Part 25

But it was important not to leave these people with the impression that we had abandoned them. I had left Sên Chai’s village with the promise to return. So I went up with the Mūsô Christian boys, and spent a last night with them. The village again assembled, and we had an interesting evening. The Sên was greatly disappointed that none of the other villages would join him. But the New Year was at hand, when the clan must be unbroken. They would wait another year, and try to get the other villages to join them. On the whole, I was encouraged. When we left them we were escorted out of the village to the music of their plaintive flutes, more like a victorious than a vanquished army.

After a day or two with the Chieng Sên church, we visited the ridge to the southeast of that city, between it and Chieng Kawng. Our experience there was but a repetition of that from which we were just come—cordial receptions, night audiences, manifest interest, individual believers, anxious consultations, promises for the next year; but the tribal bond was too strong to be broken.

But Cha Pū Kaw was anxious that we should not pass by his own mountain villages on the Mê Kok. So we turned southward again toward Chieng Rāi. This, moreover, was one of those famine years, such as we have already encountered in our story, and shall encounter yet again; many people were on the verge of starvation. In places we could not get food for our own men. And famine was beginning to be followed by disease and death. This was a serious obstacle to our work.

Another serious obstacle was the use of opium, which became more prevalent the further west we went along the Mê Kok range towards Mûang Fāng. We presently reached villages where the poppy was cultivated, until, in the last village, men, women, and boys, and sometimes even girls, were its slaves. Fevers and dysentery prevail during the rainy season. These people have a very scanty pharmacopœia, and no antidotes whatever for these diseases. Opium in some form is probably their surest remedy. Many persons told me that they began by using it in sickness. As sickness recurred the habit grew, until they were fast bound in its chains. These facts largely determined the character of the instruction we gave, and made our tour a kind of anti-opium crusade. Encouraged and disappointed at every village, I was still tempted on by visions of capturing some large village that would prove a more effective entering wedge for the tribe than Cha Pū Kaw’s poor little hamlet. The six weeks so spent were at the time the most novel and exciting, as well as most arduous, of all my missionary experiences so far.

We took both the old Mūsô men as assistants, and the younger ones as carriers for our equipment. Our first day’s journey was a fair sample of what we had to do continually. In many places it would be a misnomer to speak of the track we travelled as a path. We left the plain in the morning, and it was half-past two in the afternoon when we reached the first summit. It was five o’clock when, desperate with thirst, we came upon a flowing brook. There was, then, still another hard climb before we saw our long looked-for first village ahead. And, in general, because of the habit these people have of planting their villages upon the very highest points where they can get water, the journey from one of these villages to another in plain sight, and, apparently, but a short distance away, would take hours of the hardest travel. Sometimes we would walk weary hours through rain, or through bushes as wet as rain, to visit a village; only to walk back again after sitting three hours in wet clothes trying in vain to awaken some interest in old or young.

One of the most interesting, and, at the same time, one of the saddest, cases we met was that of Mûn Kamprai, the head man of a village which clearly bore the impress of his character in the intelligence and industry of its inhabitants. From opium he had kept entirely aloof until, only a few years before this time, under the stress of a severe illness, he began to take it. The poor man now realized that he was becoming a wreck, but seemed to have no will-power left to make the effort to break away from the habit. He was much interested, however, in his two fellow-tribesmen whom I had brought as my assistants; and Cha Waw’s example seemed to afford him a faint gleam of hope. If we would stop a week and teach his people, and would stand by to aid him, he would try. If successful, he would surely become a Christian—and then his village would be the one we had been hoping for to free itself from the tribal bond, and become Christian.

The experiment was, indeed, pathetic. Removing all temptation, he began with a desperate determination to succeed. We encouraged him with human sympathy and the hope of divine aid. We pushed as far as we dared the use of a tonic which Dr. McKean had given me for such cases; and it aided him perceptibly. He held out manfully for several days. But, at last, in an evil hour, he could endure the torture no longer, and before we knew it, he had resumed the use of the drug. For two nights he had not slept. In his own expressive language, it was not his eyes, but his heart that could not sleep. Poor man! his sufferings must have been as near those of the infernal regions as it is possible to experience in the body. And then his absolute wreck of mind, and the contempt he felt for himself when he gave up the struggle as hopeless!

We spared no labour to reach the homes of these people, or their hearts. We tried to become Mūsôs to the Mūsôs that we might win them. Sometimes we had to sleep in their huts—on a floor raised two or three feet from the ground, which the dogs shared with the family, while the pigs and goats were on the ground beneath. In the centre was a raised fireplace on which the native teapot always boiled. Sleeping-mats or thin bedding lay about on the floor, and on this, before bedtime, some of the inmates would lie down and fall asleep even while listening to the conversation.—But everywhere the tribal bond was too strong to be broken.

By this time the rains had set in. The trails—and the leeches that infested them—were getting worse and worse. Soon the torrent-streams would become impassable. We must return while yet we could. Our six weeks’ wanderings we retraced in four days of constant tramping. It had been a hard trip for all of us. I myself had a touch of fever. It seemed good on reaching our camp to have once more the luxury of a chair and a table. And then to be on the sadaw’s back travelling homewards, and to meet a good mail on the way! My three-score and fourth birthday was spent in the forest, and I reached home safely on the 18th of May, after an absence of nearly five months.

* * * * *

The peninsula of Farther India is largely exempt from the terrible scourge of famine which has become almost chronic in Hindustan, its greater neighbour on the west. There the population is so numerous that the normal production of food is just sufficient to supply its needs. Even a local or a partial failure of the crops must produce distress. Siam, on the contrary, is happy in that it not only produces an abundant supply for its own people, but is a granary for the surrounding countries. The worst that has ever been experienced in Lower Siam in years of greatest scarcity, has been the necessity of checking the export of rice. The annual floods there cover the whole country, so that a general failure of crops is, humanly speaking, impossible.

In the northern states the land is higher; and considerable portions of it, being above inundation, are directly dependent upon the seasonal and local rains. But with a population by no means dense, this very diversity of the cultivated areas is a source of safety. A season of heavy rainfall which drowns the lowland rice, is apt to prove exceptionally good for the uplands. And, on the other hand, a season of light rainfall, which cuts short the upland crop, is apt to be a good season for the flooded areas. And in considerable sections of the country there is the chance that a second crop in the same season may make good the loss of the first. There is a further security also in the fact that, until communication with the coast becomes such as to make exportation profitable, the excess of fruitful years remains unconsumed in the country, to supply the need of less fruitful ones. It thus comes about that scarcity amounting to a real famine cannot result from the failure of crops in any single year. It requires two consecutive failures to produce extensive suffering among the very poor, and three to result in a real famine.

This last, however, was the case in 1892. In 1890 there was a light crop throughout the land, with less excess than usual to be stored. In 1891 the crop was lighter still. In the eastern provinces, particularly in Lakawn and Prê, there was very little rice to be reaped. Famine conditions began there long before the time for harvest. People were scattering off in squads or by families into Chiengmai and the northern provinces, begging a daily morsel. They were poverty-stricken as well as famishing. The distress led the brethren in Lakawn to make an appeal to friends in the United States for a famine fund. Quite a liberal response, amounting to several thousand dollars, was made to this call, largely by the friends of the Lāo mission. The relief was almost as timely for the missionaries as it was for the famishing people. Otherwise they scarcely could have lived through the long strain on their nerves and sympathies caused by the constant sight of sufferings which they could not even in part relieve.

The province of Chiengmai could have met its own needs until the new crop came in, had it not been for the constant draft upon its reserves to meet the demands of Lakawn and Prê. But, between high prices offered and pity for the less fortunate, those reserves were steadily drained away, until, during the latter months of the year, famine was upon us in Chiengmai, too. Bands of men from destitute villages, maddened by hunger and unable to buy food, began to roam about the country by night, or, sometimes, by day, and seize rice wherever any little remnant of it could be found. The authorities were powerless to restrain them or to keep order. The condition of the more destitute provinces can better be imagined than described.

At last the relief committee in Lakawn were asked if they could not spare us a small portion of their fund, for it seemed that their condition could not be much worse than ours. A letter from Dr. W. A. Briggs brought us three hundred rupees, but with the following _caveat_—the italics are his:

“_Wherever_ we can reach the absolutely starving, that is a place to invest. We do not pretend to relieve all the _suffering_. Now, if the need in Chiengmai, or in the district mentioned, is so great that people are actually dying from starvation, and those now living are living on such stuff as the sample enclosed (cocanut-husks, leaves, bark, etc.), _with never a grain of rice_, then I would advise you to form a Famine Committee, and go into the business as we have done. The actual starvation _must_ be attended to, _no matter where it is_. But our saddest experience is within Prê. Some one should be sent there at once.”

The scenes reported from Prê were harrowing. I will not pain the reader by dwelling upon them. One happy result followed the efforts of the brethren who went to the relief of that district. While administering to bodily wants, they preached the Gospel, making such an impression that there was a strong demand for a permanent station there—which was established the next year, with Dr. and Mrs. Briggs as pioneer missionaries.

It should be stated that, toward the last, the Siamese government sent up supplies of rice; but, because of the distance and the difficulty of transportation, not much reached the suffering people in time to help them; and much was lost in passing through the hands of so many officials.

XXXI

CHIENG RUNG AND THE SIPSAWNG PANNĀ

At the Annual Meeting of the mission in December, 1892, the broad field of Tai peoples north of the frontier of Siam was discussed, and Rev. Robert Irwin and myself were appointed to make a tour into that region as long and as far as in our judgment might be deemed wise. The tour occupied nearly five months—from January 3d to May 25th, 1893. This time we went fairly well supplied with portions of Scriptures and tracts, and a good outfit of medicine. Of quinine we carried a hundred ounces, and returned with less than twenty-five. We relied on the medicines for the welcome they never yet had failed to win for us. And Mr. Irwin had a cornet which did excellent service throughout the tour. For riding I had my big “sadaw” elephant, and Mr. Irwin had a pony; so we could exchange mounts at our convenience. I pass over the earlier portion of our route, already so often described, and the two weeks spent among the hill-tribes visited on previous trips.

The chief object of our trip was to visit, in their ancient homes, two northern tribes of the Lāo race—the Kôn and the Lû—from which very many of our parishioners in the southern provinces derived their origin. For, under conditions which lasted very nearly down to our own time, there was almost constant predatory warfare going on in this northern country—stronger states raiding the weaker, and sweeping away the entire population of the districts they overran, to plant them in their own realms. Thus whole villages, and even entire districts, in the Lāo provinces of Siam, are peopled by the descendants of such colonies of captives. We found it unadvisable to attempt both visits in the same season, and the Lû were the more accessible, living on the nearer slopes of the Mê Kông valley. We went up on the west of the river along the edge of the British territory, now known as the South Shan States, and beyond it into Chinese territory, as far as Chieng Rung;[15] then, returning, we made a somewhat wider sweep to the east of the river, through French Indo-China; finally recrossing the river at Chieng Lāp, where we struck once more our outgoing trail.

Footnote 15:

This name appears on some maps as Chieng Hung, initial _r_ in the North being generally pronounced as _h_.—ED.

After leaving Mûang Len, the utmost point of a former trip, we travelled awhile by a fine road along the summit of a ridge so regular as to seem almost like an artificial embankment, and affording noble views over the valley. At Wieng Mai, a recent offshoot of Mûang Yawng, we spent a most interesting Saturday and Sunday. Here the Prince-Governor sent to ask if he should not put up a sālā to shelter us during our stay. In the morning we preached in the market-place, and afterwards I distributed medicine and talked with the people till noon, when I had to flee away to rest under the shade of a big tree by the river. The people seemed hungry for the bread of life. I could not supply all the requests made for copies of the Scriptures.

Mûang Yawng, the older and larger city, we reached on Monday forenoon, after a two hours’ ride. An officer met us at the gate, and showed us to the sālā. When the Chao Mawm heard of our arrival, he sent for us, meeting us at the door. We had a very interesting interview, but he was not inclined to talk on the subject of religion. He told me that the city and district had been entirely depopulated in 1809 by a force from Chiengmai, when “nothing was left behind but the ground.”[16] It had recovered itself, however, and its population was now larger than that of Lampūn. With Nān Suwan I visited the market and the Court. At the latter place I learned that the British Commissioner would arrive the next day. Knowing that everything would be in confusion, we decided to move on the next morning.

Footnote 16:

This incident is a striking illustration of the methods of warfare in those days. The expedition in question was directed against the Burmese, who had established themselves in Mûang Yāng some sixty miles or more to the northwest. On its way it passed through Mûang Yawng, where it was loyally received. But being defeated at Mûang Yāng, it fell back upon Mûang Yawng, and there gathered up all the inhabitants and swept them off to Chiengmai to prevent their falling into the hands of the enemy!—ED.

From this point on, our elephant was everywhere an object of great interest. Sometimes the people climbed trees to get a better view of him. A long day’s march brought us to Mûang Yū, picturesquely situated on high bluffs, with deep gorges running down to the Mê Lūi. Here we remained only overnight, leaving early the next morning for Mûang Lūi, which we reached about noon. That evening we had a large attendance at worship, the governor and officials remaining till after eleven o’clock. The original population of both these districts, as well as that of Mûang Yawng, are now scattered throughout the provinces of Chiengmai and Lampūn.

Next morning we crossed the beautiful stream on a raft, while our elephant took the ford. During the forenoon we came upon Captain Davis of the Commissioner’s staff, who had been sent to make a detour by Mûang Sing, and was then on his way to join his party. He was resting by the roadside, ill with fever, and was glad to get from me some quinine.

The following day, Saturday, brought us to Mûang Lūang, the largest and most important place in the valley and the southernmost of the old Sipsawng Pannā confederacy. The valley population is wholly Lû. There is scarcely a Ngīu (Western Shan) to be found east of the Keng Tung watershed. Here were the best roads we had seen anywhere in Farther India, with a real arched bridge of stone across the stream at the entrance to the city. Early next morning we were awakened by a noisy crowd about our tent, anxious to see us. It was the great market day, so, instead of attempting a regular service in camp, we chose the market-place. There, whether reading or speaking, we always had some attentive listeners.

On Monday our road lay for many miles along the summit of a low ridge on which at intervals were fifteen large villages, just at the edge of the long fertile plain, where are the rice-fields that feed the country. I never saw in all my touring anything quite to equal that row of villages. It seemed too bad to pass through so many without even stopping.

On the fourth day from Mûang Lūang we reached Chieng Rung, the limit of our northward journey. Its location is strikingly beautiful, on a high steep bluff overlooking the Mê Kōng River, which sweeps in a majestic curve about its base. It is in Chinese territory, and is ruled by a Chao Fā appointed from Yunnan. An officer from Yunnan was there at the time collecting tribute. The influence of the English was already felt there. Mûang Chê, to the west, had rebelled against the Chao Fā, who thereupon sent out an expedition which captured and brought away some three hundred families of the inhabitants. But England cannot allow border warfare to go on along her frontier. An English officer appeared on the scene, and the thing was stopped.

At Chieng Rung we were still in the midst of an area of Lāo-speaking people—an area which extended far beyond on every side. I gave a portion of Scripture to a Lû whose home was ten days’ journey northward; and others to men from as far to the east and to the west.

We had an interview with the Chao Fā by previous appointment. At the door the officer suggested that we pull off our shoes. We replied that it was not our custom, and was unnecessary. He looked very doubtful, but said no more, and we walked in. The Chao Fā received us courteously. We took him to be a man of no great strength of character, about forty years of age, and somewhat weakened by the use of opium. He asked whether we had not some antidote to enable him to stop its use. He listened attentively to our statement of the object of our coming, and said, “You are merit-makers, and that is a good work.”

When we called at the court, the presiding officer had a wise suggestion as to how we might further our purpose and establish our religion in the place—a suggestion evidently not originating with himself, but from a higher source. “The favour of the Chao Fā,” said he, “will be necessary and all-sufficient. I see you have a fine elephant. Just make a present of him to the Chao Fā. He will be delighted, and your road will be all smooth.” I told him that I was an old man, far from home, and dependent on the elephant. So I could not part with him. This same suggestion was pressed upon us several times afterwards, by the highest officials, and quite up to the hour of our departure; though its form was modified from a gift to a sale. I became at last a little anxious about the result, and was somewhat relieved when we actually got away without loss of the elephant.

I may mention at this point an incident of this trip which never came to my knowledge till thirteen years later, showing how we were providentially spared from what would have put a sudden and tragic end to our tour and to our lives. When Dr. S. C. Peoples and Dr. W. C. Dodd were in Keng Tung in March, 1907, the presiding officer of the Court told them that he had met Dr. McGilvary and Mr. Irwin on their way to Chieng Rung; that when the people of Chieng Rung first heard that some foreigners from the south were _en route_ to their capital, they planned to kill and plunder them. But when they saw that the foreigners rode elephants and were accompanied by carriers, they decided that this was probably the advance guard of a formidable army, which it might not be well to attack. And then, he said, the kindness of the missionaries so completely won their hearts, that all thought of murder and plunder was given up.

Our return was to be through the region to the east of the Mê Kōng. Its northern cities still belonged to the Sipsawng Pannā. But the rest of it was territory recently ceded by Siam to France. The governing race—the people of the plains—were everywhere Tai, speaking the Lāo language and using the Lāo literature. On its mountain ridges dwelt numerous hill-tribes, especially the Kamu and the Lamēt.

The route we were to take crosses the river two days’ journey south of Chieng Rung; so we had at first to retrace our steps. We left the city on Monday, March 13th, safe from unseen plots, and with our elephant. On the second day, after leaving our upward road to strike across to the river, we entered unexpectedly a large village, where we met with a reception ludicrously hostile. At every door men were standing with guns in their hands. We were surprised; but, supposing that it might be muster-day or something of the sort, we passed innocently along, without challenge, to the monastery, where we dismounted and began to unload. Then guns were laid aside and the head man and villagers came up to see us and to offer assistance. They had heard that foreigners were coming with elephants and men, whether for peace or war no one knew. So they had taken the precaution to be ready. When they found out our peaceful errand, they were ashamed. We had a pleasant visit and worship with them that evening.