CHAPTER I.

_ON THE UPPER YANGTSE._

Boat-travel.--Vegetation.--Trackers.--Terrace of the Sun.--Gold Diamond Mountain.--Meng Liang's Ladder.--Great Szechuan Road.--Steamer Voyage.--Chinese Hades.--Caves.

Of all ways of travel, surely boat-travel is the most luxurious. For one thing, it is accounted roughing it; and that means that there is no bother about toilets: the easiest boots and gloves, the warmest and most comfortable of clothes, are the appropriate wear. But that seems to be the whole of the roughing of it. For naturally each boat-traveller takes care to start with a favourite chair and a comfortable bed; and it is his cook's business to provide the most _recherché_ of little repasts whenever wanted. What else is he there for? Nor do _soufflés_ and pheasants taste any the worse because the supply of fresh air is unlimited, and the cabin as cosy as nothing but a perfectly well-built house, or a boat floating in water warmer than the surrounding air, can be. The first time we went up to Chungking, we had a sleeping-cabin and sitting-cabin, each 9 ft. 4 in. by 7 ft. 7 in., the former well warmed by a most conveniently arranged kitchen adjoining, with a plentiful supply of warm water for our travelling-bath. Thus our only drawback was that the wind was always favourable; and whereas our captain had been bound over to pay us six shillings a day for every day over the agreed-upon twenty-two between Ichang and Chungking, we were equally bound to pay him six shillings a day extra for every day under.

My first trip up the Gorges was, however, very different. To give its impressions in their freshness, I will quote from a letter written at the time:

"_June 20th, 1887._

"It depends, I suppose, a good deal upon how much people like or dislike the journey, whether it is worth while to come half round the world, and then steam a thousand nautical miles into the interior of China, in order to visit the Gorges of the Yangtse; but we have just returned from a five-days' trip, and what I have seen far surpasses my anticipations. Indeed, in all my travels, I know no country more altogether delightful. Although it is June, one of the worst seasons for going there, we have been able to walk about all day long, and without getting tired too. The air felt fresh, and, oh! so fragrant with delicious flowers. The feature of the region, of course, is the precipices. I should guess the precipices at nothing under two thousand feet, and perhaps not more than that sheer down, as far as I have seen: sometimes dolomitic white limestone, which always reminds me of dead men's bones, sometimes weathered a rich yellow-brown. The grandeur and massiveness of the bastions, and towers of rock, and overhanging pinnacles, and projecting isolated blocks, or pillars, standing bolt upright in fine relief against the sky, are not picturesque like the scenery round Méran, not exciting like some of the Alpine scenery in Switzerland, but awe-inspiring and sublime.

"Then the vegetation is enchanting. Nearly every flower, great big glorious butterfly, and brilliantly coloured bird is unknown to me; and till people have walked through a country where this is the case, they cannot imagine what a zest it adds to an expedition. But just to tell of those I recognise will show how charming it is. Fancy bamboos in feathery tufts, and palms, everywhere, not tall, but very graceful; chestnut-trees in full flower; plums laden with the rosiest fruit--but very bitter we found them; walnut-trees with huge leaves and nuts; orange-trees; most beautiful, perhaps, of all, the tallow-tree, rather like the lilac in leaf, but each leaf set on a very long stalk, so that the slightest breath sets it quivering, a light bright green in colour, each shoot tipped at the end with almost scarlet young leaves, and the whole tree, a tall well-grown tree too, covered with yellowish tassel-like flowers. Most lovely is the general effect. And in the autumn, they tell me, it is even finer, taking the same brilliant tints as the maple in Canada. I never know if I like this tree or the soap-tree best. The latter is like an oak in general effect, but more graceful, and grows quite big. But I am keeping the best to the last. Fancy blue larkspurs, and yellow jasmine, and glorious coloured oleanders, and begonias, virgin lilies, and yet taller white lilies, and gardenias, and sunflowers, all growing _wild_, and most luxuriantly. I was quite excited when I first saw waxen-leaved begonias cuddling into the crevices of a rock by the wayside; and exclaimed aloud when a turn of the path revealed a whole bank of dwarf sunflowers, golden in the sun. These, too, are only the flowers I can name. There are numbers more, and so fragrant! And among them all enormous swallow-tailed butterflies, and a very pretty breed of white goats, with dear little kids, disport themselves. Grand though the Gorges are, one does not feel saddened or depressed by them, as I was afraid of being. It is like seeing a whole troop of graceful loving grandchildren climbing up some grand old man's knee.

"But the Yangtse certainly does appear a very wicked river, bristling with rocks and whirlpools, just as its shores bristle with precipices. We had a very light boat, and an absurdly large crew--eight men besides the head man. And with all their exertions, they could only get us up against the rushing, whirling current at the rate of a mile an hour. But the river ran so fast, and the men worked so hard, and the shores were so varied, ever opening out some new, narrow defile, down which a torrent had cut its way--always cut quite deep--that one had no sense at all of going slowly, but just the contrary. The men had long bamboos with hooks at the end, and with these they would hook on to the rocks, and claw us up against the current; for we always kept quite close to the side, so as, as far as possible, to keep out of the rush of the river, and profit by occasional eddies. Then at other times they would bound on to the shore, scampering and giving tongue like a pack of beagles let loose, and tow the boat along, occasionally bending almost double in their efforts.

"I thought at first I would walk along the path with the trackers. Oh the foolish English idea! At times the trackers bounded along over loose boulders, or over ledges of rock, where the limestone strata made a fairly smooth surface; but at others they, with their bare feet and hands well used, had all they could do to find a footing. During these _mauvais pas_, or when they were ferried across in a boat, or waded through the river, those left on board would claw the rocks, or work the _yulohs_, very long and rather unmanageable oars. The oddest thing was the intense delight the men seemed to take in their work. But, of course, tracking our light boat was a very different thing from dragging a heavily laden junk. Hundreds of men are said to be lost in these rapids every year. And it really seems too dangerous work to put men to year in year out. Think of the tow-line breaking! During the little time we have been away, we saw one junk wrecked, and two drifting down-stream unmanageable, their tow-lines having broken, and nearly all their men being ashore. And the farthest point we got to was only fifteen miles from Ichang; so we got back down-stream in _two hours_. We did not go farther, because our captain said it was just then too dangerous to take our house-boat past the three terrible whirlpools of Nantor; and, of course, half the pleasure of the trip was in landing every now and then, and walking up the wild, narrow glens to different points of view. One day we walked from ten to seven to the Terrace of the Sun, where there is a small Taoist temple on a little ledge of rock just big enough to hold it, at the top of a mountain quite two thousand feet high, and with a sheer precipice on one side. Another day we walked from half-past six till half-past five to the Gold Diamond Mountain, where there is a Buddhist temple on a slightly larger plateau, with a spring on the top of the mountain, and a wonderful panoramic view. It is over a thousand feet higher than the other, and to get to it you walk along a quite narrow path with precipices on both sides. Do you realise that in China there are no railings and no roads, nothing but narrow paths like English field-paths? I never really believed it till I came here. And the agriculturists are always encroaching upon even the narrow paths there are, planting Indian corn and a few beans or something, on the chance that the passer-by will not tread upon them.

"The people are greatly interested in seeing a European woman. The women flock round, and beg me to take off my gloves and my hat, that they may see how my hair is done, and the colour of my hands. Then some old woman is sure to squeeze my feet, to see if there is really a foot filling up all those big boots: for, of course, all the women here have small feet--that is, they have them bandaged up; and astonishingly well they get along upon their hoof-like feet. They are very friendly, and bring out chairs and benches before their cottage doors, and beg us to sit down, and offer us tea, or, if they have not got that ready, hot water. But the children cry with terror if I touch them or go too near; and one little boy in a school we went into simply trembled with fear all the time I stood near him to hear him read. Sometimes also the dogs run away without barking, they are so afraid: a great comfort this is, for the barking of the dogs, and the loathsome-looking pigs at each cottage, and the smells, are the great objection to going through the often lovely-looking--from a distance--villages. Hoang San Tung, on its terrace nearly a hundred feet above the river, with all its curved roofs, looked really like a flight of doves settled down there, the wings not quite folded yet; and several of the others are very picturesque from a distance. But the smells of Ping Shan Pa obliged us to change our anchorage, there being no reason why we should endure them. There were fireflies there; but not such glorious ones as at Shih Pai, where they cast long trails of light upon the river, and were the most luminous I have ever seen. I do hope there will be soon a steamer running to transport people safely and easily to this delightful region. No boats were able to come down while we were up the river; and of some machinery for the Viceroy of Szechuan, that came up here on the previous voyage of the steamer in which we travelled, we have heard already that two boatloads are lost, and it is just as likely as not that the loss of these may make the rest useless.

"Seeing these ranges of mountains, across which it would, indeed, be difficult to make roads, and across which there certainly are none, I better realise how completely the rich and productive province of Szechuan--the size of France--is cut off from the rest of the world. Yet it will be sad if steamers introduce an unappreciative crowd to the grand solitudes of the ravines and precipices, the rocks and rapids of the Yangtse. Now one can pick one's hands full of flowers, without thinking one is spoiling any one else's enjoyment. Now one is away from letters and papers, from all the 'warstle and the wear o't,' and can enjoy the health-giving breezes and the grandeur of the scenery quite undisturbed. It does not require to have lived perspiring and almost clotheless through the tea-season at Hankow to enjoy such a trip; but now I begin to realise more than I did at the time what Hankow is, with its willow-shaded Bund, and its painted tea-chests flying along on the shoulders of coolies, and agitated buyers and sellers, and no 'mountain and water' beauty, as the Chinese call the beauty of landscape, only its mirages and its sunsets."

It is always pleasant to sail before a wind, and boat-travel taken thus is the delight of travel in essence divested of all its _ennuis_, of tiresome fellow-travellers, dust, steam, rush! Yet there is rushing enough in the Yangtse Rapids; but rushing of such another sort! We ran upon a rock our first day, and were not able to find a leak that night by the flickering light of a Chinese candle. But next day a bag of damaged rice showed clearly where it was, and a little tangle of cotton-yarn with some tallow made it all right. After that our mast cracked so alarmingly that we shortened sail; but that also was soon made right, the sole of an old shoe being nailed over the crack. Old shoes seem to have _lasting_ power. And we sailed on again before the favourable wind that had carried us from Ichang, all through the Yangtse Gorges, in less than a week. Was some of our good fortune owing to the three joss-sticks burning at the stern? They also were stuck in an old shoe, or rather straw sandal this time. Perhaps old shoes have a meaning, like so many other things in China, not understood by people not imbued from their cradles with the profound truths of _Fung shui_.

Our voyage was like a dream of childhood realised, a dream inspired by many readings of Sinbad's marvellous travels. At Ichang they were making merry over a disappointed globe-trotter, who had been to see the Gorges, and come back complaining they were not perpendicular! Whether he insisted on their descending perpendicularly to their winter water-line, or their summer water-line, not seldom sixty feet apart, report said not. But if he had come on to the Bellows Gorge, surely even he must have been satisfied. The great Szechuan Road, the one _new_ road I have seen in China, is simply hewn out of the face of the apparently perpendicular rock, so that the cliff arches over it. There on the southern side are the square holes in the rock, memorial of Chinese daring, which the celebrated General Meng Liang caused to be made, so that in the night he could take his soldiers, on pieces of wood stuck into these square holes, a rude but strong ladder, up the face of the cliff, naturally supposed to be inaccessible, and surprise the enemy, thereby conquering the kingdom of Shu. There also are the caves, where men gather saltpetre at dizzy heights, climbing up to them by paths that make one hot to look at. Farther on are the iron pillars on one side, and opposite the holes in the rock, between which chains were fastened so as to prevent those of the kingdom to the west of the Gorges from coming down in their vessels to attack the men of Hupeh, then the kingdom of Wei. And here, as we left the gorge, we saw the temple to the memory of Liu Pei, who was there encamped, and slain when Meng Liang made his marvellous night attack. This borderland teems with memories, and the Chinese do not quickly forget. In Kweichow there is still a tablet to the wife of Liu Pei, over the well at the back of what is now the Prefect's official residence, where she drowned herself when her husband was slain, nearly two thousand years ago.

But the day we were there was New Year's Eve, and even our man-servant said it was impossible for me to go into the city to see it that day; and on the next day's festival it would be cruel to trouble our good soldiers to escort us. For we were travelling with that great luxury, a gunboat, that is also a lifeboat; and the soldiers, as in all this admirably organised lifeboat service, were excellent fellows, whether for handling an oar or for keeping back the crowd. They seemed positively to delight in carrying the camera, or in posing for a foreground, evidently admiring their own clothes very much, and being very wishful to know if we could read the characters upon their jackets. But for this gunboat, which sailed faster than our passenger-boat, and could put us ashore anywhere, we should have been deprived of nearly all our interesting walks; for our boat sailed on and on even into the night. Sailing through the never-ending Witches' Gorge, ever following _White Wings_ before, a beautifully appointed junk, that had kept just ahead of us all day, and seeing our first sunset since we started, soft saffron in the west, had a very magical effect. It seemed impossible ever to go back again to one's friends. Why not sail on for ever, since one had for once discovered the Ideal Life?

"We knew the merry world was round, And we might sail for evermore."

But there were other moments, and moments oft repeated, when all was excitement and action. Wild shouts and waving of arms encouraged the steaming trackers. The water boiled round the bows. The drum sounded. A man sprang on to an almost impossible rock--it is climbed at least twenty times nearly every day--and disengaged the tow-line, on which our lives were depending. The camera was at full cock! And then a sailor reached in front of it, and that moment was lost! But the boat hung fire, and we tried again. At one rapid there were women tracking--women with their hoof-like feet and loathly trousers, giving delicate little pulls, that surely could not advance the boat much. Then our soldiers were poling and hooking, with crimson faces and straining arms! Now we are through that race, and flying along in the eddy preparatory to the tug-of-war at the next rapid! The trackers are running ahead like a pack of beagles. A side-ravine becomes visible, with a grand gateway, irresistibly recalling Coleridge's "like cliffs that have been rent asunder." Then we gaze at caves, squared, and with fresh-looking ladders hanging from them, and understand they are places of refuge for the husbandmen in the houses opposite to retire into should danger threaten, and that it is not so very long since they were used. Certainly, they would appear able to stand every siege but that of hunger.

We passed rocks fluted like organ-pipes, with the stones that had done the fluting still held captive in them; rocks fretted almost into lacework by the action of the water; rocks weathered red, and rocks weathered grey; and one day we saw a black mass, which we were told was harder than steel, yet it was gnarled and gnawn in rings. After passing that black mass, the strata sloped from east to west, just as on the other side of the Gorges they sloped from west to east; thus, coming up-stream, the rocks no longer seemed so menacing as before.

"But here are the far-famed singing girls of Kweichow, with reedlike voices, and a man, very pale, with a face like Dante, for accompanist on a pretty little viol; and the sound of merry-making increases. Our soldiers have been cooking their pig's head nearly all day. A mandarin's boat moored next to us has a regular witches' cauldron, full of the cock that every one has been carrying about these last few days, comb, legs, and all, a pig's head, and several more uncanny-looking bits of meat. Evidently our trackers also are enjoying a good feed outside. We have twenty lusty rogues, besides our boat's crew. And we are all moored in a tangled mass; so that there does not seem to be room for even one boat more to spend its New Year at Kweichow Fu. There are joss-sticks burning at our cabin door. Joss-sticks were burnt solemnly over our pig's head in the gorge in the morning of that day, a cannon solemnly fired three times, and the cook prostrated himself as he offered the burnt-offering. Now crackers are going off all round; and every man who has a chance has asked me if I do not think Szechuan the most beautiful country in the world. Even the captain tried to hurry me in the morning into photographing the entrance into the first Szechuan gorge. 'Szechuan is beautiful,' he said. So say all the men with white handkerchiefs bound round their brows, thus showing their Western origin."

But it was all beautiful, all wild, all grand, after we entered the Land of Promise through the gate of the Ichang Gorge. For those who do not love Nature in her wilder moods this was not the time of year to travel through the Gorges. They should wait till spring has garlanded them with flowers like a Mayfair ballroom, and perfumed the breezes with their fragrance. There is a certain sameness about the grandeur of the scenery when seen always under a leaden sky with a north-easter driving us on. But for those who admire precipice piled upon precipice, and rocks rent asunder, every season is the season for the Gorges, where the Niukan is perhaps the loveliest; but the Ping Shu Gorge and that of the Fearsome Pool are certainly the most solemn and impressive; while the Witches' Gorge offers the most variety, and the Ichang Gorge, though perhaps only because it is best known, ever seems the friendliest, and is certainly the most fantastic.

All China New Year's Day we wandered through the ruins of Liu Pei's city. Bits of the wall remain, and the gateway under the old drum tower; but it is a little hard to believe these date from A.D. 200, although all the people declare they do, and our man-servant begged that they might be photographed. We picnicked under a beautiful clump of trees, looking down upon the grand rock mass, whose being covered by the river is the signal for the Kweichow authorities to forbid the passage of junks down-river as too dangerous. The days of this grand rock mass standing in mid Yangtse must be numbered, supported as it is on three pillars; thus there are two arches to be seen beneath it, when the water is low enough. We wandered through a lovely temple on the hill, commanding the most picturesque view we had yet seen down the last Fearsome Gorge. Unlike most Chinese temples, this, the first Szechuan temple I had seen, was really exquisitely kept, clean, and well swept, with clean, bright windows of many-coloured paper panes. The priests were polite, the images freshly painted. We came down through a village, again all clean and fresh as paint. Every one was in good clothes, of course, as it was New Year's Day; but it was surprising to find that even the smartest women were ready to be photographed, and not at all too frightened to look into the camera themselves.

We longed to walk along the great Szechuan Road, completed as far as the Hupeh frontier, sixty miles, at a reputed cost of £52,000, and really a road, though, as is usual in Szechuan, it is often long flights of steps, and several of its crossings over streams looked doubtful. The Chinese do not make roads sufficiently often to be good road-makers. Hupeh was to have continued this road through its gorges to Ichang; and the great Lo, the Marquis of Carabas of these parts, had just been up to inspect and chalk O where the road was to go. If it were ever finished and could last, it would rival the Corniche Road for magnificence of scenery.

But years have past since we first travelled on the Upper Yangtse, and no steps have yet been taken to carry the road down-river; the funds intended for this purpose are said all to have been absorbed in paying compensation for damage done to foreigners' property in the riots of one summer. Some day, perhaps, a railway will be cut out along the river-channel. In the meantime, my husband has proved the long-doubted practicability of steaming through the rapids, by himself taking a little steamer up without any foreign assistance to help him, only Ningpo engineers, who knew neither the Szechuan speech nor ways, and a Szechuan pilot, who had never been on a steamer before. That voyage will for ever rank among the most exciting experiences of my life; for all the population along the river turned out to see the steamer, so that the cities presented the appearance of having all their outlines heavily underscored with a blue pencil; whilst sometimes as many as five Chinese lifeboats and gunboats, with large pennants and burgees flying, and occasionally firing their cannon, all wanted her to tow them at once, since their mission was to protect her. And as the little steamboat could at the outside go nine knots an hour, it was, indeed, a business to get her up the rapids. In one case--the worst--she steamed all she could, and three hundred men, harnessed to tracking-lines, pulled all they could, till one great bamboo line snapped. But she got up safely after seven minutes, in which one felt as if one's hair turned white; for if she had once got her head round, she must have been lost, and every man aboard her. A more powerful steamer would make nothing of many of the rapids, and even that worst one at some seasons of the year is barely noticeable.

The chief points of interest, after passing through the Gorges, are Changfei's beautiful temple, a great place to spend a happy day at; the singularly beautifully situated city of Wanhsien; Changchow, with its graceful bamboo groves; and Fengtu, the Chinese Hades.

To a Chinaman this last is the most interesting place along the river: for the Emperor of the dead is supposed to live on the little hill there, as the Emperor of the living does at Peking; and whenever a Chinaman dies, all the world over, a letter ought to be written to Fengtu announcing his death, and not dropped casually into the post, but solemnly burnt by a Taoist priest. It is the one place Chinese boatmen regard with awe, and they object to moving about at night near Fengtu. Pilgrims come in great numbers to see the well that is reputed bottomless; and every one burns a little paper and throws it in. So that when I saw it the well appeared quite full up to the top. There was an iron cover over it I longed to photograph; and as it was quite dark by the well, I asked whether the soldiers accompanying me might carry it outside into the daylight and to my surprise no objection was made to their doing so; and when I set up the camera, a priest said he would stand beside it with an incense-stick, as that would look better. There is a great sword at Fengtu; but we did not learn the legend about this. The whole hillside was covered with temples, all crowded with pilgrims; and my husband said if I would go photographing in Chinese places of pilgrimage, I really must not expect him to accompany me. But I was new to China then, and enthusiastic; so four soldiers linked their arms round me, and in that manner I photographed.

On another voyage we stopped at Fengtu for the night as we were proceeding up-river. It was when the chapels and houses throughout Szechuan were being burnt down, and missionaries flying for their lives, though no one was killed, happily. All the people on the foreshore rushed down to look at our boat, brandishing bamboos; and our servants said they had to shout very loud and very energetically that we were not missionaries in order to save our lives. The principal official sent down additional soldiers to guard us through the night. But it was impossible to be frightened. For that, I think, was really the very hottest night I have lived through; even lying on the roof of the boat it was impossible to do anything but gasp.

Beyond Fengtu are the colossal statues of the philanthropic beancurd-seller and his wife, hewn out of the living rock, and sitting in caves made in the rock out of which they are hewn. Beyond them, again, comes a very pleasant country of farmsteads, and great shade-trees, and caves in the rock-face, once inhabited, it is believed, by the aborigines, who were there before the Chinese came. But if so, how well and neatly they are shaped! And why did people who could square doorways so neatly live in such uncomfortable, dark places as caves? People all say to one another that these caves would be very interesting subjects for study; but so far no one has studied them.

Thus, by many windings, and past great bridges, and up more rapids, at last we arrive at terrible, long reaches of rocks; and then at Chungking, the commercial capital of Szechuan, China's westernmost, and one of its largest and richest provinces. But Chungking deserves a chapter to itself, especially as it is the only Chinese city within whose walls I have lived for years. Some people call thus living "doing a term of fortress." A Chinese city is certainly very like a prison.