Newfoundland to Cochin China

What a mighty river this Yangtze is. The name signifies the Child of the Ocean, and the Chinese have various others for it, such as "The Father of Rivers," "The Girdle of China." "It is the richest river in the world—richest in navigable waters, in mighty cities, in industrious human beings, in affluent tributaries, in wide margins of cultivated lands of inexhaustible fertility. This vast expanse of turpid fresh water is saturated with the loam of fields 1500 miles away." The Yangtze rises in Central Asia, and drains an area of 600,000 square miles of Midland China.

We pass hundreds of junks, the quaintest ships afloat in the world, with their sides decorated with brilliant blue and red frescoes, and sails of bamboo matting; the all-seeing black and white eye is in the bow of the boat, for no Chinese junk would sail without this occult protection.

Lost to us are the beauties of the palm and flower-covered Bund, the pride of Shanghai (on this first occasion), for we land in a drenching rain, and seek shelter in a dirty jinrikisha lined with green and red oilskin, and drawn by a feeble coolie—and this began the first of our disadvantageous comparisons between China and Japan. By all means let everyone visit China first, with its dirty mud villages, devoid ever of picturesqueness, its swarming, grasping, sullen people, and leave Japan—dear, clean, little Japan, with its picturesque streets, and charming, willing little fairies to the last. From that moment of landing I took a repugnance to China, and the more I saw of it the more the dislike grew.

An hour after reaching Shanghai, we were told of a steamer leaving for Tientsin immediately—a cargo boat, it was true, but the captain was willing to take us. The last bale of goods was being lowered into the hold, the Blue Peter flying at her masthead; a hasty decision being necessary without more reflection, and, being most anxious to push on to Peking, we embarked on board.

The Chïng Ping is a Chinese collier of 500 tons, trading between the coast ports, and with a single cabin for a chance passenger. A glance was sufficient to show us the fate in store for us for the next few days, but it was then too late. As we scudded out into the Yellow Sea, in a storm of wind and rain we began to suffer. The horrors of that long night are yet like a bad dream. We heard bell after bell strike, and thought that dawn would never break, for the Chïng Ping rolled to desperation, shipping heavy seas, whilst the wind blew like a hurricane through the "alloway" under which was our cabin, blowing showers of spray in at the door, while on closing it we were suffocated. We were unable to move, for it was impossible to stand, and in total darkness, for the matches had early disappeared amid the chaos of articles on the floor, which we helplessly heard rolling about and bounding against the walls. Nor was this the worst; for the rain and spray leaked through the woodwork of the cabin, and soon our berths and clothes were saturated, and deadly sick, with no dry place in which to place our heads, we lay drenched through the weary hours of that dreadful night.

It was a sorry sight, a scene of wreckage and despair, that good Captain Crowlie looked in upon the next morning, when we begged to be put ashore anywhere, at any cost, rather than spend such another night on board. He was so kind to us, taking us up and establishing us in his own cabin on the hurricane deck, where we passed the remainder of the voyage.

For the past few days we had been crossing the stormy Gulf of Pechele, with the now grey, now purple, coast-line of the great province of Chihli to port. It is late on the fourth afternoon that we are on the bridge with the captain, all anxiety to know whether we shall cross the bar at the mouth of the Peiho to-night, for he fears that we are just two hours too late to catch the flood tide.

The entrance to the Peiho is most extraordinary; for there is no sign of land, no banks visible to indicate that it is a river, but only the bulbous buoy of the lighter opposite the bar, rising above the horizon, growing clearer every minute. It is determined to make a desperate effort, and everybody is on the alert; officers at their various posts, the engineer putting on all steam, the steering-gear connected to the upper bridge, whilst the leadsman, a quaint Chinese figure perched out on an overhanging gangway, is set to work. At each call the water gets shallower, and decreases at every throw from fifteen feet to thirteen feet down to nine, and then the flat bottom of the Chïng Ping ensconces itself comfortably on the bed of mud, and the fatal "Let go anchor" sounds from the bridge. We stay there for the night, a sudden silence falling on the ship in the silver moonlight, save for the convulsive sobbing of the engines, giving forth their last oppression of steam. Alas! we shall not sleep in Tientsin to-night.

At 2 o'clock in the morning the commotion, as we get under weigh, begins afresh, and no sleep is possible after that, for there is the frantic whirring of the steering-gear just outside the cabin, as the sharp commands from the bridge, make the wheel race from port to starboard. We stop opposite the Taku Custom House, and whistle ever louder and more angrily for the sleeping officer, who eventually comes reluctantly on board. And then in the moonlight we glide by the crumbling banks, past mud villages, silent as the grave, lying in deep shadows, until morning glimmers in the purple red of the sky, and we pay our morning orisons to the rising sun, in its glory, over the well-cultivated, intensely flat plains, and the cracked mud banks of the great Peiho.

The navigation of this river is the most wonderful series of nautical evolutions. The steamers are especially built with flat bottoms for the service, and must not draw more than ten feet of water. It is without exception the most exasperating bit of navigation, calling forth the anathemas alike of captain and passengers. There is first of all the bar, where at high water there is often only from ten to eleven feet. Here it is possible to wait for several days before there is enough water for a steamer to cross, and in most cases the cargo has to be taken out to lighten the ship on one side, and replaced on the other, or again sometimes it may be too rough for the lighters to come alongside. Then commence the windings, so sharp that steam is shut off, whilst the bows of the ship are across the stream, and the stern is all but on the bank, the dangers of going aground being considerably increased by the shallowness of the water. To give an idea of the serpentine course of the river—a steamer which we passed in a bend on the port side, two hundred yards further on will be to starboard. The effect produced by this is, that the large sails of the sampans are a succession of ships sailing inland, in contrary directions.

We pass the mud forts of Taku, where the great battle of 1860 took place, when the allied forces were on their march to Peking. The Chinese idea of fortifications, as a rule, consists largely of walls of mud with a hard battened surface, and these forts are intended for the protection of the Peiho, but really their best one rests in the bar at its mouth. There is the embankment yonder of China's only railway. It runs from Taku to Tientsin. Fancy a country of four million square miles, with a population of as many millions as there are days in the year, with but one single railway of a few miles! Yet such is the case; China is still in the shadow of the dark ages.

The morning mists gather into a thin vapour and roll upwards, showing miles of fields, cultivated like kitchen gardens, interspersed with mud villages, where the houses are made of wattles plastered over with the earth they stand on, with chimneys formed of a cone of mud, and paper windows. In wet weather and floods these houses often partially dissolve, or subside altogether. But then they are so easily rebuilt. Here the urchins come out and revel in the murky wash in our wake, whilst the sampan propellers push hurriedly off from the bank, lest we land them, as indeed we did one, high and dry after our swell had subsided. Hundreds of coolies are trudging along, with their bamboo poles slung across their shoulders, whilst others squatted on the ground occupied with that B.C., or ancient Eastern method of irrigation, the automatically worked water-wheel.

We now have the disagreeable excitement of going aground, a gentle bump on a flat bank, where we stick fast, and recall all the stories which we have been hearing, of steamers staying aground for a week or ten days. Meanwhile the screw churns away at the liquid mud, and a crowd collects on the causeway above, and yet we remain fast. It is after half an hour's manœuvring that we get off and proceed through the few more perilous bends still left, with a few more hair-breadth escapes. We see the tall chimneys, covering a large area, of the Arsenal, and then the Pagoda, with its white umbrellas, overlooking the fort and military exercise ground for the troops, and then we are nearing Tientsin. It is pleasant in the first view of Tientsin to be greeted by a familiar remembrance of England, in the towers of a miniature Windsor Castle, the Victoria Hall of the English Settlement, that tower above the dust-coloured hovels. It is in strange contrast to the two cages on the banks, fixed on the top of tall bamboo poles, where are seen the heads of two criminals. Doubtless they were executed on the spot where the crime was committed, as is the Chinese custom.

We anchor in the river, and amid a deafening roar, and the shoving, scraping and pushing of hundreds of filthy sampans, we land on the Bund of Tientsin, and are settling into the somewhat uninviting quarters of the Astor House, when Mr. Byron Brennan, H. M.'s Consul, kindly sends for us, and in an hour we are installed in luxury, and have washed away the unpleasant reminiscences of our journey across the Yellow Sea in a collier.

The English Consulate looks out over the Bund, but it is such a different Bund to the usual one of handsome houses and gardens touching the water's edge. This one is piled up with merchandise; great bales of goods, covered with matting, are stacked under the trees or strewn about the ground, and through the wide-opened windows come all day the shouts and cries of the strong-limbed coolies, as they lade and unlade the ships. A strange silence falls over the busy scene of the day, at night. But in another month or two the Bund will be a model of neatness, swept and clean, and all this bustling scene will be hushed under the spell of winter, for the Peiho freezes in the end of November or beginning of December. Merchants are now hurrying to send away the last of their merchandise, and residents are receiving their last supplies before the river is closed. During those winter months Tientsin is entirely cut off from the outer world, save for the mails which are brought overland. No one can enter or leave the town to go south, and business is at a standstill until spring breaks up the ice. This isolation comes suddenly, for we heard of a steamer that went aground below Tientsin, and in one night was frozen in by a coat of ice a foot thick. A British gunboat is anchored under the Consulate, sent up since the late riots at Wuhu, and it is a great comfort to the English residents to feel that she is to spend the winter here.

We passed a quiet forenoon with a regular feast of the Times and of home news. Then in the evening Mrs. Brennan took me for a walk round the European Concession, down Consulate Road, where the consulates of the various nations are situated, to the Gordon Hall and Victoria Gardens. Five years ago this was a mud-dried waste—strange contrast to these pretty zoological gardens, with its tennis courts, and well laid out paths, and Chinese band playing. The Hall is the centre of social life, where dances and public entertainments are held, and it has a capital Library and Reading-room. At the entrance are stands of guns, belonging to the Volunteer corps of foreign gentlemen, who are ready to come to arms should necessity arise.

Like so many other places of this kind, Tientsin has but one drive out into the country, and along this we go up on to the city wall. We stand on the high elevation of the deeply arched bridge, and look out on the flat swamps of mudland, on the surrounding marshy and unhealthy pools. It is mud in some shape or form whichever way you look, it is seen alike in houses, walls and roads, and it is certainly very like what I pictured China from reading books of travel.

The Europeans on their small spotty Chinese ponies, or driving in their cabriolet carriages, are returning from their evening exercise. Tientsin seems to be a pleasant place socially, particularly in the cold though bright winter, when business is slack on account of the frozen river, and the little community join together to amuse themselves with skating and sailing of ice-boats. And so soon as the first dust storm spoils the river ice, they enclose this pond we are passing, and make a covered skating rink.

My husband has just returned from a visit to the great Viceroy, Li Hung Chang, who sent soon after our arrival to say that he would be glad to see him. So at five o'clock he and Mr. Brennan started out in state-green palanquins, the official colour being green in distinction to the ordinary blue, with a numerous retinue and an outrider on a white horse to clear the way, and present the Chinese card, a single sheet of long pink paper. On arrival at the Viceregal Yâmen, exterior and surroundings of which were little in keeping with the high offices of state held by His Excellency, the chairs were carried into an inner courtyard, flanked by wooden shields, bearing all the titles of the Viceroy. The visitors were conducted to the small foreign reception rooms, where His Excellency immediately joined them.

Li Hung Chang is a tall handsome man of seventy, six feet four inches high, and was dressed in a grey plush robe. He is frequently styled the Bismarck of China, and is certainly the most prominent and influential statesman of this vast Chinese Empire. For many years Li, the Viceroy, has held his present post of Governor-General of the large Province of Chihli, and unites with it that of Grand Secretary, Guardian of the Heir Apparent, and what is most important of all to us, Commissioner for Trade, in which capacity all Foreign Affairs are referred to him from Peking. In the conversation, His Excellency placed great stress upon his sincere desire to develop closer trade relations with England, and took great interest in the details of the trade of the British Empire which C. gave him. The interview lasted about an hour, the Viceroy conducting his guests back to their chairs, and sending me his photograph.

There are two ways of reaching Peking. You may ride or drive in those terrible country carts the eighty miles, staying one or two nights in an indescribably dirty Chinese inn, or go, as we decided, in a house boat, 120 miles up the Peiho.

At two o'clock the next afternoon, we drove in jinrikishas for an hour through the heart of the native quarter. This is my first view of a real Chinese city, and my early impressions are comprised in the all-pervading, all-powerful, smothering filth and dirt, in the revolting smells and disgusting sights; my next, in the jostling of crowds of coolies wheeling enormous iron-bound bales on wheelbarrows, of carts drawn by teams of mules, donkeys or oxen, of equestrians, pedestrians, jinrikishas, and sedan chairs, crowded into a six-foot wide street, curtained with bamboo mats above, producing a bewildering pandemonium. Passing the particularly squalid corner where is situated the Yâmen, we see the twin towers of the Roman Catholic Cathedral. They stand there as a solemn reminder of the dangers which yet threaten the Settlement, and of the fanatical people they are surrounded by, for it was here in 1870 that there was that awful massacre of Roman Catholic nuns, followed by the pillage of the Convent and Cathedral.

On arrival at the bridge of boats, we find our house-boat, Chinese boy, provisions, luggage and crew of coolies safely on board, and after many objurations from the delayed passengers, a passage by the removal of one of the boats is made for us, and we begin our long journey up the Peiho.

This house-boat is very comprehensive on a small scale, for we have a sitting-room and bed-room and kitchen. There is a tiny promenade deck in the bows, then down two steps and you are in a room with a bench, a table and two stools, the door being formed of movable planks of wood. Through an elegant arabesque of woodwork, screened with paper, we can see the raised floor on which are spread our mattresses with red quilts. Behind a similar screen is the kitchen, a few square inches, under the shadow of the helm, where our clever "Boy," who is cook, valet and interpreter in one, turns out the most deliciously cooked and varied dishes, with a batterie de cuisine, consisting of a few tin saucepans and an iron brazier of charcoal. As for the crew, they sleep on deck anywhere, and keep their provisions in the hold. The flat-bottomed boat has an arched roof of matting laid on bamboo sticks. It is clean, for I only saw one black-beetle, but is only moderately air and water-tight. Our tiny domicile is dominated by an enormous sail which is hoisted up and down on running strings. We either tow or pole, or sail, according to the wind and stream.

The vast and varied river life is before us. The banks for some miles above Tientsin are lined with these ugly sampans, their tattered sails hanging in ribbons, their decks strewn with débris where the naked children disport themselves, and the women steer at the helm; for in these sampans generations are born, live, and die, and they are coated too with the dirt of many decades. There are fishermen on the bank where, projecting out of the little hut which he inhabits, is a net stretched wide on bamboo poles, baited with the white of egg spread on the meshes. He lowers it slowly up and down, and at each dip we see the little silver-scaled fish jumping about in the net. There are children dabbling in the mud, true mud-larks, and women washing their clothes. We espy a bridge over a tributary, with a single graceful arch, so curved as to be half an oval, and with some houses, a willow tree and pig-tailed Chinaman, calling to remembrance the willow-patterned plate of our childhood. We pass several covered Chinese gun-boats,—war-junks,—with their blue and white striped awnings, and a Maxim gun in the bows kept for the defence of the Peiho, and the patrolling of the river.

We get out into the country at length, between high mud banks, and by a continuous succession of villages, their brown dusty walls abutting on to the hard-trodden towing path, whilst around is that careful cultivation resembling a succession of kitchen gardens, with its plots of lettuces of enormous size, of cabbages, turnips and onions; and the vertical pole of the water tank is always amongst them. A place is hollowed out in the bank, where, from a cross plank, the bucket attached to the pole is pulled down to the water, when the weighted end bears the bucket up and the water is emptied into the channels that surround each plot. Morning and evening you see hundreds of these automatically-working figures, thus irrigating their fields. The population appear ill-disposed towards foreigners, they collect in the villages and on the sampans and point and jeer at me, for the Chinese keep their women at home, and are shocked at the way "Barbarians," as they call us, travel with their wives.

After punting for a little while, three of the coolies begin to tow, but it is tedious work, as our line has constantly to be undone or passed round the masts of other sampans. Indeed, all the way there are processions of these vessels crawling up the river heavily laden with cargoes of rice, salt, camels' hair, sheep's wool, and vegetables, with their four or six towers, whose brown figures are bent double against the line, patiently staggering along for mile after mile against the current. Our coolies are very willing and cheerful, springing ashore to begin that weary work of tacking against stream, and subsisting on scanty meals of rice, cabbage and maccaroni, which we watch them, at midday and sunset, tucking rapidly into their mouths with chop sticks. Sometimes they sing in chorus to encourage themselves, with a soft crooning chant.

As evening approaches, columns of smoke rise from the stern of the sampans, showing the preparation of the evening meal, and the mists gather low over the villages. We see the great high road to Peking, raised on a mud embankment, that now and again keeps company with the river; it is bordered here with an avenue of whispering willows, and against the orange sunset come such picturesque figures along it. Now a little lady, with her pantaloons reaching to her little feet, tippeting along as if she must fall at every step, a horseman on a shaggy white pony, running along without rising in the saddle, a big man overshadowing a tiny donkey, a jinrikisha, a country cart with oxen, or one of those ancient wooden cabriolets, all outlined in black relief against the yellow sky.

We go to sleep with the sound of the water gently gurgling against the bottom of the boat, the croaking of the frogs on the banks, whilst our patient coolies plod automatically along. They anchor for a few hours in the middle of the night opposite a large village, whence the regular muffled tom-tom of the watchman, a deep and solemn tone, is wafted across to us. At three in the morning there is a rushing sound as of wind and water, and to our great joy we find that we are sailing before a brisk wind.

The scenery of the Peiho is repelling in its ugliness, and wearisome from its extreme monotony. The country is absolutely flat, and there is nothing, now that the harvest is carried in, but a parched saline plain, of mud and yellow grass, extending for hundreds of miles all around.

The only hills are those of the graves—these unwieldy mounds of battened earth, that stand in rows along the bank, or are collected in a field—a family burial place, with mounds of varying sizes. The greater the man, the larger is the tumulus raised over him. Then there are other and more disagreeable ones, where the coffin has been temporarily earthed above ground, awaiting perhaps a favourable moment for burial, or sufficient funds to take the deceased back to the place of his birth; for this is the dearly cherished hope of every Chinaman, and often, when old age approaches, he returns to his native place to be ready to die there. An even more objectionable custom is that of putting coffins down in open fields, or along the roads. We saw one covered in red standing like this, just outside a village, and you find them in the same way all over China. There is a superstition that it is lucky to bury within sight of water or in a place which commands a view, and that is why we see such rows of graves for miles and miles by the river bank. To the Chinese their burial is the most important thing of life. They prepare their coffins and keep them in their houses for years beforehand, though their unwieldy size and solidity take up much ill-spared space, and the object of every woman of the poorest class is to save enough for her grave-clothes. It has been truly said that the whole face of China is burrowed under by these graves.

The turpid yellow waters of the Peiho swirl against our boat, particularly at the reaches, where the current is strongest. The harvest is over, the poppy fields are bare, and there are only a few tall straggly castor-oil plants along the banks. A few, very few coolies, in loose blue cotton garments, are at work, ploughing with ancient and rude ploughshares. The teams they use are delightfully mixed. You may often see an ox and horse, a donkey and a mule all pulling together. And the same useful mixture is seen in the carts that resemble old Roman chariots, crawling along the towing path, where a bull with a tandem donkey is a favourite team. These donkeys are beautiful animals; small, but with sleek grey, brown and black coats, with the well-marked neck rings, and line down the centre of the back. We meet solitary pedestrians trudging along with their heads down against the wind, and we wonder whence they came and whither they are going, for we are now only passing isolated villages at great distances. In some of the few we sail by, the mud walls surrounding the villages have a graceful openwork arabesque at the top, and in one, to the sound of much tom-tomming, a festival was progressing, at which all the inhabitants (as there were none to be seen) are evidently assisting.