Shantung

“ If I were the Chinese, I'd forget Shantung and go on to centralize and develop what I had."
That was glibly said, but the fact which the statement leaves out of reckoning is that Shantung is the very heart and soul of China instead of being the appendix.
The average American has so often thought of [166] China just as China; a great, big, indefinite, far-off nation of four hundred million people, always stated in round numbers, that Shantung doesn't mean much to us. Yes, but it means much to China.
It means about the same as if some nation should come along and take New England from us ”

“ For the spirit of the dead is sometimes benevolent, and even small urchins would scarcely expect charity in return for knowingly uncomplimentary titles. But there is no doubt what the people of Shantung mean by their popular expression for the Japanese, “hsiao gwei,” or “little devil.” Nor need one inquire often or listen hard to get hints of why there is much actual hatred of the efficient islanders, quite aside from the theoretical dislike built up by rumor and propaganda. When the Japanese held it one could not buy tickets on the Shantung Railway with Chinese money ”

“ As the sun rose higher the mist was dispersed, and the bold rugged outline of the Shantung coast was unveiled before us. The clear blue water was alive with Chinese coasting craft, small and large, of most picturesque appearance. The heavy, unwieldy junks of northern China lay almost motionless, their widespread sails hanging idly to the mast, for there was just wind enough to ripple the surface of the water in long patches, leaving large spaces of glassy smoothness untouched by the breeze.
The crews of the northern junks are hardy stalwart fellows, inured to labour, and zealous in their work. ”

“ Page 30 CHAPTER VI PROVINCE OF SHANTUNG
Kiao-Chao—Visit to Confucius's Tomb—Expedition to the Jews of K'ai-fung-fu—The Grand Canal—Chefoo
In Shantung the people appear to be much more robust than their neighbours to the south. Wheat and millet rather than rice are their staple food. In their orchards apples, pears and peaches take the place of oranges.
At Kiao-chao (Kiau-Chau) the Germans, who occupied that port in 1897, have built a beautiful town opposite the Island of Tsingtao, presenting a fine model for imitation, which, however, the Chinese are not in haste to copy. ”

“ I think that I never before quite realized just what the loss of Shantung meant to these Chinese until that day, unless it was the next day, [171] when we climbed the sacred mountain Taishan, which is also in Shantung.
"It is the oldest worshiping-place in the world," said the historian of the party. "There is no other spot on earth where continuous worship has gone on so long. Here for more than twenty centuries before Christ was born men and women were worshiping. Emperors from the oldest history of China down to the present time have all visited this mountain to worship. ”

“ Far away in the southwest are the high mountains of Chinese Shantung. The old city, though within sight of Port Edward, is not like the surrounding territory under British control. Let us pay it a short visit to see what a Chinese provincial town is like. We 49 can go in by the eastern gate and look along the street and visit the temple of Confucius, the great Chinese 50 teacher and philosopher, who was a native of the Shantung province. Much of the space within the walls is not built on ”

“ Shantung Province has a population of about 30,000,000. The region has been an integral part of China continuously since before the dawn of authentic history, and is peopled today by the descendants of families who have lived there for thousands of years. ”

“ It was a great day for the college, and a great occasion for the village people; but most demoralizing to language study. The gold-embroidered, scarlet banners were so many and so immense that since that one day in the church no place has been found sufficiently large to hang them.”
In the general section of China where he lived he made many journeys. Over that part of Shantung situated to the east of the Yellow River he traveled often, and far and wide. Several times he visited Peking. Once, as we have seen, he went down the Grand Canal, to Nanking, and the lower Yangtse. ”

“ The eastern part of the Shantung Peninsula, in which Weihaiwei and the neighbouring districts of Jung-ch'êng, Wên-têng and Ning-hai are situated, is neither rich nor populous as compared with the south-western parts of the Province. The land is not unfertile, but the agricultural area is somewhat small, for the country is very hilly. Like the greater part of north China, Shantung is liable to floods and droughts, and local famines are not uncommon. The unequal distribution of the rainfall is no doubt partly the result of the almost total absence of forest. ”

“ Hardly a bowshot outside the gate they saw a thick cloud of dust out of which came all the clash and clamour of an advancing army. The Emperor and his Consort were dumb with fear. Then appeared a horseman; he was the messenger returning from Shantung. He rode up to the chariot, made an obeisance and said, “General Ts‘ao, as commanded, is coming with all the military force of Shantung, but hearing that Li and Kuo had again approached the capital he has sent Hsiahou Tun in advance. With him are many capable leaders and five legions of proved soldiers. They will guard Your Majesty.” ”

“ Shantung, but thanks to an enlightened and powerful Viceroy, in the person of Yuan-Shi-Kai, they had to move from his province, and so became the more numerous and powerful in the neighbouring province of Chihli, in which is situated the capital.
They soon succeeded in completely terrorising all the inhabitants who did not join their standard of their own free will, or rather of the madness born of mob violence. ”

“ The gates themselves were finally flung open, and I saw that an [336] oldish man of immense stature had been driven to do this work—a man who, so far from being afraid, was only held in check by a loaded revolver being kept steadily against his back. The Shantung man's face had become devilish with rage, and I could see that he was slowly working himself up into that Chinese frenzy which is such madness and bodes no good to any one. ”

“ The failure of the world to understand what Shantung means to China and the failure of Japan to understand that they cannot for many years stand out against the indignation of the entire world in continuing to keep Shantung is one of the great spiritual failures of the Far East in our century.
The second great failure is the tragic failure of an entire race of people; that of the Ainu Indians of Japan.
It is a pathetic thing to see a human race dying out; coming to "The End of the Trail." ”

“ Shantung, the birthplace of Confucius, is arid and filled with rocky, barren hills, and the provinces of Chili, Shansi, Shensi, and Kansu, which extend Westward, skirting the Great Wall, are also sandy and often parched for lack of water, while Szechwan, lying on the Tibetan border, although rich and well irrigated, is barred from the rest of China by tremendous mountain ranges difficult to pass. ”

“ In casting about for a location for the Anglo-Chinese college, the choice narrowed down so that it lay between Canton, Nanking, Shanghai, and Tientsin. Chefoo was mentioned, but not seriously considered, yet even the possibility of location there, although remote, was so important a matter to the Shantung College that it compelled the men at the head of that institution to be on the alert so long as the question was undetermined. ”

“ The Chinese converts aggregated thirty-five hundred.
In all Shantung, with its many millions of people, the only places at which any attempt had been made to establish stations were Chefoo and Tengchow, both on the seacoast. The Baptists reached the latter of these cities in the autumn of 1860. They were followed very soon afterward by Messrs. Danforth and Gayley and their wives, of the Presbyterian Board; and the next summer Mr. and Mrs. Nevius came up from Ningpo and joined them.
The natives seemed to be less positively unfriendly than those of many other parts of China are even to this day ”

“ Writing to one of the secretaries of the Board, under date of May 10, 1869, Mateer thus expressed himself as to the strategic importance of Shantung in the tremendous enterprise of evangelizing China:
I think it is almost universally admitted that Tsinan fu [the capital, situated about three hundred miles southwest of Tengchow] offers the most promising field for missionary effort in China. The region in which this city lies is the religious center of China. Here both the great sages of China, Confucius and Mencius, were born. ”

“ But Tsingtao, with its forty thousand Chinese, and Kiaochow across the bay, with its one hundred and twenty thousand more, and other villages dotting the narrow plains, maintain a very great demand for such growth on the hill lands. The wonder is that forest growth has persisted at all and has contributed so much in the way of fuel.
Fig. 121.—Close view of the wild yellow Shantung rose cultivated in the Forest Garden at Tsingtao and very effective for parks and pleasure drives. ”

“ This country is fertile but the population is so enormous that, in the absence of any manufacturing or mining, the people even in the most favoured seasons live from hand to mouth, and a drought means the starvation of multitudes.
V A SHENDZA IN SHANTUNG THE spring of 1901 was not the most propitious time for a tour of the province of Shantung. It was shortly after the suppression of the Boxer outbreak and the country was still in an unsettled condition. ”

“ Shantung is all right, never fear—such is the comment of the day.
But the political situation—the situation politique as we call it in our several conversations, which always have a diplomatic turn—although not grave, is unhappy; everybody at least acknowledges that. Peking has never been what it was before the Japanese war. In the old days we were all something of a happy family. There were merely the eleven Legations, the Inspectorate of Chinese Customs, with the aged Sir R—— H—— at its head, and perhaps a few favoured globe-trotters or nondescripts looking for rich concessions. ”

“ Lighter vessels can enter the river, only by being towed over the sands which lie at its mouth.—The promontory of Shantung is equally inaccessible, from its ruggedness. It possesses but a few good harbours, and many Chinese junks are annually dashed to pieces on its shores.—Keangsoo is easy of approach; but, though the two largest rivers of China, the Yellow river, and the Yang-tsze-keang, both disembogue themselves into the sea within its confines, yet it possesses but one good port, which is Shang-hae-Heen, near the frontiers of Chekeang. ”

“ It does not belong to the scope of this history to describe the processes by which a movement, possibly legitimate in official inception, assumed, in the summer of 1900, the character of an anti-foreign rebellion, which, breaking out in Shantung, spread to the metropolitan province of Chili, and resulted in a situation of extreme peril for the foreign communities in Tientsin and Peking. ”

“ Besides, there are both historical and visible evidences that Shantung had harbored the unwelcome visitor more than once before, that the two mountainous parts of the province were probably once islands, and that the Yellow River, washing back and forth between them, has built up the level and more fertile parts of the country. Similar things happened in many parts of the world, but in most cases the job was finished before man appeared, whereas in China it is still going on. The result is that man finds himself very much in the way during the process. ”

“ Still it was bad enough in the western parts even of Shantung. The native Christians in many places were robbed, beaten, and so far as possible compelled by threat of death to disown their faith. The story of [285] the destruction of the property of the mission at Wei Hsien, and the narrow escape of the missionaries, through the courage of one of their number, is about as thrilling as any that is told of that period of widespread burning and carnage. In the eastern side of the province, beyond ominous excitement at such places as Tengchow and Chefoo, there was no serious disturbance. ”

“ If we are to fix a particular year for this, perhaps it should be the year 1774, in which came the first great popular rising, in the province of Shantung. In 1775 there came another popular rising, in Honan—that of the "Society of the White Lotus". This society, which had long existed as a secret organization and had played a part in the Ming epoch, had been reorganized by a man named Liu Sung. Liu Sung was captured and was condemned to penal servitude. His followers, however, regrouped themselves, particularly in the province of Anhui. ”

“ These plains are very fertile, and as soon as spring comes there is a steady stream of workers to be seen arriving from China proper, especially from the province of Shantung, to which they return when the harvest is ended. Many come to accumulate enough money during eight or nine years to buy land and bring their families up to live here. In fact we met some emigrants already arriving with all their scanty possessions. ”

“ As we have already seen, in his explanation of the causes of the Boxer outbreak, notwithstanding his heartbreak and indignation for the horrors and outrages perpetrated, he lays bare the secret of it, as consisting in part of the wrongs done by foreign nations and persons to China and the Chinese. There were hundreds and perhaps thousands in Shantung who revered him as a father, and confided in him as they did in almost no other human being. ”

“ It isn't generally known, but of the two hundred thousand Chinese now in the United States, it is doubtful if there are as many as twenty from the other provinces. Only the Shantung natives have the initiative required to venture into foreign lands—or to become criminals. ”