Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

WANDERING IN

NORTHERN CHINA

A constant stream of pilgrims, largely blue-clad coolies on foot, passed up and down the sacred stairway

WANDERING IN NORTHERN CHINA

BY

HARRY A. FRANCK

Author of “A Vagabond Journey Around the World,” “Roaming Through the West Indies,” “Vagabonding Down the Andes,” “Working North from Patagonia,” etc., etc.

ILLUSTRATED WITH 171 UNUSUAL

PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR

WITH A MAP SHOWING HIS ROUTE

THE CENTURY CO.

NEW YORK & LONDON

Copyright, 1923, by

The Century Co.

Printed in U. S. A.

To

KATHARINE LATTA FRANCK

WHO CHOSE THIS PARTICULAR WANDER-YEAR TO JOIN OUR FAMILY CIRCLE

FOREWORD

There is no particular plan to this book. I found my interest turning toward the Far East, and as I am not one of those fortunate persons who can scamper through a country in a few weeks and know all about it, I set out on a leisurely jaunt to wherever new clues to interest led me. It merely happened that this will-o’-the-wisp drew me on through everything that was once China, north of about the thirty-fourth parallel of latitude. The man who spends a year or two in China and then attacks the problem of telling all he saw, heard, felt, or smelled there is like the small boy who was ordered by the teacher to write on two neat pages all about his visit to the museum. It simply can’t be done. Hence I have merely set down in the following pages, in the same leisurely wandering way as I have traveled, the things that most interested me, often things that others seem to have missed, or considered unimportant, in the hope that some of them may also interest others. Impressions are unlike statistics, however, in that they cannot be corrected to a fraction, and I decline to be held responsible for the exact truth of every presumption I have recorded. If I have fallen into the common error of generalizing, I hereby apologize, for I know well that details in local customs differ even between neighboring villages in China. What I say can at most be true of the north, for as yet I know nothing of southern China. On the other hand, there may be much repetition of customs and the like, but that goes to show how unchanging is life among the masses in China even as a republic.

Lafcadio Hearn said that the longer he remained in the East the less he knew of what was going on in the Oriental mind. An “old China hand” has put the same thing in more popular language: “You can easily tell how long a man has been in China by how much he doesn’t know about it. If he knows almost everything, he has just recently arrived; if he is in doubt, he has been here a few years; if he admits that he really knows nothing whatever about the Chinese people or their probable future, you may take it for granted that he has been out a very long time.”

But as I have said before, the “old-timer” will seldom sit down to tell even what he has seen, and in many cases he has long since lost his way through the woods because of the trees. Or he may have other and more important things to do. Hence it is up to those of us who have nothing else on hand to pick up and preserve such crumbs of information as we can; for surely to know as much of the truth about our foreign neighbors as possible is important, above all in this new age. In our own land there are many very false ideas about China; false ideas that in some cases are due to deliberate Chinese propaganda abroad. While I was out in the far interior I received a clipping outlining the remarks of a Chinese lecturing through our Middle West, and his résumé left the impression that bound feet and opium had all but completely disappeared from China, and that in the matter of schools and the like the “republic” is making enormous strides. No sooner did the Lincheng affair attract the world’s attention than American papers began to run yarns, visibly inspired, about the marvelous advances which the Chinese have recently accomplished. Such men as Alfred Sze are often mistaken in the United States as samples of China. Unfortunately they are nothing of the kind; in fact, they are too often hopelessly out of touch with their native land. There has been progress in China, but nothing like the amount of it which we have been coaxed or lulled into believing, and some of it is of a kind that raises serious doubts as to its direction. For all the telephones, airplanes, and foreign clothes in the coast cities, the great mass of the Chinese have been affected barely at all by this urge toward modernity and Westernism—if that is synonymous with progress. As some one has just put it, “the Chinese still wear the pigtail on their minds, though they have largely cut it off their heads.” How great must be the misinformation at home which causes our late President to say that all China really needs is more loans, thereby making himself, and by extension his nation, the laughing-stock of any one with the rudiments of intelligence who has spent an hour studying the situation on the spot. England is a little better informed on the subject than we, because she is less idealistic, more likely to look facts in the face instead of trying to make facts fit preconceived notions of essential human perfection. China may need more credits, but any fool knows that you should stop the hole in the bottom of a tub before you pour more water into it. At times, too, it is laughable to think of us children among nations worrying about this one, thousands of years old, which has so often “come back,” and may still be ambling her own way long after we have again disappeared from the face of the earth.

Though it is impossible to leave out the omnipresent entirely, I have said comparatively little about politics. My own interest in what we lump together under that word reaches only so far as it affects the every-day life of the people, of the mudsill of society, toward which, no doubt by some queer quirk in my make-up, I find my attention habitually focusing. I have tried, therefore, to show in some detail their lives, slowly changing perhaps yet little changed, and to let others conclude whether “politics” has done all that it should for them. Besides, the Far East swarms with writers on politics, men who have been out here for years or decades and have given their attention almost entirely to that popular subject; and even these disagree like doctors. Some of us, I know, are frankly tired of politics, at least for a space, important as they are; moreover, political changes are so rapid, especially in the “never changing” East, that it is impossible to keep abreast of the times in anything less than a daily newspaper.

At home there are numbers of young men, five or ten years out of college, who can tell you just what is the matter with the world, and exactly how to remedy it. I am more or less ready to agree with them that the world is going to the dogs. What of it? You have only to step outdoors on any clear night to see that there are hundreds of other worlds, which may be arranging their lives in a more intelligent manner. The most striking thing about these young political and sociological geniuses sitting in their suburban gardens or their city flats is that while they can toss off a recipe guaranteed to cure our own sick world overnight, if only some one can get it down its throat, they seldom seem to have influence enough in their own cozy little corner of it to drive out one grafting ward-heeler. In other words, if you must know what is to be the future of China, I regret that I have not been vouchsafed the gift of prophecy and cannot tell you.

In the minor matter of Chinese words and names, I have deliberately not tried to follow the usual Romanization, but rather to cause the reader to pronounce them as nearly like what they are on the spot as is possible with our mere twenty-six letters. Of course I could not follow this rule entirely or I must have called the capital of China “Bay-jing,” have spoken of the evacuation of “Shahn-doong,” and so on; so that in the case of names already more or less familiar to the West I have used the most modern and most widely accepted forms, as they have survived on the ground. At that I cannot imagine what ailed the men who Romanized the Chinese language, but that is another story.

Harry A. Franck.

Kuling, China,

August 16, 1923.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

The author gratefully acknowledges his indebtedness to Mr. Edwin S. Mills of Peking, China, for the use of the pictures of Urga.

WANDERING IN

NORTHERN CHINA

CHAPTER I
IN THE LAND WE CALL KOREA

The traveler from Japan to the peninsula still known to the Western world as Korea has a sense of being wafted on some magic carpet thousands of miles while he slept, a sensation which the splendid steamers bridging the Straits of Tsushima several times a day do not dispel. It is surprising how different two lands separated only by a few hours on the sea can be. A fortnight on a Nippon Yusen Kaisha liner and six weeks of wandering from end to end of the Island Empire gave us a Japanese background against which many of the problems of the Far East stood out more clearly, but it did very little to prepare us for the physical aspects of the “Cho-sen” over which the banner of the rising sun now waves. Those who have listened to the long and heated controversy over the adding of this large slice of mainland to the mikado’s realm must often have heard the apologists’ assertion that the two peoples, Japanese and Koreans, are so nearly alike as to be virtually the same. Perhaps they are; but if so, all the outward evidences the casual visitor must depend upon to form an opinion are deceiving. Superficially, at least, Japan and Korea are as different as two Oriental lands and races could well be. In landscape, customs, costumes, point of view, general characteristics, even in the details of personal appearance, the two shores of the Sea of Japan strike the new-comer as having very little in common.

Perhaps the most outstanding feature of Korea, to any one newly arrived from Japan, is her treelessness. The lack of forests is, with the possible exception of exclamations of incredulity over her extraordinary costumes, almost certain to be the subject of any Occidental’s first paragraph of Korean notes. In our own case this denuded aspect of the peninsula was emphasized by the blazing, cloudless sunshine that beat relentlessly down during all our first day of travel northward to the old capital, and on many another to follow. The bare and sun-scorched landscape suggested some victim of barbarian cruelty, who, stripped of his garments, was being tortured to death by slow roasting. Possibly we should have been prepared for this, but we were not. We had heard much of the doings of Japan in Korea; we knew something of the opera-bouffe hats of the men and the startlingly short waists of the women, but no one had ever told us of the curiously pure and molten sunshine of “Cho-sen,” of the vividness of its shadows and the filtered transparency of its air, nor, for that matter, of the incessant heat we must endure because chance allotted us from June to August in what was once the Hermit Kingdom.

Trees as sparse as the hairs of a Korean beard stood out in lonely isolation across the more or less flat lands of all that first day’s journey; beyond these, usually rather near at hand, rose scarred and repulsive hillsides as unsightly as the faces of those countless inhabitants along the way who had been visited by the “honorable spirit” of smallpox. It was not merely the barrenness of a naturally treeless country, a barrenness as dreary as those upper reaches of the Andes to which real vegetation never attains, but one which, like the denuded plains of Spain, visibly complains of the wanton violence of man. To be sure, many of the rocky hills that sometimes rose to be almost mountains were here and there thinly covered with evergreen shrubs which might some day be trees, and even forests. But these, travelers are informed with what becomes tiresome persistency, were planted by the new Government. The Japanese policy of reforestation, we were eventually to know, has already done excellent things for Korea, and that not merely, as those who resent the rape of the peninsula assert, where it will attract the passing tourist’s eye, and it promises in time to accomplish something worth while; but it is an unfortunate Japanese trait to fear that good deeds will not speak loudly enough for themselves.

The reducing of a once well wooded land to its present nude state is characteristic of the Korean, we were to learn, suggestive of his general point of view. In the olden days the people were often driven to the hills by their savage or demented rulers, and as the rigorous winters that contrast with the tropical summers came on, they not only burned the trees, but as roots make excellent charcoal they dug up even these, leaving nothing that might by any chance sprout again. To replant in better times, to take any serious thought for the morrow, would have been un-Korean. The Korean even of to-day who covets the half-dozen cherries or plums on a limb does not usually take the trouble to pick them; he breaks off the branch and goes his way munching the fruit, with never a thought of next year. Translate this improvidence, this almost complete lack of foresight, into all the details of daily life, and the condition and the final fate of Korea become understandable, in fact inevitable.

Woods survive to any great extent in Korea only in two places—about royal tombs and up along the Yalu River which forms the northern frontier. Elsewhere in the peninsula, with minor exceptions, there are only groups of trees planted by foreign missionaries, and rows of pine shrubs set out directly by the Japanese Government, or by local authorities, school children, or private individuals, under Japanese influence. This treelessness is not the unimportant detail many may think; it is the wanton destruction of her forests of long ago that gives the Korea of to-day her mainly mud houses, much of her filth, dust, and swarming flies, and those devastating floods of the rainy season which sweep roads, bridges, fields, and even villages before them.

There were many other things which gave the Korean landscape its strikingly un-Japanese aspect. Fewer people were working in the larger and less garden-like fields; the village roofs thatched with rice-straw had a flatter, smoother look than the homes of Japanese peasants; the towns themselves seemed to huddle together as closely and inconspicuously as possible, as if to escape, or join in resisting, the rapacious tax-gatherers of the olden days that are not forgotten. Koreans in white, their inevitable color, so rare in Japan, were everywhere, though more often in the shade of villages or rare wayside trees or huts than out in the baking sunshine. The suggestion forced itself upon us that perhaps the fields were larger because the people could not coax themselves to work alone. In Japan it had been unusual to see more than a peasant and his wife in the same field; here work seemed to be done almost entirely by gangs. In spite of the general aridness of the landscape, there were many flooded rice-fields, and in nearly all of them waded a soldier-like line of often a dozen laborers, as many women as men among them. Much of the country showed no signs of the languid hand of man, yet even in the drier sections scattered rows of these peasants, their garments still almost snow-white at a distance, gleamed forth in the otherwise mainly reddish landscape.

Similar groups stood in semicircles on earth threshing-floors flailing grain in a way that is familiar to the Western world, but which we had never seen in Japan. Nor were there any reminders of the Island Empire in the clusters of women kneeling at the edge of every bit of a stream or mud-hole paddling clothes with a sort of cricket-bat. The ways of life, the very architecture, were strangely reminiscent of lands inhabited by negroes.

The most primitive of plows, drawn by bulls, dragged their way to and fro in a field here and there. Along what passed for roads others of these lumbering animals plodded almost hidden under loads of new-cut grain or brushwood, at a pace which seemed to fit the languid temperament of the country. In places a highway, constructed by the new rulers, tried to preserve an unbroken march; but wherever a bridge should have been they almost invariably pitched headlong down into the bed of a stream as waterless as those of summer-time Spain. Even the Japanese, we were to learn before leaving the peninsula, are poor bridge-builders, while the Korean remains true to his natural improvidence in constructing flimsy things of branches and earth, with totally inadequate abutments, which the first dash of the rainy season down the treeless hillsides converts into scattered masses of rubbish.

All the day long the scene varied little from these first few glimpses. There was a certain rough beauty in the tawny hillsides and the broad stretches of sun-flooded rice lands, but of a similarity that grew monotonous, while the ways of the people, until opportunity should come to see them in closer detail, were such as the fleeting tourist is wont to sum up under the outworn word “picturesque” and quickly lose from between the pages of memory. Korea has often been called a land of villages, and in all the two hundred and eighty miles from the southern point of the peninsula to Seoul there was little more than a frequent succession of smooth-thatched, closely snuggled towns varying, outwardly at least, only in size. Not until later on, and by more primitive means of travel, were we to know of the remnants of bygone civilization, the pine-grove tombs of royalty, the ruined palaces of fallen dynasties, and the welter of modern problems with which the peninsula teems.

The Korean wardrobe has so little in common with that of the Occident, and includes so many startling absurdities, that it merits a few words in detail, even though some of its more striking features are fairly familiar to those interested in foreign lands. To begin with the basis of all wardrobes, there is that ingenious contrivance with which the Korean gentleman protects his other garments from perspiration during the blazing months of summer. A missionary who carried home a set of these and offered them to any one in his native parish who could identify them recorded forty-two guesses, all equally wide of the mark, which was the simple phrase “summer underwear.” Out of their environment these useful garments look more like primitive bird-cages or light baskets than what they really are. In their entirety they consist of a kind of waistcoat, a high collar of the Elizabethan period, and cuffs so long as to be almost sleeves—all made of small strips of ratan very loosely woven together. That they are effective in allowing the free circulation of air, and at the same time preserve the cloth garments from contact with the perspiring body, one is willing to grant without the evidence of actual personal experience. Now and again one runs across a Japanese petty official who, in an effort to mitigate his midsummer sufferings, has adopted at least the cuffs; but on the whole this ingenious contribution is likely to suffer the common fate of never finding appreciation beyond its native habitat.

Over his ratan skin-protectors the Korean gentleman wears a kind of waistcoat-shirt, trousers (if so commonplace a term may be used for so uncommonplace a garment) which are more than voluminous even in use and, when hung out to dry, suggest the mainsails of a wind-jammer, and finally a turamaggie, an overcoat reaching to the calves and tied together with a bow over the right breast. All these articles are snow-white, and in summer are made of a vegetable fiber so thin as to suggest starched cheese-cloth. The mainsail trousers are fastened tightly about the ankles with a winding of cloth, which also supports the carefully foot-shaped and curiously thick white socks, which are thrust into low slippers cut well away at the instep, slippers formerly of leather richly embroidered or otherwise decorated, but now rapidly giving way to the white or reddish rubber ones made in Japan which are ruining the feet of Korea. The crowning glory and absurdity of this de rigueur costume, however, is the head-dress. About the brow is bound, so tightly as to cause violent headaches when first adopted and to leave lifelong marks, a black band about four inches wide and reaching well up over the curve of the head. On top of this sits a brimless cap shaped like a fez with an L-shaped indentation in its front, and finally over all else reigns an uncollapsible opera-hat. Both the hat and the cap beneath it are made of horsehair, or cheap imitations thereof, and are so loosely woven and screen-like in their transparency that facetious and unkindly foreigners are wont to refer to them as “fly-traps.” This term is as unwarranted as it is offensive, for the one place in Korea which is free from flies in season is the hat-protected crown of the adult Korean male. One need not take the word of “old-timers,” but will find ample evidence in photographs of a decade or more ago that the opera-bouffe contraption with which the Korean gentleman tops himself off once had brim enough to do duty almost as a real hat. Such utilitarian days are past, however; perhaps it is that universal bugbear of the human family, the high cost of living, which has reduced the brim to little more than a ledge. The fact remains that a fly must walk with caution now in making a circuit which in the good old days he might safely have accomplished after sipping long and generously at the edge of a bowl of sool. However, let there be no misapprehension, no uncalled for sympathy under the impression that this shrinking has worked hardship upon the wearer. The Korean hat was not designed to be a protection for the head and a shade for the face. Its purpose in life is far more serious and is concentrated on one single object,—to protect from evil spirits the precious topknot which is the badge of full Korean manhood. Hence its duty is not merely an outdoor one; wicked beings of the invisible world have no compunction in taking unfair advantage of their victims, so that to this day it is a common practice for the Korean man to lay him down to sleep—on his bare papered floor, using a hardwood brick as a pillow—with his precious top-hat still in place.

However, we have not yet completely garbed our yang-ban, our gentleman of the Land of Morning Calm. His hat, being light, almost ethereal, in fact, must be held in place, whether in sleep or in the slightest breeze, for which purpose a black ribbon under the chin serves the ordinary man and a string of amber beads his haughtier fellow-citizen. Add to this the unfailing collapsible fan, and a pipe as long and heavy as a cane, with a bowl the size of the end of the thumb, and you may vizualize in his entirety the proud gentleman who sallies forth from his mud hut and picks his way leisurely between the mud-holes and offal-heaps of any town or city street. The fan is rarely inactive, now dispensing a breeze to the copper-tinted face of its owner, now shading it from the direct rays of a burning sun. The pipe, bowl down, swings with the jaunty aggressiveness of an Englishman’s “stick”; above all else the features remain fixed and unalterable in their serenity, for in the code of the genuine Korean gentleman of the old school there is no greater vulgarity than to show in public either mirth, anger, curiosity, or annoyance. Nothing could be more specklessly white than this dignified apparition, for do not his servant-wives spend their days, and no small portion of their nights, in preparing his garments for the daily sortie and mingling with his fellows? Behold him, then, as he joins the latter, in a shop-door or on a shaded street-corner, where he squats with them in that fashion which has caused a row of Korean males to be likened to penguins, letting his spotless starched turamaggie spread out on the unswept earth with a carelessness which seems a boast of his ability to command unlimited female labor.

We must come back again, however, to the incredible hat, as the eyes and the attention constantly will as long as one remains in Korea. If the Japanese are commonplace and unoriginal in their head-dress, certainly their newly captured fellow-subjects make up for it. Set usually at a jaunty angle, whether by design, breeze, or cranial malformation, a jauntiness enhanced by its scarcity of brim, the “fly-trap” hat furnishes Korea half its picturesqueness. Graduates of modern mission or Japanese government schools, self-complacent young men who have been abroad, native Christian pastors, may wear the Panama or the felt of the West above their otherwise national white garb, but the “fly-trap” is still the prevailing head-dress throughout the length, breadth, and social strata of the peninsula. Far and wide, in city or village, in crowded marts or on lonely country roads, indoors or out, awake or asleep, the high hat is seldom missing. It persists to the very edge of the frontier, then disappears as suddenly as it had sprung up at the other extremity of the country. After one has weathered the first shock it does not look so greatly out of place on your city gentleman, but I never learned to behold it with proper equanimity on the heads of porters, plasterers, and peasants. Even the workman without it, however, is still conspicuous. Tattered, soiled, and sun-scorched men wandering across the country with a kind of tramp’s pack on their backs wear the horsehair bird-cage on their heads; perhaps the most incongruous sight of all is to behold a battered old man of the rice-fields solemnly squatting on a garbage-heap in his mud hamlet, with his opera hat perched on guard above his gray and scanty topknot.

Once or twice we caught a glimpse of the light-brown hat formerly worn by all men about to be married, or to add a new wife to their collection of servants; once the custom was wide-spread of painting the hat white in sign of mourning, but to-day black is almost universal, and an excellent foil to the otherwise white garb. Bridegrooms no longer feel compelled publicly to announce their happy status, and there is another and more effective means of showing grief at bereavement,—a mourner’s hat like a large, finely woven, inverted basket with scalloped edges, which completely hides the afflicted face of the wearer. As he ambles along under this ample protection instead of blistering beneath a horsehair cage, surely a feeling of gratitude toward the departed relative must pervade the thoughts of the bereaved, particularly as the Korean term of mourning lasts for three years. There is a still more enormous, very coarsely woven, sunshade worn by peasants in the midsummer months, while Buddhist priests, otherwise indistinguishable from layman tramps and beggars, wear a smaller hat of similar shape to that of the mourners, but raised on bamboo stilts well above the head. The horsehair hat is costly, by Korean standards, the better ones even by our own, and, being put together with glue, is frail and perishable. Water is particularly fatal to it. Let the first drop of a shower fall, therefore, and from within the garments of every Korean man appears a hat-umbrella, a little cone-shaped cover of oiled paper or silk, like a miniature Japanese parasol, which is quickly opened and slipped over the precious hat. As to the rest of the male garb, no damage is possible which cannot be repaired by the return of sunshine or a few hours’ labor by the women at home. Thus on a rainy day the black heads above white bodies characteristic of all Korea turn to drenched cheese-cloth surmounted by oily yellow clowns’ caps.

It is fitting that the wardrobe of the insignificant sex should be simpler, and more easily described. Except that anything in the way of head-dress is denied them, lest they compete with the decorative male, the garb of the Korean women is in the main a crude replica of that of the men. All reasonably available evidence goes to show that the women are never permitted the luxury of wickerwork undergarments. Trousers, socks, and slippers are similar to those worn by the male; above these is the thinnest and slightest of garments, which barely covers the shoulders, and over the trousers is worn a white skirt fastened well up above the floating ribs. In summer at least that is all, except in a few old-fashioned communities, where a muffling white cloak covering everything except the eyes and the feet is still occasionally seen. That, I repeat, is all, and from our puritanical point of view it is not enough. For the Korean woman insists that the waistline is at the armpits, and makes no provision to have the upper and lower garments contiguous, with the result that she displays to the public gaze exactly that portion of the torso which the women of most nations take pains to conceal. Missionaries, who are as prone as the rest of us to lose their native point of view through long contact with other races, assure us that Korean women are extremely modest. In general deportment the statement holds water; but a married lady of Korea, marching down the main thoroughfare of one of our cities in her native garb, would be granted anything but modesty. One might fancy that the costume was prescribed by some lascivious tyrant of olden days; those who have looked deeply into the matter, however, assure us that it is due to the pride of motherhood. The fact remains that, though the precept and example of Western nations have tended to lengthen the upper garment among better-class women of the cities, and particularly among those who have attended modern schools, the great majority of the adult female sex in Korea still wear their breasts outside their clothing. Sun-browned and leather-textured as the face, the plumpness of matrons or the withered rags of age are almost always in plain, not to say insistent, evidence. In fact neither the men nor the women of the masses often succeed in making both garments meet; males below the turamaggie class as habitually display their navels as their wives do their bosoms.

White is as universally the color of Korean garments in winter as in summer; the only difference is that they thicken from cheese-cloth to cotton-padded ones as the cold season advances. The incongruous sight of skaters in what looks like tropical garb, of whole towns of people wading through the snow from which they are barely distinguishable, provokes the wonder of winter visitors. The whiteness of a Korean crowd can be duplicated nowhere on earth. Within the lifetime of any one capable of reading these lines the glimpse of a figure in dark or colored garments anywhere in the peninsula betrayed it at once as that of a foreigner. The first record of any variation from this rule was when, a decade ago, the upper classmen of a mission school in Seoul agreed by resolution to adopt dark European trousers, in order to spare their wives or mothers some of their incessant washing and ironing.

The sounds of these two occupations are never silent in Korea. Stand on an eminence above any town or city of the land, and to the ears will be borne the similar yet easily distinguishable rat-a-tat-rat-a-tat of a hundred housewives busy with one or the other of their two principal duties. How they attain the snowy whiteness required by their unaffectionate masters by paddling their garments at the edge of any mud-hole or trickle of sewage is one of the mysteries of the East; yet not a roadside puddle or a hollowed rock but is turned into a wash-tub, and never is the visible result outwardly anything but spotless purity. In contrast to the dull plump-a-plump of washing paddles is this falsetto tone of ironing, prolonged far into every night. Nay, wake up at any hour and it will be strange if you do not catch the sound of some distant housewife putting the finishing touches on the garments in which her lord will strut forth into the world in the morning. For in Korea the hot iron is not in vogue, except a tiny one used along the sewed or pasted seams. Instead, the clothing is folded over a hardwood cylinder and beaten with two miniature baseball-bats, beaten with an endless persistency that suggests an unsuspected durability in the apparently flimsy material, and with a rhythm that has grown almost musical with centuries of practice.

Children are often dressed in colors, and unmarried maidens may wear garments of a green or bluish tinge; but all soon succumb to the omnipresent white. Huge hats not unlike those of men in mourning were once universally required for young women not yet sentenced to the servitude of a husband, that their faces might not be disclosed to the male sex. Missionaries by no means gray in the service recall how half-acres of these basket-hats used to lie stacked up before native churches on days of service. But the old order passes, even in the once Hermit Kingdom, and one may travel far afield now and still perhaps look in vain for any survival of this long prevalent custom. As in Japan, the head-dress of the women of Korea is now a matter of hair, in this case drawn smoothly and tightly down over the scalp, like a cap of oily black velvet, and tied in a compact little knot behind, decorated perhaps with a red cloth rosette and thrust through with what looks almost like one of our new-fashioned nickel-plated lead-pencils.

The Koreans have never been reduced to any such crude expedient as a bachelor-tax to keep up their marriage-rate. Until very recent years all boys wore their hair in a long braid up to the day they took a wife. Even now this custom survives in some outlying districts, though none yielded more swiftly to the influx of foreign influence. As long as a man wore a braid he was rated a minor; when he approached manhood he became more and more a community butt, and shame and ridicule rarely failed to drive him into an early marriage. Girls, too, had powerful reasons for not long persisting in the dreadful condition of maidenhood, not the least among which was the custom, still widely practised, of burying the body of an unmarried woman in the public highway, to the everlasting shame of her family to its remotest branches. Moreover, a Korean woman is not given a name of her own until she has borne a son, after which she is forever known as “Mother of So-and-So.” Before that her title, even to her husband, is “Yea!” or the slightly more honorable “Yea-bo!” which correspond fairly closely to our affectionate “Heh!” or “Heh, you!”

CHINA
AND
JAPAN

When the happy day comes that is to put an end to the ridicule of his fellows and the shame of his parents, the youth transforms his braid into a topknot, a tightly braided, twisted, and doubled mass of hair an inch in diameter and about three inches high, standing bolt upright in the center of his head, and transfixed with a nickeled or silver ornament similar to that worn by the women. Unlike the cue of the Chinese, forced upon them as a sign of alien subjection, the topknot is the Korean’s badge of manhood, his proudest and most precious possession. Thenceforth one of his most serious problems in life is to protect it from the powers of evil. About his brow is placed the painfully tight band that he is seldom again to be seen without this side of the grave, and he sallies forth under his gleaming new horsehair hat with the masterly air that befits a man of family cares and advantages. To its wearers the Korean top-hat must have become, as even the worst eyesores of human costume will with long use, a thing of beauty; for though many are the men, and myriad the youths, who now cut their hair in Western fashion, numbers even of these still cling to the native hat, while shopkeepers with close-cropped heads, or those whom the evil spirits have outwitted and left bald, may be seen squatting among their wares virtually without clothing but with the discredited head-gear precariously perched upon their bare heads.

Once in a dog’s age even now a country youth turns up at a government or a mission school wearing the braid that not long ago was universal among unmarried males, or, since early marriages are still in vogue, with a topknot; but it is seldom that the end of the first week does not find his fashion changed. Pseudo-pathetic stories still come in from the outlying districts of mothers who wept their eyes red at the cutting of a son’s braid, or of conservative old fathers wrathfully driving from home youths who have sacrificed the topknot that stands for manhood. But the shearing goes steadily on, and thus is passing one of Korea’s most conspicuous idiosyncrasies. The bachelor braid down the back yielded swiftly to foreign influence; a generation hence the topknot, perhaps even the stovepipe screen that surmounts it, may be as unknown in the peninsula as the pre-Meiji male head-dress is now in Japan.

If one takes heed not to carry the likeness too far, the Korean might be described as a cross between the Japanese and the Chinese. Some of his traits and customs resemble those of one or the other of his immediate neighbors, but a still greater number seem to be peculiar to himself alone. He builds his house, for example, somewhat like those of Japan; he heats it somewhat after the fashion in China, yet in neither case is the similarity more than approximate. Certainly he is content with as few comforts as any race, with the possible exception of the Chinese, that ever reached the degree of civilization to which he once attained. This, of course, is partly due to the centuries of atrocious misrule under which he lived, when it was unsafe for even the wealthiest of men to attract the ravenous tax-gatherers, turned loose upon the kingdom in rival bands by both king and court, by living in anything more than a thatched mud hovel.

Thus it is that even the larger Korean cities are little more than numerous clusters of such hovels, huddled together along haphazard alleyways of dust or mud, except where the hand of the new rulers of the peninsula, or of those Westerners who have been striving for more than three decades to Christianize it, show themselves. The typical Korean house, whether of country or town, is made of adobe bricks or odds and ends of stone completely plastered over, inside and out, with mud. Thus the walls remain, until they crumble or wash away, for neither paint nor whitewash is used to disguise their milk-and-coffee tint. Except in rare cases, or a few special localities, a rice-straw roof covers them, a roof so smooth and almost glossy, so low and nearly flat, that a village suggests a cluster of dead mushrooms. The accepted shape of the dwelling is that of the half of a square, though in its poorer form it may be merely a hut somewhat longer than it is wide, and in the more pretentious cases it sometimes completes the whole square. Whether it does or not, it must be wholly shut off from the outside world, usually by a wall or screen of woven straw as high as the eaves and enclosing a wholly untended dust-bin of a yard between the two ells. The well built and spick and span servants’ houses erected by a missionary community near Seoul were unpopular with the domestics because they looked off across a pretty valley to the mountains, instead of being shut in by the customary mat-fence.

The outside of the half-square has no openings whatever, but presents to the world a perfectly blank face. The inside, on the other hand, is little else than openings, across which may be pushed paper walls or doors somewhat similar to those of Japan. Like the Japanese, the Koreans are squatters rather than sitters, so that the three living-rooms of the average dwelling are barely six feet high, and not much more than that in their other dimensions. The floors are raised somewhat above the level of the ground outside, and are made of stone and mud, like the walls, covered with plaster, or sometimes wood, and this in turn by a heavy, yellow-brown native paper of a consistency between cardboard and oil-cloth. None of the thick soft mats of the Japanese, nor of his cushions or padded quilts, soften life by night or day in a Korean home. When sleep suggests itself, the inmates merely stretch out on the floor on which they have been squatting, thrust a convenient oak brick under their heads, and drift into slumber. Rarely do they make any change of clothing at retiring or rising, the men, as I have said before, often wearing their top-hats all night. Shoes, or, more exactly, slippers, are dropped as the wearers come indoors as unfailingly as in Japan on the ledge of polished wood which forms a cross between a porch and a step along the front of the house. To the Western eye the lack both of space and furniture is surprising. In the center of the house, and usually wide open, is a kind of parlor or sitting-room, at most ten or twelve feet long, flanked at either end by two little living-rooms no longer than they are wide, and the house nowhere has a width much greater than the height of the average Western man. Eating, sleeping, the whole domestic life, in fact, is carried on in a constant proximity exceeding that of our most crowded tenements. It looks more like “playing house,” like a building meant for children to amuse their dolls in, than like the actual lifelong residence of human beings. This impression is enhanced by the miniature furniture, usually as scarce as it is small. There are, of course, no chairs, and no tables unless the little tray with six-inch legs on which food is served be counted as one. If there is a student in the family, or the father is engaged in business, there may be a little writing-desk without legs set flat on the floor; probably there is a chang, or legless chest of drawers, and one of the famous Korean chests, both more than generously bound in brass, or even silver if the family is more prosperous than the exterior of the building ever suggests. That is usually about all, except perhaps a little sewing-machine run by hand, and the few trinkets and inconspicuous odds and ends which the women and children gather about them.

In the ell, flanking one of the little square living-rooms, is the kitchen, with earth floor and the crudest of stone-and-plaster stoves and implements. Next to this, or perhaps across the dusty, sun-baked yard in the other right-angled extension, is a rough store-room, which commonly alternates in location with an indispensable chamber offering much less privacy and convenience than a Westerner could wish. The walls of the floored rooms are usually covered with plain paper, white or cream-colored, though sometimes figured in a way that recalls both Japan and China. In the yard sit half a dozen or more enormous earthenware jars of the color of chocolate. In one or two of these water is kept; others are filled with preserved or pickled food, particularly the Korean’s favorite delicacy, kimshee, a kind of sauer-kraut of cabbage and turnips generously treated with salt and time and rarely missing from the native menu except in the hot months when it is perforce out of season.

When it comes to heating his house the Korean takes complete leave of his island neighbor and turns his face westward. Under the stone floor runs a large flue, the entire length of the house, connected with the kitchen at one end and springing out of the ground in the form of a crude chimney or stovepipe at the other. None of this shivering over a hibachi filled with a few glowing coals for the otherwise comfort-scorning Korean; he will have his dwelling well heated from end to end, not merely his k’ang, or stone bed, after the Chinese fashion, but every nook and corner within doors. While the cooking is going on he may lie on the papered floor and toast himself to his heart’s content; or a bundle of brushwood—almost the only fuel left him in his deforested land—thrust into the business end of the flue in the morning and another at night makes winter a mere laughing matter. It is an ingenious scheme, yet not without its drawbacks. In the blazing summer-time, for instance, there is no way of shutting off the kitchen heat, and the house-warming goes as merrily on as in January. Not that the native seems to mind; he is as immune to a hot bed as to a hard one. But many is the foreign itinerant missionary who, having found lodging on a frosty night with hosts who would outdo themselves in hospitality, has gratefully stretched out on a nicely warmed floor and fallen luxuriously asleep—to awaken half an hour later dripping with perspiration, and toss the night through in a vain effort to shake off the nightmare impression of having brought up in that very section of the after-world which all his earthly efforts had been designed to avoid.

Our first view of Seoul, in which the former Temple of Heaven is now a smoking-room in a Japanese hotel garden

The interior of a Korean house

Close-up of a Korean “jicky-coon,” or street porter

At the first suggestion of rain the Korean pulls out a little oiled-paper umbrella that fits over his precious horsehair hat

Like his neighbors, the Korean eats with chop-sticks, but he uses a flat metal spoon with his rice. This grain is the basis of the better-class meal, but is not so highly polished as in Japan; and it is too costly for the common people, who replace it with cheaper grains, especially millet. What may seem a hardship is really a blessing. The poverty which denies them some of the refinements of the table imposes upon the people of Korea a more healthful diet than that of their island neighbors; in the mass they are more sturdily built; if all other signs are insufficient one can usually distinguish a Korean from a Japanese by the excellence of his teeth. Besides his beloved kimshee, no Korean meal is complete without a pungent sauce made from beans pressed together into what looks like a grindstone and then soaked in brine, a sauce into which at least every other mouthful is dipped. Meat is more often eaten than in Japan; fish, as generally. But tea is not widely used; in its place the average Korean uses plain water, or the water in which barley or millet has been cooked, or, best of all, sool, cousin of the fiery sake or samshu of the neighboring lands. Then come a dozen little side-dishes,—pickled vegetables, some strange, some familiar to us, cucumbers cut up rind and all, green onions, and some distant member of the celery family, all immersed in vinegar-and-oil baths, slices of hot red peppers, tiny pieces of some hardy tuber, brittle sheets of seaweed cooked in oil until they look as if they had been varnished, a jet-black kind of lettuce, and other odds and ends for which there are no equivalents in our language. Sugar is hardly used at all, and the adaptable traveler who learns to be otherwise satisfied with a native dinner usually rises to his feet with a longing for a bit of chocolate or some similar delicacy.

It is curious how geographical names often persist in our languages of the West long after they have become antiquated and even unknown in the places to which we apply them. The name “Korea,” for instance, means nothing to those who live in the peninsula we call by that term; nor for that matter did the word “Korai” from which we took it ever refer to more than a third of the country, and that long centuries ago. Ever since they absorbed the former kingdom the Japanese have striven to get the world to adopt the native name “Cho-sen” (the “s” is soft), a word already legitimized by several hundred years of use. But the world is notoriously backward in making such changes; perhaps it is suspicious of the motives of Japan, and a bit resentful at her attempt to render whole pages of our geographies out of date. Yet there is nothing mysterious or tricky in the wholesale alterations in nomenclature which she has wrought in her new possession, though there is often irksome annoyance. Every province, every city, almost every slightest hamlet has been given a new name; but this has come about as naturally as the Frenchman’s persistent obstinacy in calling a horse a cheval. It is a mere matter of pronunciation. A given Chinese ideograph stands, and has stood for centuries, for a given town or village of Korea. The Korean looks at the character and pronounces it, let us say, “Wonju”; the Japanese knows as well as we know the word “cat” that the proper pronunciation is “Genshu”—and there you are. It is hardly a dispute, but it is at least a new means of harassing the traveler. If he is American or English, or even French or German, for that matter, he will find that nearly all his fellow-countrymen resident in the country, mainly missionaries, have lived there, or been trained by those who have, since before the Japanese took possession, and that they know only the Korean names. If he has a guide-book, which is rather essential, it is almost certainly concocted by the new rulers or under their influence, and insists on using the Japanese names. So do the railway time-tables, all government documents, and the like. Thus he discovers that it is almost impossible to talk with his own people, at least on geographical matters.

“Have you ever been in Heijo?” he begins, with the purpose of pumping a compatriot for information on that second city of the peninsula.

“Never heard of it,” replies the old resident, with a puzzled air, whereupon the new-comer gives him up as a hopeless recluse and goes his way, perhaps to learn a few days later that this very man was for ten years the most influential foreigner in that very city, but that to him it has always been, and still is, “Ping Yang.” Thus it goes, throughout the length and breadth of the peninsula, so that the man who would mingle with both sides must know that “Kaijo” is “Song-do,” that “Chemulpo” is “Jinsen,” that what the guide-book and time-table call “Kanko” has always been “Ham-hung” to the missionaries, that every last handful of huts in Korea is known by two separate and distinct names, though the erratic slashes with a weazel-hair brush which stands for it in the ridiculous calligraphy of the East never varies. Long before his education has reached this fine point the traveler will have completely forgotten his resentment at finding, as he rumbles into it at the end of a long summer day, that the city he has known since has early school-days as “Seoul” is now officially called “Keijo.”

It doesn’t greatly matter, however, for the chances are that he has always spoken of it as “Sool,” which is the native fire-water, instead of using the proper pronunciation of “Sow-ohl”; and to learn the new name is easier than to change the old. Our own impressions of what was for more than five centuries the capital of Ch’ao-Hsien, the Land of Morning Calm, and is still the seat of the Government-General of Cho-sen, started at delight, sank very near to keen disappointment, then gradually climbed to somewhere in the neighborhood of calm enjoyment. Seen from afar, the jagged rows of mountain peaks that surround it should quicken the pulse even of the jaded wanderer. The promise that here at last he will find that spell of the ancient East which romancers have enticed him to seek, in the face of his cold better judgment, seems to rise in almost palpable waves from among them. Then he descends at a railway station that might be found in any prairie burg of our central West, and is bumped away by Ford into a city that is flat and mean in its superficial aspect, commonplace in form, and swirling with a fine brown dust. But next morning, or within a day or two of random wandering, according to the pace at which his moods are geared, interest reawakens from its lethargy, and something akin to romance and youthful enthusiasm grows up out of the details of the strange life about him.

There are, of course, almost no real streets, in the American sense, in the Far East; hence only those wholly unfamiliar with that region will be greatly surprised to find that the “many broad avenues” of Seoul, emphasized by semi-propagandist scribblers, are rather few in number and, with one or two exceptions, are sun-scorched stretches of dust which the rainy season of July and August will turn to oozing mud. But the eye will soon be caught by the queer little shops crowded tightly together along most of them, particularly by the haphazard byways that lead off from them into the maze of mushroom hovels that make up the native city. From out of these dirty alleys comes jogging now and then a gaudy red and gold palanquin in which squats concealed some lady of quality, though these conveyances now are almost confined to weddings and funerals; the miserable little mud hovels disgorge haughty gentlemen in spotless white who would be incredible did not the falsetto rat-a-tat of ironing and the groups of women kneeling along the banks of every slightest stream explain them. There is constant movement in the streets of Keijo, a movement that might almost be called kaleidoscopic, were it not for the whiteness of Korean dress; but it strikes one as rather an aimless movement, a leisurely if constant going to and fro that rarely seems to get anywhere. Dignified yangbans, that still numerous class of Korea, and especially of the capital, which in the olden days was rated just below the nobility, strut past in their amber beads and their huge tortoise-shell goggles as if they were really going somewhere; but if one takes the trouble to follow them he will probably find them doubling back on their tracks without having reached any objective. In the olden days they could at least go to the government offices where they pretended to do something for their salaries; since Japan has taken away their sinecures without removing the pride that forbids them to work, there is little else than this random strolling left for them to do.

In contrast to this numerous gentry, outdistanced by modern changes, there are sweating coolies lugging this or that, bulls hidden under mounds of brown-red brushwood from some far-off hillside, sleek-haired women slinking by with an almost apologetic air, many of them with the uncovered, sun-browned breasts somewhat less general in the capital than elsewhere, here and there a Korean pony, cantankerous with his full malehood, all streaming to and fro between an unbroken gauntlet of languid shopkeepers in their fly-trap “household” caps, of mangy dogs and dirty children. “Old-timers” will tell you that this was not so long ago all there was to Seoul, except inside the several big palace compounds, now so uninhabited; that walking, still much in vogue among the Koreans, was for the overwhelming majority the only means of getting about the city. Then there were no rickshaws, not over-numerous even to-day after twelve years of wholly Japanese rule; then none of the little dust- or mud-floored tram-cars, now so crowded, bumped along the principal avenues; certainly no battered and raucous-voiced automobiles scattered terror among the placid foot-going population. It is not difficult to picture the comparative silence of that bygone Seoul, with slipper-clad footsteps pattering noiselessly through the dust, or the mild clumping of that cross between the Dutch wooden shoe and the Japanese geta still worn in muddy weather, punctuated now and then by the booming of a mammoth bell, the mild hubbub of passing royalty surrounded by shrieking out-runners, and the incessant accompaniment of the falsetto rat-a-tat of ironing.

With the definite coming of the Japanese much of that ancient Seoul has departed. The great wall that enclosed the city has been largely leveled, for the Koreans, according to their new rulers, can only fight behind walls. Only a pair of the imposing city gates remain, and these as mere monuments instead of entrances and exits. The Independence Arch built to celebrate the end of paying tribute to Peking stands shabby, cracked, and blistered in a bed of sand in the ragged outskirts. Rubbish and worse litter the dark, wooden-slatted enclosure in which the mighty bell that once transmitted royal commands sits drunkenly and dejected on the ground. Vagabonds build their nests beneath the Oriental roof that shelters the stone-turtle monument of which the city was once so proud; the magnificent Altar of Heaven has become a garden ornament within the grounds of the principal hotel, and is generously furnished with Japanese settees and capacious cuspidors bearing the railway-hotel insignia. Of the three principal palaces one is a mere wilderness of weeds and vacant-eyed edifices; another houses the weak-minded remnant of the once royal family and has bequeathed most of its grounds to museum, botanical, and zoölogical purposes; the third, and most historic, is being completely hidden from the city by a mammoth modern building designed to become the headquarters of the Governor-General.

One might almost assume that a policy of blotting out the visible reminders of the old independent Korea had been adopted by the new rulers. Yet it is hardly that, I fancy, but mainly the utilitarian sense of modern improvement which is showing such small respect for the monuments of bygone Cho-sen. The Japanese are ardent in their efforts to make Seoul a city in the modern sense—the modern Western sense, I could have said, for their new structures are hardly copied from Japan. Imposing buildings that might have been transported from our own large cities are growing up for the housing of banks and important firms and government offices. There is already one genuinely asphalted street; new parks have been laid out where only wilderness or rubbish heaps were before. Besides the big central one there are adequate branch post-offices in every section of the city; police stations at every turn keep a watchful eye out for new candidates to the mammoth new penitentiary, built on the latest approved model, out near the “Peking Pass.” After their lights the new rulers are steadily improving the material aspect of the city, as of the whole peninsula. It would be too much to expect them to improve certain personal habits and domestic customs beyond the point which the Japanese themselves have reached, so that some forms of uncleanliness and undress, for instance, which a new American colony would quickly be forced to eradicate, have been given no attention.

The new rulers once planned even greater changes in the old city. They set about with the apparent intention of virtually moving it, or at least the commercial center of it, down nearer the River Han, in a section they called Ryuzan. There they built the railway headquarters and blocks of brick residences for the employees. A stone palace for the mikado’s viceroy was erected, streets laid out, and improvements impossible in the crowded portion of the city were projected. But commerce has a way of choosing its own localities; the Koreans are nothing if not conservative; local gossip has it that when Prince Ito was taken down to see his new residence he remarked to his well meaning subordinates that they might live down there in the swamp if they wished, but that he for one would stay in town. The prince is well known to have been no recluse and hermit who would deny himself the soft pleasures of cities. In the end his choice proved wise, for it is a rare rainy season that does not wipe out scores of native huts down along the Han and encroach upon the unused and isolated palace he rejected. The railway headquarters, residences, and school remain, and trains halt for an exasperatingly long time at Ryuzan station, so near that of Nandaimon to which most travelers are bound, almost as if the officials would vent their pique at having their will thwarted; but even the Japanese residents have preferred the old city. Along its southern edge, under the brow of Nansan Hill, dwell and trade that quarter of the fourth of a million of population which wears kimonos and getas, and the stroller down “Honmachidori” and its adjacent streets, narrow, crowded, busy, and colorful as a thoroughfare of old Japan, could easily imagine himself back in the Island Empire, far from the languid, white-clad throngs of the Land of Morning Calm.

CHAPTER II
SOME KOREAN SCENES AND CUSTOMS

It was our good fortune to dwell out over the hills beyond Seoul rather than in the hot and often breathless city itself. The half-hour walk led up past the big granite Bible School, along a little stream with its inevitable clothes-paddling women, flanked the grave-mound of a little prince, then climbed steeply over another half-wooded ridge from which stretched a wide-spreading mountainous view, everywhere deep green except for the broad brown streak of the River Han and here and there a mushroom patch of village. An American mission college was building in a big hilly pine-grove that owed its preservation to the tomb of a king’s concubine. Pines as fantastic and sturdy as any in Japan stood out against the sky-line; here and there a group of stinking chestnut-trees kept them company. Before they were granted this semi-sacred site the missionaries from our almost mythological land of “Mi-guk” had to agree not to build anywhere overlooking the grave; they had already been asked to close a path used as a short cut by students and an occasional faculty member, because it ran along the brow of the hill above the tomb. To look down upon a royal burial site is the height of disrespect in Korea, hence they are all arranged after a fixed pattern designed to avoid this sacrilege.

Out beyond the Todaimon, or East Gate, on the opposite side of the city, is the tomb of a more famous queen; but we preferred what we called our own, which is identical in form and size, and in a solitude much less often broken. Besides, “ours” really contained the mortal remains, while even the finger and a few bones which were all that remained after the brutal assassination and burning of Korea’s last queen were now buried elsewhere. Quite like ours are all the royal graves scattered up and down the peninsula of Cho-sen, in the several regions where succeeding dynasties built their capitals, flourished for a while, and fell, so that leisurely to visit it was worth a hasty glimpse of many others.

We could wander up over the pine-clad hill to the grave, for all the injunction against it; things are not so strict as all that in Korea, unless something Japanese is involved. But it was more convenient, and not merely more respectful, to approach the sanctuary from the bottom. On a level space in the forest, wholly cleared of trees but thick with grass, there was first of all the caretaker’s residence, a high-walled compound set off in the edge of the woods to the left. In a direct line down the center of the grassy rectangle stood first a torii, a square arch made of three light tree-trunks painted red, the upper crosspiece decorated with crude and fanciful carvings, a gateway without contiguous fence or wall. The Koreans are sensitive about the use of this symbolic entrance to their royal tombs; the caretaker of the little prince’s tomb we passed on our way in or out of Seoul told us one day, when we found that arch newly closed with barbed wire, that we might still pass through the grounds, but not beneath the torii. A hundred feet or more through this isolated entrance to her last resting-place stood the concubine’s prayer-house, so to speak—a large building by Korean standards, with a roof of highly colored tiles and four flaring gable-peaks, along which sat as many rows of porcelain monkeys to guard against evil spirits, as is the Korean custom. Through the many holes that had been torn by time or inquisitive fingers in the oily paper serving as glass between the slats of the many padlocked doors, one could dimly make out a bare wooden floor, scattered with dust and bits of rubbish, and a bare table-like altar on which, no doubt, boiled rice and other foods are at certain intervals offered to the spirit of the dead. It was plain that no such thoughtfulness had been shown recently, for dust and dinginess and faded paint were the most conspicuous features of the edifice, inside and out.

Two smaller but similar chapels flanked this main building, behind which the grass-rug-ed ground rose gradually to the burial mound, another hundred feet back and some ten feet high. In front of this plain grass-covered hillock stood a huge stone lantern, like those in Japanese temple grounds, in the opening of which the reverent or the superstitious sometimes place offerings of rice. Directly behind this graceful receptacle rose what we of the West would call a tombstone, a high upright granite slab standing on a big stone turtle and carved with Chinese ideographs briefly extolling the departed lady’s alleged virtues. More fantastic still were the figures about the mound, duplicated on either side. First came two large stone horses, such as might be chiseled by some aspiring but untalented school-boy. Then a pair of stone men, priests, or gods, recalling similar figures in the ruins of Tiahuanaco beyond Lake Titicaca, gazed at each other with a sort of smirking, semi-skeptical benignity. Two lions, two rams, and two mythological beasts, even more crudely fashioned than the rest, completed the menagerie, all these last with their backs turned to the mound, out of respect for the departed. Finally an ancient stone wall with tiled roof threw a protective semicircle close about all this at the rear, beyond which the rather thin pine forest, gnarled and bent with age, climbed the hill-slopes across which only disrespectful mortals ever pass.

About the only Korean thing which moves rapidly is a funeral, and even this may have been a concession to the incessantly sweltering summer. We met one rather frequently in the streets of Seoul,—a barbarously decorated palanquin in blazing reds and yellows, borne by eight or ten coolies in nondescript garb, who jog-trotted as if in haste to be out of reach of the evil spirit that had laid low the inert burden inside. If the latter had been a man of standing and sufficient wealth, there were two palanquins, the second bearing the actual remains, the first a false bier meant to deceive the wicked beings of the invisible world. The rest of the procession was made up of priests in fantastic robes and flaring head-dresses, leaning back at contented ease in their rickshaws, and a varying string of relatives and perhaps friends, most of them in sackcloth and on foot. Just where these incongruously hurrying cortèges finally brought up we never learned to a certainty until we ourselves moved out over the hills.

In a hollow not far from our suburban residence rose the ugly red brick chimney of what we at first took to be a small factory, but which turned out to be one of the several crematories in the outskirts of Keijo. Across the valley below us, by the little dirt road that wandered through the flooded rice-fields, came several funeral processions a day, announcing themselves by the shrieking auditory distresses which the Koreans regard as music. The unseemly pace may have slackened somewhat by this time for it is nearly five miles around the hills by the route that even man-drawn vehicles must follow; but the clashing of colors was still in full evidence, standing out doubly distinct against the velvety green of newly transplanted rice. Now and again a procession halted entirely for a few moments, while the carriers and pullers stretched themselves out in the road itself or along the scanty roadside above the flooded fields. We drifted down one day to one of them that was making an unusually long halt, and found the chief mourner, a lean old lady of viperous tongue, in a noisy altercation with the carriers over the price of their services. But those who halted, or indulged in such recriminations along the way were, no doubt, of the class that could not pay for unchecked speed.

Several times, too, when whim took us to town over the high hill from which an embracing view of Seoul was to be had, we saw processions returning. Then they were quite different. The chief burden, naturally, had been left behind, and the palanquins are collapsible, so that mourners and carriers straggled homeward by the steep direct route as the spirit moved them, the latter at least contentedly smoking their long tiny pipes, and musing perhaps on the probability of soon finding another victim. But the end and consummation of all this gaudy parading to and fro remained to us only an ugly red brick chimney, standing idle against its hilly background or emitting leisurely strands of yellowish-black smoke, according to the demand for its gruesome services.

Then one evening curiosity got the better of our dislike for unpleasant scenes, and we strolled out to the uninviting hollow. In it, a little above the level of the plain, sat a commonplace brick building with half a dozen furnace-chambers not unlike those of a brick-kiln. Several Koreans of low class, stripped to the waist, were languidly working about it, now and then producing discordant noises, which was their manner of humming a tune. Close before the principal building stood a smaller one, from which rose the loud chanting of a single voice that would have won no fame on the Western operatic stage. This, we learned, belonged to the priest whose duty it was to give each client the spiritual send-off to which he was entitled by the price of admission to the furnaces. The cost of cremating a body, explained one of the workmen, was twelve yen (nearly six dollars), but it included an hour-long prayer by the priest. The latter was too steadily engaged in his duties to be interrupted, but the cremators were openly delighted at the attention of foreigners, and at the opportunity of helping us make the most of what they called our “sight-see.” Into the ears of the articulate member of our party, born in Korea, they poured the details of their calling without reserve. That, inside the rude straw-mat screen which stood between the house of prayer and the door to the ovens, had come early in the afternoon, they explained, but he was only a poor man and had to give precedence to his betters. We peered over the top of the screen and saw a corpse completely wrapped in straw and fastened to a board with ropes of similar material. Did we care to see what was left of the last job? one of the coolies wished to know. It was time that was finished, anyway. He led the way to the back of the furnaces, opened an iron door, and, catching up a crude, heavy iron rake, hauled out half a peck of charred bones and ashes. This, he explained, unnecessarily, as he turned up one still glowing remnant of bone after another, was a rib, that was a piece of what the man walked on, and so forth. It was a rich man, he chattered on—to be rich in his eyes did not, of course, imply being a millionaire—and he had been sent here all the way from Fusan. The dead man’s relatives, he continued, as he carelessly raked the still smoking débris into a tin pan and set it aside to cool, had paid him to keep some of the ashes for them, instead of dumping them in the common ash-heap. Rich people always did that. But it was time to get that other fellow there out of the way, and go home to supper.

“What did he die of?” we asked, as the straw screen was thrown aside and the planked corpse fully disclosed to view.

“Of a stomachache,” replied one of the two coolies, as they caught up plank, straw wrapping, and all, and thrust the last “job” into the furnace, then salvaged the plank with a dexterous twist and jerk. No flames were visible in the depositing-chamber itself; the heat was applied externally, so to speak, perhaps as a sort of survival of the olden days when Korean dead were wrapped in a mat and left to bake and fester in the sun. We were turning away, satisfied for a lifetime with one “sight-see” of that kind, when a sound, so out of keeping with the matter-of-fact tone of the workmen as to be startling, brought us back again. Out of the semi-darkness had appeared a Korean of the peasant or porter class, past forty, lean and sun-browned; and with a wail that had in it something of an animal in extreme distress, he flung himself at the furnace door as if he would have torn it open and rescued the form it had for ever swallowed up. We had never suspected the rank-and-file Korean capable of showing such poignant grief. Nor was it seemly in one of his standing, evidently, for almost at his second wail the three carriers who had brought the body rushed down upon him and demanded forthwith the price of their services. Their strident bargaining rose high above the dismal, discordant droning of the so-much-a-yard prayers that had never once ceased during our stay. The surly porters made it plain that there was no time for vain mourning while the serious matter of their hire was unsettled.

“He was my older brother,” wept the man, “the last of my family. Have I any one left? Not one. And now....”

The unsatisfied carriers were still cruelly bullyragging him when we left, and the sound of their quarreling voices, intermingled with the never ending droning of the priest, came to us through the night after we were well on our way home.

It is only the Buddhists who cremate by choice in Korea, and by no means the majority of the people are of that faith. Many are mere ancestor-worshipers, or placaters of evil spirits, or have a mixture of several Oriental faiths and superstitions which they themselves could not unravel. The non-Buddhists bury their dead, and thereby hangs, as in China, a serious problem. For definitely circumscribed public cemeteries will not do. The repose of the departed and the fortune and happiness of his descendants depends upon the proper choice of a burial-place, which is by no means a simple matter. It calls for the services of sorceresses, necromancers, and other expensive professionals; it may take much time; and the final indications may point to a most unlikely and inconvenient spot. Green mounds, wholly unmarked except in the rarest of cases, but each known to the descendants whose most solemn duty it is to tend them, cover hundreds of great hillsides throughout the peninsula, to the detriment of agriculture, Korea’s main occupation. The Japanese took the Western utilitarian point of view and ordered prescribed areas set aside for graveyards; but this was one of the most hated of their reforms, and the right to lay away their dead at least in private cemeteries has once more been granted to the Koreans.

Tucked away in the pine-clad hills about us were several little Buddhist monasteries. The last word is deceiving, however, for there was hardly anything monasterial about these semi-isolated retreats. In theory the Buddhist monks and priests of Korea live in celibacy; in practice few even of their most devout coreligionists pretend to believe that they do so. About the tile-roofed clusters of buildings, varying mainly in pretentiousness from the thatched homes of laymen, there was no dearth of women and children; and the monks were the last in the world to deny themselves the pleasure of wandering to the near-by city or up and down the country as the mood came upon them. The brilliant saffron robe that distinguishes the followers of the Way in central Asia, and adds so vividly to the picturesqueness of lands farther west, is unknown in Korea. A shaven head in place of the precious topknot is almost the monk’s only difference in appearance from the ordinary layman; when whim or a sincere desire to tread in the path marked out by Gautama sends him out into the Korean world, the distinguishing hat of woven ratan may be superimposed, but even the symbolic pretense of a begging-bowl hardly marks him out from his more toilsome fellow-countrymen. For a long period in the history of Korea, Buddhist monks were rated lower in the social scale than even the peasants of the fields, and this attitude toward them has survived, perhaps unconsciously, in a marked lack of deference, almost an indifference to them, except in their official capacity, or among an unusually superstitious minority.

In these monasteries the principal living-room—to use the word very loosely—is floored with the thick oily brownish paper universal in private dwellings, and the scant furniture is of a similar type. Perhaps one of the big half-oval drums that call such of the monks as happen to be within hearing to their not very arduous duties swings from the center of the low ceiling; about the walls may sit a few bronze ornaments or figures of some significance which totally escapes the uninformed visitor. Certainly Gautama himself would not recognize the barbarous gaudiness, the crowds of fantastic figures which clutter the adjoining temples, as having been inspired by his simple teachings. Big golden Buddhas in the center, behind a kind of altar and offering-table in one, are flanked on either side clear around the three walls of the room with hybrid manikins of Chinese mythology and demonology, often of human size, which would outdo the phantasmagoric imaginings of any child in terror of the dark. Fourth wall is there none, but only a long series of double doors, which first open and then lift up to the horizontal, where they are supported by quaint Oriental substitutes for hooks. If the discreet rattling of a few small coins succeeds in accomplishing the complete opening of the doors, the more than dim religious light of the musty interior gives way to the glaring radiance of cloudless Korea, and a myriad of details that are otherwise only suspected, if even that, make their appearance. One discovers, for instance, that in addition to the score or more of large figures in the gaudiest of greens, reds, and all possible clashings of colors there are several times as many figurines, knee-high or less, interspersed among them, as if these queer puppets had their human quota of offspring. Like their adult companions, these little effigies wear expressions varying all the way from that of terrorizing demons to a smirking gentleness which suggests a well spent babyhood. Mere words, however, are useless pigments with which to attempt to picture the color-splashed paintings that cover the walls behind the row of stodgy standing figures. All the chaos of Oriental mythology seems to have been thrown together here, in battle scenes, in court processions, in helter-skelter throngs of human beings in garbs that were antiquated long before the Christian era, all fleeing in terror from the mammoth central figure of some wrathful monarch, his wildly bearded face painted jet-black to suggest the horror that his countenance sheds upon all beholders. Every feature of these silent temple denizens, be it noted, are Chinese, not Korean; and history tells us that as late as the Boxer Rebellion it was not so much the European troops as their black auxiliaries who put terror into the hearts of the fleeing Celestials.

Gautama, the Buddha, as I have said, would puzzle in vain to find the connection between the strange beings which clutter these Buddhist temples and his own gentle doctrine. The medieval Christian, on the other hand, should find himself perfectly at home in certain corners of them, where are depicted such scenes as sinners fastened between two planks in order to simplify the task of assistant devils nonchalantly sawing them down the middle from crown to hips, in exactly the same way that Oriental workmen turn logs into lumber to this day. Perhaps the most surprising thing about these monasteries, to visitors from Christian lands, is the complete lack of sanctity toward the objects they worship which marks the outward behavior of the inmates. Casual callers of other faiths, or of the absence thereof, are as freely admitted to the most sacred corners as the monks themselves. The elaborate genuflections and throaty chantings of a group of bonzes in full barbaric regalia at the behest of a group of peasants come to lay offerings of rice and copper coins before a favorite figure may be followed a moment later by the tossing of a dirty altar-cloth or a dusty old rag over the head of the same god to whom they have just been appealing so grovelingly. Whatever their faults, there is always something charming about the tolerance of Buddhists. No small number of Christian missionaries in Korea spend their summer furloughs in the monasteries of this gentle rival faith.

We struck out one Sunday afternoon over the high hill directly north of us, to visit the famous White Buddha, carved and painted on a great stream-washed rock cliff in the outskirts of the capital. It needs much less of a climb beneath the blazing sun of midsummer Korea to leave one drenched, but the view from the crest soon made that a half-forgotten detail. Of the hills rolling away into mountains on every hand, or the broad brown Han flecked with its rectangular junk-sails, little need be said; such scenes are commonplace in Cho-sen. But the complete panorama of Keijo, erstwhile Seoul, beginning at the very base of the perpendicular rock cliffs below us and stretching from the “Peking Pass” to far beyond Todaimon Gate, from ill sited Ryuzan to the section of old city wall along a mountain ridge which the Japanese have permitted to stand, called for a longer breathing-spell. Ancient Chinese-roofed palaces, efforts at modern buildings which somehow still seem unacclimated, the mainly Japanese city to the south of Shoro-dori—that broad street which distinctly separates Keijo into two nearly equal portions—the acres of yellow-brown thatched Korean huts of the northern half so compact as almost to seem a great hayfield, all stand out with the clearness of an illuminated engraving. Most incongruous, as well as most conspicuous, of all the details of the picture are the homes and other structures of the Christian missionaries, of red brick, and standing forth, if the time-worn comparison is legitimate in such a connection, like sore thumbs. Statistics assert that of the quarter of a million dwelling in Seoul only two hundred are Caucasians, a statement which there is no good reason to question, but which nevertheless seems strange from any such point of vantage above the city, for the big twin-spired Catholic cathedral alone, on the commanding site it has been true to form in choosing, seems to imply far more than that number. It was not merely the sounds of washing and ironing coming up to us in a great muffled chorus from the city below on this brilliant Sunday afternoon, however, which reminded us that for all these obvious edifices we were in no Christian country.

At the foot of the swift jungle-clad descent to the narrow suburb along the northern highway our ears were suddenly assailed by a great jangling hubbub. We crowded into the little courtyard of the square-forming house from which the sounds arose, and found that we had stumbled upon a sorceress performance. Numbers of men and children and many women were jostling one another along the wall-less fronts of two rooms on opposite sides of the yards, inside which the typical native hocus-pocus was at its height. On the papered floor of each room a sorceress was hopping, posturing, grimacing, and from time to time shrieking, with an activity which at least could not leave her open to the charge of physical laziness. I am no custodian of fancy-dress ball costumes, hence I can do little more than appeal to the vivid imaginations of those better fitted for the task to picture to themselves the incredible regalia in which these two middle-aged females, with the worldly wise faces, were swathed, though I can throw in the hint that they would not have suffered from cold six months thence, and that head-dresses which seemed to have been built, and then improved upon and built some more, about sections of stovepipe formed the crowning feature of their make-up.

We gave our attention mainly to the older, more agile, and more demoniacal of the pair. In one hand she swung incessantly a curved knife half as long as herself, and in the other a big clumsy iron three-pronged spear not unlike the one attributed to Father Neptune, one of her principal objects evidently being to slash and prod and swing as near the credulous beings who crowded about her as she could without inflicting actual physical injury upon them. In one corner sat half a dozen dejected-looking men picking at native musical instruments as they howled, and seeming to resent that the despised sex occupied the center of the stage. Several ordinarily dressed women stood or squatted along the walls. These, it was explained to us, had sick children and had come to have the malignant devils that had entered their little bodies exorcised and driven out. From time to time the sorceress called upon them to rise and join in the dance, particularly to posture in the center of the room while she made wild lunges at them with her two weapons. At other times they were ordered to kneel and bow their heads to the mats before what seemed to be imaginary gods or devils behind the displays of food set around the edges of the room. Now and again they ate bits of this, and at certain rather regular intervals the sorceress ceased her hopping, lunging, and posturing to partake copiously of some native drink respectfully tendered her by women of the house, or by those who had come to get the benefit of her ministrations. Through it all the dejected male orchestra, squatted on the floor in a corner, screeched incessantly some incredibly discordant Korean conception of music.

Some of the figures, in the gaudiest of colors, surrounding the Golden Buddha in a Korean temple

The famous “White Buddha,” carved and painted in white, on a great boulder in the outskirts of Seoul

One day, descending the hills toward Seoul, we heard a great jangling hubbub, and found two sorceresses in full swing in a native house, where people come to have their children “cured”

The yang-ban, or loafing upper class of Korea, goes in for archery, which is about fitted to their temperament, speed, and initiative

Half an hour or more after our arrival the sorceresses simultaneously changed their costumes to something quite different but equally fantastic, and after a deep drink and a long breath each they sprang again into the fray. They had already been at it for hours and might continue until dark. For these ceremonies seem to be rather of a wholesale nature, to which come all those who happen that day to have a devil to be exorcised, and the price of that service available. The bystanders made themselves comfortably at home, as is commonly the custom in the easy-going East, unawed by the great feats that were taking place before their eyes. Children played in and out of the throng; men, and some women too, placidly smoked their long tiny pipes; the sturdy fellow who had brought the paraphernalia of the sorceress calling slept babe-like on the box in which it had come, waiting for the word to carry it away again. Apparently there was nothing to be feared, except by the evil spirits which were being cast forth from within their absent or present victims. For some of the women had brought their ailing children in the flesh and were subjecting them to the noisy balderdash in ways that should have increased rather than diminished the demons of illness within them. How many mothers of sick infants came to that day’s ceremony was only suggested by the dozen or more present at one time. How many worldly-wise women of Korea, some of the most famous of them blind or boasting some other infirmity reputed to increase such powers, win their livelihood and even lay up small fortunes as sorceresses, even the statistics-loving Japanese overlords probably could not tell. One runs across them in wayside villages, in little valleys hidden by brush and rocks out among the hills all over the country—and in nearly every case there is a modern hospital run by missionaries or the Government no great distance away, sometimes, as here in Seoul, right on the road to the performance, where ailing infants would be readily admitted, probably at less cost than the fee of a sorceress.

The Japanese are so often accused of having no ideas of their own that perhaps I am mistaken in believing that they did not copy from some other nation their Railway School in Seoul. It is their own impression that the idea originated with the general manager of the Korean part of the South Manchuria Railway, and their opinion ought at least to be worth those of passing strangers. The plan is to recruit young boys after the usual six years of preliminary schooling and gather them together into a kind of railway West Point, where future employees of the railway shall be trained not merely in the immediate and mechanical things of their calling, but in general citizenship, in esprit de corps, in all those things which a body of men charged with so important a job as running a great railway system should have and be. There was already great eagerness to enter the school, though it was only in its third year, since the future for which it prepares is not only moderately bright but is definite and certain. At intervals competitive examinations for admission are given. The latest one had been attended by one thousand and eighty candidates, of whom a hundred and fifty were admitted to the school. The Japanese officials asserted, and seemed sincerely to believe, that, given equal preliminary training, Korean youths have equal opportunities for admission to the school and for preferment in what lies beyond. But the bare fact that of the five hundred and thirty-eight students only eighty were Koreans did not make it easy to accept this statement without question. It would scarcely be natural in any nation, let alone one of so tight a national feeling as Japan, to let such prizes get to any extent out of the hands of their own people.

The school is a big red-brick building, or compact cluster of them, down at Ryuzan, where the railroad community lives in an orderly, well built town of its own, and it has everything which even the most exacting peoples of the West expect a school to have. The principal is not a railroad man, but an M.A. and a famous pedagogue from Japan, and the whole curriculum is laid out with the idea of giving the future trainmen as broad a training as could possibly be of use to them in the line of work toward which they are heading. All of them take, for instance, six hours of English a week. They are taught the importance of courtesy in its practical as well as its ethical aspects—a point which seems to have been largely missed by the labor-union brotherhoods of the West. To the strictly utilitarian Occident some of the things taught would seem highly fanciful. We would hardly expect our engine-drivers to take fencing, samurai style, as well as jiu-jitsu, however handy these accomplishments might be in ridding their trains of hoboes. But the Japanese idea is to develop health and physique and a well-rounded personality as well as mere mechanical ability, the spirit of fair-play, character and esprit de corps, as well as mere laborers’ qualities, that there may be a railway morale, as there is in most countries an army and a navy morale. Thereby the founder of the school hopes to avoid what he calls “labor-union madness,” and at the same time to have men properly fitted to come into contact with the public; not merely pullers of throttles and takers of tickets. The school, as I have said, is barely three years of age, so that one could scarcely expect any distinctly visible results of the policy as yet in the railway itself, but the scheme strikes even the layman observer as at least one thing Japanese well worth imitating.

When the Russians and the Japanese grappled with each other a couple of decades ago, the railways of Korea, it will be recalled, were not linked up with those of Manchuria, destined to be the chief battleground. The little islanders pushed them quickly through, first in hastily constructed emergency form for military use, and later in a more finished manner. To this day they are straightening out curves and moving higher up from flooding areas that were ill chosen in war-time haste, and here and there along the way lie bits of the old road-bed and the abandoned abutments of a bridge that is gone. Like the railways of Japan, those of Korea are government owned; but they are not government operated. The South Manchuria Railway system, comprising all the Treaty of Portsmouth transferred from the Russians to their victors, has been given, as a private corporation, the complete control of the lines in Cho-sen for a long term of years, so that both comprise virtually one system, and operate as two trunk lines—from Fusan to Mukden and from Dairen and Port Arthur to Changchun, with their various branches. There is nothing of the Japanese model about these railways; they are almost exact copies of those in the United States, with standard gage, American cars with only minor hints of European influence, even the deep-voiced whistle which so instantly carries any wandering one of us back to his home-land. There is no railroad in the world at which the carping traveler cannot now and then find fault, but on few will he be harder put to it to find just cause for grumbling often than on these two systems operated as one from Dairen.

CHAPTER III
JAPANESE AND MISSIONARIES IN KOREA

In Korea the traveler who has seen them at home gets a somewhat corrected picture of the Japanese. It is as if they had put their best and their worst foot forward there simultaneously, and cause for high praise lies plainly side by side with reasons for strong censure. Everyone in the peninsula seems to admit that materially Korea is much better off for having been taken over, lock, stock, and barrel, by Japan. Intrigues, the selling of offices, brigands, few and virtually worthless police, catch-as-catch-can tax methods to impoverish the people, a government so corrupt that there was not a breath of hope left in the country or the hearts of its inhabitants—there remained in all the peninsula of Cho-sen little but the most primitive agriculture in an almost wholly deforested land when the Japanese at length took upon themselves the task and the pleasure of administering it. But like our involuntary wards of the West Indies and elsewhere, the Koreans object to being forcibly improved, and it is not, one comes to the conclusion, merely disgruntled, because dispossessed, native politicians who are creating the continued growl of dissatisfaction.

For all the admitted improvements they have brought, in spite of a distinct change of policy now under a civil instead of a military government, even the mere passer-by will scarcely fail to hear a long list of Korean grievances against the Japanese, and he is not unlikely to see some of these exemplified before his own eyes. The Japanese make so free with the country, run the complaints; they treat it as something picked up from the discard, with all signs of its former grandeur obliterated, no memory even of a former existence. They always speak of “Japan proper” when they mean their native islands, as if this great peninsula, more than half as large as their Empire “proper” including Formosa, and with seventeen million people who are distinctly not Japanese, were a mere tatter on the garment itself. They change without a by-your-leave not only the form of government but the very names of the provinces; they interfere in the minutest matters of every-day life—require people to walk on the left side of the street, for instance. Those who came when the country was first taken over did anything, the complaints continue, took anything, that pleased their fancy or appealed to their appetites, without payment, or at whatever they chose to pay. A new governor chased this riffraff out of the peninsula and a better class is now in evidence; but even these strike the passing observer as “cockier,” more arrogant than the average in Japan—and perhaps somewhat brighter.

One is quickly reminded of Poland under the Germans, from whom it might easily be suspected that the Japanese copied almost verbatim in their annexation of what was once Korea. Japanese get the cream of mines, factories, and other concessions; the advantages given the “Oriental Development Company,” in reality a semi-official, strictly Japanese, concern, amount to a scandal. The monopoly bank does about as it sees fit in rates and exchanges; wherever there is a chance for it a Japanese always seems to get the preference over a Korean. Railwaymen, policemen, even the “red caps” at stations, are nearly all Japanese; at such places the Japanese rickshaw-men are given the best stands, with their Korean competitors in the background. I was returning one night from Gensan on the east coast, whence there had just been put on a night train to Seoul, which for some reason had not been found worthy of carrying a sleeper. About twenty minutes before train-time I started through the platform gate, only to be stopped by the gateman, who almost at the same instant promptly punched the ticket of a little man in kimono and scraping wooden getas and let him pass. My training in taking a back seat having been neglected, I pushed past the gateman and followed the sandal-wearer across to the waiting train. From end to end it was half full of Japanese passengers, most of them stretched out on two double seats; and when, just before the train started, Korean passengers were admitted to the platform, there was little left for them to do but to squat on the floor or the arm of a seat here and there or stand up all night.

I have seen a petty Japanese official keep a public autobus waiting for half an hour while he played with his children or had a last cup of tea with his neighbors. Railway stations are, with few exceptions, miles from the towns they serve, though the line may run almost directly through them. Possibly, as those in authority claim, this is for protection, though I do not know from what; the disinterested visitor finds himself agreeing with the Koreans that it is probably done so that a Japanese town can grow up under more advantageous conditions than the old Korean city behind it, as has already happened in many cases, and perhaps to help the Japanese owners of Fords, rickshaws, and hotels. The Japanese hold up and examine mail, whether of Koreans, missionaries, or foreigners in general, at the slightest provocation, often, one suspects, out of mere curiosity. Korean youths who wish to go to school in America or Europe are almost invariably refused passports. Possibly a dozen are granted out of a thousand applications, and it often takes as long as a year to get those. One group of students who applied for permission to study industries abroad were told to study them in Chinnampo instead. To appreciate the joke fully one must have seen Chinnampo. In general the Koreans are virtually prisoners within their own country, and even if they escape from it they are not always safe. Koreans whose land has been taken away from them by force have moved to Manchuria and become Chinese citizens. Even if this prattle of “self-determination” means nothing so far as nations are concerned, certainly the right of an individual to choose his own allegiance should be axiomatic in this day and generation. But the Japanese will not recognize the Chinese citizenship of a Korean. Having taken the country, they claim possession of all its people also, irrespective of their location or personal choice, and send soldiers to round them up on the foreign soil of Manchuria, forcing the Chinese to hold them in their jails, bringing them back to Korea for trial, or shooting them on the spot.

Everywhere the Japanese stick together—another German trait; if they did not know the ropes and have everything in their favor, including the official language, say those who know both races well, the Koreans would outdo them in almost any line. Personally I could not sign so broad a statement, for though I have seen many indications that the Koreans are of quicker and sharper intelligence than the Japanese, they have other weaknesses which largely neutralize this advantage. But the policy in Korea, even in these improved days, seems never to be humanity and justice first, but Japan and the Japanese über alles—and after that whatever may conveniently be added. Koreans of standing say that Japan’s inability to overlook her petty interests for the fulfilment of greater things is her greatest weakness, as her policy of assimilation, of trying to make Koreans over into Japanese, which the experience of Germany in Poland should have taught her not to attempt, is her greatest mistake. The same dominating instinct which insists that even a railway porter shall be Japanese, if one applicant among a hundred is of that race, is manifest in all her political dealings, and this over-patriotism may prove her final undoing, where a bit less of it might permit her to continue as an unconquered nation under a single dynasty for another twenty-five hundred years.

Japan is eager to make Shintoists of the Koreans, to teach them that ancient cult of the mikado as a direct descendant of the gods which has been revived and repaired and strengthened during the last half-century in Japan itself, that his “divine right” may survive even in an age that is so completely in disagreement with such fallacies. Korean school-children especially are subjected to this form of propaganda, so similar to the German school- and pulpit-made Kultur of kaiserly days. The requirement that their children in government schools shall not merely salute the banner of the rising sun at frequent intervals, but shall bow down daily in what is virtually worship, however much the Japanese may deny it, before a picture of the mikado, is one of the sorest points with the Koreans. A modicum of intelligence should tell any people that such methods are out of date and much worse than useless. The new Shinto shrines on hilltops all over Korea, with their newly peeled torii before them, look like late and exceedingly weak rivals of the Christian churches which dot the peninsula.

Until very recently all Japanese officials in Korea, including schoolteachers, wore uniforms and carried swords! Picture to yourself how much more handy the latter would be than a ferule. But Japanese influence on the rising generation would be greater if there were not such a discrepancy in the rights of schooling. With seventeen million Koreans and less than three hundred and fifty thousand Japanese in Korea, the 65,654 Korean children who find accommodations in government schools represent something like one two-hundred-and-fiftieth of the Korean population, while the 34,183 Japanese youngsters in school are one tenth of the sons of Nippon in the peninsula. Yet the Government still hampers to a certain extent private, and especially missionary, schools. The Japanese have brought many improvements, say the Koreans, but for whom?

Silk, tobacco, salt, gin-seng, to some extent beans, and in a certain sense prostitution, are government monopolies in Korea. The Japanese seem to bring immorality and “red lights” and disease wherever they take root, and to adopt a callous, cynical attitude toward this matter which marks them as closely related to the French in at least that one point. Thirty years ago, say missionary doctors, before their war with China brought the islanders to the peninsula in any great number, the diseases of prostitution were virtually unknown in Korea; now they are widely prevalent. As is their custom, the Japanese have established yoshiwaras in every city of any size, with Korean as well as Japanese inmates—Chinese also in the zone they control in Manchuria—and while these are not exactly government owned, the protection accorded them, the official regulation of them, and the large income in the form of taxes derived from them makes them virtually so.

A Japanese policeman in spotless white summer uniform and sword, relieved by a blood-red cap-band which is said to be symbolical, is to be found in any Korean gathering, even in the utmost corner of the peninsula. The traveler will probably not be in Korea long before he sees one or two such officers driving to prison a Korean with his arms tightly bound with ropes, the loose ends of which serve as reins. This is an old Oriental custom, but one feels that it could, to advantage, yield to something a little more modern and reasonable, a bit less conspicuous. In August, 1919, the police force under an army lieutenant-general virtually independent of civil authority was replaced by a gendarmerie or constabulary directly responsible to the new governor-general, Baron Saito. The latter is widely admitted to be a superior official, with the best of intentions and a high grade of ability. But tales of oppression by subordinates, and cruelties by the police, persist even under his comparatively beneficent rule. The time-honored excuse that “excesses of police and gendarmes do not have the approval of higher authorities” is out of date; if higher officials cannot curb those under them, they are equally to blame. Baron Saito’s Government seems to recognize this and has changed the formula to “It cannot be true that the police still beat prisoners, for there is a law against it.” Definite cases of persecution and torture still turn up from time to time, but the victims are so cowed that they dare not report the matter to higher authorities, and a fluent lie by the police involved settles an investigation, since the word of a Japanese is always accepted over that of a Korean. An American missionary who had reported many cases of persecution to the present governor was asked to bring the next victim in person. But when he suggested to a man who had sneaked in to see him, badly cut up and mottled in black and blue from head to foot, that he go and show himself to the governor-general, the fellow all but fled at the bare suggestion. Word would be sure to get back to the police of his own province, he insisted, and he would be manhandled worse than ever when he went home. True, gendarmes who misbehave are sometimes court-martialed, which sounds to the average civilian like something dreadful, but those of us with a little military experience know how often a court martial is a synonym for a whitewashing, unless it is the sacred army itself which has been wronged.

The Korean method of ironing, the rhythmic rat-a-tat of which may be heard day and night almost anywhere in the peninsula

Winding thread before one of the many little machine-knit stocking factories in Ping Yang

The graves of Korea cover hundreds of her hillsides with their green mounds, usually unmarked, but carefully tended by the superstitious descendants

It is not, of course, quite the same to a Korean to be beaten by the police as it seems to us. Flogging has been practised in Korea as far back as records go, and it is not unnatural that Japanese gendarmes should consider this the only sure way of really reaching the intellect or getting the truth out of some Koreans. But they failed to see that while men punished in this time-honored way by their fellow-countrymen might not feel particularly humiliated, might take it almost like a son from his father, they would deeply resent being so treated by Japanese aliens, little men whom they have always heartily despised. Certainly some ugly stories are still afloat, and all indications point to the probability that the torturing of prisoners—and of witnesses—still goes on in the secrecy of some police stations, the perhaps real disapproval of higher authorities notwithstanding. To say that the same thing sometimes occurs in New York is not to make the practice any less reprehensible.

Once convicted of a crime, it is another matter; but when a man is suddenly arrested without warning and imprisoned for weeks, months and sometimes more than a year without knowing what charge has been made against him, without being allowed to get a word in or out of prison, even to notify some one to communicate with his family or see a lawyer, or to do anything but sit and await the good pleasure of his jailers, which may include being bambooed for two hours daily, the infliction of the “water cure,” the clamping of the fingers, the hanging up by the thumbs, the forced squat, and many other ingenious tortures which are guaranteed to leave no telltale marks on the body, it is not a sign of civilization but a remnant of the barbarism from which Japan tries hard to prove to the world that she has entirely recovered. Once the police get a confession by such methods there is no going back on it, we were told, no matter how innocent the sufferer really may be. His case is turned over at once to the procurator, and only after he has been twice condemned can he have counsel. The French system of considering the accused guilty until he proves his innocence prevails, and the chief of police has often been known to sit behind the judge and virtually to give him his orders as to what is to be done with the prisoner at the bar. Nine months in prison merely as a witness has been the experience of many a Korean Christian. Interpreters, even in important conspiracy cases, where it may be a matter of life and death, are reputed to mistranslate testimony in favor of Japanese or in favor of conviction. There is a classic case of an American missionary arrested during the independence movement on the charge of “harboring prisoners,” simply because he did not drive out of his house convert students whom he knew to be innocent and whom the police were eager to torture. Though he was ill at the time, he was refused permission to have a bed brought from his house to the bedless prison, was not allowed even to send word of his whereabouts to his wife, was kept incommunicado for fifteen days, during which he was grilled by a haughty Japanese official who spoke to him only in “low talk,” such as one uses to coolies, and after four trials his punishment was reduced from one year’s imprisonment to a fine of a hundred yen.

Perhaps the most repulsive custom of the Japanese police in Korea, from our Western point of view, is their indifference to domestic privacy. They march even into school-girls’ dormitories or women’s apartments with or without provocation; American missionary women traveling in the interior have often been compelled to admit policemen to their quarters at inns or in the homes of converts not only after they have prepared for bed, but several times during the night, merely to answer over and over again their silly “Who-are-you? How-old-you? Where-you-come-from? Where-you-go?” questions.

The many reforms that have recently been introduced into Korea, say its residents, would have been of far more credit to the Japanese if they had thought of them before rather than after the independence movement of March, 1919. The handling of that, by the way, was a typical example of Japanese stupidity. The independence agitation which broke out simultaneously all over the peninsula was merely a demonstration to prove to the outside world that the Koreans had not been so completely and successfully “Japalacked” (as the missionaries, with no unbounded love for the little brown Prussians of the East, put it) as the Japanese at the peace conference led the world to suppose. Their city walls had been torn down; they had no weapons; the native Christians, who were foremost among the agitators, had refused to have anything to do with the demonstration until it was agreed that there should be no violence. If the Japanese had acted with the jovial moderation which their power over the peninsula made quite possible, the movement would very likely have been nothing more serious than a kind of lantern procession on a national scale. There is an anecdote floating about the Far East to the effect that half a dozen British “Tommies,” strolling down the street of a city in India, were met by a mob shouting the Hindu version of “Long live Gandhi!” They neither raced back to the barracks for their rifles nor fell upon the crowd with such weapons as they could snatch up; they merely began shouting with the natives, “Long live Gandhi!” Within five minutes the demonstration had broken up in peals of laughter at the antics of the soldiers and their ludicrous Hindustani accent. Whether it is true or not, the story illustrates a great weakness of the Japanese. Almost no nation is so devoid of a sense of humor, as we use the phrase; that is, they are wholly incapable of permitting anything but the greatest solemnity of word or deed concerning their persons, their country, or their “sacred” institutions.

Instead of treating the “Mansei” movement as more or less of a joke, therefore, they acted with incredible childishness, as well as quite unnecessary brutality. Groups of unarmed Koreans gathered on hills overlooking the towns, shouted “Mansei!”—which is merely the Korean form of the Japanese “Banzai!” or “Ten Thousand Years!” and means something like “Long live Korea!”—then scattered. The silly police ran hither and thither, distracted. The honor of their nation, the luster of their military caste, the glory of their god-descended ruler might have been at stake. They arrested sixty school-boys eight years of age because some one among them had shouted the dreadful word, and they kept them at the police station until ten o’clock at night. A high official quizzed a roomful of little girls with such questions as how they could expect liberty, and where they would get money to run the Government, if they had it. When they answered, woman-like, “Oh, we’d get it,” the Japanese on the platform foamed at the mouth and devised ingenious ways of punishing the tots for their temerity. Brutalities like ours in Haiti, and worse, were perpetrated on the population. Students were beaten if they admitted they attended mission schools. They were asked at ferry stations and other points of concentration whether they were Christians, and if they replied in the affirmative they were cut with swords and otherwise mishandled by soldiers and police. If they denied the allegation, even though they were known to be converts, they were not abused, the idea seeming to be to get them to apostatize. Prisoners were tied together and driven on forced marches of sometimes a hundred miles, sleeping on plank floors full of cracks, with no food whatever on examination-day (otherwise known as “torture-day”). Great gangs were marched into Ping Yang from the country roundabout, many of them virtually unable to walk, and with carts of dead ones behind. Women who had shouted “Mansei!” were taken to police stations, stripped, and marched around while the police amused themselves by burning them with cigarettes. Whether or not they were violated, they were subjected to every other form of indignity. The Japanese claim that “not a few policemen and their families in isolated stations were ruthlessly massacred,” and that they were therefore provoked to harsh measures. But they neglect to give the exact chronology of the affair, which indicates that they were the first to adopt harsh measures, and that Korean violence was in retaliation for their unnecessarily stern suppression of what probably would have remained a bloodless demonstration. Thus all the complaints, dissatisfactions, and grievances that had been repressed within the breasts of the people of Cho-sen for ten long years broke out at last like the cataract through a broken dike.

Those not friendly to them say that the Japanese police are cowardly as well as bullies, citing such examples as a group of Americans being mobbed only a few yards from one of the innumerable police stations in Seoul during our stay there, without a single white uniform appearing on the scene. Since the establishment of civil government some Koreans have been made gendarmes and otherwise given positions of authority, but as so often happens in such cases, many of them are more cruel to their fellow-nationals, and more itching with curiosity as to the doings of foreigners, than the Japanese themselves. Up to the time of the “Mansei” movement the Japanese scorned to study Korean and tried to force the Koreans to learn Japanese instead, again aping the Germans in Poland. But they have learned the disadvantages of using Korean interpreters and depending on native stool-pigeons for information, so that now they offer five yen a month in addition to the regular salary of those who have a workable knowledge of the native tongue.

The Japanese learned considerable from the uprising of 1919, but they still have something to learn. There are officials yet who advocate fines and flogging for Koreans who refuse to hoist the flag of Japan on national holidays. A modicum of common sense should teach any people that a national flag is a symbol of patriotism the display of which should be only an expression of free will, that patriotism can never be forced into the hearts of a people, and that any false show of it is much worse than worthless. Even shops which close as a sign of protest against certain Japanese doings are compelled by the police to open their doors. When the warship Mutsu anchored in the harbor of Chemulpo, the port for Seoul, every visitor who went on board was compelled to salute the common sailor on sentry duty at the gang-plank, who barked like an enraged bulldog at any one who did not perform the ceremony with the deepest solemnity. Until they cure themselves, or are cured, of this ridiculously Prussian point of view on matters pertaining to their national life naturally the Japanese will not be able to see that it is silly to speak of the “wickedness” of trying to change, or even of talking of changing, a given form of government, that as a matter of fact any form of government is no more sacred than an old pair of shoes that has served the wearer moderately well.

We of the West should not forget, however, that the “white peril” has been a much more actual thing to the Japanese than the “yellow peril” ever was to us. Korea was not only a convenient spring-board for Russia and the whole white world behind her, but it was a greater source of danger to Japanese health than Cuba in its most yellow-feverish days ever was to us. Old residents paint a distressing picture of pre-Japanese Seoul—narrow streets plowed up into bullock-cart ruts, no general means of transportation except one’s own feet, however deep the mud, corpses of those dying of cholera left before any “rich” man’s house, forcing him to bury them. The Korean royal family was “liberally provided for” and left in possession of their palaces and their titles in perpetuity on condition that they would not interfere in any way with the new Government or the people of the peninsula. The sop of titles of nobility was thrown to influential Koreans who were likely to make trouble, and seventy-six new peers stepped forth from their mud huts. The Japanese claim that they spend ten million dollars a year on the occupation of Korea, that with its need of schools, roads, trees, sanitation, and many other things the peninsula is a great burden to them. “Though it is treason to say so now,” a high-placed Japanese in Seoul assured me, “Korea will eventually get her independence, as soon as she can stand on her own feet and protect herself—and us—from the north.” Possibly this was mere prattle meant to throw me off the scent, but I have met some Japanese intelligent enough sincerely to believe in this eventual solution.

The American and European merchants in Korea think that the Japanese did on the whole better than any one else could have done in handling the situation, and that the Koreans cannot possibly govern themselves. So, for that matter, do most of the missionaries. Russia would have forced the Greek church upon the people, they say, but would have left the lowest form of inefficient and unsanitary burlesque on government. They would virtually have encouraged the persistence of ignorance and filth that made the Hermit Kingdom in every sense a stench to the nostrils of the world and a land of but two classes of people, the robbers and the robbed. “If Japan were to say to us to-morrow, ‘Here’s your country; run it yourselves,’” said a man who was trained to become prime minister under the old régime, “there are not bright men enough in it to form a cabinet.” The people have sometimes been made to suffer, the merchants go on, in such matters, for instance, as the taking of their land to build roads—for in old Korea as in China to-day highways were mere trespassers on private domain; but on the whole Japan has been no rougher than the United States or England in the countries they have taken over.

The agitation of Koreans for independence, the foreign laymen in the peninsula claim, emanates from self-seekers in foreign lands, and from the young students of mission schools, “especially American mission schools”; and the two “provisional governments,” one in the United States, and one, which has been in existence since the annexation, in Shanghai, do not at all represent the wishes of the Korean people as a whole. As it is, they are ground between the two millstones of the Japanese on the spot and these exiled governments, which send agents to make life miserable for those who fear one or both of them may some day come into power. Even the old politicians and office-holders are content, if we are to believe the men of commerce, now that even the Japanese have discovered that few military chiefs are of a type to make successful colonial governors, and that their subordinates, especially of the lower ranks, are almost always tactless, to say the least. But business men have a tendency the world over to praise anything that tends to keep “business as usual,” and one will probably come nearest the truth by striking a balance between their impressions and those of the missionaries, crediting the latter with somewhat more sincere, because less self-seeking, motives.

Whatever his personal opinion on the usefulness of foreign missions, no one with his eyes half open can set foot in Cho-sen without being impressed by the Christian influence, or at least by the number of missionaries, converts, and churches. He may be highly amused at the many subdivisions of that faith, by reason not merely of minor matters of creed and national lines but of such political cleavages as that caused by our Civil War, so nearly obliterated at home, which bewilder the natives like a countryman in a department-store with the wide choices of salvation offered them by—to mention only some of the American varieties—the “Northern” Presbyterians and the “Southern” Presbyterians, the “Northern” and the “Southern” Methodists, the Kansas Baptists and the Oklahoma High Rollers, for all I know, all guaranteed to give equal satisfaction. But the very intensity with which native converts regard these arbitrary lines of division, much slighter among the missionaries themselves, and the care which “Bible women” and country pastors take to keep their charges from wandering into any adjoining heretical sheepfold, is an evidence of the genuineness of their new beliefs.

Whether or not Christianity is the one and only true faith, it seems to be an established fact that it thrives under persecution. Protestant mission work began in China in 1808, in Japan in 1859, but not until about 1888 in Korea; yet there is to-day only a scattering of native Christians in the two former countries as compared with the hordes of them in Korea. Many towns, even Ping Yang, second city of the peninsula, are almost more Christian than “pagan”; and the missionary boast that Korea will be a Christian land within a generation or two does not sound so wild as many another statement that drifts to the ear of the naturally skeptical wanderer. There is some evidence to show that this rapid progress is considerably due to those very Japanese who are least eager for the Christian faith to spread. The law of Japan and Korea grants absolute freedom of religious belief and practice, but even the passing layman can plainly detect something very close to persecution of Christians by some of the Japanese authorities in the peninsula, though it be only unconscious and unintentional, which it probably is not. While the Catholics have been there much longer, and have often carried things with a high hand, it is the Protestants in particular, and especially the American missionaries, who seem to have won most of the Japanese ill will. This I believe to be almost more because of the fact that they are Americans than because they are missionaries. As Americans they just naturally resent the lack of human liberty, of “self-determination,” to use the catchword of the hour, which Japanese rule in Korea means. The opposite point of view is bred in their bones. Though they never opened their lips on the subject, their mere unconscious attitude, their negative lack of approval of the existing state of things politically, cannot but seem to the Koreans an approval of their own opposition to the Japanese. Obviously, the study of American history, even of American literature, in the mission schools adds to the discontent of young Koreans with the present status of what was once their own country, even though the teachers lean over backward in the effort not to mix academic and political matters. In fact, while the missionaries might deny it, it may be that the Koreans are rallying in increasing numbers about the American sponsored churches as much under the mistaken impression that the Americans are secretly sympathetic to the throwing off of the alien yoke, even by violence if necessary, as from the conviction that the American brands of salvation are the only sure passwords at the celestial gates.

At any rate, the Japanese seem to have concluded that American missionaries were behind the independence movement of 1919, and that they are still not to be entirely trusted. Now, I am as certain as I am of anything in this uncertain world that not a single American missionary was in the conspiracy of the “Mansei” demonstration. A very few may have known something about it, at least have felt in the air that something was coming; but it was no business of theirs to turn tattletales and run to warn a Government which had usurped since most of them came to Korea and had not treated them with any notable kindness, besides having what should have been an ample supply of its own spies to pick up such information. But the Japanese have not our way of thinking. They are ready enough to have the missionaries render unto Cæsar what belongs to him by keeping out of politics, but at the same time they seem to expect them to lend a hand to the extent of passing on to the authorities any hints or rumors that may be of use to them.

However, the independence demonstration and the unwise acts it brought in its train have trailed off into history. The more intelligent Japanese officials seem to have seen the light and acquitted the American missionaries of any active and conscious part in it, and the new governor-general and his immediate aids even sometimes call them into conference to get their point of view on subjects in which they are involved. But there is still an undercurrent of something akin to persecution of the American churches. As in the case of the persistent rumors of police floggings in spite of the new law forbidding them, it is impossible to make certain whether this is due to deliberate disobedience of orders by recalcitrant subordinates, to secret instructions at variance with those made public, or to pure stupidity, of which the Japanese have their liberal quota. In every mission town there is a detective in charge of matters pertaining to missionaries. He attends all services, comes hotfooting it whenever a foreigner stops even for lunch at a mission, demanding information concerning him back to the nth degree of absurdity, asks the future plans of the church almost daily, and other stupid and impertinent questions. In some districts the police still literally hound the church—demand lists of all contributors, send spies to stand at the church door and take note of every Korean who enters, burst noisily in during prayer, order new women converts not to attend services. Even the missionaries strike one as being rather afraid of the police, though this may merely be due to their strenuous efforts to avoid giving further offense and to come more than half-way toward established friendship with the political authorities; it can easily be imagined how native pastors and the simple converts are affected by a brutal attitude.

A chicken peddler in Seoul

A full load

The plowman homeward wends his weary way—in Korean fashion, always carrying the plow and driving his unburdened ox or bull before him; one of the most common sights of Korea

The biblical “watch-tower in a cucumber patch” is in evidence all over Korea in the summer, when crops begin to ripen. Whole families often sleep in them during this season, when they spring up all over the country, and often afford the only cool breeze

Christian students in government schools often report that they have secretly been ordered to quit the church. There seems to be little doubt that the Japanese foster the student strikes which are increasingly becoming the bane of mission schools, now with demands for a Korean principal in place of an American who has grown gray in that position, now that no teacher be hired who has not been educated in Japan or Korea, or that there shall be no studying of the Bible in school—almost prima facie evidence of Japanese influence. All this cuts both ways in separating the Koreans and the foreigners. When the strikes reach the point of demanding that laboratory or library equipment be improved, notwithstanding that every tack in the school wall is due to American charity toward the strikers, the ordinary human being finds himself wishing that the missionaries would forget their unnatural patience and boot the strikers down the front steps. Permits are required for everything under the sun—to be pastor, to build a new church, even to solicit contributions to mission hospitals. The Japanese meddle with hospitals, schools, and churches in ways which even they could not possibly believe are excusable. The missionaries have to submit to their dictation as to curriculum; they even have to make their school year conform to the Japanese custom and teach in July. Perhaps the greatest hardship the missionaries have to endure is the constant dread that their sick children will be carried off to Japanese isolation wards, on the pretext that contagious diseases cannot be properly isolated in mission hospitals, and there virtually killed by being given only Japanese food, lack of beds, and treatment, while the parents may not even be allowed to see them.

All books by foreigners must be fully printed before being submitted to the police censor, who will not look at manuscript. Three days before publication two copies of the finished book must be in his hands, and if any of the contents is considered objectionable the whole edition is confiscated. Christian schools are often called out to meet officials on Sunday, or teacher’s examinations are given on that day with a frequency that could scarcely be coincidence. The requirement that all children in government schools shall bow down before a picture of the mikado in an attitude of worship is of course a constant thorn in the side of the Christians. The authorities claim that American mission students have no discipline, which is probably true from the Japanese point of view, in that they are not told just what they should think and do on every possible subject and occasion. In their published maps of Korean towns the Japanese rarely give any signs of the existence of Christian establishments, though these are often many years old and the most prominent institutions in the place. On the other hand, when their travels take them out of their own orbit the missionaries almost always go to Korean hotels instead of patronizing the foreign ones under Japanese management, but old custom and the high prices of the latter could easily account for this without including a suggestion of pique.

Personally I came to the conclusion that, while both are in evidence, it is the thick-headedness of the rank-and-file Japanese more than deliberate persecution which causes the continued friction between the two peoples who are doing the most for the regeneration of Korea. I might cite a typical case in point. Over near Gensan on the east coast the missionaries have a private summer resort, half a hundred houses and a beach, all enclosed within purchased grounds. But as the Japanese are very insistent in matters which they conceive to involve the equality of their race to the rest of the world, they refuse to let the missionaries keep the townspeople off their beach. Now, the bathing demeanor of the Japanese, innocent and proper though it may be to those who like it, is decidedly not suited to a place where American women and children come to spend their summers. So by dint of coaxing and explaining their own peculiar point of view, the Americans got the authorities at Gensan to post a notice that no one should bathe on the missionary beach unless arrayed in proper swimming costume. The Japanese of course are notoriously law-abiding. One afternoon when I found time to join my family on that beach a big limousine stood at the edge of the sand, and several dignified middle-aged men who might have been bankers or lawyers from the city were disporting themselves in perfectly respectable bathing-suits. But when I chanced to glance about a little later, one of them stood within ten feet of us, stripped stark naked as he calmly and leisurely changed from swimming to street costume, and two others were in the act of disrobing for the same purpose. I feel sure that they had no intention whatever of being offensive toward the dozen or more American women about them; probably their limited minds really thought that they were complying with both the letter and the spirit of the posted order and the desires of those who inspired it by wearing bathing costumes while in the water, and getting into and out of them on the open beach. When I addressed them with an unmissionary vehemence that might have landed me in a police station if they had chosen to make the most of it, they apologized hastily for the unwitting offense and hurried off to the privacy of the limousine. The Japanese in Korea are spending large sums in the effort to make certain of the beaches of the peninsula popular with foreigners, and quite likely some of these bankerly-looking gentlemen were involved in the scheme; but none of them still have any clear conception, probably, of why no beach can ever be popular with foreigners as long as Japanese also have the right of admission to it.

Missionaries after all are only human beings, as they themselves are the first to admit, and we do not expect the supernatural of them even in such a matter as meekly accepting the abuse of what they more or less regard as a usurping and alien political power over a people the benefiting of whom they consider their life-work. Many of the Americans in the mission field have been in Korea far longer than the Japanese. Some have lived there so long, according to those foreigners of another class who see them as dangers to their precious “business as usual,” that “they think they own the country and can countenance no changes in it, not even improvements. They used to do exactly as they liked, and they hate the least suggestion of coercion.” We should remember that the missionaries had the advantages of extraterritoriality in Korea before the Japanese came, and they cannot but resent the loss of it, the submitting to alien rulers whose ideas of everything, from housing to justice, are so widely different from their own. Moreover, though they readily admit that the Japanese are doing many things for the good of the peninsula, they see them primarily as men with an ax to grind.

It would be strange, if it were not long since commonplace, to see how sharp national lines remain even among men who think they are working above nationalities, how completely even men of strong ideals succumb to their environment. The American missionaries in Japan say that there is some reason for the Japanese to be suspicious of the American missionaries in Korea. They agree with the officials there, who contend that those destined for mission work in the Korean field should first have a year in Japan, that they may judge more fairly the Japanese national point of view. Even those in Korea, after ten to forty years’ residence there, cannot agree on many of the points involved, so how can a mere passer-by be expected to get at the exact truth of the matter? He can merely decide that there is some reason on both sides, with perhaps a private opinion as to which one is most inclined to tamper with the scales, and let it go at that. Friction is gradually decreasing, as the Japanese and Americans become more able to talk together—generally in Korean; and as there is no doubt that Japan has the good of Cho-sen and its people at heart—as an integral part of the Japanese Empire—constant improvement may confidently be expected.

CHAPTER IV
OFF THE BEATEN TRACK IN CHO-SEN

Perhaps it is because I was properly “Japalacked” that I was able to wander at will about Korea by train, steamer, Ford, rickshaw, and on foot without the annoyance of that constant police supervision and the incessant showing of my passport of which many other travelers have complained. Once, long ago, when the Japanese were at war with Russia, I was arrested forty-eight times during thirty-six days of wandering through Japan, and while the experience was much more amusing than serious, there was nothing to be gained by repeating it. So I took the trouble this time to satisfy Japanese inquisitiveness at headquarters beforehand, and while I may have been, and probably was, under more or less surveillance during my six weeks in Korea, I am sure that many of my jaunts were known so shortly in advance even to myself that no detective could have kept constant track of me. Certainly no visible attempt was made to keep me from going when and where I chose, and talking with whomever I wished.

A missionary Ford carried me off once to the gaunt hills to the east of Seoul. Even the “great roads” in the interior of Korea are much like the caminos reales of Spanish America—“great” or “royal” only in the name they bear. In places there are what the Japanese call “highways,” but even these seldom have bridges worthy the name, some being mere sod-covered logs, others dirt-and-branch foundations under concrete, or nothing at all but the crudest of ferries. In the rainy season whole treeless hillsides wash away and force traveling missionaries to sell their Fords and walk home. Though the weather of Korea is on the whole much better than that of Japan, the floods of summer are naturally severe in a mountainous and deforested country. In Seoul it rained incessantly day after day during much of July and August, sometimes with barely half an hour of cloudy clearness from dawn till dark. Many villages and some thirty miles of railroad were under water, and countless bridges were made at least temporarily impassable. Men waded waist-deep in the flooded rice-fields, raking out the duckweed with which these were covered, and which would choke the rice when the water subsided. Clothing and shoes molded overnight. In other parts of the country, such as Ping Yang district, there was less rain than the peasants asked for, though the almost tropical heat was everywhere and incessantly in evidence.

Even one of the most fair-minded of guide-book writers speaks of the Koreans as “incredibly lazy”—proof that he saw much more of the old capital and its vacant-minded yangbans than of the country districts. If he had ever toiled for a day in the blazing rice-fields, even driven a bull knee-deep in mud through them, or carried a “jiggy” load along the narrow paths between them, he might have been of a different opinion. In a land where agriculture is the national industry, where four-fifths of the population still remain living among and tilling the hills of their forefathers, their horizon bounded by their own narrow valley and the nearest market town, there can scarcely be general indolence. The Koreans in the mass are not lazy; but life means to them something more than incessant exertion merely for exertion’s sake, and they amble along even at work as if there were never any hurry to do anything or get anywhere, quite the antithesis of the busy little Japanese. With some such foot-note as this to one accusation against them, it is easy to agree with the man who put it so well, that the Koreans “are garrulous yet inarticulate, stolid yet excitable, frugal yet improvident, lazy yet lashed by necessity to strenuous efforts.” A childlike people on the whole, one is likely to conclude from weeks of wandering among them, happy-go-lucky, with little tendency of laying up for a rainy day, a trait in which they are widely at variance with their present rulers.

In June the peasants were still spreading over the fields the decomposed oak-leaves used as fertilizer, but by early July the transplanting of rice began, soon to be followed by the weeding. Gangs pull up the closely grown seedlings and tie them in bundles, which they throw out across the fields to be planted with an expertness which reminds one that their national pastime, at least in pre-Japanese days, was stone-throwing. The earth-laden roots being much the heavier end, the bundles unfailingly land upright just where the thrower chooses to place them. A line of six to a dozen men and women move slowly across each flooded field, replanting the grasses one by one, and everywhere the green, low, flat country is dotted with hundreds of near-white figures rooting in the soft, flooded earth. That no space may be wasted, beans are often planted on the tops of the dikes between the paddy-fields. Frogs sing their lugubrious chorus far and wide, little realizing the unwisdom of betraying themselves to the beautiful ibis which feed upon them. At weeding-time whole villages join together in great gangs, with drums, fifes, brass cans, and all manner of native noise-producers, to make a festival of the task, singing as they weed. The men, stripped to the waist and burned a permanent brown, display leathery skins that glisten red-brown in the sunshine, like a well polished russet shoe. Yet many a peasant uses a yellow fan as he works. Where irrigation calls for the lifting of water from a ditch to the fields, a man leisurely swings all day long an enormous wooden spoon suspended in a little framework. If the work calls for shoveling, one man holds the handle of the implement and two or three others lift it by the ropes attached to the shaft, precisely like the people of the Lebanon far across on the opposite edge of Asia. The Korean is famed for his kindness to his bulls, almost his only draft-animals now that his savage little stallion ponies have become so scarce, and it is the commonest of sights to meet a peasant lugging his wooden plow on his own broad back while the bull strolls lazily homeward before him.

Korea is a land of villages, not of cities, nor yet of isolated peasant houses, so that the broad flooded country is usually unbroken clear to the foot-hills of distant ranges, unless a town, its thatched roofs slicked down to the women’s hair, intervenes. Here stands a stone monument with a roof over it to commemorate the wife who died of grief for her departed husband, or at least refused resolutely to remarry, a noble example, by Oriental standards, to all her sex. Farther on several upright granite slabs flanking the road announce themselves as erected by grateful citizens in honor of departed magistrates, though the deep-cut Chinese characters upon them usually express anything but the real public sentiment toward these village looters. Babies suckling like shotes mothers stretched out on the floors of open houses, babies eating great green cucumbers, skin and all, babies wailing as one seldom hears them in Japan, are among the most constant details of any Korean village landscape. Among the fixed customs of the country is the burning off of the hair over the soft spot of an infant’s head, and most Koreans preserve this little round bald place throughout their lives.

In July lettuce and green onions are everywhere, adding a still greener tinge to the landscape. Men sleep anywhere in the middle of the day, on the narrow paddy dikes, at the roadside, in the road itself, naked to the waist but with their ridiculous horsehair hats still in place. You will find them still working at dusk, however, and before the mists begin to rise under the morning sun. Koreans of the masses never seem to sleep, or to eat, all at once. The children have no fixed hours of going to bed, nor beds to go to for that matter, so that they grow up able to doze off anywhere at any time. Like the Japanese, the race shows the effects of poor beds and piecemeal, catch-as-catch-can slumber. One by one each member of the family lies down, still fully clothed, on the brown-paper floor of the house as the whim strikes him, and drifts away into more or less sound slumber, while all the domestic life steps in and out among and over the sleepers. No matter at what hour of the night one passes through a village some of its people will be squatting on their porches or chattering inside. As crops approach the ripening stage, little watch-towers, like thatched dove-cotes, rise high on their pole legs all over the country, and by night he who comes strolling along almost any road will hear some or all the family within beating the little elevated shack with a stick or singing some weird old song as a protection against the myriad evil spirits which roam the darkness.

I have said that the national pastime of Korea was—for it seems now almost to have died out—the throwing of stones. In Cho-sen this game more or less took the place of jiu-jitsu in Japan, and in the olden days whole villages lined up on opposite sides, led by their chief bullies and most expert throwers, the women often piling up stones within easy reach of the warriors, and the festivities did not end until several were badly injured, if not actually killed. Koreans still have the reputation of being the most accurate stone-throwers in the world, as more than one unwelcome stranger has learned to his dismay during some dispute with a group of villagers. Under the influence of both Japanese and American residents this faculty is being turned to another account, and Korean baseball teams have already beaten more than once the best aggregations which our countrymen in the peninsula can muster.

One has moments of doubt in Korea about the accuracy of the “survival of the fittest” theory. The Koreans are superior to their rulers in mental quickness, certainly in physique, and probably in some moral qualities. This straighter, stronger-looking race seem big men beside the pushing little dwarfs who have subjected them—though I found that the largest native socks and shoes were nearly two inches too short for my own by no means oversize Caucasian foot. That they are brighter, or at least of swifter mental processes, than the Japanese, I am personally convinced by numerous little episodes within my own experience. There was the guide I had in the Diamond Mountains, for instance, only to cite one of many similar examples. He was just an ordinary jiggy-coom, a porter with the Korean carry-all on his back; yet though neither of us knew a word of the same language, we had not the least difficulty in exchanging all the thoughts we needed to during a four-day journey, by signs and gestures. I have yet to see the Japanese who would not have failed dismally under similar circumstances, and not merely because gestures mean nothing to the people of Japan. We arrived one evening at a temple-housed hotel run by the government railways, and the Japanese in charge, though he had much more education than my guide, and spoke considerable more or less English, displayed his racial density to such a degree that I was forced to call in the Korean carrier as an interpreter. Entirely in the language of signs and a few monosyllabic place-names he caught the idea perfectly, and passed it on, in one tenth the time I had already spent trying to drive it through the skull of the son of Nippon.

But while many Koreans possess an alert mentality, this is often offset by superstitions, prejudices, conceit, and the lack of initiative and perseverance. They seem to have been slaves to clan or village opinion for so long that they can seldom assert themselves individually. They learn elementary things quickly, but they are prone to run out of steam in the higher reaches. One gets the impression that they have less self-control, that they are undisciplined, both by training and temperament, compared to the Japanese. Unlike the Chinese, they will fight upon slight provocation, which may be another proof of a lack of self-control as well as of manliness. Such things as school strikes against missionaries who have given them long and unselfish service to the full extent of their resources indicate but little sense of gratitude. Even their most friendly foreign teachers admit that almost any of them will cheat at examinations if given the opportunity. Their cruelty, or at least indifference to the suffering of others, is perhaps as much an Oriental as merely a Korean trait. In the village just over the hills from Seoul near which we made our Korean headquarters an old man was found ill and half starved in a straw hut in the outskirts. If the foreign gentry who pass that way almost every day take no notice of him, the villagers evidently asked themselves, why should we? But the first information the foreigners had of the invalid or his condition was when our host happened one day to see him lying all but naked beside a muddy stream, apparently trying to drink, his skin mere parchment stretched tightly over his bones. The American gave the villagers a note to the mission hospital and paid some of them to carry the old man there on an improvised stretcher. Next morning nothing had been done. Called to account, the villagers explained that they had decided not to take him to the hospital, because he would only die soon anyway, and if they buried him themselves it would cost less, they thought, than if the hospital did so and then made the village pay for it.

It seems to be Japanese policy to keep deformity out of sight, but Korean instinct and custom work to the same end. The native teachers of a mission school vociferously objected to admitting a particularly brilliant candidate—because he had only one eye! “If this thing goes on,” one of the teachers raged, “we’ll be nothing but a collection of cripples,” and to illustrate the point he sprang up and humped himself across the floor like a paralytic, with the dramatic effect at which the Koreans are adepts. Whatever his opinion of the Japanese in that respect, no one would accuse the Koreans of having no sense of humor, though they are much more solemn of demeanor than the Chinese. An American resident who carries a massive old watch that once belonged to his grandfather drew it out one day as he was leaving a railway station—whereupon a Korean boy wearing the jiggy of the porter’s calling promptly backed up to the watch and solemnly asked if he should transport it. There is less curiosity, or at least less child- or monkey-like inquisitiveness about the Koreans than their immediate neighbors either to the east or west display, more personal dignity, one feels, and the stranger does not collect a following half as easily as even in Japan. It is true, however, that villagers poke holes in the paper walls of any inn-room housing foreigners, and missionary ladies are obliged to carry a complete curtain-room with them on their travels in the interior. Superstitions are still rife, for all the outside influence, and some of them take quaint forms. As in Haiti, it is a common thing to have a pedestrian dash across the road in front of a moving automobile just as it seems to be upon him, the idea being to get rid of the evil spirit which dogs his heels like his shadow, either by having it crushed beneath the wheels or attaching itself to the motorist. In fact, there are many little suggestions of the black man’s republic of the West Indies about Korea—Napoleon beards, little pipes, thatched market-stalls and the tiny transactions they are willing to make, the custom of sleeping peacefully at the roadside or in the roadway wherever the whim overtakes them, the same swing of the women carrying burdens on their heads, a similar carelessness about exposure of the person.

It is still an ordinary experience for a Korean bride to discover when she enters her future home that she is only her husband’s “Number 3” wife—yet all the children she may bear him are considered as belonging to Wife Number 1. Nine-tenths of the suspensions from the church, at least among Protestant converts, are for concubinage; most of the rest are for marrying “heathen.” I have already mentioned that the missionaries insist that Korean women are very modest, particularly as compared to their Japanese sisters. They seem not to consider the public display of breasts immodest, for missionaries, just like ordinary people, appear to get used to things which must at first have struck them as “dreadful.” They do not like to have them photographed, however; people at home would “misunderstand.” Women still come to church flaunting this open proof of motherhood, just as men do in their horsehair hats. Yet when Japanese women came into public baths already occupied by Korean men there was so much talk that the authorities were forced to modify a time-honored custom of Japan and order a division of the tubs by sexes. Less than two decades ago no Korean woman of the better class appeared on the streets even of Seoul in the daytime, and servant-girls compelled to do so covered their faces. After ten at night no men were expected to be abroad, for then the women, usually in sedan chairs, with lantern-bearers and followers, came out to pay their calls. In those days young men never smoked in the presence of their elders—at least of the male persuasion. No decent woman could read, but only sorceresses and keesang, the geisha of Korea. To-day things are so changed in some circles that the sewing-woman of a missionary family sent her girls to school first, saying that the boys could take care of themselves; with the result that her daughter became the wife of a vice-consul in Manchuria while her son was still a jiggy-coom, waiting at the station for a job of carrying. Points of view differ, of course, and what we of the West consider quite proper may strike the Korean as highly immodest, as well as vice versa. I remember once coming upon a group of Korean servants in a foreign house all gazing with great curiosity at the cover of one of our cheap high-priced magazines, decorated with a silly, but from our point of view harmless, picture, after the stereotyped manner of our “popular” illustrators, of a boy and girl kissing. The servant who had worked longest for foreigners was explaining to his scandalized fellows that they often did that, and held hands, too—which last dreadful vice he demonstrated by taking a hand of one of the others, by the wrist!

One should keep in mind, in considering the recent swift changes in Korea, that it was closed to the outside world much longer, tighter, and later than Japan. Yet the quaint old scholar’s cap is now as rare as the old learning. The new generation seems to have lost the poise of the old, and so far to have gotten nothing in its place. The rather flippant youths of the new schools cannot read the classics—for there is a splendid old Korean literature which is forbidden by the Japanese, so that the younger generation is growing up without it—and thus far they are not at home in the modern world that has so suddenly burst upon the ancient peninsula. One of the demands of the thirty-three men who signed the Korean “declaration of independence” a few years ago—the finest types of Koreans, according to the missionaries, and the first of whom were just being released, yellow and thin, when we were in the country—was the freedom to study things Korean, including their history. The idea of an education as the road to a government job and a lifetime of loafing still carries over from the days that are gone. Four fifths of the population is still reported illiterate, too, and even of those eager to go to school hardly one in three can get inside one. The rest can go to—well, to a Korean school of the old type, for instance. Frowsy old men keep them privately, and a dozen or a score of boys come at dawn, seven days a week, to squat on the floor of some dark and miserable little room in a back alley, their slippers in a row along the porch, and rock back and forth all day long shouting incessantly in what would be a chorus if it were not also a chaos of individual noises more often without than with meaning. Not until night falls do they unfold their legs and stumble homeward, and all the day through, as they “study,” the “teacher” in his special form of horsehair hat dozes on his knees at the head of the room, and flies beyond computation in numbers flit hour after hour from boy to boy. The Japanese officials of Korea pay a bounty on flies by the pint, but they do not seem to have done much toward wiping out their breeding-places. Yet, one recalls, while gazing in upon one of these old-fashioned schools, much of the civilization of Japan came from Korea—its culture, writing, Buddhism, pottery—and its smallpox.

A Korean church service, too, is a sight worth going to church to see. There are no seats, except perhaps a bench along one of the walls near the pulpit, for the missionaries. All others sit or squat on the floor, covered with straw matting, all in white except some of the smaller children, mainly dressed in pink. Many of the men still wear topknots, and some their “fly-trap” hats, for by Korean standards it is impolite to take these off except in one unmentionable place, where it is imperative. The sunburned breasts of women are also somewhat in evidence, though the great majority of the average congregation have adopted Western styles now in both these particulars. There may be a rare man in foreign dress, but even the native pastors almost all wisely cling to the flowing native garb of snow-white grass-cloth, so much more comfortable and becoming to Koreans. The men squat on one side, the women on the other, with the children in front between them, and seldom do they rise at all during the service, but merely bow their heads to the floor to pray. Now and again they sing one of our old familiar hymn tunes, with Korean words, in loud, metallic voices. Dozens of children of from two to six wriggle and talk and race about. From time to time a “Bible woman” squirms out of her place, picks up a few of the eel-like urchins, and returns them to their respective mothers, ordering them to be nursed forthwith, then wriggles back into her place again. There may be quiet during the infant dinner-hour, but the whole act is sure to be repeated several times before the service is over and the snow-white throng pours out between two unnecessarily stern-faced, sharp-eyed men in plain clothes whose habitat is the police station.

There can be no doubt of the many difficulties of mission work in a country where everything is so different from the home-land that an expression sounding almost exactly like “Come on!” means “Stop!” Among the dreadful stories one hears of missionary hardships is that of a man still in the field, who in his early days wished to preach a sermon on the text “Tam naji mara,” which is Korean for “Thou shalt not covet.” But as his command of the language was still somewhat faulty, he made the slight error of giving the text as “Dam naji mara.” Now while “tam” means “to covet,” “dam” means “to sweat,” and when the long service was over a little old Korean lady came up to say timidly to the youthful pastor, “I loved your sermon, dear teacher, but please tell me, how can we help sweating when it is so hot?”

Northward from Seoul by the railways which, broken only at the Straits of Tsushima, reach from Tokyo to Peking and beyond, lies much the same Korea as to the southward. Kaijo, or Song-do, reminds one that the ancient rulers of Cho-sen knew how to pick beautiful mountain sites for their capitals, for the landscape there rivals that about Seoul, alias Keijo. The first unification of the whole peninsula took place under the Korai—hence the name the West still uses—dynasty, which made its headquarters at Song-do and ruled for more than four centuries. When it was overthrown by one of the king’s generals, just a hundred years before the discovery of America, a new capital was established at Seoul and an ancient name for the country was restored—“Ch’ao Hsien,” roughly the “Land of Morning Calm.” The Chinese still call it Koli. Remnants of the groundwork of what must have been imposing buildings lie scattered to the west of the present Kaijo, and a great wall still climbs along the side of the mountain range that shuts it in. But the Song-do of to-day is little more than a large and very compact vista of smooth thatched roofs close beside the railway but an appreciable distance from the station. It has an American mission school famous for the ginghams made by students earning their way—un-Oriental as that may sound—in a factory in charge of a man from South Carolina; and some of the old customs have survived longer than in Seoul, the muffling from head to heels in a white sheet, for instance, of some of the women who glide through the narrow, unpaved streets.

Then, too, Kaijo is the center of the gin-seng industry of Korea. The root of this plant is credited with miraculous curative powers by the credulous Orientals and reaches prices verging on the fabulous. Cases are scarcely rare of wealthy invalids, particularly Chinese, paying as much as two hundred dollars for a single root no larger than a little forked carrot at most three inches long, though it is the wild mountain-growing species of this originally Manchurian weed that reaches such heights; the cultivated variety is much less esteemed. Throughout the Far East there is hardly a native drug-shop without its carefully hidden supply of this precious tonic, which is said to have some real value for old and weak persons, at least of the Orient; even Chinese physicians admit that it is too heating for Westerners, already too hot by temperament, according to their view. No doubt its celebrity is largely due, like that of many another commodity, to its absurdly high price. One might fancy that the growing of gin-seng would fit the Korean temperament, for it takes seven years to mature, after which the land must lie fallow, or at least free from the same crop, an equal length of time. The fern-like plant dies in the sun; so for a considerable distance along the way through Song-do district there are big brown patches on the landscape which on closer inspection prove to be fields of gin-seng in rows of little beds, each protected by reed or woven-leaf mats forming a north wall and inclining slightly to the south. Here, under the watchful eye of the government monopoly bureau, this delicate aristocrat of the vegetable kingdom is tended with far greater care than the babies of Korea, and at last is hidden away in the form of yellow-brown dried roots in the safest places known to native drug-venders.

Farther north are red uplands waving with corn and millet, and at some of the stations mammoth bales of silk cocoons, the worms within which are doomed to die a wriggling death in boiling water as their precious houses are disentangled into skeins in the thatched huts among which they will be scattered, the monopolistic eye of the alien government upon them also. Heijo, which to Koreans and missionaries is Ping Yang, has a somewhat less picturesque location than its two principal successors as capitals, and it bristles now with smoking factory chimneys. Indeed, it is quickly evident that this second city of the peninsula is more industrious than Seoul. Knitting-machines clash incessantly in hundreds of huts; yangbans and high hats and spotless white garments seem conspicuously rare to the traveler still having the capital in mind, and everywhere are evidences that here life has not been for centuries a holiday broken only by occasional languishing in government offices. Then, too, the eighteen thousand Chinese with which official statistics credit Korea are somewhat concentrated in Ping Yang and the north, and the Celestial adds to the industrious aspect of any land. These bigger and more rational-looking men do much of the hard work of Korea, such as stone-cutting and the building either of Christian schools or temples to the ancient gods. The latter seem to be losing some of their popularity in Ping Yang, for Christians are so numerous that the clatter of bells for Wednesday night prayer-meetings is as wide-spread as the sermons of Korean preachers are endless. Yet it is barely fifty years since Ping Yang went down to the river in a body and killed the foreigners who had dared to come in a Chinese junk into the Forbidden Kingdom.

In this metropolis of the north even topknots are rare and clipped heads the rule. It seems to be inevitable with the coming of Christianity to lose the picturesque; but usually the crasser superstitions go with it, and one should not, perhaps, regret the passing of anything which takes these also. Besides, there remain the roofs peculiar to Ping Yang and its region, with their high-flaring corners made of six to eight superimposed tiles, now required by law in place of combustible thatch; and the complicated cobweb of streets in the Korean section still teems with the ancient weazel-hair brushes working from ink-slabs and sounds with the busy, insistent, incessant rat-a-tat of ironing.

It is striking how completely Korean Cho-sen remains to its very borders. Even in Yuki, where the coasting-steamer that brought me down from Vladivostok stopped to load logs, town and people were quite the same in appearance, manner, and customs as in Seoul or Fusan—and Japan had just as firm a grip. One might have suspected, from the long array of flags out through the little frontier village, that nearly all the inhabitants were Japanese, but it turned out that all shops, in honor of some mikado-ordained holiday, had been required to put up the rising—or is it the setting?—sun.

Seishin, a more important port farther southward along the coast, is picturesquely placed among foot-hills, and even has a railway, though this begins miles away behind it. There are no rickshaws for weak-legged passengers either, though little hand-run flat-cars operate on a tiny track, the spinning along on which on the edge of the bay by moonlight is delightful. Few thatched roofs are to be seen along the isolated little segment of the Korean Railways between Seishin and the garrisoned border town of Kainei, but tiled, Chinese-looking houses set down almost out of sight in patches of corn, and many mountains and tunnels, though also some fair valleys. Big chimneys made of hollowed logs of wood sprayed at the top by the fire that sometimes reaches them stand high above every mud-stuccoed dwelling in this region. Even there the landscape is almost treeless, except for a certain growth of small evergreens in patches here and there, though it is not far beyond to the great forests of the upper Yalu. Among them rises the rarely uncovered head of the Ever-White Mountain, and there are genuine tigers of Bengal and other game worthy the best sportsman’s skill in the wooded labyrinth of mountains about it. Kainei itself is quite a large town with many Japanese, thanks largely to the great barracks that seemed to swarm with soldiers. Part of an unambitious wall crawling along the foot of the hills not far north of it marks the ancient boundary between Korea and Manchuria, and in this midsummer season the town was hot beyond description in its pocket among the mountains. There were many little straw-built watch-towers standing stork-legged at the edges of the ripening crops, and up a hillside at the edge of town was a pathetic little Shinto shrine trying to force its way into the life of the people.

A village blacksmith of Korea. Note the bellows-pumper in his high hat at the rear

The interior of a native Korean school of the old type,—dark, dirty, swarming with flies, and loud with a constant chorus

In Kongo-san, the “Diamond Mountains” of eastern Korea

The monastery kitchen of Yu-jom-sa, typical of Korean cooking

Much of the east coast of Korea is a mountainous wilderness, culminating in one truly Alpine cluster which the Japanese, quite justly, are striving to make better known to the outside world. If there is anywhere in eastern Asia a more marvelous bit of scenery, or a finer place in which to wander away a few summer days or weeks, than Kongo-san, beginning to be known among foreigners as the Diamond Mountains, I have overlooked it. One might enthuse for pages over the cathedral spires, the colossal cliffs, the magnificent evergreen forests clinging by incredible footholds to the gray rock even of mighty precipices, and a hundred other unnamed beauties of this compact little scenic paradise without giving more than a faint hint of the charms it encloses.

From Gensan, railway terminus of the branch northeastward from Seoul and principal port on the east coast, a small steamer hobbles southward for half a day to a blistering little town called Chozen, swaps passengers with a diminutive wharf, and hurries away again as if the evil spirits of the mountains were after it. One can walk, rickshaw, or Ford it to Onseiri, five miles inland, where the Japanese have built a modern hotel lacking nothing but freedom from Japanese prices, and where there are several Korean inns which house virtually all visitors. Or, one may leave the train from Seoul long before reaching Gensan, and cover the eighty-eight miles from Heiko to Choan-ji Temple, one of the buildings of which the same Japanese have made over into a pleasant little hostelry, by a highway that will carry even full-grown automobiles whenever the rainy season does not suddenly and bodily wipe out great sections of it. For that matter there are sixty-four miles of a road similar in capacity and subject to the same lapses along a beautiful coast-line from Gensan to Onseiri direct. Everything so far mentioned, however, functions only in the summer season, for from October onward Kongo-san is snow-bound and its monks and simple mountaineers drift back into the bucolic existence they and their forerunners enjoyed for centuries before the noisy, hurrying outside world discovered their enchanted retreat.

If the Diamond Mountains were in China, chair-bearers would humor the lazy in their indolence and carry them around the circuit for a most inadequate compensation. Fortunately the Koreans are not so ready to take up the burdens of others, with the result that Kongo-san is spared the sight of the mere tourist, incapable of depending for a few days on his own legs and head. A jiggy-coom, of whose intelligence I have already spoken elsewhere, and whose sturdiness, unfailing good cheer, and knowledge of the mountain paths were on a par with his other good qualities, kept my indispensable belongings within constant reach in spite of the swift pace circumstances forced me to set; otherwise my own feet paid the toll for whatever my eyes feasted upon. In fact, we made the circuit in three days, and saw in four everything that other visitors have considered worth making an exertion to see, which is reputed to be a record. But I admit this not in pride, but in contrition, for not to linger, to stroll, to camp for weeks hither and yon among the towering peaks, beside the torrential ravines, away in the scented recesses of the virgin forests of Kongo-san is to commit a sacrilege and to deny oneself one of the good things of life.

There are trails that pant upward for hours more steeply than any stairway built by man, revealing constantly changing vistas of fantastically carved rock pinnacles, of combinations of mountain and forest rarely seen even in the Alps, and, high enough up, glimpses of the sea itself, down into which Kongo-san comes tumbling in mighty cliffs, sheer as the walls of sky-scrapers. There are trails that wander hour after hour down great rock gorges where streams too clear to be described in words leap from pool to blue-green pool, and where the world rears up on either side so swiftly that only an eagle could escape from the ravine except by its natural exit. There are places which only the feet of intrepid and ardent lovers of nature have ever trodden, or, what is still better, ever will, and pinnacles of sharpened rock from the all but unattainable points of which myriads of others like them, yet each utterly different, stretch away in an endless forest of white granite spires among which sunshine and rain and the often swirling mists make new beauties each more beautiful than the last.

But we are wasting ink. The most expert weaver of words could not spin a pattern that would be more than a faint and caricature-like resemblance to the reality, even in some of the milder corners and aspects of the Diamond Mountains. Let us acknowledge plain impossibility at once therefore and see what hints can be conveyed by the matter-of-fact pigments at our disposal.

It is about fifty miles around the base of Kongo-san and the whole playground of nature covers only an area of seventy-five square miles, but not even in the Andes has the builder of mountains so nearly outdone himself within so limited a compass. A range over which no one has yet found a way divides this into what is called the Inner and the Outer Kongo, each with its endless variety of peerless scenic features. In places the trails crawl along the face of granite precipices by causeways or stairs of logs laid corduroy fashion and held in place by big iron spikes driven into the solid rock. In others there are huge chains by which to drag oneself to the top of some all but inaccessible summit that repays a hundredfold all the exertion of reaching it. Twice we had to wade and swim Bambakudo (the “Cañon of Myriad Cascades”) where man-built aids of chiseled rock or chained logs failed us, and where no human legs would have been frog-like enough to carry us from boulder to boulder across the foaming stream. To see the best of the region needs often hands as well as feet, and there are many times when the agility and steel nerves of the steeple-jack and the endurance of the Marathon runner are indispensable to the man who cannot bear the shame of turning back from an attempted undertaking.

If its delicious sylvan isolation and its marvelous scenery were all Kongo-san had to offer, it would be well worthy of world-wide fame; but to these are added about twoscore of Buddhist temples and monasteries so old and so withdrawn from the world that they alone would be worth climbing far to see. Ever since the introduction of Buddhism into Korea, some four centuries after Christ, this chaotic cluster of peaks and abysses has been a kind of holy land of that faith. Converted kings outdid each other in aiding the priests and monks who retired to this secluded region, sending workmen and sculptors to build them temples and cloisters in many and strange places, to chisel images of Buddha in isolated gorges on the faces of immense cliffs, ordering the laymen roundabout the mountains to furnish the recluses sustenance in perpetuity. Tradition has it that there were at one time a hundred and eight separate religious establishments scattered among these compact mountains; but it came to be the kingly custom toward the end of the fifteenth century to persecute Buddhism, and many of the retreats were burned or fell into ruin, while the rest cut themselves off from the outside world as completely as possible. After they were rediscovered, so to speak, some thirty years ago by, strangely enough, an English woman, their almost utter solitude of centuries began to be more and more broken by visitors of the nature-loving rather than the purely pious turn of mind.

The largest of the temples of Kongo-san is Yu-jom-sa, in which we spent the night following the perpendicular climb into the Inner Kongo, and it is quite typical of the others. A log bridge led across the acrobatic stream we had been trailing from near the summit, to a cluster of a dozen or more buildings, widely varying in size but all in the rather gaudy yet not unpleasing flare-roofed style common to Korean temples, and more or less so to those of Japan and China. Built of wood throughout, they had a dark and venerable aspect, even though they are credited since their establishment with having been destroyed more than forty times by fire—an extremely common affliction to the monkish residents of Kongo-san. Of the multicolored bogies and painted wooden gods within the temples, of the colorful wall scenes which give these background, even of the dainty pagoda rising slenderly as high as the highest roof, with tinkling little bells at each corner of its many stories, I need say nothing in particular, for these are things to be found in any Korean sanctuary. What was less familiar were the great kitchens from which the big establishment and its visitors are fed, or the wooden trough that brings the finest of mountain water down from miles away to a series of huge hollowed logs ranged closely side by side on the slightly sloping space between the two clusters of buildings. Those who wished to drink dipped with a quaint little wooden dipper from the upper logs, those supplying the kitchen took water from a little farther down; hands and faces were washed lower still, and finally came the reservoirs in which kitchen utensils and the like might be rinsed. To say that these descending orders of use were strictly obeyed either by visitors or the monks themselves, however, would be to overdraw any Korean picture.

Most of the temples and monasteries of Kongo-san supply food, and many of them sleeping-quarters, to all who apply for them, as there are neither inns nor the suggestion of shops or laymen venders in the mountains. A novice met us at the temple end of the bridge and assigned me a room, quite bare until it came time for boys to bring the little table on which I was served in a squatting position, but with the usual brown-paper floor of Korean dwellings. Cleanliness, at least as far as anything came to my eyes, was quite general. We had arrived before sunset, and there was time to see something of the daily life of the place before it retired early for the night. Big piles of cord-wood and brush in back courts testified to quite different weather than this delightful August evening at many hundred feet elevation. Numbers of the younger inmates were playing a medieval kind of cross between tennis and handball when we came; on the edge of the graveled temple terrace that served as court were two crude gymnastic turning-bars on which some of the priests and novices did tolerably difficult feats. A roar of laughter went up when, having been jokingly invited to join in this sport, I had almost to duck my head to pass under the bars that most of the others could only reach by jumping. They trotted out the tallest man in the establishment, and roared again when he proved to be several inches shorter than I; and I am sure I lost the reputation for veracity among them because I asserted that, as people of my country go, I am not particularly tall. There were many boys about the place, but I saw no signs of women, though the recluses of Kongo-san are reputed to obey their vows of celibacy much more in the breach than in the observance. The yellow robe which makes the Buddhist priest so picturesque a figure in some other lands had no counterpart here, at least in their outdoor, every-day wear. They wore almost the ordinary Korean male costume, in most cases of sackcloth, like men in mourning, though there were some white and others with a bluish tint. Heads of course were cropped, and there were no head-dresses of any kind in evidence.

One of the monks of Yu-jom-sa

This great cliff-carved Buddha, fifty feet high and thirty broad, was done by Chinese artists centuries ago. Note my carrier, a full-sized man, squatting at the lower left-hand corner

The carved Buddhas of Sam-pul-gam, at the entrance to the gorge of the Inner Kongo, were chiseled by a famous Korean monk five hundred years ago

The camera can at best give only a suggestion of the sheer white rock walls of Shin Man-mul-cho, perhaps the most marvelous bit of scenery in the Far East

The booming of a great bell struck by the end of a suspended log called for gayer and more elaborate garments in which monks and novices sat and rocked as they chanted through the evening service on the papered floors of several of the main buildings. Meanwhile I had been called back to my room and served supper. There must have been at least twenty courses, or, rather, different dishes, to the meal, including no meat, but with more examples of the really excellent performances of the Korean cook than I had ever tasted elsewhere. Even tea was served, though up to quite recent years Koreans never drank it. Best of all, the attendants and idlers did not come to sit and watch me eat, like some wild animal in a cage, but withdrew when I had been served and did not intrude again until I lighted my evening cigar. Then a group of us strolled down to the bridge across the brawling stony river and chatted in the language of signs until night blotted out the evergreen wooded mountains that pile up close on every hand above this delightful refuge from the silly babble of the world.

It is true that a quartet of Japanese noisily smoked and gambled most of the night away on the other side of a thin partition, but these are afflictions against which Koreans have no effective weapons. My attendants actually left the door open all night; but, oh, the unspeakable hardness of a Korean floor serving as a bed! Breakfast was almost as generous as the evening meal, yet as I recall it I paid, at a roundabout suggestion from my hosts, only two or three yen for the full accommodations of myself and guide.

Sometime during that morning we came upon the mightiest of the carved Buddhas in the Diamond Mountains, in a wild and utterly uninhabited ravine through which we were descending from another slowly attained summit covered with reeking wet half-jungle. The image was cut in deep relief on the face of a cliff, and is so mammoth that my companion, squatting at a corner of it, looks like a fly-speck on the picture I took. At noon we were the guests of the score of monks of Makayun-an, the largest of the cloisters, as Yu-jom-sa is of the temples. A useless, perhaps, but certainly a gentle life these sturdy white-clad fellows with the shaven heads lead at the sheer foot of one of the most perpendicular peaks of the Inner Kongo. There are other cloisters far more inaccessible, some which almost never see visitors. One, I recall, on that afternoon down the magnificent Gorge of the Thousand Cascades, was set so sheer on the vertical mountain-side that a post, which seemed to be of iron and was surely a hundred feet long, under a corner of the building was all that kept it from pitching headlong into the abyss along which we scrambled our way far below.

I have said enough, no doubt, but no visitor to the Diamond Mountains should hurry back to drab reality until he has climbed by finger-nails and eyelids into that maze of white granite crags, like a hundred gigantic Woolworth Buildings designed by no earthly architect, which the Koreans call Shin Man-mul-cho. It rained more or less all the time we were risking our lives and all but bursting our lungs to reach even some of the slighter elevations of this fairy-land, but it would have been a strange offshoot of the human race who would have considered a mere soaking and the day’s toil of a galley-slave a high price to pay for the sights that were conferred upon us. My coolie carrier himself, though he had been there more than once before, was as averse to turning back, even long after it would have been wisdom to do so, as was the bedraggled and ragged Westerner who accompanied him.

Then, if there is time enough left after throwing away the tatters to which any proper excursion into Kongo-san will reduce the stoutest garments endurable there in summer, and the substitution of something less exposing, one should have a glimpse of the Sea Kongo, where islands that are like peaks of the fantastic mountains farther inland dot the route over which ply in the summer season crude conveyances that in real life are fishing-boats.

CHAPTER V
UP AND DOWN MANCHURIA

The change from Korea to China is not merely abrupt, it is instantaneous. In the exact middle of the big bridge over the Yalu, across which rickshaws trot and pedestrians of all degrees shuttle in two constant, almost silent-footed streams on either side of rumbling trains, stand a Japanese guard and a Chinese soldier, as strikingly unlike as two men of the same profession and rather similar background could well be; and they are typical of the wide differences in customs and costumes, in all the details, if not the essentials, of life on the two shores of the famous river. White gives way to blue denim as the garb of crowds and individuals—for in China, as in Japan, the former is the color of mourning. Pigtails take the place of topknots; tiny bound feet, which the traveler perhaps has never before seen, instantly become general among women of all ages and classes; uncovered breasts die out as suddenly as does the silly horsehair pretense of a hat. Instead of stallions there are geldings; wheelbarrows and oscillating shoulder-poles replace the back-rack known as a jiggy; the Chinese sense of humor, or racial cheerfulness, comes at once to the fore—there was more laughing in an hour in Antung than in a day in Korea or a week in Japan. One could not but be struck by the size of the Chinese as compared even with the Koreans, to say nothing of the dwarfish Japanese, and by their more common-sense air and dress—and at the same time by the horrible sloughs of mud that passed for streets, the diseased beggars wallowing up and down them, the truly putrid conditions of life in the native city.

There is a paved and well built Japanese fore-city about the railway station, but even this was essentially Chinese in its human aspects, in spite of the big mat-covered arena that had been hastily thrown up to house the paunchy second-rate Japanese wrestlers who strutted the streets in loin-cloths and fluttering kimonos. The low and ancient “victorias,” that rattled to and from the station, jerked rather than drawn by an emaciated horse or two streaked with mud and perspiration, and loaded to the gunwales often with a full dozen Chinese besides the heartless driver, seemed strangely in keeping with the north bank of the Yalu. All trains halt for an hour or more at Antung for the lenient examination of baggage, so that there is time to see all this, as well as the great log rafts floating down the river as its upper reaches are denuded and their forests turned into Chinese coffins. Nor will it be an unusual experience if the traveler is approached by a Japanese gendarme asking to see his passport, to which the proper reply of course is as gentle a reminder as is consistent with the brazen courtesy and one’s individual temperament that China has not yet been internationally recognized as a Japanese colony.

A few miles northward a serrated range rises close on the right, and there are other groups of hills on the way to Mukden, two or three of them strikingly crowned by ancient temples. But broad rolling fields of corn and millet and kaoliang are the chief impression of this ten-hour journey. There is an atmosphere reminiscent of pioneer America in these broad reaches of Manchuria, so unlike the little diked and flooded paddy-fields of Korea and Japan. Only rarely is there a human being in sight, now and then a lone man in a pigtail and blue denim hoeing corn, or plowing with a thin red ox or a cow. The few houses are as miserable as the huts of Korea, otherwise quite different, being plain and square, thatched with corn- or kaoliang-stalks instead of the hair-smooth rice-straw, and without a suggestion of the picturesque about them. In the midsummer season the landscape is a deep, almost unbroken green, for the few houses are so low that they are all but hidden among the tall crops, and there is the slightly denser green of scrub timber on the constant succession of fair-sized hills. Willows abound; in fact, it would not be difficult to imagine oneself in the hillier parts of Pennsylvania, did not the visibly splendid fertility of the country contrast so strongly with the lack of real houses or any indication of prosperity and comfort. At length high terraced hills become more populous; then the country grows deadly flat, with the soya-bean, king of Manchurian products, lording it over all other crops as one approaches Mukden.

The Russian name for the capital of China’s “Eastern Three Provinces” bids fair to persist in Western speech, though to the Japanese it is Hoten and the Chinese themselves now call it Feng-tien. That constant fight for a livelihood, for bare escape from starvation, which becomes in time an accepted feature of life in China, is in evidence even this far north and east, for all the spaciousness of Manchuria. There is a swarming of rickshaws like men set on the mark ready to race to any exit where there is the shadow of a promised fare, blocking the way if one attempts to set out on foot, trailing the stroller until walking ceases to be a pleasure. Carriages with a suggestion of Russian ancestry completely surround the man who gives the slightest hint that he may at some time want one, and escape is hardly possible without the vigorous wielding of at least as deadly a weapon as a cane, which leaves the average American handicapped. Both rickshaw-men and drivers are deathly afraid of even the most insignificant Japanese bell-boy, however, and as there is no way of alighting in Mukden except from the west without passing through a cordon of these, assistance may be had against the first fierce onslaught of the over-numerous means of transportation. There are rows of “Peking carts” also, ready to crowd half a dozen hardy and unhurried travelers beneath their blue-denim hoods, and finally, if one chances to be as fond of local odors as of local color, there are the horse-cars, which may conceivably strike some of the more aged visitors from the Occident as vaguely familiar. Just how many years back it is that these same cars jogged up and down Third Avenue in medieval New York I have not the requisite data to say, but they spent quite a number of them earning their livelihood in Tokyo, and there are rumors that their jaunt into the Orient has not yet reached its termination.

There is almost nothing Chinese, except these things and those who patronize them, about the red-brick Japanese city with its wide, often well paved streets in diagonal patterns, its typically Japanese monuments and its little khaki-clad gendarmes in blood-red cap-bands, where the traveler by train usually alights in Mukden. But Feng-tien proper is quite thoroughly Chinese, when one does at last reach it by one of the many available but all leisurely means of transportation. There is not merely a massive inner wall surrounding what was the capital of the Manchus before they spread over China and took up their headquarters in Peking, but a mud wall of careless and irregular shape encloses the entire city, down to the last suburb hovel, less as a protection against earthly enemies than to shut out those omnipresent evil spirits of the fervid Chinese imagination. Inside, there is what Spanish Americans would call mucho movimiento, interminable movement, a dodging to and fro of more rickshaws than there are taxicabs in New York, a constant passing of myriads of men and boys, even of women and girls, these often in the fantastic Manchu head-dress, an ever moving multitude on business, pleasure, or nothing whatever bent. Shops offering everything from steamed bread to rolls of copper coins, from red paper banners to pulverized deerhorns, line the way thickly, in dense succession. Venders of anything which native Mukden is in the habit of consuming, or of keeping unconsumed, weave their way in and out of the throngs, the muddy side streets, the tight little alleyways, announcing their wares by strange cries or mechanical noises that have come to be accepted for what they purport to be. Yet for all the bustle there is an atmosphere of Chinese calm. Shopkeepers may be eager for trade, but they will not be hurried out of a fitting deportment merely to please clients from the breathless West; hawkers move through the streets and carry on their bargaining as if the commodity we know as time had no appreciable value to them, though they keep industriously at their allotted task of announcing and disposing of as many of their wares as the fates decree. Above all the katydids or crickets singing in their crude little woven-reed cages suspended before house- and shop-door give a sense of bucolic calm that neutralizes any hint of haste in the incessant swarming to and fro of every type of Chinese.

Hawkers of this curious breed of Chinese singing-bird wander all the streets of Feng-tien, a score or more of the little cages at the ends of their shoulder-poles, one or two of the green insects, resembling “grasshoppers,” in each cage, and beside them sprigs of grass to feed upon until their support devolves upon a purchaser. We bought one for the diminutive member of our family, cage and all for twenty coppers, which seemed to be about a nickel, though it goes without saying that both as strangers and foreigners we were no doubt grossly swindled. Nor would the captive sing for us, at least long enough to be worth the price, during the day or two we kept him, gay and melodious as he and his companions were in Chinese captivity. Possibly he missed the mellifluous odors of the native city and was drooping with homesickness. When his little alien owner set him free in the park of the Japanese city, there was no great hope that he would enjoy his liberty long, for Chinese urchins were slinking about with a furtive air and an alert demeanor which boded ill for singing insects—unless, as we half suspected, those of China prefer to hang before a shop and chant keepers and clients into harmonious understanding.

The mere “sights” of Mukden in the tourist sense all date back at least three hundred years. There is the Manchu palace within the real city wall, its many structures still impressive in their roofs of imperial yellow tiles for all the dust-covered wrecks they are fast becoming under caretakers interested only in the size of their gratuities. An hour’s churning by Mukden’s Russian type of carriage over what the Chinese regard as a road is not too high a price to pay for a stroll through the capacious grounds of the Pei-ling, or Northern Tombs, where the second and last emperor to occupy the palaces in the city lies with his consort under the usual artificial hillock behind elaborate structures roofed also in imperial yellow. For though one is sure to see as many tombs of the famous and infamous in China as cathedrals in Europe, this is by no means the least imposing of them. It takes a bit more courage to jolt out to Tung-ling, the Eastern Mausoleum, a generation older and twice as far away; but there pine-clad hills and rather gentle yet impressive scenery make up for the somewhat less expansive tombs. Then, too, those whose interests are not entirely in the past may wish to run out on the branch line to Fushun, where the Japanese are taking out—by the use of economical Chinese muscle—vast quantities of coal from an open cut that goes down into the earth in steps, like a dry-dock prepared for some mammoth ship many times larger than any sea has ever floated.

It was at Mukden that we first came into personal contact with the swarms of soldiers—“coolies in uniform” might be a more exact term—with which all China is cursed under its putative republican régime. Chang Tso-lin, the war lord of Manchuria, had just been thwarted in his plan to get control of Peking, and his troops in their muddy-gray cotton uniforms were still pouring back into the city by the train-load. Wagon-trains of ammunition, useful another year, were rumbling through the narrow streets, hauled by dust-caked mules. Troops were stowed away everywhere, in every big yard or semi-public compound, in unsuspected corners, in barracks outside the town. Nowhere could one open the eyes without seeing soldiers, lounging in unmilitary attitude before guarded gates, lolling about the streets and bazaars with the air of conquerors to whom nothing could be denied, drawn in endless files through the Japanese city on their way to the railway station stretched out at ease in rickshaws among their bed-stuffed possessions and grasping in one hand the rifle with the butt of which the great majority of them probably paid the perspiring coolies so incessantly trotting back and forth with them. How much more picturesque life would be with us if our soldiers mobilized in taxicabs, and booted the driver out of the way if he dared to call attention to the taximeter.

Scholarly-looking little Chang Tso-lin, in his ugly French-château style of dwelling that seems so inexcusable an intruder among the graceful palaces of China, is an enigma, at least to those who have merely met rather than learned to know him. How this outwardly almost insignificant man can hold a great territory in the hollow of his hand, baffling all the cross-currents of intrigue which sweep incessantly up and down the “Eastern Three Provinces,” was a query worth pondering. Virtually a bandit in his younger days, then a lieutenant in the Japanese army during the war with Russia, Chang gathered somewhere the power to rule which made him an autocrat over his own people and won him even among many of the foreigners who breathe the Manchurian atmosphere the reputation of being the “strong man” of China. His methods are drastic and prompt; he is said to depend more on intuition, on “hunches,” than on ordered reflection. Keys to the leg-irons of serious criminals he kept in his own possession, so that they could not buy off in the time-honored Chinese fashion. Just before we reached Mukden two of his generals had been detected in the not unprecedented Chinese feat of putting into their own pockets a few cents a day from each soldier’s pay. Chang had them up on the carpet only after he had undeniable proof of their guilt, and there was nothing left for them to do but to confess and plead for mercy. A curt order to have them taken to the execution-ground beyond the outer city wall closed the incident. On the same day two common soldiers who had indulged in looting in outlying districts were found in the possession of the extraordinary sum of five hundred dollars each, and for three days their bodies were left lying out in front of the Chinese railway station as a hint to others whose plans might be taking similar shape. Cynics, and those foreign residents whose pet among the “strong men” of China is some one else, lay such personal disasters to the simple fact that Chang himself did not get his share of the “squeeze,” but the consensus of opinion seemed to be otherwise.

Two ladies in the station waiting-room of Antung, just across the Yalu from Korea, proudly comparing the relative inadequacy of their crippled feet

The Japanese have made Dairen, southern terminus of Manchuria and once the Russian Dalny, one of the most modern cities of the Far East

A ruined gallery in the famous North Fort of the Russians at Port Arthur. Hundreds of such war memorials are preserved by the Japanese on the sites of their first victory over the white race

The empty Manchu throne of Mukden

The centuries-old Chinese method of execution by the lopping off of heads seems almost to have died out in modern militaristic China, at least in the north, along with such punishments as the slicing or the boxing up of those who win official displeasure. As condemned men cross the bridge to the execution-ground at Mukden, they are politely asked whether they wish to take morphine. Most of them “save face” by refusing it and assuming an outward air of bravery and indifference, perhaps even of gaiety. Sometimes as many as a score kneel on the ground together, their arms tied behind them. A soldier, who gets two “Mex” dollars for each man he despatches, walks down the line and kills as many as he chooses, and when he tires of the sport another soldier quickly takes his place. There are stories of men quarreling violently because the first one killed more than his share. The rifle barrel is placed behind the ear of each victim in prompt succession, the other kneeling men gazing up the line to see when their turn is coming, sometimes even laughing aloud at a bad shot, and as each man falls on his face from the force of the discharge a guard yanks the body out straight and cuts off the leg-irons. One might as well be in a barber-shop so far as any atmosphere of life and death, as we of the West understand it, goes at these frequent execution-parties at Feng-tien.

It must take a certain nerve-control to serve under the “war lord of Manchuria.” Hardly an hour after the two generals so radically cured of grafting had joined their ancestors, another general was asked to step into an automobile and go out to the execution-grounds with two American visitors. There was something about his manner which suggested that the general was under some great strain, but his companions, familiar with despotic rulers only in popular fiction, did not suspect until they reached their destination just why it was so obviously an effort for him to keep his attention on a subject, or even to swallow. But when he saw that there were no armed soldiers on hand to receive him, and that he had really been sent for no other purpose than to act as guide for the visitors, he thawed out so thoroughly that the foreigners carried off a false impression of the expansiveness which a Chinese gentleman displays to casual acquaintances.

Chang himself is evidently not without certain misgivings of a personal nature. When another American, armed with a motion-picture outfit and full credentials, was introduced into the war lord’s residence by one of his most trusted officials, General Chang the younger, his son and commander-in-chief of his armies, came to look things over in person, and even then the father cautiously examined the camera when he appeared, and a dozen of his personal body-guard—to which, rumor has it, no one is eligible who has not killed at least ten men—stood behind the camera-man with rifles loosely slung in the crook of their elbows during the filming. Yet the younger general reads, and to a certain extent speaks, English; his wife wears over her ears the hair-puffs of the Western “flapper”; a graduate of Columbia University is the official interpreter, several Chinese graduates of West Point serve under him, and the general’s favorite car comes from Michigan’s best automobile factory—where it was fitted with machine-gun emplacements and straps to keep the guards on the running-boards from changing their minds in times of danger.

I passed through Mukden four times before my journeys in as many directions from that focal point of Manchuria ended, and often had news from there after we moved on, for the doings of Chang Tso-lin were always of interest to the rest of China. To all intents and purposes this forceful little Chinese had become the absolute ruler of what was the home-land of the Manchus before they usurped the throne at Peking, completely reversing the rôles of the two peoples as they were played in 1644. The influx of Chinese after that date, when the Great Wall ceased to be a barrier between the overcrowded regions inside it and the vast open spaces of the nomad herdsmen beyond, gradually turned these into tilled fields where cultivation had hitherto been as strictly prohibited as had Chinese immigration, and finally swamped the thinly inhabited region entirely. The Manchus conquered China, and China began again in her time-honored way to swallow up the conquerors, until to-day there is no such thing as a Manchu nation, hardly a spoken remnant of the sonorous Manchu language, no one resembling the fierce warriors and hardy horsemen who put an end to the Ming dynasty such a little while ago. For it is barely three centuries since the chief of the “Eastern Tartars” commanded several learned persons of his nation to design a system of writing Manchu, upon the model of that of the Mongols, and not until two decades later that his successor ascended the dragon throne. To-day one meets individuals all over China who consider themselves Manchus, but they are hardly in any way distinguishable from the Chinese among whom they have been completely assimilated. One may travel the length and breadth of Manchuria now without realizing that he is not in China “proper,” and particularly since the rise of its present Chinese dictator it is much more fittingly known by its Chinese name of “Eastern Three Provinces.”

Virtually, if not openly, independent under his rule, that vast fertile region may possibly have a new future that will make it worthy of still another name, devoid of any suggestion of dependency. Mukden has its own foreign office; the incomes from the national salt monopoly and the customs, from that portion of the railway to Peking which lies north of the Great Wall, and from other similar sources flow directly into Chang’s treasury. The latest report is that he is making a good and, within Chinese limits, honest use of them. Mukden threatens to blossom out soon in widened and paved streets, to increase her school facilities, to send the old horse-cars off again on their wanderings and become the third city of China with electric tramways. Incidentally there is talk of a system of conscription to give Chang’s armies the full supply of hardy young men which this great granary of them under his command is capable of supplying, which will be a line of demarcation indeed from the haphazard, voluntary enlistments so long and fixedly in vogue in China “proper.” There are those who believe that provincial autonomy in place of the tightly centralized form of government of imperial days is not merely the visible development in modern “republican” China but the best thing that could happen to the colossal old empire, and these are watching with interest what they hope is the advancement of Manchuria under its approximately independent rule. But political changes are often swift in what was for so many centuries the unchangeable Middle Kingdom, and which still calls itself by the old name, so that it would be worse than boldness to prophesy whether another year will find Chang Tso-lin the undisputed sovereign of a progressive and well administered Northeastern China or merely another of those innumerable eliminated politicians fattening into dotage over their ill gotten gains in the safety-zones commonly known as foreign concessions.

As the traveler races north or southward from Mukden by the excellent expresses of the South Manchurian Railway, well ballasted and much of it already double-tracked, through towns lighted by electricity and as spick and span as Japanese rule can make them, it is hard to realize that when the present century began the home-land of the Manchus was almost unknown to the outside world in anything but name. Back behind these modern railway cities bulk the old walled towns of China, and in the never distant background the mere passenger glimpses the primitive methods of transportation and of life in general that are in such sharp contrast to his immediate surroundings, fitted with almost everything that civilization has mechanically to offer. In the summer season kaoliang, a species of what our own South knows as sorghum and which bears a considerable resemblance to the Kaffir-corn widely cultivated in Haiti, covers the earth with its deep green to the height of a horseman’s head, often as far as the eye can see for hours at a time—and makes magnificent hiding for bandits. The flatness of Manchuria at Mukden and to the north is made up for by the splendid range of mountains that follows the railway not far off on the left all the way to Dairen, great tumbled hills in which the mere tramper or the seeker after old temples and ancient monasteries finds himself equally rewarded. But it was still my lot for a time longer to stick rather closely to the lines of modern travel and to commonplace, if comfortable, modern cities.

Dairen, which the Japanese have made of the Russian Dalny in the leased portion of the Liaotung Peninsula that fell to them as the spoils of war, has all the un-Chinese characteristics of such cities, to enumerate which would merely be to describe in detail any one of a hundred great ports and railway termini in Europe or, with certain modifications, North America. May not therefore the broad macadamed streets, the big brick and stone buildings, the great breakwaters, the mammoth cranes on the docks, and all the rest of the signs of what we call progress, so admirable but so unpicturesque, be taken for granted? We liked Port Arthur, which the Japanese have redubbed Ryojun, better. There life was more leisurely; old buildings constructed by the Russians, streets that broke out every little while into grass- and even weed-grown open spaces, the spaciousness of a place which never grew to be the large busy city its founders planned, gave it something of the atmosphere of an old town of England, or of our South, somewhat off the track of present-day hasty and bustling activity. Ryojun is the seat of government of the Japanese leased territory, while Dairen is merely its metropolis. The old Port Arthur and the new are separated by a rivulet emptying into the splendid landlocked port, and by some hills, of which there are more than the eye can count rolling and piling away across all the landscape of the region. These are by far the most conspicuous features of Port Arthur and vicinity, for there is scarcely a knoll among them that does not bear on its summit a monument. Whether it is merely an unconscious manifestation of their military spirit, strong and continual as far back as history can trace them, or a deliberate parading of their victory over a branch of the white man’s world, the Japanese have marked every spot where a handful of their countrymen fell and have preserved the ruins of every fort out of which the Russian defenders were bombarded, so that the hilly landscape of all the region is littered with mementos to the god of war. Nor is his day over in Port Arthur, for a garrison commander sits ever on the alert against kodaking tourists who would profane his stone-built playthings overlooking the bay. Both at Port Arthur and at Dairen there are beaches that might become the international resorts the Japanese are striving to make them, could their sponsors ever learn that the rest of the world is not so enamoured of the dwarfish Nipponese form in the nude as they seem themselves to be.

A Manchu woman in her national head-dress, bargaining with a street vender of Mukden for a cup of tea

The Russian so loves a uniform, even after the land it represents has gone to pot, that even school-boys in Vladivostok usually wear them,—red bands, khaki, black trousers, purple epaulets

A common sight in Harbin,—a Russian refugee, in this case a blind boy, begging in the street of passing Chinese

A Russian in Harbin—evidently not a Bolshevik or he would be living in affluence in Russia

Northward from Mukden there are also many reminders of Japanese military prowess, besides the railway itself. Here the line was being double-tracked, perhaps because the diversion of shipping, by fair means and foul, from Vladivostok to Dairen was proving too much for it. The Chinese workmen lived in semi-caves and reed-mat huts, and left a bush or a small tree at the top of a slim pyramid of earth here and there to show how deep they had dug for the new grading. Dense green hills and the unpicturesque, widely scattered huts of Manchuria broke the general landscape of endless fields of beans closely planted, with kaoliang and millet, wheat and corn, demanding their share of the broad open country. Cattle, horses, mules, and donkeys were plentiful, and ungainly black pigs more so. Every little while we passed a large walled town of which we in the West know not even the name, and somewhere not far from each of them was a new Japanese section including the railway station and rows of trainmen’s houses, perhaps schools and a hospital. But for all the advantages showered upon them the migrating Japanese plainly could not compete hand to hand with the Chinese pouring up from the crowded provinces across the Gulf of Chihli. They kept shop, ran the railroad, filled all the higher positions in the enterprises, such as mining, milling, and electric lighting, in which they are engaged, but as actual producers from the soil itself, of overwhelming importance in spacious, fertile, still rather thinly populated Manchuria, they were visibly incapacitated.

CHAPTER VI
THROUGH RUSSIANIZED CHINA

The changes which burst suddenly upon the traveler at Changchun would be startling if he were not almost certain to be prepared for them. Unless his memory is short or his age brief he can scarcely be unaware of the fact that the Treaty of Portsmouth on our own New England coast made Changchun the meeting-place of that portion of the Chinese Eastern Railway which remained to the Russians after their trouncing, and that long section of it which their conquerors have made over into the South Manchurian Railway. One steps from what is essentially an American express-train upon the station platform, and from that into an express-train that is European down to its most insignificant details. Cars of the “Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits” offer him the comfort of their separate compartments, brilliantly lighted by frosted bulbs, furnished even with thermometers, roomy with the five-foot gage of Russian railways, on which trains use the right- rather than the left-hand track. The heavy-stacked engine is as different from the one across the platform still panting from its race northward as the densely bearded Russian trainmen are from the alert little brown men of the same calling. Suddenly there were Russians everywhere, and by no means all of them were of a type to make one unduly proud of the white race; some indeed were roustabouts and station hangers-on living by petty graft upon uninformed travelers, such as the latter are never subjected to on the Japanese railways of Manchuria. There was such a mixture of Chinese, Japanese, and Russians at Changchun that one could only surmise who was really in control. It was a Russian who asked me for my passport—and who raised his hat, bowed low, and retired with an almost subservient “Thank you” when I answered that I was American. Booted and spurred Russians in khaki, in woolen trousers and cotton smocks, in the best they could do in the way of an individual uniform, their waists compressed to maidenly slenderness by tight belts, strutted the platforms in long swords with an air that said plainly that they would far rather die than have to work and not be able to strut about in uniform, boots, spurs, and sword. European civilians of both sexes, tow-headed women and children, mere Russian farmers, leaned on station barriers or made their way to and from the third-class coaches. One type in particular was very familiar,—the half-subservient, half-cocky, always vulgar Russian Jew, much assured of himself now, since the new turn things have taken in Russia, but still more or less openly despised by the non-Jewish Russians. In our car was one of the most offensive of these fellows, head of the opium ring of Harbin, who acted as if he had purchased the earth from its original owners and was making it a personal plaything.

The train made incredibly long stops at every station, but excellent speed between them, though it burned wood and thereby saved us from soot and cinders. I had a sense of being in an utterly foreign land, many times more so than among the Japanese. For one thing station names were in Chinese and Russian, equally illegible to those of us who recognize a word only in Roman letters, while from Yokohama to Changchun even the most insignificant stopping-place announces itself in English. Hitherto at least the head trainman was almost certain to have a smattering of my tongue; at worst I could produce a few short but highly valuable phrases of Japanese; but these black-bearded fellows were separated from me by an utterly impenetrable linguistic wall. They might quite as well have been Hottentots or Zulus as far as any possibility of communicating with them either by spoken or written word went. Perhaps it was mainly this sense of strangeness that made the air seem surcharged with something ominous, something akin to hopeless political conditions.

But through it all the endless plains of corn and beans, millet and wheat, beautiful in their deep green, spread as far as the eye could reach in every direction, hour after hour, all afternoon long. The plodding Chinese peasant, who is the mudsill of all the struggles of rival empires to control this vast rich territory, was still toiling here and there when the sun touched the flat western horizon. But at frequent intervals Russian boys in soldierly caps came running out of yellow brick farm-houses surrounded by a kind of Chinese wall. Many more of them lived in villages, some of which might have been lifted bodily out of European Russia. At these, Chinese and tow-headed venders appeared on the off side of stations, until they were chased away by policemen, offering live chickens, ducks, eggs by the basketful. A wonderful land, Manchuria, whether for cultivating or merely for the grazing of stock; no wonder crowded Japan covets this broad, half-wasted region, yet she has already shown that she would exploit rather than people it.

Rain was pouring when we reached Harbin, and seemed to have been for weeks. At least never in all my wanderings have I floundered through worse sloughs of mud than in the droshke which lost itself in the inky blackness and the downpour in what looked for a time like a vain attempt to get me from the station to a hotel. By morning light there seemed no particular reason for this, for though every street was covered at least with slime, there were enough of them roughly stone-paved to carry all the droshkes with which Harbin swarms. Perhaps it was merely an example of the impracticability of the Russians, of which I was to hear so many more before I moved on.

At Harbin, though still well inside China, the traveler finds himself back in Europe. Unless his geography is proof against such deceptions, he might easily believe that he had crossed the line into Russia and brought up in one of its most typical cities. Streets, architecture, customs, inhabitants are all on the Russian model. Instead of rickshaws there are two types of carriages,—the droshke, of barouche effect, drawn in most cases by two horses, the shaft animal under a great arched pole and the off one with its head tied down to a level with its knees and twisted well to the outside, thanks to some time-honored Russian idea of style or efficiency; then there is the amerikanka. The “American woman,” as foreign residents facetiously translate the word, is a two-wheeled cart with a plain open box on top, on a corner of which sits the driver, apparently wholly inured to the jouncing with every step of the horse and every unevenness of the road which the passenger or two beside him seldom gives evidence of enjoying. But the amerikanka is ridiculously cheap by Western standards, and the Russian who manipulates it is almost sure to be cheery and pleasant, filled with naïve tales of what is and what he believes is going on inside Russia proper, if one chances to have a companion who can act as interpreter, and in any case a relief merely as a Caucasian after months among squint-eyed Orientals. Already, however, the motor-buses which probably have by this time driven most of the leisurely Russian wielders of horse-whips out of business had begun to appear on the streets of Harbin.

The houses have double windows, with a space of two or three feet between the panes of glass; and great cylindrical stoves built into the walls from floor to ceiling, preferably in a corner where they can bulge into two, and even four, rooms, are almost as universal as in Russia. In a July heat which left one drenched after a short stroll, even by moonlight, and which made the briefest interview in any of Harbin’s dungeon-like, double-walled offices a kind of “third degree,” it was hard to believe these evidences of long winters during which, barely four months thence, it would often be forty below zero and the wearing of furs indispensable. To its residents and to most of its visitors Harbin, all Manchuria in fact, is a land of snow and ice and bitter gales; to me, who happened to be there in the very climax of the brief summer, it will always bring back memories of a climate compared to which that of the tropics is mild and invigorating. Nor can I remember meeting in all Japan such battalions of flies as helped to make life miserable in summer-time Harbin, with its brief nights and its interminable days.

I know at last why one’s hat is always snatched from him when he enters a Russian-Jewish restaurant in New York. In Russia, and equally in Harbin, it is an inexcusable discourtesy to go into an office, even for the briefest instant, wearing, or carrying, hat or overcoat. There are always flunkies waiting to take them away from you outside the door, and obviously they expect to be remembered when you leave. I am overcome with grief to think that, in my appalling ignorance, I so long fancied one of the least beloved customs of our metropolis a mere scheme to extort tips, instead of a transplanted refinement from urbane Russia. Equally Russian is the Harbin practice of shaking hands with the entire personnel, from proprietor to errand-boy, of any shop one enters, however slight the purchase one has in view. Indeed, the more genuinely well bred shake hands all around again before they leave.

Several gaudy blue, green, and gold churches of the Russian Orthodox faith rise in fantastic domes and puffed-out, cross-surmounted spires above the general level of Harbin, and religious ceremonies imported direct from pre-Bolshevik Moscow may be seen any day in the week. Funerals, for instance, were of more than daily occurrence. Most often they were those of impoverished refugees, and were brief and inconspicuous; but there were frequent processions of the elaborate, typically Russian character. I passed two such within half an hour one noonday. The first was of the wife of the Russian station-master. He had discharged a Chinese employee for negligence and “squeeze,” and the latter had returned to kill him, his bullet accidentally striking the wife instead. The second was of the head of the Harbin Gymnasium, or upper school, once a colonel and a man of great wealth in Russia, now so impoverished that his wife and children, on foot behind the hearse, as is the Russian custom, were almost in rags and virtually barefoot. Mummers in fantastic costumes, including long, light-colored robes, walked before and on either side of the deceased, who were carried in canopied vehicles gay beyond anything western Europe or the New World has to offer the dead, even the horses draped from ears to fetlocks in flowing white coverlets fancifully embroidered. But the most surprising, not to say repulsive, Russian feature of the ceremony was the public display of the corpse. In each case the heavy lid of the coffin was laid diagonally off to one side, and during all the miles from church to cemetery, with several stops for the burning of incense and priestly blessings on the way, the yellow face of the departed rolled from side to side as the open hearse jolted over the stony pavements.

It is an old saying that to scratch a Russian is to find a Tartar, but I had taken this to be a mere figure of speech until I came to Harbin and northern Manchuria, where the European and the Asiatic Orientals live side by side. The Chinese and the Russians, one quickly realized there, understand each other better than we of the real West can ever hope to understand either. They have the same complicated Oriental way of thinking, a similar point of view in such matters as “squeeze,” not very dissimilar business methods. In a Russian department-store of Harbin the purchaser gets two checks, one of which he pays at the desk under the personal eye of the owner or manager, getting the other stamped and presenting it, not to the clerk who served him, but to another so far away that collusion between them would be difficult, before he is finally handed his purchase. The mere loss of time on both sides no more worries the Russian than it would the Chinese. At every turn I found myself startled to recognize as another Russian trait what I had fancied was characteristic merely of eastern Asia. Every important house in Harbin had its private policeman, usually a Russian ex-soldier, and wherever one attempted to enter a gate watchmen and domestic hangers-on sprang up from all sides as thickly as at the entrance to a Chinese residence or yamen. Perhaps the greatest surprise was the discovery that the Russian uses the abacus or swan-pan for doing his arithmetic, just like the people of Japan, Korea, and China, except that with him the contrivance is much larger, as if his heavier fingers needed wooden balls worthy of their strength. Mental arithmetic seemed to be as impossible to him as to a Chinese shopkeeper or to the subjects of the mikado. On my first visit to a dining-car on the C. E. R., it being two or three hours before dinner-time, I had merely a glass of tea and some Russian form of pastry. The bill of fare announced these as costing 15 and 45 sen respectively—Japanese money is most widely used now in the Russianized zone of Manchuria. The ikon-faced man at his desk in a corner of the car, his mammoth black beard looking like a wig that had fallen from its place on his utterly hairless head, solemnly picked up his counting-board, rattled the balls back and forth for a full minute, and finally wrote down with an air of intellectual triumph the total of the two items on my check before him. No Westerner can ever hope to sandwich himself in between two peoples who prefer the abacus to pencil and paper for their arithmetical problems.

Yet the Russians are white men, and thereby hang certain problems that are sure to thrust themselves upon the visitor to northern Manchuria in the present days of Russian upheaval. It was a distinct pleasure to find myself again where Westerners were not incessantly stared at, even though it was useless to attempt to speak a word with men and women who would have looked perfectly at home on the streets of any large American city. But it was quite otherwise suddenly to realize that some of the weaknesses of our Western civilization are much more conspicuous, or at least more public, than similar flaws in Oriental society. Neither China nor Japan are model lands in many respects, but during all the time I had spent in the Far East I had not seen a fraction of the open indecency, the unashamed vulgarity, the deliberate flaunting of sexual wares that raged in the several conspicuous café singing-halls of Harbin. It was almost a shock even to see white women again in any number; to find them dressing and behaving as no Japanese geisha, no singsong-girl of Korea or China, would ever think of doing outside her semi-domestic circle, was more impressive, more suggestive of the vices of our civilization, than the average of us would have called to his attention during a lifetime of Western residence. The contrast, added to a little knowledge of the point of view of the Oriental as to the proper place of the sex appeal in life, made such things stand out with the vividness of electric sign-boards. As Westerners we might understand that Harbin, under undefined economic conditions and somewhat chaotic government, with overturned Russia pouring its vices and its hungers down into it, was not a normal sample of the West; to the occasional fat, smug Chinese visitors to these blatant places, and through them to thousands of their race, such parading of our vices could do more to give a false impression of Western life and the Western character than a thousand decent Occidentals, working for years to no other purpose, could correct.

Two decades ago, while I was wandering across Asia during the Japanese-Russian War, an English-speaking Hindu expressed to me his great astonishment that the white world should permit the yellow race to show its superiority over even what seemed just then the most widely disliked branch of the Caucasian family. He realized what at least the untraveled bulk of the Occident does not to this day, that every sign of weakness in any white nation, almost in any white individual, is immediately applied by the average Oriental mind to the whole white race. The effect of Japan’s victory over Russia, working like a leaven through the masses of Asia for a score of years, was quite apparent in certain general changes of attitude toward Westerners, some of them fortunate, many of them quite the contrary. Now, with the second catastrophe of Russia flooding Asia with new examples of Caucasian weaknesses, of white men reduced to a lower level than Asia had ever before seen them, one could not but feel that it behooves the Western world in general to look to the impression Russians in China are making for the Caucasian family as a whole, and to know what their treatment is at the hands of the Chinese. For while we may recognize the Russian as essentially an Oriental, really more closely allied to the Chinese than to ourselves, the latter thinks of him entirely as a Westerner, typical in his faults and his weaknesses of that other side of the earth toward which the Oriental attitude is of growing importance. I do not know whether or not the continued supremacy of the white race is best for the world at large; but I have rather strong personal opinions on that subject, and those who are like-minded would do well to look into the question of the present-day conditions of Russians in China, where at least the respect on which much of that supremacy depends is being gradually eaten away.

Along all the principal thoroughfares of Harbin squatted scores of white beggars, women and children among them, appealing to Chinese as well as to European passers-by. In the market-places of this and of other towns along the C. E. R. I saw many a Russian covered with filth, sores, and a few tattered rags, a noisome receptacle of some kind in his hands, wandering from stall to stall pleading with the sardonic Chinese keepers to give him a half-rotten tomato or a putrid piece of meat. Barefooted refugee children roamed the streets, picking up whatever they could find, including some of the nastiest of Chinese habits. Former officers of the czar, and wives who were once the grace of any drawing-room, speaking French with a faultless accent, lived in miserable pens with only ragged cloth partitions between them and their teeming neighbors, eating the poorest of Chinese coolie food, some of them unable to go out unless they went barefoot. In the so-called thieves’ market every conceivable kind of junk, from useful kitchen utensils to useless bric-à-brac of Russian ancestry, was offered for sale; any morning one might see several hundred Russian men and women shuttling to and fro there, trying to sell an odd pair of boots, an all but worn-out garment, a child’s toy, for the price of a handful of potatoes or a measure of kaoliang, or attempting to exchange something they had at last found they could do without for something their fellow refugees still had that seemed to them indispensable.

The few Americans in Harbin at least were doing what they could to relieve the needy Russians. But it was an even more complicated task than we of the West would suppose, for here again the essential Orientalism of the victims came out. Young men with fine faces, on which the signs of semi-starvation were in plain evidence, would come imploring any kind of assistance, any position that would give them enough to buy bread. “Why,” they would cry, as if they were going the utmost limit in describing their horrible state, “I will even work with my hands!” But this was merely bluff; nothing could make your typical Russian of the class which Bolshevism chased out of the country debase himself to any such degree as that, starve, beg, or steal though he must. With a plethora of hungry, yet still sturdy, Russians of both sexes all about them, it was almost impossible for the American residents to get servants, unless they took Chinese from the native city. They could get innumerable teachers of Russian, almost none of whom had any conception of how to teach, nor the persistence, patience, and punctuality which that calling requires; but when it came to washing dishes and mopping floors chances went begging in the very houses which were being bombarded with frantic appeals for help against incipient starvation. It was not merely that these former well-to-do did not know how to work; they would do anything rather than learn.

Fifteen boys who worked their way across Siberia and were found jobs by the Y. M. C. A. secretary of Harbin all ran away very shortly afterward, taking with them money or clothing, or both, belonging to their employers. One went home all the way across Siberia again to find his mother, discovered no trace of her, was caught by the “Red” army, and finally turned up in Harbin once more with frozen feet and looking like an old man, though he was only seventeen. This same secretary had countless appeals for help and at the same time a job of pumping water at his own house, but he was never able to make the two meet. Time after time he offered some hungry young Russian this task, which meant less than two hours’ work a day, at any time of the day that the worker might choose, the salary to be all the food he could eat and $7.50 “Mex” a month—a very liberal offer in China, even for high-priced Harbin. Invariably each applicant for aid bowed low at this offer, assured the secretary that he had saved his life, thanked him in the deepest Russian manner possible, which might include the kissing of the benefactor’s hands—and invariably never turned up again. One case was so obviously deserving that the secretary dug a good suit of clothes out of the bottom of his trunk, had it dry-cleaned, and gave it to the poor fellow, along with the pumping job, from which he discharged the Chinese boy who had recently been filling it very satisfactorily—and the next day, when his water ran out, he found that the man and the suit had gone to Vladivostok.

American representatives of such organizations as the Red Cross, who were spending money and energy for the betterment of Russian refugees in Harbin, Kirin, and other towns of northern Manchuria, could not get a man among all the big sturdy fellows they were feeding to build a brick stove, to patch a roof, or to dig a trench for their own benefit; Chinese laborers had to be called in to do all such “work with the hands.” Indeed, the refugees expected their benefactors to hire servants to sweep out and keep in order the buildings that had been found for them. There were some well-to-do Russians in Harbin—more C. E. R. officials than there were positions for them to fill lived there in style, and a few families had escaped from Russia early enough to have been able to bring much of their wealth with them, not to mention others who had long been in business in Manchuria. But these were the last people in Harbin to help their unfortunate compatriots. They might flaunt their own comfort and extravagance in the lean faces of the unfortunate; they were even known to “squeeze” some of the poor devils among the refugees of the working-class who found and accepted work; but they were as Oriental as the Chinese in looking callously on while their own people starved about them, or were succored by men from across the sea.

For a time the Y. M. C. A. secretary helped young Russians to immigrate to the United States under the guise of students, there being some special ruling for these in spite of the new immigration restrictions; but so many of them turned out to be men who had helped to start the revolution in Russia and hoped to do the same in America that the plan proved to be unwise. Those who succeeded in finding tasks to the liking of the hand-sparing fugitives had their own troubles. “Hire a Russian and you have to hire another man to watch him,” was the consensus of opinion among all who had had that experience. Russian ideas of honesty were frankly Oriental; moreover they were idealists, dreamers, with no business sense, no conception of economics or economies, no “go,” not a practical trait in their whole make-up, unless they had some German, Swedish, or French blood in their veins, which the few enterprising ones in Harbin did. For all that they were a most likable people, childlike in their manners as well as their irresponsibility, with nothing of the surliness of the Japanese, nor of the Chinese love of ridicule. They gave one the feeling that they were not fitted to cope with the practical every-day world, that they should not be wandering about it without guardians and advisers. One soon ceased to wonder that the trade of Harbin was almost exclusively in the hands of the Jews and the Chinese; a few days in northern Manchuria were enough to explain why the Jews are so powerful and so hated in Russia, why it has been considered necessary to curb them, almost enough to make clear the incredible success of Bolshevism over common sense.

Distinctly a chip of the degenerate old régime was Harbin, inhabited mainly by people whom nothing would drive to manual labor but who were quite ready to spread intrigue and false propaganda against the new rulers in their native land. The Bolsheviks, it seems generally admitted, are at least sincere, wildly impractical as they are in their ideas of human society; these refugees of Harbin, one felt, would be just as bad as ever if once they got back into power, would have learned nothing whatever, thanks to their incapability, their temperamental ineptitude, from their bitter experiences. “Propaganda aside,” said foreign residents who were in a position to know, and who certainly were not friendly to the new order in Russia, “if the bulk of the Russian people were able to vote between the old régime and the present one they would choose the latter as the least of two evils”; and any one who has made even a brief stay in the Russian metropolis of China would probably be inclined to agree with that statement.

The night life of Harbin, even passing over the vicious part of it, was in great contrast to that of Japan and the adjoining lands I had so far visited. Whatever else they might have to do without, the Russian exiles plainly did not propose to deny themselves the gay times, the mingling together in social concourse, the rivalry of dress and public squandering of money, the joys of good music, which had been so important a part of their life at home. Countless anecdotes floated about Harbin of refugees dressing like lords though they had not a crust left at home, of selling necessary things, even of spending money that had been given to keep them from starvation, to get raiment in which they were not ashamed to appear in the frequent social gatherings. In the park of the Railway Club, to which members and their families were admitted free and passing strangers at a goodly price of admission, there was an immense crowd on the evening I spent there, as there is almost any night of the week, so purely European a crowd that it took a distinct mental exertion to realize that one was still in China. Yet in all the big audience that stood and strolled about the huge shell-shaped sounding-board, from within the mouth of which a large orchestra gave an all-Tchaikowsky program that would have been loudly applauded by music lovers anywhere, there was scarcely a visible sign of straitened circumstances, to say nothing of poverty. Ladies as well gowned as at the Paris races strolled with men faultlessly garbed, by European standards, who swung their “sticks” with the haughty grace of aristocrats to whom the lack of an adequate income had never so much as occurred. Men and women sipping iced drinks on the veranda of the club paid their checks and tipped their waiters with as lavish an air as if the World War had never happened. Not a few men were in a kind of combination smock and uniform, with collars buttoning high about the neck; but these looked as much like an exuberance of fashion as like subterfuges to save shirts or cover the lack of them, just as their tightly belted waists were more of a fad than an open admission of the meagerness of their suppers.

It was like such a concert in a Spanish-American plaza, yet in many ways different. The hearers stood during the numbers and walked between them, reversing the usual practice south of the Rio Grande. There was endless hand-shaking; beards were not conspicuously numerous and even mustaches were little in fashion, at least among the younger men, but closely clipped, even shaved, heads seemed to be as much the style as among the modern Chinese, who, now that they are doing away with the pigtail, are doing so with such a vengeance that their scalps show white through the bristles. Short hair was not uncommon among the women, too, though less as a fashion, it was said, than because so many had had typhus during their fugitive days. It was strange to see the women all wearing hats, quite aside from the fact that they were almost all new ones; it was strange to see women openly treated with respect, for that matter, and walking arm in arm with their men; strangest of all was the queer feeling of mingling again with thousands of white people, after months of never having seen more than a dozen of them together. Not a few of the girls and young women were more than good-looking, in form as well as face, a fact which many of them seemed to take care not to conceal, for some of the newest dresses were startlingly thin, and rolled stockings barely covering the ankle were almost the rule among the younger set. But Russians do not appear to be prudish about the display of the human form; during July and August great numbers of both sexes, quite of the decent class, bathe together perfectly naked in the muddy water of Harbin’s uninspiring river.

I was introduced to princesses in simple but very appropriate garb, to people with strange and with sad stories, to men who had run away from Russia and left their wives to follow—if they could—to women who had performed incredible feats and suffered unbelievable hardships to escape from the blighted land or to join such unworthy husbands, and who in some cases still retained their striking beauty and in many their Russian charm. Yet numerous as were the fine faces in the crowd, it hardly needed the experience of foreign residents to call attention to the fact that in so many instances these looked proud and impractical and—well, inefficient in the matter-of-fact things of life. Now and then there passed through the throng that made respectful way for them old generals still wearing their uniforms, blazing from shoulder to shoulder with decorations, and the same haughty expression of men expecting instant obedience as in their bygone days of power and emoluments. I could not quite get the point of view on some Russian prejudices. Not one of that race with whom I spoke during my journey through northern Manchuria lost an opportunity to curse the Jews, whom they always spoke of as synonymous with the new régime in their native land. Yet the leader of this orchestra was a Jew, and he not only got wild applause at the end of almost every number, even from men who left off vilifying his people just long enough to add to it in the heartiest fashion, but when he raised his baton to start the first number the almost entirely Russian orchestra had given him a “rouser” instead, a sudden burst of music entirely different from what they were about to play, which is considered in Russian musical circles the highest honor that can be paid a musical director.

Harbin consists of four towns, each with its individual name. There is the old one where the Russians first settled when they built the Chinese Eastern Railway, now almost deserted but for tillers of the surrounding fields, a makeshift home for orphan refugees, and the like. In Pristan, popularly called “Jew-town,” most of the business is carried on, as well as the far-famed singing-halls. Up the hill from this and separated from it by an open space in which Chinese executions take place is the more commodious railroad town, with important offices, the better-class residences, the garish Russian Orthodox churches which rise like unnaturally gorgeous flowers above the rather drab general level. Lastly, there is Fu-chia-tien, the Chinese city, a mile or more away from the others, as completely Chinese as if there had never been a Russian within a thousand versts of the place. There are many rickshaws in Fu-chia-tien, but not one in all the other three towns, and rarely indeed does a foreigner ride in one, though they are more comfortable on the horrible streets than the droshke, and certainly more so than the excruciating “American women.” The severed heads of bandits hung in cages on several street corners in Chinese Harbin, and many other such touching little details showed that the town clung strictly to its own ways in spite of the many foreign examples so close at hand.

Until the debacle of the czarist régime in Russia, the three Russian towns of Harbin were entirely under their own rule. Even now, since they have formally taken over the jurisdiction of them, the Chinese still let the Russians largely alone in their municipal affairs, but they are more and more prone to “butt in” and gratuitously assert their authority, just as they have in the Chinese Eastern Railway. This now has a Chinese as well as a Russian president and the whole category of Chinese officials down to the last clerk, in addition to Russian duplicates of the same in the greatly over-staffed offices. Some say the Russian railway officials are deliberately selling out to the Chinese; others claim that they are running this important link in world communication into wreckage and bankruptcy while they and the Bolsheviks quarrel, on paper and at a distance, as to whether it belongs to the Russian Government or merely to the Russo-Asiatic Bank. Meanwhile it staggers along under its top-heavy double staff, paying salaries to Chinese who do nothing and to many Russians who do not do much. The latter, old officials cut off for years now from higher authority, avow that they are merely administering the line for the benefit of the czarist régime that appointed them, until such time as this shall recover its rightful place in the world, but in practice they act as if the C. E. R. were the private property of the little clique of reactionary Russians who hold the power and wealth of Harbin. How public-spirited these are is suggested by such actions as their refusing to transport, except at full rates, food and clothing furnished by the Red Cross for the relief of their compatriots in the various towns of northern Manchuria.

At Versailles in 1919 and again at the Washington Conference two years later the Chinese delegates demanded the abrogation of extraterritorial jurisdiction in China, as a derogation of her sovereign status as a nation. The request was denied, but at the second gathering it was decided to appoint a commission to examine on the spot the assertion of the delegates that the administration of justice in the former Celestial Empire has so far improved that foreign jurisdiction may safely be abolished. Since then certain occurrences in China which have not been testimonials in her favor have caused the commission indefinitely to postpone its coming; but in the meanwhile there is considerable evidence at hand in the treatment of the Russians by the Chinese since the former were deprived of their extraterritorial status.

It is probably not necessary to explain that extraterritoriality, as it is familiarly called, consists, briefly, in the right—or is it privilege?—of foreigners in China to be tried only by their own consuls or judges, under the laws of their own countries. Eighty years ago, closely following the Treaty of Nanking, which ended one of her “opium wars” with China, England forced this concession upon the Chinese Government, the Americans and the French quickly followed suit, and soon there were very few foreign residents indeed who were not protected by treaty from Chinese courts and prisons. This state of affairs remained unbroken until about the time of the Washington Conference, when China took advantage of conditions in Russia to repudiate her treaty with the czarist Government, and the many thousands of Russians in China suddenly found themselves on a par, legally, with the Chinese themselves. A new treaty between China and Germany, in which the latter either inadvertently or purposely left out any mention of extraterritoriality, and lack of treaties with some of the other countries on which China declared war at the behest of the Allies has left Germans, Austrians, Bulgarians, and some other nationalities in the same boat with the Russians.

Since then life has not been quite the same in Harbin and the other Russian towns of northern Manchuria. On one hand the change has caused some just retribution. In the olden days Russians kicked the Chinese about almost at will; now when a Chinese carriage driver in Harbin gets a good excuse and opportunity, Russian heads are likely to suffer. Russian railway-men used to throw Chinese passengers back into third class or out on the platform, if they felt in the mood, even though they held first-class tickets; now the minions of Chang Tso-lin suddenly levy a new tax and Chinese soldiers go out and “beat up” Russian farmers to such an extent in some cases that ships lie waiting for cargo in Dairen while crops rot in the fields. Unfortunately things do not often stop with mere retribution. The Chinese along the C. E. R. seem sometimes to go out of their way to be insolent toward any Westerner, to jostle and to annoy him without cause; taxes have been levied on the property of foreigners other than Russian, and men arrested in spite of treaties of extraterritoriality still in existence. An Italian woman who complained that her purse had been stolen by a Chinese pickpocket was taken to jail along with the thief, as openly as was a Russian who tried to get back his fur coat, and the latter at least was imprisoned for weeks. You cannot expect the garden variety of Chinese soldier or policeman to recognize a difference in foreigners, and in a town where 98 per cent of these are Russians we others have to watch our steps. Perhaps this inability of their Chinese comrades to distinguish between foreigners without and those still with extraterritorial status is the reason that there are Russian police in Harbin, splashing through its mud in their heavy boots as if they still had the czar’s authority behind them—until the passing of some supercilious Chinese official causes them to snap to attention and salute.

The grain of the kaoliang, one of the most important crops of North China. It grows from ten to fifteen feet high and makes the finest of hiding-places for bandits

A daily sight in Vladivostok,—a group of youths suspected of opinions contrary to those of the Government, rounded up and trotted off to prison

A refugee Russian priest, of whom there were many in Harbin

Types of this kind swarm along the Chinese Eastern Railway of Manchuria, many of them volunteers in the Chinese army or railway police

Many examples of Chinese oppression of the Russians were common knowledge in Harbin, some of them more serious than others. A young Russian member of the Y. M. C. A. who was putting the shot in a park of the residence town was arrested by the Chinese on the charge of having a bomb in his possession. He spent some hours in jail, finally to be released on bail, the police confiscating what the judge agreed with them was an explosive agent of destruction. The association secretary had to threaten to refer the matter to the American consul before the “bomb” was returned, and when I left Harbin the charge against the “bomb-thrower” had not been dismissed. Then there was the sad case of another member aspiring to athletic prowess, who, in throwing the javelin, hit a dog, though that was complicated by the fact that the injured animal was of Japanese nationality, which made the affair much more serious. Chang and his retainers may have a justifiable scorn for those of us whose governments so habitually turn the other cheek of late in cases of Chinese aggression, but there are several thousand good reasons, all splendidly armed and equipped and right on the spot, why he should respect Japan’s wishes, even if his former lieutenancy and certain allegations of secret allegiances still frequently heard have no weight with him.

These instances, I admit, are not such as nations should go to war over, but they are just as good examples as are many far more serious ones, which any foreign resident of Harbin can cite, of how misunderstandings alone, if there were the very best will and desire to be just, would make it impossible for foreigners to get justice in China once their extraterritorial privileges were taken away from them. Nor was it a particularly agreeable sight to see a line of Russian men and women waiting for hours, if not for days, the good pleasure of haughty Chinese officials and their gutter-snipe-like underlings in order to get passports to go to another town, or out of the country. The court-room I visited in Harbin was an ordinary brick and plaster building, but chasers of evil spirits climbed its eaves, and dragons sat on the roof, their antennæ waving in the wind. Many Russians were gathered, including a huge lawyer in robes who suggested Gulliver in fear of his life when he bowed and smirked before the diminutive almond-eyed officials. In theory court opened at ten, but there had been fireworks in the Chinese town the night before and his honor was still being patiently awaited at noon. Out in front of the court was a string of bill-boards on which cases were posted in tissue-paper sheets covered with Chinese characters, reminding one that an interpreter to explain what the police had against one would be indispensable under lost extraterritoriality.

The judge did come at last, a boyish-looking fellow who sat in splendid, not to say haughty, isolation in his high chair, singsonging something now and then in a half-audible falsetto, and still more often hawking and spitting on the floor, though there were signs all over the court-room forbidding it. On the desk before him was one tissue-paper bordereau, as the French, who use similar loosely bound collections of papers, would call it; but there were no signs of law-books, and the judge seemed to get his precedents, and his opinions, too, one suspected, from the not too immaculate clerks and hangers-on who frequently came up to whisper in his ear. Meanwhile a gray-bearded Russian was standing respectfully before him at the rail, droning on and on in his own tongue some sort of complaint, testimony, or defense. The case was not a very serious one, it seemed, there being a mere matter of two or three hundred dollars “Mex” involved; but without going any farther into details, let me put it briefly that, though there was in evidence all the machinery of justice which a visiting commission would wish to see, I should very much have regretted the necessity of expecting justice from this soggy-eyed Celestial youth, bending his ear to this and that whisper from his unkempt, shifty-looking attendants.

I visited also the big prison down in Pristan, built by the Russians but now taken over by the Chinese. There were two hundred and seventy-seven Russian prisoners and one German in it, a dozen of them women, among whom was a Jewish member of that sex who had lived for years in “Noo Yoik,” and spoke her fluent English accordingly. The same rules governed the prison as under the Russians, but orders from higher up now came from Chinese, and inmates put their hope, in cases where they had any left, in Chinese courts and officials. Some of the guards were still Russian, but the majority were not, and the sight of white men, clanking with enormous chains, chased about the yard while they cleaned out toilets and did similar menial tasks, by Chinese jailers who openly enjoyed their discomfiture, would not have added to the joy of white nations. Nearly all the prisoners, however, were in groups of six to a dozen in large cells that could be dimly seen through a small slit in each door. Living conditions were those of the old type of Russian prisons, with immense locks, and very thick walls that made the July heat furnace-like; the food was mainly kaoliang and other cheap, coarse grains; there were no shops, or regular work of any kind, and only half an hour’s exercise a day in the open air was allowed, even “in principle.” There were, of course, desperate criminals among the rather pasty-faced but generally big brawny men who peered out the door-slits with expressions uncannily like caged lions and tigers, and from these China must protect herself and those who dwell within her borders. But my American missionary companion, who had lived for some time in Harbin and spoke Russian, knew personally of several men for whose innocence the whole Caucasian community could vouch, who were there merely out of Chinese spite and whose trials had been, or would be, if they ever took place, worse than travesties on justice. The worst hardship of all, according to the misguided lady from “Noo Yoik,” was that no one had the least inkling, nor any possible way of finding out, when the Chinese might deign to bring a prisoner to court and air the charges against him.

Terms up to forty years were inflicted, but “long-timers” had the privilege, at least in theory, of being transferred to the “model prison” in Peking. Thus far no Russians had been executed, “because of the impression this might make among foreign nations,” according to an official Chinese statement. Of course once those nations give up their extraterritorial rights it will not so much matter what impression is made. Not long after our visit, however, when a thin and effeminate-looking little Russian charged with half a dozen murders in the pursuance of his calling as highway robber, and with whom I talked “high-brow stuff” in his tiny private cell, walked calmly out of the court-room and killed two or three of the policemen who pursued him, the announcement was made that in his case at least, if he were ever retaken, this policy would be rescinded. There is little doubt that this particular “bad man” should be done away with; but when Chinese soldiers get to shooting white men as one of their regular duties, what little prestige our race retains in China will soon evaporate. For what those many untraveled Westerners who feel that China should have complete sovereignty within her borders do not realize is the primitive mentality of the Chinese masses, which includes the soldiers, in such matters as the natural fights of others and the assumption of a low estate in those who are not outwardly honored and protected.

Though it is trespassing on the future to mention it here, I visited, months later, that “model prison” of Peking. It is just that, a well built, splendidly arranged penitentiary on the most modern, wheel-shaped lines, out in the southwest corner of the Chinese city. The new section recently built for foreigners—which had room for four times as many inmates as had so far been collected—was quite all it should be, with hot and cold baths, reasonable provisions for heating in winter, a kitchen of its own where foreign food was prepared. The workshops of the entire institution were large, airy, and light; there was a Russian as well as a Chinese chapel in which Taoist, Confucianist, Mohammedan, Christian, even Y. M. C. A. speakers appeared on Sundays; the régime of the place was considerate and enlightened; as a prison, in fact, it should make such a place as Sing Sing faint with shame. I saw other “model prisons” in China, notably that in the capital of Shansi, which has never had a representative from the outside world except a Turk who was caught peddling opium pills. But these few praiseworthy institutions in the more enlightened centers, and toward which the eyes of an investigating commission would, of course, be carefully directed, are as nothing compared to the unspeakable holes all over China into which prisoners are thrown, and where foreigners also would have the privilege of moldering away while provincial authorities slept, if extraterritoriality were abolished.

There is no Chinese code of laws; the fate of most prisoners depends on the often poor judgment, the mood of the moment, the devious political machinations, of the judge himself, not to mention wide-spread bribery and Oriental intricacies of which even old residents have only an inkling. Two separate codes, for foreigners and Chinese, would certainly have to be introduced before extraterritoriality could be surrendered. You cannot justly shoot or lop off the head of a Westerner for stealing a suit of clothes or a sack of grain, however necessary such drastic measures may be among a people desperate with habitual semi-starvation and so inured to hardships that ordinary punishments mean nothing, any more than you can justly arrest a foreign merchant because his overcoat has been stolen, and keep him in jail for weeks as a witness. In Chinese jurisprudence torture is a recognized procedure, and false confessions forced thereby are considered legal proof of guilt. Every prisoner is presumed to be guilty, and must prove his innocence, rather than be convicted by the prosecution, no strange point of view to Latin races, but a topsyturvy one to Anglo-Saxons. Not the least disagreeable of Chinese practices is the “doctrine of responsibility,” which means that in any group, be it village, family, crew, or, if the present status were changed, assemblage of foreigners, some one must be punished for the misdeeds of any individual member of it, so that a perfectly innocent head may be lopped off to save the trouble of hunting out the real criminal. Even though the Chinese were to do their best to treat foreign prisoners justly, the very differences in point of view, in customs, in diet even, would make it impossible. The East and the West are so unlike that an American could die of Chinese food and living conditions while his jailers were priding themselves, in their ignorance of other lands, on giving him the best the world affords. Of course Japan is an example of the abolishing of extraterritoriality; but even there the foreigner by no means gets Western justice, and for all the virtues and likable qualities of the Celestial and the often disagreeable traits of the Nipponese, government in Japan is ideal compared to the corrupt, chaotic travesty on it which rules China.

One of the Russian churches in Harbin, a creamy gray, with green domes and golden crosses, with much gaudy trimming

A policeman of Vladivostok, where shaving is looked down upon

Two former officers in the czar’s army, now bootblacks in the “thieves’” market of Harbin—when they catch any one who can afford to be blacked

Scores of booths in Harbin, Manchuli, and Vladivostok, selling second-hand hardware of every description, suggest why the factories and trains of Bolshevik Russia have difficulty in running

I traveled from end to end of the Chinese Eastern Railway, including the extension of it from Pogranichnaya to Vladivostok, through what was once, like Korea, Chinese territory. Endless steppes, flat as a floor, covered as far as the eye could see with coarse grass, here and there being hayed, was the general aspect north of the Sungari. Great herds of cattle and sheep, carts drawn by six or eight horses over roads which in the rainy season could not have been passable at all, millions of acres of potential wheat-fields, a great granary of everything, including sturdy youths for Chang Tso-lin’s armies, formed the outstanding features of Hai-lung-chiang, northernmost and largest of China’s provinces. South-bound freight-trains were not only crowded with Chinese soldiers, gambling amid the chaotic messiness that surrounded them in their roofed cars, but the uncovered flat-cars loaded with their paraphernalia, with car-wheels and rusted machinery, were crowded with Russian women and children sleeping on makeshift nests in sunshine or heavy rain. There were cattle-cars with barefooted Russian men tending them, little European box-cars fitted up as homes, sometimes with a still aristocratic-looking young woman suckling a babe in the center of it, impertinent Chinese soldiers looking on. There is no way of computing how many pretty Russian girls, with nothing to live on but the sale of their charms, there were along the C. E. R. from Manchuli to Vladivostok, like the little end of the funnel down through which the miseries of Russia had been oozing for years.

For all the rumors of degeneration of that line, however, the through express was an excellent train, though even more leisurely than that on the branch from Harbin southward, halting interminably at every station, apparently to let the crew talk to the girls who decorated every platform. It had all the comforts of compartment-divided sleeping-cars, with Russian attendants; the dining-car, with its ikon and its abacus, had a boarding-house table the entire length of it, and comely young Russian waitresses, who rolled their socks.

When I awoke in the morning beyond Tsitsihar, the landscape was silvery with white birches. Large and often pretty towns appeared every now and then among the low green hills or on the broad prairies of this most arctic of the “Eastern Three Provinces,” decidedly Russian towns, with wide unpaved streets, discordantly colored half-Oriental churches of the Greek Orthodox faith rising high above all else, against backgrounds that gave above all a sense of vast, wide-open spaces. The Russians have about twelve square miles at each station, and a strip of territory on either side of the railway, where they can rent land for about eighty years, as against only eighteen for foreigners in the rest of China, where none but Chinese can own land, with certain exceptions in favor of missionaries. There were far more Russians than Chinese at the stations of these frontier towns, reminiscent of those of the Dakotas, where every one came down to see the daily train go through. Most of the peasant women were barefoot; in town the girls all rolled their stockings, or went without them entirely. But huge bearskin coats and big fur caps hung out on lines, airing. Hot water was furnished at all the important stations, and bushels of eggs, all manner of food, especially just at this season most magnificent raspberries, were for sale by robust Russian women, often in a substantial booth built for the purpose. But long lines of Chinese soldiers with drawn bayonets still slouched along every platform, besides no end of Russians in uniforms of every swaggering description, as if the dregs of a dozen routed armies had been scattered along the line. Many of these strutting fellows wore swords, and some carried firearms, members evidently of some sort of local or railway police, as the unarmed majority were probably men who had no other garments left. The constant swashbuckling, the incessant parading of deadly weapons, got on the nerves; quite aside from the decided economic loss of so many men withdrawn from production, there was an ominous something about these thousands of young fellows, who had not been old enough to get into the war, now strutting about in its aftermath as if looking for a chance to make up for lost opportunities. The Russians saluted all Chinese officials, even those in civilian dress, raising their hats to them obsequiously if they themselves were not in uniform. At one station a drunken Russian went around forcing Chinese ragamuffins to shake hands with him.

All northern Manchuria was much troubled by bandits, hung-hu-tze, or “red beards,” they were called, who had devastated far and wide, even attacking the trains and station towns. There were at least a few renegade Russians among some of the bands. The public shooting of hung-hu-tze, in an open space between Pristan and the railway town, was one of the frequent sights of Harbin. But the real curse of Manchuria, as we were to find it of almost all China, were the soldiers. The bandits often paid for what they took, but the soldiers looted openly and carried off their plunder by the train-load within plain sight of every one. When they wished to move, away from the railroad, they forced farmers to let their crops go to waste and furnish them transportation for ten-day journeys, feeding the drivers and their animals along the way, but leaving them to find their way home as best they could. If there were no other carts to be had at the end of the ten days, the old ones must go on, twenty, thirty days, and even more. One man I heard of had been away a year, and still could not get back. A few hundred hand-picked, well paid soldiers, perhaps with a few Russians among them to give them starch, could, according to competent opinion, put a stop to banditry in Manchuria. But such coolies in uniform as swarm up and down the C. E. R. accomplish nothing to that end, even when they are not in actual collusion with the bandits. The hung-hu-tze rout whole barracks of them, and prey on the Chinese and the Russian population alike. Yet the Government clings to the fiction that they afford sufficient protection, and will not allow the Russians to go armed, unless they hold some kind of military position under the Chinese. Soldiers and bandits alike abuse all the inhabitants of northern Manchuria, except the Japanese, who have their own troops on the spot.

Manchuli, on the edge of Siberia and almost on the fiftieth parallel, is a large, prairie-like town of much more Russian than Chinese aspect. Many of its houses are built of logs, yet are not unhomelike; sod hovels like caves half below and half above ground shelter some of the population, among which were many down-and-outs. Cossacks in their big caps, with curiously liquid eyes, roam the wide, if dusty, streets. Russians and Chinese sit joking together; both ride the small sturdy horses of the region; many of the Chinese wear the long, soft, black boots so general among their neighbors, but there seemed to be very few mixtures of the two races. Sturdy fellows indeed were these bearded Caucasian farmers from the north and west, but for that matter the far-northern Chinese, with enough to eat and room to live in, are big and strong, too, real pioneers, used to a different environment than are their overcrowded compatriots farther south, in touch with and more sympathetic toward European civilization. Now and again one of the Chinese spoke to me in Russian and, when I could not answer, announced to his companions that I was a yang gwei, though without any thought of insult in the term, Russians evidently being so numerous and familiar that they are no longer ranked as “foreign devils.” A market-place of scores of makeshift shanties was stocked with enough second-hand hardware to supply half Manchuria. Like those in Harbin and, I found later, Vladivostok, these marts were crammed with everything from railroad equipment to hinges, from factory machinery to crooked nails, all more or less rusted, broken, and out of order. It was as if every Russian who had fled before the “Reds” had torn loose and brought with him anything he could lay his hands on, and here was another explanation of why the factories and trains of Soviet Russia have difficulty in running.