H f \T A
il i i N r\
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA
Photo by n. Q. Panting, F.R.O.S. [Copyright.]
THE GREAT WALL ASCENDING A STEEP DECLIVITY NEAR THE NANKOW PASS. frontispiece]
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA
BY WILLIAM EDGAR GEIL
M.A., LL.D., F.R.G.S., F.R.A.S., M.R.A.S., F.A.G.S., ETC. ETC.
AUTHOR OF "A YANKEE ON THE YANGTZE," ETC. ETC.
WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS
LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1909
7 ID
PRINTED BY
HAZKLL, WATSON AND VINET, LD., IXJKDOK AND AYLMBOBY.
DISCOURS PRELIMINAIRE
THERE is a Great Wall of China. So much the geographies tell everybody ; but they do not make it clear whether it is built of china, or why it is, or how long it is. or how long it has been. There is developing a Panama Canal, and the journals are in ecstasy because a few billion cubic yards of earth are being moved. There was no steam machinery to build the Wall, yet General Grant estimated that it took as much work as would have built all our rail- roads, all our canals, and nearly all our cities. We have an ignorance about China almost as colossal as that land.
Our education consists, in part, of learning various languages, Thribbaty and Slapyak and other antique dialects which only introduce to literatures whose very dregs have long since been examined to the last ounce. Why not try Chinese for a change ? Then we might find out what we have long borrowed from the Central Kingdom, and what else it has to pass on to us. They are widening their curriculum : why should not we enlarge ours ?
Chin took a liberal view of education, and was anti-
vi DISCOURS PRELIMINAIRE
classic. He destroyed the old books, and so encouraged one of his generals to invent a new style of writing, which brought books within the reach of all, both to compose and to read. This was the Chin who built the Wall. He defended his country, he unified it, he reformed its education. He stands pre-eminent in the same class with Peter the Great, Alfred the Great, Bismarck. Only these men of heroic mould too often stunt originality in others, so that no successor arises to carry on their work. Chin was great enough to know himself great, to proclaim himself great : The Only First ! He was equal to at least two men, so began his allocutions " We." Nowadays every petty jour- nalist counts himself one, and his press another, so that they talk as We.
The Wall is the product of Chin. He built roads over his new domains, he put the scholars low and the farmers high. The land that produced one Chin may produce another. One built a Wall to keep the foreigner out ; another may stride over that Wall to put the foreigner in his proper place. Iran had a long turn at leading the world, Egypt another ; Europe has had several centuries as pace-maker, and begins to feel tired. Will America or China jostle to the front next ? The nation is astir and gaining momentum. Will it find a chauffeur able to grasp the wheel ?
THE GREAT WALL SEPARATES Two EPOCHS, Two LANDS, Two RACES
It separates tfie Age of Myth from the Age of Fact. While it is not true that everything in China
DISCOURS PRELIMINAIRE vii
before the Great Wall is prehistoric, yet its builder deliberately did his best to destroy the records of earlier ages, and so far succeeded that the piecing together of the relics is often a true Chinese puzzle.
But the blow dealt at literature brought a reaction, and scholars enshrined in multitudinous documents the doings of subsequent rulers, so that the clear light of history shines on every succeeding age. The Chinese know the course of events so accurately that they can afford to smile at the Western conceptions of their annals. Hear the " Relation of Pinto " : — " In one single prison of two leagues square, are kept 300,000 prisoners, appointed still for the repair of the Great Wall. . . . The king of Tartary sat down before Peking with 1,200,000 foot, 600,000 horse, 17,000 ships, and 80,000 rhinoceroses that carried the baggage for his army." The veracious Pinto got his information from the French, certainly not from the Chinese. Mendoza, too, has a fine idea of the size of Peking, asserting that a man mounted on a good horse riding from morn until night will have much ado to cross the city within the walls. Such fables might amuse the credulous Portuguese, but the Wall marks off the period of myth for the Chinese, and since its time abundant facts have been accessible to all.
The Wall separates Two Lands. To the cold North lie lands that may tempt the miner in search of gold, or the breeder who desires wide prairies for his mares to roam over. To the South are sunnier lands whose fertility encourages the agriculturist to delve in the rich soil and extract abundant crops.
viii DISCOURS PRELIMINAIRE
The Wall separates Two Races. To the South are the black-haired race, as they term themselves, but to us their outstanding mark is that they are Yellow. To the North may now be found the outward-flowing White race. The destinies of the world are committed to these two. The business of the globe will be transacted in the tongue of one or the other. But the religion of the world, the gift of neither, may yet be the heritage of both. Born in Asia, adopted in Europe, developed in America, Christianity is found by one who travels along the Great Wall a potent force in these regions. Here the Aboriginal code is effete, the Indian Buddhism is degenerate, but faith in Christ can nerve the frail to endurance and victory.
The Wall is the sign of separation : the Cross of union. The one is the greatest monument of human industry, the other of Divine love. The one, though obsolete, has a noble history ; the other has its noblest triumphs yet to come, though already it commemorates the greatest sacrifice of all ages.
Done at Doylestoum, Pennsylvania, United States of America, on the Seventh Day of the Qth Moon of the Best Year of the Chruttian Cycle, 1909.
CONTENTS
PAGE
DISCOURS PRELIMINAIRE . . T
CHAPTER
I. THE THRILLING PROSPECT
From the Golden Gate to the Yellow Sea— Chin, Van Tromp, Blake, Togo — Great Battles of Books and Brains — Progeny of the Black Art.
II. THE TRAGEDY OF CHIN WANG TAG .
Ever Open Harbour — The Isle of Chin now joined to the Mainland — The Cap of the West.
III. THE ONLY FIRST . . . A. . 11
A hrief Biography of the First Emperor of China — His wonderful Works — The Great Wall — Search for Root of Life — Invention of the Chinese Pen — Thirty-seven years' Reign — Death.
IV. FROM THE SEA TO THE EASTERN " Y ' 23
Chin's Design — Narrative of the First 300 miles of the Journey along the Great Wall— The Lily Pool — White Dandelion — Peace Project.
CHAI'TKK
CONTENTS
V. THE ANCIENT ARCHITECTURAL WAVE . 40
The Idea of the Great Wall, European, Babylonian, or Original ? — The Seven Wonders of the West — Survey of Chief Characteristics of the Epoch or the Great Wall.
VI. FROM THE "THIRTEEN "CHINA'S SORROW"
TOMBS " TO
The Ming Mausolea — The Western Tombs— Wutai Shan— Magic Mortar— Tablets on the Wall— The Picturesque Pass — Wan Li and Lung Ch/ing.
56
VII. THE DEFENCE OF THE GREAT WALL
Weapons of the Gods, etc.
79
VIII. THE LOESS OR RIVER LOOP ... 89
In Oldest China — Land of Dry Fog — The Journey from the Yellow River to the Yellow River — Legends — Fauna — Flora — Black Dog's Diary — The Line of the Least Natural Resistance.
IX. THE RISE OF CHIN . . 107
.Seven Great Chancellors— Ballad by Dr. W. A. P. Martin.
X. LETTERS FROM NINGHIAFU . . .121
Addressed to a Young Lady — No-door Life — Medicine Man — The Lone Lady of Ninghia.
XI. GENGHIS KHAN 135
The Red Raider — Passed inside the Great Wall, near Ninghia— Shed 23,000,000 gallons of human blood.
XII. THE DESERT LOOP
Mountain Mule Caravan — Famous Moon Legend — Dead Land — Great Irrigation Scheme — Important Tablet— List of Great Walls.
153
CONTENTS xi
CHAPTER PAGE
XIII. CHIN SHIH HUANG Ti . . . 170
First Universal Emperor — Historico-Economic Study of the Only First.
XIV. THE MOUND OF CHIN . . .184 XV. THE WHY OF THE WALL . . .y> 205
XVI. THE " 9 BY 3 " CITY . . . .219
Liangchowfu — Detour of the Great Wall — A Cavern of Gold.
XVII. YUNG Lo . ,; . . . . 227
Who " Moved the Urns of Empire "—The Grand Encyclopaedia.
XVIII. THE SOUTHERN LOOP .... 236
The White Elephant— Golden Tahle.
XIX. CHINA BEFORE THE GREAT WALL . 246
Yao, Shun, Yii — Lao Tzu, Confucius, Mencius — In- tellectual Activity — The " Confucian Religion."
XX. THE THREE CHINS . . ,t . . 255
Ancestral Home of the Chins — Black Dog.
XXI. MEDIEVAL CHINA , . . . 266
Since the Building of the Great Wall to the Present Dynasty.
XXII. THE TIBETAN LOOP OF THE GREAT
WALL 275
Fast Horse Caravan into Tibet — Discovery of Two Hundred Miles of Great Wall not on the Map — Sining and the "Hero of Sining " — Christian Missions.
xii CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
XXIII. THE CHIN TABLET 288
XXIV. THE PAN-HANDLE OF CHINA . . 298
Journey from Liangchow to Kanchow — Cashing a Draft in North- West Kansu.
XXV. THE PAN-HANDLE OF CHINA . . 308
Su, last Large City along the Great Wall — Legends.
XXVI. THE PAN-HANDLE OF CHINA . . 316
Western End of the Great Wall.
INDEX . 34a
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE GREAT WALL ASCENDING A STEEP DECLIVITY NEAR THE NANKOW
PASS .......... Frontispiece
•
FACING PAGB SKETCH-MAP OF THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA ..... 1
THE SOLITARY TABLET WEST OF KIAYUKWAN . . . . ' . ' 4
STONE TABLET FACING THE SEA AT THE EASTERN END OF THE GREAT
WALL • . ... 4
CHIN WANG TAG - . . -, .. 6
THE ZIGZAG WALL NORTH BY EAST OF PEKING ..... 10 THE DRAGON WALL 16
" THE FIRST GATE " IN THE GREAT WALL, WHICH IS ALSO THE SOUTH GATE
OF SHANHAIKWAN . . . ••*..». • • • .22
" THE LAST GATE " IN THE GREAT WALL, WHICH IS ALSO THE WEST GATE
OF KIAYUKWAN, IS 1,250 MILES FROM " THE FIRST GATE " ' /' *''''. 22
THE GREAT WALL, 4,000 FEET ABOVE THE SEA AND ABOUT THREE HUN- DRED MILES FROM THE GULF OF PICHIHLI . ..«.,* . 24
EAST OF MULE-HORSE PASS . . . . i rjfvv-^f ,r -J • 26
NEAR MULE-HORSE PASS, JUNE 1908 .... .'l"*:i "'* . 27
TEMPLE OF GODS THAT GUARD MULE-HORSE PASS . f^* ? ,!<a* ? 28
THE GODS THAT GUARD THE GREAT WALL AT THE MULE-HORSE PASS,
NORTH-EAST OF THE CAPITAL . . .... 30
TEMPLE DEDICATED TO THE GOD OF WAR AT THE MULE-HORSE PASS, IN
THE GREAT WALL 31
xiii
xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
NEAR LIENHWACHIH. LOOP BEHIND LOOP TO THE HORIZON . . 32
THE TOP OF A SECTION OF THE MOUNTAIN WALL AT THE MTJLE-HOBSE
PASS, SEALED WITH STONE 34
NOT FAB FROM THE EASTERN "y" 36
THE GREAT LIENHWACHIH PASS IN THE GREAT WALL NEAR THE
EASTERN "Y" 36
LIENHWACHIH 38
THE GREAT WALL AS SEEN AT THE NANKOW PASS, SHOWING THE PA-TA-
I.INI; GATE 40
LIENHWACHIH .42
ON LOFTY MOUNTAIN NEAR LIENHWACHIH 44
NEAR LIENHWACHIH . . 46
THE FORTIFICATIONS OF THE GREAT WALL AT THE ROCKY GORGE OF
TAOKWAN K'OW AS IT APPEARED IN JUNE. PERFECTLY PRESERVED 50
NORTH-EAST OF THE "THIRTEEN TOMBS," SHOWING DOUBLE PARAPETS
FOR REVERSIBLE DEFENCE 54
THE CELEBRATED " LANGUAGE ARCH " OR HEXAGONAL GATEWAY, AT
THE NANKOW PASS, SOME 22 LI FROM THE RAILWAY STATION . . 56
THE MOUNDS OF LUNG CHING 58
THE TOMB OF LUNG CHING 60
THE ARMOURY TOWER GUARDING THE ROCKY PASS AT PEYSHIH K*OW 64
ARSENAL TOWER AT PEYSHIH K'OW, 60 LI FROM FUTU YEH, CONTAINING
TWO INTERESTING TABLETS . . . 66
FUTU YEH PASS . • „ „•„ ..y« ..'.». „ • V* * * ' * 66
8HWEI KWAN K'OW „ ^.{ ^ r>»v/>*% »t * ».- • • • 68
CH'ACHIEN K'OW .•'*'', 70
A SUPERB VIEW OF THE GREAT WALL ERECTED BY THE EMPEROR WAK LI
AT CH'ACHIEN K'OW . . . . . . . . .74
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xv
FACIKO PAGE THE VILLAGE OF CH'ACHIEN K'OW AS SEEN FBOM A LOFTY TOWER ON
THE GREAT WALL 78-
ONE OF THE BEAUTIFUL TOWERS AT COPPER GREEN PASS ... 80 " THE BAD MARKSMAN BLAMES THE DRILL-GROUND " . . . .82
8HWEI K'OW IN NOVEMBER ......... 84
IN THE LOESS COUNTRY, SHOWING A NEW BRIDGE CONSTRUCTED AFTER
AN ANCIENT DESIGN OF TIED LOESS . 'V '' .' A . ' .' . 88
OX TAIL, RABBIT FACE p. 8&
LOFTY HWANG-HO LU PASS 92
A SUPERB VIEW OF THE GREAT WALL ASCENDING FROM THB LOFTY HWANG- HO LU PASS 94
THE JERBOA (KANGAROO RAT) 96
THE DESERT HAMSTER 9$
BLACK DOG AND THE GIRL-FACED QUIN . . . . . .100
DR. WILLIAM EDGAR GEIL'S CARAVAN BETWEEN SUCHOW AND KIAYUKWAN lOfr
GRANARY AND SCHOOL IN SIAOCHAO THE CHRISTIAN CITY . . . 102.
THE ONLY GATE IN THE CHRISTIAN CITY 102.
IN THE ORDOS COUNTRY NEAR THE HWAMACHI, IN OLDEST CHINA . . 104
THE RUINS OF THE GREAT WALL AT SHICHING, 20 LI FBOM YING PIEU, IN
THE ORDOS COUNTRY. A HOUSE BUILT INTO THE WALL ' *~ '"". 106-
WEST OF SHICHING T8I, IN THE ORDOS COUNTRY . ' 7<r«KT*y J 1 ^^
THE DRAGON WALL, WEST OF THE EASTERN "Y" . '"*** '' iJtl . 10ft
TWO MEMORIAL ARCHES NEAR SIANFU **"•*'. 110
THE CLUB HOUSE AND STOCK EXCHANGE IN SIANFU, WHEBE THE EX- CHANGE OF SILVER IS FIXED EVERY DAY . . . . .112
THE SOUTH PAGODA OF NINGHIA : CITY OF THE QUIET SUMMER . . 124 " WHO SAVES ANOTHER'S LIFE ADDS TEN YEARS TO HIS OWN " . .136-
xvi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE TWO VIEWS Or THE SAME TOWER AT SHICH1NO TSI, PROVINCE OF KANSU 140
BALD-HEADED NATION p. 152
" JOHN OWADEY, ESQ." (CHANG KUEI-TI.) 154
"JOHN OWADEY, ESQ." 154
GATE IN THE GREAT WALL AT KALGAK 158
LO MA GATE, A FAMOUS OPENING IN THE GREAT WALL . . .166
HISTORICAL BRIDGE NEAR HSIEN YANG, 10 LI FROM THE ANCIENT
CAPITAL OF CHINA 172
FENQ-HUAN-TAI IN HSIEN YANG, ONE OF THE OLDEST BUILDINGS IN THE
CITY 174
NINE-HEADED SNAKE . . . p. 183
THE MOUND OF CHINA 184
THE MOUND OF CHINA 188
A TOWER OF THE OLD NORTH WALL, TSUHAI YEH . . . .198
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA : SHOWING MARVELLOUS CONTORTIONS . 206
TOWER NO. 41 : CHA TYU AT TUSHAN CHENG 208
MR. L. NEWTON HAYES . . 218
ONE SHOULDER, THREE-EYES NATION p. 218
ONE OF THE TWO LABGE PAGODAS OF LIANGCHOW, KANSU . . 220 " THE FARTHEST WEST " FOREIGN HOME IN NORTH-WEST CHINA . . 224 THE " WHITE BONES " PAGODA t T - . 0T • • • • 226 THE MAGIC METEOR . . . 232
A LION . . ,j%vw ,".' • /.•! - • • • • P- 235
AN EVANGELIST OF THE CHINA INLAND MISSION WHO LABOURS NEAR
THE GREAT WAJLL . ..«.«• = . . > . • • • - 236
IRRIGATION WHEELS IN THE YELLOW RIVER 236
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xvii
FACING PAGE
MOOEE, THE GREAT DETECTIVE . 240
SHWEIKWAN K'OW . . . 246
SECTION OF GREAT WALL TOWER . . . . * . . . . 252
ARSENAL TOWER AT THE CHIANG KU LING PASS 252
DOUBLE-PIG p. 254
ADAM, BY A CHINESE ARTIST . .* . . . . . . . 258
THE VERY BEAUTIFUL BRIDGE OP CHIN CHOW. ANCESTRAL HOME OF
THE CHINS . . . . i ' • . . . . . . 260
THE CHINESE GEORGE WASHINGTON WITH HIS HATCHET . . . 264
THE "DOUBLE-DOUBLE" . . .».',* jfi . . . p. 265
ROUGH SKETCH MAP, BY HENRY FRENCH RIDLEY, OF THE REDISCOVERED
TIBETAN LOOP OF THE GREAT WALL 275
THE EIGHT FAMOUS CHURTENS OF GUMBUM, ON THE BORDERS OF TIBET.
ALSO THE TEMPLE OF THE GOLDEN ROOF 276
TEMPLE WHERE THE GREAT WALL REACHES ITS LOFTIEST ALTITUDE . 278
FIRE STATION AND CATHEDRAL SPIRES 278
DR. W. E. GEIL ON PRAYER FLAG HILL, OVERLOOKING THE KOKO NOB
AND TIBET 280
THE TIBETAN ENCAMPMENT OF BLACK TENTS . . . . . * . 280
TWO VIEWS OF THE RUINS OF THE TIBETAN OR SINING LOOP OF THE
GREAT WALL 282
A PICTURESQUE FLOUR MTT.T. AT 8HWEIMO KWAN, KANSC . .- . 284
HENRY FRENCH RIDLEY, THE HERO OF SINING, IN TIBETAN COSTUME . 286
WILLOW TREE OUTSIDE SINING . 288
"SINING HOLDS GREAT BUDDHA'S TEMPLE" . 290
THE FAMOUS I SHAN TABLET IN THE FOREST OF MONUMENTS, SIANFU,
SHENSI, CHINA 294
b
xviii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
A PICTURESQUE PAILO AT YUNGCHANG H8IEN IN KANSU PROVINCE . . 300
A FORTIFIED FARM HOUSE HEAR TUMENTZE IN THE PROVINCE OJ KANSU 300
A TIBETAN PRINCE 304
TWO PROMINENT BANKERS OF NORTH-WEST CHLNA .... 306
EAST GATE OF THE SUBURB OF KIAYUKWAN, WESTERN END OF THE GREAT
WALL 316
THE BEAUTIFUL CITY OF KIAYUKWAN AS SEEN FROM THE SOUTH-WEST . 318
THE GOOD LUCK PAILO 318
PLAN OF KIAYUKWAN AND GREAT WALL 320
DR. GEIL WRITING " THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA " AT THE WESTERN
END, KIAYUKWAN ' 322
THE BIG WHITE NORTH RIVER, NORTH-WEST OF CHINA . . . 326
THE RUINS OF THE LAST TOWER IN THE GREAT WALL, MOUNTAINS OF
TIBET IN THE DISTANCE 326
THERE IS NOTHING DIFFICULT UNDER HEAVEN, IF MEN WILL ONLY DO IT
THE
GREAT WALL OF CHINA
CHAPTER I
THE THRILLING PROSPECT
A JOURNEY all along the Great Wall ! We had longed to make it, and now, almost feverishly eager, we had arrived at the City of the Golden Gate to find the great black ocean greyhound with her strong sinews relaxed, taking a good rest in one of the kennels off the San Francisco pier. The monstrous ship was coaling up for the long run, and there was only the suggestion of a quiver in the mighty muscles. But we knew that the powerful heart, now merely quivering, was purposely inactive for the nonce, soon it would begin to beat and pump life, energy, and speed into every part of her mighty organism and drive her huge bulk through the crested billows in sunshine and storm toward the one object of our intense desire, the Great Wall of China, and that we should be on board !
And when a few days after, in the midst of cheering and weeping, the stately steamer drew grandly out from the wharf, and that ceaseless heart-throb of the engines began, our thoughts ran ahead and outpaced even her wondrous speed ; their drift was just parallel to the thoughts of a man mightier than most men, an Emperor
2 THE THRILLING PROSPECT
of indomitable will and resistless push, who lived hundreds of years before this Transpacific muscle of navigation was invented — before Christ was born. We were actually going to see the monumental evidence of his masterly activity ! Not only to see it, but to walk on it ; explore it over hill, down dale, along the tortuous alignment from start to finish. Our unshaken determination was to do the work thoroughly, not as the superficial traveller who ate lunch on the structure and then took ship and wrote an account of the Great Wall on board for the delectation and enlightenment of an ignorant public, but so complete that the future historian of the Wall would find little to write about unless he pirated our notes. By dint of perseverance, and some hardship perhaps, we expected to make certain discoveries that would benefit not only our own people but indirectly the unconquerable Yellow Race, now fully awake and advancing by leaps and bounds toward rank materialism or toward Christianity, as our readers shall choose.
Many objects in China of decent antiquity carrying traditions of uncanny happenings are said by the Chinese people to clien cMng, or be haunted. The statement has never been made so far as we know, but it must be so a fortiori, that the very ancient Wall of China is also haunted in various places. The thought occurred to us that we might set in motion among the Chinese a new tradition : everything must have a start — even a tradi- tion about a wild Western man of prodigious height and bulksome weight who traversed the brick pile of Chin. Then we pictured to our mind the myth ripe with age as the chiliads advanced — a huge spectre one hundred feet high striding half a mile at a step along the Northern Frontier, to the consternation of the populace !
WHEN THERE IS A OAJBT AHEAD THEBE IS A TBACK BEHIND
Obversely, as a matter of fact, the Wall haunted us. Whether the ship cut the brine in mid-ocean or rested in the peaceful bosom of fair Hawaii, whether she plunged madly to be free from anchor in a less placid harbour or shook herself from moorings for a last long run through a stormy main to Yokohama, it made no difference — there was the 1,200 miles of Wall instinct with life always present in our brain. We could not rid ourselves of it. Thoughts of self, the Presidential election, the Balkan volcano muttering and smoking, or even the peaceful meadow brooks of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, were sternly debarred. We ate with the Wall, slept with the Wall, thought Wall. Its bricky length would twist itself into peculiar contortions, into indescribable shapes. We fancied an immense Arch from sea to desert, and under it the Great Events that have shaped and re-shaped this planet Earth. Changes that have transmuted the world like the changes in a panorama or that have graven the earth with in- eradicable marks. The Roman Empire at the acme of its pomp and power under the indomitable Julius just tottering to ebb and ruin, the beginnings of Britain and all the now powerful States of Europe, the great battles that are written in history, and hundreds more unwritten conflicts on the field when blood flowed like water in agonising contests for supremacy ; battles of books and brains, debacles of Empires, discoveries of Continents, of true science to be substituted for sorcery, astrology, alchemy, with the whole progeny of Black Art. And under the Arch, too, stood out prominently in bold relief the Cross of Christ.
Then suddenly, as if by magic, appeared the Wall in belted form, enclosing in a crowded area the graves
4 THE THRILLING PROSPECT
of the mighty in all lands crumbled to dust long ago, while the bricks of Chin Shih Huang still cohere, silent witnesses to a splendid logical fact that these dead inanimate things cannot outlive the minds and souls of the men who contrived them. Bricks and bones must crumble away like everything else sublunary, but the mental machine that brought to pass such things as the Great Wall can never moulder and rot.
Thus the Wall danced before us in ever- vary ing shapes, now rolling itself together like a scroll, now stretching itself out to its full length, again resolving itself into all sorts of geometrical figures, triangles, parallelograms, circles, until we could almost fancy the Wall to be some agile imp playing hide-and-seek in our imagination, instead of the great structure that some lunar inhabitants see like a black welt across the face of the earth.
Things that exist in idea must exist in re. As those shadowy ghosts leapt before us we realised that phantoms would develop into facts, and that an actual Wall would soon materialise. Then the ship reached Yokohama. We disembarked mechanically, but no sooner had we set foot on terra firma than the whole enterprise became real. Two tablets appeared to our mind, one at Shanhaikwan at the eastern end of the Wall, the other at Kiayiikwan, twelve hundred miles further on toward sunset. On the one was inscribed " Heaven [God] made the Sea and the Mountains " ; on the other, "The Martial Barrier of All under Heaven."
As the traveller steps ashore on trans-Mississippi ground at New Orleans, he sees at the station of the Southern Pacific Railway a large arch bearing this legend : " Sunset Route." After days of travel through desert and wood on the splendid overland mail train
he alights at Oakland, California, and beholds a similar arch with the same letters in semicircular form. These two arches terminate the parallel bars of steel which traverse the lands wherein dwell millions of the peaceful inhabitants of our beloved America. Here on the littoral of the Far East, which was to be our terminus a quo, was a tablet instead of an arch, terminating a mighty embankment instead of steel rails, conceived before the Christian Era by one who acknowledged High Heaven as the Creator of the unnavigated seas, the Builder of the massive rock piles that frown on little frail man on the frontiers of China I
After we had re-embarked, and as we passed through the seas where the Japanese Admiral Togo annihilated the Russian Baltic Fleet, our thoughts dwelt for the time on the doughty sailors of the Sun- rise, who preferred death to defeat, and who actually did to the Russians what Van Tromp threatened once to do to the British — sweep the fleet' from the sea with a besom of destruction.
These were all men of like passions with Chin Shih Huang — Blake, Van Tromp, Togo, Chin 1 — the English- man, Dutchman, Japanese, Chinese ! What quartet of men could shape history as they did ? And although Blake's dead ashes were afterwards cast scornfully into the water by certain contemptible objects of history, and Chin has come down through perverted tradition merely as a book-burner and a student undertaker, the fact, stripped of the gewgaws of prejudice and hate, still remains : Blake and Chin moulded natiors as a potter moulds clay.
" E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires."
6 THE THRILLING PROSPECT
But with the ideas of Chin how much of superstition and ignorance were mixed 1 He was groping in the dark. The flashlight of a full revelation had never been flung prodigally upon him, and it may have been his thought to put into material shape the spiritual idea of a dragon monster whose gigantic length would serve as a mascot and guardian to a reconstructed Empire 1 Or did he plan to build a Barrier hundreds of feet high, as the men of Babel did, to shut off the Southern life-giving influences from the fierce Tartars of the North ?
" We shall have the opportunity of prying into every available nook and crevice of this Wall for evidence along this line," thought we. Thus equipped with eager desire and ample facility, we leaped joyfully ashore as the ship touched the Far Eastern coast.
X ft'
CHAPTER II
THE TRAGEDY OF CHIN WANG TAG 1
No sooner were our feet on the rocks of Chin Wang Tao than our eyes were on the rugged cliff whence a Princess of Chin plunged into the Yellow Sea. She had lost her lover, and subtle sadness, knowing no consolation, flung the beautiful young princess from the bare rock preci- pice to the dragon of the deep.
Since then Nature has joined the island to the main- land, and now the crescent breakwaters extend ever- open arms to the mariners of all nations, even when the neighbour harbours of Taku, Tientsin, and Newchwang are closed by the hand of frost.
On this historic promontory, so intimately and so tragically associated with the Great Wall, which lay along the lofty mountain in full view, we felt grateful to " The Cap of the West " 2 for his choice rendering of the ancient legend which has evidently descended from the days of the Great Emperor, who changed the geo- graphy of the East of Asia, introduced the editorial " we," burned quantities of useless literature, buried alive numbers of useless scholars, discovered and colon- ised Japan, and erected a massive monument to his energetic administration.
1 Locally the name is spelled Chin Wang Tao.
J Certain Chinese literati speak of Dr. W. A. P. Martin as " The Cap of the West," signifying his pre-eminence in scholarship.
7
8 THE TRAGEDY OF CHIN WANG TAG
THE TYRANT OF CH'IN
Twixt the Mountains here and yon Eastern Sea
Is the pivot of China's fate. Whatever your haste ; stop, tether your steed,
And listen to what I relate.
'Neath this frowning wall lies a buried past As bright as the splendours of Greece ;
Six warring States their arms lay down And submit to the Yoke of Peace.
In this Isle is the last of his victims laid, And this Isle bears the tyrant's name;
And as long as the ages continue to roll, His glory 's confronted with shame.
A century later than Philip's son,
Who united the Asian West, Had the Tyrant of Ch'in, in the Farther East,
All his rival powers suppressed.
From the Adrian shore to the Persian Gulf,
Not wider the Grecian sway ; — A structure that broke in the builder's hand —
But China endures to this day.
" For the staves of a cask use an iron hoop,
For rebellious States a chain ; While this Wall stands firm, a compact mass,
Must my Empire aye remain.
'/lOmnnf-m: ovicv^m u hot-xm bun ,fu;qj;l Not merely to shield us from foemen without,
But to punish domestic foes, This Wall shall secure to millions of men
Long ages of calm repose."
WHEN THE STATE IS IN TUBMOIL, MEN THINK OF THE ABI.E OENEKAI,
: ..'.<> u '•'< '{ ..'•,..':'. I? c :*-''• Viiv;: Thus silently mused the Tyrant of Ch'in,
Nor was his proud boasting all vain, For the foes that he slew in building his Wall
Were more than in battle he'd slain.
A princely descendant of each fallen State
Was summoned to lead a corvee ; And the sun stood still their toil to prolong,
So the ancient minstrels say.
As diggers of earth and hewers of stone, Here were stationed ten thousand men,
Whose fathers in battle the Tyrant withstood, And their leader, a Prince of Yen.
To hardship and grief the young leader succumbed, His bones were entombed in the Wall,
No casket allowed him his ashes to shrine, No funeral pomp in his hall.
The Princess in vain for his body had sought,
And when the sad story she knew, She refused to return to her desolate home ;
Was ever devotion more true?
Not long well be parted, the Princess exclaimed,
My resting place near thee shall be! This said — from the top of yon beetling cliff
She threw herself into the sea.
'Twas the First Huangti that made China a State,
This Wall has his monument been, But those who the tomb of his victim behold,
All curse the grim Tyrant of Ch'in.
As a builder of bulwarks Chin stands alone in all history. He certainly did not resemble a former ruler,
10 THE TRAGEDY OF{ CHIN WANG TAG
of whom it was said, " Le roi Yen, de Siu, avait des tendons, mais il n'avait pas d'os." Chin1 had what Virgil calls " a double backbone." Our interest in him has reached an altitude that offers and warrants a bird's- eye view of " The Only First."
1 Cb/in v. Ts'in. . . . The romanisation of Chinese sounds is of coarse largely conventional, and no single system can claim absolute accuracy. According to the Wade orthography, representing the Pekingese or Northern Mandarin, the character is written " Cb/iu " ; in Southern Mandarin it should appear as te Ts'in." The inverted comma merely indicates an aspirate ? and is inserted to distinguish the word from others which, being unaspirated, are written "Chin." But most persons pronounce the English word " Chin " with an unconscious aspirate. Hence no apology is needed for styling the First Emperor "Chin" instead of "Chfiu."
Throughout this work the Wade system has been uniformly adopted except for place-names, which are transliterated according to the system in use in the Imperial Chinese Post Office and also followed in the China Inland Mission's excellent "Atlas of the Chinese Empire." Hence such seeming inconsistencies as Ch'in Shih Huang and Chinwang Tao or Tsfinwang Tao, where the first syllable in each stands for the same character.
p. 10]
THE ZIGZAG WALL NORTH BY EAST OF PEKING.
DO NO WRONG BY DAY AND YOU WILL FEAR NO DEMON KNOCKING AT YOUR DOOR BY NIGHT
CHAPTER III
THE ONLY FIRST
HIGH-POINTED nose, slit eyes, pigeon breast, wolf voice, tiger heart, stingy, cringing, graceless, is the Chinese historian's description of the mighty man who con- ceived the idea of the Great Wall of China. In fact, however, he was one of the greatest " hustlers " the world has ever known, despite the very uncompli- mentary remarks of the harsh historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien l translated literally above from the Imperial History of China.
It has been sagely remarked that this long structure, called by the Chinese scholars the Wan- lich'ang Ch'eng, or Wall of Ten Thousand Miles, 2 could be clearly defined by the mysterious Man-in-the- Moon, if such an individual exist and if he is endowed with the same faculties which we possess. This alone should make it a most distinguished object. Viewing the character and performances of Chin 3 at an interval of twenty-one hundred years, we observe impressions, depressions, and expressions more marked
1 Ssu-ma Ch'ien, called the Father of History, was born 145 B.C.
8 The Chinese mile or " li " is roughly the third of an English mile. If taken literally, this would work out at 3,000 miles or thereabouts, whereas the Great Wall is somewhat less ; " 10,000 " is often used in a general sense for a large number.
3 Chin or Cb/in is Northern Mandarin; Ts'iu is Southern.
11
12 THE ONLY FIRST
on the country and people of China by this Emperor than could possibly be made by the Great Wall on the lunar citizen at a distance an hundred times as great in miles as the number of years we look back over in the contemplation of Chin Shih Huang. It was a fine attempt of his to obliterate all previous records and start the world afresh. Chin had no Catling guns, men-of-war, powder or steam. But for soaring ambition ! Never was there a head or heart on this planet, before or since, that was possessed of a greater amount than this same Emperor, who lived two hundred years before Christ, when Hamilcar and Hannibal went into Spain and the Punic Wars broke out upon Europe. He has been called the Napoleon of China, but Bonaparte is not in the same class with this wicked, wonderful man. One of his first decrees, as recorded in history, ordained the abolition of the use of Imperial posthumous titles, declaring it his pleasure that " he should be known simply as Shih Huang Ti, the First Emperor : and thus all suc- cessive generations should be distinguished numerically as the second generation, the third generation, and thus onward to the ten thousandth."
After having done a great many things, among which may be mentioned the subjugation of a score or so of smaller States, the unification of the Empire, and the reported burial alive of his fond grandparents because they had treated him badly, he began to cast about for the means to accomplish the ends of his itching, restless, mounting ambition. When the per- formances mentioned above, in addition to a great many others, were finished, Chin had been on the throne about five-and-twenty years. l He was now
1 As King of Ch'in, but not as ruler of a united China. He only assumed the Imperial title in 221 B.C., after which he reigned twelve years.
13
AN IMAGE MAKEK NEVER WORSHIPS IDOLS
sole proprietor of a territory which the Chinese historian says extended from near the Equator to Korea on the south and north, and from the Eastern Sea to Shensi and Szechwan. Deducting a tract to allow for the statements of ancient history, it may still be said, with more or less degree of accuracy, that Chin owned land as wide in extent as England, France, and Germany with others thrown in and put together.
The obstructive mulishness of recent Chinese officialdom presents a strong contrast to the progres- sive policy of our hero, from which it may be seen that China in the past two thousand years has gone back in the path of progress, or, in other words, has backed the future and fronted the past. Chin, who possessed immense originality, perhaps went too far in his forward movement, but at any rate there is, and has been for the past two millenniums, an inborn antipathy, a natural resilience on the part of the Chinese from the liberalism of the masterful man from whom * China is named by Europeans, but not by themselves.
He changed the face of the whole country. His taste for public achievements impelled him to do prodigious works which can be most favourably com- pared with the grand Works of Egypt. "Many objects which were in bronze, and others in gold, were of such weight, that some of his successors deemed it a considerable task to remove them from one city to another." These statues and other monuments were destined to adorn the superb palace that had been built at his capital.
1 " That is, from the State of Ch'in," an eminent scholar subjoins ; we, however, retain the statement as it is made in the text.
But the Chinese of his day objected to such magnificence, when the books of antiquity recommended simph'city in all departments. They quoted multi- tudinous examples of princes who had behaved them- selves differently from the reckless, feckless Chin. " The monarch, in a fit of irritation, in order to destroy the remembrance of these ancient sovereigns who were quoted continually by the learned as a reproach to his pomp, resolved to burn all the books." And, as the reins of government were entirely in his hands, he decided to reward himself, and abolished the title of King, and used Emperor instead ; and, as his disregard and contempt of the past increased, he proclaimed him- self Shih Huang Ti, or Chin The Only First.1
When the antiquity-loving scholars protested against his wanton unconcern for the precious past, The Only First deliberately treated them with scant courtesy : he unceremoniously buried about five hundred of them alive, and carried out his riotous resolve to eliminate the cautious classics. The " useful " books which treated of fortune-telling, astrology, agriculture, and medicine were spared. If anybody was found whisper- ing or insinuating that his edition de luxe was un- canonical, the unlucky individual was promptly decapitated. Not only were the blind followers of ancient usage beheaded, but their faithful families were exterminated like pestiferous rats, and the officials of the districts were held responsible for not stamping out all vestiges of the pesky, mouldy, rusty, dusty past. So many scholars were buried that melons grew in winter on the spot above the bodies. " History,"
1 The way he hit on this appellation is instructive. Considering that he had united in himself the virtues of the H Hr San Huang or Three Primordial Sovereigns (2852-2596 B.C.) and the J£ ffi Wu T*> Five Emperors that followed, he joined their titles into the one of Huang Ti.
WE WED A WIFE FOB HEE VIRTUE, A CONCXTBINE FOB HEB LOOKS
thought The Only First, " shall begin with Me." His country was divided into thirty-six Prefectures, and the people were called " Black Heads " because they wore dark caps.1
But people in those good old days were super- stitious, and it is no small wonder that the Emperor himself began to observe portents. Chin saw, or imagined he saw, a foreigner sixty feet high with feet two yards long 1 So it occurred to the Sovereign to gather all his weapons of war that had been used to conquer his enemies, and cast them into twelve mighty images which would rival this giant of his active imagination in bigness. Probably they did, if we can believe the History, which states that each image weighed sixty tons ! They were put in his pet palace, and afterwards destroyed in the wars that followed the death of their maker.
Chin needed no Expositions to set business agog. At his order twelve hundred wealthy families moved into his capital. The demand for luxuries and necessaries having been created, it foUowed, as the night the day, that supply would be forthcoming. To these superstitious and commercial notions, Chin added the lust of Luxury. His life was not shrouded in dim magnificence. He built a wonderful palace which has been variously described. The following facts are taken fresh from the Imperial History. This palace was magnificent, and certain gorgeous annexes were attached at intervals, the whole now extending two hundred miles. In these he corralled all the handsome women that could be found in his domains, and the
1 Some authorities suggest that the Chinese have long been accustomed to style themselves " the black-headed race" from the colour of their hair.
16 THE ONLY FIRST
annexes were so numerous that it required thirty-six years for him to be " at home " in them all at the rate of one annex per diem. Stated mathematically, the number would be 13,140 — far in advance of Solomon, third King of Israel, whose heart was turned by his numerous wives. In consequence of his luxury, the Emperor grew more superstitious and more suspicious. Being told there was an island of the sea in which certain genii made their abode, he fitted out an expedi- tion to discover, if possible, this enchanted ground. Several hundred men and women were dispatched on the voyage of discovery and were never heard from again. The annals of Japan tell how they arrived safely, and settled down in their new home. / But his superstitions and suspicions were probably / the occasion for beginning the work of the Great Wall, / for having been informed of a prophecy which foretold / his destruction by the Huns, Chin mobilised an army of 300,000 men to work (and fight, if necessary) on this great structure. It was at this time that the ' Chinese pen or brush, which afterwards proved so powerful, was invented by a soldier. In this period of antiquity the principles of capillary attraction were not understood. But a knowledge of practical physics was necessary. The astute Chinese discovered that if the hair of the goat which formed the brush of the pen was soaked in lime water the ink would " run " and the pen would be rendered serviceable. Presage of the fountain pen ! Once put an ovum of idea into the hatchery of the human brain and something will come of it in the end, even if it be only a fountain pen, and even if it takes two thousand years !
Then Chin conceived another idea. And to carry it out employed 700,000 workmen. This idea was to erect a large hall that would seat 10,000 people, a very
THE DRAGON WALL.
When the foundations had been laid straight, a fall of snow suspended the building, and softened the lowest courses. A dragon coming to inspect leaned up against the softened brick, which yielded and took a cast of his graceful shape. The workmen took the hint and continued on the lines he preferred, p. 16]
fel 3E # & /h & IS W 17
IT IS EASY TO SEE THE KINO OP HADES, BUT NOT ONE OF HIS IMPS
extensive building for that age — forerunner of the modern Auditorium 1 But suspicion, that bane of the usurper, stirred him up again. He was warned against spending two successive nights in one place, so he lay low as to where he slept o' nights. Capital punish- ment was meted out to the informer who divulged this mighty secret. Under such abnormal conditions of life the monarch became vindictive — no one was spared ; for remonstrating against his action in state affairs, his eldest son was banished and died in exile. History states that an aerolite fell about this time, on which this legend was inscribed, " On the death of Chin the country will be divided." The Emperor suspected a trick, tried hard to find out the author of the legend, and failing this he decapitated every individual in the district in which the fateful stone had fallen, and reduced the aerolite itself to ashes. Chin The Only First then canonised the T'ai Shan or Sacred Mountain of China, as it is now known : to-day his image is found in one of the temples of this famous Mecca, and a plain shaft of granite 15 ft. high, 3 ft. wide and 2 ft. thick, called the " Letterless Mountain," is said to have been erected by this same prince who buried the scholars and burnt the books.
But far more important than the superstitious dedi- cation of a mountain was the introduction of the Seal ; shadow of the Great Seal of England and all other seals since ! The original was a curious representation of birds and fish. Combined and translated into the Chinese of to-day, these symbols are shou ming yu T'ien chi shou yung ch'ang. They mean in English, " I have received the Decree from Heaven and have already enjoyed the age of everlasting prosperity."
2
18 THE ONLY FIRST
The number and variety of his wars, reforms, diver- sions and luxuries, however, wore the Emperor out. One can imagine that he became considerably blam- before the thirty-seven years of his reign were finished. In the words of Sir Walter Scott, "the stage darkened before the curtain fell." During one of his excursions abroad throughout his dominion whilst in the present Province of Shantung, the Emperor sickened and died. His ministers and attendants were alarmed, for so powerful was his personality and so potent his influence that the State was literally upheld by the man. News of his death coming before matters could be arranged at the capital, some hundred miles away, would prove fatal to the monarchy. What was to be done ? There were no means at hand for embalming the body, even if the practice of this art was known ; they were many days' journey from the metropolis, and the dreadful secret of the Emperor's death must be kept. But they set out bravely for home. Ere long the presence of the dead Chin became manifest through the olfactories. Doubts were expressed by the people who witnessed the Imperial procession when the prince appeared only in absentia. To remove these suspicions the wily ministers bought a large quantity of fish overripe for consumption in these more finicky days — and while the smell was doubled, all doubts and fears on the part of the anxious public were dissipated and allayed. Thus the insanitary, fishy cortege moved along to the capital, diffusing the mixed unfragrant odour of insanctity but dispelling the dangerous doubts of the people. But even fish cannot keep a secret and the truth came out at last, but not until arrangements were perfected for Chin the Second. The eldest son, who was assisting in the erection of the Great Wall, had committed suicide on receipt of a lying letter purported to have been
AH*PS?2ii
A PARENT NEVER KNOWS HIS SON'S DEFECTS
written by his father and ordering him to dispose of himself (obedient son !), and so it fell out that the next dutiful offspring ascended the throne as Chin the Second, or Chin firh Shih. This promising youth began his imperial life by decapitating all his brothers and sisters — there were only twelve brothers and ten sisters ; but these twenty-two persons, whose only guilt was the fact of being, were ruthlessly butchered, along with all their numerous connections, by this blood- thirsty villain. His name would not be mentioned in this book at all were it not for several acts of his short reign which had reference to The Only First. In the first place he completed the palace of the late Emperor : then he built a splendid mausoleum for his deceased father, more from fear and superstition, we trow, than from any feeling of respect or veneration. Old Chinese tombs are supposed to consist of hollowed-out hills. The History states that Chin the Second prepared a tomb in a mountain and furnished it with all kinds of precious and valuable things ; that he made a lake of quicksilver with two quicksilver rivers flowing into it which would always appear pure and clear,1 and that in this excavation he immured thousands of the wives and concubines of the dead Emperor. He shut the door in the face of these wretched women and they starved to death in the tomb. On the principle that dead men tell no tales, he secretly devised an instrument — some infernal machine — that struck down and killed every workman engaged in constructing this veritable charnel- house. Those were the brave days of old ! The
1 The word translated " quicksilver " is rather obscure, and other scholars suggest that the true meaning was " water limpid as silver." Be that as it may, the modern legends have adopted the more uncanny version.
20 THE ONLY FIRST
dynasty of Chin The Only First, set up in so much blood, and maintained with such cruelty, did not long survive the death of its founder. Chin the Second was unable to hold the half civilised chieftains together, and after seven years the Empire fell into the hands of a soldier of fortune who founded the famous dynasty of Han. And here let me close this part of China's history, merely remarking that the Chinese nowadays call themselves the " sons of Han," and not the " sons of Chin."
Ever since the death of The Only First the Chinese scholars have despised his memory. This was because of his burning and killing characteristics ; but, in fact, this Emperor, although cruel and remorseless, has left his mark on these people. We cannot describe the Celestials in any language except their own, without using the name of Chin. His name since he lived has always been, and probably always will be, on the lip of all Western nations. Even Japan has invented a designation for China which savours of the " Great First." Japanese postage stamps, now used especially for letters to and from China, bear the magic words C/i na.1 The plain, wordless tablet on Mount T'ai may indicate to the Shantung peasant the contempt of Chin Shih Huang for letters ; but in burning the antiquated records of the past he also burnt his name ineradicably distinct on the records of history, and we cannot write China without first writing Chin.
The Prefectures of China still remain, not the same geographically, but in principle. This shows by long experience that even his enemies thought Chin not so far wrong in the division of the country for convenient administration.
For many, many years China has been pining for
' Or CMh na.
3£T^ trEB * W*
IN THE PROSPERITY AND DECAY OF THE STATE A COMMON MAN HAS HIS SHARE
another Chin. The want has not been openly expressed, and probably not even recognised ; but the fact remains, China has been, and is still, sick for more Shih Huang Ti. First the libraries and brains of the literati are stuffed full of useless literary rubbish — old, mouldy, unusable lumber, and fit only to make a bonfire of. The stuff is so dry that it would burn like tinder. Chin would be just the man to light this heap. We would not approve of his burying the scholars alive, head and all, but simply up to their necks, when they could be unearthed on the solemn promise to learn something real modern and to teach that in the mad race for the beautiful and elegant, China has not swept the field. On the whole I believe that, eliminating his cruelty and bloodthirstiness, another Chin might be the man of nerve and brain to start China afresh once more. The contemptuous con- descension of the Chinese towards Lord Macartney in 1792, the direct insult to Lord Amherst and the failure of his embassy, would have been forestalled if Chin had occupied the throne at the time. He would have tackled the opium question and settled the whole matter before the benevolent but giddy Commissioner Lin destroyed ten million dollars' worth of somebody else's opium, for which the Chinese afterwards had to pay. Sir Harry Parkes, whose statue now adorns the Bund in Shanghai, and whose personality has left a mark on British Far Eastern diplomacy, would have discovered in this Sovereign a broadminded if bloodthirsty man, who would have been eager and willing to seize the opportunity for making his country strong and wise by negotiating treaties that would have stopped the mouths of cannon ; and that would have prevented the disastrous wars that flung China to the ground and humbled her in the dust.
22 THE ONLY FIRST
Chin was an old chap way back in the centuries groping after light, but, like most reformers, he was ahead of his time, and no daring Chinese have followed his lead. His canals are undredged, and have been undredged for decades. Flood and famine came down on the millions of the people like a horrible night in consequence of this culpable neglect. His roads are almost obliterated, and the Chinese peasant toils wearily through the muck of the unworked paths on his way to the markets. China now is about as far away from Chin Shih Huang as it is possible to be. Astronomi- cally speaking, the country is in aphelion. Meanwhile the West has moved into the East and set up house- keeping. New forces that this ancient Emperor saw afar off, but which were dead blanks to the past genera- tions, are now operative in the Empire, and within the next few years we shall witness changes in China which the famous Emperor The Only First, with the " high pointed nose, slit eyes, pigeon breast, wolf voice, tiger heart," would have rejoiced to see in his own day.
" THE FIRST GATE " IN THE GREAT WALL, WHICH IS ALSO THE SOUTH GATE OF
SHANHAIKWAN.
" THE LAST GATE " IN THE GREAT WALL, WHICH IS ALSO THE WEST GATE OF
KIAYUKWAN, IS 1,250 MILES FROM " THE FIRST GATE." p. 22]
THE WORK BEING ADEQUATE, THE RESULT IS A MATTER OF COURSE
oj vino '.K! •/{ rrrir, -TIJI
FROM THE SEA TO THE EASTERN " Y "
CHIN'S original design evidently was to enclose his massive empire in a rampart which should assume the shape of a horseshoe with the heel-calks at the ocean shore. He did not plan to parallel the coast with a wall, doubtless considering the seaside an ample protection to a country vast and densely populated. And the water actually did the protecting work of a Wall until steam and covetousness brought powerful fleets out of the sunrise to threaten the wealthy coastal cities.
The Great Wall of the present, following for a thousand miles the ancient line, stretches its serpentine and civilising length from the tempestuous main of the Yellow Sea to the thirsty sands of the distant desert, and on still farther to the very verge of the mountains of Tibet, where the sun starts the Yellow River on its uncertain and devious journey towards the Eastern Ocean.
It begins, where we began our journey, on the 40th parallel of North Latitude, which is the line of the highest possible civilisation, and does not reach its western limit until more than one-twentieth of the circumference of the earth has been occupied. An enterprise so vast certainly deserves the attention of
23
an experienced traveller and of an intelligent public. Our aim is not only to describe the Wall and its environ- ment by sections, as we saw them, but also to answer en route such questions as we apprehend any intelligent traveller would ask as he proceeded to explore this wonder of the Far East. Hence we have already led the reader to do what the traveller did before starting, gain an outline knowledge of the powerful personality that conceived the idea and began the project which remains after many vicissitudes a colossal monument to the mammoth mind of The Only First.
We shall continue to invite the reader to share the explorer's observations of not only the different land- scapes, the different peoples, and the various aspects of the Wall, Boundary, Rampart, and Towers, but also the ancient and modern official and legendary histories.
After a journey of 1,000 li or 300 miles along the Wall, or on the Wall, a temple of hideous idols on the Horizontal Ridge, 4,000 ft. above the sea, gave an opportunity to sit and muse on the section explored, and to meditate how many moons must elapse before the journey should end at the western limit of the Great Barrier. A mere student of the map might wonder why the Russians did not utilise this ready- made permanent way to lay their steel rails upon, and so rejuvenate the Wall as the main railroad to the Pacific ; but a little experience of the eastern section shows that the levels were adapted for defence across, not for travel along.
No, the Wall is not for modern use ; it is an ancient fossil — the largest fossil on the planet. But fossils are useful and truthful. It is a dividing line between two civilisations, and between two eras. In space it cut off the herdsmen of the North from the tillers of the South, the predatory Abels of the desert from the peaceful
THE GREAT WALL 4,000 FEET ABOVE THE SEA AND ABOUT THREE HUNDRED MILES FROM THE GULF OF riCHIHLI.
Mark the large stones in the granite base, and the good workmanship throughout. P. 24]
mmVWmMm
WHAT CAN THE SWALLOW KNOW OF THK AIMS OP A WILD SWAN ?
Cains of the rivers. This reminds us that we only know the story from the Cain side, where the Chinese pose as innocent and needing defence ; it would be interesting to hear what the Abels thought of it — how the Mongols regarded the " White Wall," as they called it, a barrier to cut them off from the water for their flocks, and if they complained, a barrier whence would issue an army to cut them down, and slander them afterwards. The wolf first quarrels with the lamb, then eats him, then tells the world that the lamb was attacking him. The Wall divided the wolves from the lambs, but which was on which side is a question.
In time, the Wall divided the China of mist from the China of history. Before it we see dimly, and discern only two or three groups of feudal States ; after it we recognise plainly one civilised, centralised Empire. And yet a hoary old vendor of tobacco-pipes, ignorant that we could understand his remarks, muttered to his pal, " Why do these people come up here, where trees are many and people are few, when they might go to Peking and see something ? "
What now have we seen along the first stretch ? Begin on the coast. The town of Shanhaikwan attaches itself to the Great Wall two miles from the sea. It boasts a thousand families, on whom the M.E. and R.C. missionaries are making an impression. We find here various samples of Christian civilisation. The Railway ends a division at Shanhaikwan, and an hotel of some foreign inclinations offers refreshment to the travelling public, while troops of certain European Powers summer on the shore of the Yellow Sea, giving a belligerent appearance to an otherwise peaceful place. There is nothing of great interest except the Great
26 FROM THE SEA TO THE EASTERN "Y"
Wall. The R.R., which is paying a yearly dividend of 60 per cent., runs through the Wall at this point. The Imperial Government gave permission to build to the Wall, but not through the Wall, which has never been pierced for such a purpose. It would be considered a cruel sacrilege to pierce the Great Wall with an iron track.
But the story of how the road got through the Wall at Shanhaikwan is interesting. It came to us in this wise. Early one summer's day, after passing through a hole in the Wall, an agriculturist hove in sight. We politely saluted him with, " Lend us some light." It is to be understood that we were not intending to light a pipe ; it is simply using ordinary salutation if asking advice. The tawny rustic stopped, gave a polite grunt, after the manner of his clan, and illuminated his fine yellow face with a liberal and benevolent smile. " How came the hole in the Great Barrier where the Iron Cart passes through ? " we inquired. He gave ready reply, " The iron road did not make the opening ; it was there long ago." In this connection he then related the following love-story, which is the version - of the people :
Many, many years ago there was a prince who was employed by the Emperor in the construction of the Great Wall. For some reason or other this prince had incurred the bitter enmity of the Sovereign. One day the prince mysteriously disappeared, as many others did in those unhalcyon days. The story goes on to relate that this prince had married a beautiful woman, who loved him tenderly and devotedly. Hearing no news of him, she undertook the long voyage to the Wall in hopes of discovering some clue to her lost loved one. After passing through many perils and hardships, she arrived at her destination only to learn that her husband had perished, and that his body was entombed some-
GOD DOES NOT STABVE THE BLIND SPABBOW
where in the half-completed structure. Stricken with grief she stood weeping on the Wall, and in her desola- tion had given up all hope even of discovering her husband's remains and of bringing them back to the family burying-ground, where the magic influences would waft prosperity to the family. Just then a beautiful fairy, lithe and slender, lightly descended before her, and inquired of the disconsolate widow the cause of her tears. " Oh, help me to find my darling husband," replied the half-frightened but ex- pectant girl. " I am so miserable and unhappy, take pity on me, please." " Do as I bid you," replied the sprite. " Cut your hand for blood that will flow from the heart ; follow the crimson drops as you walk along." Eagerly seizing a sharp stone, the delicate girl gashed her pretty hand, and, as the blood fell, her footsteps followed until they brought her to the object of her desire, lying in an opening that had been miraculously made in the Wall. Through all the ages since then, the Wall in this spot has never been repaired ; and when rude, remorseless commercialism laid unholy hands on the Barrier of Chin to push through the parallel bars of steel for the Iron Horse, it was at this elfin pass where the beautiful girl found her dead lover that the Wall was crossed and the road made.
When the story was finished, we politely said to the localite, " We have delayed your chariot." He was walking.
Our own chariot moved off in the opposite direction to reach the very terminal of the Wall. The sunrise- end is below sea-level. The sixth Emperor of the present dynasty ordered that three temples should be built on an adjoining site. Geomancers were employed to decide upon the exact spot that would be favourable,
28 FROM THE SEA TO THE EASTERN "Y"
and the Emperor came in person to add his august sanction to the ceremony. A pavilion was erected where the last land-tower had stood. Such deference to the lucky places is innate in the Chinese, and coalesces even with modern improvements. When a drought occurred there, orders were given to suspend sacrifices till the rain-god relented ; but he invited the lightning-god to come with him, and their joint visit wrecked the telegraph line for 150 yards. But in front of the tablet stands to-day another sign of change — a White Lighthouse !
After descending to the sea-level, and following on top the tumbled granite blocks that, all awry, now mark where the massive masonry once extended into the waters ; after returning, ascending, and studying the solitary stone tablet which, beside the White Light- house, illumines the mind as it faces the Gulf of Chihli, we followed along on top of the Wall, past the modern Searchlight, in a remarkable S-curve, to the Pavilion of Literature, which is perched on the terre-plein of the Wall exactly at the corner where the Great Wall joins the city wall. Where one would expect to find cannon, rapid-fire guns, mortars, and terrible dynamite-throwers, as in the West, here on this most wonderful fortifica- tion of human history we find instead a White Light- house, a Searchlight, and a Temple to Literature. Is it possible that after all the Chinese are right, and that these are a better protection for a State than death- dealing machinery of the modern diabolical kind ?
There are modern schools within sight of this Pavilion of Literature ; they are crowded, this temple is empty 1 Modern full ; ancient vacant ! The son of a rich man goes about urging the people not to oppose the modern schools. This son of an eminent family performs this patriotic work without compensation. The spirit of Chin is abroad again !
p. 25
TEMPLE OF GODS THAT GUARD MOLE-HORSE PASS.
*g# *=»*# A± A
WITHOUT TASTING THE BITTEBEST WE NEVER REACH THE HIGHEST
From this Temple of Literature we could see towering above the city, and in the centre of it, the Drum and Bell Tower. This is unique, for most cities have a tower for each. The Drum and Bell are both used at the beginning of the First Watch only. In the oldest ages the Chinese had a copper pot with a small hole in the bottom to measure time ; the water came through drop by drop and fell upon sounding- metal.
Beside this Tower of Literature we stand and look away. Yonder on the utmost summit of the mountain, 3,000 ft. towards the stars, lay, seemingly half asleep and half awake, a huge monster, born in the age of mythology, and now just awakening out of a slumber of centuries. But our eyes were promptly seized by some mighty influence and dragged down from the light above to the dark restless blue below, and we thought of the Tragedies of the Great Wall. What are the Beacon Lights of History, this history we find in the Wall ? Is there a handwriting on the Wall ? The hand of Time is ever writing on the Wall, on every Wall ; most people cannot read it. But is there another handwriting on the Wall ? We shah1 watch for it as we travel along this Great Wall !
Hear one of the recent tragedies. We spent a night in the village of More-Fertilizer, and early the next morning pushed on the caravan towards Flowering- Obedience. But ere the sunset, gaunt smoke-smeared ruins of a foreign compound spoiled the lovely land- scape. Here had dwelt hapless innocents, guarded in a time of riot by four Chinese soldiers ; they nobly refused to betray their trust to a mob, were themselves seized, overpowered, their bodies ripped open, and their
30 FROM THE SEA TO THE EASTERN "Y"
brave hearts torn out to be offered in sacrifice. Heroes, all hail !
At Flowering - Obedience, an ancient Buddhist temple sheltered us for the night, redolent of confu- sion and dreadful death. The mind was irresistibly drawn to those bloody days when two hundred Christians refused to lie and live. As the shadows of night engloomed the landscape, the pure light of the stars shone down through the silence on the grassy graves of these modern martyrs. Not even in death had they been left at rest ; the violent rage of the rioters passed ordinary bounds. Hoping to deepen the agony of the living, and to involve even the dead in posthumous misery, they rifled the very graves of all Christian bones, that an endless unrest might beset those who had escaped their malice in this world.
Before sunrise, accompanied by a body of horse, we galloped away from the gloomy old house of idols. The keen frosty air quickened the sluggist native blood, and soon we were on our way north of Tsunhwachow. Here, in the quiet landscape silvered over with the morning frost, stood a Buddhist temple dedicated to the human virtue of Almsgiving. And here an eye-witness told of dreadful doings he had been helpless to avert.
A gentle girl had been torn from her humble home, with a lad of some sixteen years. They were haled to the temple of Almsgiving, and were subjected to two ordeals. First to abjure the foreign faith ; but no escape would be purchased by denying the I^ord who suffered for them. Guilty then — of goodness 1 But what sentence? The Chinese dearly loves a gamble, and now chance is invoked to whet the appetite. Before the hideous idol are placed two bundles of incense, one dry, one soaked in lye. She may choose at random, and on her choice hangs life or — what ? Should the
• .»* ff~ Ijfif — ;** » P- /|L <21
A* § Hi ^r* JSc W
WITHOUT SORROW KONE BECOME SAINTS
chosen bundle burn freely, freedom is the lot, but other- wise a speedy death is to be hoped for. Is there no clatter of hoof, no heroic lover as in the days of yore to brave all odds and cleave a path through the bloody rabble ? Is there no heart touched with the patient heroism to harangue the mob and assuage the madness ? Nay, She chooses, and most fittingly, for what Christian maiden would willingly select incense to burn at an idol shrine ! It smoulders, it dies 1 And so must she ! But now the cold cruelty of the mob pauses. Shall the death-stroke be given at once, and all the fiendish joy end at a blow ? Cannot the agony be long drawn out ? The lad divines the hellish torments, and who shall blame if nature shrinks ? But the maiden rises to nobler heights, and can find words of cheer that nerve him to endure all. Need we describe all ? Insult after insult, virgin modesty outraged, buffeted, wounded, till the frail form is swathed in cotton, soaked in oil, lashed to a stake, to exhale the unconquerable soul in a chariot of fire ! The days of heroism are to-day ; the Church is still ennobled by the blood of her martyrs.
Soon the Great Wall came into marvellous view ! Lines of massive masonry interspersed with towers con- structed during the haughtiest age of the Chinese realm were still winding along on the summits of mountains and ridges. Near the Mule-Horse gate in the Great Wall lies a quiet village, but we fail to inquire its name in our elation over this wonderful view of the only ruin in China.
The rising sun crowned the lofty towers with glory, then burnished the battlements on the precipitous walls with jasper, and finally plunged the whole temple and mud-sided huts in the Pass itself into a magic bath of an
32 FROM THE SEA TO THE EASTERN «Y"
indescribable copper colour 1 It was a picture to ravish the heart of a painter.
Shanhaikwan and Tsunhwa were easy to find, but the " Y " of the Wall was a troublesome matter. It was a long and difficult search. The explanation lies in two parts. The ascents were steep and hard to make ; the locals even did not know where the Wall actually branched off, to Kalgan, on the north-west and to Nankow on the south-west. Several times we were led astray by natives who affirmed they knew the exact spot where the Wall forked. In answer to their con- fidence, the climb was made, only to enjoy the superb scenery, and to be disappointed in the quest for the junction of the two Walls from the west to the one Great Wall toward the east. There was also a chart error, in the otherwise excellent map, which helped to lead us astray. The error consisted in the mis-spelling of a town name, and also in misplacing the " Y " by some miles, when considered by angles with certain known towns.
Our caravan of mountain mules had rested over- night at the Pass of " The Lily Pool," Lienhwa Chih. Since there was no inn at the hamlet, we were taken in by the " Rich Man " of the place with all the hospitality of a mountaineer. The whole population was permitted to come and look us over. As often as we have been subjected to that annoyance, we have never brought ourselves seriously to object to such a practice. Our arrival was, to that hamlet, what a circus, years ago, was to Doylestown, Pa. The size of my boots amazed the populace. At that we were not much surprised, for the size of them had often attracted my own attention !
The day was very young when we began the ascent of the mountains in further quest of the lost " Y." At 1,000 feet above the Lily Pool, which, itself, was far
THE YEAR FEABS THE FALL AND THE MOON ITS WANING TIME
above the sea-level, the scene enraptured all except the third muleteer. Continuing the ascent, we came upon large sections of the Great Wall in almost perfect repair, and in truly classic ensemble which would rival that of ancient Greece. Not only the Great Wall but a solid tower, standing on the very verge of a steep cliff, and several hundred feet distant from the Wall and outside, attracted our attention. The " Rich Man," acting as guide, advanced two explanations. First, that the solid solitary tower had been used by soldiers for their horses. The tower being solid, this theory was explosive. The other explanation was the true one. Due south of this point lay the " Thirteen Tombs," or the Imperial Ming Reservation. The geomancers had reckoned it imperative to build such a tower in this high place in order to suck in good influences and con- centrate the luck on the resting-place of the Mings. How much of the " Favourable " was converged by the . Tower on the Place of Tombs we could not learn.
The sunrise-end of the Great Wall is below the level of the sea. The Wall never again descends to the tide-line. Soon after leaving the wet shore it follows a course upward and northward, bearing off to the west. During the first thousand li it is never on a level. Irregular in direction and altitude, it has been regular only in purpose. Built for peace and repaired for war, the Great Barrier has never been disappointing. Even the scenery is satisfactory. For one whole day we passed through a chain of canyons of marvellous beauty often blending into the sublime. Eighty miles north of the overestimated city of Peking, capital of the vastest empire of mortals, are location, altitude, and grandeur fit for the Olympian gods I From the tide to
3
34 FROM THE SEA TO THE EASTERN "Y"
a height of nearly a mile this stupendous structure of sublimity keeps steadily on its westward course. After beholding China's wonder of the world, I would hesitate to cross the street to see Egypt's Pyramids, for wonder purposes !
But the Great Barrier passes through regions pleasing to the scientist. The botanist can stock his herbarium as he travels from the sea to the " Y " through seven belts of flowers, in addition to shrubs, plants, and trees. The ornithologist is in almost equal " clover " with six belts of birds. While the student of rocks and stones has awaiting him binary granites, sandstones, and conglomerates of variety and design to exhilarate a Hugh Miller. The anthropologist will find an essay in the " Imperial Tombs," where the Empress-Dowager will be buried. The Imperial reserve for burial purposes of the Reigning Family, known as the Eastern Tombs, is located against the Great Wall. Indeed, the Great Wall furnishes the enclosure with its protection on one side. A charming spot the geomancers marked out as " lucky " for the interment 1 of the rulers of the present dynasty. In the enclosure grow funereal pines, and death by strangulation is the penalty to any mortal who dares to cut or mar the trees. Here her late Majesty the Empress-Dowager, who fell dead in the presence of her eunuchs on the 22nd of this Chinese moon, will be buried in a gorgeous Grave Palace. Then for the biologist is ready a list of a score or more of wild creatures that run about, several awaiting the call of a good gun. For unscientific people who love beauty and do not want exact knowledge, let us just mention the peonies, roses, clematis, snow-in-the-mountains, white dandelions, with an armful of others in great
1 A spot which is considered lucky for the burial of a King would have been also lucky for his birth.
THE TOP OF A SECTION OF THE MOUNTAIN WALL AT THE MULE-HORSE PASS,
SEALED WITH STONE, p. 34]
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A TRUE MAN DOES NOT MIND HIS LOWLY BIBTH
profusion, growing amidst environment fit for the feet of cherubim ! Nature has done no better work any- where than along the Great Wall, nor is there any work of man superior to this to be seen amidst forest-clothed mountain, streams, and ravines.
Turning to Human Nature, much is to be desired. The people dwelling near the Great Wall are mostly poor. Our thousand li of travel was through a thousand li of poverty ; a thousand li of ignorance, for the natives knew as little of the history and condition of the only wonder of the Far East as an American University graduate ! a thousand li of goitre ! This disease we have seen in many mountain lands among different peoples, but never with the same proportion as among the people of the Great Wall.
The effort necessary to provide the material (stone, brick, and mortar), carry it and lay it, only impresses the traveller when he is attempting to scale the almost inaccessible portions of the Wall. And such portions occupy no small part of the whole. It was impregnable to the enemy because inaccessible. Often we were hauled up by ropes, and many of the ascents were accomplished by holding on to the mule's tail. Yet it averages twenty feet in height and is wide enough for three or six mules to haul up three or six weary travellers abreast.
As a sample of the mountain villages stowed away in the fastnesses of these heights along the Great Barrier may be mentioned " Thistle Ravine." Far from the " Barbarian Sea," as Euripides terms the " deep blue," there are two colours, the green of the mountains and the blue of the sky. These are, however, in almost
36 FROM THE SEA TO THE EASTERN "Y"
infinite shades, for this bulge of a lofty valley is en- tirely surrounded by mountain peaks of strange and picturesque form. The hamlet has six families. We asked a native how many families dwelt here, and he said, " Five or six." When we urged on him the ridiculousness of his not knowing the exact number in so small a place, and the village of his birth from which he had never wandered, he replied: " Six"-— laconic and correct.
Though there are not ten acres of flat land, every inch is under cultivation, and work extends well up the steep slopes where the tiller of the soil must brace himself when planting, to prevent sliding down. Along the Wall at regular intervals are the remains of garrison towns, but Thistle Ravine, 8,500 ft. above the ocean currents, was not one of these.
At twilight we arrived, after a hard climb, at the only open end of the only street. There being no inn to shelter us, the kindly mountaineers placed a new house at the disposal of the expedition. This was called "The House of the Lucky Star." A red cloth with a bit of charcoal dangled at the door to prevent evil spirits bothering us. When " The House of the Lucky Star " is finished a basket of cakes will be upset and a general scramble ensue, to ensure and augment the good luck. We were amused to find on the main timber of this very modest mansion a happy saying : " This is a Great Work." We were, they said, the first foreigners who ever burst into that quiet valley. Our glasses interested them, and they had never heard of false teeth. Vaccination was un- known. An old man seeing our automatic cordite rifles asked if they would shoot rabbits. We replied in the affirmative, and then told him the best way to catch a rabbit was to put salt on its tail. Behold, at
A BOY WITHOUT AMBITION IS BLUNT IRON WITHOUT STEEL
last we had found a place where the old joke was new 1 A whole family had smallpox in full blast. These are hardworking people, and on the Great Wall near by are slabs with inscriptions naming the head brickmen, blacksmiths and stonemasons who directed the repairs on the Great Barrier centuries ago. These highlanders are religious people. Often along the Wall have we seen towers and temples erected to the tutelary gods of the Northern Boundary, but here we found a vacant shrine. No incense dif- fuses fragrance in the godless, mud-made cairn of Chihli K'ow. Near this idol-less, picture-less worship house, we came upon a native with an ugly gash upon his head. We asked him : " How came the gash ? " He immediately replied : " That is an humiliating question." He had killed a badger and then entered into a quarrel with another hunter, with the result that the other chap struck first and fully. There is one bird here which the mountaineers do not kill, found nesting in the pear trees. One was pointed out by an old man. He said that years ago an Emperor, whose early-morning slumbers had been dis- turbed by the noise of this bird at his palace window, issued a decree forbidding all feathered creatures of this description to screech within 40 li of Peking. It is generally reported that these birds heard of the de- cree and obeyed the " Ruler of all under Heaven " until this day ! The Great Wall passes through a region which is now sparsely settled, but which was probably densely populated in ancient days. Indeed the Great Wall suggests that centuries ago in this part of the country, China supported a larger popu- lation than at the present.
38 FROM THE SEA TO THE EASTERN «Y"
Here at Thistle Ravine is one of the most entrancing views to be had in any land, the wonderful festooning of the Wall, exactly on the skyline from mountain peak to mountain peak, following an almost inaccessible ridge, seemingly hung there by the Maker of the Mountains. How it was constructed is a mystery. But there it is, towers and wall, and it has been there for centuries, and never idle for a moment. Defying the frost and the rain, the snow and the wind, or pro- tecting the mountaineers from a strong enemy, who might overwhelm their slender force of warriors and overrun their meagre farms. In more ancient times, helping the Imperial legions to prevent the capital of the Empire falling into robber hands. Last night we saw this marvellous sight by moonlight. It has no equal, except a moonlight night on the Isle of Patmos.
This ponderous mass of masonry upon which we are now looking lies, like some mythical monster, prone upon the shadowy mountain and the dreary plain, as if prostrate by the blow of a proportionate foe. It does not suggest impious pride or sinewy force, but enormous might. It was evidently inspired less by rage than by the desire to prevent rage in an age of rage. The fierce Mongols between this heavy line and the frozen North, elate with unerring bow, would gladly precipitate themselves on the plodding peasants of the Southland. It seems to us that the Wall was designed to preserve peace, and as such still stands, the most pro- nounced effort of ancient or modern times. The builder, even two thousand years ago, was ahead of the senseless militarism of Europe.
It was then, and is now, madness to trust individuals or nations to the chance of blind, impious luck ! To avoid by peaceful means a dreadful fate to friend or foe, to make harmless the noisy and heedless passions
QENEKALS AND MINISTEBS ABE NOT READY-BOBN BUT SELF-MADE
of wild and wicked men, to impede rage, prevent horror, perfume wrath with hesitation, is fit achieve- ment for gods and women ! These chaste and admir- able virtues are here found writ in stone, mostly in granite stone 1
A part, then, of this Great Wall is immortal. It can now boast a lengthy youth and an old age just begun. It has prevented many a " dreadful harvest of the sword," slaughter cumbrous and fresh : it has prevented many a shameful tribute to the unfathomed hatred of barbarian hordes ! Great Wall, all hail ! It remains true that it is better to lay stones than to throw them. A wall to protect the living is better than a ditch to cover the dead. Let immortal honours cluster and bestow themselves to praise the virtue that con- ceived and constructed the greatest Wall in the world, which has for ages stood for peace, and which has for ages diffused delay. Great Wall, all hail !
CHAPTER V
THE ANCIENT ARCHITECTURAL WAVE
MARVELLOUS is this stupendous work of man. To read of it trailing its bulk along the edge of an empire is to court incredulity : to behold it climbing the sides of ravines, cresting the watersheds of ranges, striding across ravines, is to conceive a mighty admiration for its architect ; to traverse it day after day for months is to grasp at the strenuous activity of its builders ; to hear that every third able-bodied man of the Empire was pressed into service to pile the massy stones, is to gain some idea of the limitless power of its designer ; to listen to the legends of the remorseless speed of its construction, so that tardy workmen were immured in the sections they lingered over, is to realise the hatred inspired and handed on for generations. What danger threatened, or was it but the spirit of that age, like ours, millenniums later?
Did this vast construction rise Phcenix-like from the relics of a former Barrier, or did it spring, like Minerva, full-orbed from the brain of one man ? Was it the magnifying of similar indigenous monuments, a mere developing of Chinese ideas, or was it inspired by foreign ideals, by tales of barbarian doings in the Western World, by a determination to show that when the Son of Heaven condescended to look upon the
40
A SUCCESSFUL MAN IS NOT EASY-GOING, AND AN EASY-GOING MAN IS NOT SUCCESSFUL
work of the foreign devils, he could by one exertion of his power utterly outshine all their puny efforts? Was this a contemptuous defiance of the Seven Wonders of the Holy Greeks, who by the year 276 had just heard of " Thina," as the writings of Erastothenes show?
Scarcely a hundred years prior to the erection of the Great Wall, the victorious phalanx of Alexander, the Flying Leopard whom Daniel had foreseen in his vision advancing eastward, ground under its heavy heel the beautiful "strong city Tyre," scattered the power of Persia, and finally advanced into India in search of costlier conquests. Alexander wisely avoided China ! His ten years of military activity were not merely brilliant manoeuvres and series of bloody victories. The motives of Alexander the Great Butcher must not be sought in martial movements ; his conquests were for the better purpose — for the spreading of Hellenism among the nations of the earth.
This Grecianising leaven aimed at physical and intellectual culture, beauty and liberty ; which is why the Greeks planted among the conquered peoples city-centres of this influence. Alexander himself built no less than seventy cities. Indeed he stretched a chain of cities from Media to Sparta, to disseminate the principles of the Greeks. And under the quiet, happy rule of the Ptolemys, of mummy fame, the Grecian towns near and within Egyptian borders fostered the new ideas, and many cities sprang up between the two mother metropolises, Alexandria and Antioch.
Like Palestine, Rome, that world-conquering empire which " made the Mediterranean a Roman
42 THE ANCIENT ARCHITECTURAL WAVE
lake," came under the influence of Grecian culture. But Grecian manners and customs brought with them luxury and nocturnal festivities, which, coupled with unwonted wantonness, sapped the life of the nation, and the fatal fall of the mighty but immoral Mistress of the World was hastened. At the time of the building of the Great Wall, commercialism and materialism had so completely undermined the morals of Rome that civil marriages and divorces were no longer uncommon. Cato the elder, foreseeing the eventual ruin, gave this advice to his son : " The Greek race is very vicious, and believe this, as the voice of an oracle, with its literature will spoil everything at Rome I " And he might have said everywhere else except in the Far East.
The temporary glory of Hellenism shone most resplendently from Alexandria in Egypt, which was founded 332 B.C. by Alexander near the Delta of the Nile, out of the village Rhakotis. Its growth was marvellous, and it soon ranked as the model metropolis, with regular streets, magnificent skyscrapers (four storeys high), palaces and parks, a city of 500,000 habitants. Here was the emporium of the Western World, where the celebrated fine linen, so closely woven that its texture had 150 threads to the inch, made by a secret process similar to that for which Sardis was famous, had an immense foreign sale.
But Alexandria gloried most in her scholarship. She was the intellectual centre. The Museum — the shrine where the Muses are to be worshipped — sheltered the various philosophic schools. There Aristarchus edited critical and grammatical works, and left com- mentaries which are the basis of our investigations. Here also was the largest library on earth, containing 500,000 volumes. Most of these were originals which
LIENHWACHIH.
P. 42]
WITH FIRE ENOUGH YOU CAN COOK ANYTHING, WITH MONEY ENOUGH YOU CAN DO ANYTHING
had been seized and for which copies had been given in return. The half-million volumes accumulated in this perfectly modern fashion were stored in the Temple of Serapis, the Serapeion.
The city boasted of splendidly equipped observatories, zoological and botanical gardens. Philadelphus in 250 B.C. raised a temple here in honour of his father, and placed therein statues of gold and ivory to be worshipped like gods. The feast which he gave at his accession to the throne cost over £100,000 ; the most splendid festival ever seen, one in which the proud city of Alexandria enjoyed the most pompous pageants and the greatest games, "for the spoils of whole provinces were sacrificed to the curiosity of a single day to raise the frivolous admiration of a stupid populace." Among the men of the world, few have possessed the wealth ascribed to King Philadelphus : it was estimated at £150,000,000.
During his reign he caused to be constructed, among other projects, the tomb to his sister Arsenoe, in which Dionachores, his architect, proposed to build a room of loadstone and place an iron statue of her to be suspended without support in the air between roof and floor.1 This plan, however, was not executed. The ancients kindly left this for moderns.
" I would entreat thy company, To see the wonders of the World.11
When the Great Wall of Chin was begun, the narrow Hellenic world was discussing and admiring seven stupendous structures, the Seven Wonders of
1 Did not the Moslem tradition of Mohammed's Coffin originate here ?
44 THE ANCIENT ARCHITECTURAL WAVE
antiquity. Among these the greatest are the Walls and Hanging Gardens of " the Gate of God," Babylon. The walls of this ancient capital, said old Herodotus, were 15 miles on the side, 87 ft. wide, and 350 ft. perpendicular, and built in fifteen days. On each side were great gates of solid bronze which gave easy entrance to the enclosure. Towers, picturesque and powerful, rose at regular intervals ten feet above the parapet. The arrangement of the streets, each fifteen miles long, was so uniform that every well-compacted gate was joined directly to one lying opposite : the city having magnificent highways in each direction.1
The Hanging Gardens, built either by or for a woman, stood within a triple mass of masonry in the ill-omened palace and formed a perfect square 400 ft. to the side. Terraces, one above the other, rose on vast arches, which were raised on other arches. A stair of stone gave ample access to these elevations, while the whole amazing garden was encircled by a wall 72 ft. thick.
Ponderous stones 16 x 4 ft. were laid over these strong and graceful arches, and upon them was spread a thick layer of reeds and bitumen. This again was covered with two rows of bricks cemented together by mortar made with slime from the Dead Sea. Lastly, a thick covering of lead prevented the percolation of moisture from the mould that had been spread upon it.
1 " Already we know more of the glories of Babylon than Herodotus has been able to tell us, and a correct idea of the more important part of the city can even now be obtained. From the plans drawn up, we must dismiss from our minds the picture of a four-square city with all the streets at right angles like those of the great cities of America, and gates to the number of a hundred giving access to the principal thoroughfares. Babylon was no larger, Delitzsch says, than Dresden or Munich, and the walls as traced by the explorers, though roughly rectangular, enclosed a very irregularly shaped tract." — T. G. Pinches, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. VVhich is correct, Herodotus or Pinches ?
^ Hffifl^ n®
HE WHO HAS NO MONEY CAN GET THE DEVIL TO TURN HIS MILL
These unequalled gardens were adorned with gorgeous flowers, fragrant shrubs, and trees large and diverse. A pump placed in the upper terrace formed the water- works.
Wonder No. 2 l. — Proud Kufu built the Great Pyramid at Gizeh as his tomb. Shifting every three months, a hundred thousand men were constantly employed for ten years in its construction, and £200,000 worth of onions and other vegetables were consumed by these same workmen.
Its original height was over 480 ft., the length of its base 764 ft. Pliny considered these pyramids as " Regum pecuniar otiosa ac stulta ostentatio," a foolish and idle display of the wealth of kings. This is the only " Wonder " remaining to this day.
Wonder No. 3. — Third among the wonders of the ancient world was the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, dated originally 772 B.C. Built in the name and at the expense of Asia Minor, its construction, according to Pliny, took over two centuries. " Of this temple great speech was made throughout the world."
It was of gigantic size, 425 ft. in length, 225 ft. in width. More than six score costly columns 60 ft. high, each dedicated by a king, supported the roof of this marvellous building. Master artists vied with each other to excel in adorning the edifice. On the night Alexander was born, one Herostratus set it on fire for no other purpose than to make himself known to posterity. It was therefore a rebuilt temple that attracted sightseers in the days of Chin.
Wonder No. 4. — Next in time is the statue of
1 In chronological order the great Pyramid of Kufu came long before the glory of " the Gate of God."
46 THE ANCIENT ARCHITECTURAL WAVE
Jupiter Olympus, the work of Phidias, who carved it at Elis in 435 B.C. It is novel in this, that it is the work of revenge. Forced to withdraw from Athens to escape the intrigues of his rivals, he began making a statue of Jupiter which should eclipse the statue of Minerva which he had carved for the Athenians. This he achieved. It was carved in gold and ivory, 60 ft. high and wrought so well that it was believed nothing could ever surpass it. At the base were graved these words, a seal of approbation from the god : " Phidias the Athenian made me."
Wonder No. 5. — The fifth wonder of the world was the work of a woman, the beautiful tomb of Mausolus, known as the Mausoleum. His widowed wife caused it to be erected in 354 B.C., at Halicarnassus in Caria. The four most famous sculptors of the time adorned the beautiful structure, each embellishing a side. It was oblong in shape, surrounded by six-and- thirty Ionic columns, crowned by a pyramid diminish- ing by 24 steps to the summit. A colossal marble quadriga crowned the top. The total height was 130 ft. The marble lions, the magnificent frieze, its gorgeous colour effect, caused the admiration of all beholders. And this was all. For Mrs. Mausolus placed her husband's sacred ashes in costly wine and drank the hideous mixture, desiring that her husband's body should be buried in her own body.
Wonder No. 6. — The watch-tower lighthouse at Pharos, completed in 283 B.C., in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus. It stood on the island of Pharos, named after a pilot buried there. Its marble tower rose to a height of 450 ft., and on its top a fire was kept burning which was visible at a distance of a hundred miles. This "Wonder" endured for 1,500 years. Sostratus, commissioned to build it for the price of
p. 46]
NEAR LIENHWACHIH.
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WIIERE NO MONEY IS SPENT, THERE NO GRACE IS GAINED
£160,000, carved his own name into the great pillar, neglecting to do honour to the king whose munificence was responsible for the erection of the lighthouse. Ordered to correct this neglect, he filled the hollow with mortar and carved therein : " King Ptolemy to the gods, the saviours, for the benefit of sailors." The mortar finally crumbled away and revealed the original inscription, showing the modern spirit of the architect who had carved :
" Sostratus the Cnidian, son of Dexiphanes, to the gods, the saviours, for the benefit of sailors."
Wonder No. 7. — Closer to the time of the Great Wall came the Colossus at Rhodes, finished 280 B.C., after twelve years of building. Chares of Lindus wrought this stupendous brass statue ; so tall that ships in full sail might have passed between its legs, but they didn't. It was 105 ft. high and occupied a place in the harbour. The thumb could hardly be clasped with both arms. A winding staircase led to the top of this Tor de Speechi, whence by aid of glasses hung around the neck of the statue a view could be had of the shores of Syria. It cost £80,000.
While the Great Wall was building, an earthquake shook Greece and destroyed this gigantic figure. It was never built up again. The Seven Wonders, to quote a Mediaeval, were "preposterous edifices, of exaggerated hugeness, dazzling and ruinous luxury."
four Great Roads. — While Grecian architecture erected monuments of grace and beauty, Rome worked persistently along more useful lines ; she began to build highways. The queen of roads, the Via Appia, most
48 THE ANCIENT ARCHITECTURAL WAVE
important and celebrated as a highway, was built in 312 B.C., under Appius Claudius Carcus, and paid for with money collected as h'nes from rich estate-holders. It put Rome into connection with such important towns as Capua and Brundisium, was paved with blocks of lava for a distance of 300 miles. A network of roads sprang into existence branching off from this great highway, and enlaced Italy.
Then came the Via Latina, also running South. By it Rome had direct communication with Beneventum, 140 miles distant. Another ancient road, if not the oldest, was the Via Salaria, running from the Colline Gate to Ancona on the coast of the Adriatic. Branch roads from this latter crossed the Apennines to Picenum.
In 220 B.C., while China was considering the pro- ject of building the Great Wall, Consul Flaminius fortified Italy by adding the Via Flaminia to the many military roads. The terminal points of it are Rome and Ariminum to the north-east, about 150 miles distant.
Rome after the First Punic War saw her wealth increasing, and with that her power. With the luxurious life also came the desire for larger architec- tural development. Durney suggests that Rome's art until then had been sacerdotal, i.e. it served merely for ornamenting the temples. But now moneys were appropriated to works of public utility ; an aqueduct was constructed by Carius, and after 275 a new Mint was erected to coin gold instead of silver as before ; new temples were reared, more from a feeling of vanity in perpetuating the glory of a family than from a sense of piety and devotion.
For a time this revival of art received a check through the coming of young Hannibal into Italy
-4- \fr- R4* * -±> j£± 49
•^ "T 7C PS ' ^T ^
AN INCH OP TIME IS AN INCH OF GOLD
and his march towards Rome. Having sworn eternal hatred to Rome, this Carthaginian leader of great genius crossed the Alps at precisely the time when a Chinese Emperor, a greater genius, Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, is occupied with his building projects. Contrast these two historic characters, one bent on massacre, the other on masonry. The terrible losses Hannibal sustained in crossing the Alps were not serious enough to prevent him engaging the Roman army at Lake Trasimene in 216. Victorious in this massacre, the one-eyed General administered so crushing a defeat to the Romans at the bloody battle of Cannae in 216, when 72,000 Roman soldiers, together with eighty senators and the flower of the army fell, that it remained a black day in Roman history. In those days so many knights were killed that young Hannibal stripped from the fingers three bushels of red-stained rings and sent them to Carthage.
The chief characteristics of the Epoch of the Great Wall seem to have been butchering and building. The Great Wall stands at the close of the greatest building age of antiquity. Athens under Pericles had risen to unwonted splendour. What a stately array of edifices were on the hill-crest of the Acropolis 1 Then was built the Parthenon, the edifice which critics of all schools have pronounced the most faultless in design and execution of all buildings erected by man. It cost £140,000 1
It is interesting and astonishing to learn of the spirit of enterprise which filled one of the ancient architects, Dinocrates, the later architect of Alexandria. He presented plans and designs to Alexander so stupendous that they are hardly credible. Dinocrates
4
50 THE ANCIENT ARCHITECTURAL WAVE
actually proposed cutting Mount Athos into the form of a man who should .hold a great city in his left hand, and in his right a cup to receive all the rivers which ran from that mountain and to pour them into the sea. Alexander, alive to every great opportunity and fond of the stupendous, does not seem to have favoured this undertaking.
In Egypt the Ptolemy s were active. The engineer- ing projects of Philadelphus would do credit to modern engineering art. He planned a great canal, 172 ft. wide and 51 ft. deep, which should connect Pelusium on the eastern branch of the Nile with the Red Sea, so that the vessels from the sea might be brought into the interior.
Not only on land but on sea the stupendous pre- vailed. The types of naval architecture of that period, in point of luxury, would do credit to a modern nation. The Egyptians had one war vessel 420 ft. long with 57 feet beam carrying 40 banks of oars, weighted with lead at the handles to more easily move them. Four thousand rowers were required to propel this behemoth, and 400 sailors stood ready to shift its sails. On its deck enough room was left to draw up in rank 2,000 soldiers, and at its prow were seven beaks with which to strike the ships of the enemy.
About the same time, Hiero of Syracuse constructed, under the direction of Archimedes, the inventor- philosopher, a vessel each side of which was divided into thirty apartments, besides quarters for the officers and the crew. All floors in these apartments were of mosaic, representing scenes from the Iliad of Homer; the ceilings and other parts were also sumptuously finished. Between the upper decks was a gymnasium and promenades among arbours and gardens with plants and shrubs of all kinds beautifully arranged,
51
STRONG MEN HAVE STRONG MEN TO CURB THEM, AND ABLE MEN HAVE ABLE MEN AT THELB HEELS
both hanging and a floating garden. One room had a floor inlaid with agate and precious stones, ceilings of cypress wood, and windows adorned with ivory and statuary. Nor was this all ; there was a library and an observatory equipped with astronomical instru- ments. Finally it contained a bath-room of the most elaborate kind.
But the vessel was not merely for pleasure, it was a man-of-war as well. For defensive purposes eight towers had been erected, from each of which men hurled missiles against the enemy from machines throw- ing stones 300 Ib. in weight.
" These prodigies of art and wondrous cost." 1
In the realm of the intellectual, a galaxy of names have made the achievements of the past seem inimitable. Homer, Pindar, and Sappho had left their legacy of poetry, Herodotus had begun to set down in writing the history of the glorious deeds of the Greeks. Law- givers like Solon and Draco : and philosophers, no lesser ones than Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, had reasoned among their generation. The Seven Wise Men of Greece had been gathered to their fathers, and the standards of Sophocles and Aristophanes and ^Eschylos set by them for the drama had inspired those who after them aspired to honour. Greece had had her most powerful persuasive orator Demosthenes, while the four schools of Philosophy 2 had been established, and the old Hebrew Testament, the most remarkable and valuable of all ancient literature, was being translated into Greek. The Epoch of the Great
1 Odyssey, Book IV.
* Peripatetics, Stoics, Epicureans, and Academics.
52 THE ANCIENT ARCHITECTURAL WAVE
Wall was a period of great thinking and colossal achievement.
Erastothenes about this time makes an attempt to ascertain the length of a degree, and in 240 B.C. calcu- lates the magnitude of the earth, while Archimedes makes his calculations and inventions in Syracuse.
Plutarch begins writing biography ; medicine and surgery command new interest and attention. Botany and pure mathematics, also mechanics, advance with rapidity ; while Tenodatus and Aristophus of Byzantium make their first philological discoveries.
Pergamus, the rich capital of Mysia, vies with Alex- andria in learning and sculpture. Her wealth is untold, for she harbours part of the plunder of Asia that Alexander had amassed. Her school of sculpture leaves the world the beautiful statue of The Dying Gladiator. A century later Mark Antony is to give his precious parchment library of 200,000 volumes to Miss — or Mistress — Cleopatra of Egypt for a kiss.
About 250 B.C. there sprang up a new independent kingdom in the East, to become a most formidable Power, Parthia. Arsaces founded it after expelling the Macedonians. The new domain corresponded to the modern Khorassan.
The eminent French scholar Choisy holds that a wave of architectural ideas, starting from Chaldea and Egypt, swept eastward. The combined influence of Egyptian and Assyrian architecture is meant, for both countries influenced each other at an early period. In Persia are tombs built after the style of those in Egypt.
The revival of architecture and building in India almost coincides with the building of the Great Wall in China. It is the inauguration of a new period in Indian architecture known as the Buddhist period. King Asoka was then ruler over Afghanistan, Hin-
i
THE LUCKY HAVE BIO HEADS ; THE UNLUCKY ABE BIO-HEADED
dustan, South India and Ceylon. At first he was devoted to the worship of Brahma, but having come under the teaching of Buddha he embraced the new faith. Asoka (236-226 B.C.), according to Buddhist legends, massacred a hundred sons his father had by sixteen different wives, and extended his empire. With him began the history of Buddhist architecture. He caused columns with inscriptions commending loving- kindness, virtue, forbearance, temperance, to be erected after his conversion to Buddhism.
From this time dates the Buddhist period. Choisy thinks that the remains of these temples clearly show the influence of Greek architecture, which may have come by way of Persia and Bactria.
The wave of Greek influence did not touch China. That China in the origin of her art is indebted to Chaldea we question. Mu Wang l in the tenth century, when Chaldean art was at its zenith, caused terraced temples to be erected for astral worship, and the introduction of astrology. This may show the in- fluence of the art he saw in distant lands. And it is possible that he also brought back with him the know- ledge of painting on wood and the use of varnish and enamel which were known to the Chaldeans and the Egyptians. But the potter's art and brick-making were carried to great perfection in China in remotest times.2
1 The general opinion among scholars is that Mu Wang did not go so very far afield after all — certainly nothing like as far as the Mediterranean. .Mu Wang himself is hardly more than semi-historical.
J Anguste Choisy, Eistoire de ("Architecture, vol. i. p. 180 : " La* Chine et le Japon sont les contrees oil 1'art de la poterie s'est le plus developpe ; la brique s'y fabrique avec uue rare perfection et 1'usage en parait fort aucien.
54 THE ANCIENT ARCHITECTURAL WAVE
In the building of the Great Wall we have every evidence that the use of mortar was known, for entire parts of this wall were constructed or at least faced with baked bricks by way of mortar. Outside of the Chinese the Persians seem to have been the only nation which employed mortar in construction. Rome made use of it only after she had come in contact with Persia. The nations east of the Euphrates from re- motest times knew the use of unbaked brick ; and Dr. Schliemann, in his excavations at Troy, found walls of houses with baked and unbaked bricks 45 cm. square.
The use of brick was necessary for the nations where wood was not in abundance and unavailable for building purposes. Hence Egypt and Persia largely used brick ; Assyria, though having access to stone, preferred the use of brick. The brickyards of Chaldea were a gigantic industry, and the greatest structures in that country are made of brick pise, i.e. of wet clay bricks laid one on top of the other and then stamped down without any further cementing material.
Here, then, we have abundant tokens of massive architecture in the West. Whether of stone, of baked brick, of clay, there are huge piles, which even in ruins excite the wonder of the present day. But did the West set the fashion for China?
China was not addicted to taking hints from other peoples, and in this case all the evidence fails to link it up with even Bactria. The wave which started from Egypt and rolled on through Babylon, leaving behind it such huge deposits as pyramids, hanging gardens, towers of Babel, royal palaces, was split by the moun- tains. On the barriers of Afghanistan it dashed itself in vain, and India was left untouched by the art of the despised outcast. Thus through Asoka there came
W ,-,
s *
* ^ s iw a ± m
A LITTLE IMPATIENCE SPOILS GREAT PLANS
to China nothing of this cyclopean rage. Out to the east of the Caspian another part of the wave flowed into the desert, but there lost itself in the sands. We can trace nothing that joins on the plans of Chin and his congeners with Kufu or Nitocris or Alexander. Chin was original.
Since China and India have come under the in- fluence of nations where gigantic structures were in existence, and the cause of much admiration, the question has been raised why these two nations are now lacking in monumental works. The answer to this must be sought in the conditions and government of the people. Among the nations whose edifices we have mentioned, these monuments owe their existence largely to monarchs or individuals for the purpose of perpetuating their name and glory ; whereas China and India, agricultural, and therefore less vain, built largely for the present needs of the people. Thus we find, outside of the attempt of Shih Huang Ti to embellish his capital, no other but structures of utility like canals and highways, and structures of defence, among which the Great Wall stands as the most con- spicuous type of all times. The Great Wall marked a great epoch.
Thus satisfied as to the originality of Chin and the uniqueness of his conceptions, we resume our survey of the mighty monument to his glory, uncoiling and luring us westward towards the home-State of its builder.
.no 'i^j
10 uluH iltiv/-
CHAPTER VI
Iff tVlOV/ ii.OlirJ'Hf'1? • FROM THE " THIRTEEN TOMBS " TO " CHINA'S SORROW."
TOMBS and a Flood we sing I or at least that section of the Great Wall which is verged by two gruesome termini, the Thirteen Tombs and the Yellow River.
The Eastern Y sends off its northern arm of the Wall, a part of which we have seen. It passes from the Eastern Y through Kalgan, but is badly out of repair, while still further to the north are the remains of yet another wall. Not far from Chu-Yung is the famous " Language Arch " spanning the road along the Government Pass ; more than six centuries ago it was built, with carvings and inscriptions in no fewer than six languages. This has been visited and photo- graphed so often that we believed in its existence, and preferred to explore along less known sections of the Wall.
The Inner Line of defence starts from the Eastern Y, joining the Outer hundreds of miles to the west, not far from the Yellow River. Before we went far along, we came to the famous " Thirteen Tombs " of the Ming Dynasty, the great line that re-fortified the Wall and held it long against the Tartars. This mountainous mausoleum is to be carefully distinguished from the Western Tombs of the present dynasty, to be described further on.
66
THE CELEBRATED "LANGUAGE ARCH" OR HEXAGONAL GATEWAY, AT THE NANKOW PASS, SOME 22 LI FROM THE RAILWAY STATION.
The North Face is here shown; the South Face is similar in design. The Arch, the crown and haunches of which form the sides of a hexagon, is 20 feet across at the base, 30 feet through, has 5 Buddhas on each side of the flat haunches. In the perpendicular wall on either side are large tablets of granite bearing inscriptions in divers languages. p. 56]
WHEN YOU HELP, HELP EFFECTIVELY ; WHEN YOU BESOTJE, MAKE RESCUE BEAL
57
The Mings consulted an adept in the study of The Book of the Blue Bag, a classic of geomancy some thousand years old. He, by the aid of the magic tortoise-shell, fixed upon a felicitous ground which the Emperor approved and re-named the Mount of Imperial Longevity. Here was laid out the first of the Thirteen Tombs, and here most of the race were interred.
Changling Chien is the home of the hereditary tomb- guardians. The pride of their charge is the mound of the man who finished the Northern Capital, Yung Lo. There his corpse lay in state for a year while the professors of geomancy awaited a lucky day for the burial. Then it was put to its last home about thirteen miles from the Wall ; a huge mound was piled above, and in his Soul Tower a tablet was erected to his memory. One by one others were buried hard by, till the lucky number of thirteen was complete by the last Ming slaying himself on the conical Coal Hill in the palace yard. The cemetery was garnished with a dozen gigantic monoliths of men, and two dozen of animals : so impressive are they in their cold silent majesty, standing naturally on the soil without pedestals, that a later Emperor thought of transporting all to grace his own tomb ; but a horrified chamberlain chipped a piece off each, and thus rendered them unthinkable as decora- tions for a new tomb. It was this dynasty which ended the burying alive of wives and concubines; perhaps these statues were erected in place of them.
Our interest lay heavy on Lung Ch'ing, for along the Wall many tablets told us of his interest in the Great Barrier.
The main Spirit Road does not lead directly to the sepulchre of Lung Ch'ing ; the Thirteen Tombs lie
in a valley mantled with pines and arbores vitae, into which lead half a score of picturesque passes, winding between thirteen hills, and forming a lovely theatre for the Imperial shades. As we approached the group of massive mounds, we noted another instance of how East and West differ : Menelaus spoke for the Egean :—
" For if the gods are wise They lightly scatter dust upon the tomb Of the brave man who by his foes is slain ; But pile whole mountains on the coward's breast.1"
'({»:' ) Ui'JifhuX :y.'
Here, however, the artificial mountain is piled by reverential men above a hero. And yet not all his subjects reverenced Lung Ch'ing. As we climbed up the very steep stone stairway to his Soul Tower, we were rewarded by the sight of the famous tablet, shattered. " Is it possible that, after all, the geomancers made a mistake and chose an unlucky spot ? " l The guardian wavered ; either some indignant workmen thus vented their revenge on the tyrant who had forced them to slave on the Wall, or else a " clap of thunder " had come to the wrong shrine in mistake for the thunder-temple.
The geomancers, in their art of balancing the in- fluences of wind, water and hill, not only chose to put the Imperial suicide beside Lung Ch'ing, but balanced that grave by a tablet with a moon upon it. This was reputed to wax and wane with the original in the sky, but the machinery is out of gear, and there seems only some moonshine about the in- cident. The Great Wall has fascinated these cemetery- surveyors, for there are a very large number of graves
1 A mistake made in preparing the grave of the third Emperor of the Sung Dynasty defeated a conspiracy.
p. 58]
THE MOUNDS OF LUNG CHING.
59
THE IMPERIAL SWOBD, THOUGH SHARP, CANNOT SLAY AN INNOCENT MAN
hard by the Great Rampart : indeed, some have actually been excavated in its thickness. Hence it has been fantastically termed " The Longest Cemetery on Earth."
In the catacombs of Rome, amid the tombs of the dead, the living Christians sometimes sought shelter from the persecutions of the Emperor or the fury of the mob. And so it was in this cemetery. Hard by here there were fugitive Christians who found safety a few years ago, hiding in the caves or the strong towers of the Great Wall, while others, less fortunate, lie buried not far away. While the refugees were here, they wrote loving messages on any material they could find, and some of these precious documents have been found ; perchance more await the explorer who would trace the results of the recent madness. Men have wondered whether life has become too monotonous and grey for the purple of heroism to show itself ; whether in this ease-loving age the severer tests of character would not excite solicitude and alarm. " Should the cycle of time return us to the martyr days with vast amphitheatres crowded to the parapet, what then ? Lions, tigers, racks, boiling oil, slow fire, mutilation ; will these elicit the Christian virtues ? " No cycle of time is needed, only a change of place ; Uganda and China have exhibited to this generation men in such straits, climbing the steep ascent of heaven through peril, toil and pain.
On a spot north of this Inner Loop perished eleven White and thirty-two Yellow Christians. For the Whites there was no option ; death was certain, and was made attractive as an end of awful tortures, devised by an ingenious, implacable, and atrocious foe ;
60 "THIRTEEN TOMBS" TO "CHINA'S SORROW"
they met it with a calmness born of eternal hope. But in the Yellows there was an opportunity to bow to Buddha ; a very few under unparalleled trials slipped through this loophole ; most joined the victors who bear the palm-branch of victory. The whites were beheaded first ; then, in horrid mockery of the Christian sacrament, the natives were obliged to kneel and drink their blood before they, too, received the death-blow. Here, then, is one of the sacred spots of earth. The Invalides, Westminster, Mount Vernon ? These entomb no martyrs for Christ. The tumuli of Crcesus, the pyramid of Cheops, the thirteen Ming tombs, what are they beside these humble graves of Shan-si, where lie between the two arms of the Great Wall the Martyrs of the North ?
Are the Chinese bloody ? In the last fifty years they have shed less gore than any nation half their size. These believers in the Sacred Edict, with its sixteen maxims, have taken fewer lives than followers of the S wordless Christ, believers in the Ten Commandments. The Civil War in America, Austrians, Prussians and French in Central Europe, Russia and Turkey to the East, Britons in South Africa ! May not the Chinaman kill a paltry two hundred when Christendom slaughters a hundredfold ?
From the graves of the humble Christians, pass to the magnificent cemetery of their persecutors, the Western Tombs of the present dynasty. This is the third Imperial Burial Reserve we have met along the Wall ; the first is the Eastern Mausolea, more popular of recent years ; the second is the more ancient Graveyard of the Mings with their Thirteen Tombs ; this is the Western Cemetery, south-west of Peking. Here are permanent camps where a garrison commanded by a prince of the blood keeps guard over the bones of his
NO GRIEF SO GREAT AS FOB A DEAD HEABT
ancestors. A rugged mountain ridge forms the northern boundary ; dark pines rustle over the wide expanse whence gleam the red walls and gilded roofs of the edifices. Canals border off one plot from another, and stately marble bridges span them for roads to the tombs.
Visit one of the older monuments. They face south to garner in the favourable influences. Inscriptions in Chinese, Manchurian and Mongol characters — for this dynasty is foreign — adorn the avenue. Pass over the waterway, along the paved road, under the archways, and when expectation is kindling, behold an altar for the Emperor alone to sacrifice upon, in a court reserved for his sole use. Seek the goal of this magnificent approach, and there is a throne, draped in yellow silk, whereon is mounted the tablet of the departed. Before it is a table with censers and with bowls for the blood of the sacrifices. Is this the end ? Behind the building is the hill, scarped vertical, and with a recess marking where the mound was driven in to receive the coffin of the dead ruler. Is it true that when the bearers carried in their ponderous burden, the masons waited not for their return, but walled up the quick and the dead together ?
Tao Kuang, who died in 1850, is the last Emperor entombed here, with his household grouped around. But since this journey along the Great Wall began, the last sovereign of his race has been laid at rest among these Western Tombs of a dynasty that is marvellously transforming its realms, after a vain struggle against the forces of change.1
1 In the Imperial Forest Reserve are various animals, including three varieties of wildcat, the longhaired, common and spotted ; three hamsters, the desert, striped and common ; two jerboas, the Dipus sowerbyi and the Alactaga, which has five toes instead of three, and larger, longer ears. Then
62 "THIRTEEN TOMBS" TO "CHINA'S SORROW"
Many towers of the Great Barrier remain intact, and even much of the wall. Thus far in our trip of six hundred miles we appreciate the work of the engineers who brought masses of stone, brick and mortar, and built them solidly. But our native com- panions appreciate yet more highly the work of the geomancers, who fixed the sites of the towers, and so brought down good influences on the fields around. One guide would never enter a tower without kotowing thrice and repeating a formula for luck, a prayer to the god of war.
The Wutai Shan is a lofty shrine near this Wall ; and if the Wall is in a fair way to become sacred, the Wutai Shan has arrived ! Only, strange to say, it is sacred to the Mongols, the people who were to be kept out by the Wall,1 and yet it is within the circuit. Perhaps, many centuries later, it attracted them within and nerved them for the onslaught. If once again the hardy horsemen of the North seek to flood over the Empire, this racial shrine may prove of crucial im- portance. If the Jewish fanatics rallied against the legions at Jerusalem, if a Christian assault on Mecca be almost unthinkable, let the Russian bear hesitate before provoking the Mongols by violating this sacred mountain, whence the more pious will return even a thousand miles measuring their length on the ground.
there are the interesting goitred antelope, badger hedgehog, mole, molerat, rayotis, suslik or ground squirrel, chipmunk and rodents. The hare and his near relation the pika enjoy the Western Tombs, as do rats and gnats.
The -.large forest a day's journey south of the Wall at Ningwufu, in addition to the above, accommodates the roe deer, Peking stag, leopard, wild pig, David's squirrel, musk deer, and small mice, while north of the Inner Loop are mountain sheep, with enormous horns, who endure " the bold society of wolves and foxes."
1 " Mongols " was not a racial name at the time of the First Emperor. Northern warriors of Chin's time emerged from obscurity under the name of Mongols during the reign of Genghis Khan.
THE GRASS DOES NOT
MOVE WHEN THERE IS NO WIND
The Wall itself finds votaries all along its course. The mortar from its crevices works wonderful cures, especially for punctures of the dermis. "If you cut a mouth in your hand, take of the Magic Mortar quantum suff. and pulverise, take an unborn mouse and mash it into the powdered lime ; apply the ointment to the mouth. Should the mouse be not available, substitute oil." The same mixture is good for burns — or is good to take off more skin. If applied internally it will cure stomach-ache ; for an average stomach and an average ache take a pill the size and shape of a lotus-seed ; for a baby, less. Life may be hard in China, but death seems harder if men will try such remedies as Boho, Frog- blood-extract, Mouse-mortar-pills.
The pathos of life here was well illustrated by the gloom of a coolie met at a fork in a road. We asked which branch led to the Wall, and how far off it was ; he told the way, and told, correctly enough, that it was three miles off. " But I have not seen it ; to gather fuel takes me from early morning till towards sunset in the woods ; then the heavy burden prevents me looking up, and I have never set eyes upon it." Yet how many Londoners have seen the Tower 1 How many Ken- tuckians their Mammoth Cave?
Where solid facts are wanting, fluid fancy easily arises. John Gwadey here produced a tale of Chin and his big bludgeon. This was seven Chinese feet long, studded with knobs of metal — iron or gold — and precious stones, and had magic properties, so that when the Wall was built of any material that came handy, Chin struck it with his staff, and it all changed to one kind of stone — which remains to prove the story. More, it could make stones fly in any direction, and this property
64 "THIRTEEN TOMBS" TO "CHINA'S SORROW"
proved disastrous. For when he flung one into the sea at Chefoo, it hit the sea-god, who was incensed, and decided to take away the dangerous weapon.
From these picturesque legends turn to solid fact. We discovered several tablets which record either the original construction of the Wall or the last rebuilding of it and of the towers. Here is one in the Armoury Tower at Peh Shih K'ow. A complete translation follows :
Built in the Autumn of the first year of WAN Li, by Wang Tao Kung of Sihsien, Inspector of Chi (Chichow) Liao (Yungp'ing Fu) and Paoting Border Affairs, Junior Vice-President of the Board of War, and Associate President of the Court of Censors, Liu Ying-chieh of Weihsien, Director- General of Military Affairs for Chi, Liao, Paoting and other Departments, Controller of Commissary Supplies, Associate President of the Court of Censors and Junior Vice-President of the Board of War, Sun Pei-yang of Fup'ing-hsien, Governor of Paoting and other Departments, Commander-in- Chief of Tzeking (Purple Thorn Bush) and other passes, and Associate President of the Board of Censors, Wang Hsiang of P'ingtu, Associate Governor of Chihli and Supervising Censor of Provincial Circuits, Kao Wen-chien of Ch'engtu in command of military functions at Tzeking and other places and Councillor in the Governor's Office Shantung, Fu Chin of Yensui, Brigadier- General of Paoting and Superintendent of Affairs, Wang Fu-min of Yensui, Adjutant- General and Associate Commander of Tzeking Pass and other places, Chang Chu of Nganning, Assistant Prefect of Paoting Department, in control of the Tzeking Pass, Chu Chia-Chiang of Chengting, Junior Captain in charge of Peh Shih (White Stone) Pass, Huang Sheng, Deputy Director of Hwei Yi'm and Hsing
THE ARMOURY TOWER GUARDING THE ROCKY PASS AT PEYSHIH K'OW, p. 64]
If X ffl 15 E 65
SLOW WOBK MAKES A SKILLED WORKMAN
Lan Ting, Overseer of Works, Keeper of Yang Chuan Tze K'ow (Sheepfold Pass) and Brevet Captain in charge of the Middle Post of the Advance Guard.
Then in the same tower is a second tablet which records the building of the Wall ; but the tablet is too defaced to allow of the exact translating of the whole text. This is certain : it accounts for the building of two pieces of FIRST CLASS WALL ; each piece was 148 tens of feet long plus 8 feet. It was built in the Lucky Days of the Winter Season in the 3rd year of Wan Li.
Or take a third. A tablet stands beside the Natural Tower, between Towers No. 53-4 Black Letter, Shwei K'ow, and reads :
WALL RECORD
General of the Light Brigade, Tsui Ching, Commanding the Yeomanry under the jurisdiction of the Governor by Imperial Appointment at Paoting, Ensign Shen Tzu-hsien of the above Department, Ensign Sun Erh-kuo, Superintendent of Works, Liu Ching, Military Contractor, and others to the number of 130 names co-operated in building this extension of 591 ft. 6 in. of THIRD CLASS WALL, beginning on the North at the end of the Military Graduate Lung Kuang-hsien's portion of Tower No. 55 of the Black Letter " Wu " series. The completion of the construction was reported by the AUTUMN GUARD on the 16th day of the 9th Moon of the 4th Year of WAN Li. Master Stonemason Chao Yen-mei and others. Master Border Artisan Lu Huan and others.
This stone was erected by the AUTUMN GUARD on the 16th day of the 9th Moon, 4th Year of WAN Li.
66 "THIRTEEN TOMBS" TO "CHINA'S SORROW"
A fourth tablet is set in the Wall south of Shwei K'ow, and commemorates how —
Li Pei, Major of the Central Camp of Chen Tu Tang Hsiin, Sergeant in Command of the Department of the Right and Brevet Captain of the Shen Wu Right Guard, heading a Battalion of 141 names, co-operated in constructing 171 ft. 8 in. of MIDDLE CLASS BORDER WALL, beginning on the North of the Mouth of the Wang $rh, Hurry-Scurry Ravine, at the connection with Tower No. 55 of the Letter Wu Series, and ending with the termination of the Wall constructed by Sergeant Yang Hang, Director of Works of the above-mentioned Department.
The work was begun on the 12th day of the 3rd Moon of the current year, and its completion reported on the 24th day of the 4th Moon.
This stone was erected by the SPRING GUARD in the 4th Year of WAN Li.
These four tablets, and others which we found, witness to a simultaneous and hasty repair of the Wall in the reign of Wan Li. They suggest that the old Wall had fallen into bad condition (or that it never existed), but that the towers were in better order, and were carefully numbered. Perhaps they had been used as blockhouses for some time ; but now some fresh menace of invasion caused a general overhauling of the defences. First, the Towers were put in thorough repair, then the Wall between them was rebuilt at a speed that reminds us of Nehemiah's forced labour at Jerusalem.
If, perhaps, the Wall in this part is of comparatively recent construction, the ancient engineers who laid out the line seem to have done their best in selecting natural, strong lines of defence, and then intensifying these. Indeed they followed the line of the greatest
ARSENAL TOWER AT PAISHIH K'OW, 60 LI FROM FUTU YEH, CONTAINING TWO INTERESTING TABLETS.
The lower storey is on a level with the terre-plain of the Wall, and is entered through a port enlarged for the purpose.
FUTU YEH PASS.
Showinsr exceptionally fine workmanship. Decorations over the doors. Considerable remains of a house on top, probably for the guards — some Towers had four such houses, one in each corner. The measurements of one of these guard houses as follows :
Height to top of gable eaves
10ft. 6 „ 10 in.
Width . . Length . .
12 ft. 2 in. o*> 9
p. 66]
The paving brick under the floors 13J in. X 3J in. thick.
THE SEA IS DEEP BECAUSE IT NEVER BEJECTS THE TINIEST RIVULET
natural resistance. In parts more inland they had occasionally to deal with a plain, but here they had crags and mountain chains. Two level furrows were chiselled out in the solid rock, about twenty-five feet apart, and squared granite blocks were laid on this foundation some few feet up. Then special clay was chosen and moulded by skilled workmen into bricks twenty-two and a half inches long. The unwieldly blocks, according to another local legend, were tied to goats, who dragged them up the almost inaccessible ridges. Here the bricklayers placed them, all as headers, not stretchers, and the two faces were filled with earth well rammed. As the Wall arose, it was seen that its projecting faces formed a mutually de- fensive scheme of salients and curtains.
Through centuries of neglect this massive structure has endured : a fit emblem of the Chinese character. Little by little it has gathered to itself legend and superstition. If wells and trees, chairs and tables are supposed to be the abode of spirits, how much more easy to imagine this Wall the home of a superior race. A tower or peak to the north of a home assures its good fortune ; the Wall to the north of the Empire must be propitious. And if the Wall have numerous pinnacles, these must bring special good influences down. The canny foreigner will know how to utilise this idea, and when he wants to put up a factory stack, but finds the aesthetes object, he has only to locate it to the north of the factory and point out that he is ensuring its good luck, and this reason will carry weight. Ask the Super- intendent of the Arsenal if in 1873 this did not remove his obstacles. And thus the towers along the Wall, being properly located, add moral strength to its defenders.
68 "THIRTEEN TOMBS" TO "CHINA'S SORROW"
As we try to find one thousand different people along the Wall and get one thousand legends or opinions, we come at times across a few curious speci- mens. One legend is strangely utilitarian : " Chin went up to heaven and took hold of the frost tree ; he shook it and shook it till the country was covered deep with frost,1 and all the young crops were ruined. Then he obliged the people to work on the Wall, but would not give them enough to eat." The old grumbler who produced this tale was overlooking that the Wall shut off some of the cold north winds, and shut out the desperate foragers from the Mongolian steppes.
A little westward the scenery is wonderfully beau- tiful, as was recognised by the Imperial Censor about the year 1570. He caused an original ode to be incised upon a stone slab ; the version following is due to Dr. Martin, founded on our rubbings, expressly for this expedition :
Yon summit like an arrowhead
Appears to pierce the skies ; A rocky fortress westward looms,
A battleground there lies.
The northern sky is veiled in clouds,
The harvest gathered in : Our autumn rains, a precious boon,
Will very soon begin.
Peaceful the times, the flocks at ease
O'er grassy plains may roam ; There's scarcely heard a falling leaf
To mar our dreams of home.
WEN JU-CHANG, of the Board of Censors, in command of Border Garrisons, Imperial Com- missioner on a tour of inspection.
1 "B.C. 238 in the 4th Moon there appeared a great frost in Ts'in, so that people died from it." — Ancient Chinese MS.
p. 68]
SHWEI KWAN K'OW.
— S 2 * Pf # «l H 69
A SINGLE SPARK CAN BtTEN A WHOLE PRAIRIE
It seems a pity to descend to prose after such a spirited reproduction of the original. But for those who want a baldly literal version, here is a Bohn :
The Arrowhead mountain rears its vast mass against the crystal sky ; the Rocky Fortress to the west appears, and farther away a well-known battleground. Two mountain ranges unite to enclose a camp of the ancient Chin Tartars (the Golden Horde). A stream of water flows athwart, with iron bridge and lock. The north is veiled in clouds, the ripe grain is all gathered in, the autumn rains from the north-west begin to increase. The times are tranquil ; from the Great Desert is neither smoke nor dust (from the camps or marching of soldiers). After sunset the drifting leaves alone disturb our dreams (of home).
This poetical effusion, with the vastness of the over- hanging space and the soul-enthralling earth scene, prompted my muse to vague yearnings. Here the works of Nature and of man intermingle ; sheer pre- cipices affright ; steep altitudes, up which winds the line of battlements jewelled by the massy towers, lead up the vision to the living light.
In the grouping of the mountains, In the tracing of the valleys, In the shaping of the hilltops, And the arching of the heavens, There are scenes and deep impressions Which the mighty mind of Milton, Or the aged Seer of Patmos, Both inspired and yet still human, Fitly might describe for mortals.
But it must suffice to say that this picturesque pass is bounded on two opposite sides by friendly mountains
70 "THIRTEEN TOMBS" TO "CHINA'S SORROW"
on whose neighbouring flanks the firs mantle the hard rock. Among the thronging hills and peaks winds the Great Wall ; beyond a single bare valley lies a remote and hazy horizon. But towards the rising sun a vista of ravines and heaps of heights rising loftier and ever more blue until the line of land is lost in the ocean of the sky.
Could we but see the original design on which Nature wrought when these majestic proportions came fresh from the Creative Hand ; could we but study them in silence, alone upon this lofty summit, where we stand among the sighing pines ; could we but compare them with the present superb vision — what would be more inevitable than to ask, " What relation does the outward world bear to the unseen world of thought ? The downward gaze prompts to upward musing, and leads to consciousness of conscience."
And conscience is stirred by the sight of one human amendment to God's proposals. A film of blue smoke floating from a humble home enwraps a mud-walled, curved-roofed fane or temple, wherein are idols not fit for men to see, much less to worship. To con- template the handiwork of God in this masterpiece of the Creator, and then make deities of mud ! Have the aborigines done this, or only half of this ? We exclaim, " How has man fallen, or from what a fall has he not arisen 1 " Not mountain majesty ; not heavenly expanse ; not splendours of art ; not miracles of science can uplift men and nations. Beauty depends not only on the outward scene, nor on the seeing eye, but on the interpreting mind and heart.
Yet would that we had been able to photograph this wondrous landscape in all its glorious changes for one brief hour. It is not the still picture, but the fleeting shadows of the clouds, the light ever changing,
71
SOLDIERS MAY NOT BE NEEDED FOB A HUNDRED YEARS, BUT CANNOT BE DISPENSED WITH A SINGLE DAY
which so enriches the vision. The dark cloud floats by, from the sun comes a gleam that gilds with glory the mountains and picks out the chain of Wall with its jewels of towers. Words fail to tell of the splendours of this view above the Pass of Ch'a-ch'ien K'ow. Even "if life be granted me enough," however often my longing feet may draw me hither, there will be some fresh scene of magnificence — the scene in the same group of natural spires and these human buttresses of granite, yet ever new in the glory of the seasons and of the heavens.
Here we have come across inscriptions of the reign of Wan Li, and seen the tomb of Lung Ch'ing. Let us investigate these two men, and see what exactly they had to do with the Great Wall. Wan Li, at least, is so closely associated that in this part of the country many people speak not of the " 10,000-li-long Wall," but of " Wan Li's Wall," both being pronounced Wanlich'ang Ch'eng.
Who was this great king ?
Wan Li " sat under Heaven," as the Chinese phrase has it, for the lengthy period of forty-seven years. He was preceded by Lung Ch'ing, who occupied the throne for no more than six years ; yet it was during his brief tenure that no fewer than 1,200 forts were erected on the Great Wall, each garrisoned by 100 men. Numerous tablets along the Wall testify to his activity in building and repairing. This renewed care of the huge bulwark betokens a menace of some sort in that direction. In fact the Chin Tartars, sometimes called " the Golden Horde," had not forgotten that they had once been masters of half the Empire. They were watching for an opportunity to reassert their ancient
72 "THIRTEEN TOMBS11 TO "CHINA'S SORROW"
claims. Foiled by the vigilance of Lung Ch'ing or his officers, they had nothing left but to nurse their strength and bide their time. Unable to cross the Wall, they wandered away to the east and obtained a footing in Manchuria, where they reappeared under a new name as Manchus.
What Wan Li accomplished in strengthening that incomparable fortification is in the History, which is supplemented by many stone tablets. During his long reign the forts were occupied and the towers were not allowed to go to ruin. In fact the explorer finds that at many points new masonry was erected by him. Evidence is not wanting of the unsleeping vigilance with which the Chinese of that day kept watch on both the Inner and the Outer Wall.
Near the end of the dynasty, and not free from the faults of a decadent period, Wan Li may not unfairly be taken as a type of the average Emperor. Pro- claimed heir-apparent when an infant of six summers, he ascended the " Precious Seat " at the age of ten, but remained in tutelage until his sixteenth year, when he was permitted to marry and to assume the reins of government. Of his early precocity the Court chronicler gives the following instance :
When a child of five or six years, he one day saw his father gallop unattended into the enclosure of the Inner Palace. Striking an attitude, he begged to re- monstrate, not on the impropriety of an Emperor galloping within those sacred grounds, but on the daiiger of his doing so. Said the child, " Your Majesty is * the Lord of all under Heaven ' ; if you ride alone at such a furious speed, might you not fall, for which you and your people would be sorry ? " His mother, one of the secondary wives, was in the habit of taking him with her whenever she went to visit the
AN OPPRESSIVE GOVERNMENT IS WORSE THAN A FIERCE TIGER
Empress. On such occasions the Empress always took up some of the classics and asked the young Prince questions, all of which he " answered like an echo."
Not until the first year of his reign were the water- courses so improved as to admit of the tribute rice reaching the garrison of Miyuen, which is near Kupei- kow, the " Ancient Northern Pass " in the Great Wall. This was really an extension of the Great Canal, a work which the Mongols had left unfinished, and large portions of which were completed by their Chinese successors.
The official history of his reign presents us with a confused medly of occurrences, such as a child might jot from day to day or a monk put down on his parchment, confounding trivial and important, local and general, fact and legend, but with no attempt at tracing connection or generalising. The account of his first year is as follows :
In the Second Moon, on the day Kuei Ch'ou, the Emperor presided for the first time at an entertainment given to the higher literary graduates. Third Moon, Ping Shen Day, an edict, commanding all officials, whether of the capital or of the Provinces, to recommend men of ability from whom high military officers might be chosen. Summer, Fourth Moon, I Cho'u Day, the news comes of the suppression of a rebellion near Swatow in Kwangtung. On Keng Wu Day, of the same Moon, a distressing drought being reported, the Emperor commanded all his officers to cultivate their virtues and examine their conduct.1 In the Fifth Moon,
1 The Ecclesia or Assembly of Athens suffered a similar manipulation. " If any outward sign occurred which seemed to indicate the displeasure of the gods, such as an earthquake, or thunder or lightning, or even rain, the sitting broke up at once."
74 "THIRTEEN TOMBS" TO "CHINA'S SORROW"
on the Chia Shen Day, by decrees he ordered all officials of the capital and provinces to be careful in imprisonments and the infliction of punishment. In the Sixth Moon, on Jen Shen Day, he ordered relief to be given to the settlers from floods in North Kansu. Seventh Moon, day not given, the Yellow River burst its banks at Su Chow.1 In the Ninth Moon, on the Kuei Wei Day, relief was given to three districts in Hupeh and Shantung. News comes of the suppression of a revolt in Szechwan. He orders as an expression of joy the suspension of punishments. In the Eleventh Moon he commands the provincial officers to keep a careful journal of their movements in order to prevent loss of time. In the Twelfth Moon supplies were issued to sufferers from famine in Manchuria. This year the Siamese and Lewchewans came to the capital with tribute.
Let this be sufficient for a specimen of the style from which the student of Chinese history is obliged to extract great truths and great principles.
In Wan Li's third year, an eclipse of the sun taking place, his Majesty wrote down twelve good resolutions for his own guiding, and suspended them on the right hand of his throne to be a perpetual monitor. They were as follows : " Heed the warnings of Heaven. Employ the worthy and the able. Keep virtuous officers near your person. Put the vicious far away. Let rewards and punishments be well defined. Be careful as to those who go in and out of the Palace. Rise early Be temperate. Recall your wandering thoughts. Be reverent towards Heaven. Listen to faithful admonition. Beware of lavish expenditure." Had he lived up to these principles, what a paragon of virtue the world might have witnessed. Yet after
1 We cannot find any town of this name on the Yellow River. There is a Suchow in Kausu, and a Siichow (not very far off the River) in Honan.
THE HAIRLESS LIP IN MANAGING AFFAIRS IS APT TO SLIP
studying his subsequent career we have to exclaim, " What an immense contrast between promise and performance ! "
His reverence for Heaven was mere superstition. An earthquake having occurred, or a strange appearance being observed among the stars, a comet or an eclipse, a drought or flood, or even a fire in the Palace, a decree always followed commanding the officers to look into their own faults. Seldom indeed did the Emperor advert to his own. The custom of thus regard- ing unusual manifestations in the course of nature is still kept up. In fact it is only during the present Moon, and since the accession of a new Emperor, that the beating of gongs to succour the " labouring moon " during an eclipse has been forbidden. If we compare Wan Li's conduct towards his officials with his loud professions, we are shocked by the contrast. One of his high officers implored him to name a successor, no doubt from patriotic motives, in view of the danger which always accompanied a change of rulers. Yet Wan Li chose to regard the reference to his own death as unlucky, and insolent. He ordered the memorialist to be beaten with rods at the foot of the throne.
In providing for the expenses of his sumptuous court, he had the habit of sending eunuchs as his official representatives into all the provinces, who not only oppressed the people but exacted so large a portion of the legal taxes that the amount left was not sufficient for the provincial government. In the province of Yunnan the oppressed people rose in fury against the eunuch, and not only put him to death, but burned his body. The present dynasty of Manchu- Tartars has taken a useful lesson from the experience
76 "THIRTEEN TOMBS" TO "CHINA'S SORROW "
of the Mings, and made it an invariable law that no eunuch shall exercise any commission outside the Palace.
After the first years of his reign, Wan Li seems to have fallen into a condition of hopeless indolence, occupying his time with wine and women like another Sardanapalus. In the fortieth year of his reign, one of his great ministers handed up a memorial to this effect : " The treasuries of the Provinces are empty. All enterprises are at a standstill. The Emperor with- draws himself from his people ; for more than twenty years he has never called a council of his great ministers. The Empire is in danger of revolution." To this earnest remonstrance he gave no answer, but during his few remaining years he more than once appeared in public and seemed to show a desire to retrieve his lost reputation.
" 45th Year in the 7th Moon : Eclipse of the Sun." This dire event seemed to presage a host of calamities, for it is added, " In the latter half of the year the two capitals, together with the provinces of Honan, Shantung, Shansi, Shensi, Kiangsi, Hupeh and Hunan, Fokien, Kwangtung, just half the Empire, were reported as suffering from dire famine. During all the time an irregular warfare was kept up with the Tartars, who had got possession of a large portion of Manchuria. And we are told that the Imperial army, including the garrisons on the Great Wall, suffered much from the want of supplies. The Cabinet officers be- sought the Emperor to appropriate the funds received from the provinces for his army in that quarter. Their advice remained unheeded. The record adds : " In the 9th Moon of the next year, the capital was shaken by an earthquake." The following year brought to a conclusion this unhappy reign, so full of strange occurrences,
A BIG THEE HAS A BIG SHADOW
recorded alongside the follies and extravagancies of the court and its officers.
In the midst of his long period of puerilities we meet with one item of surpassing interest. " This year a man from the Western ocean, by name Mateo Ricci, begged permission to offer the products of his own country. His request was refused ! " That is, he was not permitted to come to the Northern Capital. Years previously the Portuguese had found their way around the " Cape of Storms " to the coast of China. Xavier, the first of the Jesuit missionaries, after achieving triumphs in India and Japan, had been refused the privilege of setting foot on the soil of China, and died on a neighbouring island. His successor in the arduous enterprise was this Mateo Ricci, who, foiled in one attempt after another, eventually succeeded in finding his way to the secluded capital in the North. Here he pointed out the mistakes of the Chinese astronomers, won for himself a position at the head of the Astro- nomical Board, and secured for his fellow missionaries the opportunity of preaching the holy Faith in the provinces of the interior.
Wan Li was followed by two Emperors, one of whom occupied the throne for just one month. The next, the last of the Mings, was Ch'ung Cheng, whose virtues stand out in contrast with his weak and wicked predecessors. Yet there was no possibility of retrieving the fallen fortunes of his house. Already, during the reign of Wan Li, the Tartars had occupied for a time the Outer Wall, from which they were dislodged, only to take up a more commanding position in the region of Manchuria, The provinces of the interior were over- run by desperadoes who contended with each other
78 "THIRTEEN TOMBS" TO "CHINA'S SORROW"
for a throne which was soon to be left without an occupant. Li Tzii-ch'eng, one of these rebels, getting possession of Peking, the Emperor hanged himself on Prospect Hill in his garden, after having stabbed his favourite daughter to the heart to prevent her falling into the hands of the rebel chief. His General, in charge of Shanhaikwan, called in the Tartars to avenge his master and expel the intruder. Once inside the Great Wall, they refused to retire, and from that day the destinies of China have been united with the fortunes of the Ta Ch'ing dynasty.
From that day this portion of the Wall has ceased to be a frontier or of much importance as a defence. The waves of invasion have come from the sea, whence the visitants in their causeless aggressions have earned the title of Ocean Pirates, which we render all too vaguely as Foreign Devils. But ere we take leave of Wan Li and his rehabilitation of the Great Wall, pause to consider its long value as a Rampart of Defence.
THE VILLAGE OF CH'ACHIEN K'OW AS SEEN FROM A LOFTY
TOWER ON THE GREAT WALL, p. 78]
# A * IT J* iff tt 7 *r *r
GOOD IRON IS NOT MADE INTO NAILS, NOK DO GOOD MEN BECOME
SOLDIERS
CHAPTER VII
THE DEFENCE OF THE GREAT WALL
To describe the warlike use of the Wall properly, a military historian is needed, who can set forth accurately and technically all the strategy involved, the weapons employed, the successes and the tactics. In default of him, a lay view may help the general reader.
The very conception of a chain of thousands of strong blockhouses, linked by a rampart and stretching over more than a thousand miles, betokens a mind that can conceive great measures. Great resources were needed to execute the idea and to defend the Wall, once erected. A wall would need an army of work- men to erect it, an army of soldiers to defend it. The trowel might be laid aside in a few months, the sword must be ever ready. A mere wall, without men behind it, cannot delay an invader for a day. The Wall of China involved a Standing Army.
Kings in other lands may have surrounded them- selves with a few guards permanently ; but only at a fitting season would they call to arms the able-bodied man and go out to war. David had such a few guards that he fled in panic from his capital when rebellion raised her head. The kings of Egypt put a little wall across the Isthmus of Suez, and that necessitated a corps of soldiers to garrison it. But the few hundreds there
79
80 THE DEFENCE OF THE GREAT WALL
employed were as nothing to the myriads needed along the Wall of China ; this led to a permanent army on a scale previously unknown in the world. China was the first nation to have a Standing Army, and the historians say it numbered 3,080,000 men.
There are signs in the brickwork that the towers were designed and finished first, before any wall was erected. The order is not, wall and then towers on it, but towers and then a curtain between them. In Cuba and in South Africa there was a stage when it was found wise to erect rows of blockhouses near enough to sweep the ground in between with bullets, and numerous enough to stretch for miles. The line of Chinese defence apparently began in the same way ; only, as they had no missiles that could be thrown far and swiftly, a solid line of wall became needful. At an early stage we can imagine that each garrison would be charged to build a section of wall on to meet the builders from the next forts, and thus the time would not be idly spent in mere watching.
But of the early period we have little real informa- tion, whereas we are fortunate in having detailed accounts of the frontier defences in the last period when they were important, that of the Ming dynasty. The Mings were the last Chinese who ruled over China ; they drove out a line of foreigners, even as the English drove out the Scotch Stuarts. Then they occupied the throne for two hundred and seventy-six years ; and for much of the time they had to defend the Empire against the Northern barbarians whom they had expelled, and to whom they at last succumbed. Since 1644 the Chinese have been ruled again by foreigners ; but the Mings guarded the land against these from the days of Edward the Black Prince to the days of Cromwell. All that time the Great Wall
ONE OF THE BEAUTIFUL TOWERS AT COPPER GREEN PASS.
p. SO]
A CABELESS BEGINNING MEANS A REPENTANT ENDING
was of supreme importance, and the annals tell much about it.
The policy was adopted of quartering huge per- manent garrisons in fortified camps behind the Wall. The generals in command could easily plan for detach- ments to go on guard duty to the forts for a week or two at a time, and for the guards to post sentries along the Wall itself. The homes of the soldiers, however, were not the little forts, but the great camps further back. Then their time was not occupied in mere drill and manoeuvres ; they were set to reclaim the land and to till it. Inscriptions point to a system of land grants which acted as bounties to enduce enlist- ment. But then again these would not avail to content a recruit long. A pioneer into Alberta or Saskatchewan may be tempted there by the offer of half a square mile, but when he has overcome the first difficulties he wants a home, with wife and children. The Chinese authorities recognised this, and encouraged the soldiers to marry, so that they should not wish to leave the garrisons and return to the older settled parts. And thus there grew up a cordon of married military settlers behind the Wall. Much the same policy was adopted on the Danube against the Turks; Germans were encouraged to settle on the frontiers of Hungary, and to marry, so as to stay for life and breed a hardy warrior race. Indeed the Romans had adopted the same plan on their frontier garrisons ; not barracks of bachelors, but cities of martial married men, were found facing the barbarians.
The modern policy of Europe is far different. Year by year thousands of young men are called out from home and quartered in enormous lodging-houses for
6
82 THE DEFENCE OF THE GREAT WALL
some three years ; then they go back to civil life, where first they settle down. In those celibate dormitories is nothing of home comfort, and much of vice. The Chinese had a nobler plan, and encouraged a race of warlike farmers, who laboured with plough and sickle, but took their turn at shouldering the spear and standing ready to light the beacon. They needed little pay, but supported themselves by their own labour ; they lived no long time in unnatural separation from the society of women, but had homes of their own to humanise them and to give them their stake in the land.
There was one material resource they had, unknown to their foes — Gunpowder. This they had indeed used for centuries before in fire-crackers, but had only lately learned to employ for projecting missiles. Gunpowder, invented by the Chinese, was used by them for the harmless pursuits of peace, and only after Christendom had turned the blessing into a curse did the inventors adopt it for purposes of war. The artillery of previous ages had been on the Bow principle, when springs or weights threw arrows or stones. The Greeks had learned how to use petroleum from Baku, and the terrors of the Greek Fire were widely spread. Under the Mings the Chinese employed gunpowder to throw stones or lumps of metal — in a word they had guns and bullets, and thus had a great advantage over the wild tribes of the North. Let us now explore the official Chinese History to see how this native dynasty defended its fatherland.
The descendants of the Yuan dynasty, after being driven out of China, constantly endeavoured to regain their lost dominion. When the capital was removed to the north by Yung Lo, the Great Wall was near to it on three sides, and from that time the enemy
PUH SHOH WU I PUH KAO, HTJAN SHOH TA KIAO CHANG UAI CHOH LI.
"The bad marksman blames the drill-ground." Or, as in this case, blames the gun. The cannonicr contrived to hit about two milo? beyond the rebels he aimed at ; and lest he should be beaten, administered a ceremonious flogging to the Krupp cannon, with imprecations on its ancestors, in presence of the Governor, p. 82]
A WORD MAY MAKE A STATE AND A WORD MAY MAR IT
became day by day more troublesome. Therefore, to the end of the Ming dynasty, the defence of the Great Wall became a leading object. Beginning on the east at the Yalu River and extending westward to the Kiayiikwan, in length 3,500 miles, this long line was subdivided between numerous garrisons. The first was on the borders of Korea at Liaotung. . . . Four others were successively established, extending to Ninghia in Kansu. This Emperor, Yung Lo, was especially attentive to the defences from Siienhwafu and west- ward to Shansi ; this reach extends over high hills and deep defiles, where he established watch-towers and guard-houses connected together.
At each transit pass capable of admitting carts and horsemen, guard posts of one hundred men each were established. At the smaller passes for carriers of fuel and herdsmen with their flocks, ten men. The instructions given to the General ran thus : " At each signal station let the towers be built higher and stronger ; within must be laid up food, fuel, medicine, and weapons for four moons. Beside the tower let a wall be opened, enclosed by a wall as high as the tower itself, presenting the appearance of a double gateway, inner and outer. Be on your guard at all times with anxious care." Such were the commands of the Emperor.
Tongking being subdued in the South, the Chinese acquired cannon and small arms, and the Emperor established an army corps called the Shen Ti, equipped with the Weapons of tfie Gods. The cannon were made of hard and soft copper mixed,1 others of soft iron, the latter preferred. Some were mounted on wheels, others rested on tripods ; but, on the whole, they were
1 Does this mean Bronze, " hard copper " being tin from near Tong- king ?
84 THE DEFENCE OF THE GREAT WALL
employed for defensive warfare, and so were specially useful at the Wall. Five cannon were mounted on the tops of certain mountains, and later on were placed at other points on the Wall.
Such great importance was attached to these, that their very existence was long concealed from the enemy, just as modern Powers try to keep secret their submarines or aeroplanes. Thus in the fifth year of Hsiian Te, the general in command of the North-East Division was cautioned to use great discretion in employ- ing Divine Weapons — " they must not be lightly given out."
Despite the new resources, the defensive works needed renovation about 1436 A.D. under Chen T'ung. The Censor Chu Shun recommended repairs of the Border Defences, and the general in chief command, Tan Kuang, advised that the repairs should begin from the Dragon Gate and extend to the Black Cavern Pass, a stretch of 550 li, in which the work was an undertaking of extreme difficulty, and that reliance should be put on towers and forts rather than on walls and trenches : the Emperor agreed and authorised the building of Purple City, forts, and signal stations, a total of twenty-two new stations on that reach. At Ninghai, General Shih Kao reported that all his guards lay beyond the river, and eastward there were no effective works of defence for some distance. It is not surprising that in the next reign, under Ching T'ai, the border troubles increased, and cries for support multiplied. Tartar chiefs invaded the provinces, and there was not a peaceful year.
In the first year of Ch'eng Hua, the general at Shwei K'ow reported that while to guard 300 miles he had twenty-five regimental camps, yet each contained really only 100 or 200 men. Obviously one man
WAITING FOE THE BATTLE BEFOBE WHETTING YOUR 8WOR.D
cannot protect 100 yards of frontier, night and day. Three years later the pressure became acute at the western end, under a chief named Manchuin. The troops succeeded in deflecting him northwards, but his people occupied what became henceforward known as Manchuria, whence constant attacks were delivered. So Inspector Yii Tzu-chuan erected many new forts. By the seventh year, however, the Tartars effected a lodgment within the loop of the river region, and could not be expelled for many years. Ch'eng Hua rose to the occasion, raised a large army on the land-grant principle, and gradually expelled the Tartars from the River Loop, then establishing military-agricultural colonies along the north-western frontier, and protecting it by a new Wall. Further, he threw out a new Hami garrison beyond the end of the Wall, providing it liberally with fields, cows and seed grain. We find, too, that he reformed the old practice of impressing horses for the cavalry, and paid fair prices, thus con- ciliating the farmers, while the soldiery was constantly drilled, even in wind and rain.
Under Chia Ching a further advance was made, and detached forts were thrown up outside the Wall, while large numbers of cannon were cast : at first these were known as Ta Chiang Chiin, Great Generals ; but they became known more popularly as Fo Lang Ch'i, Foreign Weapons. This was the time when Europeans first found their way to China by sea, and when their ships introduced to the Chinese the improved Western ordnance.
In the reign of Hung Chih, twenty-fourth year, the Censor Ch'en Hao reported that the enemy had thrice invaded Shansi, and that a million soldiers had
86 THE DEFENCE OF THE GREAT WALL
perished, while 600 millions of taels had been spent, without " one inch of benefit." He advised an enormous levy and a decisive battle to regain the River Loop.
This apparently was the time when the defences along the Great Wall were most fully developed. The frontier must then have been protected by fully 20,000 forts, with some 10,000 signal towers, where solitary sentries watched for the approach of any foe. Such a line of buildings might well amaze the wild horsemen of the plains.
In the reign of Wan Li, troubles became acute again. The Tartar chief An-hua pierced the Wall at Kupeikou and invaded Chihli, the generals not daring to give battle, and his ravages were repeated in suc- cessive years. Fresh artillery was cast, and the arrival of Portuguese ships gave them cannon of unusual size, which were called after the foreigners, Red Heads. These were twenty feet long, weighing three thousand catties, the balls being able to batter down city walls. So much valued were these that a later Emperor gazetted them as Great Generals, and sent officers to pay them divine honours.
These were supplemented by more handy weapons, all with quaint titles : Flying Thunder, Fiery Wild Beast, Divine Mortar, Horse Killers, Invincible Hand Guns, Goose Bills, Seven Eyes — was this a revolver or Hotchkiss ? 1000-li guns, Double-headed, Quick-firers, Fire-wheels, Nine Dragons, etc. These are nearly as curious as Drakes, Culverins, and other Western names.
With the arrival of the Jesuits, the Emperor ob- tained men of culture and science ; he therefore em- ployed them to found cannon, and Western artillery was soon mounted along the Wall. Yet the Chinese had no trained artillery-men, and the results were not
A GOOD GEITERAL HAS NO BAD SOLDIEBS
very successful. More to the point was a very old device : the iron chariots, long employed for transport, were now converted into military machines, and driven against the foe with terrible success.1
Nevertheless the pressure from without was constant, and the generals gradually neglected the line of the Wall, professedly concentrating on protecting the Im- perial Tombs and the gates of the capital. That the Wall was held was due, the History says, rather to good luck than to valour. When the Chinese them- selves rose in rebellion in many parts, a Manchu chief easily established himself within the Empire. One band of rebels sacked the capital, whereupon the Emperor slew his daughter and himself. After a period of chaos, the Manchus declared themselves Emperors, and made good their claim. From that moment little reason remained for defending the Wall ; the Northern invaders ruled on both sides ; and it became a relic of the past for most o^its length. Only at the west, where the wild Turcomans of the desert ranged abroad, regardless of kin with their brethren who had conquered the Land of Promise, was it needful to keep up garri- sons and maintain the Barrier in good repair. But since the might of Russia has restrained these nomads, the whole problem of defence has been utterly altered ; and China at present is preparing first to assert her supremacy in the East by a Mongol-Monroe doctrine, then, perhaps, to terrify Europe into erecting a Great Wall to shut off the menacing myriads of the Yellow Race.
Here, then, we have had a glance at the military
Fighting chariots had been commonly used under the Chou dynasty, long before Chin Shih Huang's time. But they suddenly went out of use.
88 THE DEFENCE OF THE GREAT WALL
efficiency of the Great Wall in its last and palmiest days. Though it may have fallen into disuse of late, there is here one of the oldest stretches along the line of the original feudal state of Chin, the Savoy whence grew up the united Italy of China. Let us now traverse this section : the Loess Loop in the Midlands.
OX TAH,, BABBIT FACE, Barks like dog, will eat any man who comes along, lives In Floating Jade Mountains.
WHEN THE MANTIS CATCHES THE CICADA HE DOES NOT KNOW THAT THE ORIOLE IS JUST BEHIND
CHAPTER VIII
THE LOESS OR RIVER LOOP, IN OLDEST CHINA I LAND OF DRY FOG I BLACK DOG'S DIARY
THE Hwang-ho is the second most important river in the land, and is popularly styled " China's Sorrow " ; the reason for which soon developed itself. Hardly were we across its uncertain flow before we found the landscape obscured by a Dry Fog,1 enveloping the whole region. When this settles, it does not coat hedges and herbage with refreshing moisture, such as makes Ireland an EmeralcTSL§le, but with a "ginger powder," as the Chinese call the yellow dust, ground to the tiniest particles by the wind. So fine is it that it will sift through the veriest cracks, even into the protected portion of cameras, dry-fogging the plates, or also into the delicate adjustments of the scientific in- struments. The Dry Fog produces a dull twilight, like the light on the planet Neptune : a dim and dreary world. This dust has created the fertility of Northern China, and has converted the Hwang-ho into its scourge.
Transportation of dust by the wind is no specially Chinese method. When Vesuvius first burst again into
1 Chang Kai, who lived about A.D. 100, studied magic and managed to raise a Fog 7 li in diameter, for which uncanny performance the Emperor threw him into prison.
89
90 THE LOESS OR RIVER LOOP
activity, the dust transported by the wind sufficed to bury Pompeii. On the uplands of the Andes there are large mounds of sand which are being slowly but steadily blown across country by the prevailing winds, and which assume the form of crescents. On a far smaller scale, every resident near a low sandy coast knows how the dunes are formed by the sea-breeze blowing the sand inland. Now the centre of Asia has inexhaustible supplies of sand and dry earth, where there is no moisture to cement it into a hard surface. It also has a large supply of wind, which appears to come down in the middle of the continent like a colossal down-draught in the middle of a big public hall. It was some of this dust-laden wind that greeted us on the right bank of the Hwang-ho ; water acts on Dry Fog as on witches, and stops it going further. But as the wind drops, so does some of the dust it conveys, and so the rocky soil gets coated over with dust from afar. This process has gone on for a few millenniums, and the result is that the yellow dust is occasionally a thousand feet deep. It has embedded all sorts of decaying vegetation, and common sense would suggest that it must have embedded villages and even men, now and again, in a raging dust-storm.1 But while the Sahara, also swept by dust-laden winds, gets no rain and remains sandy, Northern China gets plenty, and the rain not only lays the Dry Fog, but hardens it into earth again. Thus the whole of Northern China, as far as the Hwang-ho, is covered deep with yellow earth, or Huang-t'u, as the natives call it, though the Germans have taught the Western
1 " I saw a dust-storm at Kueichow which lasted for seven hours, burying some hovels and much agricultural country, and even producing a meta- morphosis of the rocky bed of the Yangtze." — Bird Bishop in "The Yangtze Valley and Beyond," John Murray, London.
iBH&JB Jft * » •& ft © Jfc
BAIN AND DEW ABE MERCIES, SO ABE ICE AND FROST
world to call it Loess. The canyon-like sunken roads, which appear to have been washed out, have in reality been blown out. We walked in one such in dust a foot deep, and a brush of wind dispelled any doubt as to how the roadway was deepened.
Now, for agricultural processes, three things are needed by the farmer — seed, fertile soil, water. The soil spreads thickly over the surface, is fertile, and, as it is being constantly renewed by a top-dressing brought by the wind, is constantly fertile. The water question is entirely separate in China, whereas in Egypt the annual top-dressing is brought from Abyssinia by the Nile water, and is spread in fluid form with very little trouble to the farmer. In China the water is furnished by another department of Nature, the clouds. When these work regularly, the soil is moistened, and the crops are amazingly prolific. So much is this the case that trnV District was settled early, and is the very oldest part of China. Indeed, because its prince was the lord of the Yellow Earth, he took the title Ruler of the Yellow, Huang Ti. And this remains one of the Imperial titles to the present day.
Now comes in the Hwang-ho. This river, having started from the Sea of Stars and wandered about in the north, comes on to a soil of this mere dusty forma- tion. Of course it cuts through it easily, and leaves the banks nearly vertical, as often happens in sandy forma- tions. But it takes up an enormous amount of the soil it displaces, and flows on charged with yellow mud, like the Nile, the Mississippi, the Po. As the slope to the ocean is very slight, this mud always tends to settle and raise the bed. In much of the lower course the bottom of the bed is above the level of the country
92 THE LOESS OR RIVER LOOP
around, and the banks have to be built up with millet- stalks to confine the water. This is a difficulty with all this kind of river ; but the floods caused by the Po, or even by the leve'es of the Mississippi bursting, pale into insignificance alongside those caused by the Hwang- ho. To say nothing of frequent minor floods, it has changed its course ten times within the period of history, and debouched into the ocean at many points separated by three hundred miles. Even to the end of its course it retains enough mud to discolour the ocean, which on the coast is therefore called the Yellow Sea. As it is silting up the Gulf of Chihli, and has a bar of mud across it some eight miles up, another huge burst is quite imminent. A few Dutch engineers, familiar with the problem of rivers flowing much above the land-level, might manage to avert the calamity, but the native engineers prefer to pocket the appropriations —not to dredge, nor pump from without, but merely tinker with the banks.
Since beginning the third section of the journey along the Wall, the mountains have yielded the land- scape to a great elevated plain, where for miles and miles the Boundary may be seen stretching off in graceful curves towards the west. The plateau is intersected by numerous canyons with vertical sides, cleft down by rivulets or rivers. On a small scale the same phenomenon is seen in the Blue Mountains of Australia. For scores of years these barred all access to the interior, though low-level canyons wound in, and then terminated abruptly where streams plunge head- long down hundreds of feet. But the Australian mountains are of hard rock, while the Chinese plateau is simply compressed dust. Occasionally the sides of the canyons are in long terraces, corresponding to various heights of the watercourses. Into the faces of
*»
WATER MAY RUN IN A THOUSAND CHANNELS, BUT ALL RETURNS TO THE SEA
these the villagers dig, and get excellent cave-dwellings, while stairs are easily carved from one level to another.
An instance of the water difficulty we found at a hamlet called the Wolf Sleeping Ravine. This is on the side of a hill four miles from Chingpien Hsien. The villagers depend on a well more than five hundred feet deep, and are not too fond of drawing water from its cool recesses. " Mr. Vermilion," for all people here belong to the Chu or Vermilion family, " will your honour be so gracious as to deign to bestow a drop of water on your insignificant visitor ? " In a general way this would gain a quick response, but here it depends which way the request is proffered. The villagers will hand out food readily, but the water is only drawn every three or five days, and if supplies on the surface are running low, mey<will not anticipate the regular day for a chance traveller.
In districts of this kind, where water is scarce and sand or loess is plentiful, the builders of the Great Wall had quite new problems to encounter. Where should they build, what sort of foundation could they secure, what sort of rampart should they erect ? The engineers traced a line from the river to the river again, like an in- verted bow. And strangely enough, unlike the engineers east of the Yellow River, these made the Wall follow the line of the least natural resistance. Finding that the dust drifted against it and sloped up on the desert side, they laid out a second wall behind, and in very wind-swept stretches even a third.1 Not only so, but they sunk
1 These three ramparts are not to be confused with the walls built by the three dynasties Chin, Sung, and Ming. The walls built by the First Emperor and in the time of the Sungs have disappeared. The remains now visible are the work of Yii Su Aliu.
94 THE LOESS OR RIVER LOOP
a moat, its width and depth being equal to the height and width of the Wall, walling it on sides and bottom to try to make it water-tight. Having thus settled their direction, they built sometimes on the style pre- valent in the East, but more often by scarping the natural formation. The fabric was either erected or cut out. For long stretches the natural state of the loess formation admitted of its being simply hewn down in the shape of a wall. They split the soil down verti- cally, and then veneered over with brick or stone. If the levels were not convenient for this, a wooden frame- work was erected, soil excavated from the moat, watered and rammed into the casing, which was presently removed and set up further on for another filling, while the rammed earth was cased with brick to protect it from the weather. This style of building houses is still practical in these parts. It has been sneeringly said that the Wall in Shensi and Kansu is only a heap of hard mud ; but if mud will do to keep people out, why not use it? Earthworks were often good enough for the Romans, and are often good enough for European and American fortresses. Even now, after long neglect, when our men measured the ruins, the remains were found in many places over 15 ft. high, nearly 15 ft. thick, with towers 35 ft. square at the base, and rising 30 ft. This would be awkward to climb over at any time, but when men are waiting on them with some- thing humorous like boiling oil for a welcome, they would seem to furnish a good defence.
The action of the rain had been rather exciting just before our arrival. Two days before we reached Ning- tiao-Liang, enough fell to sweep away a large flock of sheep, with the shepherds. Just west of the Level Village of the Li family the innkeeper tried to detain us with tales of the sudden rises ; but we took these to be
A SUPERB VIEW OF THE GREAT WALL ASCENDING FROM THE LOFTY HWANG-HO LU PASS.
p. 94]
A CROW IS BLACK THE WORLD OVER
of the Lie family. When we reached the brink of the flood, the usually quiet stream was a wild, tempest- uous rush of whirls. On the shore we tarried to await the subsidence of the waters, and after half an hour a native waded over. Him we at once engaged to lead our mountain mules over the ford, and in a few minutes the whole caravan was safely over. Not too soon : swirling down the narrow channel between the steep rocks came a fresh volume of water quite four feet high, sweeping everything before it. To note that despite such torrents the line of the Great Wall lies high and distinct, is to conceive great admiration for the engineers who planned and built so well.
Here the top-dressing of dust was thin, and we saw the bare rock, but south-east of Ching Hsien we found a mountain called the Wutai Ae, the Five-terraced Rambling Hill. Only a few families inhabit it, for the loess is here a thousand feet thick, and will not retain water. Going down the hill to fetch a pail of water does not commend itself to Chinese Jacks and Jills when the distance is some miles ; so they prepare water-vaults. On the hardest parts of the slope they dig pits scores of feet wide and deep, and ram the exposed surface to try to make it water-tight. Trenches are arranged to lead as much water as possible into the cisterns. But they have a prejudice against mere surface-water, and to clarify it they collect all the manure of cattle, sheep and pigs, which they blend with the contents. When well brewed it is used for drinking, and has a smooth, oily flavour, as of a decoction of hemp.
Here and there we found rock underlying the soil. The bedrock is mostly sand, sometimes a grey shale
96 THE LOESS OR RIVER LOOP
that is black when newly fractured. Hard sand, varying to soft sandstone, is found. Conglomerate occurs. The wild vegetation is not plentiful nor varied. The Willow- tree is the only common one. Indeed, Yulinfu literally means " Elm- wood Prefecture " ; but elms are certainly not the commonest trees. That name must have been given when the country was different, i.e. before the Ordos Desert had covered so much of the land. Willows alone can stand the sand well. Grass grows, with bushy Juniper and scrub-like American Sage brush ; the natives can get fuel out of this, but no timber. Yet the Ordos plant gardens, and find that when tended they will yield. No afforestation is done, though it might be thought the deep roots of trees would get nutriment when the surface is bare, while the foliage might attract more rain and keep it from dashing away in devastating torrents.
With the flora thus scanty, the fauna are not numerous. Rodents are well represented ; the Kan- garoo-rat, or Jerboa, suggests by its appearance that it is an evolution due to the appearance of the Wall— a high obstacle demands high jumping powers, and only those rats which developed kangaroo-like legs could survive. Our scientific friend Mr. Arthur de C. Sowerby possesses several specimens of these " com- pensated rats " ; indeed he is the discoverer of the Dipus sowerbyi. Another local curiosity is the dwarf Desert Hamster. This has not long legs, and so has to ascend the Wall by degrees ; as the Wall is not well stocked with vegetables, the thrifty Hamster has de- veloped two pouches in his cheeks to carry his lunch for the expedition, usually in the form of millet or small seeds. The " sage-brush " found among the sandhills is veiy valuable, for the seeds from this plant form the staple diet of our little four-footed friends Desert
THE JERBOA (KANGAROO RAT).
THE DESERT HAMSTER.
p. 96]
Drawn by Arthur de C. Sowerby.
-gm^^wnM^ 97
IN THE PRESENCE OF A DWARF DON'T USE SHORT WORDS
Hamster, Meriones and Jerboa. Birds belonging to the Finch family also depend upon these seeds for their daily food.
In this region are to be found five other animals which carry lunch in their cheeks, whether in imitation of the Desert Hamster, or to compete with it in climbing the Great Wall, these curious and most in- teresting little creatures, mammalites, are silent. Their names deserve advertisement in a book on the mammoth masonry of Chin : Striped Hamster, Common Hamster, David's Squirrel (Sciurus JDavidi), Chipmunk and Micromys speciosus, which has very small pouches.
The natives here in Oldest China speak of wild pigs, but these did not present themselves to us. Antelopes by the score were often seen pasturing on the ramps of the Wall. As for birds, they abounded, the magpie being peculiarly in evidence. Among the birds seen may be. mentioned the red-tailed thrush, crested lark, plovers, geese, ducks, cranes, doves, swallows, wagtails, fly-catchers, wild pigeons and sacred cranes.
As for snakes, the traveller meets at Yulin two kinds : a brown one, the other a vivid green with a row of bright red patches on either side of the neck getting smaller and smaller until they disappear near the tail. There are also two species of lizards, one of which is found pretty generally over the whole of North China. The other is found only in the Ordos, and is purely a sand-inhabiting reptile. There is a species of toad prettily marked which inhabits the sandhills, while at least two species of frog are to be found in the streams near Yulin, in which water are also at least four species of fish.
Insects are plentiful, especially beetles. We have
7
98 THE LOESS OR RIVER LOOP
often observed their antics with interest. There are four black varieties which infest the sand. Their nightly wanderings leave a network of pretty chains, their tracks, all over the sand-hills. These beetles form the sole diet of the hedgehog, and this prickly fellow seems to thrive on the hard-shelled creatures, for he is laden with fat and is most unpleasant to skin.
The most remarkable product of this district in this line is the Chinese Pigmies, or hairy wildmen. We heard rumours of a wild and uncivilised people living to the south in mountain forests ; a sort of forgotten people who in turn had forgotten the ways of the civilised. Unable to investigate in person these dwarfs, hairy and naked, as the story ran, we wrote to Philip Nelson, Esq., and received this reply: "When living north-east of Pinchow, 450 li, bird's way, I heard much about this wild people, who are as wild as wild can be. They have been uncivilised since the building of the Great Wall. They were badly treated, and being unable or unwilling to do the work set for them each day, numbers were thrown into the wall and beaten down like earth. Unable to stand this treatment, some escaped to the woods, where they have ever since been. Only a few are left. 1 am told they do not wear clothes and are grown over the whole body with hair like wolves. Smaller than the common run of people, they are shy and run when anybody ap- proaches them. There are also dwarfs living near here. I saw a married woman three feet tall." Having seen the pure pigmies in our explorations in the Forest of the Eternal Twilight in the heart of Africa, we had a great desire to visit the Yellow Pigmies, and hope to later.1
1 See "A Yankee in Pigmy Land/' by Dr. William Edgar Geil.
& ft % & ^ m g
HE WHO HAS SEEN LITTLE, MABVELS MUCH
99
While forced labour did not wreck the reason ot the labourers who piled up the Pyramids, or the Hebrews who worked for Pharaoh, or of the Israelites who slaved for Nebuchadnezzar, or of the Jews who toiled at the Colosseum, doubtless there was terrible suffering when these vast fabrics were erected ; the indignant workmen must have revolted under the lash, some may have lost their reason, others have broken away into the forest or into the desert. We have no doubt that men fled from the hard, harassing^laj)our on the Rampart that grew like a rampired rock ; and caught where they dare not emerge, there was this left : to live the life of vultures and night-nurtured vipers that eat in ambush. That habit still holds them.1 The following from the Manchester Evening News seems too good to omit :
A LESSON TO WORK-SHYS. — An instructive moral may be drawn from the discovery of a pigmy race in Central China by Dr. William Edgar Geil. The an- cestors of the pigmies, Dr. Geil declares, fled to the mountains to escape the curse of labour in the shape of assisting in the task of building the Great Wall of China. Whether or not they were justified in acting thus does not concern us now, but the fact remains that the present representatives of the race have de- generated into hairy pigmies living in a state of savagery. This Awful Example should be a warning to those people in civilised communities who, blindly refusing to recognise the blessings of labour, pine for a life of ease and idleness ! "
1 "Sang Wei Han, who lived 946 A.D., was a great minister but very short of stature. He was a dwarf. On one occasion he stood in front of a mirror and said, ' One foot of face is worth seven of body.' . . . He had a long beard, and was so fiercely ugly that the ' sight of him made people sweat even in midwinter ! ' "
100 THE LOESS OR RIVER LOOP
Revenons a nos moutons, to first-hand observa- tion. As a sample village let into the perpendicular loess, take Wanyin Chien. Our party contains not only Pale Faces but some yellow servants, a girl-faced boy, and a " Black Dog." The last mentioned kept a diary, and an extract may be welcome :
" After passing through a town there was the Yellow River. We went ahead to cross the river. When on a high bank we could see a dead man lying in the water. The corpse faced upward, and stopped in a cleft of the rock, where it bobbed up and down with the motion of the water. The body looked as if it had been blown up with the wind. Truly, truly hard to look at also. . . .
" We went forward to every hamlet and village just at the time the wheat was ripe and in full ear, until we came to Wanyin Chien and stopped ; and directly it was the Sabbath. Before we arrived here it was one piece of sandhill land. If the wind rose big, the roads were hard to find. The original men of the place plant a tree for a sign. Wanyin Chien is near the Long Wall. The towers, although ruined somewhat, are not much destroyed. Every li they are arranged one seat after one seat. We had worship on the side of the hill. The name of the inn was the ' Ten Thousand Flourishing Inn.' The men-mouths of the Inn-Lord were very many and the place fiercely dirty, so we all slept on the roof of the mule-house. When the Sabbath was past on the next day, we arose on our journey. ... I asked the governor of the Inn about the Long Wall. He made answer, * Chin Shi Huang without doctrine compelled the people to build it. He walked his horse and examined the boundary. Afterwards there was the husband of the Meng Chiang woman. Because he was building the Wall, he was compelled to die in it. The Meng Chiang woman, weeping for her husband, moved heaven and earth. The Ten-Thousand-Li-Long-Wall, with one cry, was wept down. These words are without evidence.'"
BLACK DOG AND THE GIRL-FACED QUIN.
DR. WILLIAM EDGAR GEIL's CARAVAN BETWEEN SUCHOW AND KIAYUKWAN. p. 100]
BRINGING UP A SON WITHOUT TEACHING IS JUST LIKE BRINGING UP
A MULE
This final comment of the Black Dog will win approval.
In this village, untouched by civilisation, ignorant of camera, where a photograph of a beautiful young lady affrighted the beholders, many interesting legends about the Wall were gathered, e.g. Chin, borne trium- phantly across the Empire on his horse of cloud, stamped thrice every li, and on each crushed spot sprang up tower ; and to this day, instead of the expression " Do it quickly," one hears " Do it on horseback." Chin was a broken, bad, rotten man. The Wall was erected in one day, being 80,000 li long. It was ruined when one woman gave a scream, and it collapsed from the sea to Tibet. There were eighteen Suns when Chin built ; the men were kept working so long that grass had time to grow in the dust which lodged on their heads. The men worked so long that they fell asleep and were buried ; when they awoke they were ancestors. Chin had mammoth shovels that threw up a li of wall at a scoop ; the men were twelve feet tall and broad in pro- portion ; nowadays men are small and could not build the Wall.
John Gwadey, Esq., furnished us the popular version of the ancient legend of The Wonderful Whip of Chin, or, as he calls it, " The Magic Whip." We will quote John Gwadey 's words :
A certain god up in heaven looked down and saw the people were being killed by the King and thrown into the Wall, because they could not get the work done. So he pitied the people and came down from heaven with a Magic Thread, which he gave the work- men to put about their wrists. It gave them great
102 THE LOESS OR RIVER LOOP
strength, so that when the King came along he was surprised how fast and well the work was done. In- quiring the cause, he found the workmen wearing the Magic Thread. So he took all these Magic Threads and out of them made a lash for his whip, which there- upon became more wonderful still. With the woven Magic Threads it had great virtue. With it he could remove mountains or make the Yellow River stand back for his men to build the Wall. Indeed, when he wanted to run the Wall into the sea he simply swung his whip and a mountain tumbled into the sea and the Wall was built on it.
Gwadey went on to say that Chin's horse was white, and could fly with its legs as well as if it had wings.
We asked a birth-native, " Was Chin a good man ? " He replied, " He was a King. Look into the books ; if the books say he was a good man, then he was a good man."
Not far away is Yulin, to the north-east. Yulin, we might point out, is the great mule mart of the North. About the town and surrounding country cling many legends. Indeed, the folk-lore in the section between the Yellow River and the Christian city of Siaochao is as prolific as in charming Shetland — of a vastly different sort, of course. Seventy li west of Yulin is a natural stone bridge spanning a branch of the Wuting-ho. The water, after passing under the arch, plunges down to the river-bed below, forming a very pretty waterfall. The natives say that in this bridge was a mysterious room where the hermit of the Wuting- ho hid valuable treasure. From the secret chamber ran an eyelet to the top of the bridge. And into this wee opening the people of the district continually poured oil which fed a magic lamp and kept it burning perpetually.
GRANARY AND SCHOOL IN SIAOCHAO THE CHRISTIAN CITY.
-p. 102]
THE ONLY GATE IN THE CHRISTIAN CITY.
wn tu **
A BRAVE FATHER BREEDS BRAVE SONS
Many attempts had been made to find a secret door, which was said to furnish entrance to the heaps of gold stored in the room of the hermit. It had long been prophesied that some magic word would open the way to the treasure. A vagrant fellow bethought himself to practise on the room. He tried various words, and one evening, to his amazement, the bolts slowly released themselves and the stone door mysteriously opened. Now he had taken the precaution to take a grain-bag with him. When the light of the lamp fell upon untold treasure he leaped in with a muttered shout of joy, filled the bag and descended the stairs to the door, only to find it closed in his face. Doomed to die of starvation, he fell to serious thinking, and, concluding that covetous- ness had closed the door, he emptied half the gold and gems. But no, the word failed to work. Then more gold was flung out of the sack, and still the magic was not in the word. At last he took one shoe of silver, and the word was with power ; the door opened and let him pass, and as mysteriously closed again, never more to be opened, for the gods carted off the treasure to prevent men destroying themselves. Moral, beware of covetousness !
To Oldest China, local legends say, came Fu Su, the eldest son of the First Emperor, who, because he refused to acquiesce in the burning of the books, was banished to the North, where he aided in directing the building of the Great Wall. He was murdered immediately after his father's death by command of Li, the Chancellor, that his younger brother might succeed to the throne. The building of the Wall was as good as a jail for the punishment of offenders. On not a few occasions the Only First deported dishonest judges to the North,
104 THE LOESS OR RIVER LOOP
condemned to labour on the Rampart as an expiation for their sins.
Far away towards the west we stopped at a hamlet of four houses, known as the Water Cave Ravine. Here we patronised the Inn of Increasing Righteous- ness, kept by a boniface called Happy Son of Move- ment. This mine of folk-lore produced corroborative statements as to the giants of Chin's day. " Oh yes, I know the men were over ten feet high ; the old men say so, and I have seen the bones in the wall, four feet long below the knee." The truth of this guaranteed, for Happy Son is clean, cheap, a widower, a goat-herd, he does not shave, and he worships seven ancestral tablets.
These bone stories awakened in us an interest in the Anaks of history. As a result, we fell upon the Chinese historical records, and found mention of men of height and might, concerning which narratives we have no doubt, save only that a few additional inches may have been added in some instances to their stature to intensify the native imagination.
Shih Tien Tse, high minister of Kublai Khan, with a voice like a bell, stood 8 ft. high ! In 297 A.D. lived the famous Mu-jung Huang, 7 ft. 8 in. ... Mu-jung Hui, 268 A.D., 8 ft. high. . . . 336 A.D., Mu-jung Tse, 8 ft. 3 in. ... 319 A.D., Mu-jung Tsun, fond of books, 8 ft. high. "Sinwad
The History often speaks of strong men. One such was the giant Chu Hai, a man of prodigious strength, who was sent as an envoy to the Court of Chin. The Emperor threw him into a den of tigers, whereupon Chu's hair stood on end and he took on such a hideous aspect and glared so fearfully at the tigers that they did not venture to attack him. We also read of huge humans not only over seven feet high, but other-
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THE DOOR OF CHARITY IS HARP TO OPEN AND HARD TO SHUT
wise developed in proportion. Goliath of Gath had progeny here. Then there was the old man Huang Mei Weng of the second century B.C., who is spoken of as follows : " An old man with yellow eyebrows, who told Tung-fang So that he lived on air, changed his bones and washed his marrow, cast his skin, and cut his hair once in every three thousand years, and that he had done these things three times already ! "
These abnormally large men were provided with correspondingly liberal appetites, for they ate a bushel at a meal. We offer the legends this corroborative testimony. If the men who built the Great Wall were not giants, they, when seen at a distance and on the skyline, appeared to be of unusual size. We saw men on mountain ridges, who, by some atmospheric illusion, had every appearance of being a dozen feet tall. Often we remarked this strange phenomenon. Horses were also abnormally increased in size by some mirage-like contrivance of nature. Opinions may differ as to there being giants in the days of Chin. We are convinced that more men of exceptional size existed then than now. The appearance of many of enormous stature as we passed along, due to some freak of nature, leads us to willingly credit the ancients with the human virtue of honesty in these semi-historical legends of the giants who built the Great Wall.
In Oldest China we gathered a choice selection of local legends, showing many variants on a few themes of cruelty, love and magic. The line of the Wall was marked out not by Chin, but by Chin's white magic horse. A saddle was tied to its tail, and it was allowed to wander freely ; where it strayed, the architect followed, and pegged out the line for the builders. John Gwadey
106 THE LOESS OR RIVER LOOP
improved on this by adding that at one point the workmen could not keep up with the horse, so stopped to drink tea. A dry fog blew meantime, so that they could see neither the horse nor its footprints ; so after tea they continued in the same line as before for ten miles. But not seeing the horse yet, they became suspicious, and sent one up a hill to look out. He found the horse far away to the north-west, heading in quite a different direction. So they abandoned the last stretch, returned to the tea-camp, and built a new Wall after the horse. And to this day stands the abandoned forty li of wall to prove the story.
Hear another. Hsiian Tung was a man employed on the Wall ; but because he was not active enough, Chin had him thrown into it. His widow heard of the difficulty, and came a long way to find the body. Weeping as she went