Extracts from: Journal of a residence at Bagdad, during the years 1830 and 1831, by MR. ANTHONY N. GROVES, published in London in 1832
Sept. — The weather is now become decidedly cooler. A fortnight since the average height of the thermometer in the shade, during the warmest part of the day, was 117; it is now lowered to 110. During the hottest time of the year, which is now just over, the quicksilver was rarely lower than 110, or higher than 118 in the shade, except in the morning, when the general range was from 87 to 93.
Oct. 21. — There has just been acting here a scene of duplicity, falsehood, and bloodshed, which appears strange to us, but is not uncommon in this land of misrule and cruelty. A Capidji (or Ambassador) from the Porte to the Pasha has been long expected, and with evident anxiety by him and those immediately about him, which was increased to the highest pitch, when by a messenger from Aleppo, the Pasha received the intelligence, that this man's intention was to supersede him, and of course to destroy him. It then became the object of the Pasha to endeavour to get him into his hands, which was the more difficult, as it is usual for the Capidji to read publicly his firman, and proclaim the successor at Mousul, or some place near, who, collecting the Arabs, marches to lay siege to this place, till the head of the Pasha is delivered to him. To prevent this, therefore, the Pasha made the Imrahor, or Master of the Horse, who has the whole arrangement of the military force, to write a letter to the Capidji, begging him to come here at once, and that he would, without a struggle, give the head of Dauoud Pasha into his hand, whereas if he remained at Mousul, there must be an open contention about it.
By this he was allured to approach the city, and the Pasha sent out 700 or 800 men under pretence of showing him honour, to meet him and secure him in case any accounts of the true state of the case should reach him, that he might have no possibility of flight. Thus he was brought into the city, and his quarters appointed in the house of the Musruff; when, after the Pasha had obtained from him the declaration of his object, a Divan was called, and it was determined to put him to death. This event has thrown the city into great consternation, and every one who can, is buying corn in expectation of what is to follow. For the tragedy will not end here, as a friend of the Capidji is left behind at Mousul, and another Capidji is at Diarbekr, waiting the result of this negociation. So it appears that the Sultan is determined to act at once and decidedly against this Pasha. We are now, therefore to expect a siege, and a state of anxiety and fear in this city for some months; but the Lord, who sitteth in the heavens, is ordering all for his own glory, and for our safety, and he will provide for us.
Feb. 19. — To-day we have heard that the above report of the plague being at Sulemania is false; that it has been there, but has now left it; so we know not what to believe.
March 28. — The plague has now absolutely, we believe, entered this unhappy city. Major T. and all those connected with the residency are preparing to leave for the mountains of Kourdistan; they have most kindly invited us to go with them and form part of their family; this is most truly kind, and there are many things to recommend it — the opportunities it would afford M. for learning Armenian, and me Arabic, and for observation on the country and people, besides our being delivered from all apparent danger either from the sword which threatens us from without, or the pestilence within. The absence of all these friends and so many of the principal Christian families who are going with them, leave us exposed to the bigotry of the people in any tumults that may arise — all these things presented themselves to our minds. But there are considerations that outweigh these in our minds: in the first place, we feel that while we have the Lord's work in our hands we ought not to fly and leave it; again, if we go, it is likely that for many months we cannot return to our work, whereas the plague may cease in a month; opportunities of usefulness may arise in the plague that a more unembarrassed time may not present; and our dear friends from Aleppo may come and find no asylum. The Lord gives great peace and quietness of mind in resting under his most gracious and loving care, and as the great object of our lives is to illustrate his love to us, we believe that in the midst of these awful circumstances, he will fill our tongues with praise as he does fill our hearts with peace.
March 29. — Yesterday Dr. Beagrie and Mr. Montefiore went and saw several patients they thought afflicted with the plague; but their minds were not perfectly made up. To-day, there is no longer any doubt. I accompanied Mr. Montefiore, in his visits, and now there are about twenty, and the number is increasing. Thus, then, this long expected scourge has visited this city, and our Father only knows when the awful visitation may cease. We can only cast ourselves on his holy and loving hands for safety or peace: into these hands we do cast ourselves, with all that is dearest to us in this world. We have proved our Jesus to be the Captain and Author of our hopes, and always found that in the power of his name we have obtained the victory. Nothing but the Lord's loving pity can prevent the most awful extension of the disease; not only are the people crowded together, two or three dying in one room, but the intercourse is perfectly unrestricted in all parts of the city, so that I fear what is now confined to one quarter, and might possibly, by a vigilant government be kept there, is spreading in all directions. We have, therefore, been forced to the most painful step of breaking up our school, for it would have been quite impossible to collect together eighty children from different parts of the city, without exposing all to danger. May the Lord enable us profitably to avail ourselves of our retirement, to cultivate a more extended communion with him who is our life. Dear M. is much staid on her God, and feels that as he has been, so he will be to us a hiding place in every storm.
April 1. — The plague is still increasing, but apparently not rapidly. We wait the Lord's pleasure in our own house. The only inconvenience is want of water, which cannot be had from without; and they say that when the plague becomes intense all the water carriers cease to ply; but the Lord hath said, in the time of famine ye shall be satisfied; on this promise we rest in peace.
The deaths at present from the plague are confined to the Mohammedans and the Jews. To avoid it, many of the Jews have gone to Bussorah, and the Kourds who brought it here have fled from the city; a large caravan of Christians are now thinking of returning to Mosul, who were driven from Mosul three or four years ago by plague and its attendant famine.
The poor Jews have been robbed of every thing by the Arabs, and sent naked back, and there seems little better prospect for those who are going to Mosul: they have the Arabs on one side the road, and the Kourds on the other.
April 4. — We were last night alarmed by the voices of apparently thousands of persons on the other side of the river; by degrees the discharges of guns were mingled with the cries, which gradually extended also to this side the river. We concluded it must be from a tribe of Arabs having broken into the city, the noise being exactly similar, onlv much more violent, to that of the two tribes of Arabs who were contending the other day. But after an hour's suspense, we heard it was a concourse of Arabs to supplicate from God the removal of the plague from them.
The deaths from the plague do not seem to increase with any rapidity, these two or three days; 150 perhaps is the highest any day. On a preceeding occasion, about 60 years ago, it amounted to near 2000 a day. There is with us the father of our schoolmaster, who had the plague at that time, and says you might have walked from one gate of the city to the other, and hardly have met a person or heard a sound. We trust it may be the Lord's gracious purpose to take off the heaviness of his judgment, and spare yet a little longer this sinful city.
April 9. — Stillness still prevails over the city, like the calm which precedes a convulsion; our neighbours are preparing for defence, by getting armed men into their houses, but we sit down under the shadow of the Almighty's wings, fully assured that in his name we shall boast ourselves. The Pasha, however, has not gone out as he intended yesterday.
We have just heard that the reports of the plague has stopped for a little the approach of the enemies of the Pasha, still every thing is exceedingly unsettled. He is going to shut himself up in the citadel till the answer comes from Constantinople to his overtures, but all those about him are against him, and wishing for the arrival of his enemies. About fifty went out the other day, and seized on Hillah, but they were driven out.
April 10. — The accounts brought us of the numbers of those who have died of the plague, on this side of the river alone, in little more than one fortnight, all agree in making it about 7000. The poor inhabitants know not what to do: if they remain in the city, they die of the plague; if they leave it, they fall into the hands of the Arabs, who strip them, or they are exposed to the effects of an inundation of the river Tigris, which has now overflown the whole country around Bagdad, and destroyed, they say, 2000 houses on the other side of the river, but I think this must be exaggerated; the misery of this place, however, is now beyond expression, and may yet be expected to be much greater. Dreadful as the outward circumstances of this people are, their moral condition is infinitely worse; nor does there seem to be a ray of light amidst it all. The Mohammedans look on those who die of the plague as martyrs, and when they die there is no wailing made for them; so that amidst all these desolations there is a stillness, that when one knows the cause is very frightful. The Lord enables us to feel the blessedness of the 91st Psalm, at least of the portion of those to whom that Psalm pertains; and we have, amidst all these very trying circumstances, a peace that passeth understanding. We feel indeed that we owe it to our Lord's love to be careful for nothing, neither to run or make haste as others, but to stand still and see the salvation of our God.
April 12. — I have just taken leave of the kind T.'s. The accounts of the dead are truly terrific; they say the day before yesterday 1200 died, and yesterday Major T.'s man of business obtained a receipt to the amount of 1040 on this side of the river. If this statement can be relied on, the mortality, within and without the city, must be truly appalling, and should it not please the Lord soon to stay the destroying Angel's hand, the whole country must become one wide waste.
April 13. — The plague has just entered our neighbour's dwelling, where they have collected together nearly thirty persons, not simply their own family. It seems as if a spirit of infatuation had seized them, for instead of making their number as small as possible, they seem to congregate as many together as they can.
April 14. — This is a day of awful visitation. The accounts of deaths yesterday vary from between 1000 and 1500; and to-day, they say, is worse than any, and the increase in the numbers of deaths is exclusive of the immense multitudes who are dying without the city. One of our schoolmasters is gone to Damascus, and has taken with him his little nephew who was boarding with us, so we are indeed now quite alone. In fact, nothing prevents the entire desertion of the city, but the dangers of the way, and the poverty of the inhabitants.
April 15. — The accounts of the mortality yesterday still more alarming — 1800 deaths in the city. There was great danger of the bodies being left in the houses, and the inhabitants flying and leaving them unburied, but by great exertions on the part of some young men in one quarter of the town to bury the dead there, others have been stimulated in other quarters to similar exertions, and last night all were buried. Our Moolah has just been here; he says he has bought winding sheets for himself, his brother, and his mother. He says that yesterday he was in the Jew's quarter, and only met one person, and that was a woman, who, when she saw him, ran in and locked the door. Meat, for some days, or any thing else from without, we have been unable to get. Water alone we have obtained. But, to-day, even that we cannot get at any price; every waterman you stop, answers he is carrying it to wash the bodies of the dead.
April 16. — The accounts of yesterday are worse than any day, and an Armenian girl, who has been here this morning", said she saw, in a distance of about 600 yards, fifty dead bodies carrying to burial. The son of Gaspar Khan, our next neighbour, is dead. Two have been carried out from a little passage opposite our house to-day, where two more are ill. All you see passing have a little bunch of herbs, or a rose, or an onion to smell to, and yet as to real measures of precaution there has not been one step taken; not even contact avoided, and the most unrestrained intercourse goes on in every direction, so that nothing but the Lord's arm shortening it, can prevent the entire desolation of the whole province. The population of Bagdad cannot exceed 80,000, and of this number more than half have fled,^ so that the mortality of 2000 a-day is going on among considerably less than 40,000 people.
April 19. — Still heavy, heavy news. The Moolah has called to give us an account of the city. He says it now stands stationary at between 1,500 and 2,000 a-day, and has been so for a fortnight. What a mass of mortality! Among the Pasha's soldiers, he says they have lost, in some of the regiments, above 500 out of 700. — And in the towns and villages without, the report is, that it is as bad or worse than within the city.
April 20. — The plague much the same. Among the Armenians nine were buried yesterday, and seven to-day. There are not left in the city more than 400, and now there is the plague in every third or fourth house. The water also is encreasing, so that a little more will inundate the whole city on this side the river, as it has on the other, to the inexpressible additional misery of the poor people. The caravan which left for Damascus can neither advance nor return on account of the water. Yesterday four dead were carried out from the little passage opposite our house, making in all 14 dead from eight houses, and there are others now lying ill.
April 24. — The plague still raging with most destructive violence; the two servants in our next neighbour's house are both dead, and two horses left, I fear, to starve. A poor Armenian woman has just been here, to beg a little sugar for a little infant she picked up in the street this morning; and she says, another neighbour of her’s picked up two more. They have just been digging graves beside our house. Almost all the cotton is consumed, so that persons are wandering all over the city to find some, for burying their dead. Water not to be had at any price, nor a water-carrier to be seen. Oh, what heart-rending scenes sin has introduced into the world! Oh, when will the Lord come to put an end to these scenes of disorder, physical as well as moral. In one short month, not less than 30,000 souls have passed from time to eternity in this city, and yet, even now, no diminution apparently of deaths.
April 25. — To-day, three more from the same passage, making twenty-one from these houses. Such a disease I never heard of or witnessed; certainly not more than one in twenty recovers; every one attacked seems to die.
This has been a heart-rending day. The accounts from the Residency, and the falling of a wall, undermined by the water, obliged me to go out, and I found nothing but signs of death and desolation; hardly a soul in the streets, unless such as were carrying the dead, or themselves affected with plague, and at a number of doors, and in the lanes, bundles of clothes that had been taken from the dead, and put out. The Court of the Mosque was shut, having no place left for burying, and graves were digging in every direction in the roads, and in the unoccupied stables about the city. The water also has increased so much as to be within a few inches of inundating the city. Should this further calamity come on this side, as it has on the other, the height of human misery will be near its climax, for where they will then bury their dead I know not. There seems no diminution in the plague yet, that we can discern.
April 26. — For many days we have been unable to obtain any account of the number of deaths; but the Chaoosh of Major T has been with the Pasha this morning, who is in the greatest possible state of alarm, wishing to go, but not knowing how. One of his officers, whose business it is to inquire about the number of deaths daily, reported that it had reached 5,000, but yesterday was 3,000, and to-day less. Enormous as the mortality has been, I cannot but think this beyond the truth; yet it must be remembered, that the inundation kept immense masses of poor thronged together in the city, who, but for this, would have all fled in one direction or another.
April 27. — To-day all thoughts are turned from the plague to the inundation, which from the falling of a portion of the city wall on the north-west side last night, let the water in full stream into the city. The Jews' quarter is inundated, and 200 houses fell there last night: we are hourly expecting to hear, that every part of the city is overflowed. A part also of the wall of the citadel is fallen. And, in fact, such is the structure of the houses, that if the water remains near the foundations long, the city must become a mass of ruins.
This inundation has not only ruined an immense number of houses in the city, and been the cause of tens of thousands dying of the plague, but the whole harvest is destroyed. The barley, which was just ready to be reaped, is utterly gone, and every other kind of corn must likewise be ruined, so that for 30 miles all round Bagdad, not a grain of corn can be collected this year, and perhaps, if all was quiet this might be of no consequence, for from Mosul and Kourdistan it might easily come; but this will be prevented by the enemies of the Pasha who surround us. The poor are beginning to feel immense difficulty in the city, for all the shops are shut, and there is a great scarcity of wood for firing; and should the water now cause a general inundation of the whole city, the heart sickens at the contemplation of the scenes that must follow; for the houses of the poor are nothing but mud, scarcely one of which will be left standing.
April 28. — News more and more disastrous. The inundation has swept away 7,000 houses from one end of the city to the other, burying the sick, the dying, and the dead, with many of those in health, in one common grave. Those who have escaped, have brought their goods and the relics of their families, to the houses the plague has desolated, or desertion left unoccupied, and houses are yet falling in every direction.
May 1. — The Lord has brought us all in safety to the beginning of another month, through the most trying period of my life; yet the Lord has every day filled our mouth with praise, and enabled us to see his preserving hand. To-day, as I passed along the street, I saw numbers of dead bodies lying unburied, and the dogs eating with avidity the loathsome food. Oh! it made my very heart sink. The numbers of the dead can now be no longer ascertained, for most of the bodies are buried either in the houses or in the roads; yet amidst all this, the Lord suffers not the destroying angel to enter our dwelling; but we feel the Lord has commanded the man with the ink-horn to write us down to be spared, as this is one of the vials of God's wrath on his enemies.
May 8. — The Lord has this day manifested that the attack of my dear dear wife, is the plague, and of a very dangerous and malignant kind, so that our hearts are prostrate in the Lord's hand. As I think the infection can have only come through me, I have little hope of escaping, unless by the Lord's special intervention.
May 13. — My dearest wife has reached the light of another day, still quietly sinking without a sigh and without a groan. This my prayer for her in the night of my darkness the Lord has mercifully heard.
May 14. — This day dearest Mary's ransomed spirit took its seat among those dressed in white, and her body was consigned to the earth that gave it birth — a dark, heavy day to poor nature, but still the Lord was the light and stay of it.
May 15, 16. — I feel to-day many symptoms similar to those with which my dearest Mary's illness commenced — pains in the head and heaviness, pains in the back, and shooting pains through the glands and the arms. At another time I should think only of them as the result of a common cold; but now I know not how to discriminate, the beginnings are so similar.
May 19. — The water to-day has again fallen considerably in price, and as far as we can judge, God has mercifully nearly extinguished this desolating plague. I now feel quite satisfied the attack I had the other day was an attack of the plague, though very slight.
June 29. — My dear little baby has had an attack of purulent ophthalmia, which gives me much anxiety; for three or four days she had been recovering a little, when this trying attack seized her dear little eyes; she was quite unable to open either of them.
July 9. — The camp of those without the city is moving down to-day towards us; and we hear a continued firing of cannon. It is reported they are come within half an hour's march of the city.
July 28. Thursday. — Up to this time the shells and balls of the besiegers have done us no harm. Two shells have passed just over us. The one fell on the roof of the house of an Arab family at a little distance from us, who were all asleep, and on bursting killed three: one cannon ball has just passed over us, besides musket balls innumerable, only two of which, however, I have felt so fear as to endanger us. The one just passed by me and struck the wall, the other, by bending my head, passed just over me: yet dangerous as it seems in such circumstances to sleep on the roof, the suffocating heat of the rooms is insupportable. Famine is making its destructive way here among the poor. All the necessaries of life are raised from four to six times their usual price, and often are not to be obtained at all, and in addition there is no labour going on in the city: every shop is closed, and every one's concern is to take care of his life or property. They are constantly killing persons in the streets, without the least inquiry being made after the perpetrators; nay, they are publicly and notoriously known.
Aug. 19. Friday. — Every thing seems darkening in this wretched city. Numbers of poor people are crying at the gates to be let out, that they may not be starved in the city; but they will not let them go. All the necessaries of life have risen to five times their usual price, and the pressure of this is increased tenfold by the time at which it has occurred. The bricklayers, carpenters, every trade has entirely ceased its occupations in the city since the commencement of the plague; so that all day-labourers, such as weavers and others, are thrown out of their employments, and without means of gaining their bread. In addition to this, the Arabs are breaking into every house where they expect to find a little corn or rice, so that it is a difficult choice either to be without provisions in danger of starving, or of being broken in upon by such ruffians, and stripped. We intend to bury a little box, containing some rice, and flour, and dates, under ground, that in the event of their breaking in, we may yet secure food for a few days, which may give us time to look about.
Aug. 24. Thursday — Three months and ten days have now passed since the Lord took from me her who was on earth the supreme consolation of my life; and now, this day, he has taken from me my sweet little baby without a sigh, without the expression of pain during the whole of her illness; for this my heart can, even at this moment, bless the Lord; but it has left a void that has more than ever made the world appear a waste.
Sept. 9. Friday. — Every thing continues still increasing in price, and in an increased ratio the sufferings of the poor: if they leave the city they are stripped and driven back; if they remain they are starved; and even the dates are just come to an end, upon which for near three weeks, both the people and the cattle have been feeding. The Pasha has this day taken the jewels of his wives to sell, from which and some other signs, I am led to think his course is nearly run, and that ere long he will follow the fate of his predecessor.
Sept. 15. Thursday. — After a night of anxious suspense, the day has dawned in comparative peace; the cry that Ali Pasha's troops were entering the city, began soon after we had retired to rest, and continued till near morning. Now we hear that Daoud Pasha had fled from the house of Saleh Beg during the night and endeavoured to enter the citadel, but the soldiers would not admit him. He is now in the hands of the people of the Meidan. The Chaoush Kiahya of Ali Pasha has entered the city, and every one is in an awful state of suspense as to the future fate of the inhabitants, at least of the higher classes. I have just set up the English flag that they may know the inhabitant of the house is a stranger here, who has nothing to do with the strife of the city.
October 9. Lord's Day. — It is just one fortnight since the Lord has laid me on the bed of sickness and suffering; for nearly a fortnight previous an attack of typhus fever had been making its steady advances. I had lost all appetite, strength, and ability to sleep, accompanied by that strange overwhelming depression of mind that inclines one to weep one knows not why. But this day fortnight I was completely laid by, and this is the first day I have had my clothes on since.
Showing posts with label disease. Show all posts
Showing posts with label disease. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Across China by Foot and Boat in 1894
An excerpt from: AN AUSTRALIAN IN CHINA, BEING THE NARRATIVE OF A QUIET JOURNEY ACROSS CHINA TO BURMA, BY GEORGE ERNEST MORRISON, M.D. Edin., F.R.G.S., THIRD EDITION, LONDON: HORACE COX
WINDSOR HOUSE, BREAM'S BUILDINGS E.C., MDCCCCII
In the first week of February, 1894, I returned to Shanghai from Japan. It was my intention to go up the Yangtse River as far as Chungking, and then, dressed as a Chinese, to cross quietly over Western China, the Chinese Shan States, and Kachin Hills to the frontier of Burma. The ensuing narrative will tell how easily and pleasantly this journey, which a few years ago would have been regarded as a formidable undertaking, can now be done.
The journey was, of course, in no sense one of exploration; it consisted simply of a voyage of 1500 miles up the Yangtse River, followed by a quiet, though extended, excursion of another 1500 miles along the great overland highway into Burma, taken by one who spoke no Chinese, who had no interpreter or companion, who was unarmed, but who trusted implicitly in the good faith of the Chinese. Anyone in the world can cross over to Burma in the way I did, provided he be willing to exercise for a certain number of weeks or months some endurance—for he will have to travel many miles on foot over a mountainous country—and much forbearance.
* * *
I travelled as a Chinese, dressed in warm Chinese winter clothing, with a pigtail attached to the inside of my hat. I could not have been more comfortable. I had a small cabin to myself. I had of course my own bedding, and by paying a Mexican dollar a day to the Chinese steward, "foreign chow," was brought me from the saloon. The traveller who cares to travel in this way, to put his pride in his pocket and a pigtail down his back, need pay only one-fourth of what it would cost him to travel as a European in European dress.
But I was, I found, unwittingly travelling under false pretences. When the smart chief officer came for my fare he charged me, I thought, too little. I expressed my surprise, and said that I thought the fare was seven dollars. "So it is," he replied "but we only charge missionaries five dollars, and I knew you were a missionary even before they told me." How different was his acuteness from that of the Chinese compradore who received me on the China Merchants' steamer Hsin Chi, in which I once made a voyage from Shanghai to Tientsin, also in Chinese dress! The conversation was short, sharp, and emphatic. The compradore looked at me searchingly. "What pidgin belong you?" he asked—meaning what is your business? Humbly I answered, "My belong Jesus Christ pidgin"; that is, I am a missionary, to which he instantly and with some scorn replied, "No dam fear!"
We called at the river ports and reached Hankow on the 14th. Hankow, the Chinese say, is the mart of eight provinces and the centre of the earth. It is the chief distributing centre of the Yangtse valley, the capital city of the centre of China. The trade in tea, its staple export, is declining rapidly, particularly since 1886. Indian opium goes no higher up the river than this point; its importation into Hankow is now insignificant, amounting to only 738 piculs (44 tons) per annum.
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The author's Chinese Passport
Our interests in Hankow are protected by Mr. Pelham Warren, the Consul, one of the ablest men in the Service. I registered at the Consulate as a British subject and obtained a Chinese passport in terms of the Treaty of Tientsin for the four provinces Hupeh, Szechuen, Kweichow, and Yunnan, available for one year from the date of issue.
* * *
My laoban knew twelve words of English, and I twelve words of Chinese, and this was the extent of our common vocabulary; it had to be carefully eked out with signs and gestures. I knew the Chinese for rice, flourcake, tea, egg, chopsticks, opium, bed, by-and-by, how many, charcoal, cabbage, and customs. My laoban could say in English, or pidgin English, chow, number one, no good, go ashore, sit down, by-and-by, to-morrow, match, lamp, alright, one piecee, and goddam. This last named exotic he had been led to consider as synonymous with "very good." It was not the first time I had known the words to be misapplied. I remember reading in the Sydney Bulletin, that a Chinese cook in Sydney when applying for a situation detailed to the mistress his undeniable qualifications, concluding with the memorable announcement, "My Clistian man mum; my eat beef; my say goddam."
There was a small village behind us. The villagers strolled down to see the foreigner whom children well in the background called "Yang kweitze" (foreign devil). Below on the sand, were the remains of a junk, confiscated for smuggling salt; it had been sawn bodily in two. Salt is a Government monopoly and a junk found smuggling it is confiscated on the spot.
* * *
At Yehtan rapid, which is said to be the worst on the river in the winter, as the Hsintan rapid is in summer, three of the boys went ashore to haul us up the ledge of water—they were plainly insufficient. While we were hanging on the cataract extra trackers appeared from behind the rocks and offered their services. They could bargain with us at an advantage. It was a case well known to all Chinese "of speaking of the price after the pig has been killed." But, when we agreed to their terms, they laid hold of the towrope and hauled us through in a moment. Here, as at other dangerous rapids on the river, an official lifeboat is stationed. It is of broad beam, painted red. The sailors are paid eighty cash (2d.) a day, and are rewarded with 1000 cash for every life they save, and 800 cash for every corpse.
* * *
An immense number of junks of all kinds were moored to the bank, bow on. Many of them were large vessels, with hulls like that of an Aberdeen clipper. Many carry foreign flags, by which they are exempt from the Chinese likin duties, so capricious in their imposition, and pay instead a general five per cent. ad valorem duty on their cargoes, which is levied by the Imperial Maritime Customs, and collected either in Chungking or Ichang. From one to the other, with boathooks and paddle, we crept past the outer wings of their balanced rudders till we reached the landing place. On the rocks at the landing a bevy of women were washing, beating their hardy garments with wooden flappers against the stones; but they ceased their work as the foreign devil, in his uncouth garb, stepped ashore in their midst. Wanhsien is not friendly to foreigners in foreign garb. I did not know this, and went ashore dressed as a European. Never have I received such a spontaneous welcome as I did in this city; never do I wish to receive such another. I landed at the mouth of the small creek which separates the large walled city to the east from the still larger city beyond the walls to the west. My laoban was with me. We passed through the washerwomen. Boys and ragamuffins hanging about the shipping saw me, and ran towards me, yelling: "Yang kweitze, Yang kweitze" (foreign devil, foreign devil).
Behind the booths a story-teller had gathered a crowd; in a moment he was alone and the crowd were following me up the hill, yelling and howling with a familiarity most offensive to a sensitive stranger. My sturdy boy wished me to produce my passport which is the size of an admiral's ensign, but I was not such a fool as to do so for it had to serve me for many months yet. With this taunting noisy crowd I had to walk on as if I enjoyed the demonstration. I stopped once and spoke to the crowd, and, as I knew no Chinese, I told them in gentle English of the very low opinion their conduct led me to form of the moral relations of their mothers, and the resignation with which it induced me to contemplate the hyperpyretic surroundings of their posthumous existence; and, borrowing the Chinese imprecation, I ventured to express the hope that when their souls return again to earth they may dwell in the bodies of hogs, since they appeared to me the only habitations meet for them.
* * *
I was taken to the customs pontoon on the south bank of the river, and then up the steep bank by many steps to the basement of an old temple where the two customs officers have their pleasant dwelling. I was kindly received, and stayed the night. We were an immense height above the water; the great city was across the broad expanse of river, here more than seven hundred yards in width. Away down below us, moored close to the bank, and guarded by three Chinese armed junks or gunboats, was the customs hulk, where the searching is done, and where the three officers of the outdoor staff have their offices. There is at present but little smuggling, because there are no Chinese officials. Smuggling may be expected to begin in earnest as soon as Chinese officials are introduced to prevent it. Chinese searchers do best who use their eyes not to see—best for themselves, that is. The gunboats guarding this Haikwan Station have a nominal complement of eighty men, and an actual complement of twenty-four; to avoid, however, unnecessary explanation, pay is drawn by the commanding officer, not for the actual twenty-four, but for the nominal eighty.
My two companions in the temple were tidewaiters in the Customs. There are many storied lives locked away among the tidewaiters in China. Down the river there is a tidewaiter who was formerly professor of French in the Imperial University of St. Petersburg; and here in Chungking, filling the same humble post, is the godson of a marquis and the nephew of an earl, a brave soldier whose father is a major-general and his mother an earl's daughter, and who is first cousin to that enlightened nobleman and legislator the Earl of C. Few men so young have had so many and varied experiences as this sturdy Briton. He has humped his swag in Australia, has earned fifteen shillings a day there as a blackleg protected by police picquets on a New South Wales coal mine. He was at Harrow under Dr. Butler, and at Corpus Christi, Cambridge. He has been in the Dublin Fusiliers, and a lieutenant in Weatherby's Horse, enlisted in the 5th Lancers, and rose from private to staff-sergeant, and ten months later would have had his commission. He served with distinction in the Soudan and Zululand, and has three medals with four clasps. He was present at El Teb, and at the disaster at Tamai, when McNeill's zareeba was broken. He was at Tel-el-kebir; saw Burnaby go forth to meet a coveted death at Abu-klea, and was present at Abu-Kru when Sir Herbert Stewart received his death-wound. He was at Rorke's Drift, and appears with that heroic band in Miss Elizabeth Thompson's painting. Leaving the army, C. held for a time a commission in the mounted constabulary of Madras, and now he is a third class assistant tidewaiter in the Imperial Maritime Customs of China, with a salary as low as his spirits are high.
Chungking is an open port, which is not an open port. By the treaty of Tientsin it is included in the clause which states that any foreign steamer going to it, a closed port, shall be confiscated. Yet by the Chefoo Convention, Chungking is to become an open port as soon as the first foreign steamer shall reach there. This reminds one of the conflicting instructions once issued by a certain government in reference to the building of a new gaol. The instructions were explicit:—
Clause I.—The new gaol shall be constructed out of the materials of the old.
Clause II.—The prisoners shall remain in the old gaol till the new gaol is constructed.
* * *
Opium Smoking
Morphia pills are sold in Chungking by the Chinese chemists to cure the opium habit. This profitable remedy was introduced by the foreign chemists of the coast ports and adopted by the Chinese. Its advantage is that it converts a desire for opium into a taste for morphia, a mode of treatment analogous to changing one's stimulant from colonial beer to methylated spirit. In 1893, 15,000 ounces of hydrochlorate of morphia were admitted into Shanghai alone.
* * *
I left the boat at Chungking and started on my land journey, going west 230 miles to Suifu. I had with me two coolies to carry my things, the one who received the higher pay having also to bring me my food, make my bed, and pay away my copper cash. They could not speak a single word of English. They were to be paid for the journey one 4s. 10d. and the other 5s. 7d. They were to be entitled to no perquisites, were to find themselves on the way, and take their chance of employment on the return journey. They were to lead me into Suifu on the seventh day out from Chungking. All that they undertook to do they did to my complete satisfaction.
On the morning of March 14th I set out from Chungking to cross 1600 miles over Western China to Burma. Men did not speak hopefully of my chance of getting through. There were the rains of June and July to be feared apart from other obstacles.
* * *
Six li out (two miles), beyond the gravemounds there is a small village where ponies are kept for hire. A kind friend came with me as far as the village to act as my interpreter, and here he engaged a pony for me. It was to carry me ten miles for fourpence. It was small, rat-like and wiry, and was steered by the "mafoo" using the tail like a tiller. Mounted then on this small beast, which carried me without wincing, I jogged along over the stone-flagged pathway, down hill and along valley, scaling and descending the long flights of steps which lead over the mountains. The bells of the pony jingled merrily; the day was fine and the sun shone behind the clouds. My two coolies sublet their contracts, and had their loads borne for a fraction of a farthing per mile by coolies returning empty-handed to Suifu.
* * *
I lived, of course, in the common Chinese inn, ate Chinese food, and was everywhere treated with courtesy and good nature; but at first I found it trying to be such an object of curiosity; to have to do all things in unsecluded publicity; to have to push my way through streets thronged by the curious to see the foreigner. My meals I ate in the presence of the street before gaping crowds. When they came too close I told them politely in English to keep back a little, and they did so if I illustrated my words by gesture. When I scratched my head and they saw the spurious pigtail, they smiled; when I flicked the dust off the table with my pigtail, they laughed hilariously.
* * *
Rice was my staple article of diet; eggs, fowls, and vegetables were also abundant and cheap; but I avoided pork which is the flesh universally eaten throughout China by all but the Mohammedans and vegetarians. In case of emergency I had a few tins of foreign stores with me. I made it a point never to drink water—I drank tea. No Chinaman ever drinks anything cold. Every half hour or hour he can reach an inn or teahouse where tea can be infused for him in a few minutes. The price of a bowl of tea with a pinch of tea-leaves, filled and refilled with hot water ad lib, is two cash—equal to the twentieth part of one penny. Pork has its weight largely added to by being injected with water, the point of the syringe being passed into a large vein; this is usually described as the Chinese method of "watering stock."
* * *
A young English girl at this mission, who has been more than a year in China, tells me that she has never felt the Lord so near her as she has since she came to China, nor ever realised so entirely His abundant goodness. Poor thing, it made me sad to talk to her. In England she lived in a bright and happy home with brothers and sisters, in a charming climate. She was always well and full of life and vigour, surrounded by all that can make life worth living. In China she is never well; she is almost forgetting what is the sensation of health; she is anæmic and apprehensive; she has nervous headaches and neuralgia; she can have no pleasure, no amusement whatever; her only relaxation is taking her temperature; her only diversion a prayer meeting. She is cooped up in a Chinese house in the unchanging society of a married couple—the only exercise she can permit herself is a prison-like walk along the top of the city at the back of the mission. Her lover, a refined English gentleman who is also in the mission, lives a week's journey away, in Chungking, a depressing fever-stricken city where the sun is never seen from November to June, and blazes with unendurable fierceness from July to October. In England he was full of strength and vigour, fond of boating and a good lawn-tennis player. In China he is always ill, anæmic, wasted, and dyspeptic, constantly subject to low forms of fever, and destitute of appetite. But more agonising than his bad health is the horrible reality of the unavailing sacrifice he is making—no converts but "outcasts subsidised to forsake their family altars;" no reward but the ultimate one which his noble self-devotion is laying up for himself in Heaven. No man with a healthy brain can discern "Blessing" in the work of these two missionaries, nor be blind to the fact that it is the reverse of worshipful to return effusive thanks to the great Almighty, "who yearns over the Chinese, His lost ones," for "vouchsafing the abundant mercies" of a harvest of six doubtful converts as the work of three missionaries for three years.
* * *
Shortly before leaving, the chairen or yamen-runner—the policeman, that is to say—sent by the Magistrate to shadow me to Tak-wan-hsien, called at the Mission to request that the interpreter would kindly remind the traveller, who did not speak Chinese, that it was customary to give wine-money to the chairen at the end of the journey. The request was reasonable. All the way from Chungking I had been accompanied by yamen-runners without knowing it. The chairen is sent partly for the protection of the traveller, but mainly for the protection of the Magistrate; for, should a traveller provided with a passport receive any injury, the Magistrate of the district would be liable to degradation. It was arranged, therefore, with the convert that, on our arrival in Tak-wan-hsien, I was to give the chairen, if satisfied with his services, 200 cash (five pence); but, if he said "gowshun! gowshun!" (a little more! a little more!) with sufficient persistence, I was to increase the reward gradually to sevenpence halfpenny. This was to be the limit; and the chairen, I was assured, would consider this a generous return for accompanying me 227 miles over one of the most mountainous roads in China.
* * *
At Sengki-ping it rained all through the night, and I had to sleep under my umbrella because of a solution in the continuity of the roof immediately above my pillow. And it rained all the day following; but my men, eager to earn their reward of one shilling, pushed on through the slush. It was hard work following the slippery path above the river. Few rivers in the world flow between more majestic banks than these, towering as they do a thousand feet above the water. Clad with thick mountain scrub, that has firm foothold, the mountains offer but a poor harvest to the peasant; yet even here high up on the precipitous sides of the cliffs, ledges that seem inaccessible are sown with wheat or peas, and, if the soil be deep enough, with the baneful poppy. As we plodded on through the mud and rain, we overtook a poor lad painfully limping along with the help of a stick. He was a bright lad, who unbound his leg and showed me a large swelling above the knee. He spoke to me, though I did not understand him, but with sturdy independence did not ask for alms, and when I had seen his leg he bound it up again and limped on. Meeting him a little later at an inn, where he was sitting at a table with nothing before him to eat, I gave him a handful of cash which I had put in my pocket for him. He thanked me by raising his clasped hands, and said something, I knew not what, as I hurried on. A little while afterwards I stopped to have my breakfast, when the boy passed. As soon as he saw me he fell down upon his knees and "kotow'd" to me, with every mark of the liveliest gratitude. I felt touched by the poor fellow's gratitude—he could not have been more than fifteen—and mean, to think that the benefaction, which in his eyes appeared so generous, was little more than one penny. There can be no doubt that I gained merit by this action, for this very afternoon as I was on the track a large stone the size of a shell from a 50-ton gun fell from the crag above me, struck the rock within two paces of me, and shot past into the river. A few feet nearer and it would have blotted out the life of one whom the profession could ill spare. We camped at Laowatan.
* * *
We, who live amid the advantages of Western civilisation, can hardly realise how enormous are the weights borne by those human beasts of burthen, our brothers in China. The common fast-travelling coolie of Szechuen contracts to carry eighty catties (107lbs.), forty miles a day over difficult country. But the weight-carrying coolie, travelling shorter distances, carries far heavier loads than that. There are porters, says Du Halde, who will carry 160 of our pounds, ten leagues a day. The coolies, engaged in carrying the compressed cakes of Szechuen tea into Thibet, travel over mountain passes 7000 feet above their starting place; yet there are those among them, says Von Richthofen, who carry 324 catties (432lbs.). A package of tea is called a "pao" and varies in weight from eleven to eighteen catties, yet Baber has often seen coolies carrying eighteen of the eighteen-catty pao (the "Yachou pao") and on one occasion twenty-two, in other words Baber has often seen coolies with more than 400lbs. on their backs. Under these enormous loads they travel from six to seven miles a day. The average load of the Thibetan tea-carrier is, says Gill, from 240lbs. to 264lbs. Gill constantly saw "little boys carrying 120lbs." Bundles of calico weigh fifty-five catties each (73-1/3lbs.), and three bundles are the average load. Salt is solid, hard, metallic, and of high specific gravity, yet I have seen men ambling along the road, under loads that a strong Englishman could with difficulty raise from the ground. The average load of salt, coal, copper, zinc, and tin is 200lbs. Gill met coolies carrying logs, 200lbs. in weight, ten miles a day; and 200lbs., the Consul in Chungking told me, is the average weight carried by the cloth-porters between Wanhsien and Chentu, the capital.
* * *
The selling of its female children into slavery is the chief sorrow of this famine-stricken district. During last year it is estimated, or rather, it is stated by the Chinese, that no less than three thousand children from this neighbourhood, chiefly female children and a few boys, were sold to dealers and carried like poultry in baskets to the capital. At ordinary times the price for girls is one tael (three shillings) for every year of their age, thus a girl of five costs fifteen shillings, of ten, thirty shillings, but in time of famine children, to speak brutally, become a drug in the market. Female children were now offering at from three shillings and fourpence to six shillings each. You could buy as many as you cared to, you might even obtain them for nothing if you would enter into an agreement with the father, which he had no means of enforcing, to take care of his child, and clothe and feed her, and rear her kindly. Starving mothers would come to the mission beseeching the foreign teachers to take their babies and save them from the fate that was otherwise inevitable.
Girls are bought in Chaotong up to the age of twenty, and there is always a ready market for those above the age of puberty; prices then vary according to the measure of the girl's beauty, an important feature being the smallness of her feet. They are sold in the capital for wives and yatows; they are rarely sold into prostitution. Two important factors in the demand for them are the large preponderance in the number of males at the capital, and the prevalence there of goitre or thick neck, a deformity which is absent from the district of Chaotong. Infanticide in a starving city like this is dreadfully common. "For the parents, seeing their children must be doomed to poverty, think it better at once to let the soul escape in search of a more happy asylum than to linger in one condemned to want and wretchedness." The infanticide is, however, exclusively confined to the destruction of female children, the sons being permitted to live in order to continue the ancestral sacrifices.
One mother I met, who was employed by the mission, told the missionary in ordinary conversation that she had suffocated in turn three of her female children within a few days of birth; and, when a fourth was born, so enraged was her husband to discover that it was also a girl that he seized it by the legs and struck it against the wall and killed it.
Dead children, and often living infants, are thrown out on the common among the gravemounds, and may be seen there any morning being gnawed by dogs. Mr. Tremberth of the Bible Christian Mission, leaving by the south gate early one morning, disturbed a dog eating a still living child that had been thrown over the wall during the night. Its little arm was crunched and stript of flesh, and it was whining inarticulately—it died almost immediately. A man came to see me, who for a long time used to heap up merit for himself in heaven by acting as a city scavenger. Early every morning he went round the city picking up dead dogs and dead cats in order to bury them decently—who could tell, perhaps the soul of his grandfather had found habitation in that cat? While he was doing this pious work, never a morning passed that he did not find a dead child, and usually three or four. The dead of the poor people are roughly buried near the surface and eaten by dogs.
* * *
As we went out of the west gate, I was shown the spot where a few days before a young woman, taken in adultery, was done to death in a cage amid a crowd of spectators, who witnessed her agony for three days. She had to stand on tiptoe in the cage, her head projecting through a hole in the roof, and here she had to remain until death by exhaustion or strangulation ensued, or till some kind friend, seeking to accumulate merit in heaven, passed into her mouth sufficient opium to poison her, and so end her struggles.
On the gate itself a man not so long ago was nailed with red-hot nails hammered through his wrists above the hands. In this way he was exposed in turn at each of the four gates of the city, so that every man, woman, and child could see his torture. He survived four days, having unsuccessfully attempted to shorten his pain by beating his head against the woodwork, an attempt which was frustrated by padding the woodwork. This man had murdered and robbed two travellers on the high road, and, as things are in China, his punishment was not too severe.
* * *
Coming from Szechuen, we frequently met porters carrying baskets of armadillos, leopard skins, leopard and tiger bones. The skins were for wear, but the armadillos and bones were being taken to Suifu to be converted into medicine. From the bones of leopards an admirable tonic may be distilled; while it is well known that the infusion prepared from tiger bones is the greatest of the tonics, conferring something of the courage, agility, and strength of the tiger upon its partaker.
Another excellent specific for courage is a preparation made from the gall bladder of a robber famous for his bravery, who has died at the hands of the executioner. The sale of such a gall bladder is one of the perquisites of a Chinese executioner.
* * *
Forty li from our sleeping place we came to the pretty town of Shachiaokai, on some undulating high ground well sheltered with trees. Justice had lately been here with her headsman and brought death to a gang of malefactors. Their heads, swinging in wooden cages, hung from the tower near the gateway. They could be seen by all persons passing along the road, and, with due consideration for the feelings of the bereaved relatives, they were hung near enough for the features to be recognised by their friends. Each head was in a cage of its own, and was suspended by the pigtail to the rim, so that it might not lie upside down but could by-and-by rattle in its box as dead men's bones should do. To each cage a white ticket was attached giving the name of the criminal and his confession of the offence for which he was executed. They were the heads of highway robbers who had murdered two travellers on the road near Chennan-chow, and it was this circumstance which accounted for the solicitude of the officials near Luho to prevent our being benighted in a district where such things were possible.
* * *
Bhamo is 1520 miles by land from Chungking; and it is an equal distance further from Chungking to Shanghai. The entire distance I traversed in exactly one hundred days, for I purposely waited till the hundredth day to complete it. And it surely speaks well of the sense of responsibility innate in the Chinese that, during all this time, I never had in my employ a Chinese coolie who did not fulfil, with something to spare, all that he undertook to do. I paid off my men in Bhamo. To Laotseng I gave 400 cash too many, and asked him for the change. At once with much readiness he ranged some cash on the table in the form of an abacus, and, setting down some hieroglyphics on a sheet of paper, he worked out a calculation, by which he proved that I owed him 400 cash, and, therefore, the accounts were now exactly balanced. For my own expenses I gave him 1175 cash in Tengyueh and 400 more in Bhamo, so that my entire personal expenses between two points nine days distant from each other were rather more than 3s. My entire journey from Shanghai to Bhamo cost less than £20 sterling, including my Chinese outfit. Had I travelled economically, I estimate that the journey need not have cost me more than £14. Had I carried more silver with me, I would still further have reduced the total cost of my tour. The gold I bought in Yunnan with my surplus silver, I sold in Burma for 20 per cent. profit, the rupees which I purchased in Tengyueh for 11d. were worth 13d. in Bhamo. For some curios which I purchased in the interior for £2 5s. I was offered when I reached civilisation £14. Without doubt the journey across China is the cheapest that can be done in all the world.
WINDSOR HOUSE, BREAM'S BUILDINGS E.C., MDCCCCII
In the first week of February, 1894, I returned to Shanghai from Japan. It was my intention to go up the Yangtse River as far as Chungking, and then, dressed as a Chinese, to cross quietly over Western China, the Chinese Shan States, and Kachin Hills to the frontier of Burma. The ensuing narrative will tell how easily and pleasantly this journey, which a few years ago would have been regarded as a formidable undertaking, can now be done.
The journey was, of course, in no sense one of exploration; it consisted simply of a voyage of 1500 miles up the Yangtse River, followed by a quiet, though extended, excursion of another 1500 miles along the great overland highway into Burma, taken by one who spoke no Chinese, who had no interpreter or companion, who was unarmed, but who trusted implicitly in the good faith of the Chinese. Anyone in the world can cross over to Burma in the way I did, provided he be willing to exercise for a certain number of weeks or months some endurance—for he will have to travel many miles on foot over a mountainous country—and much forbearance.
* * *
I travelled as a Chinese, dressed in warm Chinese winter clothing, with a pigtail attached to the inside of my hat. I could not have been more comfortable. I had a small cabin to myself. I had of course my own bedding, and by paying a Mexican dollar a day to the Chinese steward, "foreign chow," was brought me from the saloon. The traveller who cares to travel in this way, to put his pride in his pocket and a pigtail down his back, need pay only one-fourth of what it would cost him to travel as a European in European dress.
But I was, I found, unwittingly travelling under false pretences. When the smart chief officer came for my fare he charged me, I thought, too little. I expressed my surprise, and said that I thought the fare was seven dollars. "So it is," he replied "but we only charge missionaries five dollars, and I knew you were a missionary even before they told me." How different was his acuteness from that of the Chinese compradore who received me on the China Merchants' steamer Hsin Chi, in which I once made a voyage from Shanghai to Tientsin, also in Chinese dress! The conversation was short, sharp, and emphatic. The compradore looked at me searchingly. "What pidgin belong you?" he asked—meaning what is your business? Humbly I answered, "My belong Jesus Christ pidgin"; that is, I am a missionary, to which he instantly and with some scorn replied, "No dam fear!"
We called at the river ports and reached Hankow on the 14th. Hankow, the Chinese say, is the mart of eight provinces and the centre of the earth. It is the chief distributing centre of the Yangtse valley, the capital city of the centre of China. The trade in tea, its staple export, is declining rapidly, particularly since 1886. Indian opium goes no higher up the river than this point; its importation into Hankow is now insignificant, amounting to only 738 piculs (44 tons) per annum.
* * *
The author's Chinese Passport
Our interests in Hankow are protected by Mr. Pelham Warren, the Consul, one of the ablest men in the Service. I registered at the Consulate as a British subject and obtained a Chinese passport in terms of the Treaty of Tientsin for the four provinces Hupeh, Szechuen, Kweichow, and Yunnan, available for one year from the date of issue.
* * *
My laoban knew twelve words of English, and I twelve words of Chinese, and this was the extent of our common vocabulary; it had to be carefully eked out with signs and gestures. I knew the Chinese for rice, flourcake, tea, egg, chopsticks, opium, bed, by-and-by, how many, charcoal, cabbage, and customs. My laoban could say in English, or pidgin English, chow, number one, no good, go ashore, sit down, by-and-by, to-morrow, match, lamp, alright, one piecee, and goddam. This last named exotic he had been led to consider as synonymous with "very good." It was not the first time I had known the words to be misapplied. I remember reading in the Sydney Bulletin, that a Chinese cook in Sydney when applying for a situation detailed to the mistress his undeniable qualifications, concluding with the memorable announcement, "My Clistian man mum; my eat beef; my say goddam."
There was a small village behind us. The villagers strolled down to see the foreigner whom children well in the background called "Yang kweitze" (foreign devil). Below on the sand, were the remains of a junk, confiscated for smuggling salt; it had been sawn bodily in two. Salt is a Government monopoly and a junk found smuggling it is confiscated on the spot.
* * *
At Yehtan rapid, which is said to be the worst on the river in the winter, as the Hsintan rapid is in summer, three of the boys went ashore to haul us up the ledge of water—they were plainly insufficient. While we were hanging on the cataract extra trackers appeared from behind the rocks and offered their services. They could bargain with us at an advantage. It was a case well known to all Chinese "of speaking of the price after the pig has been killed." But, when we agreed to their terms, they laid hold of the towrope and hauled us through in a moment. Here, as at other dangerous rapids on the river, an official lifeboat is stationed. It is of broad beam, painted red. The sailors are paid eighty cash (2d.) a day, and are rewarded with 1000 cash for every life they save, and 800 cash for every corpse.
* * *
An immense number of junks of all kinds were moored to the bank, bow on. Many of them were large vessels, with hulls like that of an Aberdeen clipper. Many carry foreign flags, by which they are exempt from the Chinese likin duties, so capricious in their imposition, and pay instead a general five per cent. ad valorem duty on their cargoes, which is levied by the Imperial Maritime Customs, and collected either in Chungking or Ichang. From one to the other, with boathooks and paddle, we crept past the outer wings of their balanced rudders till we reached the landing place. On the rocks at the landing a bevy of women were washing, beating their hardy garments with wooden flappers against the stones; but they ceased their work as the foreign devil, in his uncouth garb, stepped ashore in their midst. Wanhsien is not friendly to foreigners in foreign garb. I did not know this, and went ashore dressed as a European. Never have I received such a spontaneous welcome as I did in this city; never do I wish to receive such another. I landed at the mouth of the small creek which separates the large walled city to the east from the still larger city beyond the walls to the west. My laoban was with me. We passed through the washerwomen. Boys and ragamuffins hanging about the shipping saw me, and ran towards me, yelling: "Yang kweitze, Yang kweitze" (foreign devil, foreign devil).
Behind the booths a story-teller had gathered a crowd; in a moment he was alone and the crowd were following me up the hill, yelling and howling with a familiarity most offensive to a sensitive stranger. My sturdy boy wished me to produce my passport which is the size of an admiral's ensign, but I was not such a fool as to do so for it had to serve me for many months yet. With this taunting noisy crowd I had to walk on as if I enjoyed the demonstration. I stopped once and spoke to the crowd, and, as I knew no Chinese, I told them in gentle English of the very low opinion their conduct led me to form of the moral relations of their mothers, and the resignation with which it induced me to contemplate the hyperpyretic surroundings of their posthumous existence; and, borrowing the Chinese imprecation, I ventured to express the hope that when their souls return again to earth they may dwell in the bodies of hogs, since they appeared to me the only habitations meet for them.
* * *
I was taken to the customs pontoon on the south bank of the river, and then up the steep bank by many steps to the basement of an old temple where the two customs officers have their pleasant dwelling. I was kindly received, and stayed the night. We were an immense height above the water; the great city was across the broad expanse of river, here more than seven hundred yards in width. Away down below us, moored close to the bank, and guarded by three Chinese armed junks or gunboats, was the customs hulk, where the searching is done, and where the three officers of the outdoor staff have their offices. There is at present but little smuggling, because there are no Chinese officials. Smuggling may be expected to begin in earnest as soon as Chinese officials are introduced to prevent it. Chinese searchers do best who use their eyes not to see—best for themselves, that is. The gunboats guarding this Haikwan Station have a nominal complement of eighty men, and an actual complement of twenty-four; to avoid, however, unnecessary explanation, pay is drawn by the commanding officer, not for the actual twenty-four, but for the nominal eighty.
My two companions in the temple were tidewaiters in the Customs. There are many storied lives locked away among the tidewaiters in China. Down the river there is a tidewaiter who was formerly professor of French in the Imperial University of St. Petersburg; and here in Chungking, filling the same humble post, is the godson of a marquis and the nephew of an earl, a brave soldier whose father is a major-general and his mother an earl's daughter, and who is first cousin to that enlightened nobleman and legislator the Earl of C. Few men so young have had so many and varied experiences as this sturdy Briton. He has humped his swag in Australia, has earned fifteen shillings a day there as a blackleg protected by police picquets on a New South Wales coal mine. He was at Harrow under Dr. Butler, and at Corpus Christi, Cambridge. He has been in the Dublin Fusiliers, and a lieutenant in Weatherby's Horse, enlisted in the 5th Lancers, and rose from private to staff-sergeant, and ten months later would have had his commission. He served with distinction in the Soudan and Zululand, and has three medals with four clasps. He was present at El Teb, and at the disaster at Tamai, when McNeill's zareeba was broken. He was at Tel-el-kebir; saw Burnaby go forth to meet a coveted death at Abu-klea, and was present at Abu-Kru when Sir Herbert Stewart received his death-wound. He was at Rorke's Drift, and appears with that heroic band in Miss Elizabeth Thompson's painting. Leaving the army, C. held for a time a commission in the mounted constabulary of Madras, and now he is a third class assistant tidewaiter in the Imperial Maritime Customs of China, with a salary as low as his spirits are high.
Chungking is an open port, which is not an open port. By the treaty of Tientsin it is included in the clause which states that any foreign steamer going to it, a closed port, shall be confiscated. Yet by the Chefoo Convention, Chungking is to become an open port as soon as the first foreign steamer shall reach there. This reminds one of the conflicting instructions once issued by a certain government in reference to the building of a new gaol. The instructions were explicit:—
Clause I.—The new gaol shall be constructed out of the materials of the old.
Clause II.—The prisoners shall remain in the old gaol till the new gaol is constructed.
* * *
Opium Smoking
Morphia pills are sold in Chungking by the Chinese chemists to cure the opium habit. This profitable remedy was introduced by the foreign chemists of the coast ports and adopted by the Chinese. Its advantage is that it converts a desire for opium into a taste for morphia, a mode of treatment analogous to changing one's stimulant from colonial beer to methylated spirit. In 1893, 15,000 ounces of hydrochlorate of morphia were admitted into Shanghai alone.
* * *
I left the boat at Chungking and started on my land journey, going west 230 miles to Suifu. I had with me two coolies to carry my things, the one who received the higher pay having also to bring me my food, make my bed, and pay away my copper cash. They could not speak a single word of English. They were to be paid for the journey one 4s. 10d. and the other 5s. 7d. They were to be entitled to no perquisites, were to find themselves on the way, and take their chance of employment on the return journey. They were to lead me into Suifu on the seventh day out from Chungking. All that they undertook to do they did to my complete satisfaction.
On the morning of March 14th I set out from Chungking to cross 1600 miles over Western China to Burma. Men did not speak hopefully of my chance of getting through. There were the rains of June and July to be feared apart from other obstacles.
* * *
Six li out (two miles), beyond the gravemounds there is a small village where ponies are kept for hire. A kind friend came with me as far as the village to act as my interpreter, and here he engaged a pony for me. It was to carry me ten miles for fourpence. It was small, rat-like and wiry, and was steered by the "mafoo" using the tail like a tiller. Mounted then on this small beast, which carried me without wincing, I jogged along over the stone-flagged pathway, down hill and along valley, scaling and descending the long flights of steps which lead over the mountains. The bells of the pony jingled merrily; the day was fine and the sun shone behind the clouds. My two coolies sublet their contracts, and had their loads borne for a fraction of a farthing per mile by coolies returning empty-handed to Suifu.
* * *
I lived, of course, in the common Chinese inn, ate Chinese food, and was everywhere treated with courtesy and good nature; but at first I found it trying to be such an object of curiosity; to have to do all things in unsecluded publicity; to have to push my way through streets thronged by the curious to see the foreigner. My meals I ate in the presence of the street before gaping crowds. When they came too close I told them politely in English to keep back a little, and they did so if I illustrated my words by gesture. When I scratched my head and they saw the spurious pigtail, they smiled; when I flicked the dust off the table with my pigtail, they laughed hilariously.
* * *
Rice was my staple article of diet; eggs, fowls, and vegetables were also abundant and cheap; but I avoided pork which is the flesh universally eaten throughout China by all but the Mohammedans and vegetarians. In case of emergency I had a few tins of foreign stores with me. I made it a point never to drink water—I drank tea. No Chinaman ever drinks anything cold. Every half hour or hour he can reach an inn or teahouse where tea can be infused for him in a few minutes. The price of a bowl of tea with a pinch of tea-leaves, filled and refilled with hot water ad lib, is two cash—equal to the twentieth part of one penny. Pork has its weight largely added to by being injected with water, the point of the syringe being passed into a large vein; this is usually described as the Chinese method of "watering stock."
* * *
A young English girl at this mission, who has been more than a year in China, tells me that she has never felt the Lord so near her as she has since she came to China, nor ever realised so entirely His abundant goodness. Poor thing, it made me sad to talk to her. In England she lived in a bright and happy home with brothers and sisters, in a charming climate. She was always well and full of life and vigour, surrounded by all that can make life worth living. In China she is never well; she is almost forgetting what is the sensation of health; she is anæmic and apprehensive; she has nervous headaches and neuralgia; she can have no pleasure, no amusement whatever; her only relaxation is taking her temperature; her only diversion a prayer meeting. She is cooped up in a Chinese house in the unchanging society of a married couple—the only exercise she can permit herself is a prison-like walk along the top of the city at the back of the mission. Her lover, a refined English gentleman who is also in the mission, lives a week's journey away, in Chungking, a depressing fever-stricken city where the sun is never seen from November to June, and blazes with unendurable fierceness from July to October. In England he was full of strength and vigour, fond of boating and a good lawn-tennis player. In China he is always ill, anæmic, wasted, and dyspeptic, constantly subject to low forms of fever, and destitute of appetite. But more agonising than his bad health is the horrible reality of the unavailing sacrifice he is making—no converts but "outcasts subsidised to forsake their family altars;" no reward but the ultimate one which his noble self-devotion is laying up for himself in Heaven. No man with a healthy brain can discern "Blessing" in the work of these two missionaries, nor be blind to the fact that it is the reverse of worshipful to return effusive thanks to the great Almighty, "who yearns over the Chinese, His lost ones," for "vouchsafing the abundant mercies" of a harvest of six doubtful converts as the work of three missionaries for three years.
* * *
Shortly before leaving, the chairen or yamen-runner—the policeman, that is to say—sent by the Magistrate to shadow me to Tak-wan-hsien, called at the Mission to request that the interpreter would kindly remind the traveller, who did not speak Chinese, that it was customary to give wine-money to the chairen at the end of the journey. The request was reasonable. All the way from Chungking I had been accompanied by yamen-runners without knowing it. The chairen is sent partly for the protection of the traveller, but mainly for the protection of the Magistrate; for, should a traveller provided with a passport receive any injury, the Magistrate of the district would be liable to degradation. It was arranged, therefore, with the convert that, on our arrival in Tak-wan-hsien, I was to give the chairen, if satisfied with his services, 200 cash (five pence); but, if he said "gowshun! gowshun!" (a little more! a little more!) with sufficient persistence, I was to increase the reward gradually to sevenpence halfpenny. This was to be the limit; and the chairen, I was assured, would consider this a generous return for accompanying me 227 miles over one of the most mountainous roads in China.
* * *
At Sengki-ping it rained all through the night, and I had to sleep under my umbrella because of a solution in the continuity of the roof immediately above my pillow. And it rained all the day following; but my men, eager to earn their reward of one shilling, pushed on through the slush. It was hard work following the slippery path above the river. Few rivers in the world flow between more majestic banks than these, towering as they do a thousand feet above the water. Clad with thick mountain scrub, that has firm foothold, the mountains offer but a poor harvest to the peasant; yet even here high up on the precipitous sides of the cliffs, ledges that seem inaccessible are sown with wheat or peas, and, if the soil be deep enough, with the baneful poppy. As we plodded on through the mud and rain, we overtook a poor lad painfully limping along with the help of a stick. He was a bright lad, who unbound his leg and showed me a large swelling above the knee. He spoke to me, though I did not understand him, but with sturdy independence did not ask for alms, and when I had seen his leg he bound it up again and limped on. Meeting him a little later at an inn, where he was sitting at a table with nothing before him to eat, I gave him a handful of cash which I had put in my pocket for him. He thanked me by raising his clasped hands, and said something, I knew not what, as I hurried on. A little while afterwards I stopped to have my breakfast, when the boy passed. As soon as he saw me he fell down upon his knees and "kotow'd" to me, with every mark of the liveliest gratitude. I felt touched by the poor fellow's gratitude—he could not have been more than fifteen—and mean, to think that the benefaction, which in his eyes appeared so generous, was little more than one penny. There can be no doubt that I gained merit by this action, for this very afternoon as I was on the track a large stone the size of a shell from a 50-ton gun fell from the crag above me, struck the rock within two paces of me, and shot past into the river. A few feet nearer and it would have blotted out the life of one whom the profession could ill spare. We camped at Laowatan.
* * *
We, who live amid the advantages of Western civilisation, can hardly realise how enormous are the weights borne by those human beasts of burthen, our brothers in China. The common fast-travelling coolie of Szechuen contracts to carry eighty catties (107lbs.), forty miles a day over difficult country. But the weight-carrying coolie, travelling shorter distances, carries far heavier loads than that. There are porters, says Du Halde, who will carry 160 of our pounds, ten leagues a day. The coolies, engaged in carrying the compressed cakes of Szechuen tea into Thibet, travel over mountain passes 7000 feet above their starting place; yet there are those among them, says Von Richthofen, who carry 324 catties (432lbs.). A package of tea is called a "pao" and varies in weight from eleven to eighteen catties, yet Baber has often seen coolies carrying eighteen of the eighteen-catty pao (the "Yachou pao") and on one occasion twenty-two, in other words Baber has often seen coolies with more than 400lbs. on their backs. Under these enormous loads they travel from six to seven miles a day. The average load of the Thibetan tea-carrier is, says Gill, from 240lbs. to 264lbs. Gill constantly saw "little boys carrying 120lbs." Bundles of calico weigh fifty-five catties each (73-1/3lbs.), and three bundles are the average load. Salt is solid, hard, metallic, and of high specific gravity, yet I have seen men ambling along the road, under loads that a strong Englishman could with difficulty raise from the ground. The average load of salt, coal, copper, zinc, and tin is 200lbs. Gill met coolies carrying logs, 200lbs. in weight, ten miles a day; and 200lbs., the Consul in Chungking told me, is the average weight carried by the cloth-porters between Wanhsien and Chentu, the capital.
* * *
The selling of its female children into slavery is the chief sorrow of this famine-stricken district. During last year it is estimated, or rather, it is stated by the Chinese, that no less than three thousand children from this neighbourhood, chiefly female children and a few boys, were sold to dealers and carried like poultry in baskets to the capital. At ordinary times the price for girls is one tael (three shillings) for every year of their age, thus a girl of five costs fifteen shillings, of ten, thirty shillings, but in time of famine children, to speak brutally, become a drug in the market. Female children were now offering at from three shillings and fourpence to six shillings each. You could buy as many as you cared to, you might even obtain them for nothing if you would enter into an agreement with the father, which he had no means of enforcing, to take care of his child, and clothe and feed her, and rear her kindly. Starving mothers would come to the mission beseeching the foreign teachers to take their babies and save them from the fate that was otherwise inevitable.
Girls are bought in Chaotong up to the age of twenty, and there is always a ready market for those above the age of puberty; prices then vary according to the measure of the girl's beauty, an important feature being the smallness of her feet. They are sold in the capital for wives and yatows; they are rarely sold into prostitution. Two important factors in the demand for them are the large preponderance in the number of males at the capital, and the prevalence there of goitre or thick neck, a deformity which is absent from the district of Chaotong. Infanticide in a starving city like this is dreadfully common. "For the parents, seeing their children must be doomed to poverty, think it better at once to let the soul escape in search of a more happy asylum than to linger in one condemned to want and wretchedness." The infanticide is, however, exclusively confined to the destruction of female children, the sons being permitted to live in order to continue the ancestral sacrifices.
One mother I met, who was employed by the mission, told the missionary in ordinary conversation that she had suffocated in turn three of her female children within a few days of birth; and, when a fourth was born, so enraged was her husband to discover that it was also a girl that he seized it by the legs and struck it against the wall and killed it.
Dead children, and often living infants, are thrown out on the common among the gravemounds, and may be seen there any morning being gnawed by dogs. Mr. Tremberth of the Bible Christian Mission, leaving by the south gate early one morning, disturbed a dog eating a still living child that had been thrown over the wall during the night. Its little arm was crunched and stript of flesh, and it was whining inarticulately—it died almost immediately. A man came to see me, who for a long time used to heap up merit for himself in heaven by acting as a city scavenger. Early every morning he went round the city picking up dead dogs and dead cats in order to bury them decently—who could tell, perhaps the soul of his grandfather had found habitation in that cat? While he was doing this pious work, never a morning passed that he did not find a dead child, and usually three or four. The dead of the poor people are roughly buried near the surface and eaten by dogs.
* * *
As we went out of the west gate, I was shown the spot where a few days before a young woman, taken in adultery, was done to death in a cage amid a crowd of spectators, who witnessed her agony for three days. She had to stand on tiptoe in the cage, her head projecting through a hole in the roof, and here she had to remain until death by exhaustion or strangulation ensued, or till some kind friend, seeking to accumulate merit in heaven, passed into her mouth sufficient opium to poison her, and so end her struggles.
On the gate itself a man not so long ago was nailed with red-hot nails hammered through his wrists above the hands. In this way he was exposed in turn at each of the four gates of the city, so that every man, woman, and child could see his torture. He survived four days, having unsuccessfully attempted to shorten his pain by beating his head against the woodwork, an attempt which was frustrated by padding the woodwork. This man had murdered and robbed two travellers on the high road, and, as things are in China, his punishment was not too severe.
* * *
Coming from Szechuen, we frequently met porters carrying baskets of armadillos, leopard skins, leopard and tiger bones. The skins were for wear, but the armadillos and bones were being taken to Suifu to be converted into medicine. From the bones of leopards an admirable tonic may be distilled; while it is well known that the infusion prepared from tiger bones is the greatest of the tonics, conferring something of the courage, agility, and strength of the tiger upon its partaker.
Another excellent specific for courage is a preparation made from the gall bladder of a robber famous for his bravery, who has died at the hands of the executioner. The sale of such a gall bladder is one of the perquisites of a Chinese executioner.
* * *
Forty li from our sleeping place we came to the pretty town of Shachiaokai, on some undulating high ground well sheltered with trees. Justice had lately been here with her headsman and brought death to a gang of malefactors. Their heads, swinging in wooden cages, hung from the tower near the gateway. They could be seen by all persons passing along the road, and, with due consideration for the feelings of the bereaved relatives, they were hung near enough for the features to be recognised by their friends. Each head was in a cage of its own, and was suspended by the pigtail to the rim, so that it might not lie upside down but could by-and-by rattle in its box as dead men's bones should do. To each cage a white ticket was attached giving the name of the criminal and his confession of the offence for which he was executed. They were the heads of highway robbers who had murdered two travellers on the road near Chennan-chow, and it was this circumstance which accounted for the solicitude of the officials near Luho to prevent our being benighted in a district where such things were possible.
* * *
Bhamo is 1520 miles by land from Chungking; and it is an equal distance further from Chungking to Shanghai. The entire distance I traversed in exactly one hundred days, for I purposely waited till the hundredth day to complete it. And it surely speaks well of the sense of responsibility innate in the Chinese that, during all this time, I never had in my employ a Chinese coolie who did not fulfil, with something to spare, all that he undertook to do. I paid off my men in Bhamo. To Laotseng I gave 400 cash too many, and asked him for the change. At once with much readiness he ranged some cash on the table in the form of an abacus, and, setting down some hieroglyphics on a sheet of paper, he worked out a calculation, by which he proved that I owed him 400 cash, and, therefore, the accounts were now exactly balanced. For my own expenses I gave him 1175 cash in Tengyueh and 400 more in Bhamo, so that my entire personal expenses between two points nine days distant from each other were rather more than 3s. My entire journey from Shanghai to Bhamo cost less than £20 sterling, including my Chinese outfit. Had I travelled economically, I estimate that the journey need not have cost me more than £14. Had I carried more silver with me, I would still further have reduced the total cost of my tour. The gold I bought in Yunnan with my surplus silver, I sold in Burma for 20 per cent. profit, the rupees which I purchased in Tengyueh for 11d. were worth 13d. in Bhamo. For some curios which I purchased in the interior for £2 5s. I was offered when I reached civilisation £14. Without doubt the journey across China is the cheapest that can be done in all the world.
Friday, May 23, 2008
WIT AND WISDOM FROM ANTON CHEKHOV
Extracts from the: Note-Book of Anton Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov Translated by S. S. KOTELIANSKY and LEONARD WOOLF, 1921
ANTON CHEKHOV'S DIARY. 1897.
Between "there is a God" and "there is no God" lies a whole vast tract, which the really wise man crosses with great effort. A Russian knows one or other of these two extremes, and the middle tract between them does not interest him; and therefore he usually knows nothing, or very little.
The ease with which Jews change their religion is justified by many on the ground of indifference. But this is not a justification. One has to respect even one's indifference, and not change it for anything, since indifference in a decent man is also a religion.
February 19. Dinner at the "Continental" to commemorate the great reform [the abolition of the serfdom in 1861]. Tedious and incongruous. To dine, drink champagne, make a racket, and deliver speeches about national consciousness, the conscience of the people, freedom, and such things, while slaves in tail-coats are running round your tables, veritable serfs, and your coachmen wait outside in the street, in the bitter cold--that is lying to the Holy Ghost.
ANTON CHEKHOV'S NOTE-BOOKS (1892-1904)
Mankind has conceived history as a series of battles; hitherto it has considered fighting as the main thing in life.
* * * * *
Solomon made a great mistake when he asked for wisdom.
* * * * *
Ordinary hypocrites pretend to be doves; political and literary hypocrites pretend to be eagles. But don't be disconcerted by their aquiline appearance. They are not eagles, but rats or dogs.
* * * * *
Those who are more stupid and more dirty than we are called the people. The administration classifies the population into taxpayers and non-taxpayers. But neither classification will do; we are all the people and all the best we are doing is the people's work.
* * * * *
If the Prince of Monaco has a roulette table, surely convicts may play at cards.
* * * * *
Why did Hamlet trouble about ghosts after death, when life itself is haunted by ghosts so much more terrible?
* * * * *
A nice man would feel ashamed even before a dog....
* * * * *
He had nothing in his soul except recollections of his schooldays.
* * * * *
The French say: "Laid comme un chenille"--as ugly as a caterpillar.
* * * * *
People are bachelors or old maids because they rouse no interest, not even a physical one.
* * * * *
There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.
* * * * *
The dog walked in the street and was ashamed of its crooked legs.
* * * * *
The difference between man and woman: a woman, as she grows old gives herself up more and more to female affairs; a man, as he grows old, withdraws himself more and more from female affairs.
* * * * *
But perhaps the universe is suspended on the tooth of some monster.
* * * * *
How pleasant it is to respect people! When I see books, I am not concerned with how the authors loved or played cards; I see only their marvelous works.
* * * * *
To demand that the woman one loves should be pure is egotistical: to look for that in a woman which I have not got myself is not love, but worship, since one ought to love one's equals.
* * * * *
The so-called pure childlike joy of life is animal joy.
* * * * *
I cannot bear the crying of children, but when my child cries, I don't hear.
* * * * *
A man, who, to judge from his appearance, loves nothing but sausages and sauerkraut.
* * * * *
We judge human activities by their goal; that activity is great of which the goal is great.
* * * * *
Terrible poverty, desperate situation. The mother a widow, her daughter a very ugly girl. At last the mother takes courage and advises the daughter to go on the streets. She herself when young went on the streets without her husband's knowledge in order to get money for her dresses; she has some experience. She instructs her daughter. The latter goes out, walks all night; not a single man takes her; she is ugly. A couple of days later, three young rascals on the boulevard take her. She brought home a note which turned out to be a lottery ticket no longer valid.
* * * * *
His character is so undeveloped that one can hardly believe that he has been to the University.
* * * * *
And I dreamt that, as it were, what I considered reality was a dream, and the dream was reality.
* * * * *
I observed that after marriage people cease to be curious.
* * * * *
It usually takes as much time to feel happy as to wind up one's watch.
* * * * *
One should be mentally clear, morally pure, and physically tidy.
* * * * *
It was said of a certain lady that she had a cat's factory; her lover tortured the cats by treading on their tails.
* * * * *
A government clerk gave his son a thrashing because he had only obtained five marks in all his subjects at school. It seemed to him not good enough. When he was told that he was in the wrong, that five is the highest mark obtainable, he thrashed his son again--out of vexation with himself.
* * * * *
The hen sparrow believes that her cock sparrow is not chirping but singing beautifully.
* * * * *
There has been an increase not in the number of nervous diseases and nervous patients, but in the number of doctors able to study those diseases.
* * * * *
The more refined the more unhappy.
* * * * *
Life does not agree with philosophy: there is no happiness which is not idleness and only the useless is pleasurable.
* * * * *
The grandfather is given fish to eat, and if it does not poison him and he remains alive, then all the family eat it.
* * * * *
New literary forms always produce new forms of life and that is why they are so revolting to the conservative human mind.
* * * * *
People love talking of their diseases, although they are the most uninteresting things in their lives.
* * * * *
Women deprived of the company of men pine, men deprived of the company of women become stupid.
* * * * *
A student at a village theological school was learning Latin by heart. Every half-hour he runs down to the maids' room and, closing his eyes, feels and pinches them; they scream and giggle; he returns to his book again. He calls it "refreshing oneself."
* * * * *
Going to Paris with one's wife is like going to Tula[1] with one's samovar. [Footnote 1: Tula is a Russian city where samovars are manufactured.]
* * * * *
The young do not go in for literature, because the best of them work on steam engines, in factories, in industrial undertakings. All of them have now gone into industry, and industry is making enormous progress.
* * * * *
Families where the woman is bourgeoise easily breed adventurers, swindlers, and brutes without ideals.
* * * * *
A professor's opinion: not Shakespeare, but the commentaries on him are the thing.
* * * * *
Let the coming generation attain happiness; but they surely ought to ask themselves, for what did their ancestors live and for what did they suffer.
* * * * *
Love, friendship, respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something.
* * * * *
Viciousness is a bag with which man is born.
* * * * *
A lady looking like a fish standing on its head; her mouth like a slit, one longs to put a penny in it.
* * * * *
Russians abroad: the men love Russia passionately, but the women don't like her and soon forget her.
* * * * *
It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.
* * * * *
And she began to engage in prostitution, got used to sleeping on the bed, while her aunt, fallen into poverty, used to lie on the little carpet by her side and jumped up each time the bell rang; when they left, she would say mindingly, with a pathetic grimace; "Something for the chamber-maid." And they would tip her sixpence.
* * * * *
A man and woman marry because both of them don't know what to do with themselves.
* * * * *
The power and salvation of a people lie in its intellegentsia, in the intellectuals who think honestly, feel, and can work.
* * * * *
A man without a mustache is like a woman with a mustache.
* * * * *
A man who cannot win a woman by a kiss will not win her by a blow.
* * * * *
For one sensible person there are a thousand fools, and for one sensible word there are a thousand stupid ones; the thousand overwhelms the one, and that is why cities and villages progress so slowly. The majority, the mass, always remain stupid; it will always overwhelm; the sensible man should give up hope of educating and lifting it up to himself; he had better call in the assistance of material force, build railways, telegraphs, telephones--in that way he will conquer and help life forward.
* * * * *
Really decent people are only to be found amongst men who have definite, either conservative or radical, convictions; so-called moderate men are much inclined to rewards, commissions, orders, promotions.
* * * * *
One cannot resist evil, but one can resist good.
* * * * *
Why are the dogs of Constantinople so often described?
* * * * *
The maid, when she makes the bed, always puts the slippers under the bed close to the wall. The fat master, unable to bear it any longer, gives the maid notice. It turns out that the doctor told her to put the slippers as far as possible under the bed so as to cure the man of his obesity.
* * * * *
In order to act wisely it is not enough to be wise (Dostoevsky).
* * * * *
Z. goes to a doctor, who examines him and finds that he is suffering from heart disease. Z. abruptly changes his way of life, takes medicine, can only talk about his disease; the whole town knows that he has heart disease and all the doctors, whom he regularly consults, say that he has got heart disease. He does not marry, gives up amateur theatricals, does not drink, and when he walks does so slowly and hardly breathes. Eleven years later he has to go to Moscow and there he consults a specialist. The latter finds that his heart is perfectly sound. Z. is overjoyed, but he can no longer return to a normal life, for he has got accustomed to going to bed early and to walking slowly, and he is bored if he cannot speak of his disease. The only result is that he gets to hate doctors--that is all.
* * * * *
A woman is fascinated not by art, but by the noise made by those who have to do with art.
* * * * *
N., a dramatic critic, has a mistress X., an actress. Her benefit night. The play is rotten, the acting poor, but N. has to praise. He writes briefly: "The play and the leading actress had an enormous success. Particulars to-morrow." As he wrote the last two words, he gave a sigh of relief. Next day he goes to X.; she opens the door, allows him to kiss and embrace her, and in a cutting tone says: "Particulars to-morrow."
* * * * *
N. mortgages his estate with the Bank of the Nobility at 4 per cent, and then lends the money on mortgage at 12 per cent.
* * * * *
Z. got tired of having visitors, and he hired a French woman to live in his house as if she were his mistress. This shocked the ladies and he no longer had visitors.
* * * * *
Sleep is a marvelous mystery of Nature which renews all the powers of man, bodily and spiritual. (Bishop Porphyrius Usgensky, "The Book of My Life.")
* * * * *
Russia is a nobody's country!
* * * * *
N. marries. His mother and sister see a great many faults in his wife; they are distressed, and only after four or five years realize that she is just like themselves.
* * * * *
Faith is a spiritual faculty; animals have not got it; savages and uncivilized people have merely fear and doubt. Only highly developed natures can have faith.
* * * * *
Death is terrible, but still more terrible is the feeling that you might live for ever and never die.
* * * * *
The public really loves in art that which is banal and long familiar, that to which they have grown accustomed.
* * * * *
If you wish to become an optimist and understand life, stop believing what people say and write, observe and discover for yourself.
* * * * *
I detest: a playful Jew, a radical Ukrainian, and a drunken German.
* * * * *
The University brings out all abilities, including stupidity.
* * * * *
The most intolerable people are provincial celebrities.
* * * * *
Owing to our flightiness, because the majority of us are unable and unaccustomed to think or to look deeply into life's phenomena, nowhere else do people so often say: "How banal!" nowhere else do people regard so superficially, and often contemptuously other people's merits or serious questions. On the other hand nowhere else does the authority of a name weigh so heavily as with us Russians, who have been abased by centuries of slavery and fear freedom....
* * * * *
A Mussulman for the salvation of his soul digs a well. It would be a pleasant thing if each of us left a school, a well, or something like that, so that life should not pass away into eternity without leaving a trace behind it.
* * * * *
We are tired out by servility and hypocrisy.
* * * * *
The idle, so-called governing, classes cannot remain long without war. When there is no war they are bored, idleness fatigues and irritates them, they do not know what they live for; they bite one another, try to say unpleasant things to one another, if possible with impunity, and the best of them make the greatest efforts not to bore the others and themselves. But when war comes, it possesses all, takes hold of the imagination, and the common misfortune unites all.
* * * * *
An unfaithful wife is a large cold cutlet which one does not want to touch, because some one else has had it in his hands.
* * * * *
How delightful when on a bright frosty morning a new sleigh with a rug comes to the door.
* * * * *
A little girl with rapture about her aunt: "She is very beautiful, as beautiful as our dog!"
* * * * *
The best men leave the villages for the towns, and therefore the villages decline and will continue to decline.
* * * * *
One of two things: either sit in the carriage or get out of it.
* * * * *
Love. Either it is a remnant of something degenerating, something which once has been immense, or it is a particle of what will in the future develop into something immense; but in the present it is unsatisfying, it gives much less than one expects.
* * * * *
Alas, what is terrible is not the skeletons, but the fact that I am no longer terrified by them.
* * * * *
A storm at sea. Lawyers ought to regard it as a crime.
* * * * *
He died from fear of cholera.
* * * * *
If you wish to have little spare time, do nothing.
* * * * *
He did not eat, he partook of food.
* * * * *
"To harness slowly but drive rapidly is in the nature of this people," said Bismarck.
* * * * *
When an actor has money, he doesn't send letters but telegrams.
* * * * *
When children appear on the scene, then we justify all our weaknesses, our compromises, and our snobbery, by saying: "It's for the children's sake."
* * * * *
He has a rarefaction of the brain and his brains have leaked into his ears.
* * * * *
An actress, forty years old, ugly, ate a partridge for dinner, and I felt sorry for the partridge, for it occurred to me that in its life it had been more talented, more sensible, and more honest than that actress.
* * * * *
Better to perish from fools than to accept praises from them.
* * * * *
If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.
* * * * *
Although you may tell lies, people will believe you, if only you speak with authority.
* * * * *
Our self-esteem and conceit are European, but our culture and actions are Asiatic.
* * * * *
Every one has something to hide.
* * * * *
Man will only become better when you make him see what he is like.
* * * * *
Russia is an enormous plain across which wander mischievous men.
* * * * *
Man is what he believes.
* * * * *
There is nothing which history will not justify.
* * * * *
The horse is a useless and pernicious animal; a great deal of land has to be tilled for it, it accustoms man not to employ his own muscles, it is often an object of luxury; it makes man effeminate. For the future not a single horse.
* * * * *
Everything which the old cannot enjoy is forbidden or considered wrong.
* * * * *
What empty words these discussions about the rights of women! If a dog writes a work of talent, they will even accept the dog.
* * * * *
He looked down on the world from the height of his baseness.
* * * * *
The more stupid the peasant, the better does the horse understands him.
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