Part 37

This scene was presented outside the west gate of Tientsin one October day in 1870 after the massacre at the French convent. The French compelled Li Hung Chang to give them satisfaction. Li held the execution at dawn so that a mob might not gather. The criminals were flattered as martyrs. None of them was bound. New silk clothes, fine shoes and the ornaments of females were put upon them. Arriving at the execution ground, they were given opium. They shouted to the crowd, “Are we showing a shamed face?” And the answer came back: “No.” “Call us brave lads for being given to the foreigners as a sacrifice,” they cried again. A shout of approval came back. Then they sang a war song, and while their relatives cried, they knelt and stretched out their own necks before the blow of the heavy, short, mercury-loaded Taifo sword of the executioner. The shedding of a cock’s blood, even in the British courts of Hongkong, when an oath is taken, is a survival of the ancient Chinese custom, practised in Confucius’ day (550 B. C.), when the ministers of the various states of Lu, Wu, Tsin, etc., had a criminal killed, and wetting their lips with his blood, took oath to keep the treaty, which was inscribed on wood, each party taking a broken portion. The following incident will throw a flashlight on a section of Chinese legal practise, just previous to the revolution of 1911. It is well known that Wu Ting Fang, two and a half years before the revolution, had revised and modernized the Chinese code, but it was not even in part put in practise before the revolution. In Tungkadoo, a town of Kiangsu province, a bonze (priest) murdered a fellow-bonze and confessed under third-degree torture. The native authorities brought him to Shanghai to be strangled, but the chief bonze, with headquarters at Chingkiang, requested that the criminal should be turned over to him to be burned to death according to the code of the Order. Cremation of dead bodies was more common in China when Marco Polo visited the land than it is now, though it is practised in the Honan Island section of Canton.

It is probable that not for some years will the punishments of flogging, neck cangue and stocks be removed from the revised Chinese code. These punishments, involving public “loss of face,” are abhorred by the Chinese, and while they are somewhat barbaric, they are effective deterrents of crime in China. They were both revived by the British government of Hongkong in dealing with native offenders during the turbulent times of the 1911–12 revolution, when it was found that hard labor, jail sentences and fines were laughed at by the immense Chinese population of the island colony. Greece, as long ago as 330 B. C., had borrowed the cangue from China, and Demosthenes, in the _Oration On the Crown_, can think of no way so effective to damage his accuser, Aeschines, than to mention that the latter’s father had to wear a zulon (cangue) as a punishment for thievery. Chien Shao Cheng, of the Justice Department, Peking, has visited American prisons and studied foreign penal methods.

An “Investigating and Arresting Department” is the name by which one of the Manchu courts at Canton went. It employed detectives, and the taotai (mayor) did not disguise the fact that the court resorted to “third degree” tortures. This was one of the many things which made followers for the reformers. Banishment cases are constantly coming up. The prisoner who will not or can not depart to another country or province is put in the stocks for four hours a day for a year, and the remainder of the day he spends at hard labor. Strangling in cages was in vogue at Canton in the last days of the Manchu reign, orders having come from Peking in September, 1911, that the coolie who attempted to assassinate Admiral Li should be suspended by the neck in a bottomless cage. In the yamen at Chingtu City stands a stone tablet bearing the word Sha (kill), erected by the Shansi marauder, Chang Hien Chung, who massacred the Szechuenese, who supported the native Ming emperors. The stone remained as a threat to be used by the Manchu mandarins on behalf of the Ta Ching dynasty. The Ministry of Justice under the Manchu régime ordered the viceroys and governors to prohibit foreigners from unnecessarily being present in court.

On account of the scarcity of foreign population, the Hongkong jury consists of seven and the Shanghai jury of five. There is constant argument between the Chinese press and the English press of the treaty ports in China on the subject of “mixed” courts in which foreigners sit. China is writing a reformed code in which Wu Ting Fang had a hand, and in which the new minister, Wong Chun Hui, is interested, and is pressing forward to the day when at least she will try all Chinese, including those who have injured foreigners in settlements. The newspaper argument will do good instead of harm. In 1899 Japan ceased to allow her citizens to be tried under foreign law, and even began to try foreigners under Japanese law. On the subject of trusts and directorial responsibility, I have seen in the Tientsin _Ching Wei Pao_ a plea that employés be not fined and imprisoned for corporate faults, but that those who make the money (directors and shareholders) bear the responsibility. China is, and has always been, a frank sociological thinker.

A police system on the French gendarmerie plan has been put in vogue at Peking, and photographs are being generally used for identification. The Chinese have been very averse to photographs. The custom was broken down by Hongkong insisting for twenty years that emigrants should be photographed in duplicate so that their certificates might be identified. This gradually got the Chinese used to the custom, the returned emigrants spreading word that there was no ill-luck in the operation. The old-fashioned policeman who went his rounds beating a gong is becoming obsolete, and the new policeman, like our own, is supposed to bait himself with silence and skill, so as to be sugar in leading the burglar to the trap. Not long ago, however, I heard the old-fashioned Chinese Lukong beating his wooden drum as he went his rounds in the Portuguese colony of Macao, China. When the police recover lost goods, half only is returned to the owner, and half often goes to public charity which is organized in a guild. This is an old regulation in many parts of China. One of their wits said that the difference between a lower and a higher court is that one has the first and the other has the last “guess” at a case! The Chinese point out the delays in the execution of murderers as a most serious defect in justice, and the sentimentalism expressed by part of our press and pulpit as a most serious defect in our mentality. They show headings in our newspapers reading as follows: “Ministers Strive with Murderer Blank”; “Four Pastors Prepare Murderer Blank for Death,” etc. The laconic Chinese ask: “How long a time did the murderer give his victim to prepare for death.” The Chinese say that our levity in this terrific matter has run the average of murders in America up to the highest point in any nation, and that their average, with England’s, is the lowest because of swift and sure justice in those two countries.

In our month of August occurs the festival of the goddess of needlework. It is customary for the women to exhibit the wealth and ornaments of the family during this festival. In 1911, at Fatshan, near Canton, where Sunyacius was born, robbers disguised as women arrived in closed chairs before the yamen (compound) of the Li family, and pretending to be relatives, they broke past the doormen. When inside the home, they drew weapons, and with the inmates intimidated, ransacked the house of jewels and valuables, escaping to the river, where the pirate boats took them on board and made off for the reaches and canals. Owing to the paucity of maritime police, because of a limited revenue, piracy has swept over China’s waters since her Captain Kidd, Koxinga, operated from Amoy in 1657. The West River of Kwangtung province has been notorious in recent years, and in my former book, _The Chinese_, I have related the attacks upon Europeans in the steamers _Sainam_ and _Shui On_.

The most startling attack in many years was upon the well-known Pacific Mail steamer _Asia_, in April, 1911. Known previously as the _Coptic_, this steamer sailed from San Francisco for twenty years in the trans-Pacific service, and she was therefore well known to many thousands of Americans. She was a graceful Belfast-built boat of low freeboard, and easily boarded. In a fog on April 23rd she ran against the precipitous Finger Rock Island, which rises off the coast of Chekiang province. Wireless was immediately sent out, and the Chinese Merchants’ S. S. Company’s vessel _Shoa Shing_ started for the rescue. Before she could arrive and after her departure with the sixty rescued passengers, Chekiang pirates, in swift snake boats and sanpans, put off to the attack, and despite revolver defense, boarded the _Asia_ and her boats. They even demanded under duress that passengers should sign “chits,” promising to pay sums of money for rescue. When the steamer was temporarily abandoned, they boarded and stripped her of almost everything except the smokestack paint. Fisherman and pirate are about as synonymous on some waters of China as Cornishman and farmer, Panamanian and placer miner are in some of our romantic novels! Thrilling engagements with pirates not infrequently occur almost under the windows of the fashionable Boa Vista and Hing Kee Hotels on romantic Macao’s Praya Granda.

On July 13, 1910, a party of Chinese students, women and children were kidnapped in Macao, by pirates led by the second of the swashbuckler Leungs, and by the leader Luk, and taken to Ko-Ho (Colowan) Island, where they were chained to the walls of caves and of a Portuguese fort, after the latter had been stormed, and the blue and white flag of the castles hauled down to be succeeded by the triangular red flag of the pirates. The governor of Macao sent the Portuguese gunboats _Patria_ and _Macao_, and an expedition of artillery and infantry of the “Legionaries Coloniale.” The possession of this island by the Portuguese has long been disputed by China, and the Chinese gunboats, which now drew up only watched the engagement. Two thousand pirates fought with modern weapons and smokeless powder, which had been smuggled from Japan. The Portuguese bombarded with four-inch guns, and dropped so many shells into so many compartments of two pirate junks, as with skull and sail they made for rocky Wung Kum Island, that they sank with all on board. In an armistice, Commander Wu, of the Chinese navy, a brave commander of whom we shall hear more, disguised as a coolie, courageously spied on the pirates’ stronghold and ascertained where most of the women were imprisoned, so as to save these retreats from being bombarded. The pirates were smoked out of these caves with sulphur and the women resuscitated.

Not only South China, but North China also has experienced piratical attacks in recent times. In September, 1910, a large band of Hung-Hutz pirates, disguised as bean merchants, sailed down the Liao River to Newchwang and captured for ransom fifteen wealthy Chinese merchants under the walls of the foreign settlements. They safely made retreat with captured arms to their mountain stronghold, one hundred miles up the river, near Liaoyang, and settled down for a siege. The Chinese desire to build more railways through this section, but the Japanese and Russians have opposed American backing of another road and have hoodwinked Britain and Europe into a disinterested attitude, which is the _status quo_, but not the permanent settlement of the question.

The Chinese have a saying regarding courts, retainers and the animals outside, as follows: “When the mandarin swears, the dogs bark, and when the mandarin laughs the dogs grin, and the terrible tsai ren (yamen court runners, corresponding to our detectives) stroke their rough fingers.” Some of their legal proverbs are:

“When two rascals differ, the truth is near; when they agree, the truth is hid.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions in evidence, for a grain of sand is not the seashore, nor a tree a forest.”

“It is hard to rise, but easy to fall.”

“No one would believe a blind man who tried to tell a ghost story.”

“It’s easier to twist the road than the mountain.”

XXV

CHINESE DAILY LIFE

The happy Leigh Hunt, who was half American by blood, in one of his incomparable Addisonian essays, _Tea Drinking_, wrote as follows of the daily life and surroundings of the Chinese: “The very word tea, so petty, so infantine, so winking-eyed, so expressive, somehow or other, of something inexpressibly minute and satisfied with a little (tee!) resembles the idea one has (perhaps a very mistaken one) of that extraordinary people of whom Europeans know little or nothing, except that they sell us this preparation, bow back again our ambassadors, have a language consisting of only a few hundred words, gave us chinaware and the strange pictures on our teacups, made a certain progress in civilization long before we did, mysteriously stopped at it and would go no further, and if numbers and the customs of venerable ancestors are to carry the day, are at once the most populous and the most respectable nation on the face of the earth. As a population they certainly are a most enormous and wonderful body, but as individuals, their ceremonies, their trifling edicts, their jealousy of foreigners, and their teacup representations of themselves impress us irresistibly with a fancy that they are a people all toddling, little-eyed, little-footed, little-bearded, little-minded, quaint, overweening, pig-tailed, bald-headed, cone-capped or pagoda-hatted, having childish houses and temples with bells at every corner and story, and shuffling about in blue landscapes, over nine-inch bridges, with little mysteries of bell-hung whips in their hands,--a boat or a house or a tree, made of a pattern, being over their heads or underneath them, and a bird as large as the boat, always having a circular white space to fly in! Such are the Chinese of the teacups and the grocers’ windows, and partly of their own novels, too, in which everything seems as little as their eyes, little odes, little wine parties and a series of little satisfactions. However, it must be owned that from these novels one gradually acquires a notion that there is a great deal more good sense and even good poetry among them than one had fancied from the accounts of embassies and the autobiographical paintings on the chinaware, and this is the most probable supposition. An ancient and great nation as civilized as they is not likely to be so much behind hand with us in the art of living as our self-complacency leads us to imagine. If their contempt of us amounts to the barbarous, perhaps there is a greater share of barbarism than we suspect in our scorn of them.”

In August the Chinese resort to the graveyards and burn paper money and tin- and gold-foil models at the graves of their ancestors. It is a pretty sight at night to see thousands of these little fires lighting up the vast fields of the dead like a plain of stars through which the living spirits move. The ceremonies sometimes include the Greek custom of pouring out a libation of wine, and as this is the custom especially in the western provinces, it may indicate a former communion with old Greece. Long before the Christian era Greece had possibly acquired veneration for graves from older China. Demosthenes cried out to the Athenians in B. C. 354 as a climax to his arguments: “Will ye sacrifice your sepulchres to the Persian?” A mortuary custom in the southwest provinces, also similar to the Greek, is to place a coin in the mouth, to pay for ferriage of the spirit. The round coin, made of jade, and sometimes banded with pure gold, is an exact copy of the copper cash, with a square hole in the center. These tomb jades acquire a stained appearance as compared with the delightful glisten of jades kept in the light.

Foreigners with cinematograph lanterns are now going into the interior of China with interpreters to manage part of their shows, and are doing well, as the Chinese delight in the moving pictures. It is necessary to apply to the provincial governor for a passport, and to register at the consulate at the nearest treaty port. Both French and American films are used.

The purpose of the long nails, dwarfed feet and heavy hairdressing is the snobbish one of showing that such a person does not need to work, but can afford to keep servants. These devotees of fashion, rapidly becoming fewer, suffer so much torture that their conceit can be forgiven them. “Don’t say a word, you Westerners; remember your suffocating waists and your high-heeled compressed shoes,” retort some of the Chinese! At Ningpo boys wear boots made of human hair. Over these they draw straw sandals. For waterproof material an oiled cotton is used. The very poor classes use a picturesque cape and kilt made of rush leaves, and one sees sights on the mountain roads of Hongkong that remind one of Robinson Crusoe and Friday. The Chinese are great bird fanciers. Crows, magpies, hawks, larks, ducks, finches, etc., are exposed for sale in the fairs. The singing birds are taught to sing in competition, and also to catch seeds thrown into the air. Fortune-tellers take up their location at the street corner in Hongkong, Canton, and other ports, with their trained Kwangtung sparrows. When you pay your coin, the owner places a package of cards in envelopes before the door of the cage. The bird selects one and is rewarded with a grain of rice. You identify the card by the picture that it bears. The owner puts the card, together with a tiny slip of sandalwood, back in the envelope, shuffles the envelopes and calls the bird out again. The bird will select the same envelope, which proves that Kwangtung sparrows at least have a fine sense of smell! On another corner stands a bird trainer with a grossbeak-weaver perched upon his finger. He throws coins into the air, toward which the bird darts, catching the coins in its bill and returning to the finger of the master.

On the narrow streets, in constant danger of being jostled into, the letter-writer sits at a table, painting the beautiful characters for whomsoever wishes to buy a letter. His customers are many,--fruiterers, laborers, fishermen, cooks, gunny-lifters, hotel-runners, lantern sellers, rice bird hawkers, etc. The Buddhist or Taoist priest, too, is not averse to writing a letter for a wife buyer for an added fee after his customer has bought a written prayer to Buddha or his own dead father, which prayer the priest burns in presenting it to the spirit.

There are many Mohammedan Chinese in the western and southwestern provinces, and scattered throughout the empire are Mohammedan companies. They are generally butchers and bakers by occupation. Among these Mohammedans are doubtless the lost colonies of Chinese Jews.

It is found that the Miao aborigines of Szechuen and Yunnan are a more impulsive, vivacious, and by turns a more sulky race than the staid, trim, mannerly Chinese. Missionaries, therefore, report that when they Christianize the aborigines they find them delightfully frank and vivacious companions, who grow to be liked heartily, as the cultured Chinese is in comparison deeply respected. The Miaos (Now Su tribe) show Burmese influence, too, for they burn their dead, a custom which is abhorred by the Chinese masses, though some Buddhist priests do it. The Miaos often worship a hill, and far to the east, even at Hongkong, I have seen members of the aboriginal Hakka tribes worshiping a hill, or a rock, or the seashore. On the hillsides of Hongkong jars will be found on stones among the woods. These contain the bones of Hongkong Chinese who have died in America and whose bones lie out in the woods, waiting till the Taoist calendar reports that it is a lucky day for burial. If you make the fee large enough the priest can grant you absolution any day and you may bury with full assurance of good luck. It then becomes a struggle between the priest’s determination and the mourner’s stubbornness in the matter of securing possession of the coins of the dead one! The body lies in an American graveyard until the large bones only remain. These are manifested across the Pacific as “fish bones” and are received at Hongkong by the Tung Wah Hospital for the guild of which deceased was a member. The hospital turns the bones over to the chief mourner, who places them in a jar, as already related. While the Chinese abhor sickness, and will sometimes desert a fever patient after loading his blanket with stones so that he can not leave the bed, they have no abhorrence of coffins or bones. For long periods they keep the coffin in the best room of the house, or the jar of bones in the garden.

In selling goods by auction at the pawnshops, or inns, the auctioneer does not permit audible bidding. The goods are passed through an opening for inspection. Then the bidders walk to the window, and by whisper, card, or squeeze of the hand, indicate the bid. This encourages high instead of low bidding at the beginning, for it is known that the first bidder who offers a fair price secures the article.