the Oriental from the standpoint of the Europeans and looking at the East through the eyes of the West, impress themselves upon one's mind in bewildering fashion as a hopeless problem. Everything is all at cross purposes.
However, although I lost my way from Manyüen to Man Hsien, I got my photographs of Kachins, those people whose appearance is that they have no one to care for them body or soul. ”

“ If once there is a railway to Tengyueh from Burma, a visit to West China, even on to Tali-fu, for those who are prepared to rough it a little, will become quite a common trip. A few days up the Irawadi to Bhamo, through scenery of a peculiar kind of beauty eclipsed on none other of the world's great rivers, would be succeeded by a day or two over some of the best country which Upper Burma anywhere affords, and then, when once past Tengyueh, the grandeur of the mountains is amply compensating to those who love Nature in her beautiful isolation and peace. ”

“ And I know a man who would do this even, despite the ruts: he takes a delight in running over dogs and small boys, damaging rickshaws, bumping into bullock-carts, and so on—he would have done it with liveliest freedom.
But what poverty there was! What women! What Children! With barely an exception, the women had faces ground by want and bare necessity, in which every cheerful and sympathetic lineament had been effaced by life-long slavery and misery. In the bitter cold they, women and children, crouched round a scanty fir-wood firing, not enough even to keep alive their natural heat. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One will learn much if he travels across the Empire—facts and figures quite irreconcilable will arise, but even the man of dullest perception will be convinced that much of the reforming spirit in the people is only skin-deep, going no farther than the externals of life. It is at present, perhaps, merely a mad fermentation in the western provinces, wherefrom the fiercer it is the clearer the product will one day evolve itself. Such transitions are full of bewilderment to the European—bewildering to any writer who endeavors to tackle the Empire as a whole. ”

“ Malaria is supposed by the natives of the tropic belt to be sent to Europeans by Providence as a chastening for the otherwise insupportable energy of the white man. Malignant malaria is one of Nature's watch-dogs, set to guard her shrine of peace and ease and to punish woeful intruders. And she had brought me to China to punish me. As is her wont, Nature milked the manhood out of me, racked me with aches and pains, shattered me with chills, scorched me with fever fires, pursued me with despairing visions, and hag-rode me without mercy. ”

“ I had come to see how far the modern spirit had penetrated into the hidden recesses of the Chinese Empire. One may be little given to philosophizing, and possess but scanty skill in putting into words the conclusions which form themselves in one's mind, but it is impossible to cross China entirely unobservant. One must begin, no matter how dimly, to perceive something of the causes which are at work. ”

“ In China everything is so open, and so much must be done in public, that it would surprise one to know that the Chinese have an inner room. The European traveler in this region must have no inner room, either, for the people seem to see down deep into one's very soul. But it is when one wanders on alone, as I have done to-day, doing two days in one, no less than one hundred and forty li of terrible road through the most isolated country, that one can enjoy the comfort of one's own loneliness and own inner room. ”

“ To the Englishman, daily getting nearer to the end of his long, wearying walk, and going for the first time into Upper Burma, incidentally to realize again the dream of civilization and comfort and contact with his own kind, leaving Old China in the rear, there instinctively came that inexpressible patriotic pride every Britisher must feel when he emerges from the Middle Kingdom and sets his foot again on British territory. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The captain, in essentially the Chinese way, is engaging a crew of demon-faced trackers to haul her over. Pouring towards the boat, in a fever of excitement that rises higher every moment, the natural elements of hunger and constant struggle against the great river swell their fury; they bellow like wild beasts, they are like beasts, for they have known nothing but struggle all their lives; they have always, since they were tiny children, been fighting this roaring water monster—they know none else. ”

“ The European is not wanted in China, no matter how absurd it may seem to the student of international politics, who sits and devours all the newspaper copy—good, bad and indifferent—which filters through regarding China becoming the El Dorado of the Westerner. He is wanted for no other reason than that of teaching the Chinese to foreignize as much as he can, teaching the leaders of the people to strive to modify national life, and to raise public conduct and administration to the best standards of the West. ”

“ Great excitement ensued among the perspiring laborers of the road and the dumb-struck yokels of the district. The lady was so goitrous that it would have been extremely risky to hazard a guess as to the exact spot where her face began or ended; and here, in a place where with all her neighbors she had lived through a period noted for famine, for rebellion, for wholesale death and murder of an entire village, she endured such terrible poverty that one would have thought her spirit would have waned and the light of her youth burned out. ”

“ A man must not come to China for pleasure unless he love his mistress Nature when she is most rudely clad. Some of her lovers are fascinated most in by-places, in the cool of forests, on the summit of lofty mountains, high up from the mundane, in the cleft of cañons, everywhere that the careless lover is not admitted to her contemplation. It is for such that China holds out an inviting hand, but she offers little else to the Westerner—the student of Nature and of man can alone be happy in the interior. ”

“ Trees hollowed out and spanned from field to field served as gutters for irrigation; shepherds clad in white felt blankets sat huddled upon the ground behind huge boulders, oblivious of time and of the boisterous wind, while their sheep and goats grubbed away on the scanty grass the moorland provided; high up we saw forest fires, making the earth black and desolate; ruins almost everywhere recalled to one's mind the image of a past prosperity, which now were replaced by traces of misery, exterior influences which seemed to breed upon the traveler a deep discouragement. ”

“ And well it might be; for thousands of children are disposed of in the course of a year for a few taels by heartless parents, who watch them being carried away, like so much merchandise, to be converted into silver, in many cases in this poverty-stricken district merely to satisfy the craving for opium of some sodden wretch of a man who calls himself a father. Time and time again, long after I myself passed through Chao-t'ong, did I see little girls from three to ten years of age being conveyed by pack-horse to the capital, balanced in baskets on either side of the animal. ”

“ From the extreme summit of one snow-laden peak, whose white steeple seems truly a heavenward-directed finger, I gaze abstractedly all around upon nothing but dark masses of gently-waving hills, steep, weary ascents and descents, green and gold, and yellow and brown, and one's eyes rest upon a maze of thin white lines intertwining them all. These are the main roads. I am alone. My men are far behind. I am awed with an unnatural sense of bewildered wonderment in the midst of all this glory of the earth.
Everything is so vast, so grand, so overpowering. ”