Chapter 37

At _Tien-sing_ our principal conductor _Sun-ta-gin_ had prepared for us a sumptuous entertainment, consisting of excellent mutton, pork, venison, and poultry of all kinds, a great variety of confectionary, of fruits then in season, peaches, plumbs, grapes, chesnuts, walnuts, and water-caltrops. We very soon found indeed that we were treated with more studied attention, with a more marked distinction, and with less constraint, than when we ascended the river. Our dignified conductor made no difficulty in allowing us to walk on shore as much as we pleased; but recommended us not to quit the banks of the river for fear of retarding the yachts or of being left behind. He hinted to us, at the same time, that the officers _Van_ and _Chou_ would be responsible at court for any accident that might happen to us, so long as we were under the protection of the Emperor.

In passing _Tien-sing_ we found considerable difficulty in getting our fleet through the immense crowds of shipping of every description that were collected there to remain for the winter; among which were about five hundred of the Emperor's revenue vessels with grain for the capital. The _Eu-ho_, or precious river, called also the _Yun-leang-ho_, or river upon which grain is transported, falling from the westward, forms, at the head of this city, a confluence with the _Pei-ho_. Our barges were at least four hours in getting through the multitude of vessels that were moored, for their winter-quarters, in this small river; which, however, is rendered important by its communication with the grand artificial canal.

Having passed the fleet of shipping and the suburbs, a plain extending beyond the reach of sight opened out on the left of the river, upon which were observed many thousands of small sandy tumuli, of a conical form, resembling those hillocks which in myriads are thrown up on the continent of Africa by the _Termites_, or white ants. In several parts of this plain were small buildings, in the form of dwelling-houses, but not exceeding four or five feet in height; in other places were circular, semicircular, and square enclosures of stonework, and here and there were interspersed small pillars of stone or brick and other erections of every variety of form. This was the first common burying-ground that we had observed, except a very small one at _Tong-tchoo_; and the tumuli and the different erections marked out the mansions of the dead. In many parts of this extensive enclosure we met with massy coffins lying upon the surface, some new, others newly painted, but none in a mouldering state. It was explained to us, by our interpreter, that some of these coffins had been deposited there, until the proper advice should be obtained from the priest or the oracle consulted, or from casting lots, as to the most propitious place of interment, and the most favourable day for performing the obsequies; some were placed there till the pecuniary circumstances of the surviving relatives would enable them to bestow a suitable interment, and others were left to dry and moulder, to a certain degree, in order to be burnt and the ashes collected and put into stone jaw or other receptacles[53]. On no occasion do the Chinese bury their dead within the precincts of a city or town, much less within the walls of their temples; but always deposit them at a proper distance from the dwellings of the living, in which respect they have more discretion than the Europeans; who not only allow the interment of dead bodies in the midst of their populous cities, but have thrust them also into places of public worship, where crowded congregations are constantly exposed to the nauseous effluvia, and perhaps infection, arising from putrid carcases. Yet so tenacious are the people of the privilege of interment within the walls of the church, in some countries of Europe, that any attempt to discontinue the imprudent custom would be attended with some degree of danger, as happened to the late Grand Duke of Tuscany who, having built a commodious and spacious cemetery without the city of Florence, to which it was intended to remove the coffins out of the vaults of the church, had nearly raised a rebellion among his subjects. In _Render's_ tour through Germany, an instance is given of the fatal effects of burying in churches, the relation of which makes one shudder with horror.

[53] From a passage in the manuscript journal of a Chinese who accompanied the Dutch embassy it would appear, that the art of embalming the dead was once known and practiced in this country. He observes, that at _Ou tebé_ there is a temple or pagoda inhabited by a number of priests, who shew the body of a very ancient bonze, prepared in such a manner, and filled with such ingredients, that it does not decay, but remains perfectly entire. He is dressed in his robes of ceremony, and in his hand he holds a machine which was invented by him for cleaning rice.

The bank of the river, being one of the enclosing fences to the burying-ground, was ornamented with beautiful weeping willows which, with a few solitary cypresses interspersed among the tombs, were the only trees that appeared in this part of the country.

In a corner of the cemetery was a temple, built after the usual plan, with an altar in the center; and a number of deities moulded in clay were ranged on each side on stone pedestals. We observed no priests; but an elderly lady was very busily employed in throwing the sticks of fate, in order to obtain a lucky number in which, however, she failed. During the operation of shaking the cup, her countenance betrayed a greater degree of eagerness and anxiety than usually appears on the face of a Chinese; and she left the temple in a peevish and muttering tone, sufficiently expressive of the greatness of her disappointment which, it seemed, was no less than a refusal, on the part of the oracle, to hold out the hope of her being blessed with a second husband. Till this circumstance had been explained to us by the keeper of the temple, it was concluded that the old lady had been muttering imprecations against us for disturbing her in the midst of her devotions.

After two days' sail from _Tien-sing_ we arrived at a city of the third order[54] called _Tchien-shien_. The surface of the interjacent country had continued the same uniform plain, without a pebble in the soil: the extent of cultivation by no means extraordinary; and the few scattered villages of mean houses indicated no great degree of population; the dwellings that floated on the water were numerous and crowded with inhabitants. We observed several plots of young wheat rising in drills a few inches above the ground. Buck-wheat was in full flower and several plantations of the cotton plant, _gossypium herbaceum_, were in pod, some of them perfectly ripe. Fahrenheit's thermometer on the 14th, 15th, and 16th of this month stood at 52° and 53° in the morning, and about 70° in the middle of the day.

[54] For the convenience of collecting and distributing the taxes raised in kind, the districts, and cities within them, are divided into three classes, distinguished by the adjuncts _foo_, _tchoo_, _shien_. The _shien_ is answerable to the _tchoo_; the _tchoo_ to the _foo_; and the _foo_ to the board of revenue in the capital.

On the 17th, beside a great number of towns, villages and military posts, which are regularly placed at intervals of about three miles, we passed two cities of the third order, one of which, from the length of its walls, appeared to be of very considerable importance. No true idea, however, can be formed of the population and magnitude of a Chinese city by the extent of its enclosing walls. Few are without large patches of unoccupied ground within them which, in many instances, far exceeds the quantity of land that is built upon. Even in that part of the capital called the Chinese city, several hundred acres are under cultivation. The Imperial city, containing the palace and buildings for the officers of state, the eunuchs and artificers, occupies very nearly a square mile, more than two-thirds of which is a kind of park and pleasure grounds; and under the north wall of the Tartar city there is a pond or swamp covered almost with the Nelumbium, which appeared to be fully twice the dimensions of Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, or four times their space, namely near fifty acres. Such spaces of unoccupied ground might perhaps have been reserved for the use of the inhabitants in case of siege, as the means of supplying a few vegetables of the pungent kind, as onions and garlic, for the besieged, which are the more necessary for a people who use so small a portion of animal food, and little or no milk. Thus the cities of Babylon and Nineveh, which were so frequently exposed to the calamities of war and siege, had gardens and corn-lands within their walls.

On the 18th we passed two cities and a great number of towns and villages. The face of the country still level and entirely open; not a hedge-row appearing on any side and very few trees. Almost all the vessels that we met in the course of the day were laden with sacks of cotton wool. This being the night of full moon, we were allowed to enjoy very little rest. The observance of the usual ceremonies, which consist of firing their small petards, beating at intervals the noisy gong, harsh squalling music and fire-works, required that our vessels should remain stationary, and these nocturnal orgies ceased only with the appearance of the sun. There was, however, another cause of detention at this place. In sailing against the stream of the _Eu-ho_, it was necessary the barges should be tracked by men and these men were to be pressed or forced into this laborious service from the villages bordering upon the river. The usual way of doing this was to send out the soldiers or attendants of the officers before the vessels, in the dusk of the evening, to take the poor wretches by surprize in their beds. But the ceremony of the full moon, by retarding their usual hour of retiring to rest, had put them on their guard; and, on the approach of the emissaries of government, all that were liable to be pressed into this service had absconded, so that, in addition to the noise of the gongs and the trumpets and crackers, our ears were frequently assailed by the cries and lamentations of persons under the punishment of the bamboo or the whip, for claiming their exemption from joining the yachts and acting as trackers. When the groupe that had been collected for this purpose was brought together in the morning, it was impossible not to regard it with an eye of pity. Most of them consisted of infirm and decrepit old men, and the rest were such lank, sickly-looking, ill-clothed creatures, that the whole groupe appeared to be much fitter for an hospital than for performing any kind of labour. Our companions pretended to say that every farmer, who rented lands upon the public rivers or canals, was obliged, by the tenure on which he held his lease, to furnish such a number of men to track the vessels in the service of government whenever it might be required; but that, on the present being an extraordinary occasion, they had resolved to pay them, as they called it, in a handsome manner, which was at the rate of something less than seven-pence a day, without any allowance for returning to their homes; a price for labour which bore no sort of proportion to that of the necessaries of life; and it was even doubtful if this pittance was ever paid to them.

Having cleared the fleet of shipping that was assembled at this place, a favourable breeze relieved our invalids and rendered their slender exertions unnecessary for the greater part of the day, in the course of which we entered the province of _Shan-tung_. In this province nothing worthy of notice occurred until the 22d, when we quitted the _Eu-ho_ and turning towards the south entered the grand canal, out of which we observed a gentle current flowing into the river. At this point of junction the pagoda of _Lin-tsin_, an octagonal pyramid, was erected, perhaps as a monument of this great and useful undertaking, which, however, in its present state, apparently had not stood many ages. In the hope of finding within it some inscription, that might point out its designation, we mounted with some difficulty upon the first of its nine stages or roofs (for the little door on a level with the ground was walled up with bricks) but it contained only the bare walls, not even a stair-case remained nor any possible means of ascending to the top, and the lower part was choaked up with rubbish. These pagodas (or as the Chinese name them _Ta_) that so frequently occur in the country, seem to be intended only as embellishments to particular grounds, or objects to terminate villas or prospects. Sometimes, it is true, they appear as appendages to temples, but are never appropriated for the purposes of sacred worship. Whatever their intention might have been, it would seem the rage of building them no longer exists, not one of a late erection having appeared in the whole country, and more than two-thirds of those we saw being in ruins.

At the junction of the canal with the _Eu-ho_ there was no lock nor flood-gate; the gentle current of the former was interrupted only from place to place, by loose planks let down in grooves cut in stone piers. These dams seldom occasioned the difference of a foot in the level of the water; and at each was a guard-house with double the usual number of soldiers stationed, to assist in drawing up or letting down the planks, as occasion might require. The canal, which at the commencement was from sixty to one hundred feet in width, was contracted at such places by the stone piers of the flood-gates to about thirty feet.

Towards the evening of the 23d, as we approached the city _Tong-tchang-foo_, we were much amused with a military manœuvre, which was evidently intended to astonish us. Under the walls of this city about three hundred soldiers were drawn out in a line, which, however, the darkness of the night had rendered invisible. But just as we were coming to anchor, each soldier, at the sound of the gong, produced from under his cloak a splendid lantern with which he went through a regular manual exercise. The following morning we observed, for the first time, a few hillocks breaking the line of the horizon to the eastward. The country appeared to be in a tolerable state of cultivation; but the mode of tillage exhibited no extraordinary degree of skill or of labour. Villages of considerable extent were erected along the banks of the canal, at intervals of about three miles from each other; and, in the gardens contiguous to these, grew in abundance the tobacco plant whose leaves were small, hairy, and viscous, and the flowers of which were of a greenish yellow passing into a faint rose colour at the edges of the petals. We observed also small patches of hemp. A greater use is made of the seeds and leaflets of this plant, as a substitute for or to mix with tobacco, than of its fibres for cloth, a purpose to which it is as rarely converted by the Chinese as by the Hindoos, being little esteemed for those valuable uses to which, since its introduction into Europe, it has been applied. The number of lateral branches, which in a warm climate each stem throws out close above the surface of the ground, breaks the length of fibre and renders it unfit for those purposes for which, in the northern regions of Europe, its tall branchless stem is so well adapted. The sow thistle, a plant that occurs in almost every part of the world, was nothing different here from its usual habit in Europe. We observed also a species of _Chenopodium_ and of _Artemisia_ or wormwood; abundance of the _Pe-tsai_, and other common culinary vegetables. In the small flower gardens, without which we scarcely observed a single cottage, were balsams, several kinds of beautiful asters, holy-hocks, two species of _Malva_, an _Amaranthus_, and the showy and handsome shrub the _Nerium Oleander_.

Having passed on the 26th October the walls of the city _Tsie-ning_, where a multitude of small craft were lying at anchor, we came to an extensive lake of the same name, navigated by a great number of sailing boats. From the east side of this lake the canal was separated only by an immense mound of earth. To the westward the whole country, beyond the reach of sight, was one continued swamp or morass, upon which were interspersed pools or ponds of water abounding with the Nelumbium, at this time in full flower. The morass being several feet below the surface of the water in the canal afforded the means of regulating the quantity; and, accordingly, at certain distances, we observed stone arches turned in the earthen embankment to let off the superfluous water that might be occasioned by the swelling of the feeding rivers. About this place also, it was remarked, that the bed of the canal was carried in a line so nearly horizontal, that the water had a gentle current either to the northward or the southward, according as these sluices were kept shut or thrown open; this line being ascertained, perhaps, rather by the surface of the lake than by the assistance of instruments; for it was sufficiently remarkable, that no opportunity had been omitted in carrying this great work along the side, or through the middle, of lakes or other pools of water wherever it could be done.

The nature of the country admitted of such management for three days' journey, or about eighty miles from _Tsie-ning_. The whole of this extensive plain consisted in lakes or swampy ground half covered with water. On the former were constantly seen moving about vessels with sails and boats of every description, conveying an animated picture of activity, industry, and commerce. Almost all the lakes were studded with islands and these were covered with villages, that were chiefly inhabited by fishermen. Here, for the first time, we observed the _Leu-tzé_ or fishing corvorant, the _Pelicanus Sinensis_, diving after the finny tribe and seemingly no less anxious than its master to take them. This bird is so like another species of the pelican, called the _Carbo_ or common corvorant which in England, as naturalists inform us, was formerly trained for fishing, that it has usually been considered the same, but from several specimens brought home with us it appears to be a different species. The usual practice is to take ten or twelve of these birds, in the morning when fasting, upon a raft of bamboo poles lashed together, and to let one or two at most at a time dive for fish, which are taken from them the moment they bring them to the surface. These birds, not much larger than the common duck, will seize and gripe fast fishes that are not less than their own weight. When the proprietor judges the first pair to be pretty well fatigued, they are suffered to feed by way of encouragement on some of the fish they have taken, and a second pair are dispatched upon the water. The fish we observed them to take was a species of perch. In the course of three days' navigation, we saw several thousand boats and rafts employed in this kind of fishing.

Except on the water and the islands, the whole of the swampy country might be said to be uninhabited and totally void of any kind of cultivation. Sometimes, indeed, a few miserable mud huts appeared on the small hillocks that here and there raised their heads out of the dreary waste of morass; but the chief inhabitants were cranes, herons, guillemots and a vast variety of other kinds of birds that frequent the waters and swamps. Here too are great numbers of that singular and beautiful bird, the _Anas Galericulata_, usually known by the name of the _Mandarin duck_ which, like the gold and silver fishes, is caught and reared as an article of sale to the opulent and curious. The great extent of water had a sensible effect on the temperature of the air, especially in the mornings and evenings, when Fahrenheit's thermometer was sometimes below 40°.

Having passed the lakes and swamps, we entered suddenly, on the 31st, upon a most delightful part of the country, crowded with temples and villages and towns and cities, near all of which, and on every part of the canal, were vast numbers of the revenue vessels, collecting the surplus taxes paid in kind, in order to transport them to the capital. Wheat and cotton appeared to be the two principal articles of culture. The surface of the country was now broken into hill and dale, every inch appeared to be under tillage, except the summit of the knolls, which were generally crowned with forest trees, and few of the detached houses or temples were without extensive gardens and orchards. Apples, pears, plums, peaches, apricots and pomgranates, were the common kinds of fruit, and the culinary vegetables were the same as those of _Pe-tche-lee_. The canal at this place is, perhaps, the grandest inland navigation in the whole world, being nearly a thousand feet in width and bordered on each side by stone quays, built with massy blocks of grey marble mixed with others of granite; and this immense aqueduct, although forced up several feet above the surface of the country by embankments thrown up by the labour of man, flowed with a current of three miles an hour nearly towards the Yellow River, to which we perceived we were fast approaching, by the bustle and activity both on shore and on the numberless canals that branched out in every direction from the main trunk; on whose banks, for several miles on either side, one continued town extended to the point of junction with this large river, celebrated in every period of the Chinese history. A village was particularly pointed out by the bargemen, whose name was derived from a miracle, which is most sacredly believed by the Chinese. Tradition says, that the famous astronomer _Heu_ was carried up to Heaven in his house, which stood at this place, leaving behind him an old faithful servant who, being thus deprived of his master and his habitation, was reduced to beggary; but happening by accident to throw a little prepared rice into the ground, it immediately grew and produced grain without chaff for his sustenance; from whence the place is called _Sen-mee_, _rice growing ready dressed_, to this day.