IN CHINA THE wise man budgets for delays all along the line. I had expected that Chiang Kai-shek would prove inaccessible, and that it would take us at least four days to find out that this was so. Now, after only twenty-four hours in Kuling, our mission was miraculously fulfilled, and we could start on the next stage of our journey. We were jubilant.
We went down the hill that afternoon. The descent was uneventful, except that half way down we met a young man who was driving a pig up to Kuling. The unhappy creature was no mountaineer, and at last its forelegs had refused their office, though the hind ones still had some strength left in them. The pig lay prone in the gutter, squealing, while the young man thrashed it incessantly with a switch, uttering loud and angry cries.
As usual, it was a question of face, that dominant factor in Chinese life, which I can never hope to define, but only to illustrate. The young man was a cut above the coolie class, and therefore could not demean himself by adopting the obvious and only practical course of carrying the pig up the mountain slung from a pole across his shoulder. Nor could he allow himself to be defeated without a struggle by the pig’s collapse. So he made a loud noise (which always helps to give you face, as the Chinese artilleryman well knows) and flogged the pig mercilessly, though he was aware that no amount of corporal punishment would get it any further up the hill, as yet only half scaled. His face expressed a fiendish rage, but only for the sake of appearances. He was waiting for The Mediator – for some passer-by who would intervene in the strained relations between him and the pig, and effect a compromise. The whole incident was cut to a traditional pattern.
In the evening we reached the village at the foot of Lushan and got a car to Kiukiang, where we were put up for the night by a Scot and initiated into the game called Pin Pool, which dominates the billiard tables of the Yangtse Valley. Gerald, who has a fine natural eye, easily defeated the local expert, and we acquired face.
Very early the next morning we boarded a train for Nanchang. It was the most irresolute of trains. After maintaining for perhaps twenty minutes its maximum speed of eighteen miles an hour, it would suddenly lose heart and draw up in a siding for a period of introspection, during which we suffered some discomfort on account of the intense heat.
We were however partially consoled by tangible signs of Communist depredations, which grew thicker as we approached Nanchang. Quite a large proportion of the fields were uncultivated, which meant that the situation must recently have been very bad indeed. The Chinese peasant’s capacity for ‘Business As Usual’ during disturbances is, and needs to be, extraordinary. He is as nearly impervious to political conditions as the English sportsman is to climatic; both excite awe and amazement in the foreigner for the same reasons. He allows the chaos of which you read in your newspaper to affect his daily life hardly more than it affects yours. Uncultivated fields are the symptoms either of death or exile.
Then there was a recently derailed train lying on its side, and several of the wooden bridges had been burnt down and rebuilt. Not very solidly rebuilt, I thought, and a week later we heard that a hundred soldiers had lost their lives when one of them gave way beneath a troop-train. All the stations were guarded by soldiers, and on the little hills commanding them there were trenches and small pill-box forts of recent construction.
And this, you must remember, was north of Nanchang, more than a hundred miles from the main Red area in southern Kiangsi.
Nanchang itself, which was to be the base for Chiang Kai-shek’s autumn campaign, was protected as thoroughly as if it had been an advanced post. A wide circle of high barbed wire entanglements ran all round the provincial capital, and within this a new and massive city wall was being hastily constructed. Every knoll on the outskirts was crowned by one of those little forts which from now on were to become a familiar sight.
Our train was an hour and a half late. The station was crowded with troops, among whom were the only Chinese soldiers I had ever seen wearing steel helmets. They were four in number.
The railway stops short at the river on the further side of which the city lies. We crossed in hulks towed by a tug and, reaching the Bund, chartered rickshaws. I use the verb advisedly. Characters in old-fashioned novels were always said to ‘charter a hansom’. The phrase had an even more impulsive and dashing connotation than its modern equivalent, to ‘hail a taxi’, and thus ran counter to the true meaning of ‘to charter’, which is to hire in a particular and rather complicated way. To charter a hansom, in fact, does not mean what it says; to charter a rickshaw does.
Li did the chartering, and it always took hours. Himself of a fanatically economical nature, he belonged to a race with whom bargaining is a passion and to pay any price above the minimum is to lose prestige. (In China you earn as much contempt as gratitude by an over-generous tip.) Whenever we appeared, casting among the rickshaw coolies those carefully non-committal looks which betray the potential passenger, we would be instantly surrounded by a yelping semi-circle, the slender shafts of their vehicles converging on us like the spears of some hostile tribe. Li would step forward, facing pandemonium and by his adamant parsimony increasing it. For five, perhaps for ten minutes, the process of chartering would continue with the greatest animation; and in the end it would very often be necessary for us to walk away, shaking our heads more in sorrow than in anger, until three disgruntled coolies came trotting after us, their faces expressing a sulky acceptance of Li’s ultimatum.
Noise and delay are two of the chief drawbacks to travel in China, and I often used to wonder whether it was worth provoking and enduring these in their most aggravating form for the sake of a financial saving which in very few cases totalled more than a penny between the three of us. But Gerald said, and I have no doubt that he was right, that Li would lose face if we interfered with his transactions; so we gave him his head, and very soon our nervous systems became hardened to the consequences.
In the province of Kiangsi, we discovered, the rickshaw coolies do not trot, as they do elsewhere; this is probably because they have a guild powerful enough to enforce the working conditions they prefer. We proceeded, therefore, at a stately pace through the principal streets, which looked very up to date, being wide and smoothly paved with concrete subjected only to a negligible extent to the wear and tear of motor traffic.
In due course we came to a large but unprepossessing building, bearing the name of the Grand Hotel de Kiangsi, but no other trace of foreign influence.
It was the chief hotel in a provincial capital, and I suspect that it was typical. It had about six storys, built round a dark courtyard which served as entrance-hall, airshaft, and urinal. This place was infested, as indeed were all other parts of the hotel, by people who would in the West have been thought to have no business there: soldiers, relatives of the servants, coolies who had brought a message, coolies who had not brought a message, and a substantial number of persons who seemed to have decided, like the suburban housewife, to slip into something loose and have a good lie-down. We took a large and comparatively clean room without – once more, paradoxically, for reasons of face – haggling about the price.
For two nights then, and two later, the Grand Hotel de Kiangsi was our headquarters, and we came to know its sounds and smells fairly well. I am peculiarly well qualified for travel in the Far East by having practically no olfactory sense, and it is therefore the sounds that I remember best, though Gerald assured me that the smells were not less remarkable. The sounds were continuous, reaching a crescendo in the hot hours after midnight. The crash of mah jong: the urgent clamour of the ‘scissors’ game: the unendurable voices of singing girls entertaining officers on their way to the front: a gramophone with a limited repertoire of Chinese records: a bugle in the courtyard below our window, where men drilled with an air of tolerant amusement: the snoring of servants sprawled in the passage outside; and, eternally punctuating all these noises, the vigorous sound of spitting. It was not a bad hotel, but I would not choose it for a quiet week-end.
Many foreigners, when they travel in the interior of China, burden themselves with a large roll of bedding and a lot of food in tins. Gerald and I had none of these things, and never felt the lack of them. The beds in the hotels, and the k’angs in the inns, were of course no softer than the floor; but the quilt provided for you to lie on, if it could not in any circumstances have been called clean, was never as thickly populated with vermin as it looked to be on first sight. Neither of us was badly bitten. As for the food, it varied; but while there is rice there is hope, and there was always rice. Some of the meals we had were excellent.
The only real discomfort was the heat – a heat not to be kept at bay, as it is in the Treaty Ports, with a battery of electric fans and many long, cool drinks. In Nanchang, where there was no electricity, the place of the fans was taken by a primitive form of cloth punkah, divided into two sections, and having the words ‘FAIR WIND’ embroidered across it in large, erratic capitals. Very few of the people who used these punkahs can have had any idea of what the words, or even the letters, were; I often wondered how they came to be established there, and by what infallible instinct the poorer householders, whose punkahs boasted only one section, always chose the noun and not the adjective to adorn it.
In Nanchang we worked quickly and had luck. The first person we interviewed was Mr. Hsiao, who was not a member of the Provincial Government but an outsider appointed by Chiang Kai-shek as a sort of Food Controller; his mission was to effect an economic blockade of the Red Areas. He was an extremely intelligent man, and spoke good English. He told us that Communism in China was not an economic problem, as most people supposed, but a political one; far the most important feature of the anti-Communist operations was the food blockade.
Next we interviewed the Governor of Kiangsi, Mr. Hsiung. He told us that Communism in China was not a political problem, as most people supposed, but an economic one; in the course of an extensive survey of the measures which were being taken to suppress the Reds he made no mention of the food blockade. He was a small, alert man, wearing a smart blue uniform. He received us at the Yamen, in the last of many courtyards. Though the buildings were ancient, and their courts pervaded by the proper atmosphere of sleepy tranquillity, the administrative offices had an air of modernity. Telephones not only rang, but were promptly answered. There were files of Chinese newspapers, and good maps. The Governor’s car, standing in the shade of a banyan tree outside, had bullet-proof shutters over the windows which looked as if they came straight from Chicago.
Both the Governor and his Food Controller gave us a great deal of information about the Communists; such of it as we were able to confirm is summarized in my conclusions in an earlier chapter. The general impressions that I got in Nanchang were that the Red Armies were a formidable and incalculable striking force; that everyone was afraid of them; and that the measures which were being taken against them were ambitious but unreliable. We were told, too, of many schemes for the future – Utopian projects for railways, and co-operative markets, and agricultural credits. They were paper schemes, and likely to remain so; but for a province as sorely afflicted and as impoverished as Kiangsi to have worked them out even on paper was an achievement. The traveller in China finds everywhere grandiose and enlightened plans which seem doomed to remain indefinitely plans and nothing more; and after a time, perhaps, he grows impatient and sceptical of these castles in the air. This, I think, is a wrong attitude. Castles, especially in the modern style, are difficult, expensive things to build; this straining after rarely attainable civic ideals is in itself a healthy phenomenon, and must in time (for the Chinese are at heart an intensely practical people) produce some positive and tangible result. The result may be only a tithe of what was aimed at, but it is at least something.
The provincial government, though apprehensive for our safety, very kindly arranged for our journey by car to advanced posts on the anti-Communist front; we were told that we could leave Nanchang on the morning of our second day there. The interim was filled in with rather aimless activities. We walked out to the gigantic aerodrome which was being hastily constructed by forced (but paid) labour on the outskirts of the city, dodged the sentries, and inspected the ten assorted machines which were already there; they included a special bomber of Chiang Kai-shek’s, a huge tri-motor Ford. Coolies, working night and day in shifts, were levelling the field and constructing a concrete runway which would be proof against the rains. It was all very impressive, but I suspected (and later confirmed this suspicion) that aeroplanes were no more use against the Reds than they were against the bandits in those parts of Manchuria which are, like southern Kiangsi, mountainous and densely wooded.
The Governor invited us to dinner, and Li replied formally on an imposing sheet of Times notepaper. In China your calligraphy is an important clue to your social status; it serves something of the purpose of your Old School Tie in England, but is of course much better fitted to serve it. Li wrote a good hand, and as we watched him painting the delicate lovely characters on that sheet of paper with the London address we hoped that we had acquired face by conforming to a good tradition.
Perhaps we had. But the dinner was not what we hoped. The considerate Chinese had thought, mistakenly, that we should prefer foreign cooking, and at one place in Nanchang – the Chinese Y.M.C.A. – foreign cooking was rife. So we dined there off a substantial parody of a European meal and had a disappointing evening.