China by Frank G. Carpenter — Free Audiobook

1 01 - A Word Before We Start 3:22

CHINA.

A WORD BEFORE WE START. I have often been asked what country I found the most interesting in all of my travels over the globe. To me, they are all interesting, and each has its own appeal. But regard for the truth has compelled me to answer, China. I have visited this far eastern land no less than five times, yet its fascination increases rather than grows less. It is a country with a most amazing past, and destined, I believe, to an even more amazing future. I first visited China on my maiden trip around the world, when the Manchu dynasty was at the height of its medieval power and splendor. Secure in its belief in the superiority of China over all other nations. Western civilization had only begun to appear over the horizon, and the people were not yet aroused against the white man and his ways.

Six years later, however, when I made my second trip here, an outburst of rioting against foreigners had just swept the country. My third landing in China was at Canton in 1901. The Boxer Rebellion in North China had been put down the preceding year, and under the whip of foreign compulsion the country was being reorganized. On my next trip I found that the ancient examination system had been abolished, new schools for the teaching of Western learning had been ordered set up by the Thousand, and iron and steel and cotton manufacturing had been begun. Significant of the great changes impending was the death of the Empress Dowager during my stay. Had the old lady lived but a few years longer, she would have seen the inglorious end of the rule of which she was the most able exponent, and an upheaval compared with which all the previous storms she had weathered would have seemed but spring zephyrs.

Now, nearly forty years after my first visit, I am once more in China. The empire has passed away, and a republic has succeeded it, although it exists more in theory than in fact. Instead of trying to fight the foreigner, thousands of Chinese are rushing headlong to adopt his ways, both good and bad. Ancient walls that once guarded great cities have been torn down to make room for modern highways, and the skies are darkened with the smoke from the chimneys of factories equipped with modern machinery. Foot binding has been almost abolished, queues have been cut off, and the Chinese are getting ready to take a new place in the world. It is to see something of this new China that I ask you to join me in the travels of this volume.

At the same time, I must remind you that we are in one of the most ancient of countries, and that we shall learn much that is interesting by stopping frequently to look at the old as well as the new.

2 02 - Hong Kong, Great Britain's Gateway to China 18:17

CARPENTER. HONG KONG. GREAT BRITAIN'S GATEWAY TO CHINA. I am in Hong Kong, the chief ocean gateway to South China. It is a little island off the southeastern edge of the country, and directly in the path of every ship that plies between China and Europe. I am as far from Peking as New York is from Denver. As far west from Manila as Cleveland is from New York, and as far from the limits of western China as the Rockies are distant from the city of Boston. Hong Kong is 10,000 miles from London by way of the Suez Canal, and halfway around the world from New York City via the Panama Canal. Hong Kong belongs to John Bull. It was ceded to Great Britain in perpetuity in 1841. And, like Venice in the Middle Ages, the British are taking their toll from all who go by.

They do not levy direct taxes, for this is a free port, but every ship has to stop here for supplies, and it is certain to leave a number of pounds, shillings, and pence before it departs. Since I first visited it in 1900, Hong Kong has trebled in size and is now as large as Pittsburgh or Los Angeles. As the trade center for South China, it has taken mighty strides. Until today, it is the fifth port of the world in volume of shipping. Indeed, the wealth that annually passes through Hong Kong runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The imports alone amount to about $300 million a year, of which $65 million worth comes from Great Britain and its colonies. The 700,000 vessels that call at Hong Kong every year have a total tonnage of more than 50 million tons and range from great ocean liners to small native boats.

As I landed here from Manila, I saw craft flying the flags of almost every seafaring nation on Earth, in addition to the thousands of Chinese junks and sampans that swarm everywhere. The junks are great clumsy-looking objects, with their fat hulls and their sails of matting or coarse cloth stretched on bamboo frames. On some of them I noticed a great eye painted on each side of the bow, a survival of the ancient Chinese belief that a boat must be able to see if a voyage is not to end disastrously. The sampan is a long, low craft, from fifteen to fifty feet long, with one end covered over, and looking for all the world like a giant Chinese slipper. Indeed, because of this very fact, they are often called slipper boats.

I am told that there are fifty thousand Chinese living upon them, and that they are the homes, not only of the humans, but also of an assorted population of chickens, ducks, and pigs. Often the Sampans are propelled by women, who stand up and scull their boats, much like the gondoliers of Venice. Some of them have babies tied to their backs by strips of cloth, the bare legs of the little ones sticking out in front, and their tiny black heads bobbing up and down as their mothers bend to the oars. If you will imagine a great rocky mountain as high as the Blue Ridge of Virginia, Rising up at an angle of 45 degrees from a landlocked harbor, you will have an idea of how Hong Kong looks. This little island, which is only 10 miles long and not more than 4 miles wide, consists of six great hills, the largest of which, known as the Peak, is 1,800 feet high.

The whole island is so small that one can motor all around it in two hours, and I can almost imagine a giant standing it upside down and whirling it around like a top. When John Bull took over this bit of land, it was so barren that even weeds would not grow upon it. Its only inhabitants were the fishermen, who lived in huts along the shores, and the pirates, who made this their headquarters for preying upon the shipping off the coast of South China. The pirates were finally driven out by the British, who then found that the only way they could keep them out was by occupying the island themselves. In 1841, England obtained complete possession of it, and at once set about founding the great port of today.

The first thing necessary was to rid the island of disease. And this was done, even though at a cost of 20,000 lives in the three years from 1842 to 1845. Much of the land on which the finest buildings of the city now stand was reclaimed from the sea. Great wharves, shipyards, and dry docks were constructed, and harbor fortifications were built. Today, only a little more than three-quarters of a century later, The British have here one of the finest and most important cities in the Orient. Opposite the island of Hong Kong, across the narrow channel that is crossed by ferry in a few minutes, is the peninsula of Kowloon, which juts out from the mainland of the Asiatic continent. This peninsula also has been leased by the British and is now the southern terminus of a railway that is building to Canton.

The concession for it was originally given to Cal Bryce and other American capitalists, but it was later sold back to China. Although the work on it has been stopped, owing to the chaotic conditions here, it will someday be completed, and there will then be a through freight and passenger service from Hong Kong to Peking, and from there by other new railroads to all parts of western China. Although the world knows this port as Hong Kong, and I refer to it by that name, there is really no such thing as the city of Hong Kong. Hong Kong is the name of the island and colony. The city and port is Victoria, so-called in honor of Queen Victoria, who made the island a crown colony. But that name is practically never used, except on official government documents and in the records of the post office.

Victoria, known to the Chinese as Fragrant Streams and Good Harbour, is a beautiful city, and an unusual one. Lying on a bay on the northern side of the island, it rises in terraces up the slopes of the hills, almost to the top of the peak. Near the water are the warehouses and exporting establishments, and back of them are the shopping and business sections of the city. Here there are fine streets, magnificent office and government buildings, and handsome stores, many of which have arcades upheld by massive pillars. During certain seasons the city is subject to heavy rains, when the very heavens seem about to fall. And for this reason, many of the streets are lined with these arcades, so that the shoppers can go from store to store without being drenched.

There are, of course, many Chinese to be seen in this part of Hong Kong, but otherwise it seems entirely Western. There are moving picture shows where the racial stolidity of the Chinese is vanquished by the antics of a cross-eyed comedian from Hollywood, and there are soda fountains that concoct the ice cream sundaes and milkshakes of our own United States. In front of one of the latter is a sign requesting customers to come in and enjoy. Indeed, the announcements of many of the stores betray a struggle between the native merchant and the English language, often with amusing results. A big bazaar on Queens Road, for instance, advertises conspicuously in posters and guidebooks its incomputable prices.

Flanking the European settlement on both sides are the Chinese quarters of Hong Kong, with their narrow streets, their gay storefronts, and their quaint double-decked streetcars. Only a short walk from the post office is one of the most densely populated sections in the world. Here, there are 150,000 people living and doing business on an area smaller than a 160-acre farm. Or, more than a thousand to the acre. Some own rice factories, some are silversmiths, others are bankers, and others, both women and men, work at hard labor of every kind. Here also are the retail stores of the Chinese and the East Indians, containing all the wealth of the Indies. There are great shops filled with the most gorgeous embroideries, rugs, and silks.

Through some of the windows I can catch a glimpse of blackwood furniture, wonderfully carved, and in others is silverware and jewelry in exquisite designs. Back of the business district and climbing the slopes are the homes of Hong Kong. Here live both Europeans and wealthy Chinese, some in bungalows and some in luxurious and pretentious mansions. The houses are built on terraces and rise one row above another, more than halfway to the top of the peak. Winding its way up the steep slopes between them is the Cog tramway, on which cars run up and down all day. It ends at the Peak Hotel, which from its location almost at the top of the mountain commands a magnificent view of the harbor. Beyond it, a road leads to the very summit, almost 2,000 feet above the city.

Victoria itself rises up from the sea so steeply that many of its thoroughfares are nothing but flights of steps, and there are only a few streets near the waterfront where automobiles can be used with comfort. Outside the city, however, there are several hundred miles of fine motor roads, one of which nearly encircles Hong Kong. I went over this road yesterday in a trip to Repulse Bay, eleven miles from the city on the opposite side of the island. The scenery along this highway reminded me of the French Riviera. The road goes uphill and down, now skirting the water and now climbing a thousand feet up the mountain sides. It is bordered with trees for practically all its length, and much of the ride was through the forests that have been planted on the former bare slopes of the peak.

Repulse Bay is the seaside resort of the colony and has a hotel with all the surroundings of a beautiful villa. There are gardens of semi-tropical flowers, porches that look out over the sea, and below them a fine bathing beach. The hotel has a dance hall and a dining room that would be considered large in any city hotel in the States. And at tea time, the veranda is crowded with as gay a throng as at any of our most fashionable resorts. Were it not for the police in the gorgeous uniforms of the Far East and the waiters in their Chinese gowns, one would not realize that he was out of America. Hong Kong is a mecca for sports lovers. It has a cricket club, a football club, a polo club, tennis and golf clubs, jockey clubs, rifle clubs, and yachting clubs.

The best golf in the East is to be found in Fan Ling, about 20 miles away, where there are two courses of 18 holes each. There are other golf links at Deepwater Bay and Happy Valley, and at Happy Valley there is also a race course in a natural amphitheater in the hills. Everyone in Hong Kong goes to the races, practically all the business offices closing, and the banks shutting down for three or four days when the meets are held. I happened to be here during the races the first time I came to Hong Kong, and until they were over, I could get no money on my letter of credit, and could not even cash a check. The resorts and clubs of Hong Kong are patronized by the wealthy Chinese as well as by the whites.

The revolutions throughout China have driven the rich natives to the treaty ports so that they may be under foreign protection, And some of the finest homes here are now owned by Chinese. Indeed, I am constantly being surprised at the wealth and the poverty of this gateway to Asia. Its rich are so rich, and its poor so poor. Hong Kong is a city of millionaires, both British and Chinese, and of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who labor for from three to five cents an hour. There are many who earn barely enough to keep soul and body together, as you may see from their faces, which seem pasted on to their skulls. My ride around the island of Hong Kong was in the $10,000 motor car of a capitalist from Great Britain, driven by his East Indian chauffeur in faultless livery.

On the way, I passed gangs of Chinese women and girls of all ages working on the road, their thin cotton trousers flapping around their bare feet. Each had a hammer in her hand, and my host told me they had been breaking stone for the highways. Their wages are just about two cents an hour, and they put in ten hours a day. Yet they were laughing and smiling, and by no means bemoaning their lot. On this ride, we passed many women. bare-armed and bare-legged, harnessed like horses and dragging heavy loads up the hills. Others were carrying baskets of earth and stone slung to a pole across their shoulders. Women do much of the bricklaying, road-mending, and coaling in Hong Kong, and the only difference in the treatment accorded them is that the men get the most money.

Indeed, human labor is the cheapest labor in Hong Kong. and human muscle, one of the less expensive commodities. The Chinese are the pack animals, the beasts of burden, the drays and cab horses of the city. I have hired a gin rickshaw for 10 cents an hour. Think of being pulled across town for the price of a glass of soda water. Or I can be carried about in a sedan chair, slung on poles, resting on the bare shoulders of two big coolies, whom the law prohibits from charging more than 17 cents an hour. For 75 cents gold, I can have them all day, from 6 in the morning to 5 in the evening. A sedan chair of this type is a sort of wicker box, with a soft wicker back and armrests. Along the sides are fastened two poles as big around as your wrist and 18 feet long.

Between the poles, in front and behind, stand the two bareheaded, yellow-skinned coolies, who act as bearers. Where the poles come in contact with the skin, they make it so calloused that it is thicker than that of one's heel, or else rub it raw as a badly-adjusted saddle galls the back of a horse. Having seen Hong Kong by automobile, rickshaw, and by sedan chair, last night I took a tramp through the streets to see how the city looks after dark. Although I am told that all sorts of vice goes on in the narrow alleys that climb the hills, I felt safer than I would in a strange city of the same size in the United States. Everything was quiet. The great buildings were as dark as pockets, and the mountains back of the town were shrouded in gloom.

The green woods were turned to blue by the darkness, and the lights of the houses shone like rows of stars under the clouds that enveloped the peak. Walking along Queen's Road, I stopped under the electric lights to watch the night crowd as it passed. It was a cosmopolitan one. There were red-turbaned, black-bearded Sikh policemen guiding the traffic and directing the chairs, gin rickshaws, and automobiles this way and that. There were British soldiers from the garrison and sailors in the uniforms of a half-dozen nations. The navies of all the world visit Hong Kong, and their marines may be seen any night in the streets. There were many East Indians dressed in calicos, Parsi girls with white shawls over their faces, Clings, half-clad in white cottons, brown-skinned malays from Borneo and the Philippines, and Japanese just off their vessels, besides Westerners from America and all parts of Europe.

Sampan women in wide black cotton trousers and cotton chemises moved silently along on bare feet, and some rich Chinese merchants in cloth shoes took up the greater part of the sidewalk with their voluminous silk gowns. By and by, it began to rain. The water came down in sheets, drenching the women until their chemises clung to their bodies. The sailors ran for shelter, and the street policemen donned raincoats and put on caps over their turbans. As for the rickshaw men and the chair-bearers, they dragged out coats of palm leaves and covered their heads with hats of bamboo as big as umbrellas. The hats were painted bright blue. The palm leaves looked like feathers, and as they trotted along inside the shafts, they appeared to be yellow-legged birds with blue topknots, harnessed to the chairs and the carriages.

3 03 - The Monte Carlo of the Far East 19:49

From Hong Kong, I have come to Macau, the smallest and oldest of all the European colonies in the Far East. There were Portuguese traders here only eighty-five years after Columbus discovered America, and from then until now this little peninsula Extending out from the coast of South China has practically belonged to Portugal. The grandfather of European colonies in the Western Pacific, it has declined from an important commercial port to a notorious gambling center, and today its chief revenue is from games of chance and the sale of opium. Although worn with vice and old age, it is still one of the interesting spots in Eastern Asia. In addition to this peninsula, The Portuguese possessions here consist of the small islands of Tarpa and Colawan.

Macau, which is only four or five square miles in area, was also formerly an island. It is now connected with the mainland by a narrow, sandy spit, built up by the tides, jutting out from the mouth of the Pearl River below Canton. It was settled by the Portuguese in and for three hundred years was the chief foreign commercial port of China. During the eighteenth century especially, it was the neck of the bottle, as it were, for the trade between this country and Europe. Here, too, came the sailing ships of American traders, carrying away tea and silk to the New World. And in the graveyard of the old English church of Macau, there are still to be seen the names of many Massachusetts seafarers, who ended their last journey here, halfway around the world from their New England homes.

For a long time during its early history, Macau had a steady revenue from its traffic in Chinese coolies, who were shipped from here to the United States, South America, Australia, and to northern China. Thousands were kidnapped and carried to the islands off the coast of South America, where they were forced to dig out guano, and where they were treated so cruelly that most of them died. Others were sent to the Isthmus of Panama to work on the railroad and the canal, and there they committed suicide in such numbers that one station on the railroad was known as Matachin, or Dead Chinaman. Still others were shipped to the sugar-cane plantations of the West Indies and the Guianas. In all, about a half-million coolies were carried away from China in this way.

The Emperor of Peking objected again and again, but it was not until 1875 that the traffic was stopped. With the opening of the free port of Hong Kong only 40 miles away, the trade of Macau entered upon its rapid decline. As fewer and fewer large vessels stopped here, the port was neglected, And when at last it made a desperate effort to regain its lost shipping by removing its customs duties, it found that the harbor was so filled with silt that big ships could not enter. Today, only sampans and small fishing boats can use the old harbor, the steamers that come here daily from Hong Kong and Canton anchoring in another harbor between Macau and one of the neighboring islands. Although practically useless, commercially, The harbor of Macau is one of the most beautiful in the Far East.

A small crescent-shaped bay, it lies at the foot of a great hill, covered with buildings, that might have been lifted up from the streets of Lisbon and dropped down here in China. They are of the Portuguese type, roofed with red tile, and painted in every shade of red, blue, pink, gray, and yellow. Many of the houses were separated from the roadway by arcades, under which one can walk protected from the heat of the tropical sun. Some of them have bars over their windows and doors. These were originally put up, according to the former Portuguese custom, to shut in the women from the streets. Indeed, one may find here many other survivals of the Portuguese life of centuries ago, and this in spite of the fact that Macau to-day, with its seventy-five thousand people, is largely Chinese.

Intermarriage between the Chinese and the Portuguese has been so common that practically the only pure-blooded Portuguese left are the officials, the police, and the soldiers. Many of these Chinese are Christians, and in the churches the whites and natives worship together. Considering its reputation for vice, Macau has an unusually large number of churches and convents, and in its gaming-houses the sound of the church bells may be heard above the click of the roulette wheels and the rattle of the dice. I attended services last Sunday in the cathedral, a structure covering more than a quarter of an acre. It has no seats, and I found the floor filled with kneeling figures, including many natives and half-castes.

Macau was for centuries the center of Christianity in Asia. There were missionaries here before there was a church on the North American continent, and ruins still remain of a cathedral built 18 years before the pilgrims first set foot on Plymouth Rock. That was the Church of St. Paul, which was founded in 1602, and which was almost entirely destroyed by fire in 1833. Today, only its magnificent facade remains. In front of the ruins is a stone-flagged court. Now almost grass-grown. Here, where tried the Christians of three hundred years ago, I saw spread out to dry great trays filled with incense sticks for worshipping the gods of the Chinese. They are made in an incense factory nearby, one of the several small industrial establishments that are to be found in Macau.

This city still has a small trade in tea, silk, and tobacco, and especially in firecrackers, which it exports largely to the United States. Many of the Chinese have become very wealthy and now live in the former homes of the rich Portuguese on the beautiful boulevard that extends along the bay for ten miles or so. This drive is but one of the numerous well-paved highways that are a feature of this pretty little city. The roads of Macau are smoother than the asphalt streets of our national capital, and as beautiful as those of Central Park. The wide boulevard along the harbor is shaded by banyan trees, the branches of which interlock overhead, and there are seats here and there where one can enjoy the beautiful views.

A few automobiles are used in Macau, but outside the city, the rickshaw is the chief vehicle. I took one yesterday when I went for a trip through the surrounding country. Passing through the arched gateway, Guarded by soldiers that separates the Chinese from the Portuguese territory, I rode for miles over the mainland. Everywhere I went the road was lined with luxuriant crops, but the people, dressed in blue cotton and barefooted, seemed terribly poor. There were many beggars, and near the graveyards we met mourners in sackcloth, with coolies to support them as they moved along, seemingly prostrated with grief. It is near such scenes of poverty that vast sums of money are spent daily in the gambling-dens of Macau.

These establishments are open and busy from early morning until late at night, and are frequented by all classes, from coolies to millionaires. I visited one of them myself last midnight. It was in the heart of this Portuguese capital, on the Rua de Yogo, the chief gambling street. Suppose you come with me for a visit to this palace, where Dame Luck alternately frowns and smiles upon those who court her. Going through a well-lighted passage, we enter the ground floor, which is crowded with Chinese. Men and women are gathered about a long table covered with matting, upon which are lying money and chips and cards. These are the poorer Chinese. The upper classes sit in the galleries that surround the gambling room.

As the game goes on, they let down little baskets containing their money, singing out, as they do so, the number on which the stake is to be placed. At the close of each game, the bankers shout the lucky numbers, and the winners pull up their profits in these baskets. The game in progress is Fantan, which is popular all over China. As it is played here, the banker takes a couple of handfuls of coins from a pile at one side of the table and covers them with a brass bowl. Later he counts them into groups of four, and the betting is on whether they will come out even, or whether one, two, or three will be left. The game looks fair, and I put my money on number one, only to find that three wins the stake.

The next time I put it on two, but luck is against me again, and my stake goes into the pile of the banker. The Chinese are among the greatest gamblers of the world, and one finds gambling houses in every colony, city, and village. The people gamble on the roadside, in the tea houses, and on board ship. Many of the passengers on my steamer here were Chinese, on their way to try their luck in the fan-tan houses, and to indulge in the other vices forbidden by law in the English settlement of Hong Kong. Next to gambling, Macau's second big source of revenue is from the manufacture and sale of opium. Here is located a great opium farm that pays $4 million annually for the privilege of operating. I say farm, as that is what the people of Macau call it, but it is really a factory, a monopoly farmed out by the government for turning the crude juice of the poppy into opium.

The juice from which opium is made is obtained from the capsule of the poppy blossom. In the gathering of it, these capsules are cut in the afternoon with a notched iron instrument, and the next morning the fluid that is oozed out is scraped off into a receptacle, which when full is set aside for its contents to dry. After being exposed to the air for two or three weeks, it is sent to the factory. During my visit to the Macau farm, I saw the opium arriving in the form of great round balls, as big as my head, or packed in boxes. I asked the manager of the factory to let me photograph some of them, but he refused to allow me to use my camera in the works. He permitted me, however, to go through the establishment, and I spent several hours in the different rooms.

It is one of the busiest places I have seen in China. The melting room, where the opium is boiled and refined, is not more than twenty feet wide, but fully five hundred feet long. Along each wall, running the entire length of the room, are scores of little ovens, in each of which is a flat brass basin. In these basins, the opium was being cooked, seething and boiling, as a half-naked Chinese stirred it with a huge ladle. The room was filled with white vapor from the hundreds of boiling kettles. The fumes got into my nostrils, my head ached, and for the time I actually experienced the sensations of an opium addict. Leaving this room, I went into another, where the opium, having been boiled to the consistency of unpulled taffy, was being made into a paste-like mass.

Here, after being rubbed and stirred and kneaded by sweating coolies, The opium is put up in the tin boxes in which it is shipped. The Macau factory makes more than 40,000 pounds of opium a year, half of which is consumed in this country. Opium has been known in China for 700 years, having been introduced here by the Arabs during the 14th century. At first, it was used only for its medicinal properties, but later the Chinese learned how to smoke it from the Dutch in Java. From then until the middle of the 19th century, it was smoked and eaten in increasing quantities, although several royal edicts had been issued from time to time, prohibiting its sale and use in the empire. Practically all of it then came from India, and the emperor of China tried to suppress its importation, but without avail.

He taxed the consumers of opium and sentenced to death many of the Chinese dealers who were bringing it in. The officials could do nothing, however, with the foreigners, and by 1840, $7 million worth was being brought in from India annually. In that year, a Chinese official staged a second Boston Tea Party of his own by destroying 10,000 chests of opium, an act that precipitated the opium war between the Chinese and the English. That conflict ended disastrously for China. which was obliged by England to open five of its ports to foreign trade, to cede Hong Kong to the British, and to pay a large indemnity besides. When China was defeated a second time in another opium war in 1857, it decided that as long as it could not suppress the use of the drug, it would raise its opium itself.

This it did, and it was not long before the poppy was being grown in practically every province in China. The number of addicts to its use increased many times, and every city and town had its opium dens. The craze for the drug grew to such proportions that parents even sold their children and husbands their wives to buy it. By 1907, China had more than 15 million eaters or smokers of opium, and was the largest consumer of the drug in the world. In that year, the Empress Dowager was successful in making an agreement with England, according to which India was to reduce its opium shipments to China ten per cent each year over a period of ten years. At the same time, a drastic campaign was begun against opium raising and opium using in the empire.

Imperial edicts were issued cutting down the size of the opium farms, shutting up the opium dens, and requiring all dealers in opium to take out licenses. The government commanded all farmers to reduce the size of their opium fields by 10 per cent every year, thus providing that no opium at all should be cultivated after the end of 10 years. It required that the merchants decrease their opium sales 20 per cent every year, closing out their entire business in the space of five years. It ordered that all public opium dens should be summarily closed, and that the retail opium shops should be gradually abolished. At the same time, it inaugurated dispensaries, where medicines might be obtained free to take away the craving for opium, and encouraged the establishment of opium hospitals for those who had contracted the habit.

In the meantime, large stocks of opium and supplies of smoking paraphernalia were confiscated and burned. Hundreds of thousands of pipes, bowls, lamps, boxes, and vessels for opium cooking were destroyed by fire, and like numbers of hypodermic needles used for morphine injections were broken up. These wholesale burnings and destructions took place in every province, and they are still frequent occurrences. However, it is an open secret that in many instances Where a stock of opium is ordered destroyed, what is really burned is so much brown sugar, flavored with only enough opium to give out an odor, while the drug itself is hidden and later sold. At the beginning of this 10-year campaign against opium, and for some time thereafter, high hopes were entertained that at last a successful method had been found to destroy the greatest curse of the Chinese people.

But circumstances again, Conspired against the enemies of opium. First, this program was interrupted by the Revolution, and the subsequent founding of the Chinese Republic, and later came the World War and the general industrial upheaval and confusion that made itself manifest all over the world. While other important international matters crowded the opium question to the wall, poppy raising was again increasing and the drug traffic flourishing. As time went on and political conditions in China became more upset, the central Peking government had less and less authority over the opium situation. Today, although poppy-raising and opium-using are forbidden by national law, it is a fact that more opium is grown and consumed here than ever before.

It is estimated that the total opium need of the whole world for medicinal purposes is only three hundred and fifty tons a year. Nevertheless, ten times this amount is now being produced outside of China, while this country alone raises more than all the rest of the world together. In most of the provinces, the law against it is entirely ignored, the officials encouraging its planting to provide themselves with a private source of income, and in some places even enforcing its cultivation and sale to raise money for the upkeep of their troops. The province of Shenzi, for instance, is almost one vast poppy field, and a common remark about it is that one of every ten people there, eleven are opium smokers.

In the few provinces where the officials make a genuine effort to cooperate with the central government in prohibiting its cultivation, opium is used just the same. as it is practically impossible to prohibit its being smuggled in. With nine-tenths of the high officials of the country regular addicts to it, there is little hope of stamping out its use among the common people. As in the past, anti-opium societies exist everywhere in China today, but have little effect upon the industry as a whole. As a matter of fact, the use of opium will probably be wiped out in China, Only through active intervention and cooperation on the part of the great powers of the world, combined with the efforts of a central government that will be strong enough to enforce its laws in every corner of the country.

4 04 - The Wonder that is China 20:51

Carpenter. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The wonder that is China. From the two outposts of English and Portuguese civilization in the Far East, I have come to the Chinese city of Canton, the southern gateway to the Republic. I almost said the Empire of China, for although China is now a republic politically, the word empire gives a better idea of the vast extent of this ancient land. It is so large that if I were to take an airplane and fly to its western frontier, I should have to travel as far as from the Atlantic Ocean to Great Salt Lake. And if I should turn the machine to the north and head straight for Siberia, I should have to make a flight almost as long before I came to the northern boundary of this country.

Roughly, China is an irregular square, each side of which measures about 2,000 miles, sandwiched in between Siberia on the north and the Indo-Chinese peninsula and Hindustan on the south. And from east to west, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the high desert wilds of Russian Turkestan. It contains by far the best part of Asia, the tenderloin of the continent, as it were, with about the same kinds of climate and soil that we have in North America on the opposite side of the globe. As to size, the greater China is the largest nation on Earth. It is so big that its area equals that of the United States, Alaska, and all our dependencies, with enough left over to make 11 states the size of New York.

It contains one-fourth of all the land in Asia and one-fourteenth of all the land surface of the globe. It is an enormous tract. Indeed, to be shut off from the rest of mankind, to be given up to pillage and banditry, and to remain dormant when the whole world wants a part in developing its resources and trade. Only one-third of this vast area is contained in the eighteen central provinces that we know as China proper. The remainder of the country is divided among the dependencies of Manchuria, Mongolia, Turkestan, and Tibet. Each of which, as far as geography and racial customs are concerned, is a separate nation in itself. China proper extends westward from the Pacific Ocean in the shape of a giant fan, bounded by the desert of Gobi and the mountains of Tibet.

Its western frontier is mountainous and in the southwest highly mineralized, but it is for the most part a vast plain sloping gradually down to the Pacific, The three drainage systems of this plain are those of the Yellow, the Yangtze, and the West Rivers. The Yellow River, or the Huanghou, has a basin almost ten times as large as New England. Just south of it is the Great Valley of the Yangtze. This is the Mississippi of China, but considering the rich territory on both sides of it and the vast number settled within its basin, It is far more important than the Mississippi or than any other river in the world. It drains an area as large as the basin of the Huanghou, and which has a population twice as great.

Parts of this basin are more densely packed with humanity than any other region on Earth. In South China, the basin of the West River, or the Sikyung, as the Chinese call it, has an area ten times as large as Ohio. and is populated by 60 million people. Here, the average is only about one person to every four acres, whereas the Yangtze Valley has 420 to a square mile. Altogether, the Chinese number more than half of the population of Asia. There are 100 millions more than all the peoples of North America, South America, Australia, and Africa put together. They are almost equal in number to all the races of Europe, with the Russians included. They are one fourth of the inhabitants of the Earth.

Stop a moment and think what this means. This is an age of small families. If all the human beings who are living today could be assembled in families of four, with a proportionate division of races and nations, every family on Earth would have a Chinese as one of its members. The population of the globe is estimated at 1,748 million, and according to the official Chinese figures published this year, China proper alone has 446 million people. The dependencies of Mongolia, Tibet, and Turkestan, which are not included therein, have from 6 to 10 millions more. Enormous as is this population, it will someday be even bigger. The present rate of infant mortality among the Chinese is probably the highest on Earth.

If, by medical attention and sanitation, it were reduced to a level with ours, the population of China would be doubled in a short time and would equal nearly one-half of all the people in the world. But perhaps you will say that China is already crowded and cannot support an increased population. As a matter of fact, two-thirds of its people are concentrated in one-third of its area, leaving millions of square miles in northern and western China that have hardly any inhabitants at all. These regions await only transportation to be settled and developed so that their riches can be poured into the world. Already, there is a westward movement of settlers from eastern China that in many ways is comparable with the westward tide of pioneers that flowed across the United States during the last century.

Once means of communication and access to markets are provided in her unsettled areas, China could easily support 50 or even 100 percent more people than she has now. In spite of the vast population scattered along the coast and in the valleys of her three mighty rivers, enormous numbers of Chinese are still entirely out of touch with the rest of the country and the outside world. In the western provinces of Sichuan, Shenzhen and Kansu, there are 70 million Chinese, or more than half as many as all the people in the United States. who are isolated and of necessity entirely self-sustaining. The natives of this region make their own clothing, build their own dwellings, raise their own food, and in short, furnish for themselves every necessity of life.

Too far from the ocean to get salt from the sea, they even drill down into the earth 3,000 feet to reach a supply. On one plain, only twice as large as the area of Rhode Island, A half million people live upon crops that are watered with an irrigation system 2,000 years old, yet so skillfully constructed that American engineers admit that they cannot improve it. When these regions are reached by railways and roads, when they have an outlet for their products, and when they are able to buy what the rest of the world has to sell, their trade will amount to as much as that of some of the nations of Europe. In fact, it is almost impossible for me to give you an adequate idea of the wonder that is China.

Like a giant just roused from the sleep of centuries, it is not yet wide awake and hardly realizes its vast potential wealth and strength. But the story of its development in the next few decades will surpass anything that the world has ever known before. Like the Israelites of old, the Chinese have begun their exodus from the dark Egypt of superstition and are escaping from their enslavement to tradition. When they are once fully underway with the civilization of the Western world, they will have a momentum that nothing can stop. Because of the large part America has played in the development of China, and the even larger share we shall probably have in the making of the new China, Whatever happens here in the future will be a matter of vital interest to us.

Now stop and think how long China has been in existence. A contemporary of Babylon and Chaldea, it has seen those powerful nations of the ancient world rise and fall, and although they have passed into antiquity, it is still great. Some of the scientists who are seeking the origin of the Homo sapiens, the first man to think, Now believe that his original home was in Central Asia, on the edge of Chinese Turkestan. Excavations made not far from there show that people were living in houses and had sheep, cattle, and hogs 2,000 years before Abraham, the stock farmer of the scriptures, went out at the command of Jehovah to offer up Isaac. It is not yet 2,000 years since our ancestors in Northern Europe Chinese history dates back more than 2,000 years before that.

It has records or traditions of one emperor born in 2852 BC who started out with a huge emigrant train to conquer and settle what were then the wilds of this land. Taking a great following over the mountains, he established them in Kansu. The northwestern province of China proper, an estate that has now about five million people. He stayed there a while, and then led his pioneers eastward to within one hundred and twenty-five miles of the site of Peking. This invasion was followed by others, the conquering settlers taking north China first, and then making their way on to the south. Our ancestors were still cave-dwellers when the Emperor Shen Nung Gave his people the wooden plow and started them farming.

That was in 2700 BC. 500 years later, China had an emperor who was known as the Great Engineer, chosen to rule because of his ability to keep the floods of the Yellow River in check. It was at about that time that the Chu Li was written, a work that is said to have equaled anything in the literature of the world, not even excepting the Bible. The Chinese have had scholars and religious leaders from that time to this. Lao Tzu, Confucius, Mencius all lived long before Christ. In Charlemagne's time, the Chinese already had a system of civil service examinations in literature, and they had a geographer 300 years before Christ. They had classics before King David sang the Psalms. Or Solomon wrote his Proverbs, and not long after the time of Christ, China had a national mistress of poetry, history, and eloquence.

The Chinese invented fibrous paper and the art of printing, and were the first to make photographic engravings. Some of their books were published a half-century before Gutenberg, and they had written poems in 1765 BC. Two hundred years before Christ, they began the Great Wall of China, one of the engineering marvels of the ancient world. They were the first to use gunpowder and ink, and probably the first to evolve the principle of the Mariner's Compass. They originated dishes of porcelain, and they gave silk and tea to the world. Many of the social and political theories proposed throughout the world today had already been tried out by the Chinese when Europe was governed by petty kings and robber barons, and when the mass of our ancestors were practically slaves.

About 1000 AD, two generations before William the Conqueror introduced feudalism into England and 200 years before the Magna Carta was signed, there lived in China a socialistic philosopher. Wang An Shim, whose theories were given a ten-year trial by the Emperor Shen Tseung. These embodied a more complete system of government ownership than that attempted by the Bolshevists of Russia. In this experiment, the state took the management of commerce, industry, and farming into its own hands, with the avowed purpose of helping the working classes and keeping them from being ground into the dust by the rich. It established commissions to fix wages and prices. It measured the land into equal plots, graded it according to the richness of the soil to create a just basis for taxation, providing also that the taxes should be paid only by the rich and that the poor should be exempt.

It established old age and unemployment pensions and made every family of more than two men furnish one member to the state militia. Throughout the centuries, these people have been perhaps the world's greatest preachers of personal liberty, good order, and scholarship. Yet today, they are in a state of semi-anarchistic chaos in which the authority of the government has almost wholly disappeared. I can best describe the state of affairs by making a comparison with the United States. Let us imagine that our federal government had become so weak that its influence extended no farther from Washington than Baltimore, forty miles away. Suppose it were powerless to make our citizens pay income taxes, or to levy its present toll of millions of dollars on tobacco, luxuries, and inheritances.

Suppose also that the major generals commanding United States troops at New York, El Paso, and other army posts refused to take orders from the Secretary of War or even from the President himself. Suppose that the governors of our various states were levying taxes on goods passing through their respective territories and collecting revenues as they pleased, nominally for the government at Washington, but actually to line their own pockets. Think what would be the situation in our country if goods in transit across the United States were taxed every time they passed over a state boundary line. Let us say, for example, that a trainload of corn were started from Kansas City for New York. If the conditions in the China of today were to prevail, the governors of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York would each demand the payment of a tax before they would allow the train to cross their states, and they might help themselves to some of the corn besides.

But this is not all. To complete the picture, you must suppose that half of all the soldiers in our country had not received any pay for six months. A year, or even more. Let them be roaming about in bands of from 50 up into the thousands, preying on travelers and raiding towns. Finally, suppose also that down in New Orleans, a government was set up in rivalry to the one in Washington, calling itself the Republic of the South, and keeping a big army in the field. All these conditions are existing in China. Under the Republic, the central government of China has not been comparable with ours in the United States. The 18 provinces, exclusive of Manchuria, have been governed like so many little kingdoms.

They range in size from areas as large as the state of Indiana to districts 100,000 square miles bigger than Texas, and they have populations of from 5 to 45 millions. In practically each one, some military man is the real ruler, and while most of them have civil governors, the latter are compelled to do the bidding of the generals who command the troops in the field. These generals rarely recognize any supreme commander-in-chief. They control the people by force of arms, say how much the latter shall pay in taxes, and then go out and collect it. In the provinces, especially those of the interior, they raise money by selling licenses for gambling and other concessions. They sell public property at auction and often let the men help themselves to whatever they can, picking up by raiding a village.

Whenever they want to move troops or goods, they commandeer railroad cars and locomotives. More often than not, these provincial military rulers, known as Tutuns, Laugh up their sleeves whenever the Peking government tries to control them. Although the taxes they collect are supposed to be for the support of the central government, they send almost no money to the capital. It is little wonder then that the customs duties continue to be collected by the representatives of outside nations. Thanks to scrupulously honest foreign administration, they are the only guaranteed source of revenue available for the payment of at least a portion of the country's foreign obligations. The Chinese have never really been ruled by Peking or even by the governors of the provinces, but by clans or families.

China is not a nation of individual patriots like the United States or Japan, but rather an aggregation of families and villages in which the clan spirit is stronger than it ever was in Scotland. As a rule, each family works for itself and cares nothing for the others about. The children consider that they owe allegiance only to their parents, and in the past, fathers and mothers have had practically the power of life and death over their children. Filial piety has always been considered by the Chinese the greatest of virtues, and the worship of ancestors figures largely in their religion. In the past, the family was also the foundation of the government. The emperor was theoretically the father of his people, and they were supposed to revere and obey him.

Like the father of a family, he could do what he liked with his national children, who submitted to almost any extreme of imperial authority, but who at the same time expected him to leave them alone, for the most part to look after themselves. This family principle worked very well for the Chinese. Until the foreigners began to force their way into the country. The imperial authorities never welcomed Europeans, and for a long time did all they could to keep them out. In the conflicts that followed, the inability of the Chinese system to withstand outside aggression was exposed to the world. In the first war between the Western nations and China, which took place 82 years ago, Hong Kong was ceded to the British, and the five ports Canton, Amoy, Fuchao, Ningpo, and Shanghai were forced open for foreign trade.

The Second War with Great Britain resulted in that country taking Kowloon on the mainland opposite Hong Kong and the opening up of Tianjin. In the meantime came the Taiping Rebellion, which lasted for 14 years and resulted in more ports being open to the Western nations. France came in and demanded indemnities, and the administration of the maritime customs was given over to the British. In 1885, France fought with the Chinese and, as a result, grabbed Tongking. With the Chino-Japanese War, the island of Formosa went to Japan. After beating Russia on Chinese soil, the Japanese took also a part of Manchuria, and later Korea, which had been a dependency of China, while the Germans established themselves on the Shantung Peninsula.

When one considers all these things, it is not so surprising that China is in chaos today, but rather that as a nation it exists at all.

5 05 - The City of Rams in the 20th Century 19:16

The City of Rams in the Twentieth Century Come with me for a motor-car ride through Canton. Yes, a motor-car ride. We are in one of the most progressive cities in China, and in the districts we visit to-day shall not have to tramp along on foot, be hauled in gin rickshaws, or carried in sedan chairs on the bare shoulders of coolies. Canton lies on the Pearl River, 90 miles from Hong Kong and 60 miles from the Pacific Ocean. It was a commercial center when Rome was at the height of its glory, the capital of the kingdom of Nanyush, up to 100 years before the time of Christ, and a town that the Chinese say dates back to fairyland. According to their traditions, it was founded by five fairies, clad in coats of as many colors as that of Joseph, who came riding through the air on five rams.

That is why the people still call Canton the City of Rams. It is now many years since I visited Canton. The city then looked the same as it had for centuries. It was strictly Chinese, its only foreign section being confined to the little island of Shamin. On the mainland, the streets were so narrow that a cart or carriage could not be used, and all my trips about the city were either on foot or in chairs carried by sweating, half-naked coolies. We shall cover the same ground today in a high-powered automobile supplied by the mayor. To understand the changes that have brought about the canton of today, we must know something about the canton of the past. And so she'll look at it first through the impressions registered on the eye of my mind 30 odd years ago.

Imagine a mighty beehive of humanity covering 10,000 acres. Let it spread out for three miles from the banks of a muddy yellow river teeming with shipping. And let it be cut up here and there by canals covered with boats so closely packed in that one wonders how they can ever be moved. These are but the faint outlines of the picture. You must cover this territory with somber, gray, one- and two-story buildings of brick with overhanging roofs of tile. You must put them along streets so narrow that you can stand in the center and touch both walls with your hands. As a high Chinese official passes by, he is preceded by a liveried servant beating a gong, behind whom is another servant. Carrying the Mandarin's badge of rank in the form of a red umbrella mounted on a handle as big around as a flagstaff.

After these, surrounded by soldiers in ragged uniforms, comes the great man's chair, carried by coolies, with a pony often bringing up the rear. The wheelbarrows that are the motor trucks of this old canton must stop at the corners to let others pass. And the great loads borne along on the shoulders of men and women force everyone back to the walls. Under our feet are the flagstones worn smooth by the tramping of millions of barefooted Chinese throughout the ages. And above, the tunnel-like streets are roofed with straw matting to shut out the tropical sun. As I look back again, another vivid series of pictures comes into my mind. One is a mighty wall, forty feet wide, and perhaps thirty feet high.

A huge ring of stone and brick, six miles in circumference, dropped down, as it were, into the honeycomb of this human beehive. This is the wall of the old city, which was built about 1000 A.D., six centuries before there was a single blockhouse on the North American continent to defend our pioneers from the Indians. This wall was to protect Canton from the hordes of invaders who again and again tried to loot the city of its vast riches. It served for generations, but the Tartars of the North came again and again, and finally, less than three centuries ago, the Manchu armies were victorious. They subdued all China, putting their garrisons into every city and district. They then quartered here an army which lived on the city until the Manchu dynasty was overthrown and the Chinese Republic was founded.

My memory records the great Yamuns, or palaces, of the officials of the past, the tens of thousands of cells of examination halls, and the Buddhist temples, large and small, then found in every part of the city. At that time, Canton had grown far outside its walls. It was crowding the river, and the buildings extended out to the multitudinous graves that covered the surrounding hills. With these pictures in mind, we begin our trip through the canton of today. Our starting place is the island of Shamim, where are located the foreign consular offices, the homes of the officials, and the chief foreign business houses. This site was given to the foreigners about 65 years ago, when it was only a mud flat.

Today it is an Occidental settlement in the heart of the Orient. It is almost a separate city in itself, a city of handsome homes and magnificent buildings, of streets several hundred feet wide, with concrete or flagged sidewalks, and of a general atmosphere of luxury and comfort. Many of the streets are so wide that large spaces have been closed to traffic and turned into tennis courts for the residents. Shamim is connected with the mainland by two bridges, which are guarded day and night. At times, the hatred of the Chinese for foreigners is so roused that the latter do not dare stir from their concessions without special protection, and no Cantonese are allowed upon the island after nightfall without an explanation of their business.

The natives are especially antagonistic to the missionaries, whom they call Jesus Devils. I have myself been greeted with cries of, See the foreign devils? Cut their heads off, and Down with the barbarians. As with some friends, I moved in and out of the swarming lanes that made up the old city of Canton. It was a Chinese holiday, and the roughest of the people were on the streets. We got many a scowl, and as we left one of the temples, a crowd of hooting and yelling boys followed us, and the boldest of them began to throw stones at us. A soldier finally came up and drove the crowd away, and then went with us several squares for our protection. But let us return to our trip. We must first walk to the bridge, for nothing on wheels, not even a gin rickshaw, comes into the foreign concessions.

As we go by the guards, we face a great wall of new buildings, some finished and some in the course of construction, on what was the edge of the beehive I have described. Everywhere new structures are rising, and a new city is being created. Right in front of us are warehouses and office buildings of four and five stories, built in foreign style, with a hotel of eight floors and a tower rising above the whole. This wall of buildings is several hundred feet back from the water. And between it and the stream has been constructed a wide concrete roadway that extends along the river for the entire length of the city. The banks have been walled with stone, hundreds of ramshackle old buildings have been cleared away, and, as a result, Canton now has a bund, or shore drive, that compares with those of the other big cities of the Far East.

It is thronged with business, the river along it is hidden by boats, and the traffic in people are those of the changing Chinese. It is in the heart of this Bund that we step into our automobile. As we take our seats, one of the features of the new China is brought to our attention. This is the motor buses that we see rumbling along. These buses are small, with Canton-built bodies on American chassis. Each bus has seats for about two dozen passengers, and are all jammed with men, women, and children. The fare is 10 cents, and attached to some of the buses are trailers, each of which holds 40 persons, and which, being considered second class, charge only 5 cents. At the same time, well-to-do natives are riding by us in covered chairs carried by bearers, and hundreds of bright red gin-ricoshaws Each pulled by a half-naked coolie, with a hat as big around as a parasol, form waving streaks of bright color upon the gray concrete bund.

As we move onward, our chauffeur sounds his siren at every turn of the wheel. A multitude is passing on foot, and as the crowd breaks to let us go through, we have the changing china under our eyes. Everywhere the new is mixed with the old. The new is seen in the great buildings going up in every direction, half-finished structures enclosed in a lacework of scaffolding made of bamboo poles tied together with ropes of rattan, and the old and the yellow-skinned women and men, barefooted and often bareheaded, who are working like ants making modern buildings without modern building machinery. There are no steam shovels to dig the foundations, no concrete mixers to work the cement and gravel, and no motor trucks to carry the freight.

Every sort of building material is carried on the backs or shoulders of men, or, I might say, of women, for the women here do as much work and as hard work as the men. They are the hod carriers and the helpers of the bricklayers and the masons. Working on one building are girls who have not reached their teens. and women who have the wrinkles of three-score years or more. Here comes a great cart-load of bricks that must weigh a ton. It is as much as two horses could haul over one of our country roads, and it is dragged along by three women, harnessed with clothes-lines to tugs of thick rope attached to the axle. See how they bend and strain as they move the cart onward? They are barefooted. And the breeze flaps their wide black pantaloons against their yellow calves.

They wear jackets that fall loosely from the neck to the hips, and they have on huge bamboo hats. Their wages are 25 cents a day. The whole riverfront is now walled with warehouses, stores, office structures, and fine municipal buildings. A large modern department store is getting the trade of some of the old business cells that I have described. And here and there, factories with modern machinery are springing up. At Honan, one of the suburbs, a cotton-spinning mill has just been completed. And not far away, a new copper foundry is making sheeting from native ore. A new shipbuilding plant is turning out 200 barges a year, and there are five large factories that make socks and underwear. I have on a pair of tan shoes that cost me $12 in Washington.

The secretary of the mayor, who is sitting beside me, has on shoes that look equally good. When I ask him the price, he tells me they cost three dollars and that they were made in the new shoe factory here in Canton. Leaving the Bund, the next stage of our journey is along the route of the Great Wall that formerly enclosed the center of old Canton. You remember how Joshua took Jericho in his conquest of Palestine. The walls of that city, the remains of which I saw being excavated during my last trip to the Holy Land, were not one-third as wide as those of Canton, and the city within them was not one-twentieth the size of that within the walls here. They were great walls, nevertheless, and they fell flat at the command of Jehovah, when Joshua, the general of the Israelites, had his seven priests blow their seven rams' horns, and the people make a great shout.

The Joshua of Canton is the mayor, the owner of the car in which we are riding. It is only a few years since he sounded the trumpet. In this city of Rams, and now there is less to be seen of its mighty wall than that of old Jericho on the banks of the Jordan. In its place is a wide-belt road, paved with concrete, made by crushing the old brick and stone. Other roads have been built from this one, the whole creating a system of streets planned with the aid of American civil engineers. All these new motor roads are being lined with modern buildings. They are lighted by electricity and have concrete sidewalks. White Cloud Road, which is now under construction from the Hong Kong-Kowloon-Kanton Railway Station to the White Cloud Mountain some miles away, is to be as wide as Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, and to have a parkway of gardens and trees running through its center.

This road will cut its way through the town, demolishing not only the buildings on the space needed for the roadway, but enough on each side of it to make room for new buildings all the way to the slope of the mountain. Another striking feature of the new Canton is the parks, many of which are the old Yamuns and temple grounds transformed. They are known as gardens, and there is a first public garden, a second public garden, and a third public garden. Each in a different section of Canton. The first garden is in the central business section and has an area of 20 or 30 acres. The second garden, which is twice as large, is on the site of the former Eastern Parade Grounds and is to have an athletic field, tennis courts, and golf grounds.

I spent some time today in the first public garden, which is a wonder of economical construction and beauty. It was formerly the Amun of one of the provincial officials, but no sign of the old buildings is now to be seen. The grounds have been cleared, and beautiful gardens created that remind me of those of the Tuileries in Paris. One walks through plot after plot of beautiful flowers, through long arbors covered with green, by fountains where the water plays over artificial rock creations made according to the artistic celestial idea. And finally, under the old banyan trees that have been walled in to protect them, one finds a gorgeous tea-house. At the entrance to this garden is a fountain with a tall statue of the Chinese goddess of mercy, and on each side of the roadway are carved lions that came from the old Yamun and are perhaps a thousand years old.

Some of the bronze bells and other things from the temples have been put up in the garden, and the whole is in good taste End of great beauty. The mayor's secretary told me that this park cost about $100,000 in gold. A similar creation in Washington City could not be attempted for less than $1 million, and I doubt if it could be completed for double that sum. Nevertheless, this garden was made within two years, during all of which time Canton was in the throes of revolution and war. As we make our way through Canton, we find that the temples and joss-houses are fast disappearing. By order of the military authorities, hundreds of the small ones have been sold at auction. Vast numbers of art-works of one kind or another have been scattered, and many lost forever.

Some of the statues have been placed in the parks, others are in the hands of curio-dealers, And in the chief English hotel, there is a gigantic bronze Buddha of more than life size, which probably will soon be bought by an American tourist. Some of the chief temples still stand, and they will probably be preserved because of their historic and artistic value. One of these is the Flowery Pagoda, which rises high over the center of old Canton. It contains a wonderful statue of Buddha that is one of the art treasures of the world. Another temple, that of the 500 geni, was founded 503 A.D., a hundred years before Muhammad was born, and was rebuilt about 70 years ago. Inside it is a great hall arranged in aisles, on each side of which are richly gilded figures sitting upon elevated platforms.

These are the 500 genii, supposed to be disciples of Buddha. Among them, Strange to say is the statue of Marco Polo, the famous Italian traveler who came here from Venice more than two hundred years before Columbus discovered America. Although his hands are folded in Buddhist style, Marco has a hat and a mustache that make him an incongruous figure among the others. The reason for the sale of the temples, so one of the city officials tells me, are two. One, is that, because of revolutionary troubles, Canton is living from hand to mouth and has had to raise funds by making a general sale of all the public property it could possibly dispense with. The temples brought in something like two million dollars in gold, part of which was taken by the soldiers and the rest used for improving the town.

The other reason is the fact that superstition is dying out in China, and that the best element of the modern movement wants to hasten its passing. The people are caring less and less for their old religion, and there is no further use for the gods that represent their former beliefs. I am inclined to think that the statement as to superstition is true. The progressive movements in China are overthrowing many of the old ideas, and new opportunities are being created thereby for the missionaries. The natural trend of the human mind when it gives up any religion is toward atheism or some new faith, and with the breaking down of the old beliefs, Christianity will be accepted the more easily. China is one of the great missionary fields of the world, and Canton is one of the oldest stations in it.

This city was the first to be opened up by our American missionaries, and as a result of their work, it now has great hospitals, a strong native YMCA, and many schools and colleges.

6 06 - Through Old Canton 23:19

Carpenter. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Through Old Canton. Today we shall leave our twentieth-century automobile, and instead of gliding over new wide streets shall walk or be carried by sedan chair through the Old Canton, the Canton that has not yet been caught up in the march of modern progress. The old china is a giant compared with the baby of the new civilization in this land of the Far East. Like Moses on Mount Nebo, when on the edge of the grave his eyesight is undimmed and his mighty strength unabated. Meantime, the baby is lustily growing. It is slowly unbinding the feet of its mother, and, copying Delilah, it has clipped off the hairy pigtail of its Samsonian father.

But the old giant still shows no lack of strength, and it will be generations before he succumbs entirely to the Western era. Within five minutes' walk from one of the new macadamized avenues, we find that modern Canton has disappeared. We are lost in the past, in a narrow old street lined with stores. In front of almost every establishment is a gorgeous wooden sign, a foot or more wide, and from four to ten feet long. Beautifully carved and inlaid with gold leaf, or enamelled in brilliant colors, these signs make the streets a blaze of red, white, green, and gold. Upon each is cut the name of the firm doing business inside. Some have slogans advertising the excellence of the goods within, and others bear such names as Lucky Profits, Good Fortune, and Cheap John.

We wander through alleys walled with cells, Filled with satins and silks, and crossed by other alleys where the merchants sell nothing but furniture. We go through a street a half-mile in length, in which there are silversmiths working and selling. On into cave-like sections where embroideries are being made, and beyond that into streets devoted to huge wooden coffins, and others where only pipes and tobaccos are to be seen. Farther on we stop in quarters selling gold earrings, and bracelets and ornaments of apple green jade. The Chinese have luxurious tastes and are fond of the best in all things. When they buy gold jewelry, they insist upon its being 22 carats fine. They delight also in ornaments of silver, many of the women using silver hairpins, and the Chinese gentlemen commonly drinking their wine out of silver cups.

One can buy silver toilet articles everywhere. These include not only combs and brushes, but also toothpicks and ear picks, tongue-scrapers and back-scratchers. Nearly every American traveler in China talks of the bad smells of old Canton. There is no doubt that they are numerous and penetrating, but I find that there are also good smells, and many that I wish to carry home with me. There are streets here that deal in nothing but sweet-smelling woods. On every hand are men cutting up odorous sandalwood logs to make fans, workboxes, and other articles, and the delightful fragrance pervades the entire street. Some of the wood is ground up to be mixed with mud for the incense sticks that serve as cigarette and pipe lighters, and which are used also in every Chinese temple.

Sometimes there are altars outside the stores where these incense sticks are lighted as dust comes on. The native stores of Canton do a large business. You must ask for what you want, for the Chinese do not put their goods on display, nor do the largest of the dry-goods stores employ a man solely to arrange the windows, as is done in the United States. Indeed, these stores have no windows on the first floor, but are open across the entire front. The biggest of them are not more than fifteen feet wide, but they are long and high, and the walls and sides are lined with shelves filled with goods. The merchant, in black gown, black skull-cap, and cloth shoes, waits upon the customers, and a cashier counts up the sales on an abacus, a little calculating machine consisting of wooden balls on wires.

You who have an idea that all Chinese go barefooted should shop with us in the Shoe Street. There are hundreds of stores here that sell nothing but shoes. Some are of wooden cloth, some of leather of all colors, and some have soles made of sheets of paper, pasted layer upon layer, until they are a half an inch thick. There are shoes of black patent leather, of the white canvas that is so much liked by the modern Chinese woman, and shoes for old women, whose feet have been bound. These are so small that an American girl could not get her hand in one, much less her foot. They are made of the finest of satin, and are embroidered in silver or gold. The old-style man's shoe is of black satin, with a sole of white wood, as thick as two of your fingers.

Of late, the men are buying more and more foreign-style foot-gear, and among the public officials, I seldom find one who is not wearing leather shoes, black, white, or tan. Every shoe store is also a factory. In some are sewing machines, But most of the work is still done by hand, and at the back of each establishment we see men and boys sewing and stitching away. The same is true in the Sweatshop District, where street after street is filled with open cells in which men and boys are making clothing for men and women. The costumes of the Chinese are rapidly changing, Western-style garments displacing those of the old Native type. The skullcap with the feather or button on top is being put aside for felt and straw hats, some of which are imported from Europe and America, and some are made here in Canton.

The bright-colored silk gown worn by the Chinese man in the past is another garment that is now less frequently seen. Those that are worn reach from a man's neck to his feet and are still of blue, white, or yellow silk, but the sleeves are much shorter and smaller than formerly. Both the men and women who affect foreign dress lose their Chinese appearance to a large extent. At a distance, one can hardly tell that they are of the Mongol race. The men have lost their cues, and the women walk with a swing as firm and active as that of an American girl. Their complexions may be fair, and the nose and the mouth may not be different from yours and mine. However, there is one feature that always distinguishes the Chinese.

And that is the eye. I have thought many a Chinese a Westerner until I looked at his eyes and observed their buttonhole shape. No matter how much foreign blood the Asiatic has in him, his ancestry shows in his slanted eyelids. Many of the rich Americanized Chinese now live in homes furnished in modern style, and far different from the old type of native palace that their fathers owned. In this connection, I recall a visit I made to the home of Hao Kua, a millionaire Chinese, the first time I was in Canton. He lived in a palatial residence on the banks of the Pearl River, and in the midst of a wilderness of buildings occupied by servants and relatives of his family. When a man makes a fortune in China, his whole clan settles down upon him, and Hao Kua supported about four hundred of his poor relations.

As I passed through the several courts about his home, I saw all kinds of work in progress, some of the servants being busily engaged in cleaning fish, and others in grinding rice into flour. From the reception room I remember hearing Hao Kua's children, as like all Chinese pupils of that time, they sang out their lessons at the tops of their voices. Now and then the sharp clap of the ruler could be heard when one of the boys made a mistake. Their father told me he intended to have his sons educated at the Hong Kong Foreign College, and to let them finish in America and England. He spoke English himself, and was then among the most progressive of the Chinese. As we sat and chatted, the choicest of Formosa tea was brought in, the leaves of which, I judge, were worth about $20 a pound.

It was served in covered cups without saucers, and we drank it sitting in black ebony chairs around small tables. In those years, there were no easy chairs in a Chinese gentleman's house. This palace had uncarpeted floors of stone, and the chairs that stood against the wall had straight and unyielding backs. The partitions between the rooms were of colored glass framed in ebony. Some of the curiously shaped panels had pictures painted on them by Chinese artists. and the effect of the whole was that of a fancy but unoccupied storeroom rather than that of a comfortable home. Some of the finest rooms in the house looked out upon a garden that, contrasted with the narrow, bad-smelling streets just outside its blue brick walls, seemed like Eden in bloom.

About a lovely little lake covering nearly an acre were rustic bridges Tiled summer houses and all kinds of tropical vegetation growing luxuriantly in the moist air of Canton. The great leaves of the lotus almost covered the lake. Goldfish darted through the water like streaks of light. Blackwood seats, stiffly Chinese, stood out against a background of green, and birds were singing everywhere. Although in the heart of the city, we seem to be miles away in the country. While the rich Chinese in Canton number thousands, and although the standard of living is rising, and the common people have more money than ever before, there are hundreds of thousands of poor. The old section of the city swarms with lewd fellows of the baser sort, both men and women.

Canton is in the same latitude as Havana, but it is hotter, I should say, for here the air reeks with moisture. The men and boys of the poorest class are often half-naked. In a common sight in a store is a burly merchant clad only in a pair of thin cotton trunks, the waist-string of which is lost in rolls of fat. As for the women, the old Chinese conventions say they must not expose their persons regardless of the temperature. The standards of Chinese propriety are far different from those of Japan, where a girl will primp, Bathe or labor away in public, while bare to her waist. We shall see many beggars as we go through the streets. Most of them are professionals who have created their loathsome sores to attract pity and alms.

I saw one man to-day who seemed to have sliced a pound of meat from his thigh. The raw red wound was flaunted in my face as he held out his hand for money. As I went up the steps to the bridge at Chamine yesterday, I was accosted by a boy, terribly crippled, who writhed along on his withered hands and legs, showing a surprising speed, as, twisting this way and that, he kept himself under my feet. Another professional beggar, who I've seen more than once, is an aged woman who carries a crippled old man on her shoulders. The blind beggars, from decrepit old men and women to young boys and girls, are legion. They come from an asylum of the city, and, guided by a leader whose sight is not entirely gone, each one clutches the clothes of the one in front of him as they go about.

All of them have flat, brown baskets that they hold out as they roll their sightless eyes and beg in piteous tones. Now and then we see a gang of these beggars standing in front of a shop, waiting for the merchant to pay them to leave. He will give them only a pittance, but they will stay until they get it. A missionary I have met here tells me of a beggar who used to go about Canton with a leper on his back, and force the people to give him money to get rid of him. The ears, hands, and feet of the leper were apparently just ready to drop off, and it was a brave man who paid no attention to him. I have noticed no lepers in China on this trip. But when I was here before, I saw several. There was then a leper village outside of Canton, and another in the city, and many of the boats on the river were inhabited by lepers.

I am told that they made a practice of going to funerals, and demanding alms of the mourners, and that they sometimes leaped into the graves, and refused to leave until they had been paid. Going on through these scenes of want, we find food in profusion. There are cookshops at every few steps, and restaurants are as numerous as along the banks of the Seine in Paris. There are stores selling all kinds of meat, fish, and game. There are cells piled high with oranges, bananas, mangoes, melons of every variety, and sweetmeats that make one's mouth water. Canton-preserved ginger is eaten all over the world, and nowhere can you buy more different kinds of dainties. I had dinner today at a restaurant that covered an acre and contained dozens of rooms.

My host led me through garden after garden until we reached a room at the back before which a fountain was playing, and there we sat down at a table. The dinner lasted three hours. We began with watermelon seeds, followed by bird's nest soup, a jelly-like mixture made of the spittle with which the birds of some of the South Sea islands cement their nests. From that we went on to bowls of delicious shrimps as big as a thimble, to slices of ham from far off Yunnan, and then to cream-fed chickens and suckling pigs fattened on chestnuts. The many sweets I cannot describe. Yesterday I was taken to a cook-shop on one of the avenues, where the piece de resistance for each guest was a specially fed pigeon as big as a broiler, so fat and so dainty, that it made me think of Lucullus and his Nightingale's Tongues.

Daily I taste some new Chinese dish that I should like to add to my menus at home. Many of the most elaborate dinner parties of China are served on the water, and among the tens of thousands of boats here are some floating hotels. They are gorgeously decorated, being painted in brilliant colors and having small paned windows of stained glass, Which sometimes wall all sides of the vessel. At night, they form a most picturesque sight as they move over the water. Here, a rich Chinese often brings his friends for a great banquet, with several sing-song girls as entertainers. The dinner may be good, but the singing is sure to be bad. To the American ear, Chinese music has neither tune nor harmony, and the most nerve-wracking noises I have yet heard.

Outside of an insane asylum is this sing-song wailing of the native performers. At none of the meals I have eaten here have I yet had a taste of what is known in America as chop-suey. The truth seems to be that there is no such dish eaten in China, although it is commonly served as Chinese throughout the United States. Chop-suey, I am told, originated at a dinner that Prince Lee Hong Chang, gave in New York when he made his trip around the world. Prince Lee carried his own chef with him, and the menu was strictly Chinese. One of the dishes especially delighted the wife of the guest of honor, and she asked Lee what it was. He called in his chef, who replied in Chinese that it was a chop suey, which means a hash that he had concocted himself.

Prince Lee said in English, it is a chop suey, and the name clung. The Chinese restaurants in New York, hearing of it, began to include chop suey on their menus, and today it is the chief concoction they serve. In the cheapest restaurants of Canton, the kitchen is on the ground floor, and the poorer people dine on the floor above. The prices rise as one goes upward, the best meals being served on the second and third stories. Half-naked waiters bring in the dishes, the contents of which only the cook knows. Chopsticks are used, and if you want to compliment any person who is dining at the same table with you, you will use your chopsticks to pick up one of the daintiest morsels on your plate and, with a bow, offer to put it in your neighbor's mouth.

There is no cloth on the table, and a piece of brown paper serves as a napkin. After the meal is over, a wet towel is passed around, and with this each guest washes his face and neck. This used to be the most approved method of Chinese washing, and a wet towel was passed around even at the theater. In a country of leprosy and smallpox, it is one of the best means possible of spreading those diseases. The teaching in our old geographies was that the chief diet of the Chinese is rice and rats. The truth is that although much rice is eaten in this part of the world, and no people can cook it better, It is too expensive a food for tens of millions of Chinese. In the northern part of the country, ground millet and cornmeal take its place, and even here, where it grows everywhere, the best rice costs too much for the poorest people.

As to rats, Canton is the only place in China where I have ever seen them sold, although they are probably eaten by the very poor throughout much of the interior. On a former visit here, I bought a pressed rat that had been skinned and smoked and hung up for sale with a long string of others. It measured a foot from nose to tail, looked like a slice of dried pork, smelt like salt meat, and might have formed the center of a sandwich. I bought it with the idea of sending it to the Gridiron Club, that association of newspaper gastronomes to which I belong, and whose semi-annual dinners in Washington are famed all the world over. However, after carrying it for several days in an unopened part of my baggage, a single sniff at it told me that it could never go through Uncle Sam's mails.

The rats relished by the Chinese are not the common gray rats that we know in the United States, but a different species entirely, which are caught in the fields. The gray rats are thought to have been the carriers of bubonic plague, which has caused such terrible epidemics in China, and laws have been passed Prohibiting them from being sold or served in restaurants. I do know that dogs and cats are eaten here. As I visited a restaurant yesterday where I saw dog flesh stewing away on the stove, it looked like fresh pork and was relished with much smacking of lips by the yellow-faced, slant-eyed coolies who brought it for a cent or so a plate. The flesh of black dogs and black cats is especially esteemed in China.

as it is supposed to give great courage to anyone who eats it. And in this dog stew, I noticed that about an inch of hair had been left on the end of the animal's tail to show his color. Overhead was hanging a cooked dog with the same tip of black hair still upon the tail. Outside of the restaurant were a number of cats in little square wooden cages, with a woman poking each of them in the ribs to see how fat they were. Their meat is higher priced than dog meat, as it has, I am told, a much better flavor. Only the poorer classes eat dog meat, and the restaurants serving it are usually of the very cheapest type. In some of the cities of China, snakes are sold for food. The dealers take out the fangs before putting them into the baskets in which they are kept, and a peddler will hold one up and squeeze it as he expatiates on its fatness.

Python meat is considered a particular delicacy, being, I am told, as tender as chicken. For special occasions, it is elaborately served and decorated with chrysanthemum petals. The poorer classes of the Chinese seem to eat every part of every kind of animal. In North China, horse meat, mule meat, and donkey meat are sold everywhere. And there are butcher shops in Peking, where one can buy camel steaks. Neither the age of an animal nor the manner of its death makes any difference whatever in its sale, and even cattle that die from disease are cut up and sold for food. I had a gastronomic discussion the other night with a man who was at the head of the American Bible Society, during which he described a trip he made some years ago through the Yangtze Valley.

Nearly all the crops had been destroyed by floods, and for weeks the only thing he could get to eat was some poor rice. When his stomach finally revolted against this diet, he was in the neighborhood of a temple presided over by Buddhist priests, noted for their love of good living, and he decided to go there and see if he could not get something to eat. I called at the temple, he said, and told a priest, who I knew was a gourmand, that I would pay whatever he asked if he would get me a good meal. And lo, that very night we sat down to what I thought was a fine dinner. There were a bowl of beef, white rice, and several other things. The meat tasted delicious, and I ate heartily of it, but was rather surprised to see the priest leave it untouched.

As we were about getting up from the table, I paid the priest for the dinner, and, feeling in fine spirits after my meal, tweeted him on the fact that he, who was a devout Buddhist, must have broken the rules of his religion in taking the life of the cow from which my delicious meat had come. "'Ah,' said he, "'you do not understand. I furnished you meat, but still I did not sin. The animal from which that meat came was not killed by me, nor for you. It was not a cow at all.

7 07 - In Shanghai 20:51

Carpenter. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. In Shanghai. It is now more than a quarter of a century since I first steamed through the mouth of the great Yangtze River into the wide waters of the Wang Pu, which reaches the ocean through the same delta as the Yangtze. There I anchored under the shadow of the immense fortifications built by the Chinese at the Wusung Bar. to guard this entrance to their country. Standing on the deck of the ship that had brought me from Japan, I could see the guns frowning down upon me from the ramparts, and could almost hear the shrill cries of the officers as they drilled their cotton-gowned, pigtailed, almond-eyed troops. Surrounded by the gunboats of China's navy, we lay for some time directly opposite the entrance to the fort.

A Chinese structure so covered with gilded carvings that I thought at first it was the gate to a temple. Shanghai is 12 miles up the Wangpu River from Wusong at its mouth, and as that stream was then too shallow for the largest ocean steamers, we made the last lap of our journey in a steam launch. The region through which we passed was as flat as a board, having been built up by the rich sediment brought down by the Yangtze from the uplands of China. From the launch I could see for miles over gray mud plains, relieved here and there by what, in the distance, looked for all the world like cocks of hay, but which were really the graves of the Chinese. Scattered over the landscape were thatched huts surrounded by trees, and in the creeks that cut up the plain could be seen the masts of the ships and boats floating along.

The ride up the Wangku on my present trip was a constant revelation of how the new China is tramping on the heels of the old. The Wangpu has been deepened so that the largest steamers plying between the western Pacific ports can anchor in the very heart of Shanghai. Steam dredges are always at work in the stream to keep the channel clear, and a great steel pipe a mile long carries the silt above the water over the banks to where it flows out to build up new land. All the way up to Shanghai, the Wang Pu is filled with shipping of every kind, from the junks with eyes as big as dinner plates on their prows to great oil-burning steamers from the ports of America, Europe, and the rest of Asia. For ten miles or more, it is lined with wharves and warehouses and with modern factory buildings with English signs.

As we made our way through the shipping, we passed flour mills, sawmills, cotton factories, And the tank farms of the two great oil companies, the Standard and the Dutch Shell, which compete for the job of lighting the Orient. Farther on were silk fillagers, cigarette factories, and other industries, which together employ tens of thousands of people. Shanghai has now 11 modern rice mills and 16 great flour mills, equipped with steel rollers just like those of Minneapolis or Duluth. It has 52 cotton factories, which produce much of the yarn consumed in the valley of the Yangtze River. It has knitting mills that are making silk stockings for the United States, weaving mills that compete with Manchester, Fall River, and Osaka in producing the cloth used in China, and mills extracting oil from cotton seeds and beans.

On one bank of the Wang Pu, in the midst of these, is a $25 million electric power plant, which runs the street railways and furnishes power at low rates to most of the industries. These modern buildings now rear their great black smokestacks into the air, where once the grave mounds were the only things to break the flatness of the landscape. While the Chinese of the interior reverence their ancestors as much as ever, many of the graves near the seaports are being moved. and the land where they stood used for building purposes. Yet hundreds of these mounds still remain. In the midst of a rice field, one will often see a half dozen of them, looking like so many green haycocks, and built up as symmetrically as though chopped out with a chisel.

There are now automobiles chugging along the roads through these ancient graveyards, and with my field glasses I could see also a locomotive. hauling a train down to the little town of Wuseng. It was this railway, which covers the 12 miles between Shanghai and Wuseng, that introduced China to steam locomotion. Its track, the first built in the empire, was constructed by a British company in 1876, at a cost of $100,000. It had been operated only two months when it was destroyed by the Chinese officials. who were opposed to railroads because they thought the smoke of the locomotive might disturb the spirits who inhabit the air. As the story goes, they persuaded a coolie to allow himself to be run over by the cars by promising to pay one hundred dollars to his family upon his death.

The man threw himself in front of the train, and after his mangled body was removed from the tracks, a mob tore up the road, just as the officials had known they would. For a long time after that, the railway movement in China was dormant. Arriving at Chang Hai, I went on shore at the Central Wharf, the landing place of the Robert Dollar Company, which has many lines of steamers across the Pacific, and in fact, clear around the world. Here I took an automobile, and crossing a bridge of concrete and steel, rode up the Bund. This is the wide strip of land laid out in parks and roadways That borders the river for several miles. On one side, it is lined by the acres of sandpans that extend far out into the river, and on the other, it is backed by the chief business structures.

The highway is paved with asphalt, with long lines of automobiles parked in the middle. While moving along on both sides are gin rickshaws and wheelbarrows, carriages, and cars. Near the building line is a tramway, and beside the parks near the river Shanghai now has automobiles and motor trucks and trolleys with first- and second-class compartments that seem to be always crowded. There are red ginric shahs in which one can ride a mile for 10 cents, pony carts in which the passenger often stands up while the driver sits on a seat at the front, and wheelbarrows carrying passengers on shelves. The streets extending out from the Bun are named after Chinese cities, and those running parallel with it after Chinese provinces.

The whole comprises one of the most modern centers in China. The new Shanghai is a city of asphalt with flagstone sidewalks, of tall electric light poles, and safety islands through the center of the wider streets, and of traffic policemen whose costumes vary according to the concession in which they are. In the English concession are tall, somber, and stately Sikhs from India in blue uniforms with brass buttons, and wearing great yellow or red turbans above their bearded faces. The French have their own police on the streets of their concession, some of which, like the Avenue Joffre, The Chinese soldiers are named after generals of the World War. In other places, the traffic police are clad in the blue uniforms of the Chinese soldier, with their brass badges of office worn on their caps instead of on the breasts of their coats.

Shanghai is the chief ocean gateway to the Great Yangtze River Valley, which supports more than 200 million people. It is situated in one of the most densely populated parts of the Republic, having, it is said, 40 million souls living within a radius of 150 miles. Within only a few hours ride by train is a city population as large as that of Chicago, including Greater Shanghai, which is as big as Philadelphia, and Hangzhou and Sichou, each of which is larger than Buffalo. It is this population and the more than 200 million people reached by the rivers That formed the foundation of Shanghai's financial and commercial supremacy. From a business and manufacturing standpoint, the city is the most important in China.

With a railroad era that is bound to come sooner or later, it will probably be one of the world's greatest cities and rival in people and wealth, New York, London, Berlin, and Tokyo. It is of the city that the Bund is the financial, business, and commercial center. It is lined with structures of four, five, six, and even of nine stories, built of granite, brick, and reinforced concrete. Some of them cost millions of dollars. The Whitestone building of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, for instance, looks more like one of our great government buildings than like a bank, and it is as beautifully finished within as any financial house in New York. Here also are the Bank of China, which is to some extent a government institution, the Bank of Communications, and perhaps 50 other Chinese banks, all of which are paying dividends.

They work according to modern banking methods, pay interest on deposits, and have regular checking accounts. Shanghai has a cotton exchange and a silver exchange, the brokers and the latter buying and selling money amid scenes of as much excitement as in the New York Stock Exchange. When Wall Street is on the verge of a panic, different kinds of currency are used in the different parts of China, and among the well-paying professions is that of the exchange broker, who handles the financial operations involved in the export and import trade. This man is often a foreigner and may be known by the pony-drawn Victoria, in which he rides from bank to bank. The bed of the carriage is only about 10 inches from the ground.

So that he can easily step out and in, and as he rapidly covers the short distances from one business institution to another, he usually stands up instead of sitting down. Shanghai is growing by leaps and bounds, and not only along the Bund, but in all parts of the city. Real estate values have been rising rapidly, until they now compare with those of the larger cities of the United States. Land that a few years ago was nothing but grave mounds has been bought up, the families of the deceased having been paid for moving the ashes of their ancestors, and is now being sold at high prices. Property along the waterfront in the International and the French concessions has jumped to a half million dollars and upward an acre, and will yield more than 8% interest on the capital invested.

Even three miles from the heart of the city, land sells at about $18,000 or $20,000 an acre. Along the Siu Chao Creek, a water highway lined with flour, cotton, silk, and oil mills, land has doubled in value within a short time and is still going up. It is the same along the riverfront all the way to Wusong, the people banking on the belief that the population of Shanghai will eventually increase to several millions. Shanghai has a unique system of government, being controlled by a municipal council of nine members who derive their authority from the treaties made by the great powers with China. Though located on Chinese soil, it owes no allegiance to China, except in the payment of about five dollars a year for each acre of land in the settlement.

The nine members of the council, the majority of whom are British, are elected annually at the rate Payers' Meeting. This meeting is composed of all foreign residents of Shanghai who own property or pay a rental of $40 a month or more. Each resident has a vote for each piece of property he holds, so that at the annual meeting some persons are able to cast 20 or 30 votes. After election, the nine members appoint one of their number as chairman and another as vice chairman. But neither of these two members, nor any member of the Council, receives any compensation for his services. It is a position that carries with it a large amount of prestige, and when a new Council of any nationality arrives in Shanghai, he calls upon the Chairman of the Municipal Council, as well as upon his consular colleagues.

The Council is located in an imposing stone structure. occupying a whole block opposite the cathedral. Here there are offices for the secretary and his staff, the Public Works Department, the Tax Department, the Commissioner of Police, the Public Health Department, the Chief of The heads of departments receive good salaries and, through their positions, enjoy a high social standing in the city. Socially and intellectually, Shanghai is the center of this part of the world. The city has good schools, a public library, a lecture hall, clubs for men and for women, art exhibits, and amateur theatricals. There are, in fact, all the features of social life in a large American city, with a constant round of teas, luncheons, dinners, receptions, and dances.

The wealthy residents of Shanghai live in a section that reminds me of the suburbs of a great European city. Here there is one luxurious home after another, each surrounded by gardens and shut off from the street by brick walls or iron fences. One of the most aristocratic resident streets is the Bubbling Well Road, leading out to the Temple of Qing An Su, which dates back to the year 250 A.D. It is lined with the homes of Chinese millionaires, as well as those of rich foreigners. The Chinese live in the most magnificent style, and some of their extravagances are astounding. There is one widow, for instance, who did not want her sons to live in the dormitory of the big Shanghai University, and so she built them a comfortable brick house on the edge of the campus and installed a retinue of servants therein.

Formerly, The wealthy Chinese mingled almost not at all with the foreigners, but they are coming more and more to take part in the social life and sports of Shanghai. A striking difference between the new and the old customs is to be seen also on the passenger steamers here in the Far East. Instead of keeping to their cabins as formerly, the rich Chinese now appear in the smoking and lounging rooms and stroll about the decks. At dinner, they have their own tables in the dining room. You see them playing mahjong in the smoking room, and in the ballroom, young Chinese girls often dance with foreigners. In coming from Hong Kong to Shanghai, one of the passengers on my ship was a striking-looking six-foot Chinese with a bald head that shone under the electric lights like varnished ivory, a thin mustache, and about 25 hairs of a beard.

He was dressed in a long gown of sky-blue silk. His wife, who was a bit younger, was literally loaded with jade, pearls, and diamonds. The two seemed to be much interested in watching the dancing, and I finally learned that a pretty young Chinese girl who was dancing with the foreigners was their flapper daughter. This family, by the way, was but one of the many evidences one sees in China of the mixture of the new and the old. The daughter's hair was as smartly bobbed, her dress as modish, And her little dancing pumps were quite as neat as those of an American debutante. Her father, however, was a picture of the Chinese gentleman in a guise that is being seen less and less. Take his fingernails, for instance.

Among the Chinese, long fingernails have for hundreds of years been a sign that the owner does not have to do manual labor. I once met a man whose nails seemed almost a foot long. They were not white, but as dark as a cow's horn. And they curved inward. He was as careful of them as the society girl is of her complexion. And he told my guide that it was a great sorrow to him that he had broken off his favorite nail, which had been even longer than those left. Often the nails of only one or two fingers are allowed to grow long, being protected by the pointed silver or gold shields that are sold in the shops for this purpose, and that fit the finger like a thimble. Like Hong Kong, Shanghai is a city of sports.

What would you think of a big racetrack covering an area of 20 city blocks right in the heart of New York at Times Square? That is what there is in Shanghai. The land was granted to the Jockey Club for this purpose generations ago when the city was smaller, with a provision that if it was ever used for anything else, it should go back to the original owners. Today, the races are still held there. And the spring meet is one of the great events of the year. Everyone goes, and nearly everyone bets. All the banks close, the foreigners come in from the settlements up and down the Yangtze River, and the hotels are crowded. Shanghai has football, tennis, golf, hockey, polo, and swimming clubs, and all kinds of sports associations.

In the racing grounds are also two cricket fields, golf links, tennis courts, A baseball diamond and a polo field. Here are held athletic tournaments and baseball matches in which the best players of our Asiatic Naval Squadron and of the Shanghai civilians contend for the championships of the Far East. There are also athletic games in which visiting clubs from the Philippines, Japan, and Hawaii compete with the Chinese. Hockey is played mostly by the Sikh police and the Britishers who learned the game in India. And the polo clubs are largely British, the mounts used being Manchurian ponies trained for the purpose. Shanghai has its nightlife also. There are cafes of all types and prices, vaudeville houses where one can dance with the women performers, and cabarets where maidens from Russia and Siberia try to induce the guests to drink champagne with them at something like $12 a quart.

The native resorts of this city are not so bad as they were in the past. Most of the old gambling houses are now closed, and Shanghai today is a goody-good city, in outward appearance at least. The opium smoking that goes on is done illicitly in private houses or shops, which are often raided by the police. As Shanghai is an international settlement governed by foreigners, such cases come before the mixed court. which ensures they're being tried without bribery and that the sentence is just. Among the new amusements of modern Shanghai are the moving picture theaters, of which there are many, and also the resort known as the New World, which is It was located at the beginning of the Bubbling Well Road.

At night, the New World blazes as brightly as the structures on the Great White Way of New York. It has all sorts of shows, and it might be called a Coney Island under a single roof. It is frequented by Chinese, and it has dances at which Chinese girls in foreign dress and bobbed hair go whirling about in the arms of their partners.

8 08 - The Far Eastern Land of Cotton 14:38

Carpenter. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Far Eastern Land of Cotton China is the land of the blue cotton gown. Only the rich and the well-to-do can afford silk or wool, and there are at least four hundred million people who wear nothing else but cotton all the year round. Every man, woman, and child of the masses has one or two thin cotton garments for summer, and for winter, as many suits of well-wadded cotton as are necessary to keep him warm, or as he can afford. In the northern provinces, which have a climate much like that of Montana, the people don suit upon suit as the weather grows colder. They gauge the temperature not by the thermometer, but by the number of garments they have to put on.

Two suit days are mild, three suit days are colder, And five or six suits mean that it is ten degrees or more below freezing. On such days, the portly Chinese, who can afford five wadded suits, has every one of them on and has to squeeze to get through his own doorway. There is no other country in the world that consumes as much cotton as China. Dr. Wu Ting Feng, the famous Chinese minister to the United States, put the matter in a nutshell when he said, If one inch could be added to the shirt-tail of every Chinese, it would keep the cotton mills of the world busy supplying the increased demand. A conservative estimate of the amount now used is 20 yards per person a year. At that rate, the cotton goods required by the Chinese would equal 8,000,000 yards annually.

These figures are beyond ordinary comprehension. To give a concrete illustration, the cloth would be enough to carpet a motor highway wide enough for thirty automobiles running abreast all the way from the Earth to the Moon. Or it would make a strip almost three miles wide, stretching across the North American continent from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. But even this is only a patch on the possibilities of the future. Wages are rising, and the purchasing power of the people is growing. Indeed, it is probable that many of the Chinese are already using sixty yards of cotton a year instead of twenty. To meet this rapidly growing demand, new movements have been inaugurated to increase the cotton-growing areas, and modern spinning and weaving mills are being built throughout the country.

We are apt to think that the United States is the only big Cotton-raising nation on Earth. One of our agricultural explorers, who has traveled widely over this country, tells me that China was raising this fiber 400 years before there was a single cotton plant in our country, and that it has as much good cotton soil as we have. The best of it is in the Yangtze Valley, especially in the Delta. But the plant will thrive almost everywhere, from Peking to Canton, and from Ningpo to Ching-Tou. In eight provinces, it is one of the leading crops. The present yield makes China about second or third among the cotton-growing countries of the world. The United States ranks first, and it is neck and neck between India and China, as to which hold second place.

Most of the cotton-grown here is of a short staple. And the seed used has been bred so carelessly throughout the ages that the production per acre is not large. By the native method of cultivation, the seed is sown broadcast, which means that the plants must be afterward thinned out. If this is not done, the cotton bushes rarely grow to a height of more than three feet. So thickly are they planted. The bulls then do not average more than six to a plant, and are so small that it takes forty or fifty of them to yield a pound of seed cotton. Of late, the agricultural colleges have been turning their attention to increasing the cotton yield. Seed is being imported from the United States, and the Chinese government has hired American experts to assist in the movement.

Special summer schools are being started in the region about Nanking, and in some parts of the cotton area, It is proposed to consolidate the small farms into large plantations, managed by foremen especially trained in these schools. Not long ago, American seed was introduced in a cotton field in Shantung, which previously had produced about the poorest crop in China. The result was an increase of 50 per cent in the yield, which so excited the farmers that as soon as the cotton was ripe, they came at night and stole it for seed. The American seed was found to be much superior to the native in hardihood, and Shantung cotton is now bringing high prices. As to cotton cloth, the Chinese have been weaving it since the days of the Crusaders, and in a number of localities the same methods that were used then are employed today.

Vast quantities of Chinese cotton are still ginned with a bowstring, and tens of thousands of hand looms are in use. All over the country there are farmers who work in the fields in summer and spend every winter weaving cloth for their families. Within the last decade or so, many of the old Chinese looms have been replaced by others imported from Japan. It is these hand looms that create the great demand for the cotton yarn now being spun in the big mills throughout the country. In the far interior, wages are so low that the hand-woven cloth Often cost less than the machine-made product. The weavers in the remote districts work by the piece, getting only a dollar or so for 200 yards, and making perhaps 20 yards in a day.

They do well to earn 25 cents in 12 hours. For this reason, their cloth is able to compete with that made in the cotton mills to so great an extent that there are hand looms right here in Shanghai, The center of the modern machine spinning and weaving industry. When I visited China in 1888, there was not a modern cotton mill in the empire, and at the time of my second visit six years later, only two had been established. One of these was at Shanghai, and the other at Wu Chang, opposite Han Kao, six hundred miles up the Yangtze. When I came to China again in 1901, I found at Shanghai a new mill that belonged to Li Hongcheng, the great statesman, Sheng Kung Pao, the steel king, and other wealthy Chinese.

At that time, there were only eight cotton mills in China, and in all, less than 400,000 spindles were running. Today, China has more than 70 cotton mills, to say nothing of those being built in Manchuria. They are operating more than two million spindles, and upward of 13,000 looms, and producing about two million pieces of cotton goods and one million bales of yarn every year. More than half of all the mills and about two-thirds of the spindles are here in Shanghai. Perhaps the most up-to-date of all these cotton factories is the Wing Gon, situated on the west bank of the Wang Pu River, about three miles from the heart of Shanghai. I went through it with the selling agent of the Boston firm that designed and built all the machinery with which it is equipped.

He tells me that there is not a more modern mill anywhere in the world. When I was here before, most of the cotton manufacturing machinery used was British, but our machines have since proved so superior that the new mills are being equipped by United States companies. The Wingonne Mill has eight acres of buildings for spinning cotton yarn only, and a plant of the same size for weaving piece goods. These are of reinforced concrete with walls and roofs of glass. All the interior woodwork and iron is painted white, and hundreds of electric lights make the mill as bright at midnight as at midday. It is run by electricity furnished by the Shanghai Municipal Power Plant, and the machinery is well provided with safeguards against accidents to the workers.

The ventilation is excellent. In fact, the wing-on would be considered the last word in up-to-dateness anywhere, and it differs from our best American mills only in the people that work in it. The mill now employs seventeen hundred hands, who are divided into two shifts, the work never stopping for Sundays or holidays from one year's end to another. Of these seventeen hundred hands, fully sixteen hundred are women and girls. For a wage equal to from 20 to 30 cents of our money, they work 12 hours every day, or rather 11 and a half, for they are now allowed a half hour off for lunch. The Chinese manager told me of this concession of a half hour with pride, saying that the other factories give no recess, but expect the girls to eat their lunches while they are tending their spindles.

He showed me the lunchroom that had been built for the employees. It is equipped with tables and benches, and as a special favor, the workers who bring cooked rice with them may heat it in the steam kettles with which the room is supplied. I suppose this is the Chinese idea of a free lunch. Another concession is the alternation of the shifts, so that after every ten days, the night shift becomes the day shift, and vice versa. I am told that these women receive about the highest wages of all those in the fifty-two cotton mills of Shanghai. They certainly seem to do as efficient work as the women in our cotton mills who get twelve times as much. In the United States, we have more than 26,000 establishments making textiles and employing a million and a half workers.

What a revolution it would bring on if their owners tried to cut wages to two cents an hour, and how the men would object if they were paid less than the women, which is the case in the mill I am describing. When I asked the manager why the women received the highest wages, he replied, they work quite as well, and they cause us less trouble with strikes. The men will strike when they think they have a grievance, but as a rule, the women will not. These yellow-skinned, slant-eyed Chinese women and girls Dress in cotton coats that reach to their hips and wide trousers that fall to the ankles. They wear their hair in one long braid down the back, sometimes banged over the forehead, and sometimes combed straight up without a parting.

Many of them have earrings of gold. They look fairly healthy, and extraordinarily so, when one remembers their long hours of continuous work. The manager says the youngest are thirteen or fourteen years old. But I saw several who looked less than ten. Some of the girls tend one hundred and sixty spindles each, and others more. When I think how they must stand for nearly twelve hours watching machines that require attention almost every minute, I am surprised that they do not drop to the floor in utter exhaustion. The Wing-On Mill is now earning money at a time when many other mills are falling behind and even shutting down. It pays dividends of 6%, a rate that is very low for China, where 10, 12, or even 20% is looked upon as only a fair return, and where most of the factories divide all their earnings every year.

China today is the world's greatest importer of cotton yarns and the second greatest importer of cotton piece goods. On the other hand, there is no doubt that this and others of the new Chinese mills will eventually make a great part of the cotton yarn and cotton piece goods used by the people here. They will not only do that, but they will export yarn and cloth to other parts of the world. The day may even come when the Chinese will produce more cotton goods than we and employ many more workers. We Americans have never pushed our trade as we should in this part of the world. The people of the Yangtze Valley and of South China who comprise about three-fourths of the total population of the Republic are supplied with cottons, largely by the British.

Our cottons have been consumed chiefly in Chile, Shantung, and the other provinces of the North, including Manchuria and Mongolia. Those regions demand a heavy textile to keep out the cold, and the American peace goods are of that quality. In the provinces on the Yangtze and in the South, A finer cotton, better bleached and of lighter weight is required. The British make this of our raw cotton, thus taking from us all the profit of manufacture, carriage and handling. When I asked one of our consular officials how Uncle Sam could increase his cotton exports, he replied, To do so he will have to get rid of the idea that anything will do for the Chinese. These people are particular about little things.

They know good materials, and they buy only the best at the fairest prices. They are also full of fancies and superstitions, and one cannot offend their sense of propriety. Take a little incident that happened last year, the consul continued. An American exporter shipped to Shanghai a big consignment of handkerchiefs for the use of the natives. Each handkerchief had the Chinese symbol for good luck stamped on one corner. which the exporter thought would help sell the goods. The shipment was a total loss. No Chinese would buy those handkerchiefs at any price, and when one was finally asked why, he replied, We Chinese have too high a regard for good luck to wipe our noses upon it.

9 09 - Secret Societies and Labor Unions 19:22

Carpenter. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Secret Societies and Labor Unions. I write today of the secret societies, the guilds, and the labor unions of China, for hundreds of centuries, almost from before the era of recorded history, down through the imperial dynasties to the present state of chaotic republican government. This country has had such organizations. There are in existence today secret societies and guilds nearly as old as China itself, while the progressive movement that has swept over the land since the fall of the empire has brought to this country the modern labor unit. The secret societies of China have sometimes been evolved from the clan system, but they are conducted independently of family organizations.

and often sprang from entirely different sources. Many are political in their aims, and others are religious. Both kinds have been involved in bloody outbreaks. Their rules are extremely strict, and violation of them has been known to result in torture and death. Women, as well as men, have their secret societies. In one of them, the Golden Orchid, the girl members swear never to marry and to commit suicide rather than break their vows. Another sect, the activities of which belie its poetical name, is the White Lily. During a rebellion in Hupei province some years ago, more than 20,000 of its members were beheaded in four months. The oldest secret organization in China is the Triad Society. It is said to have been the cause of the Taiping Rebellion, which was led by a fanatic who claimed that he had been sent to this world to reform China.

This outbreak lasted for years and cost China 10 million lives, thousands of temples, and the devastation of several provinces. The Triad Society holds regular meetings and ceremonials, and its members have a system of signs and passwords by which they may recognize one another. In entering a house, I am told, they stop a moment at the door and then put the left foot inside first. In sitting down, They point their toes together and keep the heels apart, and they have a way of raising their trouser legs that is known only to the brethren. They are bound to help any fellow member who gets into trouble. When a man has once joined this order, it has the power of life and death over him and punishes any disloyalty by beheading.

Another strong sect of this type is the Kaloa Hui Society. which has its origin in the province of Hunan, and now numbers millions of members with branches in every city. Members are initiated by drinking hot wine mixed with the blood of a cock killed during the ceremony. Before the Revolution, this order was an enemy of the Manchu government, and ever since its beginning, following its motto of China for the Chinese, it has been violently opposed to foreigners. In years past, it has exhorted the people to destroy the Christians, spreading abroad posters accusing the missionaries of frightful practices. These depicted them mutilating Chinese children and killing babies, cutting off the breasts of young girls, and gouging out eyes.

The boxers, who were responsible for the anti-foreign uprising of 1900, had much the same principles and ceremonials as the Triads, and, like the Kaloa Hui, were united against outsiders. Their motto was, Protect China and Kill the Foreigners. Their name was the result of a very free translation of their Chinese designation, which meant, The Fist of Righteous Harmony. They believed that the heavenly powers were sending down multitudes of spirits that entered their bodies and gave them added power. Against the enemies. Some of these frenzied fanatics believed so firmly that they were immune from death that they shot themselves in an attempt to prove it. Unfortunately, the bullets missed the spirits and killed the men.

Another belief of the Boxers was in the power of hypnotism, and they spread the story that the foreigners had a magic medicine that if rubbed on the palm of the hand, and held up before the face of a Chinese, would hypnotize him and make him the slave of the foreigner. They said that this medicine was made out of the eyes of infants and young children, and that the missionaries stole them for that purpose. During my early travels through China, I often saw a mother put her hand over the eyes of her child, or hide its head in a shawl, until I had passed out of sight, and it is because of the old belief that crushed eyes were used in photography that the primitive Chinese even today does not like to be photographed.

When his face is thus recorded, he believes that the mysterious eye mixture with which the plate is covered catches hold of his soul, and that its owner can cause him all sorts of evil thereafter. Today, of course, this belief exists only in the isolated districts. Far removed in their practices from the secret society, But with almost as strong a hold upon the members are the Chinese guilds. These have today much of the influence and power that they wielded a thousand years ago. Many authorities say that China has had guilds of one kind or another for two thousand years, and it is an accepted fact that the guild of the blind in Peking existed during the Han Dynasty, two hundred years before Christ.

The guilds of China are divided into two main groups. Provincial and Crafts. The former are organizations of the people of one district or city who are living in another part of China and who form their society for their mutual benefit. Here in Shanghai, for instance, are a Canton Guild, a Ningpo Guild, a Shantung Guild, and so on. The trades and crafts guilds, on the other hand, are combines of the craftsmen and workers of a city or province. They cover every possible occupation, From goldsmiths to slop carriers, beggars and burglars, and having as members both employers and apprentices, manufacturers and merchants. They differ from the modern union by being a combination of capital and labor.

They are the outgrowth of the age-old industrial system of China, in which every store makes its own goods, and as modern manufacturing establishments increase, they will probably decline in power. One of the activities of these guilds is to fix prices, and another is to act as arbitrators in settling disputes. The average Chinese will flee from a lawsuit as from a pestilence, and looks to his guild to keep him out of court. These organizations also regulate the terms of apprenticeship in different trades. The craftsmen, who do the exquisitely delicate handiwork of China, acquire their amazing proficiency Only after years of service, usually for no reward except food and lodging, and often even pay a cash premium for being taken on.

In the past, the guilds were their only protection against the autocratic government, and as the workmen realized their power, they did not hesitate to use it. One such instance arose out of a rush order for gold leaf, issued by the emperor himself. To fill this order at short notice, A gold leaf merchant, who had a factory at Tsu Chao, obtained permission from the authorities there to take on more apprentices than were permitted by the rules of his guild. Thereupon the other workmen went on strike and called a meeting to decide upon a punishment for the employer who would defy his guild law, even by official orders. Then they attacked him in his factory and bit him to death, first assuring themselves that there was no law in China.

Making biting to death a capital offense. Every man was required to join in the execution, and those who bit first were stationed at the door to see that each man who left the building had his lips covered with blood. The employer died a horrible death, and the men who committed the crime were arrested and tried, but only the one who took the first bite was beheaded. Workmen who break the rules of the guilds are also dealt with severely. Fines are common, and maiming and killing are not infrequent. I remember that when I was in Shanghai before, a dock worker was found with his eyes gouged out because he had disregarded the order of his union, forbidding members to work on the docks. Some men will even injure themselves rather than break a guild law, and an instance is known of a cooper who being ordered by a magistrate to work at lower wages than those specified by his guild.

Cut off his right hand to incapacitate himself for the job. Another evidence of the former power of the Guilds was in a threatened strike of the Barbers. Their trade was for a long time considered such a menial one that no Barber's son was admitted to the literary examinations through which official positions were filled. The Guild finally demanded that this custom be changed, and, by taking their appeal to higher and higher authorities, The officials knew that if the barbers carried out their threat to strike, all China would soon be bearded and unkempt. At the very bottom of the Chinese social scale is the slop carrier. Yet he, too, has his guild. Many large Chinese cities have no sewers, and all the garbage and refuse of every description are taken out of the house every day by men who do nothing else.

They carry their malodorous loads in huge wooden buckets slung to the ends of a long pole that rests on one shoulder. Naturally, everyone gives these men a wide berth, but occasionally a collision occurs, and with disastrous results. Such an instance took place the first time I was in Nanking, and the gorgeous lavender silk dress of no less a personage than a magistrate was hopelessly defiled. His Excellency thereupon ordered the slop carrier To be thrown into jail and threatened him with severe punishment. Before 24 hours had elapsed, however, his fellows had heard of his predicament, and as one man they struck, they refused to lift a bucket of slops or to permit anyone else to do so. It was only a few days before the city was in such a condition that even the Chinese could stand it no longer, and the magistrate had to release his prisoner.

There is no doubt that even to this day, the Chinese are masters of the art of walking out on strike. This fact was demonstrated to the foreigners only too forcibly at the time of the recent Hong Kong seamen strike, which tied up the whole city for more than a month. Demanding higher wages, every seaman and dock worker in that great port quit work. No ship could obtain a crew in order to clear the port, while the Chinese on incoming steamers joined the strikers the moment they arrived. When the strike ended, almost two hundred vessels were lying idle in the harbor. Not only that, but the entire city was in a state of paralysis for lack of workers, for out of sympathy for the seamen, every other class of celestial labor had struck also.

Public transportation facilities were at a standstill. All kinds of industry ceased, and practically the whole city was servantless. Guests in the hotels had to buy food outside and make their own beds, and even in private residences domestics of many years' service joined the strikers. In the end, the seamen were victorious, but only after more than a quarter of a million Chinese in Hong Kong had quit work. With the progress of modern industry throughout China, the Guild, developed as it had been to serve the proprietor worker, is being replaced by the labor union composed of workers alone. Such organizations are still in their infancy in this country, but there is no doubt that they are lusty infants and growing steadily.

Here in Shanghai, the workers in the cotton and silk mills are all unionized, and in Canton, organized labor is even more in evidence. That city not only had the strongest guilds in China, but it has learned more of Western ways than at most other cities, and it lies in a rich agricultural district where strikers know they can always obtain a living from the land if necessary. Besides, under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen, it long had a government that was decidedly partial to labor. It was only a few weeks ago that I saw in Canton a labor demonstration in which 200,000 workers took part. They represented 100 different organizations and included seamen, wharf hands, railway workers, employees of rice, lumber, textile and knitting mills, machine workers, and all kinds of craftsmen.

It has been only within recent years that a district and permanent class of industrial workers has been formed in China. Formerly, the laborers in a machine industry were considered as on a much lower social scale than craftsmen or followers of the time-honored occupation of farming. and they were ostracized by the guilds. Now, with the increased number of craftsmen who labor for others, many of these same guilds have split up into various unions and have revised their laws to conform with changing conditions. The Chinese laborer is as good as can be found anywhere in the world. He is expert in operations requiring delicacy and precision. He has the mechanical instinct, and he will do the same thing over and over, For twelve or fourteen hours, without variation or complaint.

His wages are nearly the smallest in the world, but the cost of living is likewise low. An enlarged family is met by the combined earnings of the father and the father. China has no laws against child labor, and what few attempts have been made to regulate it have met with opposition, not only from the employers, but from the laborers themselves. For instance, the manager of one of the cotton mills here experienced great difficulty in enforcing his rule that no child less than four feet tall should be hired. Children under this height were constantly being found at work, and it was discovered that their mothers or some other older person had applied for the position and then turned over to the child the employment badge that everyone who enters the factory must show.

The interests of both craftsmen and laborers are looked after in many cities by native chambers of commerce, of which there are now 800 in China. Practically all the guilds and unions are represented in these organizations, which settle disputes among members, secure immunity from merchandise from bandits, and help see that bills are paid when due. The old-style Chinese merchant is used to paying his debts only three times a year, and foreign firms that want to do business with him Must accept this custom. The first payday is during the Dragon Festival, the second during the Moon Festival, and the third during the Chinese New Year celebration. It is particularly important that all old accounts be settled by New Year.

As if they are not, not only does a man lose his credit for the next 12 months, but, according to the Chinese belief, he is sure to have bad luck. The Chinese New Year, which occurs later than ours, is a sort of Fourth of July, Christmas, birthday, and Sunday mixed together. Every man, woman, and child in the country counts himself a year older on that day, and all call on their friends and wish one another many happy returns. It is the only time of rest that many of them have throughout the year, and for ten days before it arrives, the country goes wild in preparation. The stores feature low prices and new goods, and the bargain counters are thronged. Everyone buys presents, and everyone who can do so purchases a new suit of clothes for the occasion.

Those who cannot will borrow or rent, so that on New Year all China dresses in satins, furs, and silks. Every person is supposed to take a bath the day before, and for the majority of the lower classes, this occasion is the only time during the year when they are comparatively clean. The Chinese paint their whole country red on New Year. In more than one sense of the word. With them, red denotes good luck and prosperity, and all the New Year cards and invitations are on paper of this color. Every child gets its New Year present wrapped in red paper, and over the doors of the houses are pasted red inscriptions bearing characters praying for good fortune, wealth, and happiness. Red firecrackers are set off on the night before to scare away the evil spirits, and hardly anyone goes to bed.

The Chinese say that the man who for ten years in succession sits up to the last night of the old and sees the first sunrise of the new year will have a long and prosperous life. In addition to this holiday, the public offices, the new schools, and the big business houses in some of the larger Chinese cities are now observing Sunday. When I was in Canton on that day, the city offices and the department stores were closed. Also, the banks and some of the larger of the Chinese business houses and all public services were suspended. Common labor and small merchandising went on as usual. This condition is but the beginning of a new movement for Sunday observance, which the labor guilds are now agitating, and which someday will probably spread all over China.

So far, there are no religious observances connected with the day. And to the Chinese, it is a rest day, not a Sabbath. Even at that, the adoption of Sunday marks a big stride forward in the new civilization of China.

10 10 - The Hangchow Bore 11:29

Carpenter. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Hangchao Boer. From Shanghai I have come to Haining, a hundred miles or so away, over the Shanghai Hangchao Nungpo Railway. I boarded a train on this line in the Shanghai station, which, even at the hour of seven o'clock in the morning, was thronged with people. My car was built in the British style, being divided into compartments, handsomely upholstered in leather. There was room in ours for eight persons, but as Chen, my guide for the day, had gone ahead and tipped the conductor, we had seats to ourselves and were not disturbed by other passengers throughout the ride. As we slipped out of the Shanghai station and rode slowly through the railroad yards, I had an opportunity to see the Chinese method of coaling an engine.

This was done by coolies carrying on their backs baskets holding about a bushel of coal apiece. Walking up a plank that reached to the top of the tender, they dumped their loads into the bin and then went back for more. In this country, everything possible is done by manpower, which is so cheap that oftentimes it does not pay to use labor-saving machinery. The roadbed of this line is well ballasted. The track is of standard gauge. The cars moving along comfortably, and we seemed to be going at a good speed. In addition to the first-class cars, the train also had accommodations for second, third, and fourth-class passengers. As I went through the train to have a look at my fellow travelers, I noticed that one of the first-class cars had seats arranged much like those of our Pullman's.

Tables were set between each two seats, and the passengers who were not taking naps leaned on these, conversing together, smoking or reading newspapers. I saw a Chinese girl dressed in sky-blue silk, with earrings of jade shining against the black hair combed straight back from her forehead and ears. She was reading the Sun Wan Pao, a Shanghai daily that has the largest circulation in China. Soon after we left Shanghai, a blue-gowned boy served tea to such passengers as had come aboard without their breakfast, and at intervals during the journey, peddled his wares through the train, just as does his American brother. He had for sale cigarettes, candies, and fruit, and seemed to be doing a good business most of the time.

Occasionally, the conductor and the inspector visited our compartment to look at our tickets. Both wore official-looking caps and suits of clothes in Western style. Their coats and trousers being of navy blue cloth adorned with the usual bright brass buttons. The conductor was always polite and never failed to wish me well on my journey. A ride of about four hours brought me to the town of Shan Gan, where I left the train and came by sedan chair to the top of the great stone seawall at Hai Ning on the north shore of Hang Chao Bay. Suppose you join me there and with me watch one of the wonders of China, indeed, one of the wonders of the world. This is the famous Hang Chao Boer, the white-crested tidal wave that twice every day, like a mighty dragon, rushes from out of the Pacific up Hang Chao Bay to meet the Tien Tang River.

It is a solid wall of water, usually about 10 or 15 feet high. The river is gradually diminishing as it makes its way inland. Like all the great tidal waves of the world, it is caused by the configuration of the bay and the river. At its mouth, the Bay of Hangchao is approximately 60 miles wide. But seventy miles inland, it is narrowed to a width of only nine miles, while thirty miles farther on, it is but two miles from shore to shore. It is at the entrance to this bay, dotted with its numerous islands, that the boar formation begins. From there, it rushes inland at the rate of 13 miles an hour, with a roar so loud that at a given point farther up the bay, it can be heard fully three-quarters of an hour before the wave reaches there.

The seawall in which we are standing was built by the Chinese centuries ago to keep these tidal waves from flooding the countryside.

As high as a two-story house, It extends along the shores of the bay for more than 100 miles, and is one of the great engineering works devised by these people in their continual struggle with the forces of nature. At the foot of the wall is a series of broad terraces, 20 feet wide, faced with piles, the spaces between which are filled with stones. The top of the terraces is about 15 feet above the water and is paved with blocks of stone. Lying on these stones is a long line of cargo-laden junks, toppled over on their sides, anchored to the wall by cables made of twisted bamboo as big around as my arm, their tall masts towering high above us. They sailed up the bay as far as this point in the preceding high tide, and are now stranded on the shelf above the water, awaiting the next great inflow of the ocean to set them afloat.

so that they may continue on their way. At each end of the terraces is a buttress, twenty feet high and sixty feet in diameter, made of interlaced poles filled in with stones. These serve the purpose of breaking the crest of the boar as it rushes inland, thus preventing the junks from being dashed to pieces against the sea wall. The buttresses and terraces alternate with one another for miles. So that sailing vessels may be always within reach of a place of refuge from the bore. Below us, the tide is still flowing out to the open sea. The water of the bay is muddy and slimy and filled with the silt brought down from the mountains by the Txientang River. A gray sheet of bright yellow ten miles wide, it is bordered on each side by deep blue mountains and roofed by a blue sky filled with fleecy clouds.

Far out beyond the yellow expanse, we can see the whitecaps of the Pacific. Behind us is a garden-like region covered with patches of luxuriant crops and dotted with clumps of green trees and dabs of pink, the peach orchards just bursting forth into bloom. There are thickets of gray mulberry trees and clumps of feathery bamboos, out of which peep the thatched roofs of farmhouses. Laborers in blue gowns and gray hats are at work in the fields. Lazy buffaloes are dragging plows along the furrows, and birds are singing in some willows nearby. It is an ideal country scene, as peaceful and quiet as a spring day amid the hills of my farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. But listen, what is that sound in the distance?

It makes us think of a railroad train running at great speed, but far off. That is the mighty Pacific, gathering itself for its onslaught upon the Bay of Hang Chow and the Tsiang Tang River. Looking through our field glasses, we can see, about ten miles away, at the foot of a blue island, a faint line, a mere streak of silver across the surface of the water. As we watch, the line broadens and lengthens. It advances with a noise like charging cavalry. The sound of the crashing waters becoming louder and louder. The wall of water continues to grow nearer and higher, carrying behind it a fleet of boats that are riding up into the bay with the tide, dancing about madly like cockle-shells. Toward the center of the bay, the wave curves upward in a great arc, its crest tossing spray and foam into the air as it seems to be rolling over and over.

Where the wave touches the sea wall, Its waters are deflected and form another wave just behind it, even higher than the first. One moment the surface of the river at our feet is as smooth as a mill pond, but the next we hear the mighty slapping of the water against the buttress below us, and the rising flood catches the first of the junks at the end of the terrace. The boats are suddenly alive with men, who with a great keying rush about with poles in their hands, Each one trying to avoid a crash against the embankment or a collision with the neighboring craft. In a few seconds, they are all afloat and are rising as rapidly beside the wall as if propelled by giant elevators. As the water seethes and boils, making myriads of whirlpools in the bay, the boats sway this way and that, tugging at their bamboo cables and tossing their masts about in the air.

A moment later, all is quiet again. The boar has passed, and the contest is over. The Pacific has met the river and crowded it back. It has filled the bay and is now carrying the tide far into the interior. Their farms protected by the dikes and walls, the people are working in the fields just as peacefully as before the Great White Terror came galloping in. Hang Chow, only 40 miles distant from where we are standing, is a city of some half a million population, while but a little more than 120 miles away is the great Chinese metropolis of Shanghai. I venture that if the Hang Chow Boer were so near any of the large cities of our Atlantic coast, there would be daily excursions of thousands of people to see this spectacle, and that the seawall for miles would be lined with hotels.

As it is, the Boer is only a handicap to Hang Chow. for it makes that port inaccessible to ocean traffic. The bay is too shallow for safe steamer navigation, while the inrush of the tide twice daily constitutes a great danger to shipping. No vessel can meet The Chinese have many legends about the Hangchao Boer. According to one of them, it is caused by the spirit of a successful general, who so incurred the jealousy of the emperor. that the latter had him assassinated and thrown in the river. His spirit is now trying to take revenge, the people say, by flooding the country with this mighty tide. Another story tells how one of the rulers at Hang Chao tried to control the war, the tides interfering so much with the building of dykes, he finally ordered several hundred bowmen to shoot the evil spirit of the waters.

Prayers being said, meanwhile, for divine aid. These measures, the Chinese say, proved quite effective. The tide withdrew and stayed away until the prince had completed embankments and buttresses.

11 11 - The City of Heaven 18:09

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. The City of Heaven. I am in Hangzhou, the City of Heaven, the capital of the province of Qigong, and the former seat of empers and kings. It is famous for three things. It is important in the history of China, it is noted for its beauty, and it has a drugstore like none other on earth. In the first two respects it has many rivals, but in the last it is unique among all the cities of the world. We have no store in the United States like this establishment, and in forty years of travel over the globe I have not seen its equal. This drug hall of propitious munificence, as it is called, covers a large area and is made up of many rooms and departments.

It is said to be the largest on earth. I cannot vouch for this statement, but I do believe that it is the most interesting. Located in the heart of Hang Chow, it is surrounded by many modern improvements. But if you were to visit it with me, you would think we had stepped back into the Middle Ages. It is not merely a store where drugs are sold, but also a factory where Chinese medicines are compounded. When I visited it, dozens of clerks were selling remedies for various Chinese ailments. And both the wholesale and the retail departments were crowded with purchasers. The walls of this shop were covered with gilded inscriptions in Chinese, setting forth the virtues of the remedies sold, and praising the potency of certain pills.

The names of some of the preparations for which the establishment is noted are such as almost to make illness attractive. I myself, for example, might be tempted to be sick if I knew that I would receive the Great blessing pill, which contains ten different kinds of drugs, each one said to possess special curative properties. If I were residing in China, doubtless I should feel more secure if I had also a good stock of the pill of ten thousand efficacies, said to be excellent for no less than ten thousand different kinds of aches. Then there is to be had here the double mystery pill. Highly recommended as a cure for elephantiasis, while the Six Taste pill is credited with power to act on the brain.

Finally, there is the Transparent Peace pill, good perhaps for the nerves, while most precious of all is the Thousand Gold pill. The latter is reserved for maidens exclusively, the name of the remedy referring to the Chinese custom of praising the daughter of a friend by saying she is the equivalent of a thousand ounces of precious metal. Possibly, if our own patent medicine men were to name their remedies in the Chinese style, they might increase by millions of dollars the huge sums Americans already spend on tonics and cures. Going on into the manufacturing department, I saw men grinding roots and bones into powder for making these pills. I was startled to discover that every one of these workers was blind.

When I asked why this was so, I was told that it was for two reasons. One, because it is considered a good deed to give work to blind men, and the other, because these unfortunates can be hired for less than even the ridiculously low wages of the Chinese coolie. I understand also that the fact that these workers cannot see how the medicines are mixed, and therefore cannot give away any trade secrets, makes them preferred to men with good eyesight. Leaving the grinding mills, I went into a department where scores of men and girls were molding the pills, and then into one that contained a number of big stone jars, each holding about fifty gallons of little pellets. There were, I venture, enough pills in those jars to kill or cure all the people in a dozen cities of China.

The jars were arranged in sections and had different labels upon them. I asked the man how the pills were sorted. And he told me that it was according to the diseases for which they were intended, and also according to whether they were for women or for men. It seems that even though a Chinese woman may suffer from the same kind of stomachache as her husband or brother, she is not necessarily treated to the same kind of pill. I finally visited the outdoor department of this Chinese medicine factory. It was a little zoological garden or menagerie. in the pens of which were about twenty deer waiting their turn to be made into magical remedies. All of them will one day be stripped of their antlers in order that the latter may perform their mission of relieving the internal distress of some Chinese citizen.

Deer horns are supposed by the Chinese to have valuable medicinal properties, and a pair of them is the usual drug store sign in China. The Hang Chow drug store purchases Also, the bones and the whiskers of tigers, believed to have such powerful medicinal qualities that pills made of them cost more than would so many pellets of gold. In making their remedies, the Chinese doctors and drugstores use some of the ingredients known to our materia medica, but they employ mostly substances more commonly associated with a witch's cauldron. These include snakeskins, moths, asbestos, Oyster shells and a great variety of other weird constituents. The more vile and nauseating the concoctions offered them as medicines, the more powerful the Chinese believed them to be.

They also practiced the theory that if a little medicine is good for an ailing body, a lot of it will be even better, and so they frequently pour these mixtures into their system by the gallon. In recent years, patent medicines have been introduced and widely advertised by Japanese and American firms, and are now being consumed in enormous quantities. Everyone who has studied the Chinese methods of treating the sick agrees that their practice is far better than their theory. Although the native physicians have the most fantastic conceptions of the organism of the human body and the functions of its various parts, they have also a great deal of practical knowledge gained by long experience. They rarely understand the exact causes of either the illness or its cure, but by observation they have learned that certain things happen under certain conditions.

Many of them are particularly shrewd judges of human nature and are often able to inspire a faith in themselves on the part of their patients that probably is more effective than are the remedies they prescribe. In making his diagnosis, the physician is supposed to be able to locate the trouble and determine its cause merely by feeling the pulse. And if he turns to the other members of the family for information about symptoms, they will think he does not know his business. Also, a Chinese doctor must effect a cure rather quickly or be dismissed from the case. If the physician first called in by a sick man does not obtain satisfactory results, another is sent for almost immediately. And if he does not succeed, a third, a fourth, and even a fifth may be successively consulted.

If these fail to cure, the patient is then likely to become angry, declare that all doctors are frauds, and turn to his gods for relief. The latter are quite as likely to make him well as the ministrations of the native physicians. Doctors whose fathers before them practiced medicine are especially a seam, as it is assumed that the sons have inherited Many secret and valuable prescriptions. In recent years, of course, many Chinese have graduated from Western medical colleges and are successfully practicing modern medicine. On the whole, the Chinese are a healthy people. When one of them becomes sick, he usually abstains from work and all other activities and takes to his bed. This course gives nature its best opportunity to restore normal conditions, and the man usually recovers.

Also, it is a fact that the Chinese are differently constituted physically from members of the white race and are not nearly so sensitive to disease as we are. They have larger digestive apparatus. Their nervous systems are not so highly organized as ours, and in general, they are so adapted to their environment that they can survive living conditions and even diseases that would bring illness and death in an American community. Another commercial establishment for which Hangchao is noted is the world's largest fan store. The manufacture of fans is one of the great industries of this city. They are produced here by the million and shipped to all parts of China and to Europe and to the United States as well.

Some are made of eagle's feathers and others of silk with fine ivory handles. But the great bulk of Chinese fans are manufactured from paper and wood. The most gorgeous specimens are not used by the Chinese themselves, but are shipped abroad. The common type of fan in China, and the one used largely by the lower classes, is the familiar dried palm leaf, cut to the desired shape and size, its edge bound with a splint. The largest fans of this type, which are nearly a yard in diameter, are seldom seen in our country, as only the smaller ones are sent to the United States. These big fans are used by the common people for all sorts of purposes. To blow up a fire, to dust off a seat or cool a chair for a visitor, as hats and sunshades for the women, and to cool babies' food.

In passing a blacksmith shop, one may often see an apprentice fanning the man who is sweating at the forge, while coolies usually fan themselves vigorously whenever they get a chance to sit down for a rest. Fans are even more extensively used among the upper classes and form a part of the personal equipment of both men and women. There are all sorts of styles and varieties, some of them reserved for the use of one or the other of the sexes or for particular occasions or seasons. There are fans for spring and fans for summer, and also fans for autumn, although with the advance of cooler weather they are less used. A deserted wife is sometimes referred to by the Chinese as an autumn fan, signifying that she has been discarded as no longer serving her master's purpose.

With the adoption of Western ways by the younger generation, fans are moving somewhat into the background of things Chinese, and are not playing so great a part in the social intercourse of the more cultured people. Nevertheless, their manufacture and sale Still continue on a large scale, and when I visited the big fan shop of Hang Chow, I found it one of the busiest establishments in the city. At the front, a score of clerks were busy showing goods to prospective customers, and in the workshops, one set of men was engaged in shaping the sticks, another was painting designs on the leaves, and still others were fastening the parts together. This is contrary to the usual custom The most important industry at Hangzhou is the manufacturing of the The city has been a production of the city, and since time immemorial, this city has had its silk millionaires.

There are here now a number of steam-operated silk filletours, and whole streets are given over to silk shops. in which hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of goods are sold every year. Many are little factories as well, and in them I saw children weaving the most beautiful ribbons and crepes, a few of the finest grades being made by boys and girls under 15 years of age. Hangzhou has a population about the size of that of Cleveland and has always been an important center of Chinese industry. Its manufacturing and commercial prosperity The city is the more remarkable by reason of the fact that, as I have said, the boar in the Bay of Hangzhou and the Txientang River makes the city practically inaccessible as an ocean port.

Even the Grand Canal, which has one of its terminals here, has no water connection with the bay because of the boar. Practically all the goods made here or brought into the city are moved by way of the Grand Canal. and the network of inland waterways that covers this part of China. One of the newer industries in Hangzhou is the tourist business. The city has become a resort for both natives and foreigners, the Chinese coming here from all parts of the country to dwell for a time in the city of heaven. Hangzhou and its surroundings possess great natural beauty. Prominent among its many attractions is West Lake. situated on the western edge of the city. The hills about it are covered with bamboo and plum and peach trees, and have gardens and parks full of roses and honeysuckle.

The diamond-bright surface of this lake is studded with emerald-green islets, on some of which are the homes of the wealthy men of present-day Hang Chao, while on others are palaces built by the kings and emperors of the past. In bygone times, the pageants and feasts staged on the lake and its islands rivaled in their splendor the spectacles of ancient Rome. The earliest recorded history of Hangzhou goes back to about the time when Constantine made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire. This city was then the capital of kings, and later the Chinese emperors made it their capital, greatly enlarging and beautifying it. The walls were extended from a circumference of some thirteen miles to include an area said to have been forty miles around.

It was during this era that Marco Polo visited Hangchao and told the world of its beauties. It is the grandest and noblest city that the whole world containeth, he wrote in his account of his travels in China. Had he come later, his comment would have been far different. For the northern invaders kept pushing their way south and finally sacked and destroyed this city. When the Manchus came into the ascendancy, they built alongside the old Hangchao a military reservation that became the Tartar city in which the representatives of the emperor lived surrounded by troops. In the Taiping Rebellion of the 19th century, and again in the revolution of 1911, the Tartar city and part of Hang Chow as well were pillaged, burned, and razed to the ground.

Nevertheless, after each calamity, Hang Chow has been rebuilt, and though it is now smaller than formerly, it still retains much of its old beauty and prosperity. It is in the damaged areas that the modern improvements of present-day Hang Chow are most conspicuous. Fine new thoroughfares have been built, ancient walls have been torn down to make room for broad boulevards, The site of the Manchu camps by the lake is now occupied by new hotels, modern in their construction and equipped with all the The city is a mixture of ancient and modern types of architecture. So much so, in fact, that many of the Chinese feel that its beauty is doomed by the structures of brick, steel, and concrete.

More than 1500 years ago, Hangchao was a meeting place of the religions of the world. It was here that a Buddhist monk from India founded one of the first monasteries of his religion in China. Here also came the fire-worshiping Parsis, Jews who built synagogues, Christians from Palestine and Syria who established their own places of worship, and Mohammedans who erected a great mosque. to the one God. The foreigners and their religions prospered so well that in the ninth century the officials and the populace combined to exterminate them, and some twenty thousand were massacred within a few days. As late as the beginning of the eighteenth century, another Chinese ruler had the idea that the Christians and their religion were a menace to his authority.

He therefore expelled the Jesuit missionaries who had gradually established themselves here and destroyed some 300 Christian churches. Other foreign religious buildings were destroyed when the city was sacked by the Taipings, who were determined to exterminate all idols in China. Since they found no images in the Mohammedan Mosque, they allowed it to stand, one of the only two houses of worship that were spared from destruction. After the Chinese-Japanese War, Peng Chau was again open to foreigners for trading and residential purposes, and its modern development began.

12 12 - Along the Grand Canal 20:03

Along the Grand Canal At Hangzhou, I am at the southern end of the Grand Canal, the world's longest artificial waterway. It extends northward from here to Tianjin, a distance of nearly 1,000 miles, and is ranked among the greatest engineering works on earth. The Chinese, whom we regard as a backward people, began it when our English ancestors had not even a word in their language meaning engineer. That was six hundred years before Christ was born, at the time when Athens was at the height of its glory and when the city of Rome had just been founded. The portion lying north of the Yangtze River was constructed first, then followed the stretch from the Yangtze South to Hang Chow, while last of all, the northern section was completed during the fourteenth century.

Although the canal itself ends at Tianjin, it connects with Peking by way of the Peiho River. If you will look at the map, you will see that the Grand Canal provides an inside water passage along the eastern edge of China, lying on the average about 100 miles back from the coast. Running through the Great Plain from north to middle China, the canal crosses both the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers, It was a long time, and taps the regions of greatest wealth and population. It touches several of the chief cities, many of which owe their population and trade largely to their location on it, and for centuries formed the chief artery of trade between North and South China. During a former trip to China, I spent some time at Xinkiang, a city as large as Minneapolis, where the Grand Canal meets and crosses the Yangtze River.

I have followed the course of the canal across much of the Yangtze Valley and have seen other parts of it about Tien-Sin. I have traveled for hundreds of miles upon it by steam launch and houseboat, and have made side trips into some of the myriads of smaller canals that branch from it. According to one authority, the first section of the Grand Canal was dug at the order of a king of the Shu'i dynasty. who, to please his queen, wanted to make a voyage southward through this territory by water. Later, its chief use was for transporting the rice that was sent as tribute from southern China to the imperial government at Peking. In fact, the northern portion was constructed partly to serve that purpose in the absence of roads worthy of the name.

Formerly, most of the government taxes of China were collected in kind. And every year the farmers of the South sent more than one hundred million pounds of rice to the capital. This custom was as though our government were to require every farmer of the Middle West to ship a part of his corn crop to Washington, by means of a canal from the Mississippi River at St. Louis to the Potomac. Every town along the canal had its government granaries. and at Nanking, I once saw acres of barns filled with tribute rice awaiting shipment to the north. Sometimes the rice boats that started from southern China in April did not reach Peking until September. But I gather that the men selected to deliver the rice tax did not mind the long, tedious journey, for as bearers of tribute they were privileged characters.

They always claimed the right of way on the canal and made other boatmen await their convenience. On the return trips, the riceboats brought down goods that were sold in the south at a handsome profit, especially as the boatmen usually evaded the payment of taxes supposed to be collected on all cargoes moving through the canal. At times, these riceboats used to make their way up the Grand Canal in large fleets, their number being often so great that they choked the waterway for weeks. Even under the most favorable conditions, the canal afforded but a slow means of communication. The boats were towed by human muscle, the thousands of coolies employed for this purpose toiling along like so many horses.

In some places, especially after the waterway began to suffer from neglect, boats were pulled through the shallows by manpower. and were even dragged up muddy inclines where there were no locks to serve as steps between the different levels of water. Another thing that caused congestion along the waterway was the tyranny of the lock keepers. This position was a coveted one among the Chinese, as it offered plenty of opportunity for squeeze, as the people here call the private rake-offs made by officials. The owner of a large boat, for instance, would bribe the keeper to close the locks after it had passed, and not to let anyone else through until it came back on its return journey, thus assuring that it could make its trip without delay.

This meant that thousands of smaller craft, the owners of which could not afford to pay any extra toll, were held up sometimes for a week at a time. For hundreds of years, this waterway was the only means of communication between the North and the South. and successive governments spent enormous sums on its maintenance. Great dykes and other works were built along its course, and lakes and rivers were diverted to feed it water or to prevent its being flooded. At one time, more than a hundred thousand men were employed on a single section one hundred miles long, and it is said that an army of three hundred thousand laborers once worked seven months to turn the course of a river into the canal.

Wherever possible, it runs through lakes and streams, winding about in great loops, but there are many sections that require the hardest kind of digging and the highest quality of engineering ability. North of the Yangtze, there are places in which the canal is carried over the country on tops of viaducts 20 feet high. Across it were built hundreds of thousands of bridges, usually of stone and beautifully arched. So that boats could pass under them. Locks and reservoirs were constructed as needed, but the former were not nearly so elaborate as the canal locks to which we are accustomed. Many of them are now in ruins, for with the building of railroads along practically the entire route of the canal, and with the development of steamship service along the coast and on the rivers, this waterway has been increasingly neglected.

In recent years, both foreigners and Chinese have been agitating for the restoration of parts of the Grand Canal, in order to give the people again the full benefit of this cheap means of transportation. The government has both appropriated and borrowed from foreigners large sums for such purposes. But I am told that repeatedly the funds have been diverted elsewhere and that little work has been done. Even so, portions of the Grand Canal are much used today. And in the Shantung section alone, the canal handled in a recent year goods worth about $11 million. However, the volume of traffic is slowly decreasing and will probably continue to shrink unless the waterway is modernized and improved. The importance of the Grand Canal as an artery of trade and travel was increased by its connection with the many lakes The country is cut up by artificial waterways that in some places are more numerous than the roads of rural New England, and that have a total length measuring tens of thousands of miles.

In the seacoast provinces of Jiangsu and Chaikyung alone, two of the most wealthy and progressive districts in China, there are no less than 25,000 miles of inland waterways. As to China as a whole, no one knows just how many canals it has, but it is estimated that they have a total length of 225,000 miles, or enough to reach nine times around the Earth at the equator. One authority says that if 40 canals were built across the United States from east to west and 60 from north to south, their total mileage would be less than that of all the Chinese canals. In coming from Shanghai to Hangzhou, I saw something of the canals of the Yangtze Delta. There seemed to be more of them than in Holland, and I should say that almost every farm in this region can be reached by boat.

Many of these waterways are so narrow that nothing wider than a canoe can pass through them, but others are broad enough for big sailing junks. Out in the country, the canals themselves are often invisible at a distance. and the white sails of the watercraft seemed to be skimming along the surface of the level green fields. In the villages, the people build their houses right on the banks of the canals, and thus have at their doors not only a means of transportation, but also an abundant supply of water for domestic purposes. They obtain from the waterways much of their food, including the roots and seeds of the lotus, which are considered delicacies, and the water chestnut. A tuber that, when cooked, has something of the flavor of green corn.

On that trip, I saw but few roads. Indeed, the canals are so many that it would be difficult to cover this country with motor highways, such as we have, for example, in Rhode Island. The roads, I noticed, were but narrow tracks winding their way in and out through the fields, many of them following the route of the canals. Some of these highways were merely wheelbarrow paths. Over which all kinds of goods were being transported. I saw men and women walking along, carrying heavy burdens, and I occasionally observed a person of the well-to-do class riding across country in a sedan chair. Once in a while I saw also a cart, sometimes dragged by men and sometimes pulled along by a water buffalo. This region is picturesque and beautiful, although it is as flat as a floor.

It is dotted here and there with grave mounds and with clumps of bamboo. And now and then there is a farmstead, its low buildings of brick, stone, or mud, roofed with black tiles and surrounded by green trees. All about is a vast patchwork of color, the fields of rice, wheat, and cotton, and the truck gardens for the big cities of this area. The Chinese have been noted as farmers for more than 4,000 years. In the days of the empire, The ground was always broken each spring by the emperor, the festival of spring plowing having been the great yearly event of the Chinese since 2200 years before Christ. At that time, His Majesty, after fasting and praying in the Temple of Heaven in Peking, made sacrifices to the god of agriculture.

Then, assisted by princes of the blood, he would put his royal, long fingernailed hands upon the rude plow. painted for the occasion with imperial yellow, and guided as it was dragged through nine furrows by a water buffalo. At the same time, all over China, this ceremony was enacted by the chief officers of the various provinces. Couriers were then sent forth to notify all the farmers that spring had officially arrived and that they might begin cultivation of their fields. A day or so later, the smell of newly plowed ground was rising from an area Half the size of the United States. Although this ceremony is no longer observed, China is as much as ever a land of farmers. The greater part of the country is cultivated like a garden.

There are countless families here who live from the proceeds of one-acre farms, every inch of which is cultivated. The fields are not even separated by fences, the only boundary marks being little pieces of granite or sandstone. In many regions, there is literally not vacant land enough on which to pitch a tent. There are no roadsides, no wastelands, no commons. Every bit of ground is producing something. Every lump of soil broken up, every weed destroyed, and every plant tended like a baby. The crops are planted so close together that they form one solid patch reaching far and wide. Everything is sown in furrows, And it is not unusual to see a new crop sprouting between the rows of one nearly ready for the harvest, while three crops a year are often obtained from the same soil.

Traveling through this region, I was struck by the number of people at work in the fields. The women do just as much as the men. I see them digging up the rich soil with hoes and wading through the flooded rice fields. They are bent almost double as they set out the rice sprouts. and with their bare yellow legs remind me somewhat of great birds diving for worms. I did not see any of them harnessed to either ploughs or harrows, although such practices are said to be quite common in the more popular The plows are of the most primitive type. consisting of a beam handle and a share with a wooden stem. Sometimes the share is tipped with iron, and sometimes not, but in either case it barely scratches the surface.

Chinese farmers measure the depth of a furrow, as the western cowboy did his whiskey, or the farmer's wife her cloth, that is, so many fingers. The spade hoe, in common use for loosening the soil, is a long-handled instrument. with a heavy blade about four inches wide and a foot long. Such harrows as I saw were each made of a heavy stick to which were fastened a handle and a row of stout wooden or iron teeth. In spite of the crudeness of their farming methods from a modern standpoint, the Chinese are still making their land produce after 4,000 years of crops. The soil has not given out, and the natural resources are not exhausted. Two reasons for this are irrigation and fertilization. The Chinese have been irrigating their land for thousands of years.

Many of the canals in the Yangtze Valley have been built largely for the purpose of getting the water of the rivers and lakes to the farms. To lift it up to the level of the fields, they use methods as primitive as those I have seen employed along the banks of Old Father Nile. Oftentimes, the irrigation equipment is nothing more than a two-quart bucket swung on the end of a rope. The Chinese also raise water from one level to another by rude water wheels, one type of which consists of a series of paddles stuck in a log from which project treadles worked by foot power. Others are turned by the ubiquitous water buffaloes, which are probably the ugliest cattle in existence. These animals, though often dangerous in their actions toward strangers, are easily managed by the small children who tend them, and I have seen little boys of five or six years sound asleep upon their backs.

Mud, as well as water, is taken out of the canals and spread over the surface of the fields. It is only one of the many fertilizers used by a people who save potato peelings, the pairings of fingernails, and even hair cuttings to enrich their soil. Thousands of men all over China do nothing else but gather up bits of such matter and sell them. This fertilizing material, together with the garbage and refuse from the house, is usually kept in great vats and is spread in dipperfuls over every inch of cultivated ground. Along the canals, many of the farmers raise fish, often stocking their ponds with spawn obtained from the rivers and streams. In shallow waters, the fish are sometimes caught by means of a long, cone-shaped basket open at both ends.

Waiting out, the fisherman puts this basket down over a fish and then reaches through the opening in the top and catches the fish in his hands. Traps made of wicker Work are often built along the sides of the canals, and dip nets are also used. On the riverbanks, one often sees a large dip net so attached to a bamboo framework that it can be lowered and raised into and out of the water on the principle of the old-fashioned New England well sweep and bucket. In the creeks and canals of Kiang Su, the Chinese sometimes use birds to catch fish for them. These are cormorants. brought up in captivity and specially trained. They are taken out in a boat and then driven into the water where they dive for fish.

A ring around the cormorant's throat prevents him from swallowing his catch, while a string tied to his leg keeps him from flying away very far. At the end of the day, the birds are rewarded for their work with the share of the fish they have caught. Like the rivers, the canals of China are alive with boats and people. Near every city or town, the water is literally covered with craft, packed together so closely that it would seem none could ever get out. They form a community complete in itself, even to beggars and priests. Some of the boats are floating markets on which one can buy meats, poultry, and all kinds of food. While sails are sometimes used, many of the boats and barges are propelled by oars, or pushed along by poles thrust against the bottom or sides of the waterways.

The principal motive power is usually furnished by women. On the back of each is usually a baby, while other children are playing about, always within six inches or so of drowning. If you look closely, you will see that each child has a piece of clothesline tied about its middle. It's shoulders and arms, or even its neck. The lines are short enough to keep the child above the water if it should fall overboard, while as an added precaution, a life preserver in the form of Many of the boats on the rivers are covered with rude roofs of bamboo matting and are in fact houseboats. The front of which is devoted to cargo, and the rear to the quarters in which the families sleep and live. The cooking is done over a fire in a little stove or box at the stern.

In such limited space, grown-ups, babies, children, dogs, cats, singing birds and chickens all live together, and all seem quite happy in the midst of the filth, smells, and general confusion. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of Chinese are born, live, and die on the boats that swarm around the river cities, and that move up and down the inland waterways. Girls who are born on the water spend their childhood helping their parents, and then marry other boatmen on whose craft they devote the rest of their lives to bringing up children of their own, and so on, for countless generations.

13 13 - Soochow, the Athens of China 14:04

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. Suqiao, the Athens of China. Climb into a gin rickshaw with me and let us take a ride behind our human horses across Suqiao, a city built by the Chinese in the time of Confucius, 500 years before Christ was born. It had its parks and canals when Nebuchadnezzar was eating grass in the gardens of Babylon. and had been a commercial center for two thousand years when the first Yankee traders did business in Boston. In one of its temples is an ancient stone map, one thousand years old, on which the streets and temple sites of this city are shown to be practically the same as those of today. Si Chow, like Washington, was built to order. The king who founded it depopulated three large towns in order to people his new capital.

Ever since then, it has been a city of note, a center of trade, the chief silk market of the country, and the home of so many authors and scholars that it is said to have been the Athens of China. The people themselves have always been extremely proud of their city, and have a saying, Above is heaven, below are Hangchao and Suchao. Suchao has long been a residential city. Here dwelt kings and their courts, and here came wealthy men from other parts of China to enjoy their riches in congenial surroundings. Many of them built gardens costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, some of which can still be seen today. Others piled up fortunes on the profits of the silk industry or from rents from their rice-lands.

Su Chow is two hours by train from Shanghai. In the midst of a lake region known as the garden spot of all China, to the east there are nearly 100 lakes. To the west is a range of mountains beyond which is the Great Lake, an inland sea 60 miles across. The city is located on the Grand Canal, and is also crisscrossed by 12 other canals that intersect one another at right angles every quarter of a mile. These lead out to hundreds of towns and villages, in the surrounding country. Within a radius of 30 miles are more than 100 market towns and no less than 1,000 villages, containing in all about 5 million people, or nearly as many as live in the state of Ohio. As for Sioux Chow itself, estimates of its population vary all the way from 400,000 to 1 million people.

It is difficult to judge its size, For the city has long since outgrown the Great Wall, 12 miles in circumference built centuries ago to defend it. This wall is 30 or 40 feet high and crenellated along the top so as to leave spaces for the bowmen and the gunmen of old to shoot down upon attacking forces. A wide moat surrounds it, and in some places the city proper is entered by water gates as well as by land gates. In bygone days, People entering Sioux Chow by one of the canals had to put toll money into a bag swung down from above on a pole before the water gates would be open to let them in. As the rickshaw boys pull us through the streets of Sioux Chow on the dead run, we pass many fine houses and gardens shut off from the street by black and white walls.

We cross canal after canal over some of the 200 bridges of this city. all of them high and arched so that boats can pass under them. Along these canals, the buildings rise up out of the water like those of Venice, and on some of the smaller ones, the houses on opposite sides are connected with each other by planks extending from window to window. The streets of Souchao, with the exception of some on the outskirts of the city, are not so wide as the sidewalks of Broadway. I am told that all were originally eight feet in width, but that they have been narrowed by the merchants building their shops farther and farther out into the thoroughfares. Many of them are now so narrow that two rickshaws cannot pass.

Even one vehicle going through is enough to crowd the people to the walls. The business activity in these streets is beyond conception. You may have seen ant-hills in which the insects have divided the structures they have created Into apartment houses, with passages running this way and that. Suchao reminds me of them. We go through street after street lined with cell-like stores, in each of which some kind of business is going on. Most of these cells are factories as well as stores. Goods made in tiny shops at the front or at the back are finished almost while you wait. Here we see blacksmith shops and foundries where Chinese boys and men are working in iron. And there a shop where jewelry is being made.

Next is the establishment of a lumber merchant, whose coolies are sawing logs into boards with cross-cut saws pulled back and forth. Adjoining it, a number of men are making silk embroidery engraved on hand machines, producing trimmings for the finest of silk gowns. Suchow is noted for its manufactures of silk, jade, and carved work. And for a few years, it was especially busy making mahjong sets for Americans. As we go on through the larger streets of Suzhou, we pass bazaar after bazaar that are veritable museums filled with beautiful goods. Before each shop hang signs of Chinese characters, which, painted in the brightest of hues and decorated with gold, form a waving maze of color. Beneath them is a constantly moving mass of humanity.

filling the street from wall to wall. Let us stop a minute and watch the people. Moving along in front of us are men, women, and children, clad in the many costumes of the various levels of Chinese society. There are babies on the backs of their mothers, and little boys with their hair standing out all over their heads, in pigtails, each tied with a ribbon. There are laborers in blue gowns, or half-naked, carrying great burdens hung on the ends of poles, that rest across their shoulders. Now and then comes a donkey, or pony laden with goods, a man pushing a wheelbarrow, or again some rich man or woman carried in a sedan chair by tall, burly coolies. Here also is the ubiquitous slop carrier with his two buckets.

Su Chow has no sewers, and all the refuse and garbage of this great city is collected and carried away in buckets. Going on, we come to the city temple, a huge building in the heart of the city. Standing in the midst of grounds that cover perhaps ten acres, it is surrounded by out-of-door stores and shops that give it the appearance of a bazaar rather than a temple. So many kinds of business are carried on that we think of what our Lord said when he drove the money-changers out of the temple. You have changed the house of the Lord into a house of merchandise. Yet the Siu Chow people say that heaven is just like the city temple. About this temple are all sorts of toy stores. Porcelain of every variety is stacked up in the streets, awaiting customers, and men are selling pet birds in cages.

When a Chinese buys a bird, he carries it around with him on his finger, tied to his wrist with a string, so that if birdie tries to escape, it can be pulled back. Here also are barbers plying their trade, Pill vendors selling medicine, and native dentists, the sign of whose profession is a dinner plate filled with extracted teeth. These dentists will pull a tooth or put in a gold crown for you at a moment's notice. Many Chinese believe that toothache is caused by a worm in the tooth, and that an expert extractor can draw out the worm without paying to the patient. I am told that some of these native dentists Actually show the victim a wriggling worm and tell him it came from one of his molars.

This, of course, is the result of sleight of hand, but it brings in the money. In the temple itself is a statue of Buddha, as high as a four-story house, with statues of other gods grouped around it. On one of the platforms below these huge figures are more than 100 idols of eminent scholars and gods, standing or sitting. Candles are burning to show that the people have some veneration for the surroundings, and moving about are priests with shaved heads. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this temple is the art gallery that surrounds the great hall of the statues. Covering an acre or so, it is filled with wide corridors walled with Chinese paintings that hang from the ceilings, or are tacked to the woodwork and rolled up in scrolls ready for sale.

They include landscapes and figure paintings, some bizarre and some really good as examples of modern Chinese art. In another temple, we see pictures depicting all the punishments of the lower world. More famous than the temples of this city are its eight pagodas. The newest is 300 years old, while the Tiger Hill Pagoda was built 1,300 years ago. It must be feeling its age, for it leans to one side like the Tower of Pisa. Standing on a low hill commanding a fine view of the city, it is near the tomb of the king who founded Su Chao, and of whose funeral the Chinese say six hundred thousand men were employed to prepare the grave and attend the ceremonies. The largest of these structures, called the Great Pagoda, is octagonal in shape and the highest in all China.

From a stone foundation one hundred feet in diameter, it rises to a height nearly half that of the Washington Monument. This great tower is divided into nine stories, each with its balconies and its niches, in which stone images have been set up. The outer walls, which are covered with carvings, are ten feet thick. Inside are other walls that extend up to the top of the tower, thus making a pagoda within a pagoda. In the space between the two are the steps by which one climbs up from story to story. In contrast with these remains of the old Tzu-Ciao, I notice here many evidences of the new era in China. The Jin rickshaws, for instance, have rubber-cushioned tires, nickel-plated lamps, and bells to clear the way.

Many of them use old-style automobile horns worked by rubber bulbs, and the din of their honk-honking is so great that it makes me think of a barnyard of human fowl, each crowing or clucking One of the most striking evidences of the new China is the use of electricity. The god of lightning has made his way into every large city, and narrow streets that once were dark at sunset are now bright until midnight. The business section of Suzhou is now perfectly lighted, and industry and trade go on everywhere long after sunset. The people spinning and weaving, hammering and sawing, Making embroideries or cutting jade far into the night. Everyone seems to be working overtime to meet the commercial needs of the new China.

Even the people are far different from those of the old Tzu Chow. The cutting off of the queues having made perhaps the greatest change in their appearance. In my previous visits to China, every man I saw had his head shaved, as bare as a pumpkin, except in one spot. from which his pigtail fell down to his knees, sometimes pieced out with false hair or braid. Back in the interior, many of the older men still cling to these cues, but in the treaty ports and large cities, one now seldom sees them. The average man in China today has a thick thatch of black hair combed up from his forehead and standing out all over the scalp. The custom of wearing cues did not originate with the Chinese. but was imposed upon them by their Manchu conquerors as a sign of submission.

When all cues were ordered cut off at the time of the overthrow of the empire and the setting up of a republic, most of the men cheerfully parted with their long hair. In some towns, officials stood at the gates, and every man lost his cue as he passed through. There were lively times, however, when it came to handling the objectors. Some of the university students were even forbidden. by their parents to come home after they had sliced off their cues, and I have heard of a young man who, before going to call on his grandmother, always had a false cue fashioned on his head so that she might not notice the absence of the original. Another tremendous factor in the changes taking place in Siu Chao is the new system of education.

On the outskirts of the city is Siu Chao University. One of the chief missionary educational institutions in all China. It has students from every part of the Republic, and especially from the province of Jiangsu. The university has fine buildings and a large campus and athletic grounds, and it has done remarkable work in making Suchao a center from which Western learning is being spread throughout the country.

14 14 - The World's Oldest Poultry Farmers 13:35

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. Read by Betty B. The World's Oldest Poultry Farmers. In coming to Su Chao from Shanghai, I have seen something of one of the great poultry-raising districts of China. In the United States, we think of the American hen as one of our oldest institutions, but she is a mere chick in comparison with her cousin in China. The Chinese hen was on the job before the pyramids were built, and she has been working regularly through the thousands of years ever since. Archaeologists have found evidence that the Chinese had domesticated the ox, the pig, and the sheep as far back as 8000 BC, and I doubt not also that the wives of those days cooked an occasional egg for their lord and masters.

These people are the chief fowl raisers in the world, poultry holding practically the same place in the Chinese gastronomy that beef does in the American. In the country districts, every family has a few hens, usually living in the same house with the people, and in the markets of every Chinese city, one may purchase the finest of fowls, alive, freshly killed, or dried. Dried chickens, ducks, and geese are as common here as dried beef in America. They are split, cleaned, dried in the sun, pressed, and salted, and as seen hung up in the markets for sale, they are as flat as a board, and of the same rich yellow color as the complexion of the almond-eyed merchant who sells them. In many of the cities there are duck and chicken peddlers who go about the streets with two big loose-meshed baskets, Hanging from the ends of a pole carried across their shoulders.

In the top of each basket is a hole just large enough to permit of a duck or chicken being squeezed through it. Once inside, the fowls find a foothold as best they can on the bottom of the basket and stick their heads out through the meshes. The Chinese have many curious customs in connection with the raising of poultry. They consider chickens with short feathers the best. and believed that the hens that do the least cackling are the most prolific layers. To make ducks lay, they pull feathers from their wings and tails, or else starve them for several days, and then let them eat their fill. To fatten fowls, they give them daily a dose of a paste of flour mixed with oil. They claim that they can change the plumage of their birds by feeding them certain things, and that they can produce dwarf chickens By giving the chicks opium.

As a cure for pip and similar afflictions, they bleed the fowls under the left wing. Another common belief here is that sitting on the ground retards the growth of geese, which are made to roost at night upon wicker shelves. To save their fowls from being caught by the hawks, the Chinese have also many ingenious devices. In North China, The pigeons wear tail whistles that make a whirring noise as the birds fly through the air, thus frightening away the hawks. The goose herder protects his charges in much the same way, having a sort of bamboo whistle fastened to the end of a rope that he swings around his head from time to time to scare away any bird of prey that may be hovering near. Duck raising is even more of a specialty in China than chicken breeding.

In the Lake Districts, flocks of them are often driven from pond to pond to feed, herded by a man or a woman carrying a long bamboo pole. The driver plans his trip so that he and his flock will arrive at some large town by the time the birds are ready for market. In other regions, the ducks are raised on boats, and at Canton, I saw craft on which lived as many as 2,000 birds. These duck herders row or scull their boats along the low banks of the canals and streams, stopping from time to time to let the ducks feed upon the marshy lands. The birds march off the boats in single file and rush about, poking their bills into the mud for worms and shellfish. They feed greedily until their owner blows a whistle when they make a dash for the boat.

As the last one frantically waddles aboard, he is assisted by a smart slap from the man who stands at the end of the gangplank with a stick in his hand. The ducks quickly learn that the tail-ender is sure of a whipping, and to avoid it, each runs like mad for the boat. The duck herder gets his birds when they are half grown from farmers who buy them from big central hatching establishments. There are eight of these hatcheries here in Tzu Chow. And yesterday I visited one that was in operation hundreds of years before the United States even heard of an incubator. It is now hatching more than three million chickens, ducklings, and goslings every year. Entering the hatchery, I found myself in a room with a dirt floor, covered with baskets as big around as a cartwheel, in each of which were more than a hundred newly hatched chicks.

Near them were other huge baskets filled with duck eggs and goose eggs ready for hatching, and as I watched, more baskets of eggs were brought in. The chicken merchants tested each one before buying, candling them with the rays of the sun that came through little holes in the brick wall of the house. Leaving this room, I entered the hatchery, which consists of clay ovens shaped like old-fashioned beehives. Each had a fireplace in the bottom and a sort of padded basketwork cap on top. A burly Chinese, bare to the waist, lifted up one of the caps, and looking inside, I saw two or three layers of baskets the size of the ones holding the chicks. Each contained between one and two hundred eggs. As I watched, a workman lighted a fire in another oven.

For fuel, he had only a bundle of rice straw Worth perhaps one or two cents, yet this was enough to warm the oven for the ten days the eggs were to remain in it. During this period they are turned over every day, and at the end of it are taken out and put upon racks overhead or into deep baskets. The baskets used are of closely woven straw lined with paper, and each layer of eggs is covered with a cloth to keep them warm. In other words, These Chinese incubators are based on the principle of the fireless cooker, the eggs being first warmed in the ovens and then packed so that they will not lose any of their heat. Watching the eggs is a work requiring infinite care. Usually the workmen sleep in the same room with them or in one adjoining, and someone is on duty at every hour both day and night.

Although it is necessary that the eggs be kept at just the right warmth, No thermometers are used. Instead, a worker tests their temperature by thrusting them one by one against his eye and holding each there a second or two. He becomes so expert that as the egg touches his eyelid, he can tell immediately whether it is too warm, too cool, or of just the right temperature. In another room, I saw a space about 20 feet square covered with eggs. Out of which goslings, ducklings, and chicks were poking their heads. The manager told me that he had no trouble in selling all he could hatch, and that the chicks are ready for sale as soon as they are dry. I wish I could take one of our helpful American hens, or even a rooster, through a factory I visited on the banks of the Wangpu River when I was in Shanghai.

I ventured that the hen would be clucking and the rooster crowing with indignation. For weeks to come. One day's output of that factory represented more than one million eggs, which were being dried or frozen for use abroad. Although for centuries the Chinese have had many ways of preparing eggs for the market, it remained for Americans to come here and establish the business of freezing and drying eggs by the million and shipping them all over the world. This particular plan is a striking example of American sanitation and cleanliness. Of the nine hundred workers in this factory, everyone who handles an egg has to take a shower or tub bath every day. Four hundred of them are girls, each of whom has to keep her nails manicured down to the quick.

She is inspected by a physician when she comes to work, and has to put on a long white gown, that reaches from her head to her feet, and a cap that covers every lock of hair. At first I rather doubted the truth of the manager's statement about the manicuring of the nails, and so he took me into a room where two hundred girls were breaking eggs and separating the yolks from the whites. They sat at long tables with knife-blades fixed horizontally before them, and broke each egg without touching its contents. The manager asked me to point out any table at random, and when I did so, he had the fifteen girls at it come before me, one by one, and hold up their hands. His statement had been quite true.

Their nails were absolutely immaculate. The girls, evidently thinking I was a doctor, making an inspection, also opened their mouths wide and put out their tongues, that I may gaze down their throats. The eggs arrive at the factory, From the country for hundreds of miles around, coming in huge baskets, each of which holds three or four bushels, and contains perhaps 1,000 eggs. When I inquired why cases were not used to prevent breakage, I was told that at the present prices of eggs, it is cheaper to stand the loss of the few smashed in transit. From the baskets, the eggs are rolled out on endless belts and carried by machinery to the candling room. Next, they are open and the whites separated from the yolks, each manicured maiden handling about 5,000 a day.

Some of this liquid egg mixture goes to the freezing rooms, but the greater part of it is dried. The yolks are churned by machinery until they are thoroughly mixed and then poured out upon rollers on which they are dried by blasts of hot air. When every bit of moisture has evaporated, the dried yolk is scraped off the rollers in flakes and packed in tin boxes of 125 pounds each for shipment abroad. The whites are churned in large fats, allowed to stand for several days, and then dried by hot air. Both these products are sold chiefly to bakers and candy makers who use them in place of fresh eggs. The albumen from the whites It is used also in making medicines, patent foods, hair and skin lotions, and even in printing cotton cloth.

Dried eggs are produced also in native factories where the Chinese ideas of cleanliness prevail. However, these low-grade establishments are being driven out of business by the increasing demand of the buyers that the eggs be dried under the most sanitary conditions. As the export trade affords practically the only market, those who do not meet the standards of foreign countries must sooner or later find themselves without customers. The largest single market for the eggs is Great Britain, the United States taking only a little more than one-fourth of the total amount exported. For centuries, one of China's gastronomical delicacies has been its famous pickled or preserved eggs. They can be kept a long time, but, as a matter of fact, those put down in any one season are usually eaten within a year.

The impression among Americans that the Chinese eat eggs many years old is largely contrary to the facts. In the preparation of these eggs, each one is covered with a quarter-inch layer of paste made of soda, straw ashes, salt, and slaked lime. Wrapped in rice straw to prevent them from sticking together, the eggs are then put into a jar and sealed up for 30 days. At the end of that time, they are ready for eating. Their contents have coagulated and acquired a distinctive flavor. In some methods of pickling, the eggs turn as black as jet. In others, they are steeped in water in which the leaves of fir or cedar trees have been boiled. The Chinese preserve eggs also in salt water, regarding them as being especially good for medicinal purposes.

15 15 - In the City of Fine Silks 17:03

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. Read by Betty B. In the City of Fine Silks. Have you ever heard of Wuxi? I doubt it. Nevertheless, it is one of the most up-to-date cities of China. It has been in existence for 900 years, having been a thriving town back in the Middle Ages when London was but a village. Traders were doing business here when the southern portion of the Grand Canal was built, and as that waterway increased in importance, the city grew with it, spreading out over the country and erecting a great wall to keep out the robbers. As time went on, Wuxi became a commercial center for a vast region connected by a network of canals. Later, the railway from Shanghai to Nanking was built through it, and the old city took on a new lease of life.

That was only a comparatively few years ago, but since then, Wu-Tsi has far outgrown its walls. Its population has increased to 300,000 people, its trade is surpassing that of Souchao, and except for Shanghai, it has more industries than any other city in the lower Yangtze Valley. Seen from the train, it is a forest of smokestacks. Rising from the silk filleters, the cotton factories and the flour, rice, and bean oil mills. All these establishments use modern machinery and up-to-date methods. Indeed, the Chinese say that the chimney is the pen and the smoke the ink, with which the fame of Wuxi as an industrial city is being written across the sky. Wuxi has electric lights, wide streets, telephones, and new schools.

I understand that the women here are interested in schools, hospitals, and welfare work, and that they have done much to promote civic progress. The city has many of what the Chinese call modern buildings, including a large public library that contains nearly 200,000 volumes, all of which have been collected here since the founding of the Republic. Adjoining the library is a beautiful park, divided into separate gardens by hedges of boxwood. and containing a number of tea-houses built on the shores of a lake or along the canals. On the edge of the lake is a rugged, artificial hill of rocks, surmounted by a monument erected by one of the Wuxi Colleges to its alumni. Wuxi is situated in the heart of the chief silk region of China, having a warm, moist climate not unlike that of Louisiana, and especially suitable for raising worms And weaving silk.

Nearby, rising perhaps a thousand feet above the plain, is the beautiful mountain of Waisan, which the common people believe protects the silk industry. At the foot of the mountain gushes forth a stream of water said to be the second most famous spring under heaven, and not far away are lovely gardens and temples. On a certain day each year, thousands of women The wives and daughters of the silk farmers make pilgrimages to this mountain. Each woman brings with her thousands of silkworm eggs, which she carries in her bosom under her clothes, hatching them out with the heat of her body. She believes the spirits that inhabit the mountain will appreciate the worship shown in this visit to their shrine, and that the cocoons that are spun by the worms thus produced will be large and free from disease.

On a former trip to China, I spent a week traveling by houseboat through the canals of the Silk Regions. Day after day, I floated along on one waterway after another, through a country that was a vast orchard of mulberry trees. By getting off the boat and climbing to the top of one of the bridges that arched the canals at every few miles, I could see trees by the million, extending on and on until they met the horizon. They bordered the waterways for miles, and were broken only by occasional clumps of peach trees, or the taller shade trees of some farm village. On this trip I have come to Wu-Sih by train, riding through mulberry orchards all the way from Si Chau. In the United States, the mulberry tree grows about as large as an elm, but here most of them are trimmed down to a height of six feet.

and the orchards look more like thickets than forests. These mulberries are as knotty and gnarly as an olive tree and as ragged as the quince. They are planted in rows only a few feet apart and so carefully cultivated that not a weed is to be seen. Here and there, garden stuff is raised between them, but nothing is allowed to grow close to the trunks, and a continual fertilizing and hoeing go on the year around. This is the time for harvesting the leaves and feeding the silkworms, and the branches have been cut off the mulberry trees until little more than the stumps are left. Cutting does not injure the tree, and a sound one will live for a half-century, yielding as much as a hundred pounds of leaves annually.

New sprouts come out every year, and it is these sprouts that produce the fresh green leaves that are fed to the silkworms. In a mulberry orchard just outside Wu-Sit, I saw men, women, and boys cutting off the branches and carrying them away in baskets. Several of them sold their leaves at less than a cent a pound to a silkworm owner whose worms were feeding in his little one-story house nearby. Here, in shallow baskets about four feet in diameter, were thousands of silver-gray worms, not quite as long as my little finger, and about as big around as a lead pencil. They were eating the shredded mulberry leaves, and I could plainly hear the chop, chop, chop of their jaws as they devoured the green food.

As I watched, the wife of the owner gave me some leaves and asked me to feed the worms, saying that otherwise they would be offended and would not understand why I had come to see them. Nearly every farmer in this part of China raises some silkworms every year. In some places, the eggs laid by the silk moth are hatched by artificial heat in what might be called silkworm incubators, but more often they are put next to the breasts of the women and kept there until the worms come forth. These newly hatched worms are no larger than small black ants, but they have the most voracious appetites and have to be fed regularly from the day they are born. It is estimated that the worms produced from one ounce of eggs will consume a ton of leaves.

At intervals, they fall into a state of stupor and stop eating, but as all of them do not take these days of rest at the same time, the feeders must always be on duty. After each such sleep, the worms shed their old skins and then start busily eating again. During this period of eating and growing, the Chinese tend the silkworms as carefully as though they were babies, observing many superstitious precautions regarding them. The feeding is done in rooms kept at an even temperature, and loud talking is never permitted in the presence of the worms, any noise being supposedly offensive to them. Thunderstorms, in particular, are believed to frighten the little silk producers. Strong odors of all kinds are kept away from them, no visitors having even a suspicion of perfume being allowed near.

When the worms have had their fill of mulberry leaves, they are ready to start climbing the hill, the common expression used here to mean spinning the cocoon. The hill is a bunch of rice straw loosely tied in the center. It is stood upon end, and the worms are dropped down between the straws. Each worm climbs to the top of the bundle, and there begins to spin its silk thread, wrapping it around its body as it does so. It continues to spin for three or four days, at the end of which the cocoon of fuzzy silk is completed. A few of these cocoons are laid aside to supply moths to lay eggs for the next crop, but in the others, the worms are killed immediately. This is done by dropping the cocoons in boiling water or by baking them in ovens.

After that, they are dried and put in baskets to be taken to the markets, or else the silk fibers are unreeled and spun into thread in the homes of the Chinese, many of whom also weave the silk on hand looms. The dead worms inside the cocoons are eaten as a table delicacy by some of the Chinese. They are said to be particularly good in oil, but few of the people dare to serve them so. They say that the living worms have such a dislike for the odor of oil in any form that if they are eaten in this way, the next generation will take revenge on this offense to their ancestors by making poor silk. Wu Si produces the finest white silk in the world and has now 18 great silk fillagers or factories. The cocoons are unwound into the beautiful skeins of silvery yarn used in our silk mills.

I have visited several of these villagers, one of which lies on the banks of the Grand Canal, some distance outside the walls of the city. I went there by steam launch and entered it by steps leading up from the water. This establishment covers more than eight acres and consists of several buildings of modern construction, equipped with machinery of the latest type. I am told that the work often goes on for 14 hours a day, although the manager informed me that the regular schedule calls for only 11 hours. In this factory, I went through room after room in which cocoons were stored in large baskets or lay in great piles on the floor. Asking us to the value of one of these piles, containing perhaps 15 bushels, I was told that the silk in it was worth something like $600.

The manager said it was necessary to watch the employees to keep them from stealing the cocoons. Every man caught in theft is photographed, and enlarged prints of his picture are sent to all the other silk filmmakers as a warning to them in case he applies for a job. In other rooms, I saw the cocoons put into copper kettles to be soaked and steamed. The water, fed into the kettles by pipes, is boiling hot. and a thick steam always rises from it. With a scoop, a girl ladles up a score or more cocoons from a basket on the floor and puts them into the water. She then takes a brush of stiff bamboo and stirs them around rapidly so that any life in them is killed at once. The water softens the cocoons so that the ends of the fibers spun by the worm may be easily picked up and reeled off.

This work is done by little girls, some of whom did not reach to my waist. Many of them seem no larger than American girls of four, five, or six years, and there were hundreds working who were much under ten. Some look hardly old enough for kindergarten, much less for school. Yet there they were, toiling away through every hour of the sunlight, eleven hours a day, seven days in the week, and for more than eleven months of the year. Their only holidays come at New Year, when the factories all over China are closed for two weeks. Some of the little ones tending the kettles were bare to the waist, and clad only in trousers, stockings, and cloth shoes. All worked busily. Of the hundreds of children I saw, not one was loafing or dawdling.

The manager called my attention to the stools provided for them, none of which I saw occupied. And to the fact that the kettles of boiling water over which they were bending were so low that they could stir the cocoons without reaching up. He said that this made the work much easier, and that in some factories, the little girls had to work in front of kettles placed at a height convenient only for grown women. When I asked about wages, my guide told me that the women received 17 cents and upward a day, and the children 10 cents or more. This meant that the babies I saw were toiling for less than one cent an hour, in an atmosphere much like that of a washerwoman's kitchen when she is boiling clothes.

It was a striking example of the child labor situation that prevails all over China. After the cocoons are thoroughly soaked and steamed, they are divided into lots of five, six, or seven. The end of the silk on each cocoon is then fastened. to a reeling machine that twists the whole number into one strand, and so winds it that it comes out as yarn. The work of bringing the threads together so that they can be twisted into yarn is handled by women of 18 years or older. It requires great care and can be done well only by experienced hands. I understand that some of the silk filleters in China are doing what they can to better the condition of their workers. Another establishment that I visited called Sun Nei, which means for the better development of business, has a kindergarten for the children of the employees.

It has also a nursery where babies are kept so that their mothers may give them breast feedings during working hours. In this nursery, I saw a dozen yellow infants, each in a basket cradle on rockers. When a baby's mealtime comes around, one of the girls employed at the steam kettles is sent out to carry it to its mother. who stops work long enough to give it refreshment, after which it is taken back to the nursery. These modern fillagers of Wu-Si represent the latest development of a national industry begun 4,000 years ago. China gave silk to the world, the wife of the Emperor Huang Ti, who ruled about 2600 BC, having discovered that the filaments of the silk cocoon could be unwound and twisted into thread for weaving beautiful fabrics.

From that time on, China has been cultivating silk, and as recently as 50 years ago, was supplying half the total output of the world. Although silk continues to be one of the chief products of this country, the exports alone amounting annually to more than $100 million worth, Chinese silk has been superseded by the Japanese product in quantity and quality. Japan now furnishes 70% of the raw silk. The Chinese have risen to their present place in the silk world chiefly by making a careful study of the silkworm and the best methods of raising it. By studying its diseases and destroying the bad eggs and worms, they have greatly improved the standard quality and value of their cocoons and raw silks.

China, on the other hand, has been paying almost no attention to silkworm diseases, and the result is that much of its silk is of inferior quality. While at Shanghai, I met a representative of the American Silk Association, which is encouraging a movement for the improvement of Chinese silk. This association has been working through the new universities and schools, and is doing much for the industry. At Nanking University, for instance, It is raising silkworms in the bright sunlight, which is contrary to the old Chinese idea that they can be raised only in the dark, and it is introducing many changes in the methods of handling the eggs and cocoons. Several of the mission colleges now conduct courses in sericulture.

Some of the provinces also have established They are employing experts to teach the people the best methods of breeding the worms and handling the cocoons. China has vast areas adapted to raising mulberry trees and silkworms, and the more progressive people are putting forth efforts to regain for their country its former place in the silk trade of the world.

16 16 - Nanking, New and Old 18:00

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. Nanking, New and Old. In a luxurious car of the fast Shanghai Express, I have come to Nanking, the capital of Jiangsu Province, located almost 200 miles north from Shanghai on the south bank of the Yangtze River. It is one of the oldest cities in all China. And about it are wrapped the splendor and grandeur of the China of the past. Its name means southern capital, just as Peking means northern capital, and it had already been the seat of a kingdom seven times before the rulers of the Ming Dynasty made it the seat of the empire. They occupied it until 120 years later, when the third Ming Emperor, Yung Lo, left it for Peking. Even before the Ming Dynasty, Nanking had been a city of political importance for 800 years.

It was 600 years old when Christ was a baby, and was surrounded by walls that were more than 100 years old when Columbus, while seeking a short route to trade with the ancestors of the present-day Chinese, discovered America instead. In later years, Nanking was the scene of some of China's numerous rebellions, and political upheavals. Here, in 1657, the great pirate, Kuxinga, made an attempt to unseat the Manchus from the throne and restore the Ming Dynasty. He laid siege to the city for 20 days, only to have several thousand of his pirate followers massacred on the night of the 20th. Here, too, the Taipings had their capital for 11 years, and it was here that Dr. Sun Yat-sen took his oath of office as the first president of the Republic of China.

Nanking is famous also as the biggest walled city in all the world, although the city of today occupies only a small part of the enclosure within these walls. They go uphill and down over a rolling country, taking in small farms and market gardens, many of which stand upon the site of the Greater Nanking of the past. The distance across the enclosure From one wall to the other is more than eight miles, and there is room enough to accommodate double the present population of less than a half million. In the days of the Ming emperors, the city had more than twice as many people as it has today, and the land that is now farmed is sprinkled with archways that mark the sites of bridges in the old Nanking.

For the most part, the ancient city has crumbled away to dust. And in place of the grandeur of a thousand years ago are the modern improvements of the 20th century. When I arrived at Nanking, a Chinese captain with a squad of eight grinning, undisciplined soldiers halted me in the railroad station, demanded that I show the special passport necessary in traveling in interior China, and with much difficulty was dissuaded from examining my baggage in search of weapons. From the station, I went by motor car to my hotel just outside of the entrance gate of the city, driving first to the small commercial suburb of Siakuan, which lies immediately outside the walls surrounding Nanking on the side toward the river.

Here, most of the foreign business houses have their establishments, but foreigners are permitted only to reside and do business in Nanking proper. On the opposite, or north shore, of the Yangtze is Pukau, the southern terminus of the railroad from Tianjin, which is connected by a ferry service with the Shanghai-Nanking Railroad. Nanking is also a port for ocean steamers, and until the building of these two railroads, practically all the freight entering or leaving the city was handled by boats and barges on the Yangtze. In ancient times, Nanking was a city of great commercial importance, and during the years when our clipper ships were sailing the seven seas and leading the vessels of the world in trade with China, it sent to the United States a buff cotton cloth known as Nanking.

This cloth, which was later imitated by the cotton mills of New England, was very popular a generation or two ago, and made this corrupted name of Nanking as well known as any of our modern trademarks. But let me tell you of my ride through the Nanking of today. I engaged an American car, a Chinese chauffeur, and a footman, whose chief concern appeared to be to see that his passengers did not escape without tipping him. As we drove along, we narrowly missed several pedestrians, who seem here to be even more reckless than our jaywalkers at home. My guide explained that in China, There is a superstition that every person has a devil constantly following him, and that if he crosses before an automobile just in time to save himself from injury, the car will run over and kill the evil spirit.

As we pass through the principal gate to the city over a fine, macadamized road, I recall that in an earlier visit to Nanking, I rode from the river to the town on a donkey. which climbed up hill and down, half swimming in pools of water and wading in mud all the way. Beggars then lined the roadside near the gate, but today there were none to be seen, and everyone seemed to be working. We crossed bridges marking the intersection of former streets that have now become cultivated fields, and went between clumps of bamboo or patches of vegetables under cultivation, where rows of buildings once stood. Billboards displaying lurid posters have been erected here and there in the fields, most of them advertising, in both English and Chinese, a popular brand of American cigarettes.

Arriving at a more populated and busier section, I found wide streets with neatly uniformed policemen stationed at the busiest crossings. Here, the contrast between the old and the new China is to be seen on every hand. There are shops displaying Western clothing, straw hats, suits, shirts, and leather shoes, and others selling the native garments of China. Long gowns, richly embroidered silk trousers and jackets, and shoes of purple and blue cloth. The native barber who shaves the heads of his patrons out on the sidewalks competes with a modern barber shop nearby furnished with every up-to-date appliance. Farther along is a dentist's office. Fitted with the newest of equipment, while across the street an old medicine man is peddling his herbs, bear claws, and tiger's heads.

Noticing a crowd at a booth next to him, I edged my way through and found a man telling fortunes for two cents apiece. The people in the crowd presumably considered this the better and cheaper way of assuring themselves as to their health. Next, we came to an old Confucian temple. A barn-like structure in front, and in back of which are small flower gardens. As we approached it, I noticed a fire burning in an oven of mortar and clay, in which a young girl was placing a piece of paper covered with Chinese characters. Every temple of Confucius has one of these fires burning before it, and those who feed its flames with bits of writing do so to accumulate merit. Entering the temple, I was impressed by its simplicity.

Across the back are three large tablets, while extending around the sides of the room are seventy-two smaller ones, all of which bear inscriptions such as, Most Holy Teacher, Confucius, From the creation of man there is never one like him, without equal in heaven or on earth. In front of one of these tablets an old man was offering up prayers and burning incense. Coming to a tea-house farther on, We stopped for a rest and a drink, and then went on from the busy city of the present to see something of the Nanking that is passing away. When the Manchus became the ruling dynasty in China, they built here a Tartar city, enclosed in walls to separate it from the common herd of Nanking. These walls are now grass-grown in crumbling ruins, and in the area within them little remains of the wonders of ancient Chinese art and engineering that once were here.

Where the ancient warriors held court, there are still some wide streets paved with flags of granite as big as the top of a dining table, and worn smooth by the feet of generations of Chinese. There are several large bridges built of huge blocks put together in beautiful arches without the use of keystones. Fences made of stones mixed with broken tile of the imperial yellow glaze, pieces of dragon discs in green and red that once adorned the palaces of the city, and bits of shattered marble with which their interiors were decorated. Beside a pillar of what in all probability was once the palace of a prince, I saw lying the plastered coffin of a coolie, whose relatives were too poor to raise a mound above it.

Close by in the fields, blue-gowned men and women were digging in soil once trod by the feet of royalty alone. My guide finally led me into a tumble-down palace and showed me two marble stones streaked with reddish veins. These, said he, were a part of the floor of the emperor's palace. One of his nobles had abused the royal confidence by saying that which he should not have said, and straightaway the emperor had his tongue cut out. The blood from his mouth dropped upon the white marble and stained it, as you see. In the exact geographical center of Nanking is the Old Drum Tower, a large, red, two-story building with a tower on the top. The first tower on this spot was erected in 1092 AD, less than 30 years after William the Conqueror landed in England.

The present massive structure was built by the Emperor Hung Wu of the Ming Dynasty in preparation for a battle with rebels. He placed in it an enormous drum that served as a signal for his soldiers to march against the enemy. Near this tower is a temple in which is a huge bell made at the order of one of the Ming emperors. The story is told that all attempts to cast this bell were failures until the daughter of the worker making it had thrown herself into the molten metal. Another gruesome tale of Nanking relates how, when the Manchus besieged the city during the Taiping Rebellion, the wells of the city were choked with the bodies of women, who thus destroyed themselves rather than be captured by the men of the attacking army.

Near the drum tower is the North Star Hill, surmounted by a Taoist temple that is approached by a path worn smooth by the feet of countless worshippers of past generations. From here, one can obtain a view of the whole city and can see the distant hills, shaped like a dragon's back, that caused Chu Hung-wo, the founder of the Ming Dynasty, to build his capital here. Chu started life as a beggar, but he organized a rebellion that enabled him to conquer China. Under the dynasty he established were accomplished the greatest things the Chinese have ever done in architecture and public improvements. The dragon, you know, is the imperial animal of China and is supposed to bring luck. According to the ancient beliefs, a dragon can do anything.

It can make itself as large as an elephant or as small as a gnat, and can build up empires and throw down kings. Some years ago, I was in China just before an eclipse of the moon was to occur. The Peking Gazette at that time announced in all seriousness that on the night of the eclipse, the people should turn out and make a great noise so as to scare away the dragon, which would then be trying to swallow the moon. Well, when Chu saw the dragon shape of the Nanking Hills, he said, if I can build my capital on the The result was Nanking, which became, for a time, the greatest city of China. Probably the most famous of the ancient wonders of Nanking was the Porcelain Pagoda. The beautiful tower, built at a cost of more than three million dollars by Jung Lo, son of the first Ming emperor, in honor of his wife.

This tower was octagonal in form, with a base more than 100 feet in circumference, and rose to a height nearly half that of the Washington Monument. Doubtless you remember Longfellow's lines that have immortalized it. And yonder by Nanking, behold, The tower of porcelain, strange and old, uplifting to the astonished skies its ninefold painted balconies, with balustrade of twining leaves, and roofs of tile beneath whose eaves hang porcelain bells that all the time ring with a soft, melodious chime, while the whole fabric is ablaze with varied tints all fused in one, great mass of color, like a maze, of flowers illumined. By the sun. The Porcelain Pagoda was kept in good condition until about 75 years ago, when the leader of the Taiping Rebellion captured Nanking.

Conceiving the idea that this pagoda was causing him bad luck, he had it blown up. Its every brick has now disappeared, and the only remaining vestige of the once beautiful structure is the great bronze dome that crowned its top. This has been turned upside down. and set upon a foundation of marble. It must weigh several tons, and it is a marvel to me how the Chinese, with their crude mechanical contrivances, were able to place it in position on the top of the pagoda. 251 feet above the ground, where its gleaming surface could be seen for miles up and down the Yangtze Valley. From Nanking, I rode out into the country to see the tomb of the first of the Ming Emperors. Recalling, as I did so, the story of how Dr.

Sun Yat-sen, soon after he took office as the first president of China, came here to inform the spirit of the emperor that the Manchus had at last been forced from the throne that they had usurped from the Mings. This mausoleum must have been one of the most magnificent ever made by man. The approach to it is by an avenue more than a mile long, which throughout its entire length commands a fine view of the city. At its beginning is a tower in which squats a turtle, the Chinese emblem of longevity, carved out of black marble and so big it would fill a good-sized room. A marble tablet upon the back of the turtle commemorates the greatness of the emperor, who lies buried at the other end of the funeral highway.

Between the tower and the tomb, the avenue is lined with gigantic marble elephants. Camels, lions, and tigers, most of which still stand facing one another in solemn grandeur in what is now an open field. The broad backs of the elephants are covered with stones, the people believing that the man who can throw a stone to the back of one of them so that it will remain there will have good luck. Guarding this avenue also are giant warriors, each about 12 feet tall, and each, like the animals, carved from a single block of marble. As I stood beside one of these huge figures and reached upward, the tips of my fingers just touched his elbow. As there is no such marble in this region, the stone for these statues must have been brought to Nanking from far in the interior.

The figures of both animals and men are well executed, and some of the carving upon them is beautifully done. One of the stone horses has been upset and lies half buried in a ditch. And others are somewhat broken and chipped, but most of them are as perfect today as when they were first set up here more than 500 years ago. The Emperor's tomb, however, is in ruins. There was originally, I judge, a temple on the top of the mausoleum. The four thick walls of some such building still stand, reminding me of the grass-grown, moss-covered ruins of Europe. I ate my lunch within them, sitting on a stone with my feet among the blue flowers. That were springing out of the crevices between the flags of the grass-grown floor.

As I did so, I could look out through one of the great arched doorways upon the thousands of grave mounds of the Nan King of today, while the cries of a poorly clad woman who sat and wailed at one of them floated up to my ears. It was the mourning of a peasant for her dead, and I again realized that of all things, death alone is king, ruling from age to age. And with his mighty hand making all men of one size.

17 17 - The New China Goes to School 17:12

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. The New China Goes to School Here in Nanking, I am in one of the intellectual centers of both the Old and the New China. The city has been important in the educational history of the country since the days of the Ming Dynasty, which inaugurated the famous civil service of China. Under that system, All official positions were filled only through scholastic examinations, held yearly in the chief cities of the empire. During a former visit I made to Nanking, there were 10,000 students here, taking such examinations in the vast halls built for that purpose. These great structures were divided into tiny stalls, no larger than a modern telephone booth.

Yet in each little cell, a student was required to stay constantly for three days and nights. Guards were stationed outside to see that he spoke to no one during this period, and food was passed in through a slit in the door. After the examinations were over, it was not at all unusual to find that many a luckless candidate for academic honors had died in his cell. Today, the vast structure containing these stalls is entirely deserted and has been partly torn down. Nanking now has as modern educational facilities as any city in China, including a number of schools and colleges established by American missionaries. The largest and most interesting of them is the University of Nanking, which is maintained jointly by four Protestant denominations in the United States.

It is situated in Nanking proper, not far from the ancient drum tower, and has an 80-acre campus About which are scattered modern dormitories, laboratories, lecture halls, and houses for the faculty. The latter include both Americans and Chinese, the Native instructors being, for the most part, men and women who have studied either in the United States or at some American institution in China. The university departments include colleges of arts, sciences, and business education, nursing and medical schools, Schools for training missionaries and teachers, and a model school with kindergarten, primary, and grade departments. In addition, there are special language schools, a summer school, and schools offering short courses in sericulture, agriculture, and forestry.

Another interesting feature of the University of Nanking is the Hospital for the Care of Foreign Patients Only. It is thoroughly modern, with a staff of highly competent American physicians, and nurses, and an equipment that makes it capable of rendering service as complete and up-to-date as that of the best of similar institutions in the United States. Besides providing hospital facilities for Americans and other foreigners in this part of China, it serves as a training school for Chinese physicians and nurses, and is the directing center of a vast amount of invaluable work in hygiene, sanitation, and medical relief in the Nanking District. The Nanking University is typical of the higher institutions of learning that are going down into history as pioneers in introducing modern education into China.

Although the Chinese have the oldest spoken language on earth, they are for the most part a nation of illiterates. Eight out of every ten people have never attended a school of any kind and cannot read or write their own names. This fact is not so surprising, however, when one realizes that the spoken and the written languages of China are as unlike as English and French, and that a formidable task is involved in learning to read and write the simplest vocabulary. The Chinese language as it has existed through the ages has no alphabet like ours, but is composed of thousands of separate characters. It is ideographic, that is, written in words and phrases, Rather than letters and syllables. We consider a man a scholar if he is master of 5,000 words of Shakespeare or the Bible.

But in China, that number of characters is regarded only as the minimum that the educated man must know. As for a Chinese scholar, he must be familiar with fully 40,000 characters, an accomplishment that often takes a lifetime to achieve. The Imperial Dictionary of Kanghai The spoken language of China, with the different meanings of words conveyed by slight variations of intonation, is difficult enough to learn, yet it is child's play compared to the written one. Chinese characters are really pictures. And in translating or reading them, a single word cannot be considered by itself, but rather an association with the characters that stand next to it. For instance, the symbol for man originally showed two legs, a head, and outstretched arms.

In the evolution of the printed language, this has been abbreviated to the two strokes indicating only the legs. This symbol forms the basis for hundreds of Chinese characters. Combined with four strokes indicating a fenced area, it means farmer. Inside a box, it is prisoner, and so on. It is the same with the word field. Combined with the word picture for mouth, it signifies happiness, which one writer explains by saying that a vision of a man with his mouth in close proximity to a rice field is all satisfying to the hungry celestial. In the same way, A mouth in proximity to a door means beggar. A door with a bar across it indicates lock, and an ear at a door is to listen. The characters derived from the symbol for woman are likewise numerous and often amusing.

Wife, for instance, is a combination of woman and broom, and good of woman and son, the latter symbolizing the Chinese belief that a boy-baby represents woman's highest achievement in life. On the other hand, two women together mean quarrel, and three of them nothing other than gossip. Home is appropriately signified by a pig under a roof, and marriage is evolved by adding the symbol for woman thereto. The education of the student of the past consisted chiefly of learning to read Chinese history and classic literature, and to recite from memory the sayings of Confucius and Mencius, the two great Chinese philosophers. There were no science, no geography, no history of other nations, and only the rudiments of mathematics.

There were no schools or colleges, candidates for official and military positions, having been selected by the examinations I have already mentioned. It was the missionaries who laid the foundations of Western education in China, both through their own schools at first and later by their teaching in the government schools. The first of the latter were established only after the enforced opening of the treaty ports. Obliged to come in contact with the foreigners, the Empire realized the necessity of preparing its people to do business with them. The wars and uprisings of the decade from 1895 to 1905 brought this realization even more forcibly to the Chinese. It was in 1898 that the death knell of the examination halls was sounded.

When the young emperor issued an edict providing for teaching Western learning. A half dozen years later, the old Empress Dowager, who had first opposed such measures, became their ardent advocate. She ordered that a primary school be opened in every village, a grammar school in every walled city, and a college and normal school in every province. With the founding of the republic, seven years later, a Ministry of Education was established. New textbooks were prepared, and manual training was introduced. Even during the chaotic political and economic conditions of recent years, the educational movements have continued to make progress. The school system is still more complete on paper than in its actual existence, and some foreigners say that the tendency is to encourage too many young Chinese to seek white-collar jobs.

Boys and girls are now allowed to study together. They are trained also in athletics, although it was with difficulty that these people were persuaded to engage in sports. The old-type Chinese scholar prided himself upon his green goggles, his long fingernails, his attenuated form, and his hollow chest, and looked upon any strenuous activity as coolies work. The story is told that the first tennis game played in China brought from the native onlookers Exclamations of puzzled astonishment over the foreigners, violent cavortings, and the inquiry, can you not hire coolies to do this for you? Today, there are Boy Scout and YMCA organizations in many of the Treaty Port cities of China. The Chinese students are now as enthusiastic over football and baseball as our own college undergraduates.

While the ultramodern Chinese girl plays tennis and basketball, in abbreviated sports attire. The more progressive Chinese now have an entirely different attitude toward Western education from what they had 30 or 40 years ago, when the first Chinese students sent to the United States were thrown into jail upon their return here because of the foreign taint they were supposed to have acquired. When the United States returned 11 million dollars of the boxer indemnity, To be used for the education of the Chinese abroad, the Peking government founded a school for preparing students to enter our colleges, and today many Chinese young men and women are studying in the United States. The chief purpose of the men students is to prepare themselves for a part in the social, political, and industrial development of China.

And where formerly they worked only to acquire a degree, they now study the applied sciences and technical and business organization. They take practical work in industrial plants, business offices, hospitals, and agricultural experiment stations. Even large numbers are studying these subjects in the colleges and universities of China itself, many of which are now offering courses much the same as those taught in our higher educational institutions. Within the last few years, a movement has sprung up in China. That is revolutionizing the language and creating a simplified written form that the masses of people can more easily learn. This has resulted in the selection of 1,000 of the most common Chinese words, and the representation of them by 1,000 characters, which are now being taught in the schools.

These characters were selected by two Chinese scholars, who, unknown to each other, had been working out simplified textbooks For adult illiterates, one was T.E. Tong, vice president of the Shanghai Baptist College, and the other, James Yen, a graduate of Yale and one of the field secretaries sent by the International Committee of the YMCA to work among the Chinese laborers in France during the World War. Tong had prepared textbooks covering such subjects as geography, letter writing, citizenship, and health. He had published books also on current events, farming, the nursery, the education of children, and a monthly magazine containing news and topics of human interest. All these were in only six hundred characters.

At the same time, without any knowledge of what Tong was doing, Yen made up a thousand-character vocabulary based on the words used most by the coolies in France, and published a set of three simple readers. When these two Chinese learned of the similarity of their efforts, they decided to collaborate. Each of them had, to a large extent, selected the same words, and it was on the basis of their additional study that the final thousand were chosen. The effect of this thousand-character movement will undoubtedly result in giving the Chinese not a new language, but a simplification of the old language in which newspapers and books will be published, and which everyone will be able to read. In the meantime, a new Chinese alphabet also has been devised.

The various sounds of the language are represented by 39 symbols, which are now being taught in the schools. This phonetic alphabet promises to do much toward founding a national language that will be understood by every Chinese. Since modern schools have been established throughout the country, China has begun to publish its own textbooks, and two firms in Shanghai The largest and oldest company, which I have visited upon two different trips to China, is the Commercial Press. It employs 4,000 people and has buildings that cover more than 15 acres. These include a clubhouse and a moving picture theater for the entertainment of the employees, and a public library with thousands of volumes printed in Chinese, English, French, German, and Russian.

The commercial press has departments for making educational toys, picture puzzle maps of China, and models of flowers and animals. In one room, I saw snakes, frogs, and all sorts of insects preserved in alcohol in glass bottles to be sent out to the schools as biological specimens. It has also sections devoted to printing, picture making, and bookbinding, and one for manufacturing printing presses in casting type. Both of which are shipped all over China. It even makes moving picture films for the Chinese theaters. The mechanical equipment of the commercial press is equal to that of our modern printing plants. The largest branch of the business, of course, is printing books, both in Chinese and in English.

In many of the departments, I found women at work and learned that 800 of them are employed. They feed the stitching and binding machines, perform all sorts of clerical duties, correct manuscripts, read proof, and serve on the editorial staff. A number of Chinese women are translating books from other languages, and some are writing school books themselves. In addition to the new Chinese books that are published here, the commercial press is translating and printing many American and English works, and without so much as a buy-your-leave to the authors. China has no copyright laws, although it has signed a treaty that is supposed to protect American authors to a certain extent. For the most part, however, this is disregarded, and as I went through the color printing rooms, I saw coming hot from the press sheets containing the text and illustrations of one of my own books around the world with the children.

When I went through this establishment 15 years ago, I found copies of my other school books translated into Chinese, and even received an offer from the manager to write a geographical reader, especially for the Chinese schools. The New China now has its up-to-date newspapers as well as its books. When I was first here, the Fourth Estate was in its infancy, and I saw still being circulated the old Peking Gazette. The handwritten news bulletin edited by the emperor himself. The first newspaper in the modern sense was established in 1872, but it was not until after the revolution of 1911 that everyone who could read was reached by the news of the country. I say news with reservations, as nearly everything printed was colored by political views.

Even today, most of the Chinese newspapers are largely subsidized by political parties or leaders, although it has been found that the independent ones that specialize in human interest news rather than politics achieve the largest circulations. Besides the Chinese newspapers, which today include many trade journals, there are several published in English, Japanese, and French, which have a large circulation among the educated Chinese.

18 18 - Up the Yang-tse to Hankow 17:36

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. Up the Yangtze to Henkau. Today I write from Henkau, the Chicago of China, which lies 600 miles up the Yangtze. I have just come up that river by steamer from Nanking, and on a former trip to China made the trip here by water all the way from its mouth. The Yangtze-Kiang, as the Chinese call it, is one of the great rivers of the world. Rising in the mountains of Tibet, three miles above the level of the sea, it flows for 3,200 miles before it empties into the Pacific, near Shanghai. If it could be laid down upon the United States with its mouth at New York, Han-Kal would lie west of Cleveland, and the mighty waterway would be navigable for small steam vessels as far as Denver.

The Basin of the Yangtze Although only a little more than half as large as that of the Mississippi and the Missouri together, contains nearly twice as many people as live in the United States, and absorbs almost 60 percent of all the foreign trade of China. The river is the jugular vein of China. For thousands of years, it has been the chief artery of trade and commerce, and the main highway by which foreigners have penetrated to the interior of the country. Although shorter than the Nile or the Mississippi, the Yangtze has a greater flow of water than either, and carries with it a tremendous volume of silt. In sailing along its course, I could see in its banks the strata of soil deposited from year to year.

At some point, these layers of sediment were between one and two feet thick. It is estimated that this river each year brings down enough silt from the Tibetan plateau, and the plains of Sichuan to build an island one mile square and ninety feet deep. Chungming Island, which is 32 miles long and about 10 miles wide, has been built up in this way during comparatively modern times, and there are other islands at the mouth of the river that have grown up within the memory of men living today. The delta now extends 20 miles beyond Shanghai, which was once on the seashore at the mouth of the river. The Yangtze not only has built up a vast delta plain, but it also at times cuts it away. Changes in its course have been frequent, with the result that for hundreds of miles its banks are fortified with great walls and dikes.

In some places I saw several earthen ridges, one behind the other, marking successive endeavors to keep the river in its course and prevent it from spreading over the plain. and tearing great gashes in the farmlands. Several times I saw graveyards that had been eaten into by the river, and noticed the gaping holes left where coffins had been washed out. At one point I saw a casket extending halfway out of the bank, within a foot of the water. In coming here from Nanking, I traveled on a steamer as modern as any operated on the rivers of the United States. All the way from its mouth to Henkau, The Yangtze is dotted with vessels, ranging from the smallest and crudest Chinese riverboats to great passenger and freight ships.

Among the craft I observed were junks that patrol the river and, after severe storms, pick up sandpans and fishing boats that have met with accidents. They also search the river for the corpse that are always floating in it, especially in times of famine and flood. These craft really form a sort of river police. and now and then capture a smuggler or a pirate. We passed many walled cities where pagodas and temples rose above the ridge-shaped roofs of the houses. The whole lower Yangtze Valley is an enormous granary and workshop in which nearly every foot of land averages two or three crops a year, and where industries supporting hundreds of thousands of people are carried on. I marveled at the size of the towns we passed.

One of them was An Qing, noted for one of the finest pagodas in the Yangtze Valley. It was more than once besieged in the wars of the past, and about seventy-five years ago, it is said that food became so scarce that human flesh was sold in the markets for its weight in silver. As An Qing is not a treaty port, our steamer did not stop there, but we did put in at Kew Kiang, a city farther up the river, and only one hundred and forty-two miles below Han Kao. In the past, it was a center of Buddhism, but is now the location of the first girls' school to be established in central China. Another famous educational institution in this part of the country is Yale in China, established at Shang-Sha, the capital and commercial center of the rich Hunan Province.

At that city, Yale University is trying to provide for the Chinese at home all the essentials of Western education, and there is also a native college 700 years old. Shang-Shia is noted for its brass and pewter, for its embroidery The Yangtze above Hangkau is even more interesting than below it. Steamers from Shanghai regularly go up to Yichang, which is nearly 400 miles farther inland, although it is only 133 feet above sea level. Between that point and Chongqing, however, the level of the river rises 500 feet in about 400 miles. In this part of its course, the Yangtze flows through a series of gorges formed by walls of rock rising almost straight up out of the river. Sometimes to a height of 2,000 feet.

One of them, the Wushan Gorge, is nearly 30 miles long. In the gorges are a succession of rapids, including 13 large ones and more than 70 smaller ones that make the navigation of the upper Yangtze extremely dangerous. The scenery through the gorges is magnificent, almost beyond description, and the trip up this part of the river is one of the most interesting in all the world. For centuries, these cataracts were navigated only by native junks. Such vessels are operated by sails and oars, but in going upstream through the rapids, they must be pulled by men on shore. The downstream voyage is easier, of course, but wrecks have always been so numerous as to cause excessively high freight rates. In the last thirty years, the navigation of the gorges to Chung King has been accomplished by steam vessels.

which make the upstream voyage in two or three days instead of the month or so required by the junks. While the risks in this service are great, the profits are proportionately large, and often a vessel pays for itself with the proceeds of a few trips to Chung King and return. On both steamers and junks, the upriver rates are about three times as much as for the downriver passage. The rocks and rapids are not the only dangers to be faced in this section of the Yangtze. The junkmen, jealous at the loss of their monopoly of the upper river transport, have frequently attempted to interfere with the passage of the steam vessels, and in one case killed the captain of a British riverboat. Both the United States and Great Britain now have among their naval vessels on the Yangtze light gunboats capable of making the trip to Chongqing during high water.

Thus maintaining a patrol for the protection of foreigners. Han Kao might be called the New York as well as the Chicago of China, for here are three cities in somewhat the same relation as are New York, Brooklyn, and Jersey City, having an aggregate population of about three million people, and separated from each other only by narrow expanses of water. Han Kao is at the point where the Han River flows into the Yangtze from the north. On the opposite bank of the Han is the city of Hanyang, while across the Yangtze from both Han Kao and Hanyang is Wuchang. These three places are often referred to as the Wuhan cities, although Hanyang is the name generally used by foreigners to designate all of them, for the reason that the city has become the most important commercially and contains the international settlements.

To get a view of these three cities, I climbed to the top of the Pagoda Hill, beyond Han Yang. Before me was the Yellow Yang Sea, nearly a mile wide. On the opposite bank lay Wu Cheng, divided by the famous Serpent Hill. The story is told that the Viceroy living there was suffering from a carbuncle at the time the first road was being blasted out of this hill, and that his physician declared he was so afflicted because the new road had been cut down into the serpent's neck and was hurting its backbone. The Viceroy at once had the cut filled in at a great cost. Apparently, the people now care less about the monster's feelings for Serpent Hill as today, pierced by a tunnel. The foreign concessions of Han Kao are located along the Yangtze, and in them one may see the beginning of a new city that is becoming as modern as the international settlement in Shanghai.

Extending along the river for more than two miles is a paved bun, flanked by modern buildings set in shaded lawns. Here, the foreigners live in much the same style and degree of comfort as in any city of the world, and have their clubs, golf courses, and motor cars. Between Han Yang and Han Kao, the Han River is so filled with shipping that as I looked down from Pagoda Hill, the masts made me think of a forest. While out on the Yangtze was likewise a vast conglomeration of water traffic. There were boats that had come down through the gorges of the upper Yangtze, vessels from the seaports of China, tea junks from Poyang Lake, and queer-looking craft from a score of other localities. It was easy to believe the statement that China has more boats than all the other countries of the world put together.

It seemed to me also that most of them had come from Han Kao. Besides its importance in water transportation, Han Kao is also the natural, intersecting point of no less than three trunk lines of railroad. One of these has already been built. A second is nearly complete, while the third has been surveyed. If I like, I can board a train here and ride straight north through the provinces of Hupe, Honan, and Chili to Peking, a journey of about a day and a half. Or, I can cross the river to Wucheng and there take a train that runs 200 miles southwest Shishang Sha on a railway that will eventually connect with one built northward from Canton. The ends of the two sections are now less than 100 miles apart, and when the gap is filled, direct rail communication between Canton and Peking will be established.

The third railroad line running through Henkau will follow the course of the Yangtze. to I-Chang and Chongqing. It will provide an easy outlet for the products of the western areas and will make Han-Kao an even greater commercial and industrial center than it is now. Modern industry has already made its way up the Yangtze to the three Wuhan cities. When Han-Kao was first opened to foreigners as a treaty port, the Russians gave an impetus to its growth by founding here factories to supply the trade in tea leaves pressed into bricks for Russia, Siberia, Mongolia, and Turkestan. For many years, these establishments were an important industrial factor in Henkau. But with the World War, tea shipments to Russia were cut off, and the business almost disappeared.

At present, it seems likely that Shanghai will replace Henkau in the again increasing tea trade, not only with Russia, but with the rest of the world as well. China gave tea to the world and still raises enough to furnish employment to 60 million people. It produces some of the finest teas known, but in the international markets, they have been superseded by those from India and Japan. Like its silk, Chinese tea suffers from a lack of scientific methods of cultivation and marketing. This fact is now being realized by the more progressive Chinese, who for several years have been making systematic efforts to improve the industry. A committee was sent to India and Ceylon to study the latest methods of cultivation and manufacture.

Government experimental stations have been established in several provinces, and a school of tea culture has been founded at Nanking. Of special interest to American industry is the fact that Han Kao has practically a monopoly on Chinese wood oil, of which we buy about a million dollars worth a month. This product is so called not because of its source, being obtained from seeds of the fruit of the Tun oil tree, but because it is used so extensively in connection with wood, particularly in making varnish, paints, and linoleum. These industries in the United States are almost entirely dependent upon the Chinese supply, as the oil is not produced commercially on a large scale in any other country.

Han Kao has several electric light and power stations, oil mills, and smelters for reducing the antimony ores mined in Hunan. It has modern cotton and paper mills, steel and cement works, plants for drying and freezing eggs, and cigarette and match factories. These industries are owned and managed by both Chinese and foreigners, the latter including Britishers, Americans, Germans, and Russians. In the native settlements, the Chinese have innumerable old-style shops and factories where flax is spun, cotton is woven, and lumber is cut up by the primitive hand methods that have been in use for centuries. In Han Yang is the largest iron and steel plant on the continent of Asia. The plan for it was conceived more than thirty years ago by Shang-Chi Tung, a viceroy of Canton.

Obtaining permission from the emperor, He ordered an English firm to send him at once a complete steel plant. The British replied that they would be delighted to sell him a ready-made steel mill, but asked that he first send a sample of ore, explaining that there were two types of equipment designed for the two principal kinds of iron ore. The Viceroy told the Britishers not to waste time asking for ore samples, but to send him a steel plant. In the meantime, Shang was transferred to Henkau, and directed that the plant be sent there instead of to Canton. The reason he had refused to tell what kind of ore he was going to use in his steel mill was that none had yet been discovered. He took for granted its existence at either Canton or Han Kao, and, strangely enough, large iron and coal deposits were later found near Han Kao.

In choosing the site for the plant, Shang insisted that the furnaces must be so situated that from his house he could see their smoke by day and their glare by night. He consulted the geomancers who looked over the surrounding country, sampled the soil at various places, and finally told him that a strip of lowland where the Han flows into the Yangtze was the one indicated by the gods of good luck. The site selected was a swamp, flooded during high water. The Viceroy, however, assembled an army of coolies who filled in the ground with baskets of earth until the level of the whole area had been raised 14 feet. Shang spent millions of dollars in building the steel plant, an arsenal, and a powder factory, and millions more in operating them.

However, as they showed continual losses, he sold the steelworks to Sheng Kung Pao, a Chinese multimillionaire. Sheng placed in charge of the works Chinese who had studied iron and steel making in the plants of Europe and the United States and spent large sums in improving their design and equipment. Since then, the establishment has been mortgaged to Japanese interest and is practically owned by capitalists of that nationality. In talking with American steel men about the Hanyang works, I find them doubtful about the future. They tell me that if the plant were in the United States, It would be forced out of business because of its high costs of production caused by poor design, faulty construction, and inefficient practices.

19 19 - To Tsinanfu on the Blue Express 15:51

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. To Xin'anfu on the Blue Express. I am on my way to Peking and North China, and have been riding all day on one of the finest express trains in the country. Coming back down the river from Hanqao, I left Pukao on the opposite bank of the Yangtze from Nanking at 10 o'clock this morning. and have been traveling ever since across the province of An Wei. My route today lay about parallel to the Grand Canal, which we shall cross during the night. The first part of my trip from Pukau was through a green, well-watered country, such as I found on the south side of the Yangtze River. As we went on, the landscape changed, and we rode through a region of billowy plains that reminded me of Iowa, finally crossing the range of hills at the northern edge of the Yangtze watershed and entering the Hui River Basin.

The Hui is one of the most turbulent and unruly streams in all China. Its periodic floods have been responsible for untold losses of The railroad on which I am riding is the Pu-Kao-Tien-Sin Line, the crack train of what is known as the Blue Express. So-called because the cars are painted that color. It was this blue express that was held up by bandits near the town of Linching in May 1923. The attack on the train was the cause of an international incident due to the fact that a great many Americans and other foreigners were on board. The bandits forced all the passengers out of the cars in their nightclothes and hustled them off on foot into the mountains, where they were held captive. Until their ransom was paid.

While the kidnapping of Chinese and an occasional foreigner had been frequent occurrences, this was the first time that so large a number had been the victims of such an outrage. Following the holdup, the time of departure of the Blue Express from Pu Khao was changed so that it would pass through this particular bandit area during the day, and the diplomatic body at Peking presented demands for guards on this and other trains. In order to assure the safety of foreigners traveling in China. Later, however, the old schedule was resumed, and although it was threatened with penalties, the Chinese government did not provide the guards that were asked for. The Pukau-Tien-Sin Railroad is one of the most important in all China, its construction having brought Shanghai within 36 hours of Peking and made it possible to go from London to Shanghai in 16 days.

It was built for the Chinese government by British and German capital, the Germans constructing the northern half of the line and the British the southern half. During the World War, the Chinese took over the German section, but the southern half is still staffed largely by British railway executives under the direction of a Chinese official, who in turn is responsible to the Ministry of Communications at Peking. The Chinese government now has control of the bulk of the railroads in this country. In some cases, the control is largely nominal, and the railroads are really run by foreigners. But in others, the Chinese are in full charge. This is contrary to the conditions of some years ago, when nearly every railroad was operated by the particular group of foreigners that built it.

For many years, foreign countries had engaged In a grand scramble for railroad concessions in China, not always because they expected or wanted to build a particular railroad, but in order to prevent a rival power from doing so. If one of them extracted from the Chinese the right to run a line through a given area, all the other powers immediately demanded something else as good. During the last decade of the 19th century and the first 15 years of the present century, The whole country was covered on paper with prospective railroads to be built by foreign interests. Backed by their governments, banking and other interests of no less than six nations played hands in this game, and there was continual rivalry between British, French, Germans, Russians, Japanese, and Belgians.

Even Portugal sought a concession in South China, and the United States once entered a combination for floating a railroad loan. They tell a story in China of an American who came out here full of enthusiasm for opening up the country by means of railroads. At Peking, he obtained concessions for building a line that would tap the rich western provinces and bring them into communication with the rest of China and the outside world. The story goes that at this point, he was taken to one of the European embassies and shown a map of China. When he indicated the route of his proposed railroad, he was told, you can't build there, because the British have a concession for that area. When he shifted his route, he was informed that it ran afoul of exclusive rights held by the French.

He tried once more, only to be met with the statement that it would trespass on an area reserved to the Russians. Finally, he gave up a disgust, exclaiming, will someone please tell me where in blazes is China's territory? China now has something like 7,000 miles of railroads, practically all of which have been built during the present generation. Within the period of my own several visits to China, the people have changed their attitude toward railroads from one of fear and suspicion of the fire carriages to that of welcoming trains and riding on them up to the limit of their financial ability. This country still has only one mile of track. For every 50,000 people of its enormous population, whereas in the United States there is a mile for every 360 people, and in Australia one for every 150.

With less than three-fourths of the area and only one-fourth as many people, we have in our country 37 times as many miles of railroad as China. In the United States and Canada, railways were built in advance of the population. and served to promote the settlement and development of the regions through which they passed. In China, the opposite is true. Here, there already exists one of the most dense populations on Earth, and an enormous amount of traffic awaits modern transportation facilities. This is why China is the world's richest field for railroad development. Experience with the existing lines has proved that Chinese railroads can be made to pay. Were it not for their abuse by the mill tourists, most of them would now be operating at a substantial profit.

Some years ago, it was estimated that 50,000 miles of new railroads could be built and run profitably within the next decade, yet there has been almost no new construction since then. From an American engineer, I obtained the other day some surprising figures about the cost of transportation in China. Because manpower is cheap, The services of a coolie being available for from 12 to 18 cents a day. One might suppose that it would cost little to move goods about the country by this means. As a matter of fact, even the high freight rates charged by Chinese railroads are cheaper than the more primitive methods. According to my engineer friend, the average cost of moving goods by cart is from 4 to 8 cents per ton mile.

By wheelbarrow, from 4 to 12 cents. And by mule, six cents. The average railroad cost is four cents a ton mile, and the only rate that is lower is that for movement by boat. Nevertheless, since the construction of the Pu-Kao-Tien-Sin line, hundreds of miles of canals in this territory have become clogged with silt through lack of use. Unlike our railroads, the Chinese lines do not accept responsibility for the safe delivery of freight, and it is a frequent practice for a shipper to send a man along to ride with his goods. Before cars with steel floors were adopted, thieves used to bore holes through the planking in order to get a kerosene oil shipped in tin cans. Another trick was to thrust a metal tube through the side of a sack of wheat or rice in a freight car and thus run off the grain.

The Chinese seemed to make excellent railroad men in subordinate positions. All the engines I have seen were spotlessly clean, and their brass trimming shone like the fittings of a smart yacht. I noticed, too, that the native engineers stop and start their trains with less bumping and jolting than I sometimes experience in the United States. Some years ago, the government established at Peking a school for railroad employees, which at times has as many as 600 students. Scores of Chinese have studied railroading in the United States and possess abundant technical skill. But they are said to be more subject to influence, political or otherwise, than are the men in similar positions in our country.

Foreigners tell me that the Chinese are fairly competent to run railroads, but that they cannot be trusted to finance their construction. While the Chinese businessman has a reputation for keeping his word in a business contract, as an administrator of government or corporate funds, he is not so dependable. He has not our conception of a public trust, and when he comes into control of expenditure of other people's money, he sees no reason why he should not use the opportunity to reward himself, give remunerative positions to his relatives, and grant special favors to his friends. The need for more railroads in this country can hardly be overstated. While trunk lines have been built connecting some of the more important cities, There are almost no branch railroads to supplement them.

As it is now, coal, for example, may be available at a mine for 50 cents a ton. While 50 miles away, people are freezing because of lack of facilities for moving the fuel. A system of highways to serve as feeders to the railroads is considered by some engineers even more essential than branch lines. Construction of modern roads would, they say, bring China out of chaos. By making the people of different parts of the country acquainted with one another, by facilitating the movement of foodstuffs in time of famine, and by widening the markets for the products of the land. About the time of the discovery of America, China possessed 12,000 miles of imperial highways, centered mainly about Peking.

As soon as the central government ceased spending the large sums necessary for maintaining these roads, they fell into disrepair, and disintegration. The stones with which they were paved were stolen for building purposes, and now only a few remain to show the root of the ancient highways. They illustrate the saying of the people that A road is good for ten years and bad for ten thousand years. For centuries, all land in China was regarded as belonging to the emperor. If he did not choose to build or maintain highways, It never occurred to the Chinese that it was anybody else's duty or privilege to do so. Roads were seldom regarded as public property, and this is still the case outside the cities.

Those who till the soil are jealous of every foot of land used for any other purpose than growing crops, and therefore tried to keep the roadways and footpaths crossing their farms as narrow as possible. More often than not, these follow the boundaries between adjoining holdings, and consequently meander about a good deal. Some of them have a strip of stone paving no more than twelve inches wide, intended to accommodate the single wheel of the Chinese wheelbarrow. Through centuries of constant wear, these stones have become so deeply rutted that a wheelbarrow moves over them with bumping and jolting. Where the narrow roads are not paved, The rims of the wheels used on barrows and carts have cut deep ruts, which, whenever it rains, are turned into watercourses and washed deeper.

Oftentimes, too, the farmer, wanting some fresh soil for a field, goes to the roadway with his shovel and barrow and digs out as much as he needs. He figures, in true Chinese fashion, that the road as a road is of no benefit to him, and that he might as well make it furnish dirt for leveling his fields. Horse-drawn vehicles have not come into use in China, principally because the people cannot spare enough land to raise forage for draft animals, and the primitive methods of transportation still prevail. The chief vehicle used on these roads is the wheelbarrow, in which goods are frequently moved hundreds of miles. The most common type consists of a narrow platform with a large single wheel from two to three feet in diameter, rising up through the middle of it.

Loads of incredible size are carried on these barrows. Sometimes as many as four people are taken aboard, two on each side of the wheel, while the coolies regularly pile on more goods than it would seem possible for one man to move. The Barrow Man slips over his shoulders a strap fastened to the handles, and this helps him sustain the load so that he can devote most of his strength to pushing it along. In the cities, wheelbarrows, along with sedan chairs, are being replaced by rickshaws, horse vehicles, and motor cars. The wealthy Chinese and the foreign residents are using the automobile more and more, and most of the cars of American make. But there will be no large market for our motor vehicles in China until it has modern roads.

In the centers of population, businessmen favor new road construction. At least one good roads association has been organized. and a few of the provincial authorities have undertaken road-building programs. In some cases, it is proposed to construct highways at public expense, while in others the plan is to have them built privately and to permit the owners to collect toll, as used to be done in the United States. One new road in China runs from Tian-Sin to Peking, a distance of some 80 miles. The American Red Cross was largely responsible for its construction, as a means of affording employment during a famine. Other motor roads have been built out for 10 or 20 miles from some of the large cities, and suburban motor buses are operated on them.

A long-distance motor service is maintained. The Chinese proved long ago that they have the engineering ability to build roads. In the region of the Upper Yangtze is an old highway. that in some places is on a shelf carved out of the mountain sides several hundred feet above the water, and there are sections where it climbs up in the form of steps. The Chinese say of it that it goes where a monkey could not hang. This highway is so exceptional that it only serves to prove the statement that China is still a country almost without roads and will probably remain so until she has an honest and stable government.

20 20 - Shan-tung and its Capital 18:46

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. Shantung and its Capital This morning I climbed to the heights of Pagoda Hill to take a look at Sinanfu, the capital of the province of Shantung. Like so many cities in China, it is but the shrunken ghost of the Sinanfu that existed here in the past. Still, it is larger than Indianapolis and an important political Here, the railroad from Pukau to Tien-Sin, over which I have come some 400 miles, meets a line that runs due east to Singtao, the port of which we heard so much in the World War, when the Japanese took it away from the Germans. Sinanfu is 260 miles from Singtao, and nearly as far from Tien-Sin, which lies to the north on the line to Peking.

According to the Chinese superstition, Sinanfu is held in place by an invisible rope extending from the pagoda on top of this hill down to the city, and if through evil influences this rope is broken, the town will sink into the swamp below. I must say I can easily imagine an occasional citizen being lost in the mud of some of the streets of the old city, but as a whole, Sinanfu seems too substantial for any apprehension that it will vanish overnight. It has mud and brick walls about 40 feet high and 40 feet thick, that the Chinese say once surrounded a city 25 miles away, and that were moved brick by brick by a line of men reaching the whole distance. As I looked down, I could see inside the walls a vast expanse of one- and two-story buildings, with an occasional temple rising above them.

In the center of the city, a great bell, at least 10 feet high, Up to the time of the Boxer Rebellion, Sinanfu was one of the most conservative cities in all China, and refused to have anything to do with the foreigner and his ways. Later, the Chinese themselves began negotiations for opening it to foreign trade, which was done about 20 years ago. The foreign settlement that was founded here now contains most of the modern buildings, many of which were erected by Germans. There are also many Japanese now in business in Senanfu. Here, too, are several important missionary institutions, including Shantung Christian University, which is conducted jointly by British and American organizations. The educational record of Senanfu in the past has not always been so good.

For it was here that the Emperor Shi Huangti, the Napoleon of China, once burned all the books in the country. That was more than 2,000 years ago, yet there are villages in Shantung today that still take their names from that great literary conflagration. One of them is called the Hamlet of the Paper Fire. Another is known as the Village of the Heap of Cinders. Guides show visitors also a field in which they say 450 scholars Like other ancient Chinese capitals, the fortunes of Sinanfu rose and fell with the passing centuries. While it achieved vast splendor, it also suffered great calamities. As recently as the Revolution of 1911, more than 10,000 Manchus were massacred here, and their section of the city razed to the ground.

Great hollows still marked the trenches in which the bodies of the dead were buried. Others, who took refuge in caves, died a horrible death when bodies of victims of the massacre were thrown in upon them in such numbers that they could not get out. Looking to the north across the treeless plain on which Sinanfu is built, I saw a broad street glinting in the sun. That is the Great Yellow River, or the Huanghou, as the Chinese call it. Its basin covers an area of almost a half million square miles, and although its source is only 1,300 miles from its mouth, it winds about so much that it is about 2,500 miles long. Unlike the Yangtze, it is not an important artery of navigation and trade, being so shallow and so loaded with silt that ocean vessels cannot ascend it.

Nevertheless, it has its water traffic. consisting of rafts that bring down the products of the western provinces of Honan and Shenzhen. At the completion of their downstream journeys, these rafts are sold as firewood, as it is cheaper and easier to build new ones than to take the old ones back upstream. The Yellow River has a bad reputation for fickleness and instability. It has violently changed its course many times, the last occasion having been only about 75 years ago. At that time, at a point near the city of Kaifeng and not far from the line of the Peking-Hankau Railroad, it shifted the direction of its flow from southeast to northeast. Instead of reaching the ocean south of the Shantung Peninsula, it formed a new outlet on the north side of that promontory.

In coming from Pukau to Sinanfu, I crossed the old course of the river at Su Chaufu. The embankments and hollows of the old riverbed are there plainly discernible, although the land is now cultivated and partly covered with houses. This and other changes of its course, together with the frequent devastating floods that have killed tens of millions of men, women, and children, have given the Yellow River the name of China's sorrow and the river of death. Geologists say that the end is not yet. They predict that the river will, in a comparatively short time, As time is measured in the history of the Earth's changes, again shift its course, and that such a change will, as in times past, be accompanied by disastrous results.

Besides its changes, of course, the Yellow River frequently breaks through the elaborate systems of banks and dikes that the Chinese for centuries past have built and rebuilt in the hope of keeping it in check. These earthworks represent the labor of millions of men throughout thousands of years. The first ones constructed on a large scale, so far as Chinese history records, were built by a great man of China who lived centuries before Christ was born. He was given the job at a time when the Yellow River had burst its bounds and its muddy waters were carrying devastation over the country. According to an early chronicler, The inundating waters seemed to assail the heavens, and in their vast extent embraced the mountains and overtop the hills, so that the people were bewildered and overwhelmed.

It was at that time that one, Yu, was selected by the Emperor as the man to deal with the disaster. He not only built dikes, but also deepened the beds of the streams and the canals in order to drain off the floodwaters, succeeding so well that eventually he was made Emperor himself. Although Yu lived more than 2,000 years ago, his name is said to be better known among the masses of the people of China today than that of any other ruler. Yu was far wiser than were his successors, for they paid little attention to drainage, depending almost wholly upon building dykes to control the Yellow River. The enormous quantities of silt deposited by the Great Stream have slowly raised the level of its bed, With the result that the earthworks along its banks have had to be built higher and higher to keep the waters from spreading over the plain.

A few years ago, the river tore through the dikes at Lai Ching, a town between Sinanfu and the sea, and destroyed 500 small towns and villages. The dikes at that time were repaired by a firm of American engineers located in Shanghai, who also diverted a section of the river into a new and safer course. At one time, as many as 23,000 men were employed in this work, the successful completion of which made possible the return of a quarter of a million people to the lands from which they had been driven by the inundation. American engineers who have studied the habits of the Huanghou say that drainage, and not embankments, is what is most needed here. Under the auspices of the American Red Cross, Various plans for flood prevention have been worked out, but the Chinese have failed to provide funds for doing the work.

One of the obstacles to draining this region properly is the Grand Canal. In many places, its embankments form an impenetrable wall across the country, preventing the floodwaters from flowing off. The embankments of the Tianjin-Kukau Railroad also interfere with the drainage of some of the country through which this line passes. The floods and breaks of the Yellow River not only cover enormous areas with water, but frequently deposit sand that makes cultivation of the soil impossible for a long time after the waters have subsided. Even if this does not occur, the floods destroy the crops and cause local famines. The country between the Yangtze watershed and the Yellow River is the chief famine area of China, especially in the vicinity of the Hui River.

Americans who have not been in China can hardly imagine what famines mean in this part of the world. The population is so dense and the stores of food so scanty that every crop failure brings death to vast numbers of people. From eight to ten million died in the Great Famine of 1878, while in a recent famine period it was estimated that 100 million people were suffering from lack of food. And that 45 million were in the most acute distress. At that time, the deaths in one district numbered more than 1,500 a day. When famine comes on, from either drought or flood, the poorer people begin to sell their possessions in order to get food. Their extra clothes usually go first, and tens of thousands of Chinese each year shiver through the winter season.

Next, they are likely to sell the roof timbers of their houses as fuel. and as a last resort, their wives and babies. In one village, typical of hundreds of others, American famine relief workers found that 100 persons had starved to death and that 20 children and eight wives had been sold. The wives and girls usually become white slaves, while sons are frequently purchased by men who have no sons of their own. Girl babies are sometimes sold for as little as two or three cents. While young girls bring only two or three dollars, or less than half as much as the carcass of a dead donkey. The valley of the Yellow River is typical of the greater part of North China, the six provinces of Khansu, Shansi, Qili, Honan, Shansai, and Shantung.

In climate, in food products, and in appearance, Shantung is quite different from either the Yangtze Valley, where I have been spending the last few weeks, or South China. Where I started my present journeys. The cultivation of rice in wet fields ends with the Yangtze watershed, and the luxuriant bamboo trees grow but little farther north. In place of the water buffalo, which I saw so frequently along the canals between Shanghai and Nanking, now only slow-moving oxen are to be seen. Here in Shantung the people do not consume so much pork and rice as in South China. But instead, eat more beef and corn. As a race, they are taller and sturdier than the Chinese of the South, and also of less amiable disposition than the people who live where nature is more gentle and kind.

The climate of Shantung may be compared to that of Maine. The summers are cool and delightful, but the winters are long and severe. The Yellow River country is as yellow as are the waters of the mighty stream itself. Its color is due to what is called the Loaß Formation, about which geologists have had many disputes, although the generally accepted belief is that it is made up of dust and sand blown down from the mountains and the lofty deserts of the far west. This Loaß forms a layer of soil from 1,000 to 2,000 feet deep, which is filled in the valleys and smoothed over the mountains. It is fertile, but because of its loose and poor structure, is easily washed out. Rivers tear great gashes in it, while roadways sink down and down until sometimes there is as much as 80 feet below their original level.

The result is that in Shantung and elsewhere in the north, China Plain, the roads are often invisible, being hidden at the bottom of deep clefts in the earth. Poor people sometimes dig caves in the steep walls of these sunken roads and live in them all the year round. Because of this peculiar formation of the soil, irrigation is usually impracticable in Shantung. The farmers must depend largely on the uncertain rainfall and are in constant danger of crop failure, not only from floods, but also from drought. The tiller of the soil in North China has indeed a difficult time, and most of the population live on the narrowest margin of existence, with starvation always staring them in the face. Nevertheless, Shantung is the most densely populated of all the provinces of China, with an average of 525 people to the square mile.

On an area no larger than that of Arkansas, it has some 30 million inhabitants, or nearly as many as in all France. One of the chief industries of Shantung is peanut raising, which had its beginning with a few quarts of the goobers brought to Shantung by an American missionary from Virginia. and which has developed to an enormous extent in recent years. The American missionaries brought also apple and pear seedlings from which have sprung the orchards of today. Another rapidly growing form of agriculture in Shantung is the raising of tobacco, the consumption of which is increasing enormously in China. Much of it is grown from seeds sent over by the American Tobacco Trust and planted under the supervision of experts.

As a rule, the farming methods of Shantung are exceedingly crude, and the tobacco manufacturers are interested in getting larger yields and better quality from the Chinese farms. Much of the grain, beans, peanuts, and cotton grown in Shantung are brought to Sinanfu for marketing or to be processed in the industrial establishments that have sprung up here. These include flour and cotton mills, Beet sugar mills, bean oil mills, paper factories, machine and railway repair shops, and a few hairnet factories. Most of the industries of Sinanfu are owned by Chinese, although some belong to Japanese and Germans. So far, there are no American-owned manufacturing establishments in the Shantung capital, but some of our largest export corporations have offices here.

It was the building of the railway from Tsingtao and the line from Pukau to Tien-Sin that gave Sinanfu its start in modern commerce and industry. The Tsingtao line was built by the Germans from Kiao Chow Bay on the south side of the Shantung Peninsula, which they held under lease from the Chinese government. The way the Germans obtained their footing in Shantung is typical of the way the European powers used to take slices of China. In 1897, Two German missionaries were murdered in the interior of Shantung. The Chinese government promptly paid an indemnity, but the Kaiser made the incident an excuse for a grab. He demanded a lease on Cao Chao Bay in the port of Tsingtao, the right to build a railroad to Sinanfu, and also the privilege of working mines through a strip of territory extending out 10 miles on both sides of the proposed railroad line.

All these demands China was forced to grant. When it came to the construction of the Tien-Sien-Pukau Railway, the Germans demanded and obtained the right to build the Shantung portion of the line, including the bridge across the Yellow River. They spent large sums improving and fortifying the harbor of Tsingtao, but lost all their investment when the Japanese drove them out in 1914. The Japanese, in turn, after holding Tsingtao and the railway to Sananfu for a few years, gave them back to China. Following the Washington Conference of 1921. The third most important city of Shantung is Chaefu, which lies on the north coast of the promontory. Chaefu has less than 100,000 people, and since the building of the railway from Xiangtao, it has suffered from lack of communications with the interior by either rail or water.

Nevertheless, it is an exporting point for two large industries. These are the weaving of panji silk, and the making of hairnets. Panji, or shantung silk as it is sometimes called, is made from cocoons spun by silkworms fed on oak leaves instead of mulberry leaves. The work is carried on large The Chinese hairnet industry is centered largely in Shantung and especially at Chifu. It was developed by the Germans, and at one time all the hair was sent to Germany to be washed and dyed, then brought back to China to be made into nets, and once more shipped across the ocean to be sold in the department stores of our country. This treating process is now being done in China, and although of no great importance in itself, it is, like scores of other newly begun industries, a sign of the gradual development of the country.

21 21 - In the Holy Land of China 22:22

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. In the Holy Land of China Forty-five miles to the south of Sinanfu, and in plain sight from the top of Pagoda Hill, is sacred Taishan, undoubtedly the oldest holy mountain in the world. For more than four thousand years, it has been an object of worship and a place of pilgrimage. And from its location in Shantung gets its name, which means east of the hill, just as Shansi, the adjoining province on the west, means west of the hill. It is the presence of Taishan and the fact that this province contains the birthplace and burial ground of the Great Confucius that makes Shantung the Holy Land of China. According to Chinese tradition, the Emperor Shun worshipped on the top of Taishan 2,300 years before Joseph and Mary fled to Egypt to escape King Herod.

In ancient times, practically all the successive rulers of China made the pilgrimage to the top of the mountain, and today hundreds of thousands of people go up every year, especially during the period from February to May, which includes the Chinese New Year. In that season, as many as 10,000 a day make the ascent. Pilgrims to Taishan usually begin their journey up the mountain from the town of Tayanfu, which lies about two hours south of Sinanfu on the Tianxin-Pukau Railroad. From there, a road about 12 miles long leads to the top of Taishan. The latter half of the ascent is made almost entirely up of flights of broad stone steps, which are said to number more than 6,000. Most of the people who make the climb are peasants and coolies, and in the old days even women with bound feet walked the whole way to the top and back.

Those who can afford it usually hire what is known as a Taishan chair, an uncomfortable arrangement that is little more than a sling suspended from poles resting on the shoulders of coolies. The chair-bearers are Mohammedans who have held this concession for years. They are strongly unionized and are said to impose a fine on any member who lets his chair fall while carrying a pilgrim. During the busiest pilgrimage season, the whole route of the ascent is lined on both sides with peddlers and beggars, such as infest practically every holy place I have ever visited anywhere in Asia. I am told that the country people of this section make it a regular practice to leave one person in charge of a farm While the rest of the family spent several weeks in begging on the slope of Taishan.

The roadway is lined also with innumerable tea houses and with temples in which are priests beating gongs, demanding contributions, and calling out to the people to buy prayers inscribed on tissue paper or to come and have their fortunes told. Going on past the great red gates, known as the First Heaven Gate, And the south gate of heaven, one reaches the bare, rocky upper portion of the mountain, which in many places has been broken into mighty boulders and crags. On the summit, which is more than a mile above sea level, are several temples, many of them hundreds of years old, where the pilgrims set off firecrackers and hold all sorts of ceremonies. Here, too, is a tablet bearing an inscription that says, Confucius stood here, The writings of the sage record the fact that from this spot he even saw the ocean, which is now more than a hundred miles distant.

The top of Taishan overlooks the country in all directions for from 80 to 90 miles, including Confucius's own town of Chufu, where he now lies buried. The Tian-Sin Pukau Railroad does not pass through Chufu. When the line was being laid out, the Duke Kung, said to have been the direct descendant of Confucius in the 73rd generation, refused to permit it to touch the precincts made holy by the great sage. Consequently, those who make the pilgrimage to his tomb must go on foot some five or six miles, or ride in a springless two-wheeled cart so uncomfortable that walking is usually preferable. The town of Chufu contains 40 or 50,000 people, all of whom are said to be descendants of the family of Confucius.

This claim, however, is disputed by those who say that the Confucian line, as in other families in China, was maintained more than once by the adoption of a son, no male heir having been born. Just outside the walls of Chufu is a cemetery of 600 acres. which has been the bearing ground of members of the Confucian family for 2,500 years. The grave of Confucius is simplicity itself. It is nothing but a large mound on which several oak trees are growing amid the rank grass. The grass and trees about the grave are supposed to have mystic properties, just as stones from the mountain of Tishon are taken home by pilgrims to serve as charms and talismans. The chief attraction of Chu Fu is not this tomb, but the great temple of Confucius that extends along one side of the town.

It is even larger than the big Confucian temple at Peking, though similar in design. Inside the temple is a statue of the great man, in front of which is a tablet with the inscription, the seat of the spirit of the most holy ancient sage, Confucius. All about the temple are tablets, dedicated to various disciples of Confucius, who at one time numbered more than 3,000. There are smaller temples devoted to the memory of Confucius's father and other members of his family, including one to the wife whom he is said to have divorced. In the rear of the main building is a smaller one, containing a series of stone tablets on which is inscribed a story of his life. Confucius was born of noble lineage in this town of Chufu, Probably in the 550th year before Christ.

His father belonged to the official class, but died when Confucius was a young boy, so that the son grew up in poverty under the care of his mother. He held various small offices, and at the age of 22 had gained some reputation as a teacher of the principles of right conduct and good government. He became well-versed in music, An expert in shooting with a bow and arrow, and is represented to have been a very human and likable sort of young man. Like Buddha, who journeyed about India on foot in his search for truth, Confucius wandered for some 15 years, applying his ideas of good government as a sort of peace magistrate in the kingdom of Lu, which is now Shantung. He is said to have been so successful that the manners of the people were reformed, crime disappeared, and all was peace, prosperity, and brotherly love.

This condition was not to last long, however, for the ruler of the adjoining kingdom resorted to trickery to end this happy state of affairs. It is told that he sent gifts of fine horses and troops of beautiful dancing women to the king of Lu, with the result that the ruler and his court He gave up the ways of Confucius in favor of the pursuit of pleasure. Confucius withdrew, believing the king would see the error of his ways and call him back. But he never did so, and the sage again spent years in wandering. Confucius died at the age of 72, believing that his life work had been a failure. He was a preacher of law and order who believed that man at heart was good, but that he suffered from bad government.

He felt also that man's first duty was obedience to his parents and veneration of their spirits after they had died, and on this basis he built up his whole theory of society and politics. He claimed that if the people had the right kind of king, they would themselves become good by force of their ruler's example. He stressed the necessity of benevolence and righteousness in those in authority, and the duty of submission on the part of those beneath them. He is best known to Christians as having voiced what is practically the golden rule of Jesus. Confucius said, What you do not like when done to yourself, do not do to others. Confucius never had an expectation of a life after death, nor did he teach such a belief to his disciples.

When the question was put to him, he said that since we know little of life, we can hardly expect to know anything of death. He did not think of himself as the teacher of new doctrines or a new religion, but only as the expounder of the wisdom of the ages before him. He once said of himself that he was not an author, but an editor, that he was not the creator, but merely the teacher. It was the activities of the disciples of Confucius after his death that preserved his name as that of a great philosopher and teacher. These followers wrote down not only accounts of his teachings, but also described his every look and gesture. To one of them, named Mencius, is given the chief credit for establishing the doctrines of Confucius among the religions of the world.

He is ranked next to the great sage himself as a philosopher, and he is sometimes described as the Saint Paul of Confucianism, although he lives some 300 years afterwards. Every large city in China has one or more temples to the memory of Confucius, and at times of the year the officials still perform memorial rites in them. His teachings have had a tremendous effect upon the people of China. He strengthened the practice of ancestor worship, his writings were studied by all scholars for centuries, and the learned men of today can quote almost whole volumes from his works and those of his followers. Even the masses of the common people who cannot read are familiar with hundreds of his sayings and often quote his moral precepts.

Before Confucianism, the two other religions recognized in China in the days of the empire were Taoism and Buddhism. Taoism has been much corrupted from the teachings of its founder, Lao Tzu. Until today, it is largely a spirit worship. With hundreds of gods and devils representing all the forces of nature, disease, mountains, rivers, seas, the sun and moon, the stars, every organ of the human body, and in fact practically everything that exists or can be imagined to exist. Buddhism also has been greatly degraded among the Chinese as a form of worship. Its priests are tolerated by the people, chiefly in connection with ceremonials for births, deaths, and burials. In fact, the Chinese have but little use for either priests or nuns.

Concerning the latter, they have a saying that, of ten nuns, nine are bad, and the tenth is probably mad. The Chinese are not sharply divided into faiths and sects, such as Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Instead, The religion of the masses of the people is apt to be a mixture of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, each being represented by a particular precept or practice that in the judgment of the people best suits a particular occasion. Also, Christianity has made considerable progress among all classes. Full liberty of religious beliefs is guaranteed in the Constitution of the Republic. It is estimated that there are something less than a half million communicants in the Christian churches of China, but through their educational and other social institutions, as well as their places of worship, the American and other missionaries here are in intimate contact with millions of Chinese.

Mohammedanism also is represented in China, the Muslims being variously estimated at from five to thirty millions. They first came to Hangzhou, and hundreds of years later, a second wave of Mohammedans poured into North China after one of the emperors had made a bargain with the Caliph for the use of Muslim troops. Many of these soldiers married Chinese wives and remained here. In some northern districts, their descendants form one-third of the population, while their mosques are found also in several cities of South China. Closely interwoven with their religious beliefs are the superstitions that color practically every act of the Chinese. They are a part of the life of all the people, from the lowest to the highest, the average Chinese believing that the very atmosphere is full of evil spirits conspiring to do harm, and that he is never safe from them, night or day.

The Chinese cannot even die in peace in his bed, but when the end seems near, is stretched out upon a board. Lest his soul take possession of the bed and make it impossible for anyone else to sleep there. If he passes away before he can be moved, the bed is destroyed and the room renovated before it is occupied again. Another superstition requires that cats be sent away from a house in which there is a dead person, as they are accredited with the power of bringing a corpse to life by jumping upon it. In preparing a corpse for burial, the Chinese first bathe it with water purchased from the gods by burning incense or paper money before an idol. After it is dressed and put into the coffin, bed quilts, parcels of quicklime, and articles of clothing are packed around it.

Care is taken that no fur is put in, as this may cause the deceased to be born again as an animal. On the third day after death, the soul is supposed to arrive at the Terrace of Oblivion, which means that the coffin can be sealed. Taoist or Buddhist priests having in the meantime performed their rites over it. All Chinese more than 60 years of age are supposed to have their coffins ready, and a coffin is a not uncommon gift to one's parent or grandparent upon the latter's 61st birthday. The Chinese coffin is made of boards from one to four inches thick and as ornate and expensive as its purchaser can afford. Those used by wealthy families cost hundreds and even thousands of dollars. The one made for an emperor who died when I was in Peking on a former trip was constructed of cypress planks about ten inches thick.

Over these were stretched a rhinoceros skin and the hides of water buffaloes. After His Majesty's corpse was put in, the hole was hermetically sealed and beautifully lacquered. For children under 15, there are practically no funeral rites, whatever, among the poor Chinese, while infants are not even given a decent burial. The parents say that the fact that a baby has died proves that it is not a true child, but an evil spirit. that has been inflicted upon them, and that to bury it in the family cemetery would be the equivalent of keeping the spirit among them always. In the case of a grown person, however, the spirit of the dead is thought to wander about and inflict punishment upon his descendants if the proper burial rites are not performed, and families vie with one another to make their funerals as pretentious and as gaudy as possible.

Indeed, it has been said that only a person Well-versed in Chinese customs can distinguish between a funeral and a wedding procession, both being accompanied by such gala effects. For an ordinary person, the Chinese hearse is a framework of heavy red lacquered locks, on top of which, under a drapery of red satin, rests the coffin. It is carried on the shoulders of eight men. And the number of people who follow it depends chiefly upon how many professional mourners the family can afford to hire. There is usually a band. Street urchins bedecked in gay caps are hired to carry paper figures and bright banners, and coolies carrying red boards upon which are Chinese characters relating the wonderful deeds of the deceased and his ancestors.

If he was wealthy or an official, His coffin is carried on a red katalfuk by bearers who may number as many as fifty-six or sixty-four, being always in multiples of eight. Often a sedan chair containing his portrait immediately precedes the katalfuk. With the passing of the empire, much of the old splendor of official funerals has likewise now disappeared, and I consider myself fortunate in having been an eyewitness of the funeral procession. of the next to the last of the Manchu emperors. It lasted for five days, the coffin being carried 80 miles from Peking on the shoulders of men, accompanied by an army of officials and other mourners. The line of march was guarded by policemen, armed with clubs and by native soldiers who carried rifles and bayonets.

At every cross street, blue curtains were put up to prevent ordinary mortals from seeing the procession. and all foreigners were warned that they must not come out of their houses. Notwithstanding this order, I decided to see what I could, and after various adventures with soldiers and police, gained a position on the ledge of a house from which I had a fine view of the procession. First came a company of palace servants in blood-red gowns and huge black hats, then a caravan of ponies, two abreast, draped in imperial yellow. Behind them were fifty magnificent camels, each blanketed with yellow. Then came the imperial musicians and men carrying trays of yellow wood, on which were the meats to be eaten by the ghost of the departed.

They were followed by other men bearing the emperor's flags, and others carrying gilded poles to which great silk balloons were attached. It was at this point in the procession that a crowd of government officials clad in white sheepskins came along. Throwing to the four winds paper disks the size of a saucer, each with a square hole in the center. These represented money and were scattered so that they might delay the evil spirits that hover over every funeral procession to work ill will to the corpse. According to the old belief, each spirit has to crawl through a hole in anything that obstructs its way, and the more disks put in their path, the slower the spirits are in crawling through, Following these paper-throwers came the highest officials of the government, carrying sticks of burning incense, then the favorite horses of the emperor, and finally his hearse.

It was covered with a gorgeous canopy of yellow silk that was a mass of exquisite embroidery and shone like gold under the sun. It was carried upon long, heavy poles, supported by other poles, all tied together with ropes of yellow silk. In such a way that the weight was distributed over the shoulders of 80 men. Funeral ceremonies in China reach their climax at the grave, where besides the religious rites, firecrackers are set off and theatrical performances are often given. The burial itself may take place immediately or be postponed indefinitely. It is most necessary that a lucky day and place be selected, and the Chinese will keep a corpse for months rather than put it into the ground. When the spirits are not propitious, the emperor Tung Chie, who died in the month of January, was not buried until October, while the body of Quang Su, another ruler, remained uninterred from November until May.

It is necessary to select a burial site where the evil spirits cannot attack the bodies of the dead, and where no star on high and no dragon below can disturb their repose. It takes a geomancer to tell just where such a spot is, and graves selecting in China is a well-paid profession. These men pretend to calculate the stars, they go forth with books and diagrams, and they use forked sticks with which to hunt the lucky spots. The search, I am told, usually continues just as long as it can be made profitable to the geomancer. The morning customs of the Chinese are fully as interesting as their funerals. In the deepest mourning, sackcloth is worn. In the next grade, one may have blue clothes with a sackcloth belt, and in others he may wear ordinary plain clothes in white, gray, or black.

For three years after the death of a parent, no silk should be worn, and if an official is so bereaved, he should retire to private life to wail. After the death of the emperor, whose funeral procession I saw, the country was officially in mourning for three years. The government issued orders also that for one hundred days no man should be shaved or have his fingernails cut, and that every person should leave off jewelry and bright colors. All feasting and lovemaking were prohibited, and for twenty-seven days even marriages were forbidden.

22 22 - Tientsin 16:20

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. Tien Tzin. I am in Tien Tzin, the city where, more than almost any other place in North China, the yellow giant that is this great country is awakening to modern progress. He has sprung from his long sleep and is fast drawing on the clothes of Western civilization. The ruts and filth of the old Tien Tzin have largely disappeared. Macadamized roads, widened streets, and rustic parks are taking their places, and a beginning has been made toward water and sanitary systems. The old wall, 40 feet high and 20 feet wide, that I formerly saw here is now only a memory, and its base furnishes the foundation for a fine roadway extending all around the city.

Over it run the electric streetcars that have almost driven the rickshaws and the wheelbarrows out of business. The tearing down of the old city wall was one of the first of many rude blows that made Tian-Sin rise up and take notice. It was done by the foreign troops at the time of the Boxer Rebellion, when the Allied armies laid siege to and captured this city. The Chinese were greatly excited when they learned that the wall was to be destroyed, and claimed that it would ruin Tian-Sin. A town without walls, said they, is like a woman without pantaloons. It is disgraceful and cannot bring good. Nevertheless, the powers proceeded, determined that never again should this city, which is the key to Peking, some eighty miles inland, be in a position to hold out against invasion in case of another uprising against foreigners in China.

At the same time, they destroyed the forts at Taku at the mouth of the Pei Ho, The river on which Tian-Sin is situated, forty-seven miles from the open sea. This was the beginning of the advance of Tian-Sin, which has since then progressed so rapidly that today it is the commercial center of this part of China. Tian-Sin has the second largest foreign population of all the treaty ports in China. The great powers of the Western world realize fully its importance and are strongly represented here. Outside the old native city, ten different nations have concessions in the large territory they seized just after the Boxer Rebellion. Here, each foreign country has its own little city, in practically all of which troops are stationed.

Even the United States, which has not played the game of concessions in China, as have the European governments, keeps some 1,200 soldiers in Tianjin. Our trade with this section of China has increased greatly since the World War, and today there are more Americans here than any other foreign nationality except the Japanese. The foreign concessions are in every respect modern cities that in appearance and convenience compare favorably with places of the same size in the United States. They have fine, broad streets, most of them macadamized and equipped with electric lights, The city of Hong Kong has a cold, water service, and sewage systems. All are well-policed and even have fire departments with modern apparatus manned by volunteers.

Tian Sin is the central point for telephone service. I have a telephone system extending throughout both the foreign and native cities, and from my hotel in the British settlement, I can call up friends living in Peking. The system of lightning words, as the Chinese used to call it, is under government administration. An hour's ride through the foreign concessions of Tianjin is like visiting a half-dozen different nations. Many of the buildings would be considered fine in London or Paris, and there are scores of palatial homes occupied both by foreigners and by retired or exiled Chinese officials. who have sought a haven of refuge under the foreign flags. The hotel in which I am stopping is modern in every respect, and there is an English club adjoining it that must have cost several hundred thousand dollars to build.

There are fine banking houses and stores with plate glass windows filled with all sorts of goods from Europe and America. The foreigners have their golf courses, tennis courts, and cricket fields. and in the parks, concerts are given by the military bands. The British and Americans maintain a school for their boys and girls, and the French have built a cathedral here. Tian-Tsin, as I have said, is the northern terminus of the railway from Pukau and Shanghai, and on the direct route from central and southern China to Peking. It is connected with the capital both by railway and by the Pei-Ho River, which forms the northernmost section of the Grand Canal Route from Hang Chao. The Pei Ho is here crossed by two steel bridges that have replaced the native boat service, formerly the only means of transportation across the river.

When the first bridge at this point was begun, the boatmen made such a protest that the Viceroy did not dare to risk their enmity by taking away their means of livelihood. And it was several decades before these bridges were finally built. The two of them stand today as signs of the passing of the old order in Tian-Sin. Lying as it does less than 50 miles from the coast, Tian-Sin is one of the important ports of the Peking district. By eliminating some of the windings of the Pei-Ho River, the city has been brought 10 miles nearer the sea than it formerly was, and it is believed that the route eventually will be still further shortened. As it is, the river freezes over at Tien Tien every winter, and there is a bar at Taku that prevents the largest ocean steamers from coming up to this city.

But experiments with icebreakers have shown that it is now possible to keep open the channel except during the most severe winters. At present, the harbor of Chin Wang Tao, which lies to the east on the line of the railroad to Mukden, is used as an alternate winter port, and the only other competition that Tianjin has as a port for this region comes from Tsingtao. In its commercial aspects, Tianjin is the New York of North China. Tributary to it is the vast population of the Northern Interior, and it is the natural collection point for North China, Mongolia, and even parts of Manchuria. Many of the products of those regions are carried by caravan to the railheads and then shipped here for export.

They include furs, hides, and wool, and especially the first mentioned, Tianjin being the chief fur market in all China. While Tianjin first came into importance as a shipping and trading city, it is now becoming an industrial city also. It has factories for spinning and weaving the wool that comes down from the northwest, flour mills that grind the products of the wheatlands, and modern mills for manufacturing cotton goods. There are a number of soap and candle factories in the city, a tooth powder factory, and cold storage, meat packing, and egg freezing establishments. Many of the Americans in business here are engaged in the importation of oil, tobacco, iron, and steel, machinery and provisions, while others are exporters, dealing in rugs and carpets, wool, skins, hides, bristles, straw braid, cotton, and peanuts.

Ever since its modernization began, Tianjin has been an important center of Western education in China, and in no other city of this country have the Americans and other missionaries made more rapid progress. Millions of dollars have been invested in new school buildings by both the foreigners and the Chinese, and many of the old temples have been turned into schools. In a drive about the city yesterday, I went past structure after structure of brick and stone, all devoted to education. There are kindergarten and primary schools, secondary and grammar schools, schools of manual training, domestic science, and technical studies. as well as high schools and universities. There are night schools largely attended by pupils who work by day, and other schools that have both day and night courses.

Tianjin was one of the first places to take up the education of girls, which in times past was never encouraged by the Chinese. The first women's medical college in China was established here by Yuan Shi Kai, who succeeded Dr. Sun Yat-sen as president of China. and it was probably the greatest man of his time in this country. During a previous visit to Tian-Tsin, I called on Dr. Ya Mei-Kin, the woman who was the first head of this institution. She held a degree from one of the best medical schools in the United States, and I was much impressed with her earnestness and ability. Women doctors are greatly needed in China, she said to me. Our customs are such that it is not proper to call in men to attend women.

And in most of our cities, there are neither female doctors nor trained nurses. The few Chinese women who have received medical education abroad have all and more than they can do. Those trained in the mission schools are largely employed in the mission hospitals, and it is almost impossible for us to get Chinese women teachers for our institution. As it is now, we do not claim to be a college. We are rather a medical academy and we give such an education as is common in England and America for visiting nurses. Our students come from every grade of Chinese society. We have the daughters of merchants and also of some high officials. One of our students is a slave girl. We have many widows, and I expect the practice of medicine to become a favorite profession with such women.

The condition of the Chinese widow is not as bad as that of the widow in India. but it is often most unhappy. She must live with her parents-in-law, and if they are not kind, she may be a drudge or a slave. One reason for the educational and commercial progress of Tien-Sin is the fact that for many years it had as its viceroy Li Hongcheng, who was for a long time the virtual ruler of China, and who deserves to rank among the great statesmen of the world. He was ready to experiment with all kinds of new things, and tried out many of them here in Tianjin. As early as the latter part of the last century, he began the introduction of Western civilization. It was he who started China in railroad building, and it was he also who introduced telegraphic communication.

I first met Li Hongchang on my first trip around the world, and at that time, and during the interviews I had with him in later trips to China, I learned much about this man who was such a dominating figure in the days of the empire. From a poor boy who had managed to pass the literary examinations with honors, he had risen to be the biggest man in all China, and also about the richest. The royal family at Peking used to shower upon him presents of money, jewels, and works of art of untold value. At the same time, giving him positions of honor amply provided with opportunities for lining his own pockets. Under the old system, no official salaries were paid in China, but it was considered quite proper that one in authority should make his position yield him a profit for his trouble.

Although, since the founding of the Republic, salaries are supposed to be paid to officials, I am told that the system of graft has changed but little. Still, Lee was a truly great man, and a remarkable character. In his palace at Tian-Sin, he was accustomed to work twelve or fourteen hours a day, and he told me once that he found five hours sleep all that he needed. To keep in touch with international events, he subscribed to clipping bureaus all over the world, and sat there with his fingers on every important string in China. It was my good fortune many years ago to attend an official dinner given by Li Hong Chang, in honor of John W. Foster, the former American Secretary of State, who was then in China on a trip around the world.

This occasion was a revelation to me of the magnificence and splendor with which the official class entertained in the days of the Empire. To begin with, the invitations were inscribed in letters of gold on red cards, larger than a magazine page, and accompanied by Lee Hong Chang's personal card, also read, and as big as a sheet of note-paper. In going to the dinner, which was in the Admiralty Palace on the edge of Tian-Tien, I had to have my own specially made Chinese card carried by a servant in official livery, while I followed in a chair trimmed in blue silk and, borne upon the shoulders of four men, gorgeously dressed for the occasion. I wore evening dress to this dinner, but felt shabby in comparison with the Chinese guests, who were clad in silk gowns trimmed with costly furs and had their fingers loaded with rings.

The old viceroy himself, whose tall form towered above those of the European and American diplomats, was garbed in a yellow gown, light pink trousers, and heavy black satin shoes with white soles at least two inches thick. On his head was a fur cap in which was stuck the famous three-eyed peacock feather. the highest decoration in the Chinese Empire, and which had never been wore by any except royalty until it was granted to leave. Fifty guests were present at this dinner, all of them men, except the wives of the American officials present. After they were seated, each of the Chinese took off his coat and gave it to his own servant in gorgeous livery, who later waited on him during the feast.

From time to time these servants handed their masters hot, wet cloths, with which the nobles wiped their lips and rubbed their faces in order to refresh themselves between courses. Not one, but two or three servants hovered about Lee, waiting upon him and keeping his dress in order. The menu at this dinner was written in gold letters in both English and Chinese, on a red card a foot long. I have it with me as I write, and so I can tell you just what dishes were served. They included pigeon egg soup, fried fish, bird's nest soup, meat pie, red shark fins, wild duck, bamboo shoots, filet and vegetables, stewed leg of mutton, fungus in clear sauce, pate de foie gras, Korean shrimp dumplings, truffled turkey, ham, salad, roast duck, asparagus, fruit custard, Chinese cakes, fruit jelly, fruit and coffee.

In addition, there were six different wines, imported from Europe, and two kinds of native liquors, which I tasted with the utmost respect. It seemed to me that I had never in my life seen so much food, but like my fellow Americans, I tried manfully to do my duty toward our distinguished host.

23 23 - The Story of China's Capital 17:51

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. The story of China's capital. From Tianjin, I have come 80 miles westward to Peking, the vast walled metropolis that is the capital of China. I have made the journey between the two cities on a modern double-tracked railway, a means of transportation far advanced over the only ones available when I first visited this country. My first journey between the two cities took me four days and was made by houseboat and donkeys. I hired the houseboat at Tian Sin, engaged a crew of sailors, a captain, a cook, and an interpreter, and provided my own bedding, a cook stove, and enough provisions to last us for the trip. The sailors worked day and night, half the time pulling the boat along by a rope attached to its mast and extending to the shore.

Where, harnessed like so many horses, they struggled slowly onward. At the town of Tung Chau, we left the boat and made the remainder of the journey by land on the backs of donkeys, while our baggage was carried behind us in native carts. The Chinese Empire at that time was governed by the Empress Dowager, the most autocratic sovereign in three centuries of Manchu rule, and Peking should have been one of the finest capitals on earth. Instead, I have never seen any city more filthy and slimy and foul. Its streets were without sidewalks or paving, and the native carts sank up to their hubs in mud, making deeper and deeper the holes in which pigs wallowed and scavenger dogs searched for refuse. The city was without water system or drainage, and the streets were the sewers for a million people.

At night, they were a pitch-black maze without lights or police. The pedestrian who dared venture forth upon them knew that he stood even chances of being beset by robbers or falling into a mud hole. This, then, was the Peking of the last decades of the empire, a city at that time more than 3,000 years old. There is said to have been a settlement on this site 1,200 years before the birth of Christ, with men living under a municipal government centuries before the founding of Rome. Here was the capital of the Kingdom of Yen, which was overthrown by the Tzin Dynasty, about 200 BC. And here, a thousand years later, the Tartars, sweeping down from the north, defeated the Chinese and occupied the city.

It was recaptured by the Chinese in the 12th century, later occupied by the Tartars again, and then taken by Genghis Khan, the great Mongol leader, whose grandson, the famed Kublai Khan, Made it his capital. With the ascendancy of the Ming Dynasty, the capital of the empire was established at Nanking, remaining there until the third Ming Emperor moved his court and the seat of government back to the city, which he called Peking, or Northern Capital. Although far removed from the real centers of Chinese civilization, thought, and population in the Yangtze Valley, it has continued to be the capital. Even when the Ming Dynasty was overthrown in 1644 and the throne taken by the Manchus, who were destined to occupy it until the fall of the empire almost three centuries later.

Today, although Imperial China is no more, the capital of the Republic remains at Peking. With the chaotic conditions of the country and the power usurped by the factions in the south and in Manchuria, it has become a capital in name only. The seat of a powerless president who has been left with little more authority over his people than has the throne-less boy emperor. Its royal pomp and splendor are no more. Its temples and palaces are falling into decay, and the footprints of Western civilization are everywhere to be seen. The old imperial Pei King seems to be gone forever, leaving unchanged only the spirit of China itself, which, ageless and changeless, But let me tell you something of the plan of Peking as it lies sprawled over the plain on which it is located.

It is a vast city of low, one- and two-story buildings, surrounded by walls and divided into two main parts. At the north is the Tartar City, a great square compound crisscrossed by six broad avenues and noted for its open spaces and long vistas. At the south is what is known as the Chinese City. Into the latter were driven all the Chinese after the Ming Dynasty fell. Only Manchus and those Chinese who had aided them in their conquest, being allowed to remain in the Tartar City. The Tartar City is surrounded by walls greater than any others I have seen in all China. They were begun by Genghis Khan 200 years before Columbus discovered America, and in spite of sieges and revolutions, Still stand in their entirety.

Parts of them are grown up with grass and brush, but they seem just as substantial as they were centuries ago. With a length of more than 13 miles, they are almost as high as a five-story building, and wide enough at the top for four automobiles to be driven abreast upon them. Like those around Nanking and the other walled cities of China, they were built by putting up two Parallel facings of bricks, and then packing the space between with earth and stone, which have been turned by time into one solid mass. The Tartar walls are pierced by nine huge gateways, each of which is surmounted by a giant watchtower, the blue-tiled roofs of which were the first things I saw when approaching Peking. From them, one can look over the whole city and even beyond to the hills behind it, fading away into the mountains of Mongolia.

And the level lands to the south that stretched down to the Yellow River. Until a few years ago, the gates under these towers were bolted every night, just as they were in the times when Mongol hordes threatened this capital. Today, they are open to any traveler and to all merchandise that pays the required tax for entrance. In the center of the Tartar City, occupying about one-sixth of its area and surrounded by walls 20 feet high, is what is known as the Imperial City. It contains the President's Palace and the government buildings, and in the days of the Empire was the residence of royal princes and high Manchu officials who lived here in magnificent style, supported largely by the rice tributes from the Yangtze Valley.

Rising out of it at the north is Cole Hill. A five-peaked elevation said to be formed by five great mounds of coal, gathered together by a Mongol ruler to be used in case of siege. Whether or not this legend is true, the mountain is obviously of artificial origin. Its sides are covered with grass, and each of its summits is crowned with a temple, in one of which the last Ming emperor hanged himself when he saw that usurpation of the throne by the Manchus was inevitable. Inside the Imperial City, enclosed by still other walls of reddish pink, is that Holy of Holies of old China, the Forbidden City, in which the dwellings of emperors and kings have stood for a thousand years. It is a park-like expanse of beautiful grounds, exquisite artificial lakes, and trees, out of which rise the royal palaces with their roofs of Imperial yellow.

Here, surrounded by his family, his concubines, And his thousands of eunuch servants lived the Emperor, the exalted Son of Heaven. No one but the nobles and high officials were ever admitted to his presence, and not even when he went out into the city could he be seen by ordinary mortals, as strips of matting were hung over all the houses along his route, and side streets and alleys were screened with cloth. To the mass of the Chinese people he was as a god, revered and obeyed, but never seen. During the last half century of imperialism in China, the dominant power in the sacred precincts of the Forbidden City was not one of the several emperors on the throne during that time, but rather the old Empress Dowager.

She was undoubtedly the most remarkable woman in the history of China, having kept the reins of government in her hands for almost 50 years after the death of the Emperor Hien Feng in 1861. She was only the secondary wife of that ruler, and one of the many stories circulated about her insinuated that the subsequent death of the first wife was caused by her machinations and plots. After that, the Dowager reigned supreme during the minority of her son, the Emperor Tung Chi, who was only a baby when put upon the throne. When Tung Chi had reached the age of 15, at which time he might aspire to rule independently, He died of smallpox, but there were many who said that his death was really due to an overdose of opium pills.

They whispered also that after his death, the suicide of his wife, the Empress, who threw herself into a well, was caused by the same woman, and that she was guilty of other crimes in a similar nature. During my early trips to China, I heard countless rumors of the most contradictory kind about the Empress Dowager. Some exalted her to the skies as an angel of mercy and light, while others said she was a demon incarnate, and compared her private life to that of Catherine the Great of Russia. Everyone acknowledged, however, her unusual ability and strength of purpose. She kept a finger on the pulse of China year after year, and her indomitable will was felt all over the empire, in spite of the fact that before the Boxer uprising, few people had seen her.

It is true that when the Emperor received the nobles of the court, she was present also, but with a gauze screen before her. The Empress Dowager held all foreigners in the greatest contempt, and looked upon the ministers of the Western nations as vassals, rather than as emissaries of countries equally as important as China. Indeed, the avenue along which the foreign legations were located was designated by the Chinese as the Street of the Subject Nations. and the ministers from Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, and the other great capitals of the world were popularly supposed to be present in Peking for the purpose of acknowledging the greatness of the ruler to whom their respective governments were paying tribute.

The dowager is said to have had the most luxurious tastes and to have spent money like water. In contrast with the present poverty of Peking, she exacted and received a constant stream of tribute, and upon occasion had no scruples about diverting government monies to her own purposes. One of her most expensive whims was the building of a new summer palace on the mountain of 10,000 Ancients, about eight miles west of Peking. The old palace had been destroyed by foreign troops in 1860. And when the Empress Dowager decided to build a new one, she used for the purpose of the money appropriated to build up a Chinese navy. The Summer Palace is now falling into decay, but the evidences of its extravagance and luxury are yet to be seen.

And on the swampy surface of the once beautiful artificial lake it overlooked is still standing the Imperial Marble Pavilion, which she had built in the form of a houseboat. This represented the peak of her extravagance, which was costly to China in more ways than one. For had the old empress invested this money in modern gunboats instead of such playthings, the defeat China suffered in the subsequent war with Japan might not have been so severe. Another crushing blow to the power of this autocratic old lady was the Boxer Rebellion and the way in which China was made to pay for it. In this uprising against the foreigners, said to have been encouraged by the Empress Dowager herself, the Chancellor of the Japanese Legation and the German Ambassador were murdered by Chinese.

With hostilities becoming more and more serious, all the foreigners in Peking were obliged to take refuge in the British Legation in the Tartar City. Here, poorly fortified and inadequately armed and provisioned, they were constantly besieged by the boxers, For two months. We all know the history of that terrible siege, when for weeks the lives of the Americans and Europeans hung by a thread and were finally saved only by the foreign troops marching on to Peking. That relief army of 18,000 men was made up of Japanese, Russian, British, American, and French soldiers. It took Tien-Sin on July 14, 1900, and reaching Peking a month later defeated the Boxers. And captured the Chinese capital. It added the final thorn to the crown of humiliation forced upon the Chinese by marching into the Forbidden City, the first time in history that foreign troops had trod the sacred soil of that imperial spot.

With the terms of peace that followed this uprising, China was obliged to relinquish many of its old customs, catering to that divinity that doth hedge a king. Foreign ministers were granted access to the Forbidden City and audiences with the Emperor, and the Empress Dowager was compelled to receive the ladies of the diplomatic corps. Nevertheless, her contempt for the foreign barbarians was in no way lessened, and when some of the guests at her first reception presumed to touch her exquisite curios and draperies, she afterward had every article thus defiled removed from her palace. She also caused to be erected a foreign-style building in which she declared she would recede these barbarians in their own vulgar surrounding.

This structure today is occupied by the President of the Chinese Republic. The death of the Dowager in 1908 was likewise the death knell of the Empire, which fell in the revolution of only three years later. The Emperor of that time was a boy six years old, and with the founding of the Republic, although stripped of the power that would have been his, he was granted the privilege of retaining his title, his imperial seclusion, and his palace in the Forbidden City. In addition, he was guaranteed the same courtesies that would be given to any foreign emperor on Chinese soil. In 1924, however, even these semblances of royalty were taken from him. Fearing that an attempt might be made to reinstate him upon the throne, the Republican government caused him to be evicted from the Forbidden City, which was then open to the public.

Today, anyone with a permit may go through this domain, which so short a time ago, only royalty could enter. Visitors may now inspect the hallowed dragon throne of the Son of Heaven, that masterpiece of exquisitely carved wood backed by a screen of priceless lacquer. And they may stroll about the throne hall of purple effulgence, the jade rainbow bridge, the bridge of ten thousand years, the halls of central peace, intense thought, and literary abyss, and the palace of earth's repose, places the very names of which retain something of the mystery and fascination of the old regime in China, although they are today falling into disrepair and shabbiness. Peking has indeed been shorn of its pomp and power.

The foreigners living here today are as safe as they would be anywhere in China. In the settlement following the Boxer Trouble, they were allotted the section of land on the southern edge of the Tartar City, now known as the Legation Quarter. This reservation is, I judge, about a half mile long, and perhaps two-thirds as wide. It is bordered on the south by the Tartar Wall. and on the other three sides by walls that have been put up since the siege and by open spaces in which no buildings may be erected. Inside these walls are the homes of the foreign ministers and the attachés of their legations, the military barracks and officers' quarters of the troops stationed here, and the foreign churches, banks, shops, hospitals, clubs, and hotels.

The buildings of each nation are enclosed in a separate compound And soldiers are always on guard at the gates. Other troopers patrol the section of the wall from which the Chinese bombarded the Legations in that fateful summer of 1900, and where afterward the guns of the foreigners were pointed at the Forbidden City. No Chinese is supposed to live in the Legation Quarter, although from time to time several have been given refuge here, and no foreigners except missionaries are officially allowed to reside outside this quarter. In spite of this decree, many Westerners and Japanese now do business and make their homes in the Tartar City, where commercial establishments have sprung up on the sites once reserved for the Yamuns and pleasure grounds of Manchu nobles.

24 24 - Shops and Shrines of Peiking 18:17

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. Shops and Shrines of Peking. The old and the new China rubbing elbows. Modern buildings side by side with ancient temples. Western schools and colleges and imperial examination halls crumbling into dust. Electric lights and pavements along streets that once were reeking mud holes. Tram cars competing with rickshaws, wheelbarrows, and native mule carts. 20th century traffic policemen displaying their authority on thoroughfares, where once the Mandarin and his fifty servants had the power to drive all from his path. And the cheapest and most popular automobile of the Western world rattling along beside caravans of surly camels that might have stepped from a page in the era of Kublai Khan.

Such is the Peking one sees when he leaves the Legation Quarter. and walks or rides through the native streets of this huge Chinese capital. It is one of the most interesting cities in China, and as fascinating, perhaps, as any on earth. Lying as it does on the northern edge of China proper, it is the meeting place for the Chinese of the south, the Mongolians and Manchurians of the north, and the Tibetans of the west. The people of half-dozen religions and as many languages jostle one another as they walk through the streets in a stream of yellow humanity of all classes and ages. One meets silk-gowned officials, bespeckled scholars, strutting Chinese gentlemen, American and European tourists, and officers and soldiers of almost every nation.

There are cotton-clad coolies, Manchu ladies, little boys with their hair braided in pigtails so that the evil spirits will think they are girls and pass them by. and everywhere the ubiquitous beggar. One boy who followed me was naked to the waist, and his arms had been cut off at the shoulders. He held a pan in his mouth, in which I was glad to put a few coins to be freed of him. Another beggar, who has long been in Peking, has thrust through his cheeks an iron skewer, a foot long, which he twists to keep the flesh torn and sore. Poverty and wealth may always be seen here, hand in hand. And there is no other place in the world where the contrasts in humanity are so great. The street traffic of Peking is even more interesting than are the crowds on the sidewalks, and the policemen who maintain order in it have more difficult jobs than they would have almost anywhere else on earth.

Peking is unique in China for its broad streets and the great amount of its wheeled traffic. Moving along in two noisy streams are wheelbarrows. hauled by donkeys and pushed by men, rickshaws, cabs, automobiles, and the springless two-wheeled hooded carts typical of North China. They are used by all classes of people, and the ones owned by the wealthy residents often boast highly varnished woodwork, silken hangings, and silver-trimmed harnesses for the donkeys that pull them. There are funeral processions and wedding parties, Both as noisy and gaudy as an American circus parade. Hundreds of donkeys and ponies loaded with goods, and most curious of all, caravans of camels. These animals are of the dromedary, or two-humped type, and are covered with dirty brown or white hair from six to twelve inches long.

They have come down across the Chinese wall from the wilds of Mongolia and Siberia, and even from beyond the great Gobi Desert. They bring furs and coal for the Chinese markets, and carry back chests of brick tea that will be mixed with mare's milk and eaten as soup by the Tartars. Many of the camels are roped together in single file, and others are ridden by savage-looking Mongol men or women clad in sheepskins and fur caps. I have already spoken of the new streets of Peking. The main avenues are now lined with granite gutters and trees. The roadways have been leveled and built up with crushed stone, and sidewalks have been laid. Also, waterworks have been installed in the city to fill a long-felt need.

The flat, sandy plain on which Peking is built makes it subject to frequent and heavy dust storms, and formerly the only way of sprinkling the streets and laying the dust was to have men go over them, dipping out water from buckets. Modern Peking, likewise, has its radio and telephones, as well as its electric lights. When I was here years ago, a story was going the rounds among the foreigners that the government had appropriated $80,000 for lighting the city, but that the sum had been distributed as followed. The official in charge of the matter took $40,000 as his squeeze, and then handed the remainder to his chief lieutenant. The latter pocketed $20,000, and gave the balance to a third man, who made a similar division.

The distribution went on until the appropriation for lights was at last reduced to a few copper cash, which were given to coolies to buy oil and wicks to be placed in saucer-like lamps. The lamps were set on the streets, whereupon the beggars drank up the oil, and that was the end of the lighting project. All these evidences of a modern civilization Only emphasized the more the old Peking that still exists. Riding at ease in a motor car, one can visit the old temples and pagodas outside the city walls, and can live amid the most up-to-date conveniences in a huge hotel, yet be but a few minutes' drive from remnants of hoary antiquity. Only a short distance east of the Legation Quarter, for instance, is the oldest astronomical observatory in the world.

It was originally built by Kublai Khan in 1279 AD, and still contains many scientific instruments made under the direction of the early Jesuit priests. Near this observatory are the ruined foundations of the old examination halls, an educational institution that has long since been replaced by universities, colleges, and a large number of elementary and advanced schools. North of the Forbidden City, The former rises high over Peking and commands a magnificent view of the capital, and the latter contains a bell cast by the order of the Emperor Yung Lo, who built the Porcelain Pagoda at Nanking. Farther on is the Hall of the Classics, where the emperors came to expound the ancient literature of China, and adjoining this hall is a temple to Confucius.

Another religious institution in this part of the city is the Lama Temple, one of the many such in Peking. Here live 1,500 Tibetan monks, practicing their strange rites amid surroundings of the worst filth and squalor. They have never learned to speak Chinese, but since their revenue from the government has been cut off by the founding of the Republic, they have recognized commercialism. To the extent of acquiring enough Pigeon English to serve them in begging from visitors. Peking is famed not only for its temples and palaces and shrines, but also for its shops, which are found chiefly in the narrow streets of the Chinese city, south of the Tartar Wall. Had I the space, I could write a whole chapter about this part of Peking.

I could tell you of a vast business done in the paper that the Chinese burn at the graves. to furnish their dead with money to pay their passage to heaven. I could tell you of stores where thousands of dollars worth of incense and joss sticks are sold every month, and I could take you into establishments that sell only birds and goldfish. We could find shops that make nothing but porcelain stoves, places where wood is sold in bundles by weight, and others where coal dust is mixed with mud. and sold in lumps the size and shape of a baseball. There are markets for buying and selling chickens and flowers, all sorts of toy stores, locksmiths and hardware establishments, and dirty little shops where for a few cents one can get a meal of camel's meat soup and mule roast.

Peking was formerly one of the chief fur markets of China, and whenever the death of a ruler forced the nobles into mourning garments of white, The most valuable furs of the forbidden colors could be picked up almost for a song. It is still the best place in China for buying curios and antiques of native workmanship in porcelain, lacquer, jade, embroidery, and cloisonne. In the days of the empire, the finest products of the craftsmen were brought here as tributes to the emperor and the officials, and were added to the private and government collections. After the Boxer Uprising, And during the Revolution of 1911, thousands of almost priceless articles were looted from the palaces, or pawned by reduced Manchu gentlemen.

Most of these, of course, have by this time been bought by collectors, but genuine antiques are still found from time to time, and so are eagerly searched for by practically every foreigner who comes to Peking. Many of these credulous buyers, if the truth were known, often pay fabulous prices. For antiques that were turned out by machinery in Japan or Western countries and then shipped back here to be sold. But whether the search be for museum pieces or inexpensive trinkets, the Peking shops are sure to make it interesting for the visitor who has time to explore them. Even their names are fascinating, few people being able to resist an institution of felicitous understanding or an establishment of 10,000 glories.

Their chief attraction seems to be their embroideries, some of which have really come from the palaces, and some from the factories behind the stores where they are sold. Few travelers come to Peking compared with the number who annually visit Shanghai and Hong Kong, and the result is that those who do come here have the field more to themselves. Embroideries are sold by peddlers as well as in stores, and during my stay in the legation quarter I had visits every morning from silk-coated merchants who, incidentally, asked three times what they expected to get. Examples of the best of the arts and crafts of China are now being preserved in the art museum that has been founded in a former military hall of the Forbidden City.

This museum contains the old Manchu collection that was brought here from Mukden in Manchuria, and countless articles besides that It has what is undoubtedly the world's finest collection of Chinese cloisonne, lacquer, porcelain, paintings, ivory and jade, embroideries and bronzes, and it is unique among national museums in that it contains the art of no other land than its own. Experts who have visited it value this art collection at no less than $30 million, while others have even appraised it at a figure Besides its shops, the old Chinese city of Peking is famous for its two temples, the Temple of Heaven and the Temple of Agriculture. The Temple of Heaven is an enclosure about three times as large as the Legation Quarter.

It is surrounded by three miles of walls and filled with gardens and trees, temples and altars. Here the emperors of China prayed to heaven and offered sacrifices The origin of this worship is lost in the mists of antiquity, but it end to date. Taoism and Confucianism, and is generally believed to have existed for four thousand years. The imperial processions from the Forbidden City to this place were always screened from the view of the common people. who were never allowed inside the temple, being represented in their intercourse with heaven by their divine ruler. The emperor rode here in a cart pulled by elephants sent from Siam, and was always accompanied by the highest officials of the empire, each of whom, in turn, was escorted by minor nobles and their retinues, all gorgeously gowned in beautifully embroidered robes.

Arriving at this great park, the emperor made his sacrifices of oxen, on the altar of heaven, which is formerly the most sacred spot in all China. It is built of the purest and most beautifully carved white marble in the form of three circular terraces, the uppermost of which is about eighteen feet above the ground and ninety feet in diameter. The base of this altar covers nearly an acre. The flights of steps between the terraces, the pillars of the balustrades, and all the measurements are in multiples of nine. According to the Chinese belief that there are nine points of the compass and nine divisions of heaven. In another part of the temple of heaven is the altar of prayer for grain, at which the emperor worshipped each year after spending the preceding night fasting in the palace of abstinence.

This altar also is in three marble terraces. Above it rises the temple of the happy year, the highest building in the enclosure. and perhaps the most beautiful example of religious architecture in all China. It is a circular structure with red columns, green gold friezes, and windows shaded by Venetian blinds of blue glass rods. It is surrounded by three roofs of sapphire blue tiles, above the peak of the topmost of which is an immense golden ball. The original building was struck by lightning and burned in 1889. A catastrophe that the Chinese believed occurred because a centipede had climbed up to this golden ball, angering heaven by such presumption. Be that as it may, they immediately set about reproducing the temple, and the one that now stands here is said to be an exact duplicate of the original, with the exception that Oregon pine, instead of Chinese timbers, was used for the beams upholding the roof.

Just opposite the Temple of Heaven, on the other side of the wide roadway that leads down from the Forbidden City, is the Temple of Agriculture, where the Emperor always started the spring ploughing for the nation, and where the Empress annually fed the silkworms with mulberry leaves. It is dedicated to Shen Nung, the Emperor who is supposed to have been the inventor of the plough. As such, he is greatly revered to this day by this people. who placed farmers second only to scholars, and ahead of merchants and craftsmen in the four most honorable professions. Like the other once sacred places of Peking, the temples of heaven and agriculture have been greatly desecrated in the eyes of the Chinese.

Foreign troops camped here after the Boxer uprising. The Committee for drafting the Constitution of the Republic made the Temple of Prayer for Grain their headquarters. The grounds have been used as public parks, and to-day there are barracks and playgrounds where formerly only the feet of nobility could tread. The altars and temples are becoming grass-grown and shabby, but even so, neglect and vandalism have not yet been able to dim their beauty. Before leaving Peking, I rode out to visit what was at one time the largest and most gorgeous royal cemetery in the world. This is the burial-place of the 13 Ming emperors whose tombs lie about 30 miles from the city, in a huge natural amphitheater selected by Yung Lo, the emperor who caused the capital to be moved from Nanking back to Peking.

These mausoleums of the last purely Chinese rulers to occupy the throne are approached through a gigantic gate, 90 feet long and 50 feet high, covered with beautiful carvings. Farther on are the pillars of victory, and beyond is the triumphal way, an avenue lined with huge stone figures, like those leading to the Ming tomb at Nanking. These statues formerly bordered a paved highway, but the stones over which the Ming emperors rode on their last earthly journeys are now torn up. The trees that shaded the avenue have been cut down, and the country stretches away on every side, bare and desolate. with no sign of habitation and no evidence of life except a few poor peasants at work in the fields.

The tombs are situated perhaps a half mile apart in the form of a great semicircle about the amphitheater, in the center of which is a temple to the Emperor Yong-Lo, whose tomb, just beyond it, is the most ornate of any of the thirteen. This temple covers an area nearly as large as a city block, and has a central hall two hundred feet long. The structure must have been magnificently beautiful in its day, but now the teeth of time are gnawing into its grandeur, and the iconoclastic foreigner is carrying away the porcelain tiles from its crumbling yellow roofs.

25 25 - The Women of China 22:11

CARPENTER. THIS RECORDING IS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. THE WOMEN OF CHINA. When a son is born in a lordly bed, wrap him in raiment of purple and red. Scepters of gold and playthings bring for the noble boy who shall serve the king. When a girl is born in coarse cloth wound, with a tile for a toy, let her lie on the ground. These verses from an ancient Chinese classic indicate that the status of woman in China has changed but little through the ages. Today, as when these lines were written, the female of the species is considered of small importance among the majority of the Chinese. Her birth is usually a cause for disappointment to her parents, who have been praying for a boy. Her marriage is looked upon as a failure if she does not bring a son into the world, and if her husband dies while she is young, her only alternative to a lifetime of practical slavery for her parents-in-law is to commit suicide.

In my travels through this country, I have seen Chinese women of every age, class, and type. Whether rich or poor, old or young, and whether eking out an existence on a filthy riverboat or enjoying every luxury in a palace, all of them, to a certain extent, are bound by about the same customs and conventions. The discrimination against women in China begins when she is born. A girl baby cannot grow up to bring glory to her ancestral name, having to marry into another family. She is often considered a burden rather than a blessing, and the festivities incident to her birth are far simpler than those for her brother. Every expectant mother prays for a son, and keeps a knife and paper animals on her bed to frighten away the spirits that might harm him.

When he is born, he is presented with gifts and offerings, including eggs colored red, and when he receives his first bath three days later, These gifts are put into the water with him. When he is a month old, there is a feast in his honor, at which time his head is shaved, and on the hundredth day the hair is thrown into a lake, an act that is believed to bring courage to him. When he is a year old, he is supposed to give the first indication of what his future will be. At that time, a number of articles are put on a table. And the one he reaches for first shows what occupation he will follow when he becomes a man. Needless to say, if he favors a pen, there is great rejoicing, scholarship being the most honored profession there is in this country.

The girl baby, on the other hand, is shown little attention in comparison, and among the very poor is often given away or sold. This practice is now officially prohibited by law and has disappeared in the treaty ports, but in the interior cities it probably flourishes almost as much as ever. It is carried on largely by slave brokers whose business increases at times of famines and floods, when parents will sell boys as well as girls, both for the money and because such a sale will mean one less mouth to feed. The boys and most of the girls Bought by the brokers are later usually sold as house servants. It is cheaper to buy a servant than to hire one, for if one purchases a girl of eight, her services can be had for nothing until she is fifteen.

She can then be resold for perhaps ten times the original price. Parents of China no sooner have a daughter than they begin to make plans for her marriage. Many children are betrothed before they can walk. Although among poorer families, it is customary to wait until they reach their teens. Whatever their rank, most families consider it a disgrace if their children reach the age of 20 without being married. The family being the social unit of China, marriage is the greatest event in one's life here, and the old-fashioned Chinese cannot conceive of any one choosing to remain single. Even in Shanghai, That most modern of Chinese cities, I heard of a native unmarried woman of 28 who is an efficient and well-paid forewoman in a factory, but who is looked upon with pity, even by the married women who envy her her easy life.

The latter slave 12 hours a day for a mere pittance, carrying a baby, and sometimes two, back and forth to work with them, and their life is one of drab, never-ending drudgery. Nevertheless, it is to be preferred, they believe, to the disgrace of spinsterhood. According to the old belief, it is not respectable for a boy or a young man to do his own courting, nor for his parents to do it. The parents select the girl, it is true, but they make their overtures through third parties, who are often professional matchmakers. There are both men and women who do nothing else but arrange marriages. They are supposed to understand all about human nature and to be able to judge at a glance whether a girl will make a good wife.

The most important thing the matchmakers do, however, is to ascertain that the day and the hour on which each party was born were such that their marriage will be a happy one. If the horoscopes are not right, another bride has to be selected. The Chinese bride sometimes goes to live with her future husband's parents months and even years before the marriage takes place, but generally she remains with her family until her wedding. The ceremony usually occurs in the evening at the home of the groom instead of the bride, and on a day chosen by the groom's family, although the parents of the bride are the ones to select the month. Red, not white, is the color for brides in China. And the presents exchanged by the two families after the betrothal are often partly or entirely scarlet.

It is customary for the parents of the boy to send a pair of geese to the home of the bride, indicating that, like those fowls, their son is mating for life, and if the geese are white, it is proper for them to be dyed scarlet. Other presents are symbolic of good luck. Fermicelli, for instance, carries with it the wishes The gift of the giver for a long life. Wedding gifts are expected from the friends of the young couple as well, and are usually sent in pairs, together with a present of money. Each family has a feast of its own before the wedding, while another feast always follows the ceremony. The girl is carried to her future husband in a covered chair of bright red, which, together with a veil and dress of red, are sent to her by the groom.

As she goes out the door, she throws a pair of chopsticks back over one shoulder to indicate that she will eat her father's rice no longer, and it is expected of her also to make a great show of weeping and wailing as she is put into her chair, to signify her deep sorrow at leaving the parental abode. I wish I could show you one of the many wedding processions I have seen in these Chinese cities. In Canton, I met four of them in a single ride, and in Peking and Tian Sin have witnessed as many as a half-dozen on a day that was decided upon by the matchmakers as particularly lucky. They are always accompanied by a great din, produced by a band with crashing cymbals and drums, and by the sputtering of firecrackers set off to frighten away the demons.

The chair-bearers and most of the marchers are dressed in red, And banners and balloons of this color float at the ends of long poles carried by boys. The bride herself cannot be seen, as her chair is tightly closed to keep out evil spirits. Behind her are brought bedding, clothing, and foods of all kinds, displayed partly to impress the neighbors and partly to intimidate these same evil spirits. Upon reaching the home of the groom, the bride and her prospective husband, together, Prostrate themselves before his ancestral tablets. Next, they kowtow to the kitchen god and to each other, and, as the culmination of the ceremony that makes them one, drink wine from the same cup. The groom then lifts his wife's veil, probably seeing her face for the first time, and the guests flock in to congratulate the couple.

The newlyweds are next seated on the edge of the bed and two candles lighted and put on a table before them to determine which one of them will live the longer. If the candle on the right side burns out first, it is a sign that the wife will die first, but if it is the one on the left, then the wife knows she will one day be a widow. At the same time, Posterity, as well as the dead, is remembered by putting about the room dishes of watermelon and pumpkin seeds and vegetables and fruit that contain seeds. The characters for seed and sun have practically the same sound in the Chinese language, and the presence of these edibles is an encouragement to the gods to send many sons to this union. The remainder of the night is spent in feasting and celebrating.

The lot of the average bride in China Who marries according to the old Chinese customs, is far from an easy or enviable one. She must obey her mother-in-law, and if she is the wife of a younger son, she is imposed upon by her older sisters-in-law as well. Her status in the family rises only when she bears a son, but if she happens to be a secondary wife, even her boy baby is not her own, but is given over to the first wife. The latter is the legal mother to all the children of secondary wives or concubines. By law, a husband may have as many concubines as he likes, but the ordinary man can usually support but one wife, and as a rule, takes another only when the first has borne no male child. Practically, the only solace the young wife has is the thought that when her son grows up, he will look upon her with honor.

And that when she is a mother-in-law, she will have a chance to issue orders to others. In no land in the world have mothers and mothers-in-law such power as here. And I should not be surprised to learn that all our mother-in-law jokes originated in this country. Not only is the wife the servant of her mother-in-law as long as the latter lives, but old men also seem to obey their mothers just as they did when young. In the treaty ports and the cities where Western influence is most felt, and among the Chinese educated in the mission schools, there has been a decided revolt against the old marriage customs. Boys and girls are demanding that they have a part in the selection of life partners, and occasionally take the whole matter into their own hands by refusing to marry the person of their parent's choice and eloping with someone else.

Women who have learned our customs are demanding more independence after marriage, while as for widows, they are defying the ancient Chinese teachings and beginning to marry again. Not only in marriage, but in other respects, is the new woman ignoring old precepts and precedents and adopting the ways of the foreigner. The women who have been educated in mission schools and abroad, and the ones who have had an opportunity to observe Western customs, are but a small proportion of the feminine population of China. Nevertheless, their progress during only a decade or so has been so remarkable that I should not venture to say what they could not accomplish were they given the same opportunities for development as those of our American women.

Less than a generation ago, no Chinese women who worked outside their homes were considered respectable. Today, they are employed by the thousands in the silk and cotton mills and in other industries, and in lesser numbers are even entering business and professional life. In Shanghai, there is a business woman's club presided over by a Chinese graduate of Smith College, with a membership of Native Women bankers, typists, advertising writers, proofreaders, saleswomen, reporters, teachers, doctors, and office workers. Peking has a savings bank conducted entirely by and for women, and the commercial press of Shanghai in 1914 began the publication of a woman's magazine, printed in Chinese, that contains departments devoted to fiction, sewing, Cooking, homemaking, civic improvement, babies, and in fact, everything that is covered by the Modern Woman's Magazine in America.

Most of the Chinese women who have broken with the old restrictions and conventions received their early training in the mission schools, in many cases followed by courses in an American college. One such woman is famous all through the Orient. She is Dr. Mary Stone. She was adopted in childhood by an American missionary, given an anglicized name, educated in mission schools, and then sent to the University of Michigan to study medicine and surgery. Today, she conducts a hospital that is one of the foremost in China in its good work among the natives. She has a sister who is also a physician with a degree from Johns Hopkins University. Chinese women have proved to be particularly successful in the medical and nursing professions, in which their quietness and steadiness are valuable qualities.

In society, as well as in business and professional life, women are emerging from their old existence. They are going on the stage, formerly the exclusive domain of men, taking their place as hostesses to their husbands' guests, appearing in public at theaters and restaurants, Dancing with men not of their family and engaging in sports. Even their looks have changed. They have taken up new ways of dressing their hair. Some of the young girls are having it bobbed, and in the treaty ports, they generally wear foreign clothes or modifications of the native styles. I see the old-time loose silk jackets and wide, full pantaloons, but I also see short skirts, blouses, and sleeves cut off at the elbows.

Often the skirts are so abbreviated that as the girls walk along, they display, I shall not say intentionally, a conspicuous red or blue silk garter clasping a silk stocking leg just over the calf. The blouses reach to the hips and end in a slight peek at the back and front. They are usually tight at the neck and loose across the chest. It is contrary to the Chinese proprieties for a woman to wear clothes that even indicate, no matter how plump she is, that she has a bust, and this convention is being outgrown very slowly. The modern Chinese girl of a well-to-do family presents a most attractive appearance, more so, I think, in native clothing than in foreign. Her silk blouse is of the brightest of red, She is a white, green, or yellow, and her skirt or white trousers are likewise of a gay color.

Her feet are small, but the smallness is nowadays only that of nature and not the result of tight binding. She has low shoes of satin or leather, and her stockings are silk, while the wearing of knit underwear or lingerie is replacing the old custom of putting on layer upon layer of outer garments in cold weather. The women of the old regime have not discarded the gold combs or gold knots in their hair, but their modern sisters prefer instead diamonds, pearls, and jade set in finger rings, earrings, and bracelets. Cosmetics are plentifully used, and the eyebrows are shaped into the merest lines of black. On the other hand, some of the women tried to ape the ways of the foreigner to such an extent That they succeed only in making themselves ridiculous.

Probably the most pronounced departure from age-old custom among the women of China has been the abolishing of foot binding in many parts of the country, especially the larger cities. This custom is so old that its origin has been forgotten, and nothing but legends remain. One of these stories says that it was started by an imperial concubine 10 or 15 centuries ago. Because she thought her feet were too large for beauty. Another intimates that the custom, like the wearing of cues, was a mark of conquest imposed by an ancient emperor, and another that it was adopted to keep Chinese women from gadding about. Perhaps the most accepted explanation is that foot binding was introduced by an empress who had club feet and who bandaged them to hide the deformity.

She clothed them in yellow satin, and they came to be known as golden lilies, which is a term still used for these crippled extremities. Of course, the people did not know of the Empress's deformity and were eager to follow the new fashion she had set. The binding of the feet is begun when a girl is five or six years old. The first wrappings are put on by professional foot binders and consist of long pieces of tape about a half an inch wide. The binder presses the four small toes down under the sole and then takes a turn with the tape about the big toe at the joint. She fastens this and then draws the tape back around the heel, pressing it forward and materially increasing the height of the instep.

The tape is next carried to the front of the foot, and the four small toes are bound in so they are almost sunken in the flesh. Next, a piece of stiff cloth is wrapped around the foot. and fastened with heavy thread, and the feet are squeezed into stiff shoes or slippers over which more binding is put until they are absolutely rigid. The instep is so forced up that the heel and the big toe form a perfect bow, and it is not unusual for the flesh to break and the bones to protrude. Needless to say, this binding is accompanied by severe pain, not only in childhood, but all through life. While in the winter, these compressed feet are liable to freeze. It is exceedingly difficult for a foreigner to see a bound foot without its wrappings.

The Chinese women will not take their bandages off even in the presence of their husbands, and it was only through a missionary doctor that I was able to see the bare foot of a native girl in his hospital. I cannot describe the ugliness of this golden lily, which looked more like a club than a foot. The heel and the ball of the foot were bent together, leaving a crack between them about three inches deep. The big toe was abnormally developed, being really the only part of her foot upon which the girl walked. The unnatural way of walking, compelled by the bound feet, had prevented the development of the muscles of the calf, and her leg was the same size from ankle to knee. I have asked many Chinese Why footbinding has such a hold upon the people, and have always been answered that it is because it is the fashion.

The truth seems to be that the men are the cause of its continued vogue. By the majority of the masculine sex, a small foot is still considered beautiful, and a large foot the sign of a servant or plebeian. Such men feel that a wife with large feet would lower their social standing. And if a husband discovers after the marriage ceremony that his bride's feet are not bound, he is considered to have sufficient excuse for sending her back to her parents. With such a feeling existing in a country where marriage has been woman's chief aim in life, it is small wonder that the practice of foot binding continues. The most regrettable thing about the slowness With which foot binding is being abolished is the fact that it is the poor, the ones whose need for natural feet is greatest, who suffer the most.

The rich, who can afford servants, are the first to break away from the old custom, but the lowest classes are too enslaved by convention to make much progress in the movement for natural feet. In the country districts I have met farm women with bandaged feet. who were obliged to hitch themselves along on their knees as they worked in the fields, and have seen others so crippled that they could not leave their homes. The first step in the movement against foot binding was taken by the mission schools, who refused to enroll any girls with bound feet. Later, a national society was formed to abolish it, and many of the leading Chinese officials expressed themselves as against it. Today, natural feet are the majority in the treaty ports and large cities, but throughout the interior the bound foot remains, to a large extent a symbol of the slowness with which, after all, the mass of the Chinese assimilate new customs.

26 26 - The Great Chinese Wall 15:37

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. The Great Chinese Wall. I am at Shanhai Kuan, which lies on the Yellow Sea at the eastern end of the Chinese Wall, and is the last outpost of China proper before the northbound traveler enters Manchuria. It is a city of little commercial importance, but has a buffer between these two sections of the country. It has been in the midst of hot fighting again and again. In recent years, during the warfare between the Peking Army and the forces of Shang Tso Lin, the warlord of Manchuria, Shan Hai Kwan has been bombed by Manchurian aviators who flew their planes over territory once successfully defended by Chinese archers stationed on top of the Great Wall.

Shan Hai Kwan is two hundred and sixty-two miles from Peking on the line that extends from the Chinese capital to Mukden, the capital of Manchuria. I was in China when this line was open to traffic and was on board the first special train to pass over it, going from Mukden to Tianjin. On the present trip, I am traveling in the opposite direction, having come from Peking back to Tianjin and thence northeastward to Shanhaiquan. We left Tien Tien in the early morning, making our way through myriads of grave mounds, passing the city of Tong Koo at the mouth of the Pei Ho River, and turning to the north, where stand the ruins of the Tak Koo Forts. Standing on the platform, I could see the scores of windmills that pumped the brine of the Yellow Sea into the salt pools of the government reservoirs, and could watch the gangs of coolies cutting down the mountains of salt, I rode for an hour over salt marshes upon which were grazing Mongolian ponies, cattle, and donkeys, and then entered the rich garden lands of the Great Plain of North China.

Here, every inch of soil is cultivated, and the farmers were everywhere, laboring in the fields. Shanhai Kwan is now four miles from the eastern end of the Great Wall of China. which originally extended to the very edge of the sea at this point. From here, this mighty barrier that separates northern China from Mongolia and Manchuria goes over mountain and valley until it reaches the great desert of Gobi, twelve hundred miles to the westward. If it could be lifted up and put down upon the United States, it would stretch from Philadelphia almost to the borders of Colorado. and if its twistings and windings could be straightened out, it would extend several hundred miles farther west. At its eastern terminus, time has gained the mastery over this stupendous work of man, and the end of the wall has crumbled away and become overgrown with moss and grass.

Farther inland, however, it has weathered the passing of centuries, and one can see it climbing up the Manchurian mountains, jumping the gorges, and scaling the peaks. Like a gigantic serpent, it flings itself clear across China, winding its way tortuously over the greatest obstacles that nature could present. Although it is gray with age, parts of it still seem as imperishable as the hills whose hoary brows it crowns. Through its eastern course, the wall is from 20 to 30 feet in height, and its width ranges from 15 to 30 feet. If you will imagine a solid block, of two-story houses, fifteen feet deep, built across the United States from the Atlantic to Omaha. You will have a faint idea of the size of this wall.

Such a block, however, would be easy to construct in comparison with the work that was required to build this vast fortification. The Great Wall climbs up crags so steep that the bricks in it had to be carried on the backs of goats. It crosses peaks higher than any in the Alleghenies, and at one point goes over a mountain, the top of which is 5,000 feet above sea level. A large part of it has a foundation of granite blocks from 2 1⁄2 to 4 feet thick, all of which had to be brought from long distances. The bricks of which the wall is made were put together in two parallel walls, each about 3 feet thick. The space between was then filled with earth and stone well rammed down. The top of the wall which is also paved with these bricks, is everywhere so wide that two wagon-loads of hay could be driven abreast along it without touching.

I have seen enough of the building of railroads and other engineering works in China to understand how this wall was constructed. The Chinese had no machinery to help them, and few cattle or horses were used. Every foot of the masonry was made by human labor, and the earth and stones for the filling were undoubtedly brought up in baskets on the backs of that army of laborers of centuries ago. As a feat of engineering, the building of the Great Wall impresses me even more forcibly than the pyramids of Egypt. The greatest of those huge piles covers thirteen acres, and reaches to a height less than that of the Washington Monument. The Great Wall of China is so large that a fifty-mile stretch of it contains enough brick and stone to build a pyramid higher than old Cheops itself.

The Chinese Wall was begun seventeen hundred years before America was discovered, at a time when our ancestors, half-naked and altogether savage, were wandering through the wilds of northern Europe, when Rome was still a republic, fighting her last battles with the Carthaginians, and more than two hundred years before Christ was born. It was planned by the Emperor Shi Huang Ti, whom I have already mentioned as the Napoleon of China. To a large extent, he was the founder of the empire, as he consolidated the many kingdoms of China into one, abolishing the feudal system and dividing the country into provinces. He began the canal system of China and built many of the ancient highways. Like Alexander and Napoleon, he grew vain as time went on.

He decided that Chinese history should begin with him. And for that reason, he committed an act that has made him in the eyes of the Chinese the most despised and detested of their emperors. It was he who caused to be burned all the books of history, poetry, and classic literature in China. I have already told how, for fear that there might be other books written than such as he desired, he killed hundreds of the most eminent scholars of the Empire. It is said that not a single perfect copy of the Chinese classics escaped destruction, and that those that exist today were written by scholars who were not known to their ruler and who kept their work secret until after his death. The Imperial History of China says of Shi Huangti that he had a high pointed nose, slit eyes, a pigeon breast, a wolf voice, and a tiger heart.

and that he was stingy, cringing, and graceless. In spite of all this, it must be admitted that he was a great executive, especially in materializing his plan for a wall across China to keep the enemy hordes from the north from swooping down upon his country's fertile plains. He drafted as laborers all the prisoners of war and all the criminals in the land, with 300,000 troops to help and to keep the workers in order. And this vast army never ceased its labors on the Wall for fifteen years, although the Emperor himself died during this time. The original Wall was by no means the formidable structure it became in later centuries, and its western portion never has been as important as that in the east.

The part of it west of the Yellow River was largely a protecting rampart for the trade road between China and the west. But as the chief purpose of the eastern stretch was to keep out the Tartars, it was constantly guarded and kept in repair. It was almost entirely rebuilt in the sixth century, and from time to time was extended and its route changed. At one time, it is said, a Tzin ruler put up a large sector in ten days by the forced labor of a million men. During other eras it was neglected, and after it had failed to keep out the Mongols, Who ruled China in the 13th and 14th century, it had almost no use and was practically forgotten. Marco Polo, who visited China at that time, makes no mention of it whatever.

With the ascendancy of the Chinese Ming's, the Great Wall once more became an important barrier. This dynasty, determining that never again should the wall fail to keep back the invaders, Generally, reconstructed it throughout its entire length and built a new stretch of 300 miles. They strengthened and enlarged it with heavier masonry, built massive gates through it at the passes in the mountains, erected 50-foot watchtowers above it at every 200 yards over part of its length, and inaugurated a better system of guards and signal fires to keep watch for and give notice of approaching enemies. In 1644, when the throne was again seized by a race from north of the barrier, the Great Wall began the deterioration that has continued ever since.

While it is still intact for hundreds of miles, other parts of it have today crumbled into ruins and even disappeared entirely. No archers now guard it, no soldiers parade its top, and it remains only as a monument to the millions of men. who, two thousand years ago, worked to protect their homes and those of their descendants from the invaders from the north. The best place to visit the Great Wall today is at the Nankau Pass, about twenty-five miles north of Peking, and not far from the Ming tombs. The gate at this great gap in the mountains was formerly the neck of the bottle through which passed the chief caravan trade between Peking and Mongolia. Today, the wall has been cut through for the railway that now connects Peking with the city of Kaogan, and which will no doubt eventually be extended on to Urga.

This railway has now become the chief freight carrier in the territory through which it runs, but nevertheless, it is far from displacing entirely the camel trains, and to the north and west of Kaogan camels and an occasional motor car are the only modes of transportation. It is estimated that more than 100,000 camels are employed in carrying tea alone from Kalgan to Siberia. Before the railway went through the wall at the Nankau Pass, all travel had to go through the Pa Ta Ling Gate, the great archway that dates from the 14th century. It is built of massive blocks of marble, exquisitely carved, and is covered with inscriptions in six different languages. Besides those in Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan.

There is one in Sanskrit, one in ancient Urgar, and another in Tangut, which is today one of the rarest and least known languages on Earth. The trip to the Great Wall at Nankau can now be made in a few hours in comparative comfort, but before the railway was built, it meant a journey of several days. The first time I made it was when I was taking a honeymoon trip around the world. My wife and I engaged donkeys and mule litter, our party all told consisting of ourselves, three pigtail Chinese, and four long-eared mangy beasts. There was Nanshu King, who was our English-speaking guide and cook, a Mohammedan mafu, or groom, and a ragged, dirty donkey boy, who ran behind and kept the animals going at full speed by poking a stick into their bellies.

The mule litter was an arrangement somewhat like a dog kennel, covered with cloth and swung between two poles about thirty feet long. These extended out in front and in back to form two pairs of shafts, which were bound to saddles on the mules. The interior of this litter was filled with blankets, and was just large enough for one person to sit or lie down within it. It was far from comfortable, and for the greater part of the trip, My wife and I consigned it to the guides and rode the donkeys ourselves. I wish I could show you one of these Peking donkeys and its queer saddle, still a common enough sight in North China. The saddle is made of a number of blankets strapped one on top of the other until they stand out like the flat board on the back of a circus horse.

The stirrups are heavy pieces of iron tied to these blankets with pieces of rope, and the bridle is more often than not Merely a rude halter. The donkeys themselves are not much bigger than a Newfoundland dog, and when loaded down with all this paraphernalia, not to mention a rider on top, they almost disappear. While riding along, I remember remarking to my wife that she seemed to be sitting rather far back on her mount. That may be, was the reply, but at any rate I can't see anything of his head but the tips of his ears. There is now an excellent hotel at Nankow, but travelers who want to explore the country more than a day's ride away must still carry their own food and bedding with them, and must stay at night at one of the rude inns of this region.

These hostelries, usually boasting some such name as the Inn of Increasing Righteousness or the Inn of Accumulating Prosperity, are never clean and seldom comfortable. They are not far different, I judge, From those of Palestine in the days of the Savior. Low one-story brick buildings, they extend around open courts in which droves of hogs and camels are kept, adding their grunting to the braying of the donkeys and mules. The wall here at Nankau is a much more solid structure than at Shan Hai Kwan, and from the watchtowers above the pass, it is possible to get a more magnificent view of it than elsewhere along its route. The snow-clad mountains of Mongolia, with the caravans of camels moving along them, stretch away to the north until the camels become the size of kittens, and sky and mountains meet in the horizon.

To the south is China, also mountain-covered, and cutting the landscape is this great stone barrier, its towers rising above the peaks themselves and extending on and on as far as human eye can see.

27 27 - The Manchus Ancient Capital 18:31

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. The Manchus Ancient Capital. Stand with me at the top of the great drum tower of Mukden and take a look over the city. We are in the capital of Manchuria, the ancient home of the Manchus and the birthplace of the last dynasty to rule over the Chinese empire. For a thousand years or more, the city has occupied a prominent place In the history of China, from the days when its Tartar and Mongol hordes swept down over the Great Wall to battle with the Chinese, to the present time when a Manchurian warlord heads at Mukden, one of the most powerful of the independent military factions that have sprung up since the birth of the Republic. Among the earliest known inhabitants of Manchuria were the Qitans, who were in the 10th century established the Liao dynasty.

and ruled over what is now southwestern Manchuria, eastern Mongolia, and a part of northern China. Two centuries later, they were conquered by the New Chens, the founders of the Ching, or Golden Dynasty, and the real ancestors of the Manchus. The New Chens, in turn, were overthrown about 1,200 A.D. by the Mongols under Genghis Khan, the grandfather of Kublai Khan, and their Manchu descendants did not return to power, until 1644, when they seized the throne at Peking. Built on a pedestal fifty feet wide, through which two tunnel-like roadways cross each other, the drum tower rises one hundred feet above Mukden. In passing it, I noticed a wicket gate standing open, and slipped in. Ahead of me I found two flights of stairs with high, narrow steps, up which I climbed to the great drum that hangs among the pigeon-roosts under the roof.

This spot offers the best vantage point in Mukden, and is the place from which I ask you to look with me in your imagination over the city below us. Mukden is a panorama of temples and palaces, gateways and towers, and shops and houses. Stretching out on all sides are the low one-story buildings of gray brick, so crowded together that their ridge roofs from banks of black tiles above each side of the checkerboard of streets, crossing one another at right angles. Over the whole rise, the roofs of the great temple-like buildings of the old imperial palace of the Manchus, their yellow tiles shining like gold under the sun. Here, this dynasty reigned before it achieved supremacy of Peking, and here, during the succeeding centuries, the Manchu emperors made pilgrimages to reverence to their ancestors, and the officials came to register their grief whenever a ruler of that dynasty died.

Erected in 1637 by the founder of the Qing dynasty, the palaces of Mukden are much like those of Peking, but on a smaller scale. For hundreds of years, they were the repository of a library of thousands of volumes, of priceless jewels and precious stones, and of articles of rare workmanship in silver, and porcelain, worth their weight in gold. Since the fall of the empire, the books and many of the relics of the old Manchu splendor have been removed to Peking, and the buildings have been slowly deteriorating. The great chambers and halls are now festooned with dusty cobwebs and littered with the feathers and droppings of the pigeons that fly in and out, while the grounds surrounding them are strewn with rubbish and straw.

Beyond the old imperial palaces are the modern ones, erected for the former viceroys. These now contain the residence of the Governor-General of Manchuria and his officials, and the offices of the various departments of the government. They are immense one- and two-story buildings, covering a half-dozen acres. In the days of the empire, when the imperial viceroy lived here, Tartar soldiers, armed with guns, stood at the gates, And richly dressed Manchus passed in and out all day long. Today, they are the headquarters of General Shang So Lin, and the independent revolutionary government of which he is the head. Around the inner city of Old Mukden is a great wall built of brick, thirty or forty feet high, and wide enough for two automobiles to be driven abreast on it.

At its four corners are turrets overlooking the city, and above its eight gates Watchtowers rise high into the air. From each of these gates, broad avenues extend in every direction. Lining them are the principal stores and buildings, while between them are other streets, narrow and irregular, dirty and smelly. Enclosing the whole in a great circle is a second wall made of mud. Like the inner one, it has eight entrances, through each of which the roadway winds about through towers and walls, so built by the ancient Manchus, That the evil spirits in which they believed should get lost in attempting to follow their twists and curves. Not far outside these encircling walls of their ancient stronghold are buried the early Manchu emperors.

Their tombs rival in splendor and ornateness the imperial palace itself. I drove out yesterday over the four miles to Pei Ling, as the North Mausoleum is known, passing in turn the mounds of an old Chinese cemetery and a golf course, where the foreign residents of Mukden were driving their balls over the green turf. The East Mausoleum, or Tungling, is ten miles from the city, while the ashes of a third emperor lie buried in still another tomb, Yungling, almost a hundred miles distant. All this is the old Mukden. There is also a new city built by the Japanese, which is the Mukden that the traveler first sees upon arriving. The Japanese control the South Manchuria Railway, and all along it, on their leased territory, they have founded settlements with Western improvements and Western progressiveness.

Coming here from Shan Hai Kwan, I traveled all day from the eastern end of the Chinese Wall, and just as the sun was setting, rolled up to the imposing station of the new Muq Den. On the second floor of the station building is a modern hotel. One of a chain operated by the Japanese throughout Manchuria. About it centers the Japanese city, with its paved streets, its modern stores and office buildings. Except for its Japanese signs and the motley crowd that meets the trains, it might almost be a city of our Middle West. The traveler welcomes its comfortable hotel, takes advantage of its up-to-date business methods, and sighs with relief at its cleanliness. Indeed, one finds everything here but atmosphere, and for that he visits the walled city.

The two or three miles between the new station and the old Mukden may be covered by motor car, horse-drawn street car, carriage, rickshaw, or even in one of the hooded, springless mule carts that fairly jolt the bones in one's body. The road passes within sight of the memorial erected to the tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers Killed here in the war with Russia. Goes by hospitals, schools, and factories, and then, before reaching the wall, winds through the foreign settlement. Here are the various consulates and the homes of the foreigners and moved in. Stopping at the Consulate of the United States, I found it housed in an old temple, its doorway guarded by a grinning stone monster, almost as high as the building itself.

But now let us climb down from the drum tower and take a walk through old Mukden. The crowds on the streets are not much different from those of the Chinese cities south of the Great Wall. The Manchus, although originally much stronger and larger physically than their neighbors to the south, have been almost entirely absorbed by the Chinese, just as their language has been. Nevertheless, the strain of Manchu blood still shows in the physique of many of the people. In comparison with the Chinese of Canton, some of them are giants, the men being often six feet tall, with big frames, heavy bones, and large heads well set on broad, full shoulders. The Manchu women are especially fine-looking. They are large-framed and broad-hipped, and they carry themselves erectly as they pass along the streets.

They walk with a swinging stride, for their feet have never been bound. Like those of their Chinese sisters. Their native dress consists of pantaloons, over which is worn a long coat reaching to the ankles and often lined with fur. Every girl rouges her cheeks and eyelids, but it is her headdress that especially distinguishes a Manchu from the other women of China. Her gorgeous coiffure far outdoes in splendor the most elaborate ones ever devised by American hairdressers. Atop the head of a Manchu lady is a framework of gold, silver, or other metal that often extends out so far on each side that she has to turn sideways when going through a door. Over this, her shining black locks are twisted and coiled until the whole is indeed a fearful and wonderful creation.

Such headdresses make these women seem at least a half foot taller than they really are. Their height is increased still more, and often to a startling degree, by the shoes that many of them wear. These have wooden supports, three times as high as a French heel, extending down from the center of the sole. Such a shoe is always the badge of wealth and culture, as no working woman could go about in them. As we continue our walk through Old Mugden, we are carried along by the stream of humanity, There are animals and vehicles that flow through the streets of this city from morning till night. We have to pick our way carefully and at times must even jump into stores to keep from being crushed by the crowd.

Mingled with the pedestrians are automobiles, gin rickshaws, and huge wheelbarrows pushed by sweating Chinese. There are freight carts loaded with bean cakes, coal, or millet, and hauled by donkeys and mules. Single or double, Now and then, one sees a foreign carriage with coachmen and footmen in livery, and occasionally We passed peddlers selling everything from ice cream to live crickets in tiny cages. and calling attention to their wares by all kinds of noises. One. A shrill whistle that rises above the general babble of these teeming streets may be heard in almost every block. It is long, loud, and continuous. Still, it took me some time to learn whence it came. At first I thought it might be from the whistle that these people tied to the tails of their pigeons to scare off hawks.

But I afterward learned that it was the signal of the hot-water peddler. This occupation constitutes the life work of many men in Mukden. They always do a thriving business as fuel is carefully conserved by the poor people, who prefer to pay a fraction of a cent for enough hot water to make tea for a family rather than go to the expense of building a fire of their own. Passing money exchange shops, bookstores, dry goods stores, jewelers, and photographers, we finally reach a long street. Not far from the drum tower, occupied entirely by brass smiths. Here are rows of shops in each of which a half dozen men in blue jackets and trousers sit before low anvils, pounding out brass dishes, pots, and basins.

They make also candlesticks and chafing dishes for charcoal incense burners. Beyond this block is one of Silver Smith's shops, where one can buy the most exquisite hairpins and bracelets of silver decorated with enamel. Such wares are sold by weight, an extra charge above the actual value of the silver being made to pay for the workmanship. Among the stores of Mukden are many selling shoes, hats, and caps of all kinds. We see winter shoes and summer shoes, shoes for working men and shoes for officials. There are men's boots of felt and creations of all sorts in silk. Satin and fine leather for women. There are felt shoes with soles an inch or more thick. They look clumsy and heavy, but they are unbelievably light and remarkably cheap.

The coolies work in shoes of leather that are much like moccasins, while the wealthy Chinese and Manchus wear high boots of black silk and velvet. As a sign of his business, the shoe merchant displays a wooden boot painted white, green, and red. and quite large enough to be the shoe home of the old woman and her numerous progeny of nursery rhyme fame. Not only the shoe dealers, but other storekeepers as well, have queer signs over their shops. Some of these figures advertise the merchandise for sale, but many seem to have no connection with the goods sold. They are made of brass or wood in the form of birds, fish, dragons, and beasts, and I am told that they are often handed down as heirlooms.

The caps of Mukden are of as many kinds as the shoes, and are made of fur, silk, and felt. They can be seen by the hundreds on any main street, stacked up outside the stores upon shelves along the walls of the buildings, or inside shops that sell nothing else but hats and caps and fur ear taps. For years, Mukden was the chief fur market of China. And although Tian Sin and Harbin have now forged ahead of it in that respect, this city still has a considerable fur trade. Northern Manchuria swarms with wild animals, and raw pelts are brought here for sale from hundreds of miles away. There are tanneries in and about the city, and one sees leather and fur stores everywhere. The skins are displayed just as they come from the tannery, or are sewed together into large coats, which are afterward cut down and fitted to the size of the buyer.

Many such furs are used for the inner lining of the brocaded satin or silk garments of the wealthy. Some are worn with the hair outward and with the silk inside. During the coldest weather, the tartars in the northern part of Manchuria wear almost nothing else but furs. The coolies have suits of sheepskins and goatskins, and those who can afford it wear fox, mink, and sable. All the houses are poorly heated, And such clothing is worn indoors and out. In addition to the vast number of skins used by the natives of this region, Mukden exports tiny sables worth almost their weight in gold, tiger skins that sell for hundreds of dollars each, leopard hides, and the furs of wolves, badgers, goats, and lambs by the thousands.

A large share of these go to America, which buys also bales of squirrel and foxtails, Manchuria is so cold in winter that dogs here grow unusually long, thick coats. Between Mukden and Siberia are many farms where these animals are bred for their pelts alone, much after the manner of sheep farming in Australia. To some extent, they are fed on coarse millet and scraps, but for the most part they are allowed to forage for their food. In those regions, dogs are often given as wedding presents, and a girl sometimes receives a dozen or so as her dowry. Inasmuch as they begin to breed when eight months old, such a gift is a good foundation for a small fortune. The killing time is early in the spring, while their coats are still long and thick, and they are usually strangled to death so that their fur will not be damaged.

The Manchus in the past believed that dog meat had medicinal properties, and, like the Chinese, they still used tiger bones and claws and deer horns in compounding their remedies. In this connection, the story is told of a Chinese doctor who was trying to cure a Manchu mandarin of dropsy. The tiger bones and cat claws he had prescribed have been of no avail, and he was reduced almost to desperation, when one day he saw the German consul Walking along with his two new dachshunds, one black and one brown. As the story goes, the physician had a long-standing grievance against the German, and immediately he was struck with an idea whereby he could settle his grudge and cure his patient at the same time.

He straightway told the Mandarin that the only medicines that would really benefit his dropsical legs were two long-barreled, short-legged dogs with drooping ears. What you need, said he, is to get a black dog of that species for your right leg, and a brown dog of the same breed for your left leg. Cook their meat into stews, and the rich broth will flow into your legs and drive out the dropsy. The Mandarin thereupon sent out his servants in search of two such animals, and before the German was aware that his pets were missing, they had already been transformed into stew.

28 28 - Farms and Farming in Manchuria 21:09

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. Farms and Farming in Manchuria Manchuria produces two crops, soybeans and bandits. Thus runs an old Chinese proverb, which is as true today as it was in the past, and as far as the former commodity is concerned, more applicable than ever before. In another chapter I shall speak of the bandits of Manchuria. Today, I write of the soybean. It has been cultivated and used here for five thousand years, but was never commercially important until after the Russo-Japanese War, when it entered into international trade through a shipment made to England by the Japanese firm of Mitsui & Company. Since then, the rise of the soybean in Manchuria has been phenomenal.

Now, as the principal export of the country, it is the chief factor in increasing the prosperity of the people individually and of the region as a whole. It thrives throughout most of Manchuria and much of North China, and is cultivated over vast areas, on a great deal of which, before the official suppression of the opium traffic, the pink and white blossoms of the poppy waved in the breeze. Although there are probably two-score varieties of soybeans, the three of greatest commercial value in China The yellow, the green, and the black ones. They grow in two or three inch pods on plants three feet high, and often are planted in alternating rows with maize, millet, and kaolieng, the sorghum-like plant that furnishes one of the staple foods of the people.

In coming here on the Peking Mukden Express, even before reaching Shan Hai Kwan and the Great Wall, I entered the region where the soy is king. As I traveled northward, I saw the beans everywhere, in long caravans of mule and donkey carts moving slowly across the country, and in bags stacked beside the railway tracks awaiting shipment. Later, at the stations, I saw, piled up like so much cordwood, the huge round cakes made from the residue left when the oil is pressed from the beans. At Dai Ren, The chief bean exporting city of Manchuria, these cakes, looking like so many cartwheels or grindstones, stretch along the tracks and wharves as far as the eye can see. Bean oil and bean cake have always been used by the Manchurians and continue to be the two chief products of this crop.

But in the last decade or two, the soya has been utilized in hundreds of new byproducts, ranging from cosmetics to explosives. Its stalks make good stalk feed, and the roots are burned as fuel by the poorer classes. The green leaves of the vines are eaten by the Manchurians, and what is known as bean curd is as staple of food here as is rice in southern China. Dried, the beans go into soy sauce, provide the foundation for our Worcestershire, and appear as coffee, cheese, and milk substitutes. The dry bean cake is made into breakfast foods as well as stock feed, and the Japanese use large amounts of it to take the place of the fish with which they formerly fertilized their fields. As to the oil, the list of products that contain it is too long to enumerate.

We eat it in butter and lard substitutes and salad oils. We use it in our houses and enamel. Varnish, linoleum, paint, and celluloid, and it appears also in toilet soaps and face lotions. Scattered over South Manchuria are more than 200 bean factories, ranging from primitive mills where the beans are ground by donkey power and the oil pressed out by hand, to great establishments equipped with hydraulic presses operated by electricity. Recently, a new way of extracting the oil by chemicals has been introduced and is now being successfully used by Suzuki and Company, who at Dai Ren have the largest bean oil factory in Manchuria. By this method, not only is more oil obtained from the beans, but the residue is not in cake form and so is easier to use as a fertilizer.

There are more than 70 of these yu fangs, as the bean mills are called. In Dai Ren, the city that the Japanese have transformed, into one of the most modern ports in all China. It is the southern terminus of the South Manchuria Railway, over which come soybeans from every part of the country. Here, the mills turn out every day 400 tons of oil and 10 times as much cake, most of which is exported to Europe, the United States, Japan, and other countries in Asia. Not only in its production of soybeans, but of many other hardy grains as well, Manchuria is forging ahead to a place among the great agricultural lands of the world. Consisting of the northeastern part of the Chinese Republic, these three eastern provinces, as this region is called, contain more land than ten states the size of Indiana.

Much of this area is covered with a soil just as fertile as that of our own Corn Belt. Nevertheless, not one-fifth of it is under cultivation today, And even that much has never been farmed to its fullest capacity. In riding over the country, I have traveled for days through land that, although it is as rich as that of any part of America, is now practically waste. As to the cultivated portions, they are worked by men, donkeys, and oxen, with almost primitive tools. And with farming methods so crude that if they were employed in the United States, we should not be able to feed ourselves. One can only surmise the seven league strides this country will take in agricultural progress. The greater part of Manchuria looks like Illinois, Wisconsin, or Minnesota.

And the soil of its river valleys is just like that of the prairies along the Mississippi. Much of it may be compared with the best parts of the wheat belt of Canada, and not a little will surpass in fertility the soil of the Red River Valley. The country has some mountainous regions, but the greater part of it is in wide valleys and rolling plains, so rich they need only to be tickled with the plow to laugh with the harvest. I have seen much of this Manchurian countryside by taking trips out from the different cities by carriage and by motor car. Around Mukden the fields have no fences, their boundaries being marked only by stones. The roads that cut their way right through the farms look more like ditches than highways.

I have gone over many of them with the carriage in which I was riding, tilted at an angle of 45 degrees. Now our wheels would be in ruts two feet deep. And at other times we would bounce high into the air as we went over drains crossing the road. The road was frequently lined by great ditches on either side, which, I was told, the farmers dig to keep the traffic from cutting out into the fields and destroying their crops. As we rode along we met loads of sorghum seed hauled by rough Manchurian ponies and carts piled high with bags of soybeans. Now and then we went by a grain shop. Where millet and sorghum seed were set out for sale in round basketwork bins the size of a hogshead. And again we passed men and animals bringing beanstalks and sorghum cane into the city for fuel.

These people skin the land of its natural fertilizers. Every cornstalk, every bean vine, and every weed is saved for fuel. Even the stubble of the sorghum is pulled up by the poor people, who are allowed to go over the fields after the crop is harvested. They leave Mother Earth stark naked, and the land is as bare as though nothing had ever grown here. This has been done generation after generation, and notwithstanding, the soil is still rich. The Manchus do not live on their farms, but herd together in villages of mud, About some of the settlements, one sees sorghum cane and beanstalk stacked up or even piled on the roofs and against the walls of the houses. These two products are the wood and coal of the farmer and furnish the fuel for cooking and heating.

The Manchurian heating stove Which is called a keng, is a brick ledge two feet high that occupies one end of a room and has a series of flues beneath it by which it is heated. When a little bundle of straw or corn stalks is set on fire in it, the flames leap through the flues and make the bricks quite hot. It is upon this ledge that the members of the family sit during the daytime, and there, sprawled out side by side, they sleep at night. Among the villages rising high over the houses, I saw many ragged trees, every one of which was filled with what I first thought were birds' nests. I was told, however, that they were bunches of mistletoe. These are found in every part of the country, and being air plants, are as destructive to the trees as are the orchids of tropical climes.

Going closer, I had a chance to examine this species of mistletoe. It is scattered all over the trees, and its pretty yellow and red berries may be seen shining out of the green of almost every branch. It is so plentiful that I can only wonder what would happen to the Manchurian bells were the good old mistletoe traditions of England and America observed here. The population of Manchuria has never been determined by an official census, although various estimates put the number of people in these three provinces And in eastern Mongolia, at less than 25 million. Not more than one-tenth of these are descendants of the original Manchu race. The remainder are Chinese, Japanese, and Russians. The majority of the population is in the southern half of Manchuria, which is fairly well settled.

Above Mukden, the farms are widely scattered, and there are huge areas of government land that are being thrown open to immigrants. For two hundred years after the ascendancy of the Manchu dynasty, Manchuria was a forbidden land to the Chinese. Reserved as a hunting and fishing ground for the nobles and the officials, it was closed to immigration by everyone else, except a few persons allowed to enter to gather wild ginseng and falcon feathers. Thus it was that this vast, fertile territory remained so long undeveloped and unfarmed, while to the south, Parts of China proper that were subject to recurring famines swarmed with human life. Today, the Chinese in Manchuria number millions. And every year, almost another half million coolies from the provinces of Shantung and Qili migrate here to work on the farms during the summer.

While a few of these coolies settle here permanently, most of them return home after the harvesting season. In order to avoid the severe winters. Although Manchuria is in the same latitude as parts of Spain, France, and Italy, its climate is more like that of central Canada, with hot summers and long cold winters. As to the Japanese in Manchuria, they are found chiefly in the cities and towns in the zone of the South Manchuria Railway. They have not been able to compete successfully with cheap Chinese labor on the farms. Manchuria contains enough unsettled land to take care of all Japan's surplus population. But the Japanese colonization attempted after the war with Russia proved a failure. The people who came over did not take to Chinese methods of farming, and most of them who had expected to make fortunes overnight have gone back to Japan.

In North Manchuria, near the boundary of Siberia, The Russians occupy much the same position as the Japanese do in the South. Droshkis are in common use in the cities and towns. Russian signs are seen over the stores, and even many of the Chinese use the Russian language in their everyday life. Before the World War, a great movement was enforced to colonize eastern Siberia with emigrants from European Russia, a movement that caused much speculation. As to whether a thickly settled Russian territory in this part of the world would not eventually result in another Russo-Japanese conflict. At one time, the Russian government was putting 50,000 immigrants a week into these regions, the people being brought in not as individuals but as whole villages at a time, old and young and men and women all coming together.

However, all this was stopped by the World War. and the ensuing revolution. And the vast areas in eastern Siberia that the Tsar once planned to make the greatest wheat lands in Asia are still at the beginning of their development. Here in Manchuria, and especially in North Manchuria, wheat is grown largely, being second only to soybeans as the chief crop of the country. Both climate and soil are adapted to it. Indeed, wheat sown here in April matures six weeks sooner The wheat is more than that grown in the same latitude in the United States. Like all crops in Manchuria, it is planted in rows about 18 inches apart, just as we plant corn or potatoes. These rows of wheat are each year sown by hand in furrows that remain from the preceding year, and a plow is run along the sides to cover them.

In most places, the wheat is weeded, and occasionally it is even hoed, as we hoe cotton. A curious feature of Manchurian farming is that the rows are never straight, but wind their way over the fields with all the undulations of a Marcell wave. They are perfectly parallel and remarkably regular, but never straight. A Tartar farmer, whom I ask why this was so, replied that one could get more grain from a field of crooked rows than from one of straight rows. After the harvest, the wheat is threshed, by being pressed under stone rollers pulled by donkeys led round and round by children. It is winnowed in the wind and then ground in rude native mills, or else sent to one of the half dozen or so modern flour mills that have been recently erected in Manchuria.

These establishments are known as womos, or fire mills, while a native factory is called a mofang, which literally translated means grinding house. During the World War, the wheat and flour industry here increased to such an extent that by 1919, Manchuria was exporting wheat to Europe. Such exports, however, later fell off, and Manchuria has continued to import American flour. It buys also our wheat to mix with the native grain, as the American product is a much harder and firmer variety than that grown here. These imports are handled largely by the Japanese, Who, when they begin to build up a market for flour bearing their trademarks, are said to have put the American product in Japanese packages.

The Manchus and Chinese are noted for their faith in trademarks. If they once like an article, they will stick to it blindly, even though the quality may later change. For this reason, there are old store signs in China that sell for several hundred dollars apiece, just because they may be relied upon Even as many Chinese are too poor to eat rice, so are there millions of Manchurians who cannot afford to use wheat for food. They live instead mainly upon millet and kaoliang. The latter is cooked like rice, usually mixed with vegetables and eaten with chopsticks. The grain is a valuable food for animals, too, while the stalks are put to use in making fences, bridges, and houses, and in weaving mats.

I have ridden for hours through fields of this grain, which grows higher than a man, and which, because of this fact, has been found to be a most excellent hiding place for bandits. At present, the leading factor in developing the agricultural resources of the country is the South Manchuria Railway. It has a big experiment farm at Cheung Chuling, between Mukden and Harbin, and other smaller stations at various points near the route of the railway. It has brought in sheep, hogs, and cattle for breeding purposes and has one establishment devoted solely to reforesting wastelands and planting trees in new regions. Among the products being grown successfully in Manchuria by the Japanese are sugar beets, tobacco, rice, and silk.

Tobacco is raised as far north as the latitude of Canada. And the experts of the American Tobacco Company say that if the plants were properly cultivated, the leaf produced would be as good as that of Virginia. The rice is raised both on dry land and on flooded areas. In the region around Mukden, 10,000 Koreans have been brought in to work in the rice fields. As to silk, that from Manchuria is known as wild silk. About $4 million worth is produced annually. As in parts of Shantung, the silkworms here feed upon oak leaves instead of those of the mulberry, and the fabrics made from their silk are different kinds of ponji or tussa. Many of the cocoons are unreeled on native hand filagers, but more and more are being sent to Antung on the border of Korea, which is becoming the silk center of Manchuria.

Attempts are being made, as I have said, to improve the cattle of Manchuria, by better breeding. But little can be accomplished until the work can be carried also into Mongolia, where most of the cattle in this part of the world are raised. The natives there breed their cattle in certain places where the bulls are kept. As soon as a good-sized herd is accumulated, they drive them from place to place over the wild prairie uplands to find pasture. When the cattle are fat enough for the market, they drive them to the Russian One of the principal markets is the town of Sitzikar, which during September and October of each year has its population increased by 30,000 or 40,000 Mongol cattle dealers.

As to the pork of Manchuria, no white man eats it if he can possibly help it. The hogs are the scavengers of the country. They are seldom fed, and they root about. Through the mud and filth, living on all sorts of vile stuff. As a result, they are black-bristled, big-stomached, small-hammed, hungry-looking animals, much like our razorbacks, but with flesh by no means so good. The sows are very prolific, having from 12 to 14 pigs to a litter. By proper crossbreeding, they might be turned into excellent stock. In addition to improving its livestock and its crops, Manchuria is now realizing the importance of its forest resources, and so is planting several million young trees every year to take the place of those that are cut.

There are thick forests along the Yalu and Tsungaree rivers, and on the former stream rafts bring the lumber down to Antung for export. Another lumber center is Kirin, at the head of navigation on the Tsungaree, which is noted as a junk-building center, and has several sawmills, including one owned by the Japanese Mitsuis.

29 29 - In the Hung-Hutze Country 18:44

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. In the Hung Hutsa Country For decades, Manchuria has been overrun by bands of brigands who have one of the most remarkable organizations on Earth. At the height of their activities, they surpassed in number and daring even the African Torex, the veiled, camel-mounted bandits of the Sahara. They are known as the Hung Hutzes, or red beards, a name that arose from their early custom of dyeing their hair and beards of fiery hue. Thus decorated, they evidently wanted to become synonymous with the devil in the minds of the people of North China. They seem to have been successful, as from childhood on, the Manchurians have always looked upon the Hung Hutzes, with the same fearful respect that the American child used to give the traditional boogeyman.

Today, the Hung Hutzes have been temporarily reduced in number by many of them joining the army of General Chang So Lin, and the scene of their depredations has been pushed farther and farther into the outlying districts. Even so, they still operate as highly trained units of cavalry, infantry, engineers, and an intelligence corps. Divided into battalions of about 250 men each, they are commanded by captains and lieutenants under a discipline far more strict than that of the Chinese National Army. During recent years, every battalion has been equipped with rifles, revolvers, and machine guns, all of which remain the property of the battalion leader and are not individually owned. Each unit is restricted in its operations to a certain territory, but as to the nature of its activities, there seems to be no restriction whatsoever.

From their dens and hiding places in the mountains, the bandits, always well-mounted, swoop down upon railway trains and rob the passengers. Exact tribute from merchants transporting freight by cart from place to place. Sack entire villages and hold wealthy persons captive for big ransoms. They employ secretaries and bookkeepers to keep records of all the men in each band and of the proceeds from each robbery. At the end of the summer, they deduct their expenses from their plunder, about half of the net income going to the leader and the rest being divided equally among his followers. They usually then disband for the winner, Many of them working as coolies until the following spring. The hung hutzes are so organized that they can combine their forces at short notice.

They use modern means of communication, or when necessary, light fires on the mountains as signals to their fellows. Many of these signal lights are made of wooden pegs, hollowed out at the top and filled with a highly inflammable composition. Halfway down each peg, there is a hole to which a fuse is attached. When this is lighted, the composition blazes up, making a bright flare that lasts several seconds. The message to be sent is indicated by the number of flashes given. In other words, a kind of primitive dot and dash code. Every band of hung Hutzes has its secret agent scattered throughout the region where it operates, and almost every isolated village has to pay a tax to be immune from raids.

The spies of the bandits are employed even in the government offices, and one's coachman or chauffeur may be a brigand in disguise. It has not infrequently been the case that village policemen have themselves been hung hutzes, and that the officials of the larger cities have often been in alliance with them. In the days of the Empire, soldiers were sometimes sent to execute any official discovered to be a hung hutze. They usually returned bringing what they claimed was the head of the bandit, but which, if the truth were known, was more often the head of a coolie whom they had killed instead. The hung hutze spies notify the brigand bands what cargoes of goods are to be shipped and when, and as far as possible, report the wealth and importance of the shipper.

Indeed, the merchants of Manchuria have always been the ones to suffer most from these brigands, whose chief revenue has been the tribute exacted as a payment for letting the freight caravans go unmolested, or the plunder captured when this tribute was not paid. A shipment of opium has always been considered a particularly choice booty. The merchants have submitted to such blackmail for centuries, and have at last come to regard it as a necessary Item of expense, just as we do postage stamps. Not only the merchants, but also every traveler who goes over backwoods Manchuria on foot, by cart or on horseback, must pay tribute. When this is done, a bandit passport, as it were, is issued. These are little red-bordered flags printed with Chinese characters, certifying that the bearer has paid his toll and that he is not to be held up again.

Not a few merchants, when they have valuable shipments to move from one place to another, take additional precautions by hiring companies of brigands to go along with them as escort. Even foreigners are not exempt from the attacks of the hung hutzes, and many a missionary has been robbed of his money and belongings and left by the roadside. In the case of rich Chinese, the victims are usually kidnapped. Not long ago, a silk trader was caught within five miles of the city in which he lived and carried off to the mountains, where the Hung Hutzes kept him until the $30,000 they demanded as a ransom was paid in full. I have heard of one instance of a hundred carts starting out across the country to Mukden, all but two of which had paid the tribute demanded and bore Hung Hutze flags.

The men and goods in the carts so flagged, The others, who had refused to pay the toll, were attacked by the bandits before they had gone 15 miles. The goods were stolen and the drivers were killed. During my stay in Mukden, I talked with the agent of a big mining concession owned by an organization of British and Japanese capitalists. He was opening up a gold region in the Kirin province and had to send his supplies across a wild country. To the mining camps. He said he dared not start out a single cart without buying protection from the bandit leaders, and that in important cases he usually employed one of the brigands to go along in person. My drivers might have gone through all right with the hung Hutsa flags on their carts, he told me, but outside this big organization of brigands there are petty bands of robbers who often attack caravans.

These petty thieves, however, live in fear of the larger organization, knowing that they will be killed if they are caught robbing anyone under the protection of the Hung Hutzes. The province of Kirin, which lies to the north of Mukden, is one of the chief hunting grounds of the Hung Hutzes. Much of it is mountainous, and the rough country affords good hiding places for the bandits, who collect a heavy toll on the cart traffic always moving through that region.

Some of the caravans are protected also by armed guards, furnished by private insurance companies, which have distinctive flags of their own to notify bandits that the goods they insure are under their protection. Ostensibly, these guards are to frighten off the hung Hutzes, but it is an open secret that the money the insurance companies pay the brigands and not their guards affords the real protection. The Hung Hutzes as a whole are daring and courageous men. They seem to have no fear of death whatsoever, and they fight bravely. Although having no physicians or surgeons at their service, they know that anything more than a slight wound means intense pain and suffering. Many of their depredations are directed against the railways, and all the way from the Great Wall to the Siberian boundary trains are continually being held up.

For this reason, practically every train in Manchuria has armed guards on it. Some of the bandits carry on their activities also along the coast of Manchuria, going about in junks and capturing sailing vessels and the smaller trading craft of the Chinese. If they are chased by police boats, they sail up into the shallow streams where the larger vessels cannot follow. A Japanese gunboat that once captured two of these pirate junks found more than $300,000 worth of silver on them. The pirates frequently lie in wait for the trading junks as they come out of the rivers and make each one pay toll, and when business is dull, they leave their boats and pillage the towns on shore. The power and activities of these Manchurian bandits The boxer's Uprising are largely the result of the political chaos that has long existed throughout China.

After the Boxer Uprising, for instance, they were at their strongest for many years, their strength being augmented by large numbers of recruits from the boxer forces. For that matter, whenever China is engaged in a war or revolution, the Hung Huts' profit, as they can carry on their depredations with less danger of interference, On the part of the authorities. Also, their forces are sure to be enlarged by soldiers, who, fighting on the losing side, are often suddenly left without work or wages and decide to take up banditry as a better-paying profession. The Japanese have been accused of furnishing arms to the hung hutsus and using them for political purposes. More recently, as I have said, many of them have been absorbed into the army of General Cheng So Lin.

Cheng So Lin himself was carried off by brigands when a boy and brought up as a hung hutze. During the Russo-Japanese War, he joined the Japanese army in which he served as a lieutenant. Later, he became so powerful as the leader of the Manchurian bandits that the Peking government gave him a colonel's commission in the National Army as an inducement to give up banditry. Accepting this commission, he continued to rise in political importance, finally organizing an army of his own and leading it against Peking. In 1922, he set up at Mukden a separate government and is today the supreme ruling power in Manchuria. Much of the recent development of Manchuria has been due entirely to Chang Tso Lin's efforts to make these provinces self-supporting and commercially and economically independent of the rest of China.

All kinds of modern innovations have been introduced by him, from the building General Chang has put into effect also a more rigid Army discipline, and if necessary uses the most drastic measures to enforce it. Not long ago, for instance, he had two of his own generals executed when it was proved that they had been working the time-honored Chinese institution of squeeze to their private advantage by putting into their own pockets a few cents from each soldier's monthly pay. The police force of Mukden is as well organized as Chang's army, and there are now uniformed policemen on every block. In place of the long Manchu gown of former days, they wear padded black clothes that are almost European and cut.

They carry clubs as big around as a broomstick and almost as long, and painted black to make them look like ebony or iron. As a matter of fact, these weapons are exceedingly light, and a good blow upon a hard skull would no doubt break them into pieces. General Chang does not hesitate to fill the jails with offenders against his rule of law and order, but he has also made many improvements in the penal system of Manchuria. In a visit to the Mukden prison, I found the criminals treated like men, not beasts. Accompanied by two English-speaking Chinese officials and a director of the penitentiary, I went through ward after ward of two prisons. In one of which were hundreds of convicts working away at all kinds of labor.

This latter institution covers about four acres. It is surrounded by a wall of gray brick, 15 feet high, and its front gate is guarded by two six-foot Manchurian soldiers who presented arms as we entered. The buildings are large one-story brick structures with heavy tiled roofs. They are so built that they form a series of wings Running out from a central point like the spokes of a wheel, making it possible for a guard standing at the hub to command a view of four or five corridors and the cells opening off them. The cells are about 12 feet square, well supplied with fresh air and light, and five prisoners are usually kept in each one. They are heated by Kangs that also serve as beds, a bunch of burning straws sufficing to keep one room warm.

As we went through the outer gate into the prison grounds, a gang of 75 convicts was marching in from work on the roads outside the city. Their prison garb consisted of a jacket reaching to the hips and a pair of thick trousers that looked as though they were made of quilted comforts, such as we use on our beds. They were light gray and each had a black cross painted on the back. Every man wore shoes of pigskin, and his legs were so chained together That there was no danger of his running away. As I looked on, the director told me that the long-termers could be distinguished by their collars. The ones with black collars were serving terms of thirty years. Those wearing blue collars were in for twenty years, those wearing red for ten, while the gray collars meant still shorter sentences.

Every prisoner learns a trade here, and all sorts of things are made in the workshops. The first shop we entered was devoted to saddlery and shoemaking. In another was a gang of carpenters and cabinetmakers, and in a third about two dozen convicts were spinning and weaving. The spinners sat on the floor, turning the wheels with their hands, and the weavers were using looms worked by their feet. A number of them were making carpets and rugs, some of which were 20 feet square. Such rugs are made on a great upright framework. The weaving begins at the bottom, and as the work progresses upward, the men have to use scaffolds upon which they sit while they draw the threads in and out. All the work is done by hand, and the oriental patterns used are executed in many colored wools.

From the workshops, I went in to see the prisoners eating one of their two daily meals. As the men entered the ward, each one took from his back a little brown canvas knapsack containing his complete outfit for prison life. This consists of a folding campstool, a pair of wooden chopsticks, and two porcelain bowls, each of which holds about a half pint. At a given signal, the men set up their stools on the floor, and at a second signal, they arranged themselves on the stools in two long aisles facing each other. Next, a gang of convicts who acted as waiters brought in great, watertight baskets filled with steamed sorghum, seed, and vegetable soup. The sorghum was served first. It was shoveled out into dishes, much like wash basins, and one of these was placed on the floor in front of each group of four men.

From these basins, each convict filled one of his porcelain bowls. At the same time, the soup was passed around, each man putting some into his second bowl. In eating, the men picked the vegetables out of the soup with their chopsticks, mixed them with the sorghum, and then raised the bowl to their mouths and scraped the food in with the chopsticks. They seemed to enjoy the meal, which probably was much better than what most of them had been accustomed to outside of prison. Asking about the punishments inflicted here, I was told that the old, barbarous practices had been discontinued, although the convicts are still beaten with strips of bamboo. On their bare skins. For ordinary offenses, the men are put in dark cells, but not for more than five days at a time.

At my request, the director showed me one of these, and even shut me inside to make the experience more realistic. The cell was triangular in shape, with one side just large enough for the door, the other two sides meeting in an acute angle at the opposite end. There was room for a man to lie down upon the floor, but he could hardly turn over without touching the walls. The room had neither bed nor chairs and was unheeded. When the dark cell is occupied, food is thrust in through a little hole in the door, so arranged with a double lid that no light is admitted. With the door closed, the darkness in the cell seemed almost thick enough to cut, and I was decidedly relieved on being let out. In the courts of Manchuria, torturing prisoners to make them confess has been almost abolished, and chopping off the heads of condemned men has gone out of style.

Execution by shooting taking its place. These executions are usually carried out in wholesale lots, as it were, large groups being shot at one time. The executioner is a soldier who receives a certain amount for each man he shoots. And when he becomes tired or feels that he has earned enough money for one day, another takes his place.

30 30 - Where Japan Meets China 15:01

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. Where Japan Meets China. I am in Da Ren, the chief port and industrial center of Manchuria. It is the finest city in the three eastern provinces and one of the most modern and progressive to be found anywhere in China, from Hong Kong to the border of Siberia. Nevertheless, as cities go, it is hardly more than an infant. Having grown to its present importance within little more than 25 years, at about the end of the last century, it was still a small Chinese fishing village known as Qingniwa, the literal meaning of which, Black Mud Hollow, undoubtedly gives the best and most concise description of it. Along in the 90s, the Russians began casting about for the site of a winter port to take the place of Vladivostok.

which is frozen up for four or five months every year. They selected this spot with its ice-free harbor on an inlet of the Yellow Sea, and in 1898 leased from the Chinese the Liao Tung Peninsula, on which it lies. Here, extending up a slope backed by hills eight hundred feet high, they founded the city they called Dahlny, the faraway. It was laid out along much of the same plan as Washington, The principal streets radiating from three or four circles, and with the intersecting thoroughfares forming several great spiderwebs. The Russians spent something like $20 million in dredging the harbor, constructing docks and port facilities, and in erecting magnificent buildings for their business headquarters and homes.

Then, a half-dozen years later, came the Russo-Japanese War. At its close, the Manchurian territory, leased by the Russians, was taken over by the Japanese, and Dahlny passed from the dominion of the Tsar to the government of the Mikado. A large part of the city had been burned during the war, many of the buildings were roofless, and the Chinese had carried away doors and windows by the hundreds. They had even tried to steal the great Russian stoves in the houses. As to harbor works, the Japanese found a half-completed breakwater And one pier. With these as a nucleus, they set about making Dalney into the great port it is today. Changing its name to Dai Ren, they completed the docks and built new ones, repaired the damage in the residential section, paved the streets, and erected new buildings everywhere.

Indeed, Dai Ren has expanded even beyond its original plans, and a movement is underway for the reclamation of a large area of land along the waterfront. I wish I could show you the Dairan of today. It is a city of telephones, electric lights, and streetcars, automobiles, broad paved streets, and hard-surfaced roads leading out into the country. In the heart of its business section is the Central Circle, which was the Nicholas Circle of the Russians. From this park, the principal streets extend in all directions, and about it are located the chief buildings. Here is the imposing establishment of the Yokohamas, BC Bank, as well as the homes of other financial institutions, the Chamber of Commerce, the Post Office, the Civil Administration Office, the British Consulate, and the Yamato Hotel.

This hotel, the most up-to-date in northern China, is one of a string operated by the South Manchuria Railway in the largest cities in Manchuria. It is entirely modern in every respect, with elevators, steam heat to replace the big Russian stove formerly used in each room, electric lights, telephones, and billiard and reading rooms. It has even a delightful roof garden with trees, shrubbery, waterfalls, and artificial ponds, laid out on the lines of Japanese landscape gardening. The meals at the hotel are served in Western style, but the waiters are pretty Japanese girls. Clad in kimonos and long white aprons. Japanese boys serve as chambermaids. The manager and many of the employees speak English, and on the whole, the service is good.

Another hotel under this management is at Hoshigara, a resort only 10 minutes ride from Dai Ren by a good motor road. Here, there are a bathing beach and facilities for sports of all kinds, from an 18-hole golf course to a baseball diamond. Farther inshore from the business district is the truly magnificent residential section of Dai Ren, where are the homes of the railway officials and other prominent men. These are handsome dwellings of brick and stone, surrounded by beautiful gardens and facing wide streets. This section is reached by crossing a stone bridge that reminds me somewhat of the million-dollar Connecticut Avenue bridge over Rock Creek in Washington. Although the one here is by no means so large.

If you could lift up the finest villas on the outskirts of a European city, gardens and all, and drop them down on the slope of a hill overlooking a beautiful harbor, you would have a reproduction of this section of Dai Ren. Indeed, this famous city is more European than Asiatic. The population of Dai Ren is a mixture of Japanese, Chinese, Europeans, and Americans. With Japanese composing more than half of the total number of people. The Chinese, for the most part, are of the laboring class. They carry the bricks and other materials used in the new buildings under construction. And they do the market gardening and all of the peddling. Many of them, of course, own property and are wealthy. But the largest and most modern business establishments belong to the Japanese.

The European and American population is composed chiefly of the consuls and their employees, the missionaries and a few commercial agents. The best way in which to realize the activity and importance of Dai Ren is by paying a visit to its waterfront. It has one of the finest harbors along the western Pacific and one free from ice the year round. The wharves extend for several miles along the Yellow Sea. and have four great piers for large steamers and another for junks and small craft. Ships drawing thirty feet can enter at low tide, docking at the wharves and unloading their freight directly into the cars of the South Manchuria Railway. Steam cranes move on tracks up and down the piers, and there is a granite dry dock three hundred and eighty feet long, the only one in North China.

The approach channels are indicated by buoys, While the inner harbor of Dai Ren is protected by a breakwater of stone and concrete two and a half miles long. It rises ten feet above the level of the highest tides and encloses a deep water basin more than 800 acres in area. During the Russo-Japanese War, this breakwater was blown up and partially destroyed, but it was afterward repaired and lengthened. With a foreign trade of nearly 200 million dollars a year, Dai Ren ranks next to Hong Kong and Shanghai, among the ports of China. The vessels of three ocean steamship lines call here regularly to say nothing of the innumerable smaller passenger and freight vessels, the riverboats and the sailing junks that may always be seen in the harbor.

In addition to the soybean products that constitute three-fourths of its exports, Dai Ren ships coal, furs, hides, and silk. Its chief commerce, of course, is with Japan and southern China, after which comes the trade with the United States. The Japanese have followed the Russians' example in making Dai Ren a free port, and through its wide open doors, United States goods come in huge shipments. One American tobacco firm has a branch factory at Mukden. Farm implements manufactured in Chicago have been brought in for use on the government farms. A large part of the flour milling machinery is of American make, and all the rolling stock of the South Manchuria Railway was bought in the United States.

Our chief export to Manchuria is cotton goods in various forms, which reminds me that we have stiff competition in this line from both the English and the Japanese. I came to Dai Ren from Mukden, over the South Manchuria Railway, which has the best roadbed and operates the finest trains in all China. Its butterfly-like emblem of an M and a cross-section of a rail may really be said to be the emblem of the New Manchuria, as this railway has been more important than any other one factor in the development of the three eastern provinces. The whistle of its trains on their way from Siberia to the Yellow Sea has sounded the death knell of the old Manchuria, and its gleaming rails have turned a land that three or four decades ago was almost a wilderness into the most easily accessible region in the Far East.

The South Manchuria line was opened in 1903, just about a year before the beginning of the war between Russia and Japan. After that war, it was turned over to Japan, along with other property in the territory leased by Russia. And in 1906, the South Manchuria Railway Company was organized by the Japanese. The new owners leveled the roadbed, broadened the gauge of the track to standard width, double-tracked the line, and imported modern rolling stock from the United States. No steam shovels or other machinery were used in building up the new bed for the tracks, all the work having been done by cheap Chinese labor. The material employed was rock broken into pieces the size of sugar lumps. All along the line from Port Arthur northward, piles of this rock are still to be seen, heaped up ready for use, marked with white paint at the corners and on top, and so arranged that the railway officials can tell if any of this stone is stolen.

Covering the faces of the hills like so many blue-backed ants, or the Manchurian Chinese, who break up the stone. They hammer the rocks into pieces and carry them to the tracks in baskets, slung to poles that rest on their shoulders. The earth for all the The train on this line are equipped with Pullman's dining cars and day coaches, as up-to-date as any in the United States. The car in which I made the 250-mile trip from Mukden had a reading room with the latest Asiatic papers and American and English journals, and in its diner I ate as good a meal as I could possibly ask for. As for service and cleanliness, I wish I could show you how, spick and span, the Japanese keep these cars. They dust them inside and out at almost every stop.

They even wipe off the wheels and rub up the brasses again and again during each trip, treating the cars like so many new babies brought out for display. Altogether, the railway company has about 700 miles of track in the peninsula of Chosin, or Korea. The line from Port Arthur and Dai Ren to Mukden terminates at Shang Tsung. North of this point, the track that connects The first with the Trans-Siberian is of narrow gauge, which in fact has thus far prevented the Japanese from running their standard gauge trains into North Manchuria and thus spreading their influence into that territory. On the other hand, they are working on new feeder lines into eastern Mongolia, and no doubt will someday control the transportation and industry of that region.

From Mukden, another section of the South Manchuria line, runs southeastward to Antung, where, after crossing the great 3,000-foot steel drawbridge built over the Yalu River by an American company, it connects with the Korean railways. This 180-mile stretch between Mukden and Antung was built during the Russo-Japanese War. It was originally of a narrow gauge less than a yard wide and carried little cars only eight feet long. There were no passenger accommodations whatever, and the heavy freight rates prohibited any large traffic over it until the new standard gauge track was laid in 1908. Belonging to this railway and under its management are the great coal mines of Fushun and the iron mines and steel mills of Anshun.

Manchuria has valuable deposits also of gold, silver, lead, and asbestos. But none of them has been developed to the extent of its coal and iron. The Fushan mines cover about 15 square miles and yield an average of 3 million tons of bituminous coal a year. It is of sufficiently good grade for smelting and manufacturing purposes, and is also used largely as fuel for the Japanese Navy. As to iron, it is said that the Manchurian province of Fengtian alone contains more than half of all the reserves of this metal in China. Although the South Manchuria railway system is the largest single investment of the Japanese in this part of China, it is by no means the only one. With almost a million Koreans and Japanese in the three eastern provinces, and controlling an area in least territory greater than the state of Rhode Island, Japan has been able to inaugurate all kinds of new movements here.

She has built new towns along the route of the railway and has invested more than $500 million. The Japanese have founded industries for the manufacture of bean products, silk, porcelain, bricks, and glass, and have scattered schools, hospitals, and laboratories throughout these provinces. The public school system of the Chinese is still far inadequate to the educational needs of Manchuria, and the best institutions of learning here The prayers are conducted by missionaries or the Japanese.

31 31 - Port Arthur, A Fallen Gibraltar 15:43

Carpenter. This recording is in the public domain. Port Arthur, a fallen Gibraltar. I went out this morning to take a look at the battlefields of Port Arthur. They lie peaceful and quiet, the scars of war almost obliterated by the passing of two decades, and it is hard to realize that the huge natural amphitheater in which the city is built was for eight months the scene of the greatest gladiatorial show the world had then known. As I stood on the heights above it, I could look down upon the harbor and could see in my mind's eye the Russian gunboats that were bottled up there while the Japanese squadron, lying outside, fired shrieking shells at them. Facing the harbor is the city that the Russians once planned to make a second Gibraltar, and on the hills all about The story of how, inch by inch, every bit of this ground was fought over was, until the World War ten years later, the story of the bloodiest battles that had ever been fought.

Although it remained for the Russians to make a great naval stronghold of Port Arthur, its natural advantages as a harbor had been recognized centuries before. History tells of boats putting in here for shelter as early as the rule of the Tang Dynasty from 620 to 907 A.D. At one time, because of the formation of the entrance to the harbor, it was known as the Lion's Mouth Port, and later by a Chinese name that meant Travel Facilitating Port. In 1857, during the hostilities between China and the combined English And French forces, this place was made the base of operations for the latter two countries and was named Port Arthur in honor of young Prince Arthur, now the Duke of Connaught. Some years afterward, Li Hongchang, recognizing its strategic importance, erected fortifications here that were occupied by the Chinese.

With the lease of the Liao Tung Peninsula by Russia, The Tsar set about making Port Arthur the base of his naval operations in the Far East. Fort after fort was built on the hills that rose to the east, the north, and the west of the city. These forts were made of concrete, reinforced with steel, and they stood like sentinels in a semicircle more than ten miles long. They made Port Arthur one of the mightiest fortresses in the world, and one that the Russians looked upon as wholly impregnable. At the south, Port Arthur faced two almost landlocked bays that opened into the sea through a single narrow channel. On the shores of the western inlet was the old Chinese town. Along the eastern bay, the Russians laid out a new city designed on a magnificent scale.

For their officials, they erected enormous office buildings and elaborate residences. They spent vast sums of money dredging the harbor, building wharves and docks, The Port Arthur of those years was far different from the city of today. There were soldiers everywhere. Military officers in big caps and long coats swaggered through the streets. There was a large garrison. Everything was booming, and money and drink flowed like water. A circus building was erected in which all sorts of shows were held, and there were cafes and restaurants. modeled after those of St. Petersburg and Moscow that became famous throughout the Far East. At the height of this period came the Russo-Japanese War. Japan had long been apprehensive of the Russian influence in Manchuria, and when the Tsar began to extend his activities into Korea also, the Mikado added armed force to his protests.

Under Admiral Togo, the Japanese fleet surprised the Russian warships The remainder managed to retreat to the harbor where the Japanese dared not venture because of hidden mines, but by that time the Russian squadron was so badly crippled that it could not prevent the Japanese from landing their soldiers upon the Liaocheng Peninsula and cutting off the troops in Port Arthur from the main Russian forces in Manchuria. With the Russians pressed back to the very edge of the Port Arthur fortifications, the siege of this city began. For almost six months, the Japanese soldiers and the Japanese artillery stormed the forts with a terrific loss of life. The country about Port Arthur looks much like the bare hills of Montana or Colorado.

It is dry and thirsty, and there is no vegetation except scanty grass with here and there a bit of scrub oak. The fighting was all in the open, and the fortifications had to be thrown up out of gravel and broken stone. The tunnels made by the Japanese were not through earth, but through rock, and in undermining the enemy forts, they could advance but a few feet a day. Nevertheless, they dug mile after mile of such trenches and tunnels. In burrowing into the forts, the Japanese were often within a few feet of the Russian trenches. And soldiers of the two armies remained so for days, separated only by ramparts of sandbags. A Japanese officer accompanying me over the battlefields pointed at a tunnel in which he said he had fought for several days with the Russians so close on the other side of the wall that the opposing troops could talk back and forth.

We even joked with one another, using one of our men as an interpreter, he said, and we passed brandy and tobacco over the sandbags. How did the Russians fight, I asked? They fought bravely, he replied, but the odds were against them, because their common soldiers did not know what they were fighting for. They did not care for Manchuria, and they had no faith in their emperor. On the other hand, every Japanese esteemed it an honor to die for his country, And most of us preferred death to defeat. The hardest fighting in the siege of Port Arthur took place in the capture by the Japanese of what is now known as 203-meter hill. This eminence, though not so heavily fortified as were some of the other hills about the city, was quickly recognized to be the most important strategic point near Port Arthur.

It overlooked the harbor and the other fortifications. The Russians realized that its capture meant the certain fall of the city and fought the more doggedly against the terrific onslaught of the Japanese. The siege lasted day and night from November 27th to December 6th and turned the eyes of the whole world upon the struggle. To quote from one of the guidebooks, the Japanese now sell to visitors to the battlefields This insignificant hill before the war have got now a worldwide fame. Three weeks after the fall of 203-meter hill, Port Arthur surrendered to the Japanese. The terms of capitulation were discussed by Generals Noji and Stossel in a little native house in the village of Shui Xingying, which is now preserved as a historic relic.

In the meantime, the fighting was going on through southern Manchuria. Finally resulting in the fall of Mukden the following March, which marked the climax of the Japanese operations. It was at this point that President Roosevelt invited Japan and Russia to make peace terms at a conference to be held in the United States, and in the fall of 1905, the Treaty of Portsmouth, New Hampshire was signed. According to the terms of the treaty, the Russians transferred their concessions in the Liao-Tung Peninsula to Japan. agreed to a hands-off policy as far as Korea was concerned, ceded half of the island of Sakhalin to Japan, and agreed to restore to China the three eastern provinces. Thus ended the Russian regime in South Manchuria.

The Japanese officer who guided me over the battlefields was here when Port Arthur fell. He tells me that the Russians were crazy to get away, and that furniture of every kind went for a song. Sofas, tables, and chairs could be had for the taking, and grand pianos sold for $25 apiece. Costly hangings were thrown out into the streets, and some of the houses were set on fire by their owners. After we took possession, he told me, I found our soldiers tearing up valuable books, using them for fuel or throwing them into the snow, and I besought the general in charge to allow me to go through the town and save the libraries. He did so, and when he saw how many books there were, he gave me a detail of soldiers to bring them in.

We collected altogether about 20,000 volumes. Most of them were printed in Russian, but there were a thousand or so in French and in English, several hundred in Italian, and some in Chinese and Japanese. I tried to catalog them, classifying them first by languages and later by subjects. There were nine sets of encyclopedias, all Russian or German, and a great many musical books. There were also many scientific works, but most of the volumes were fiction. The Russians had every luxury here. They lived well, and at the close, even better than the Japanese, for by the terms of the capitulation, we gave them fresh meat, although we were living on canned stuffs. The end of the war found every foot of ground about Port Arthur scarred by battle, and the face of old Mother Earth pockmarked by the siege.

As soon as the fighting was over, Chinese by the thousands swarmed over the landscape and gathered up every bit of lead and iron in sight. They even dug up the shells that had been buried deep in the ground, often finding one that had not been exploded and innocently picking the cap. The result was still another big hole in the earth and almond-eyed coolies scattered to the four winds. They collected army buttons, torn caps and coats, and pieces of barbed wire that, when charged with electricity, had entangled the soldiers as they climbed the hills and burnt them to death. Most of these relics have since found their way into the War Memorial Museum east of the Old Town, where, to quote again from the aforementioned guidebook, Everything have long, brave, and bloody record.

Another structure commemorating the war is the Soldiers' Monument between the Old and the New Town. It stands on a saddle-shaped hill that rises to a height of a thousand or more feet out of the arena of the amphitheater in which Port Arthur is located. The first elevation to be seen as one comes into the city. It faces the narrow entrance to the harbor, where the Japanese and Russian gunboats showered shells upon one another, and about it may be seen the fortified hills taken one by one by the Japanese during the siege. It is upon the top of this eminence that the soldiers' monument towers more than 200 feet into the air. It is a great temple of silver-grey granite, whose stone came by the shipload from Shimonoseki.

Japan. Inside the tower is a spiral staircase, and from the top I obtained a magnificent view of the harbor and the hills behind Port Arthur. At the other end of the elevation, perhaps 800 feet distant, is a Shinto shrine of this same silver-gray granite, under which lie the bones of more than 22,000 Japanese who were killed at Port Arthur. The way to the shrine is through a great bronze torii. The stone platform must be more than 100 feet square, although the shrine itself is comparatively small. These two monuments are reached by military roads that wind their way up the mountain and by flights of steps. The Japanese have erected also a little granite temple with a Greek cross upon its top.

As a monument to the dead among their enemies who fell at Port Arthur. This is situated at the foot of 203-meter hill, and surrounding it are the graves of thousands of Russian soldiers. Inside a brick wall enclosing several acres about the monument, the officers are buried, the grave of each being marked with a stone or an iron cross. Outside on the slopes of the hill stands a thicket of white wooden crosses The inscriptions on the monument are in Japanese and Russian, and they state that the memorial was erected by the Emperor of Japan in honor of the bravery of the soldiers of his great enemy, Russia. But let us turn from the battlefields of Port Arthur to the city itself. As it stands today, it makes me think of one of the inflated towns of our own west after its boom has collapsed.

From a growing metropolis of 100,000 people, its population has decreased to less than one-fifth that number. The old forts have fallen into ruin except for the two that guard the harbor. And aside from the naval station that the Japanese maintain here, there is little activity in the port. Indeed, the chief importance of Port Arthur today is as an educational center and as the seat of the government offices for the least territory. It has several fine schools and colleges for both sexes, to which Chinese as well as Japanese are admitted. Port Arthur is also a popular resort, not only for Manchuria, but for Shanghai and Peking as well. Lying as it does at the extreme tip of the Liao Tung Peninsula, it is always cold by sea breezes in summer, and in addition, has an excellent beach.

A motor road built between here and Dai Ren, 37 miles away, has made it almost a suburb of that great port. And the old military stronghold of the Russians in South Manchuria is now only an hour's drive from the new commercial stronghold the Japanese have founded in the ancient land of the Manchus. Today, Port Arthur is only a symbol of the tragic outcome of the clash between two great forces of the Far East. Its downfall marked the end of a chapter In the history of the struggle for supremacy in Eastern Asia, and the next one is still unwritten. For me, it marks the end of these travels, and I must leave it to others to tell the story of what is to come. The End End of chapter 31 End of China by Frank G.

Carpenter

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