EVEN ON THE map, where journeys fairly radiate feasibility, Shanghai and Canton looked a very long way apart. The comments of Shanghai on my project did little to bring them closer together. I was confronted once more with the ghost of Mr. Riley. Mr. Riley was a brilliant correspondent of the Times who came out to China a few years ago and was almost immediately murdered in the interior. All the way from Printing House Square to Peking people had reminded me of his unhappy fate with a monotonous regularity; among strangers to whom I was introduced it was a favourite conversational opening. In the end even Mr. Riley himself could hardly have wished more fervently than I that he had escaped his assassins.
But it is my experience that in foreign communities inhabiting more or less outlandish countries only one man in twenty is worth listening to on the subject of travel in the interior. The information of the other nineteen is often either second-hand or out of date; still more often it is both. So I went ahead with my preparations, which consisted mostly of collecting information about Communism from men whom I cannot, alas, thank publicly.
My first objective was Nanking. Early one morning, equipped1 with a small suitcase, a rucksack, and a bottle of some chemical which was said to be capable of making even the foulest water drinkable but was never given a chance of showing its worth, I left Shanghai in company with the delightful R.
R was an Englishman attached to the Nanking government in an advisory capacity. His task it was to formulate a scheme for the reconstruction of the Civil Service (at least I think that was it), and he brought to it, in default of previous experience of the Far East, a sense of humour, a quickness of perception, and a charm of manner which were the best possible qualifications for understanding the Chinese. The Nanking Government is an enlightened one, and its kingdom is already a Utopia – on paper. Whether that corner of Utopia which is R’s province will ever be transplanted from the ideal to the real I do not know; but it will not be his fault if it is not.
We travelled to Nanking in a car – an excellent and (like most of the cars in China) an American car. The journey took us two days. They were well spent.
Shanghai is at no time a likeable city, and at no time is she less likeable than in July. The heat is bad. The humidity is worse. The brow of the village blacksmith, if I remember right, was wet with honest sweat. In England to sweat is both praiseworthy and beneficial; honest sweat, like an honest penny, is earned, and to earn anything is good. But in Shanghai during the summer you do not earn your sweat, far less deserve it. It springs into being unprovoked by exertion. Your hand, as you write, sticks to the paper; and when you lift it a powerful electric fan blows the paper across the room. When you go out to lunch your thin clothes cling to your body, and at night you either court rheumatism by sleeping under a fan or insomnia by trying to sleep without it. It is an enervating kind of heat.
To our delight, R and I found that we had left the heat behind. The car ran swiftly along a good, unmetalled road beside the sea, which was decorated by junks and an occasional small island. The hired chauffeur was an excellent man. He came from Buriat Mongolia and answered to the name of Alec. He was fat, spoke always in thick, languid, and despondent tones, and appeared to be a man of character. His sense of humour was recondite, manifesting itself chiefly in the sudden, hoarse shouts of laughter with which he greeted the sight of a peasant working naked in the paddy fields.
At eleven o’clock we stopped, left the car, and followed a path over some low hills to the sea. Here there was a sandy cove, overlooked by some garish wooden huts, tenanted by a small colony of garish White Russians. Judging by the number of females in evidence, it seemed to be a matriarchy, and R and I, who were unprovided with bathing dresses, had some difficulty in both entering and leaving the sea without offending the laws of public decency. The bathe, however, well repaid the furtive and shameful skirmishes which led up to it.
We emerged feeling invigorated but very thirsty. Among the huts was one, rather more ramshackle than the rest, which proclaimed itself ‘The Beach Café’. We sat down on a kind of veranda and ordered some beer from a Chinese boy of cretinous appearance.
I don’t know why I remember that scene so well. It wasn’t that there was anything wildly funny about it. But it had an element of the fantastic just sufficiently strong to underline its complete meaninglessness. It reminded me of those symbolic problem pictures which crop up from time to time in the Academy, full of howitzers in flower-beds and skeletons in ballet-skirts and bishops neglecting their duty.
The veranda was thickly surrounded, for no reason at all, with barbed wire. There was a chicken tied to the leg of my chair with a very thick piece of black cord. The centre of the stage was occupied by a witch-like Russian lady, wearing an enormous green hat and a Cubist dressing-gown. Her companion, a small, fat man, had somehow come by a gigantic fish and the two of them, with an air of ritual, photographed each other again and again holding aloft this trophy. They used the tiniest camera imaginable.
This pair, with the tethered hen and the Chinese cretin, were the principal permanent decorations of the foreground. From time to time, however, an aged Russian, heavily whiskered but wearing only a brand new straw hat and a tattered pair of shorts, would be dragged at high speed across the veranda by a large Alsatian dog. What this piteous figure was doing, or trying to do, it was impossible even to conjecture. Meanwhile, up a bright green hill which occupied the centre of the background, there slowly crawled a procession of six priests. In their black robes, and diminished by the distance, they looked exactly like beetles. They were on their way to a mission on the summit of the hill.
When we had had enough of the warm beer and the indefinable atmosphere of this unexpected place we went back to the car. Alec was roused from the torpor into which he was able to fall at a moment’s notice, and we took the road again.
In the middle of the afternoon we reached Hangchow, famous for its silks, its temples, and its lake. I had been there two years before with the delegates to an international conference. That had been a month after the invasion of Manchuria, and I remembered the special guard which had been called out to protect the Japanese delegates, and the lurid anti-Japanese posters with which the streets had been plastered. Of that great wave of popular feeling there were now no outward and few inward signs.
The lake, set among the hills of Chekiang, is indeed very beautiful. Bridges and causeways intersect it, leading from one to another of the little islands on which rich merchants have built themselves curious and splendid houses. The principal streets in the city have been modernized, and there is a foreign-style hotel, where we established ourselves for the night.
Now began the quest for Gerald. Gerald needs some explanation. I had met him only twice in my life – once, when I was at Eton, at dinner with the Provost, and once at a week-end party in the country. All I knew about him was that he had had an extremely distinguished academic career both at Eton and at Cambridge: that he had been to Mexico: that he was supposed to have lived for a time in a Welsh cave: and that he had come out to China nine months ago to do some research work, travelling ‘hard’ class on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I knew also that during the Jehol fighting last spring he had been up to the Great Wall with the Chinese armies as Reuter’s correspondent, and that he had been arrested, though only for a short time, by the Chinese authorities behind the front line. He sounded an enterprising chap, and a potential companion for my journey to Canton; so I wanted to get in touch with him.
I knew that he had lately been living in a Buddhist monastery outside Hangchow, and R and I set out to comb these establishments for traces of an Old Etonian. In this somewhat unusual task we were greatly assisted by Mr. Hsiao, a young Chinese to whom R had a letter of introduction. He produced a car and drove it at a furious speed round the lake and out into the hills. We visited three monasteries, and drew blank at each of them. They were pleasant, silent, aimless places, standing in groves of tall trees and maintained in excellent repair by the gifts of the pious. The monks drifted about their courtyards with an air of benign detachment; visitors chattered in low voices and drank tea. At one it was admitted that there had been an Englishman staying there, who claimed that in his native country he was a member of Parliament. (This was new if rather apocryphal light on Gerald.) At another he was known, but had recently departed, leaving no clue to his whereabouts save the address of a Buddhist organization in Shanghai.
So we returned, baffled, to Hangchow, and dined with Mr. Hsiao in a Chinese restaurant overlooking the lake, across which the lights of sampans moved mazily. From a room downstairs came that sound which so often accompanies meals in China – the staccato, competitive ejaculations of a party playing the ‘scissors’ game. In this you and your opponent shoot out your right hands at each other simultaneously, the fingers being arranged in one of three postures. A clenched fist means ‘stone’; two fingers extended mean ‘scissors’; all five fingers extended mean ‘paper’. Scissors cut paper but are broken on stone, and paper wins against stone because stone can be wrapped up in paper. It is a pleasant, childish game, and the Chinese play it endlessly on convivial occasions.
Mr. Hsiao had been trained as an engineer in France, England and America. He had been trained in the best sort of way; instead of collecting a sheaf of diplomas on the strength of academic theses, he had worked as an apprentice with big engineering firms. His life in the West seemed to me to have stabilized him; he was now a very solid citizen, talking good sense, but at the same time he was rather dull. The Chinese mind is vagrant and subtle; Mr. Hsiao’s had become rather literal and slow. He spoke with affection of the English, whom he appeared to respect for the right reasons. He told us amusing stories of his first days in Birmingham, and the problems presented by the time-table of lodging-house meals. He still, he said, corresponded with his landlady.
Early the next day we were on the road again. The country grew still more beautiful. It appeared that there were more shades of green than one had realized before. The rice fields were that colour which I suppose the hymn-book to mean by ‘living green’; and between them and the dark trees clustered round a shrine or a grave was a subtly graded range of variations. The hills were better wooded than is usual in that part of China, and there was almost always a bamboo-grove or a clump of little fir trees in sight. The houses had white walls and grey bedragoned roofs; they harmonized well with the landscape. The road, which was now cobbled, often passed over stone bridges, from whose acutely humped backs only a narrow aisle of water showed in the canal between the double rank of sampans which crowded the village moorings. We overtook many buses, all crowded, and some towing trailers on which the luggage of the passengers was stacked. The fare from Hangchow to Nanking or Shanghai was only five dollars.
The bus and the road on which it runs are a new and highly significant portent in Chinese life. In the most unexpected parts of the interior you will find bus services plying regularly and on the whole efficiently. Sometimes they are operated by the provincial government, sometimes by private enterprise which pays heavily for the privilege. Save in such exceptional circumstances as prevail in Kiangsi, they are almost always run at a profit. The chassis and engine are American, the body is of local manufacture and characteristically designed with an eye rather to economy than to equilibrium. The bus service, as a Chinese institution, is both conceived and carried out on a far sounder basis than the railway. It requires a much smaller capital outlay, and therefore presents fewer opportunities for squeeze. A road is quicker as well as cheaper to build than a railway, and the Chinese talent for delay is accordingly a less operative factor. The running of a bus service, as compared with the running of a railway, is not only easier but offers more scope for individualism, and is therefore better suited to the Chinese character. Finally, in the event of political upheavals, a bus service is less vulnerable than a railway because its capital value is much smaller.
To the small farmer and the small trader – the two most important people in China – a bus is as good as a train, any day. Culturally, too, the buses must produce a considerable effect. The barriers of distance and of dialect are two of the most formidable obstacles to Chinese unity; and in the long, slow war of attrition which may one day wear those barriers down the buses are a potent weapon. They are a new thing; they have not been going long, but already they have gone far. Towns and villages which formerly knew each other only by name now exchange frequent visitors. The old, traditional distrust of the stranger is breaking down, new curiosities are being aroused, new contacts made. The buses were the best omen that I came across in China.
A more ancient and more deeply characteristic feature of the Chinese scene is the water-wheel. This represents the motive power in the irrigation system. In country which is at all hilly the fields are all at different levels, and the water-wheel is the link between each level. A chain of little wooden paddles, worked by a treadmill, forces the water up from one field to the next. I do not know how many centuries it is since the Chinese first evolved this primitive but ingenious apparatus, but I doubt if its design has altered in the course of them.
The treadmill is worked by anything up to half a dozen persons of either sex and any age. They are well worth watching. A small awning of thatch protects the whole contraption from the worst of the sun. As they pedal at the mill the men lean the upper half of their bodies on a horizontal beam. Their legs move like automata, rapidly but without haste. The contrast between the upper and the lower halves of their bodies is thus very striking. As they pedal they converse with each other and with passers-by, so that down to the waist they have the aspect of men vacantly lounging at a bar. Their faces in no way reflect the dogged yet demoniac energy of their lower limbs, which go eternally through the motions proper to a six-day bicycle race. There they hang, relaxed and unpreoccupied above, frantically active below. Their gossip drifts on the still air. The treadmill squeaks recurrently. With a soft, unheeded gurgling a few gallons of water are lifted by their infinite and patient labour two more feet above sea-level.
Whenever somebody rings and tells the servant to turn on the bath I think of the Chinese water-wheels.
1 I should do wrong to omit all mention of my visiting cards. These are indispensable adjuncts to travel in the interior of China – far more necessary than a passport. They have a mollifying effect on everyone, from the provincial Governor to the officious (and incidentally illiterate) sentry at his gate. They must bear, in Chinese characters, the traveller’s Chinese name, which comes as near as possible to a phonetic equivalent of his own. Mine is Fu Lei Ming; it means, I believe, Learned Engraver on Stone.