New forces in old China; an unwelcome but inevitable awakening

Front matter

'' 8 1 \ "

.A fr *

^0

Preface

THE object of this book is to describe the operation upon and within old, conservative, exclusive China of the three great transforming forces of the modern world — Western trade, Western politics and Western religion. These forces are producing stupendous changes in that hitherto sluggish mass of humanity. The full significance of these changes both to China and to the world cannot be comprehended now. There is something fascinating and at the same time something appalling in the spectacle of a nation numbering nearly one-third of the human race slowly and majestically rousing itself from the torpor of ages under the influence of new and powerful revolutionary forces. No other movement of our age is so colossal, no other is more pregnant with meaning. In the words of D. C. Bougler, " The grip of the outer world has tightened round China. It will either strangle her or galvanize her into fresh life."

The immediate occasion of this volume was the invitation of the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary to deliver a series of lectures on China on the Student Lectureship Foundation and to publish them in book form. This will account in part for the style of some passages. I have, however, added considerable material which was not included in the lectures, while some articles that were contributed to the Century Magazine, the American Monthly Review of Reviews and other magazines have been inserted in their proper place in the discussion. The materials were gathered not only in study and correspondence but in an extended tour of Asia in the years 1 90 1 and 1902. In that tour, advantage was taken of every

6 Preface

opportunity to confer with Chinese of all classes, foreign consuls, editors, business men and American, German and British officials, as well as with missionaries of all denominations. Everywhere I was cordially received, and, as I look at my voluminous note-books, I am very grateful to the men of all faiths and nationalities who so generously aided me in my search for information.

No one system of spelling Chinese names has been followed for the simple reason that no one has been generally accepted. The Chinese characters represent words and ideas rather than letters and can only be phonetically reproduced in English. Unfortunately, scholars differ widely as to this phonetic spelling, while each nationality works in its own peculiarities wherever practicable. And so we have Manchuria, Mantchuria and Manchouria; Kiao-chou, Kiau-Tshou, Kiao-Chau, Kiautschou and Kiao-chow; Chinan and Tsi-nan; Ychou, Ichow and I-chou ; Tsing-tau and Ching-Dao; while Mukden is confusingly known as Moukden, Shen-Yang, Feng-tien-fu and Shengking. As some authors follow one system, some another and some none at all, and as usage varies in different parts of the Empire, an attempt at uniformity would have involved the correction of quotations and the changing of forms that have the sanction of established usage as, for example, the alteration of Chefoo to Chi-fu or Tshi-fu. I have deemed it wise, as a rule, to omit the aspirate {e. g., Tai-shan instead of T'ai-shan) as unintelligible to one who does not speak Chinese. Few foreigners except missionaries can pronounce Chinese names correctly anyway. Besides, no matter what the system of spelling, the pronunciation differs, the Chinese themselves in various parts of the Empire pronouncing the name of the Imperial City Beh-ging, Bay-ging, Bai-ging and Bei-jing, while most foreigners pronounce it Pe-kin or Pi-king. I have followed the best obtainable advice in using the hyphen between the different parts of many proper names. For the rest I join the perplexed reader who devoutly hopes that the various commit-

Preface 7

tees that are at work on the Romanization of the Chinese language may in time agree among themselves and evolve a system that a plain, wayfaring man can understand without provocation to wrath.

i£b Fifth Avenue, New York City.

Part I Old China And Its People

I. The Ancient Empire . . . . . • ^5

II. Do We Rightly View the Chinese ... 25

III. Attitude Towards Foreigners — Character and

Achievements . . . . . '35

IV. A Typical Province . . . . . .45

V. A Shendza in Shantung . . ... .52

VI. At the Grave of Confucius . . . .65

VII. Some Experiences of a Traveller — Feasts, Inns

AND Soldiers ...... 84

Part II The Commercial Force And The Economic Revolution

'VIII. World Conditions that are Affecting China . loi

i, IX. The Economic Revolution in Asia . . .111

^'X. Foreign Trade and Foreign Vices . . .121

y'XI. The Building of Railways . . . .130

Part III The Political Force And The National Protest

XII. The Aggressions of European Powers . .145

XIII. The United States and China . . . .154

XIV. Diplomatic Relations — Treaties . . .165

Contents

XV. Renewed Aggressions . . . . .

^j/XVI. Growing Irritation of the Chinese — The Re-

form Party ......

'XVII. The Boxer Uprising . . . . .

»74

184 193

Part IV The Missionary Force And The Chinese Church

XVIII. Beginnings of the Missionary Enterprise — The

Tai-ping Rebellion and the Later Development ......

XIX. Missionaries and Native Lawsuits .

XX. Missionaries and Their Own Governments

XXI. Responsibility of Missionaries for the Boxer

Uprising ......

XXII. The Chinese Christians

XXIII. The Strain of Readjustment to Changed Eco-

nomic Conditions ....

XXIV. Comity and Cooperation

217 228 236

249 268

280 290

Part V The Future Of China And Our Relation

TO IT

XXV. Is There a Yellow Peril . . . • 305

XXVI. / XXVII.

Fresh Reason to Hate the Foreigner Hopeful Signs ....

XXVIII. The Paramount Duty of Christendom Index ......

320 333 351

List of Illustrations

Facing

Railway Station, Paoting-fu

View of Canton, Showing House Boats .

H. I. H. Prince Su and Attendants

A Rut in the Loess Region

Germans Building Railway Bridge in Shantung

Climbing Tai-shan, the Sacred Mountain

The Grave of Confucius

Part of the Author's Escort of Chinese Cavalrymen

Watching the Author writing in his Diary at a noon stop — A Snap Shot .....

The Bund, Shanghai .....

American Cigarette Posters on a Chinese Bridge

The Chinese Cart .....

The Old and The New ....

French Military Post, Saigon ....

German Soldiers on the Bund, Tien-tsin .

The British Legation Guard, Peking

The Temple of Heaven, Peking

Memorial Arch, Hall of the Classics, Peking

Graduating Class, Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Canton, 1904 .....

Approach to the Imperial Palace in the Forbidden City, Peking .....

Two of China's Great Men — Yuan Shih Kai and Chang Chih-tung .....

Map

Page Title '

320 /

344 370 ^

PART I Old China and its People

I

E must be dead to all noble thoughts who can tread the venerable continent of Asia without profound emotion. Beyond any other part of the earth, its soil teems with historic associations. Here was the birthplace of the human race. Here first appeared civilization. Here were born art and science, learning and philosophy. Here man first engaged in commerce and manufacture. And here emerged all the religious teachers who have most powerfully influenced mankind, for it was in Asia in an unknown antiquity that the Persian Zoroaster taught the dualism of good and evil ; that the Indian Gautama 600 years before Christ declared that self-abnegation was the path to a dreamless Nirvana ; that less than a century later the Chinese Lao-tse enunciated the mysteries of Taoism and Confucius uttered his maxims regarding the five earthly relations of man, to be followed within another century by the bold teaching of Mencius that kings should rule in righteousness. In Asia it was 1,000 years afterwards that the Arabian Mohammed proclaimed himself as the authoritative prophet. There the God and Father of us all revealed Himself to Hebrew sage and prophet in the night vision and the angelic form and the still, small voice ; and in Asia are the village in which was cradled and the great altar of the world on which was crucified the Son of God.

We of the West boast of our national history. But how brief is our day compared with the succession of world powers which Asia has seen.

Chaldea began the march of kingdoms 2,200 years before i6 New Forces in Old China

Christ. Its proud king, Chedor-laomer, ruled from the Persian Gulf to the sources of the Euphrates, and from the Zagros Mountains to the Mediterranean. Then Egypt arose to rule not only over the northeastern part of Africa, but over half of Arabia and all of the preceding territory of Chaldea. Assyria followed, stretching from the Black Sea nearly half-way down the Persian Gulf and from the Mediterranean to the eastern boundary of modern Persia. Babylon, too, was once a world power whose monarch sat

" High on a throne of royal state, which far Outshone the wealth of Ormus or of Ind." '

Persia was mightier still. Two thousand years before America was heard of, while France and Germany, England and Spain, were savage wildernesses, Persia was the abode of civilization and culture, of learning and eloquence. Her empire extended from the Indus to the Danube and from the Oxus to the Nile, embracing twenty satrapies each one of whose governors was well-nigh a king. Alexander the Great, too, at the head of his invincible army, swept over vast areas of Asia, capturing cities, unseating rulers, and bringing well-nigh all the civilized world under his dominion. And was not Rome also an Asiatic power, for it stretched not only from the firths of Scotland on the north to the deserts of Africa on the south, but from the Atlantic Ocean on the west to the River Euphrates on the east.

Altogether it is a majestic but awful procession, overwhelming us by its grandeur and yet no less by its horror. It is a kaleidoscope on a colossal scale, whose pieces appear like fragments of a broken universe. Empires rise and fall. Thrones are erected and overturned. The mightiest creations of man vanish. Yea, they have all waxed "old as doth a garment," and "as a vesture" are they "changed."

But were these ancient nations the last of Asia ? Has that

1 Milton, " Paradise Lost," Book TI.

mighty continent nothing more to contribute to the world than the memories of a mighty past ? It is impossible to believe that this is all. The historic review gives a momentum which the mind cannot easily overcome. As we look towards the Far East, we can plainly see that the evolution is incomplete. Whatever purpose the Creator had in mind has certainly not yet been accomplished. More than two-thirds of those innumerable myriads have as yet never heard of those high ideals of life and destiny which God Himself revealed to men. It is incredible that a wise God should have made such a large part of the world only to arrest its development at its present unfinished stage, inconceivable that He should have made and preserved so large a part of the human race for no other and higher purpose than has yet been achieved.

Within this generation, a new Asiatic power has suddenly appeared in a part of Asia far removed from the region in which the wise men of old lived and studied, and the might of that nation is even now checking the progress of huge and haughty Russia. But brilliant as has been the meteoric career of Japan, there is another race in Asia, which, though now moving more sluggishly, has possibilities of development that may in time make it a dominant factor in the future of the world. Great forces are now operating on that race and it is the purpose of this book to give some account of those forces and to indicate the stupendous transformation which they are slowly but surely producing.

The magnitude of China is almost overwhelming. In spite of all that I had read, I was amazed by what I saw. To say that the Empire has an area of 4,218,401 square miles is almost like saying that it is 255,000,000,000 miles to the North Star; the statement conveys no intelligible idea. The mind is only confused by such enormous figures. But it may help us to remember that China is one-third larger than all Europe, and that if the United States and Alaska could be laid upon China there would be room left for several Great Britains. Extending from the fifty-fourth parallel of latitude southward to the eighteenth, the Empire has every variety of climate from arctic cold to tropic heat. It is a land of vast forests, of fertile soil, of rich minerals, of navigable rivers. The very fact that it has so long sustained such a vast population suggests the richness of its resources. There are said to be 600,000,000 acres of arable soil, and so thriftily is it cultivated that many parts of the Empire are almost continuous gardens and fields. Four hundred and nineteen thousand square miles are believed to be underlaid with coal. Baron von Richthoven thinks that 600,000,000,000 tons of it are anthracite, and that the single Province of Shen-si could supply the entire world for a thousand years. When we add to this supply^of coal the apparently inexhaustible deposits of iron ore, we have the two products on which material greatness largely depends.

The population proves to be even greater than was supposed, for while 400,000,000 was formerly believed to be a maximum estimate, the general census recently taken by the Chinese Government for the purpose of assessing the war tax places the population of the Empire at 426,000,000. This, however, includes 8,500,000 in Manchuria, 2,580,000 in Mongolia, 6,430,020 in Tibet and 1,200,000 in Chinese Turkestan. Some of these regions are only nominally Chinese. Those on the western frontier were until comparatively recent years almost as unknown as the poles. Sven Hedin's description of those that he traversed is wonderfully fascinating. Only a daring spirit, the explorer of the type that is born, not made, could have pierced those vast solitudes and wrested from them the secret of their existence. That Hedin had no money for such a costly quest could not deter this Viking of the Northland. Kings headed the subscription and others so eagerly followed that ample funds were soon in hand. Princes helped with equipment and counsel. The Czar made all Russian railways free highways, and every local official and nomad chieftain exerted himself to aid the expedition. Hedin does not claim to give anything more than an ordered diary of his travels, together with a description of the lands he explored and the peoples he found. But what a diary it is ! It takes the reader away from the whirl of crowded cities and clanging trolley-cars into the boundless, wind-swept desert and the solitude of majestic mountains where the lonely traveller wanders with his camels through untrodden wildernesses or floats down the interminable stretches of unknown rivers, while night after night he sleeps in his tiny tent or under the open sky. The author failed to reach the long-sought Lassa, the suspicious Dalai Lama refusing to be deceived or cajoled and sternly sending the inquisitive traveller out of the country. But the expedition of three years and three days was rich in other disclosures of ruined cities and great watercourses and lofty plateaus and majestic mountain ranges. The population is sparse in those desolate wastes, and the scattered inhabitants are wild and uncouth and free.

Manchuria, however, is far from being the barren country that so many imagine it to be. It is, in many respects, like Canada, a region embracing about 370,000 square miles and of almost boundless agricultural and mineral wealth. The population, save in the southern parts, is not yet dense but it is rapidly increasing.

But in central and eastern China, the conditions are very different. Here the population can only be indicated by a figure so large that it is almost impossible for us to comprehend it. Consider that the eighteen provinces alone, with an area about equal to that part of the United States east of the Mississippi River, have eight times the population of that part of our country.

" There are twice as many people in China as on the four continents — Africa, North and South America and Oceanica. Every third person who toils under the sun and sleeps under God's stars is a Chinese. Every third child born into the world looks into the face of a Chinese mother. Every third pair given in marriage pliglit their troth in a

Chinese cup of wine. Every third orphan weeping through the day every third widow wailing through the night are in China. Put them in rank, joining hands, and they will girdle the globe ten times at the equator with living, beating human hearts. Constitute them pilgrims and let two thousand go past every day and night under the sunlight and under the solemn stars, and you must hear the ceaseless tramp, tramp, of the weary, pressing, throbbing throng for five hundred years."'

There is something amazing in the immensity of the population. Great cities are surprisingly numerous. In America, a city of nearly a million inhabitants is a wonderful place and all the world is supposed to know about it. But while Canton and Tien-tsin are tolerably familiar names, how many in the United States ever heard of Hsiang-tan-hsien ? Yet Hsiang-tanhsien is said to have 1,000,000 inhabitants, while within comparatively short distances are other great cities and innumerable villages. In the Swatow region, within a territory a hundred and fifty miles long and fifty miles wide, there are no less than ten walled cities of from 40,000 to 250,000 inhabitants, besides hundreds of towns and villages ranging from a few hundred to 25,000 or 30,000 people. Men never tire of writing about the population adjacent to New York, Boston and Chicago. But in five weeks' constant journeying through the interior of the Shantung Province, there was hardly an hour in which multitudes were not in sight. There are no scattered farmhouses as in America, but the people live in villages and towns, the latter strongly walled and even the former often have a mud wall. As the country is comparatively level, it was easy to count them, and as a rule there were a dozen or more in plain view. I recall a memorable morning. It was Friday, June 28, 1 90 1. We had risen early, and by daylight we had breakfasted, and started our carts and litters. In our enjoyment of the cool, delicious morning air, we walked for several li. Just before the sun rose, we crossed a low ridge and from its crest, I counted no less than thirty villages in front of us, » The Rev. J. T. Gracey, D. D,, " China in Outline," p. 10.

while behind there were about as many more, the average popU' lation being apparently about 500 each. For days at a time, my road lay through the narrow, crowded street of what seemed to be an almost continuous village, the intervening farms being often hardly more than a mile in width.

Imagine half the population of the United States packed into the single state of Missouri and an idea of the situation will be obtained, for with an area almost equal to that of Missouri, Shantung has no less than 38,247,900 inhabitants. It is the most densely populated part of China. But the Province of Shan-si is as thickly settled as Hungary. Fukien and Hupeh have about as many inhabitants to the square mile as England. Chih-li is as populous as France and Yun-nan as Bulgaria.

The density of China's population may be better realized by a glance at the following detailed comparison between the population of Chinese provinces and the population of similar areas in the United States :

Area

Provinces

Square mil

Hupeh,

71,410

Ohio and Indiana,

76,670

Honan,

67,940

Missouri,

68,735

Cheh-kiang,

36,670

Kentucky,

40,000

Kiang-si,

69,480

Kentucky and Tennessee,

81,750

Kwei-chou,

67,160

Virginia and West Virginia,

64,770

Yun-nan,

146,680

Michigan and Wisconsin,

111,880

Fukien,

46,320

Ohio,

40,760

Chih-li,

115,800

Georgia,

50,980

Shantung,

55.970

New England,

62,000

Shan-si,

81,830

Illinois,

56,000

Shen-si,

75.270

Nebraska,

76,840

Population

35,280,685 5,864,720

35,316,800 2,679,184

11,580,692 1,858,635

12,324,574 3,780,769

20,937,000

Kan-su,

125,450

California,

155.980

Sze-chuen,

218,480

Ngan-hwei,

54,810

New York,

47,600

Kiang-su,

38,600

Pennsylvania,

44,985

Kwan-tung and Hainan,

99,970

Kansas,

81,700

Kwang-si,

77,200

Minnesota,

79,205

Hunan,

83,380

Louisiana,

45,000

10,385,376

1,208,130 68,724,890

5,258,014 31,865,251

1,427,096 5,142,330

1,301,826 22,169,673

1,110,569

Perhaps the most thoroughly typical city in China is Canton. The approach by way of the West River from Hongkong gives the traveller a view of some of the finest scenery in China, The green rice-fields, the villages nestling beneath the groves, the stately palm-trees, the quaint pagodas, the broad, smooth reaches of the river 'reflecting the glories of sunset and moonrise, and the noble hills in the background combine to form a scene worth journeying far to see.

But Canton itself is unique among the world's great cities, and the most sated traveller cannot fail to find much that will interest him. After much journeying in China, we thought we had seen its typical places, but no one has seen China until he has visited Canton. With an estimated population of 1,800,- 000, it is the metropolis of the Empire. The number of people per acre may be less than in some parts of the East Side in New York, for the houses are only one story in height. But the crowding is amazing. The streets are mere alleys from four to eight feet wide, lined with open-front shops, so filled overhead with perpendicular signs and cross coverings of bamboo poles and mattings that they are in as perpetual shade as an African forest, and so choked with people that men often had to back into a shop to let our chairs pass. No wheeled vehicle can enter those corkscrew streets and we saw no animal of any kind save two cows that were being led to slaughter.

And the hubbub ! Such shouting and yelling cannot be heard anywhere else in the world. Our chair coolies were in a constant state of objurgation in clearing a way. Everybody seemed to be bellowing to everybody else and when two chairs met, the din shattered the atmosphere. A foreigner excites a surprising amount of curiosity, considering the number that visit Canton. Troops of boys followed us and there was a good deal of what sounded like cat-calling. But it was all good-natured, or appeared to be.

The unpretentious shop-fronts often beckon to mysteries that are well worth penetrating — tobacco factories where coolies stamp the leaves with bare feet ; tea, gold, dye and embroidery shops where designs of exquisite delicacy are exhibited ; silkweaving factories where fine fabrics are made on the simplest of looms; feather shops where breastpins and other ornaments are made of tiny bits of feathers on a silver base — a work requiring almost incredible nicety of vision and such strain upon the eyes that the operators often become blind by forty. Another curiosity is a shop where crickets are reared for fighting as the Filipino fights cocks and the Anglo-Saxon fights dogs. The Chinese gamble on the result and a good fighting cricket is sometimes sold for ^100. The attendant put a couple in a jar for our alleged amusement and they began fighting fiercely. But I promptly stopped the mglee as I did not enjoy such sport.

The river is one of the sights of China. It is crowded with boats of all sizes. The owner of each lives on it with his family, the babies having ropes tied to them so that if they tumble into the water, they can be pulled out.

Altogether, it is a remarkable city. Viewed from the famous Five-Story Pagoda, on a high part of the old city wall, it is a swarming hive of humanity. As one looks out on those myriads of toiling, struggling, sorrowing men and women, he is conscious of a new sense of the pathos and the tragedy of human life. If I may adapt the words of the Rev. Dr. Richard S. Storrs on the heights above Naples, at the Church of San Martino, on the way to St. Elmo — I suppose that every one who has ever stood on the balcony of that lofty pagoda "has noticed, as I remember to have noticed, that all the sounds coming up from that populous city, as they reached the upper air, met and mingled on the minor key. There were the voices of traffic, and the voices of command, the voices of affection and the voices of rebuke, the shouts of sailors, and the cries of itinerant venders in the street, with the chatter and the laugh of childhood ; but they all came up into this incessant moan in the air. That is the voice of the world in the upper air, where there are spirits to hear it. That is the cry of the world for help." '

1 " Address on Foreign Missions," pp. 178, 179.

II

"^00 much has been made of the peculiarities of the Chinese, ignoring the fact that many customs and traits that appear peculiar to us are simply the differences developed by environment. Eliza Scidmore affirms that " no one knows or ever really will know the Chinese, the most comprehensible, inscrutable, contradictory, logical, illogical people on earth." But a Chinese gentleman, who was educated in the United States, justly retorts : " Behold the American as he is, as I honestly found him — great, small, good, bad, self-glorious, egotistical, intellectual, supercilious, ignorant, superstitious, vain and bombastic. In truth," he adds, "so very remarkable, so contradictory, so incongruous have I found the American that I hesitate." ^

The Chinese are, indeed, very different from western peoples in some of their customs.

" They mount a horse on the right side instead of the left. The old men play marbles and fly kites, while children look gravely on. They shake hands with themselves instead of with each other. What we call the surname is written first and the other name afterwards. A coffin is a very acceptable present to a rich parent in good health. In the north they sail and pull their wheelbarrows in place of merely pushing them. , . . China is a country where the roads have no carriages and the ships have no keels; where the needle points to the south, the place of honour is on the left hand, and the seat of intellect is supposed to lie in the stomach ; where it is rude to take off your hat, and to wear white clothes is to go into mourning. Can one be astonished to find a literature without an alphabet and a language without a grammar ? " ^

J " As a Chinaman Saw Us," pp. I, 2.

* Temple Bar, quoted in Smith's " Rex Christus," p. 1 15.

It would never occur to us to commit suicide in order to spite another. But in China such suicides occur every day, because it is beheved that a death on the premises is a lasting curse to the owner. And so the Chinese drowns himself in his enemy's well or takes poison on his foe's door-step. Only a few months ago, a rich Chinese murdered an employee in a British colony, and knowing that inexorable British law would not be satisfied until some one was punished, he hired a poor Chinese named Sack Chum to confess to having committed the murder and to permit himself to be hung, the real murderer promising to give him a good funeral and to care for his family. An Englishman who thought this an incredible story wrote a letter of inquiry to an intelligent Chinese merchant of his acquaintance and received the following reply :

" Nothing strange to Chinamen. Sack Chum, old man, no money, soon die. Every day in China such thing. Chinaman not like white man — not afraid to die. Suppose some one pay his funeral, take care his family. • I die,' he say. Chinaman know Sack Chum, we suppose, sell himself to men who kill Ah Chee. Somebody must die for them. Sack Chum say he do it. All right. Police got him. What for they want more ? "

These things appear odd from our view-point and there are many other peculiarities that are equally strange to us. But it may be wholesome for us to remember that some of our customs impress the Chinese no less oddly. The Frankfurter Zeitung, Germany, prints the following from a Chinese who had seen much of the Europeans and Americans in Shanghai :

" We are always told that the countries of the foreign devils are grand and rich ; but that cannot be true, else what do they all come here for ? It is here that they grow rich. They jump around and kick balls as if they were paid to do it. Again you will find them making long tramps into the country ; but that is probably a religious duty, for when they tramp they wave sticks in the air, nobody knows why. They have no sense of dignity, for they may be found walking with women. Yet the women are to be pitied, too. On festive occasions they are dragged around a room to the accompaniment of the most hellish music."

A Chinese resident in America wrote to his friends at home a letter from which the following extract is taken :

" What is queerer still, men will stroll out in company with their wives in broad daylight without a blush. And will you believe that men and women take hold of each other's hands by way of salutation ? Oh, I have seen it myself more than once. After all, what can you expect of folk who have been brought up in barbarous countries on the very verge of the world ? They have not been taught the maxims of our sages ; they never heard of the Rites ; how can they know what good manners mean ? We often think them rude and insolent when I'm sure they don't mean it ; they're ignorant, that's all." '