Hunan

“ Each day junkloads of men were coming down from Hunan to join the Revolutionists—trained troops from the Hunan Army—and from them great things were expected. Everywhere one went he heard the boom of cannon, the whizz of shell, the ping of rifle shot. There was no escape. Foreigners were not allowed out of the Concessions, found it unsafe to go outside their houses, suffered shocks so great that all were on tenterhooks of excitement. Never before in any country were foreigners living as neutral parties to a war so near. ”

“ The propaganda of the rebels now bore fruit in rapid succession. On October 22nd the rebels, under the leadership of Tan Yen Kai, president of the Hunan Assembly, took Changsha, the capital of Hunan province. Yale College37 has a branch in this long forbidden city. Hunan has always been notable for honest, sturdy, independent men. It is the proudest province and the sternest in China. ”

“ What was to be the outcome of this Hunan dissension any one who knew the Hunanese would not be inclined to say offhand, but the fact that there has always been some little contempt mutually between the Hupehese and the Hunanese probably magnified the dissension in the military that occurred. One of the first arts of warfare is to cut off the pursuers. Now, when the Hunan men were in the city of Hanyang the Friday previous there was a little teashop squabble between a couple of dozen men, the Hupeh men being accused of flinching the hard graft of the front line. ”

“ After burning the great commercial city of Hankow, they crossed the river to attack Wuchang. On the pretence of defending Hunan the viceroy was absent. The governor did the best he could, and the soldiers who, under Hsiang Yung, were arriving from Hunan, were only a mile from the city walls with the rebels between, them and the city. Neither the defenders nor the army of Hsiang seemed willing to come to blows with the rebels, and the winter rains afforded them excuses for inactivity. The Taipings were therefore left free to undermine the wall. ”

“ In Hunan Province the peasants had organized five million strong. They controlled absolutely the village governments of most of central and southern Hunan. They therefore proceeded to the next step in the revolution, the solution of the land problem upon which their very lives depend. ”

“ The practice of allowing the finger-nails to remain uncut originated in Hunan some two hundred years ago amongst Chinese ladies, from whom it was copied later by the literati, who sought in this way to show that they were not engaged in any manual occupation. ”

“ The religious fanaticism of Hung and Yang—Hsiao having perished in the siege of Changsha shortly thereafter—delivered the movement over to a grotesque insistence on their superstition to the eventual undoing of the cause. Even Fêng, who had been associated with Chu in founding the societies and might have used his influence with Hung to guide the enterprise wisely, perished soon after they emerged from Kwangsi into Hunan. ”

“ At certain seasons vessels of considerable size are able to ascend as far as Changsha, the capital of the province of Hunan, which is a large and apparently prosperous place. Siangtan, a great trading-place further on, though only a third-class city, is larger than Changsha, and its population is estimated by the Chinese at one million, which, no doubt, is an exaggeration. In the neighborhood of the borders of Kwangtung the country is bleak and uninteresting. ”

“ Tuen, Slave and Empress.
CHAPTER I.
The sun had set in the land where the dragon reigns, and darkness and silence and rest and sleep, the ministers of the night, waited to come to their own. But their presence was not needed in the eastern portion of the province of Hunan, for a wonderful stillness hung over all the barren landscape, and there was no sign of life. On the banks of the streams the patient buffalo no longer went his ceaseless rounds, working the pumps that sent water over the thirsty earth ”

“ The villagers consented, and the guns and cartridges were stacked together; but no sooner had the 280 soldiers started on their way, than the villagers seized the guns, and commenced a deadly fire on the now disarmed braves. Many were killed, and all were robbed of everything about them, until their costume was scarcely as extensive as that usually worn by a Swatow fisherman.
Here is a sad little account of one detachment, taken from a Chinese paper:
"The first batch of Hunan men who are without occupation, property, or income is three hundred and seventeen in number. ”

“ For four days they bombarded it steadily without a shot being fired in reply, but fearing some deep-laid plot, they dared not attempt an assault; on the fourth day General Ho came to their assistance. 310 Encouraged by these reinforcements, the Hunan troops rushed to take the stronghold by storm. They had just got to the gate when they were met by an old woman, who meekly inquired why they had been firing so long, for besides herself there were only two old women in the village ”

“ In fact, the eighteenth-century Japanese master Hakuin wrote a commentary on Han-shan.
2. See Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Yoshitaka Iriya, and Dana R. Frasier, The Recorded Sayings of Layman P'ang (New York: Weatherhill, 1971) , p. 18.
3. See Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 145. This story is famous and found in many sources.
4. As evidenced by a common saying of the time: "In Kiangsi the Master is Ma-tsu; in Hunan the Master is Shih-t'ou. People go back and forth between them all the time, and those who do not know these two great Masters are completely ignorant." ”

“ The information there given was furnished by Hung Jin, who after the rebellion broke out escaped to Hong Kong, where he became an evangelist, remaining there for several years until he joined the rebels at Hanking. Some assert that during his stay in Hong Kong Hung Jin was a servant in a foreign home. ↑ The Miao are a non-Chinese group of aborigines pushed back into the hills by the Chinese conquests. Many are to be found in southern Hunan also. ”

“ The pressure of the Huns upon Europe had first been felt in the fourth century of our era. They had long been formidable to the Chinese Empire, but the ascendancy in arms which another nomadic tribe of Central Asia, the Sienpi, gained over them, drove the Huns from their Chinese conquest westward; and this movement once being communicated to the whole chain of barbaric nations that dwelt northward of the Black Sea and the Roman Empire; tribe after tribe of savage warriors broke in upon the barriers of civilized Europe, "Velut unda supervenit undam." ”

“ DAYS IN YUNNAN-FU
THE situation of Yunnan's capital is extraordinarily picturesque. It stands in a wide plain, its northern wall running along a low rocky ridge from which there is a charming view over city and lake to the great mountains that skirt the plain on all sides. Lying at an elevation of nearly seven thousand feet, it is blessed with a white man's climate. Eighty-five degrees in the shade marks the highest summer temperature, and the winters are just pleasantly bracing. ”

“ The chief Turkish tribes to-day are the Yakuts, on the Lena, the Kirghiz, the Uzbeks, of whom there are a considerable number in Bokhara and Khiva, the Turkomans, and Osmanli, the Turks themselves, and they have all something of the Hun about them. Their history is Hunnish history. A deformed and brutal people were the hordes of the Huns; there were many cripples among them and people of distorted features, many dwarfs. They were the cruellest people that have ever been, and probably that is why they have [47] such a name for ugliness. Cruelty and ugliness of feature go together. ”

“ THE CHIEF OF THE CUSTOM-HOUSE GIVES A LESSON IN OPIUM SMOKING. Urumtsi, or Hun-miao (red temple) of the Chinese, still retains its ancient prestige in being the seat of government for the viceroyalty of Sin-tsiang, which includes all that portion of western China lying without the limit of Mongolia and Tibet. Thanks to its happy position, it has always rapidly recovered after every fresh disaster. It now does considerable trade with Russia through the town of Chuguchak, and with China through the great gap which here occurs in the Tian Shan range. ”

“ Meanwhile the Chinese clique of the Chin dynasty had hastened to make a prince emperor in the second capital, Ch'ang-an (Min Ti, 313-316) while the princes' struggles for the throne continued. Nobody troubled about the fate of the unfortunate emperor in his capital. He received no reinforcements, so that he was helpless in face of the next attack of the Huns, and in 316 he was compelled to surrender like his predecessor. Now the Hun Han dynasty held both capitals, which meant virtually the whole of the western part of North China, and the so-called "Western Chin dynasty" thus came to its end. ”

“ They became thenceforward known by the name of the conquering clan, which in course of time was modified to Kushan, and appears so inscribed on their coins. The recent overthrow of their most persistent enemies the Hiung-nu rendered the more easy the task of consolidating their power, for in the year B.C. 71 the reigning Chinese emperor had administered a crushing defeat on the Huns, who were in B.C. 60 finally enrolled into the Chinese Empire. They thus became masters of all those countries which go to form Turkestan, Eastern Iran, and Afghanistan. ”

“ The movement grew rapidly. From all sides recruits came to the rebel ranks, among them two women chiefs, each at the head of about two thousand men. Hung now proclaimed himself as sent by Heaven to drive out the Tartars—whom he declared to be examples of all that was base and vile—and to place a Chinese emperor on his country's throne.
Putting his forces in march, Hung made a remarkable progress of about one thousand miles to Woo-chang on the Yang-tse-Kiang and down that stream, the army fighting its way through all opposition. When towns and cities submitted their people were spared. ”

“ When the Hiung-nu [655] power was weakened by their westerly migrations to Sungaria and south-west Siberia (Upper Irtysh and Lake Balkash depression) , and broken into two sections during their wars with the two Han dynasties (201 B.C.-220 A.D.) , the Korean Sien-pi became the dominant nation north of the Great Wall. After destroying the last vestiges of the unstable Hiung-nu empire, and driving the Mongolo-Turki hordes still westwards, the Yuan-yuans, most powerful of all the Sien-pi tribes, remained masters of East Central Asia for about 400 years and then disappeared from history [656] . ”

“ All the accounts of the Huns taken from the above-mentioned [102] celebrated work have been subjected to a learned and strict examination by Klaproth. According to the result of this research the Hiongnu belong to the widely diffused Turkish races of the Altai and Tangnu Mountains. The name Hiongnu, even in the third century before the Christian era, was a general name for the Ti, Thu-kiu or Turks, in the north and north-west of China. The southern Hiongnu overcame the Chinese, and in conjunction with them destroyed the empire of the northern Hiongnu. ”

“ They believed, these scientists, that before the great Han dynasty of China, an Indo-Aryan race known as the Sacæ had ruled Central Asia. The forefathers of the Europeans had ruled the Mongolians. The ancestors of thousands of Central Asians of to-day had been white men—tall men, with long skulls, and yellow hair, and great fighters.
The earliest annals of China mentioned the Huing-nu—light-eyed devils—who came down into the desert. ”

“ Through his dependence on the soil, he has a kinship with the lowliest beggar crouched at the approach to a temple and exhibiting his festering sores for all to view.
The swallows returned to Changan, on the very morning of the day of worship.
As Ming Huang emerged from the palace, he murmured: "When the mind is not present, we look and do not see; we hear and do not understand. We eat and do not know the taste of food." ”

“ To Huang-ti, whose reign is said to have commenced in 2704 according to one source and in 2491 according to another, are ascribed most of the cultural innovations which historians were not able otherwise to locate within historical times. Under Huang-ti we find the first mention of a nation called the Hun-yü, who occupied the north of his empire and with whom he is represented to have engaged in warfare. The Chinese identify this name with that of the Hiung-nu, their old hereditary enemy and the ancestors of Attila’s Huns. ”

“ If we wish to know anything about the Huns—who, indeed, are scarcely worth knowing anything about, for they have rendered no service to mankind—we find some slight notices of those barbarians among the Chinese—that most ancient of all nations, after the Indians. From them we learn that, in certain ages, the Huns went like famishing wolves and ravaged countries which, even at this day are regarded as places of exile and of horror. ”

“ The people in Yunnan seem cowed and crushed. That arrogance which characterises the Chinese elsewhere is entirely wanting here. They have seen the horrors of rebellion and civil war, of battle, murder and sudden death, of devastation by the sword, famine, ruin, and misery. They are resigned and spiritless. But their friendliness is charming; their courtesy and kindliness is a constant delight to the traveller. ”

“ The Huns asked themselves: "Have we, as aliens, any right to become emperors and rulers in China, when we are not descended from an old Chinese family?" On this point Liu Yüan and his advisers found a good answer. They called Liu Yüan's dynasty the "Han dynasty", and so linked it with the most famous of all the Chinese dynasties, pointing to the pact which their ancestor Mao Tun had concluded five hundred years earlier with the first emperor of the Han dynasty and which had described the two states as "brethren". ”