CHAPTER XV

RAMBLES IN THE PROVINCE OF CONFUCIUS

The chief impression of the long all-day journey from Peking to Tzinan in early spring is of graves. All sizes of them, from mere haycocks to veritable haystacks, take up almost more of the fields than they leave to cultivation, so that the deadly flat landscape, drearily dry brown at this season, looks as if it were broken out with smallpox. In Chihli Province there had been no real snow all winter; but from about the time we entered Shantung onward the shrinking remnants of a recent modest fall of it varied slightly the bare yellowish monotony spread out under a cloudless sky.

The old walled city of Teh-chow was the first place of importance over the boundary, and there was nothing visibly different about that from a hundred other walled cities of China. At one end of the long graveled station platform sat an old coffin, and lying on top of it was the stone that had marked its first grave and was needed now for the new one somewhere else. The Chinese are coming to be more easily persuaded by the clink of silver that their ancestors will endure removal, when a railway or a growing mission station or an industrial plant finds it imperative to have more room. A policeman quite as up to date as those of Peking was driving up and down the platform two men who seemed to have known some prosperity before this misfortune overtook them. Ropes tied to their outside arms furnished the driver his reins, and about their necks hung by cords big wooden placards detailing their crimes. The officer saw to it that they forced their way into every group, so that there could be no excuse for any one, in or outside the long crowded train, not to recognize them as rascals, before he drove them back to wherever they waited until the next train called them forth again. It was an anachronism, this ancient mode of punishment amid such modern surroundings; but what would be the effect if our own absconding bankers and sneak-thieves were similarly paraded from suburbs to railroad station, pausing for any one who cared to read? It would at least make their faces more familiar to those who might benefit in future by such knowledge. But on second thought our press serves us the same purpose, without physical exertion to criminals or policemen.

At Teh-chow the ancient and the modern means of transportation between the Yang Tse and Peking part company. All the way from Tientsin, the railroad which, about a decade back, brought Shanghai within thirty-six hours of the capital is within rifle-shot of the Grand Canal that Kublai Khan merely _re_constructed six hundred and fifty years ago. Before we realized that maps and modern conditions are not counterparts in the China of to-day, we had a pleasant dream of houseboating from Peking to the Yang Tse, when it came time for us to move southward. Intuition should have sufficed, but we only learned from inquiry that, since the tribute grain which once came yearly to Peking by hundreds of junks could now come by other means, if any one still gave Peking tribute, the Grand Canal has silted up for long distances, to say nothing of the bandit nests through which it runs in these days of the self-styled republic. Once the railroad meets and crosses it again, at the southern boundary of the province; otherwise the two routes are never in agreement below Teh-chow.

The capital of Shantung Province announces itself by its smokestacks about the time the rumbling of the long German-built bridge across the Yellow River awakens the traveler to the fact that the day’s ordeal is over. Flour-mills account for most of these spirals of smoke where ten or fifteen years ago little more than graves grew. Tzinan is an exception to the general rule of Chinese treaty-ports, in that it was opened to foreign trade in 1906 by desire from within rather than pressure from without. The Germans, and after them the Japanese, have built up a fore-city of broad, almost-paved streets, lined by modern buildings that here and there approach the imposing, on the space turned over to the growth of foreign enterprise by the Chinese themselves. Japanese hospitals and schools, buildings that carry the thoughts back to the bridge-heads on the Rhine, here and there a contribution by some other nationality, give quite a manly air to this modern section of Shang-Pu, with its railway stations. But if one’s mind has that queer and no doubt reprehensible quirk which makes the picturesque more interesting than standardized efficiency, the wheelbarrows are strong competitors for the attention. In Peking and the north these are less used, and not at all for passengers. In Tzinan they carry a much larger proportion of the population than do the rickshaws. For while the latter are numerous also, their capacity is limited, and there seems to be no exact high-water mark to the number of persons a barrow-man can crowd upon the two cushions flanking his high wooden wheel, with its guards doing duty as seat-backs. Especially when the factory workers are going to or from their mud huts, eight or ten, and even twelve, pairs of little misshapen feet hang over the sides of these patient vehicles, still barely bending the sturdy back of the human packhorse in the shafts. Men ride in them, too, sometimes a pair or a group of coolies whom it would be impossible to distinguish from the man whom they are, one must assume, paying to do their walking for them. A wheelbarrow trip costs but a half or two thirds as much as the same journey by rickshaw; the mere matter of greater speed or comfort is not, of course, of any importance to the rank-and-file Chinese; and the invariable ungreased squeaking of the conveyance, which announces its coming as far off as could a trolley-bell, may easily be soothing music to a people who enter Chinese theaters without compulsion.

The main stream of squeaks ambles its way into the old native city, doubly surrounded by two rambling walls. There the recent snow had left what passes for streets ankle-deep in mud, except perhaps for a few short stretches paved centuries ago with huge slabs of stone so rounded off now that a rickshaw can scarcely make wheelbarrow speed over them, and which at best are only somewhat less thickly covered with paste-like slime. Foreigners who have lived there half a century say they can see improvements in the native life of old Tzinan, but the new-comer will have to take most of this on faith, and is not likely to carry off many impressions essentially different from those he has had or will have inside the walls of any well populated Chinese city. Merchants in black lounge in skullcaps in constantly repeated little booth-shops on either hand, outwardly indifferent to custom as they sip their tea from handleless cups, smoke their tiny pipes with the often yard-long stems, play chess, checkers, cards, or dice, all of an Oriental kind. Immediate attention comes, however, when a possible client pauses in what would be the doorway if there were a front wall, quadrupled, quintupled if the pauser is astonishingly a foreigner. Here and there several people stand before a counter, and two or three times as many behind it. Street venders paddle through the mud, stridently announcing themselves. Roofless shops on the corners, and everywhere else that there is a bit of space to crowd in, sell steaming balls of dough, bowls of watery chopped-up meat, China’s kind of macaroni, served with worn chop-sticks and accompanied, perhaps, by a constant refrain designed to draw, rather than to drive off, more customers. Beggars in costumes which could not have possibly reached such a state without deliberate aid splash along beside the stranger’s rickshaw at a speed to prove health and strength, crying incessantly, “_Ta Lao Yea! Ta Lao Yea!_” “Great Old Excellency!” in the vain hope that the Chinese compliment of granting old age where it is still not physically due will bring perhaps even silver from the outside barbarian who is in reality still disgustingly youthful. Glimpses at irregular intervals down side streets that are merely poorer examples of the same thing, with more makeshift booths and fewer large shops, more strident venders and fewer hopeful beggars. Once or twice the big weather-beaten gateway to a yamen, with coolies made into soldiers by the superimposing of a faded uniform padded with cotton leaning on their rifles and eying the passing throng with the air of bad boys who are far too seldom spanked. Less shopkeeping and more miserable dwelling farther out, women and girls standing or hobbling about in the mud on their little deformed feet, everywhere a plethora of boys, nowhere a person who could be called clean, almost everything and every one dirty as a pigsty. Then the street shifts a block before it passes out the farther gate—for evil spirits would make short shrift of a city with a straight passage clear through it—and the stranger finds himself in the outskirts, between the great and the outer wall, with a picturesque glimpse along the former of women washing clothes in the tree-lined moat, and ragged boys are pushing his rickshaw from behind over a bridging hump in the stone and mud-slough road in the hope of being tossed a copper.

With the example of decent dwellings and habits in plain sight about them in as well as outside the walls, this plodding through filthy streets between dismal mud dens seems to remain wholly satisfactory even to those visibly able to improve their conditions if they chose. Rows of modern two-story stone houses of the missionaries stand on two sides of the city, and with all the efforts of these enigmatical men and women from across the Pacific to jounce China out of her old ruts, it would have been curious to find how slight effect such patent examples have on the daily living of those in constant contact with them, even to the extent of a little increased effort for cleanliness and convenience—if one had not already seen China elsewhere. Just around the corner from the well equipped hospital manned by Americans and English, the Chinese medicine-shops continue to sell powdered fossils for curing diseased eyes, dried frog’s liver for kidney troubles, deer horns ground up into remedies for other ailments, and to send inquirers to native medicine-men who know the hundred and some spots on the human body where sickness can be let out by puncturing with a needle. The mission university with its big campus backed by a splendid landscape and reached by a hole cut specially for it in the main city wall continues to look utterly incongruous in its setting of ignorance and filth. The turnstile of a mission museum filled with graphic illustrations of China’s errors and the simple cures for them records hundreds of thousands of visitors from all the surrounding region and beyond during the pilgrim season alone, yet the callers seem to carry nothing home with them except the honor of having climbed the sacred mountain and worshiped at the shrine of the famous sage a little farther southward. Graphic proofs that deforestation has brought in its train devastating floods, that it contributes to the aridity of the soil on which even the snow, for lack of shade, evaporates before it sinks in, that it is mainly responsible for the locusts which birds might make way with if there were trees for birds to live in, has barely caused the planting of a few shrubs here and there on the mountains that roll up at the edge of the plain on which Tzinan is built—and these will be hacked down and carried off for fuel at the first good opportunity. The people of Shantung’s capital seem to regard as their chief civic asset the big spring that boils up in three mounds of water in the heart of the city and forms a great lake within the walls, through the reedy channels of which they are poled on pleasure-barges, set with tables for their favorite sport of eating, out to island temples where gaudy gods still gaze down upon worshipers unable to recognize the sardonic smirks on their color-daubed wooden faces.

South of Tzinan there are low mountains or high hills, bare except for temples and patches of snow that glistened in the moonlight. These culminate in fame, if not in height, in Tai-shan, most sacred of the holy peaks of China, two hours below the provincial capital. I had purposely timed my journey to Shantung so that I could climb Tai-shan with the pilgrims who flock to it during the fortnight following the Chinese New Year. Though he might have been extremely nasty at that season, the weather god evidently approved my plans, for it would be impossible to picture more perfect conditions for making this far-famed excursion than that brilliant first day of March according to our Western calendar.

Even in Peking those who should have been better informed had led me to expect strenuous opposition to my refusal of chair-bearers. There was nothing of the kind, though I seemed to feel an atmosphere of mingled surprise and prophecy that I should deeply regret it before the day was done, when I asked merely for a coolie to carry my odds and ends. The ability of almost any foreigner in China to afford servants for all his menial tasks gives the great mass of the Chinese the impression that he has no physical endurance of his own, but only untold riches. The coolie who set off with me at sunrise was well chosen, for not only was he all that a coolie and a guide and “boy” combined should be, but he was so quick-witted and so free from the worst crudities of the Shantung dialect that we conversed almost freely on almost any subject in spite of the scantiness of my Mandarin vocabulary.

The way lay first across a stony plain sloping gently upward, with the compact mass of rocky mountains so close in the cloudless atmosphere that one might easily have been deceived about the exertions that lay ahead, had not common fame more than corrected any such error. Pilgrims were already converging from both directions upon the partly stone-paved route leading out of the north gate of Taianfu, surrounded by its time-blackened walls, and within an hour we were all passing in a single stream through the first great archway. _I-T’ien-Men_—“First Heaven Gate”—the Chinese call it, and over it hangs an inscription announcing in the brevity of Chinese characters that Confucius took this path when he climbed Tai-shan—enough to make it the accepted one even if there were other feasible ascents. Stone steps soon begin to hint at the obstacle race ahead, though this early they are merely in isolated half-dozens scattered up the gradually more sloping road floored with big irregular stones worn smooth by uncounted millions of feet. Already the beggars who decorate the entire ascent were raising their insistent clamor, and shops and temples and tea-houses and itinerant venders formed an almost unbroken wall on either side. Higher up there were increasingly open stretches looking off across the steep tumbled gorge we were climbing, to the swift rocky mountain-sides that shut us in. Here and there a cluster of rugged, misshapen pines gave as dainty a retreat as if we had been in Japan, but the general lack of cleanliness alone distinctly informed us that we were not. These clumps were rare, too, even on China’s most sacred mountain, otherwise almost entirely of stone, with hardly a patch of earth big enough for the planting of a flower-bed.

This did not make it infertile for its inhabitants, however; rather the contrary. My coolie companion, to whom the ascent was an old, old story, put the number of beggars that lined it at one thousand; but that certainly was over-modest. Surely there were several times that number from bottom to top, and just as many from top to bottom. They sat in the center of the great stairs, so that chair-bearers passed one on either side of them, and those who were carried up passed directly over their heads. The top of each little cluster of stairs seemed to be the exclusive territory of one mendicant, or, in the great majority of cases, of one whole family of them, and not one did I see poaching even for an instant on his fellows’ preserves. Just as often as the half-dozen steps were surmounted a beggar was certain to be found squatting in the middle of the topmost, his woven-reed scoop lying invitingly beside him. Where the merely sloping stretches between these steps were more than ten or twelve feet long other beggars were regularly spaced along them; and higher up, where the ascent was all stairs, there was one, or a family group, about every sixth step.

Sleeker, fatter, more contented-looking beggars I cannot recall having seen anywhere on earth. Red-cheeked children, boys seeming to predominate, were the chief stock in trade, though there were a few adults who were visibly in sad states of health. During the pilgrim season, I was told, hundreds of peasants leave their little farms in charge of one member of the family and the rest establish themselves somewhere along the ascent to Tai-shan, until the spring grows so warm that their other occupation requires their presence at home again. On one side or the other of the climb, seldom more than a few feet from their squatting-place, each group had a makeshift dwelling,—a hut of rocks and grass-mats, sometimes a natural grotto covered over with whatever was available, generally only high enough for the adults on all fours, but carpeted with mountain hay and better than the average homes along Peking _hutungs_. Mountain water, magnificent air, a far-reaching view across the plain below, if that means anything to them, made the dismal mud dwellings of most Chinese, within the reeking gloom of city, town, or compound walls, nothing to be compared with this life of perfect leisure in such a vantage-place.

There might have been one serious drawback to all this,—like the “horrible example” of the temperance lecturer, the exhibits could not be kept in proper condition to make the best appeal. The whole mendicant army on Tai-shan, except the small minority that was really ailing, looked so well fed and well slept that only an unusually charitable or exceedingly unobserving Westerner would have yielded to their pleas. He might have been inclined instead to thump the well padded ribs of the woman who here and there, at his approach, stripped suddenly naked the plump youngster she held in her lap, hastily trying to hide its thick warm _i-shang_ behind her—for there was still a distinct bite in the air even on this southern slope of the mountain with a brilliant sun beating down upon it. But the visible prosperity of the mendicants seemed to matter little, for the Chinese pilgrims who made up the now almost constant stream of humanity toiling skyward had evidently some superstition that their pilgrimage would not be effective if they did not succor all who needed it along the way, and most of them were taking no chances on passing by a deserving case merely because it looked better nourished and housed than they did themselves. Those who gave confined their gifts almost exclusively to brass “cash”; but there were many scoops an inch or two deep in these cheap coins, occasionally with a real copper standing conspicuously out among them, though the recipients sneaked off to their lairs now and then to hide their gleanings. A whole scoopful of “cash” would not resemble riches to an American “panhandler”; to Chinese of the lower class, however, the pickings of most of the mendicants on Tai-shan, if that day was an average, would seem almost an income of luxury.

About nine o’clock the descending peasants and coolies had also grown to a constant stream, so that rules of the road—or, more exactly by this time, of the stairway—had to be more or less strictly obeyed if progress was to be made either up or down. There were no pilgrim costumes, such as the Japanese climbing Koya-san, for instance, so commonly wear, though frequent groups of coolies carried triangular flags bearing a few characters, touches of color that livened somewhat the almost invariable blue of the every-day garments of the masses. Unfailingly good-natured, the coolie pilgrims had neither a suggestion of the rowdiness of our popular excursions nor of the rather belligerent self-complacency of their island neighbors to the east. Except for two little Japanese professors from Manchuria, who conversed with me in English and German respectively and with the Chinese by characters scrawled on scraps of paper, I was the only foreigner making the ascent that day. The sight of me on foot did not arouse more than the usual gaping to which any Westerner outside the restricted orbits of his kind is subject anywhere in China—until my coolie made one of his often repeated answers to the question as to what had become of my chair. Even the little Japanese climbed on foot for an hour or more, their chairs trailing behind them, and only a few of the haughtiest and fattest Chinese declined to get out and stretch their legs at all. But that a man not only ostensibly of the wealthy class, but a weak “outside barbarian” into the bargain, should be so foolish as to risk getting himself stranded by undertaking a journey which naturally he could not finish unassisted, changed the mere gaping to excitement. It was all very well, I gathered from such of their remarks and gestures as I could understand, for even a foreigner to win whatever merit was given such beings by making as much of the journey as he could on foot, but he most certainly should have brought along a chair to rescue him when he could no longer climb.

The chairs, by the way, were really not worthy of that name. Instead of the sentry-box-like sedan used in many parts of China to this day, with a carrier or two, or even three, in front and as many behind, these were merely a kind of pole-and-rope hammock, mildly resembling a crude, low rustic arm-chair, in which the carried sat facing forward with his feet hanging over before him, grazing the heads of the incessant beggars in the middle of the ascent, while his rarely more than two carriers walked on either side of him, bearing the contrivance sidewise. Every little distance, when the straps over their outside shoulders became painful, they shifted simultaneously by swinging themselves and the chair around with a swift, almost automatic motion, and continued to toil upward. This was as near as the facts corresponded to the tales so often told of the breath-taking dangers of chairing it up Tai-shan, where, according to the most imaginative tellers, the carriers “just toss you off into space” whenever they change positions. Ever since I first heard this yarn I had pictured thousands of feet of sheer abyss directly beneath the trembling chair-rider, whereas I doubt if he would at any time have dropped more than six or eight feet, exclusive of what he might have rolled, in the unheard-of event of the bearers’ spilling him.

A little spill would have served the riders right anyway, for most of them were larger and better nourished than the coolies who bore them, needed in fact just such reducing exercises as walking up Tai-shan; and any really two-legged mortal can make the ascent considerably sooner on foot than by chair. On this day at least the carried were decidedly the aristocratic minority, for there was by no means one of them to each hundred of the foot-travelers who shuttled past in two often long unbroken lines. To win full merit for the pilgrimage, evidently, it should be made under the pilgrim’s own steam, though there seems to be no harm in getting a little assistance by the way. Thus most of the women who were painfully toiling upward on their bound feet had each a coolie walking beside her to sustain her faltering steps and give her a boost every now and then by the hand in one of her armpits.

One by one we came to “Flying Clouds Hall,” to the “Ten Thousand Genii Hall,” where the Emperor Kao-Tsu paused to receive homage during his ascent in 595 A.D., to the “Horse Stopping Place,” and finally to _Hui-Ma-Ling_, the “Horse Turning Back Peak,” where even an emperor was forced to dismount and resort to some other means of locomotion. All these “halls” were Chinese temples, quite commonplace except for their location, filled with dusty, gaudy wooden gods before whom pilgrims burned joss-sticks by the bundle, heaping the big iron urns with ashes, and with the clamor of begging priests, beating gongs, shrieking their demands, calling upon all passers-by to try their fortune-telling or invest in their tissue-paper prayers. In the courtyards of many of them, too, and on the landing outside all, were venders of tea and dough-balls and other delicacies of the Chinese cuisine, some having permanent establishments with home-made tables and sawhorse benches, most of them men who carried their stock in trade on a pole over their shoulders. The general stoniness of the mountain broke out here and there in mighty boulders and rock-faced cliffs, on which inscriptions had been carved centuries ago in characters sometimes the height of a man. There were fixed resting-places at which not only chair-coolies but my own companion insisted on stopping, though his load was next to nothing. It had only been a lunch-basket and some extra clothing to begin with, and at the bottom of the first cluster of stairs he had hired a boy to carry most of that. At _Ch’ung T’ien Men_, for instance, approximately half-way up, as its name suggests, there were two or three temples and as many tea-houses, a terrace from which one could gloat over the ascent that already lay below, and a view of the flat plain stretching away interminably from the foot of the mountain; and my failure to stop there for refreshments caused as great astonishment among the custom-shackled throng as did my strange Western garb.

At this point the road descends rather sharply for a furlong or more through a ravine, across which the rest of the climb stands in plainest sight, like a stairway to the sky, a ladder rather, for it seems almost perpendicular, and disappearing high above through the archway of a big red structure famed throughout China as the _Nan-T’ien-Men_—the “South Gate of Heaven.” This furlong is a relief, not only from incessant climbing but from beggars, none of whom are so needy as to choose a station on this damp and shaded slope. They soon began again, however, interminable and insistent as before, at the bottom of the remaining ascent. Some one with more taste for statistics than for scenery has computed that there are six thousand steps on this final stairway to Tai-shan, and no one who has made this upper half of the journey by his own exertions will accuse him of exaggeration. But it is not, as common repute would have it, impossible on foot, either because of the steepness of the stairs, the precarious steps, or the danger that beggars or carriers will push one off into space for not contributing the orthodox amount—all of which one may hear from the lips of educated Chinese as well as foreigners even in Peking. The stone steps are uneven, from six inches to a foot wide, the average perhaps eight inches, and some of them are worn to a distinct slope. When they are wet with melting snow, as many things were that day on the upper part of the mountain, only the foolish would set their feet down carelessly upon them, but that could not constitute a worthy reason for intrusting one’s health to a pair of panting coolies who would double the time of the ascent. The beggars, I had gravely been told by a Chinese lady who had lived abroad in several embassies, would simply not allow me to pass if I did not contribute, and as a last resort they would take my offerings by force, so commanding do they become on the mountain at New Year’s time. They were certainly numerous and sturdy enough to have named their own contributions, and there was no visible force that might have curbed them. But they were Chinese—in other words, timid, passive, submissive, in spite of their blustering manner. In regular succession as often as half a dozen steps were surmounted they raised their voices in what might have been mistaken for demands that could not be refused; but just as often their seeming ferocity oozed quickly away into a meek and helpless, and withal a cheerful, resignation as soon as I passed without contributing. One or two, who were women, snatched at my coat-tail or legs, but the hint of a menacing gesture quickly freed me from their noisome attentions, and most of them seemed to be too well fed and contented to rise and run beside me, wailing the “Great Old Excellency!” so familiar in Peking and most other cities of the North. From the plain to the Gate of Heaven the adult mendicants at least seemed to think it exertion enough to squat beside the little fire almost every group had built in the center of its step, and depend on voice and manner—and of course, most valuable of all, ancient custom—for their gleanings. Indeed, one wise old fellow had resorted to absent treatment, remaining in his kennel across the rocky ravine nearly a hundred yards from his scoop on the stairway, beating a gong and shouting to attract attention, and no doubt strolling over now and then to carry home the wealth that rained upon him, which his colleagues made no attempt to appropriate.

The “Clouds Stepping Bridge” was the last break in the sheer ascent, which thereafter marched straight up to the southern Gate of Heaven, dense blue from top to bottom with cautious coolies picking their way up or down. Sometimes there was a very old man, half carried by his sons; now and then a limp, white-faced fellow whose exertions had been too much for him came down in the chair he had scorned to take, or could not afford, when he set out. Even on this upper stretch of the journey the stairway was broken by landings, and on these even the sturdiest paused for breath more and more frequently as the red archway slowly descended to meet us. Youths loitered about the steepest places and lent a hand to those who looked likely to reward their efforts, unless one drove them off with scornful gestures. Near the top a great iron chain was set in the rock as a kind of hand-rail but was hardly needed by any whose legs had not deserted them. When at last, a trifle more than four hours after setting out from the railway station, I marched in through the archway, it occurred to me that, beggars, pilgrims, and stairs aside, the climb had been very similar to that up the steeper side of Mount Washington, in New Hampshire, both in the amount of exertion required and the rockiness of the landscape.

A cold wind swept across the summit, in disconcerting contrast to the burning sunshine below the gateway, calling instantly for all the garments my two carriers had brought for me. The climbing was not yet done; in fact it is a good half-mile from the _Nan-T’ien-Men_ to the Taoist temple which crowns the mountain. But this is by a winding, leisurely road passing through several temples in which pilgrims were performing the feats for which they had come. The courtyards of these, neglected by the sun, were littered with heaps of dirty snow, with the ashes of myriad sticks of incense, with the débris of firecrackers and tissue-paper prayers, and as temples they were nothing out of the ordinary, duplicated by hundreds all over China, but famous for their location and the special potencies their gods derive from it. Coolies and peasants made up at least three fourths of the throng kowtowing here, faces touching the ground, burning incense there, lighting big bunches of firecrackers for the edification of some sleepy-eyed god over yonder, rubbing a glass-smooth stone monument from which some form of blessing seems to be extracted by friction; but there were many men of the well-to-do and the ostensibly educated classes among them. The scarcity of women and children made each temple compound seem a congress of adult males, and the mixture of Fourth of July boyishness and fishwife credulity with which these men solemnly carried out their superstitious antics would have seemed even more out of place but for their girlish cues and their generally simple, almost childlike manners.

Out on the rock knoll before the highest temple, marked with a stone shaft here and there and swept now by wintry winds out of keeping with the unbroken brilliancy of the day, a few stone-cut characters announce that “Confucius stood here and felt the smallness of the world below.” A wide expanse unfolds on every side, with only the heavens above. One can make out Tzinan, and faintly the Hoang Ho, then a lake of considerable size, and the railway stretching like a hair on the glass into infinity in either direction—a brown world rolling away in a myriad of peaks and knobs and salients of what looks like a boiling landscape suddenly struck solid. I have nowhere been able to find why Tai-shan is a sacred mountain, but it was already so twenty-five hundred years before the Christian era began; perhaps its great sanctity had its start among the largely plain-dwelling Chinese simply because of the comprehensive view of the world below from its summit when there is nowhere the hint of a rag of cloud and only the haziness of great distances limits the power of the eye.

There was a surprising change in the human element of the scene when I descended early in the afternoon. Where there had been crowd after crowd two hours before, in every temple courtyard, in every refreshment-shop, where the great stairway had seemed carpeted from top to bottom with shimmering dark-blue, there were now only scattered individuals, and most of these were lolling or squatting inside the buildings. What had become of the vast throng so suddenly was a mystery; as nearly as I could make out from my guide’s answer they had gone home again. Taoist priests in their black bonnet-caps were enjoying siestas along the stone verandas on the sunny side of their courtyards; worshipers, in so far as they remained at all, were sipping tea and wielding chop-sticks, or doing nothing whatever, in the den-like places where their patronage had been so vociferously solicited in the morning. The completest change of all had come over the beggars. Their shallow baskets, barely sprinkled now with “cash,” lay in constant succession in the center of the stairway as before, but in the whole descent I doubt whether as many as a dozen mendicants were there in person to make a vocal appeal. Perhaps the rules of their union forbade labor at this hour—which reminds me that the medical mission school in Tzinan can rarely get the bodies of beggars for dissection, numerous as they are in life, because the beggars’ gild insists on giving them honorable burial—and the corpses of criminals, readily furnished by the Government, are useless in the study of the brain, because the modern substitute for the headsman’s sword in China is an officer who steps up and blows the back of the culprit’s head off with a revolver. The general desertion of their stations looked, however, more like the contented retirement of craftsmen whose wants were amply satisfied by a part-day’s exertion. They sat off the trail against sunny rocks or beneath an occasional evergreen, or about the mouths of their huts and caves, gossiping, quarreling, scratching, and otherwise heartily enjoying themselves, especially sleeping in their grass-floored nests, scorning to exert themselves even to the extent of a pleading word or glance at likely passers-by. Their untended baskets were plea enough, if charity was still abroad—and evidently honor is no less among beggars than among thieves, for no one seemed in the least concerned lest some one else appropriate the coins meant for him.

We passed now and then a few descending pedestrians, and two or three going down in chairs. Those who have tried it say that there is the exhilaration of dancing in the descent of Tai-shan in these misnamed contrivances, especially down this upper half of it. For though the stairway is continuous here, it is frequently and regularly broken by landings, and the technique of the chair-bearers, handed down perhaps from remote antiquity, is to trot down each cluster of stairs, then saunter slowly across the landing, perhaps shifting shoulders upon it, before jogging suddenly down the next flight. So the descent is like a rhythmic dropping through space, something suggestive of waltzing by airplane, soothing or terrifying, according to the nerve adjustment of the rider. A few belated pilgrims, mainly women on their pitiful feet, were still laboring upward; but the way was almost clear, and two hours below the summit found us strolling away down the last gentle slope between old cypresses. Once, before we entered the square-walled town of Taian, my companion dragged me aside into a temple to “see something good see,” and one of those mixtures of rowdy and beggar which so many Chinese priests become unlocked a kind of chapel containing an ugly gilded statue that pretended to have human arms and legs, the latter crossed in Buddhist repose. The story has it that a monk sat on this table until he starved himself to death as a short cut to Nirvana, but the thing was a mere dressed-up mummified corpse arranged to mulct credulous coolies of their precious coppers. It was an outbreak of barbarism worthy the Catholicism of Latin America and many times more surprising in a land which, whatever else it has to be ashamed of, is not particularly given to this form of savagery.

Inside the walled city, too, I came upon the first deliberate obscenities I had so far seen in the Middle Kingdom. A great fair was in full swing in the grounds of a temple, and among the large colored photographs which several story-tellers inserted in the double-panel screens they had set up to illustrate their chanted tales, were quite a number depicting such things as women nude to the waist. A slight breach indeed in many another land; but in China, where the subject of sex so rarely receives public recognition, it meant almost an open parading of immorality. But New Year’s season seems to bring a relaxation even of morals, and especially does gambling, quite publicly and without distinction as to age or sex, rage throughout China during that fortnight, as it did not at scores of places within these temple grounds. They were vast, and shaded by magnificent old trees, with a wall as mighty as that of the city itself surrounding them, and still with room to spare, though all the hawkers, traders, and money-changers for many _li_ roundabout seemed to be gathered there. At one end stood a mighty hall, famed for its four colossal wooden statues, which still did not reach the lofty beams of the roof nor seem cramped within the walls on which ancient frescos were still moderately well preserved. Here, as everywhere that a wooden god is housed in this holy land of China, stood begging priests and a receptacle heaped with “cash” and coppers flung at it by passing pilgrims. The latter are no doubt the principal source of income of Taianfu, yet prosperity seemed more at home there than in the great majority of China’s smaller cities. Time was when the people knew prosperity would depart at the building of the American Methodist Mission just outside the walls, but both the mission and the prosperity seem to increase rather than to languish.

When the Germans, something more than a decade ago, built that portion of the Tientsin-Pukow Railway which runs through Shantung, they naturally planned to have it touch Chufou, sacred to Confucius. But their surveyors insisted that the line must cut across the long cypress avenue between his temple and his grave, and rather than permit such a desecration Chufou did without the railroad. Perhaps it is fitting, anyway, that those who come to honor the great sage should bump by “Peking cart” the twenty _li_ between the station, a short two hours south of Tai-shan, and the town; for did not Confucius himself suffer in some such contraption while vainly hawking his wisdom to and fro through the land we now know as China? At least, sinologues assure us that the cart antedates Confucius, and certainly there has been no notable improvement in it since its first appearance, for that would be un-Chinese. Tucked away inside by a solicitous seeker after gratuities who had furnished several pillows by the simple method of stripping a few hotel beds, one expects a “Peking cart” to ride rather well—until the first jolt disabuses him. There may be roads smooth enough to make such traveling comfortable, but they do not grow in China. How many times one side or the other of the vehicle deliberately reached over and severely thumped me here, there, or elsewhere during that six miles across a fertile sea-flat plain which should have been as easy-riding as the labyrinthian road should have been direct I have no means of computing. I do recall, however, wishing a thousand times that the mule who tossed with me would be a little less deliberate and have it over with, only to thank fortune a second later when something, anything brought him to a momentary halt.

If Confucius could return to the old town he would certainly be disappointed—or am I imbuing him with a modern point of view to which he could not attain even by reincarnation? Judging by the effect several hundred centuries of his philosophy have had on his countrymen, I doubt on second thought whether he would lose any sleep over the insignificant fact that before he could reach his own compound he would have to wade at least calf-deep in oozy black mud for a mile or so, between mud hovels at which our pigs would curl their tails in wrath, stared upon by a redundancy of people to whom his native soil seems preferred as covering to cotton or wool. At worst he would probably quickly forget it, once inside his own private domain, especially if the thought of the streets and of “Peking carts” were not embittered by the necessity of returning to the station. The wall of Chufou has a circuit of four miles, and a third of the area within is taken up by the temple of Confucius and the residence of his lineal descendant. One steps directly from an unspeakable street into the vast enclosure, broken up by wall behind wall and building behind building in the style common to Chinese construction. First comes a forest of tile roofs, each covering a single turtle-supported stone shaft set up by this or that Chinese emperor. There are several rows of these, with perhaps a dozen in a row, larger and many times better built than the home of the average living Chinese. Above them, as through all the subdivisions of the great enclosure, rise old cypress-trees affording the sylvan pleasures of shade, the singing of birds, and the murmur of swaying branches. In the principal courtyard the stump of a pagoda-tree reputed to have been planted by the sage himself is preserved under a little glass-sided temple, a miniature of those in the outer yard. This is popularly believed to take on new life through another sprout as often as one dies, thus bridging all the centuries between the planter and present-day China, and certainly a large old tree of the same variety now leans forth from what seems to be the same root. Beyond is an open temple of kiosk shape where Confucius sat under a plum-tree and taught—even in winter no doubt, for he was probably as impervious to cold and discomfort as are the Chinese of to-day in their cotton-padded garments.

The great main temple about which all else centers has often been described in detail, so that all who read of such things should know that it is a hundred and thirty-five by eighty-four feet in area and seventy-eight high, with a portico upheld by nine far-famed stone pillars intricately carved with dragons. What seems to be less widely known is the impressive simplicity of that great structure, especially of the interior, dimly yet amply lighted through paper windows, and as strikingly free from the cluttering of painted idols which crowd most Chinese temples as is the whole enclosure from beggars and sycophant priests. A seated statue of the sage, ten feet high, occupies an alcove in the center of the room, facing the great doors. He wears the ancient scholar costume, culminating in a head-dress from which our mortarboard cap might have been derived, being a flat thing some two feet long, with ropes strung with beads, hanging well down over his face, which greatly resemble the warnings that our railroads hang on either side of low bridges as a caution to their brakemen to duck their heads. Above the alcove a slab of wood bearing four characters boldly announces Confucius the “Master Exemplar of All Ages”; before it stands the spirit tablet, the table on which sacrificial food is offered, and a great iron urn filled with the ashes of countless joss-sticks. On the right and left are the images of the “twelve disciples” of Confucius, a number which seems to have been purposely reached, by including the “boob” among his pupils and the commentator on his Classics who lived during the Sung dynasty—something like adorning the tombstone of Shakspere with the name of some professor who had edited a school edition of his works. Yet spaciousness on either hand, and upward to the old painted beams supporting the tile roof, is the impression likely to stay longest with the visitor from the West.

The original temple was built on this spot in 478 B.C., and to realize how slightly Chinese worship of the illustrious dead has changed during all the centuries since, one has only to drop into the former home of Li Hung-chang in Tientsin and note how similar in all its details is the temple in which his spirit tablet is enthroned. With each renovation there came an increase in size, until the shrine of Confucius became the vast cypress-shaded enclosure it is to-day. Many priests are attached to it, but they spend their time in learning the elaborate ritual and intricate forms of ceremony used during the spring and autumn festivals, so that regular and frequent worship, as we who live in Christian lands understand it, is scarcely practised. At stated periods the lineal descendant of Confucius comes to burn incense and offer food before the statue, as every Chinese son is expected to do before the graves of his ancestors. Pilgrims, too, come in great numbers, especially at certain seasons; but there is nothing similar to the daily mass or the weekly service of our churches.

Behind this main temple—which means on the cold north side of it, since every properly constructed Chinese temple faces south—is a smaller, much more severely simple hall containing the spirit tablet of Mrs. Confucius, though just which one is not specified. A spirit tablet, by the way, is a varnished or painted piece of wood a foot or two high, narrow and thin, bearing in three carved and usually gilded characters the posthumous name under which the deceased is honored, and set upright in the place sacred to him. At one side are two other temples, of the parents of Confucius, identically arranged. That is, the father is represented by a statue, in scholar’s costume, and the mother by a mere tablet, in a building following as meekly after that of her lord and master as does the Chinese wife in the flesh to this day. Why not statues of the wife and mother also, I asked the first man of learning willing to strain his understanding to catch my mispronounced meaning, though almost certain what the answer would be. It would be improper, he explained, politely, as to one with the ignorance of a new-born child, indecent, to speak plainly, to have a female statue, particularly in a sacred place. Given the ramshackle, filthy condition of a very large number of Chinese temples, the care with which all these were kept up was striking. But even these were not fleckless, especially those of the wife and the mother, where everything was covered with dust and the bare resounding chambers had a lonely air, as if very few ever took the trouble to come and burn incense to mere females.

I might, with a little effort or foresight, have come to Chufou properly introduced to meet the present head of the Kung family, which is the one we know by the name Confucius. But he is a mere boy—the prince who long held that position having recently died—and was certain to be in no manner different from a million other Chinese youths of the well-to-do class. Besides, though he passes as the seventy-fourth descendant in direct male line from the sage, he is in plain fact nothing of the sort. For the Confucius family, like many others in China, illustrious or commonplace, has now and then been forced to adopt a son to keep the line unbroken; even if a generation is not entirely sterile mere daughters are wasted effort in preserving a Chinese lineage. T’ai Tsung, nearly fifteen centuries after the death of the sage, bestowed posthumous honors upon the descendants of Confucius for the past forty-four generations, and exempted those to come from taxation, a privilege they still enjoy.

It is some two miles from the town itself to the grave of Confucius, by a worn-out avenue of ancient and bedraggled cypresses. “Those with letters of introduction, or persons of distinction,” explains the nearest approach to a guide-book of this region that is to be had, “are the only ones admitted; but others may be by tipping the guardian.” As if any one could possibly have gotten this far afield in China without knowing as much! The custodian was an unsoaped, one-eyed coolie who lay in wait just inside the first ornamental gateway, before which a pair of stone tigers, two _lin_ (sacred animals unknown to natural history), and stone statues of two gigantic gentlemen known as Weng and Chung, stood on guard. A tablet over this, or one of the other several entrances we passed on the half-mile walk that remained to the grave itself, announced it the “Tomb of the All-Accomplished and Most Saintly Prince Wen Hsüan,” a posthumous title by which the sage would scarcely recognize himself. There were fields to be crossed, sometimes along ways lined by trees, a landscape covered far and wide with ordinary graves, a small stream, finally a locked and bolted gateway through a temple-like building, before our walk ended. But when it did it was at a last resting-place that even the Western world would have approved, perhaps have envied. Venerable old trees whispering with last year’s dead leaves rose above the secluded spot, yet not so thickly as to cut off the arch of the blue heavens or to more than filter the brilliant sunshine. Birds flitted here and there. It was such a spot as could scarcely be found in any Occidental cemetery, for not even the formality of granite tombstones or graveled walks between the graves was there to mar the sylvan charm. Stones there were, a single plain slab before each of the three mounds, but with only three characters in the old rounded script on each of them, and the softening hand of time, perhaps of centuries, to bring them into harmony with the scene, they seemed as naturally in place as did the old trees stretching their arms above them. Cone-shaped, as is the custom in China, but many times larger than the graves strewn by millions throughout the land, the mounds were simple hillocks, covered now with winter-brown grass. The slightly larger one, the characters on its stone in gold instead of red, was of the sage himself; that on the east covered the remains of his only son, while before the main mound rose a third that caused dispute among the several hangers-on who had accompanied me, so that I have no certain means of knowing whether it is that of the sage’s brother, his father, or his grandson.

Kung Fu-tze, as he is known in his native land, was born some twelve miles eastward from Chufou, in the village of Ni-San, now under the rule of bandits, and has been dead only a little more than twenty-four hundred years. In those days the small states that eventually coagulated into what we know as China were separate principalities, of which modern Shantung alone contained four, Confucius being a native of the one called Lu. He was already teaching at twenty-two, and studied much history. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that there was not much of anything more exciting to do for a young man wading the streets of Chufou twenty-five centuries ago; hence undue credit should not be given this particular youth for frequenting libraries rather than pool-rooms. A few decades of his life seem to have passed without anything particularly worth recording; but what are a few decades in China? Whatever else he passed this time at, there is no question that the studious young man was doing everything in his power, short of overstepping the easy marital laws of Lu, to beget him a son, in which he eventually succeeded. At length he emerges again from obscurity “at the early age of fifty-five,” as a chief city magistrate. The elections seem to have run his way, for we behold him soon afterward the _acting_ minister of state—that unsatisfactory prefix probably being due to the fact, if one may judge by the politics of present-day China, that his appointment was not confirmed by Parliament. As such he “put an end to all crime,” evidently a simple little matter in those days, perhaps because “squeeze” was not included. But the old prince of Lu died and the new one abandoned himself to sensual pleasures, and at length Confucius quit the job and went on the road. Once it broke out, he seems to have had as serious a case of wanderlust as any ordinary mortal, for he rambled for thirteen years, looking in vain—so at least he told the story to sympathetic listeners—for a prince who would follow his advice and set up a model administration. The briefest reflection will remind the most thoughtless how times have changed in this matter of reformers since then.

If it were not improper to be critical toward so venerable an old gentleman, one might voice the suspicion that Confucius did not suffer severely from lack of self-confidence, for he repeatedly stated that he would produce a faultless administration and do away with all crime within three years in the domain of any prince who would hire him. Alas, if only he were back, be it only in the principality of Lu! No present member of the human race, unless perhaps a “practical politician,” will have the cynicism to suppose that the offer of this wandering Luluite was not eagerly competed for from the eight points of the Chinese compass. Yet the truth is far worse than that: he found no takers whatever! What was left for him, then, but to come back home and write a book? In fact, during those last three years of his life in Chufou he wrote five books, bringing himself unquestionably into the class with almost any of our modern novelists, though he succeeded in gathering about him only three thousand disciples. Population was scarcer in China twenty-five hundred years ago, of course, and publicity hardly a science at all. However, whatever he lacked in numbers he made up in quality, for no fewer than seventy-two of this handful became “proficient in the six departments of learning.” From these he chose ten as “master disciples,” granting them whatever passed for sheepskins in those days “for attainment in Virtue, Literature, Eloquence, and—and Politics!”

It is chiefly through these chosen followers, who wrote his “Discourses and Dialogues,” that Confucius became famous—and, like Christ, greatly misconstrued—and laid the foundation of China’s ethical and political life. But he could scarcely have had more than an inkling of the fame that was to accrue to him in later centuries, for his honors have been mainly posthumous, and it was not until twelve hundred and seventeen years after his death that he was made the “Prince of Literary Enlightenment!” Why, then, this hectic eagerness of modern man to attain to fame even before the sod has closed over him? I wonder, too, if the great sage would swell with pride at his achievements if he could come back and wander again through the grave-strewn, soiled and hungry, wickedly overpopulated, politically chaotic China of to-day. Surely he could not plead innocence of helping to bring about her present woes, for one of the most famous of his dictums, which have had so much influence on Chinese life for many centuries, runs “He who is not in office has no concerns with plans for the administration of its duties.” Where can be found, in so few words, the explanation of what is mainly wrong with the ancient empire which so erroneously now calls itself a republic?

Personally I should have preferred to Chufou the birthplace of Mencius, some thirty miles still farther southward, for there hills rise above the plain, growing larger beyond. Tsowhsien is a more enterprising town, too, with an electric light plant that had just been installed by an American company, and less of the air of making an easy living out of pilgrims than either Taianfu or the home of Confucius. Perhaps it has to thank the lesser fame of Mencius for this more manly attitude, for though he is reckoned second, or at worst third, among China’s sages, not one person in ten, even in his native province of Shantung, seemed to know where he lived and died. Pilgrims do come to Tsowhsien, for it is on the direct line of places of pilgrimage through this holy land of China; but Mencius has only dozens or scores of visitors where Confucius has thousands.

The green roof of his chief temple rises among the trees within easy sight from the railway. If the rest of the land somewhat neglects him, his native town bears him constantly in mind, and any street urchin can point out the monument marking the spot where he traded his shoes for a book, or where other typical escapades are immortalized in stone slabs, in spite of the fact that centuries of a swarming population have left them sad, slum-like spots. Chinese celebrities have, of course, an advantage over those of the Occident in being kept before the attention of posterity. Public monuments and dwelling-house museums are all very well, but how much more certain of constant attention Shakspere or Washington would be had they direct male descendants, overlooking an adoption now and then, whose main business in life it would be, generation after generation, to worship at the shrine of these illustrious ancestors and see to it that the things sacred to their memories grow and prosper.

The present head of the Meng family—for the name of the chief successor of Confucius was really Meng Tse—is a man in middle life, who dwells inside a big high-walled compound across the street from that enclosing the temples; and he evidently bears a striking resemblance to less fame-pursued Chinese of his class, for information reached us that he was just then busily engaged in feasting some friends. Except that it is considerably smaller and less imposing, the temple grounds of Mencius are quite similar to those of his more famous forerunner. Aged cypresses and the marks of time give it dignity and a certain charm; the statue of the sage wears the same bead-veiled scholar’s head-dress, and a costume as exactly similar as if it had been copied by a Chinese tailor; behind him is the meeker temple of his consort, containing only her spirit tablet; at one side are the smaller but almost identical shrines of his parents. If there is anything unique about the place it must be the birds nesting in the tall trees in the unoccupied back of the compound, beautifully graceful white birds that resemble both cranes and herons, yet do not seem to be exactly either. The information that they are found nowhere else in China was disputed by some of those who heard it.