Northern China

“ A great proportion of the northern Chinese seem to be in a sleepy or dreaming state, from which it is difficult to awake them. When a foreigner at any of the northern ports goes into a shop, the whole place inside and out is immediately crowded with Chinese, who gaze at him with a sort of stupid dreaming eye ”

“ But the character of the Chinese as a nation must not suffer from a partial view of this kind; for it must be recollected that, in every country, the worst and most lawless characters are amongst those who inhabit sea-port towns, and who come in contact with natives of other countries: and unfortunately we must confess that European nations have contributed their share to make these people what they really are. In the north of China, and more particularly inland, the natives are entirely different. ”

“ Russians and Chinese sit joking together; both ride the small sturdy horses of the region; many of the Chinese wear the long, soft, black boots so general among their neighbors, but there seemed to be very few mixtures of the two races. Sturdy fellows indeed were these bearded Caucasian farmers from the north and west, but for that matter the far-northern Chinese, with enough to eat and room to live in, are big and strong, too, real pioneers, used to a different environment than are their overcrowded compatriots farther south, in touch with and more sympathetic toward European civilization. ”

“ The republic, however, opened this great uninhabited region to settlers, with the result that here there may still be seen sights utterly unknown in the rest of China, pioneering conditions completely out of place in that densely populated, intensively cultivated land, and at the same time a demonstration of what must have happened many centuries ago on an infinitely larger scale to make North China the dust-blown, denuded area it is to-day. ”

“ Although the Chinese countenance and eye differ considerably from those of a native of Europe, yet a traveller in the north has far greater chance of escaping detection than in the south of China, the features of the northern natives approaching more nearly to those of Europeans than they do in the south, and the difference amongst themselves also being greater. ”

“ CHINA, a country of eastern Asia, the principal division of the Chinese empire. In addition to China proper the Chinese Empire includes Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet and Sin-kiang (East Turkestan, Kulja, Dzungaria, &c., i.e. all the Chinese dependencies lying between Mongolia on the north and Tibet on the south) . Its most southern point is in 18° 50′ N.; its most northern in 53° 25′ N.; its most western in 74° E., and its most eastern in 135° E. It lies, however, mainly between 20° and 50° N. and 80° and 130° E. It is considerably larger than the whole of Europe. ”

“ The start of the Sui dynasty, while the Chou still held the north, was evidence, just like the emergence in the north-east some thirty years earlier of the Northern Ch'i dynasty, that the Chinese gentry with their landowning basis had gained the upper hand over the warrior nomads.
The Chinese gentry had not come unchanged out of that struggle. Culturally they had taken over many things from the foreigners, beginning with music and the style of their clothing, in which they had entirely adopted the northern pattern, and including other elements of daily life. ”

“ The Chinese name is derived from a stone chessboard said to have been carved out of a rock by a hsien-jên, a kind of wizard or mountain recluse who lived there in bygone ages. Most of the more remarkable or conspicuous hills in China are believed by the people to have been the abode of weird old men who never came to an end like ordinary people, but went on living with absurdly long beards and a profound knowledge of nature's secrets. ”

“ The population of the three provinces is mainly Chinese, and, assimilated in government to those of China, they are reckoned as completing the number of twenty-one. Opulent in grain-fields, forests, and minerals, with every facility for commerce, no part of the empire has a brighter future. So thinly peopled is its northern portion that it continues to be a vast hunting-ground which supplies the Chinese market with sables and tiger-skins besides other peltries. ”

“ This great, featureless, windswept plateau keeps but a scanty population of less than three millions. [253] On the northern and southern borders a few among the people have adopted the settled ways of the Chinese; but elsewhere they live as their fathers lived before them, their fields the land where the flocks are grazing, their home the spot where the yurts are temporarily set up. Nomads they are, but within definite limits, moving no long distance nor very often. Over them rule their native princes or khans, subject, up to last year, nominally to China ”

“ When ripe, the crops are cut with a small instrument, not very unlike our own reaping-hook, and are generally thrashed out at once in the fields where they have grown. Sometimes, however, and more particularly in the north, the paddy is tied up in sheaves, and carried home before it is thrashed; indeed every thing in the northern agriculture of the Chinese has a great resemblance to what is practised in Europe.
The terrace cultivation of China has been noticed by nearly all writers upon this country, and, like most other subjects, it has been either much exaggerated or undervalued. ”

“ North and South China are divided in speech, and the people are unlike, physically and mentally, but I wonder if the separation is really deeper than that between the Northern and the Southern States in America to-day. ”

“ Not only are there bleak mountains and vast morasses, dreary despoblados without a sign of man for days, and the fanatical Mohammedan province of Kansu to cross, but in these settled times there are real dangers from bandits of several nationalities. So the beaten trail of to-day, except for those Tibetan divinities who come by sea, like any tourist, leads down through northern India and across into central China, thence northward through the former Celestial Empire, which still claims, if in vain, jurisdiction over all Outer Mongolia. ”

“ They, from the highest Mandarin down to the meanest beggar, are filled with the most [Pg 3] conceited notions of their own importance and power; and fancy that no people however civilised, and no country however powerful, are for one moment to be compared with them. As an instance of this I may mention the following:—When the first steamer visited the coast of China, the Chinese in Canton and Macao did not exhibit the least surprise, but merely said "Have got plenty, all same, inside," meaning that such things were quite common in the interior of their country. ”

“ While the foreigners have taken plenty of space for the construction of their buildings and laying out their streets, the Chinese have crowded together as closely as possible, and seemed desirous of putting the greatest number into the smallest area. It is so all over China from north to south. Even where land is of no particular [Pg 322] value, as in the extreme north, the result is the same; and there are probably no people in the world that will exist in so small an area as the Chinese. ”

“ Fancy a country of four million square miles, with a population of as many millions as there are days in the year, with but one single railway of a few miles! Yet such is the case; China is still in the shadow of the dark ages.
The morning mists gather into a thin vapour and roll upwards, showing miles of fields, cultivated like kitchen gardens, interspersed with mud villages, where the houses are made of wattles plastered over with the earth they stand on, with chimneys formed of a cone of mud, and paper windows. ”

“ The bamboos’ luxuriant, sword-shaped, fern-like beauty still edges with gray-green lace the twisting footpath between Victoria City and the blue-topped Peak. Red Chinese roofs still up-turn here and there among the persimmons and oleanders. Junks and sampans still huddle in the harbor, and the water still croons blue and green and limpid about them. At night Young China seems almost a myth, an unloveliness almost forgotten and quite negligible; the moon and the stars keep their old state up in an imperial sky ”

“ But do not imagine from this that there are many of these, for the Chinese have been for days avoiding the Legation quarter as if it were plague-stricken, and sounds that were so roaring a few weeks ago are now daily becoming more and more scarce. A blight is settling on us, for we are accursed by the whole population of North China, and who knows what will be the fate of those seen lurking near the foreigner? ”

“ The history of China is so closely connected with that of the nomad tribes that one cannot be given [Pg 229] without the other, and before telling the story of the Mongols a brief outline of the history of these tribes is desirable. China is on three sides abundantly defended from invasion, by the ocean on the east, and by mountains and desert on the south and west. Its only vulnerable quarter is in the north, where it joins on to the vast region of the steppes, a country whose scarcity of rain unfits it for agriculture, but which has sufficient herbage for the pasturage of immense herds. ”

“ Western China consists of highlands often sparsely, and eastern China of lowlands densely peopled. Western China contains the only provinces where the population is under 100 per sq. m. From the Tibetan and Mongolian tablelands project mountain ranges which, ramifying over the western region, enclose elevated level tracts and lower basins and valleys. ”

“ China, with her teeming millions, is separated from western Asia by the whole bulk of the broadest and least hospitable portion of the system of lofty plateaux with peripheral ranges. The echelon of chains, which seam the continent in a north-easterly direction, are the nurseries of the hardiest tribes. The valleys which space these ranges are the arteries of human movement, and they lead from west to east, from east to west. ”

“ No one can gain any adequate idea of the magnitude of the Empire of China until he has journeyed up that great waterway, the Yang-tse-Kiang, and observed the millions upon millions of natives that throng both the river and its banks. For the first four hundred miles of its twisting, serpentine course, the Yang-tse seems to wind through one successive village, back of which the skilfully cultivated gardens and fields are visible. The people as a rule seem peaceful and plodding ”

“ The plain between these hills and the town is very beautiful. It is thickly studded with farmsteads, knolls of trees, and tombs, which are always the prettiest spots in China, for as a balance against the dirt and squalor in which they pass their lives, the Chinese choose the most romantic and delightful places for their final habitations. The soil is wonderfully fertile, and yields two crops in the year, so that [88] usually the plain bears every appearance of prosperity ”

“ In the south there were only peoples in a very low state of civilization, who could offer no serious menace to the Chinese. The trading colonies that gradually extended to Canton and still farther south served as Chinese administrative centres for provinces and prefectures, with small but adequate armies of their own, so that in case of need they could defend themselves. In the north the position was much more difficult. In addition to their conquest within China, the rulers of Ch'in had pushed their frontier far to the north. ”

“ In the north and east the realm was also protected by difficult mountain country. The south lay relatively open, but at that time there were few Chinese living there, but only natives with a relatively low civilization. The kingdom could only be seriously attacked from two corners—through the north-west, where there was a negotiable plateau, between the Ch'in-ling mountains in the north and the Tibetan mountains in the west, a plateau inhabited by fairly highly developed Tibetan tribes; and secondly through the south-east corner, where it would be possible to penetrate up the Yangtze. ”

“ Nor is this all; immense tracts in the north and west of the province have lain waste since the Mohammedan rebellion, and owing to the antipathy of the Chinese to settle on lands which they look upon as the property of people who may still be living, or whose descendants may still be living, it must be many years before the [206] agriculture of the province is properly developed. It will be said that I take a gloomy view of the south-western corner of China ”

“ The Chinese are a colonizing race, and in Manchuria, Mongolia and Turkestan they have brought several districts under cultivation. In the regions where they settle they become the dominant race—thus southern Manchuria now differs little from a province of China proper. In Indo-China, the Malay Emigration. Peninsula and throughout the Far East Chinese are numerous as farmers, labourers and traders; in some places, such as Singapore, Chinese are among the principal merchants. This colonizing spirit is probably due more to the enterprise of the people than to the density of the population. ”

“ Urga the Sacred City, the home of the Gigin, [276] the Living God, third in the Buddhist hierarchy, is not so much one city as three, all located on a high ridge above the Tola. Each is distinct, separate, entrenched. Arriving from the south, the one you reach first is Mai-ma-chin, the Chinese trading settlement, a tangle of small houses and narrow lanes hemmed in by stockades of wooden slabs and unbarked fir trees. Here are the eight or ten thousand Chinese who control the trade of North Mongolia. ”

“ Finally, many Chinese migrated northward, into the territories of the frontier peoples, not only of the Hsien-pi but especially of the Huns. These alien peoples, although in the official Chinese view they were still barbarians, at least maintained peace in the territories they ruled, and they left in peace the peasants and craftsmen who came to them, even while their own armies were involved in fighting inside China. Not only peasants and craftsmen came to the north but more and more educated persons. ”