A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  Another infallible liver-shaker was to do a bit of shooting in the autumn. It was grand sport too, if you owned a shooting-boat (staffed with half-a-dozen coolies, a cook and boy, loaded with food and claret) in which to go floating past the low-lying beanfields around the Yangtze delta. Flocks of partridge, teal, snipe, flushed out by boys and dogs, sprayed up from the reedy islands, and the hunter’ guns crackled. There was, however, one untoward, hazard about shooting in the Shanghai area – that of ‘Accidental Shooting’, which is referred to in the local Sportsmen’s Diary. This cautionary note is necessary, the writer explains, ‘because the country people will lie perdu in the most unlikely spots, jumping up at the very moment the trigger is pulled’. It was an extremely irritating habit, for ‘the results of wounding a native, male or female, may be so serious that the ever-present danger does not conduce to that steady nerve and calm demeanour proper to a sportsman. I believe,’ the writer concludes, ‘that nearly every man who has shot in China will agree with me that if this risk did not exist, or if it only existed to the extent that it does on an English estate, his shooting would be greatly improved.’

  ‘But I will go no further,’ as Isabella says, to curtail her caustic compilation of Shanghai pastimes; enough has been said to suggest, as she did, that the prevailing tone was one of frivolity, philistinism and an unblushing disregard of China and its people. ‘May it be permitted to a traveller to remark.’ Isabella concludes, ‘that if men were to give to the learning of Chinese and of Chinese requirements and methods of business a little of the time which is lavished on sport and other amusements, there might possibly be less occasion for the complaint that large fortunes are no longer to be made in Chinese business.’ Several times during her journey inland she returned to this theme, noticing that the British were allowing the China trade to fall into other hands. In Chinkiang and Hangchow the Germans had set up flourishing albumen factories and were monopolising the trade; Americans had taken the lead in the import of kerosene oil; Russia was out-pacing the British in the tea market and the Japanese were everywhere. They alone had trained Chinese-speaking agents ‘to find out what the people want and supply it’, and, at the up-country markets of the Yangtze basin, she repeatedly noted that, among the jumbles of bamboo hats and baskets, preserved eggs and beancurd patties, were just two imported items: American hardware and Japanese cottons. British cloth, she was told, came in the wrong width and bound in wrappers of unlucky colours. Following treaties forced upon the reluctant Chinese in 1860 and 1876, some of the ports along the River Yangtze had been opened to foreign trade, and an increasing number of foreigners – consular officials, missionaries, a few enterprising merchants – settled in the more accessible of them. After the humiliating defeat in the war against Japan, the central Chinese government was seriously weakened both economically and politically. Several major European powers seized this opportunity to lay claims to various parts of the Celestial Empire and a territorial scramble for ‘spheres of influence’ensued – entered into, wrote one historian, ‘with all the zest of a Cornish wrecking raid’.

  This process was just getting under way in 1896 when Isabella was there; two years later, and before her book The Yangtze Valley and Beyond appeared, the British informed the world that the valley was now in their ‘sphere of influence’. This was a most unfortunate term, Isabella suggested in a paper to the Royal Geographical Society, and it carried ‘all sorts of evils in its train’. In her view the bullying western expansionism – for which the term was a euphemism – could only result in violence and disruption within the Chinese Empire while giving its statesmen ‘a glorious opportunity … to play off one set of foreign interests against another’, and she therefore advocated a policy of prudence and a patient reform of the existing regime, in default of a better. Her forecast of the violence that would result from the West’s aggressive policy was amply borne out; her views on the possibility of improvement under the Manchus were, as a reviewer said, ‘rather too roseate’; her general observations on the state of the land were sensible and well-founded, for she, unlike most of its foreign residents or visiting dignitaries, certainly saw the ‘real’ China, as it was in 1896 and, in some respects, probably still is.

  The Yangtze is 3433 miles long; it is the largest river in Asia; ‘more like a sea than a river,’ thought Marco Polo; the Chinese call it the ‘Great Long River,’ the ‘River of Golden Sands’ in its upper reaches, or, succinctly, ‘The River’; by any name it is a vast body of water forever surging towards ‘its imperial audience with the ocean’. The river’s lower reaches are usually opaque grey-yellow like muddied topaz; its rapid late-spring rises wash seeds from the nearby paddies and rats from their mud-holes; its equally sudden falls reveal dangerous sandbanks and stinking flotsam. In the course of its seaward journey, the Yangtze cleaves through gorges – those of the Rice Granary, the Horse’s Lung, the Tiger’s Teeth, the Wind Box, for example; it swirls past massive mid-stream rocks – the Heavenly Needle, the First, Second and Third Pearls, the Goose Tail, the Little Deer’s Horn; it eddies among the Three Lotus Whirlpools and the Saw-Teeth Shallows and pours down the cataracts of the Three Yellow Cows, the Temple Stairs, the Get-Down-From-Horse Rapids. When Isabella sailed that way, the main sources of the Yangtze had not been fully explored, its upper reaches were not navigable by steamer and its heaviest traffic was that of salt junks, ‘from seventy to one hundred tons burthen, with their lofty, many-windowed sterns like the galleys of Henry IV, their tall single masts and their big brown-amber sails of woven cane or coarse canvas extended by an arrangement of bamboo, looking heavy enough to capsize a liner, and with hulls stained and oiled into the similitude of varnished pine’.

  All her sympathies were with those huge ancient vessels, even though she began her journey prosaically aboard the Poyang, one of those modern river steamers that at once ‘dissipate the romance of travel by their white enamel, mirrors, gilding and electric light’. It was early in the year and the weather was raw, damp misted the offending mirrors, and she was the only foreign passenger leaving the securities of Shanghai for the uncertainties of the interior at such a bleak time. The Poyang called at each treaty port, where there was a trim paved Bund along the waterfront, a clutch of factory chimneys and godowns, a rotting fringe of ‘semi-amphibious native life’ with decayed and ragged crones peering out from hovels of wet straw. None of these ports much interested Isabella, who conscientiously noted the presence of consulates, chambers of commerce, custom and mission houses, tennis courts and clubs ‘and other necessaries of the British exile’s life’, and then hastened on her way.

  Matters became more inspiriting at Ichang, about a thousand miles upstream, an impressive city with towers, temples and sturdy battlements. It looked prosperous, but in the recent past had had some considerable trouble with its feng-shui. Feng-shui, that is, geomancy, was a potent force in everyday Chinese life and foreigners who belittled its influence did so at their peril. No prudent Chinaman would build a house or bury his grandfather without first consulting the local geomancer to ensure that the proposed site was propitious. Cities also had to be careful where they put themselves and, for many years, Ichang had suffered from being under the baneful influence of a great pyramid-like hill on the Yangtze’s opposite bank. Because of this Ichang’s citizens felt they had fallen on hard times and some of their most promising sons had failed in the triennial examinations. So, as the geomancers advised, a huge pavilion was erected on another hill to counteract this evil shadow, since when, naturally, the city’s prosperity had increased and undoubtedly a respectable number of local candidates had passed their triennials. Another conceivable reason for Ichang’s improved state was that, in 1887, it became the new upstream terminal point for the steamers and therefore a centre for the transhipment of goods from steamers to junks, and vice versa.

  At Ichang, therefore, Isabella hired her first native boat. It was quite a luxurious vessel compared with the Korean sampan with its roof of pheasant-grass,
for it had a projecting rudder, a tattered sail and a ‘passenger cabin’ opening on the bow-deck where sixteen oarsmen laboured to heave its twenty tons up the torrents. The ship’s master, the laopan, was a shifty character ‘with the leanest face I ever saw, just like very old, yellow, mildewed parchment strained over bones, sunken eyes, no teeth, and in the bitterly cold weather, clad only in an old blue cotton garment, always blowing aside to show his emaciated form’. Also aboard were the lean one’s ‘loud-mouthed virago’ of a wife, her interpreter, Be-dien, two English missionaries, to whom she gave passage part-way, and the usual concomitants of babies, dogs and hens.

  It was grand to be off at last, on the first day of February, when ‘With a strong fair wind our sail was set; the creak and swish of the oars was exchanged for low music of the river as it parted under our prow; and the deep water … of a striking bottle-green colour, was unbroken by a swirl of ripple and slid past in grand, full volume. The stillness was profound, enlivened only as some big junk with lowered mast glided past us at great speed, the fifty or sixty men at the sweeps raising a wild chant in keeping with the scene.’ For the landscape was wild enough. On either side of them towered the cliffs of the Ichang gorge, a bizarre conglomeration of pinnacles, grottoes and stalactites garlanded with mauve primulas, maidenhair fern and, wherever the rock sloped to anything less than the utterly perpendicular, with arable patches ‘not larger than a bath-towel’ to which the peasants lowered themselves on ropes. Limestone pillars, like ‘gigantic old women gossiping together in big hats’ abutted the cliffs, alongside boulders adorned with Chinese writing. The writing did not, as might similar manifestations in the West, proclaim the merits of ‘spic-sparc soap powder or Bottomley’s beans,’ but reminded the passing voyager that ‘The hills are bright and the waters dark’ or ‘The river and the sky are one colour.’

  Before leaving Ichang, Isabella had asked one of its foreign residents how travellers were wont to pass the time on the long upstream voyage, to which he had replied, ‘People have enough to do looking after their lives.’ And this turned out to be no more than the truth, as Isabella discovered as soon as they approached the first of the notorious Yangtze rapids and saw the signs of disaster on every side. ‘Above and below every rapid, junkmen were encamped on shore under the mats of their junks, and the shore was spread with cotton drying. There were masts above water, derelicts partially submerged in quiet reaches, or on some sandy beach being repaired, and gaunt skeletons lay here and there on the rocks which had proved fatal to them. The danger signal is to be seen above and below all the worst rapids in the shape of lifeboats, painted a brilliant red and inscribed with characters in white: showy things, as buoyant as corks, sitting on the raging water with the vexatious complacency of ducks, or darting into the turmoil of scud and foam where the confusion is at its worst, and there poising themselves with the calm fearlessness of a perfect knowledge of every rock and eddy.’ Before tackling their first rapid, Isabella’s crew slew a fowl as a hostage to fortune and smeared its blood on the bow-sweep; and she, watching the scene, commented that while ‘the deterrent perils’ arrayed before the eyes of aspiring travellers were often greatly exaggerated, those of the Yangtze rapids, ‘fully warrant the worst descriptions which have been given of them’.

  The method of ascent was painful, dangerous, gruelling, infinitely slow: ‘trackers’, attached to long tow-ropes, simply hauled the vessels up the thundering cataracts. ‘The huge coil of plaited bamboo, frequently a quarter of a mile long, is landed after being passed over the mast-head, a man on board paying out or hauling in as is required…. The trackers uncoil the rope, each man attaching it to his breast strap by a hitch, which can be cast off and rehitched in a moment. The drum beats in the junk, and the long string of men starts, marking time with a loud yell – “Chor-chor”, said to mean, “Put your shoulder to it”. The trackers make a peculiar movement; their steps are very short, and with each they swing the arms and body forward, stooping so low to their work that their hands nearly touch the ground, and at a distance they look like quadrupeds.

  ‘Away they go, climbing over the huge angular boulders of the river banks, sliding on their backs down spurs of smooth rock, climbing cliff walls on each other’s shoulders or holding on with fingers and toes, sometimes on hands and knees, sometimes on shelving precipices where only their grass sandals save them from slipping into the foaming race below, now down close to the deep water, edging round a smooth cliff with hardly foothold for goats, then far above, dancing and shouting along the verge of a precipice, or on a narrow track cut in the rock 300 feet above the river, on which narrow and broken ledge a man unencumbered and with a strong head would need to do his best to keep his feet.’ In short, these trackers, their sallow, scraggy bodies clad only in soiled cotton drawers, their skins scarred with cuts and sores, performed ‘the hardiest and riskiest work I have seen done in any country, inhumanly hard, week after week, from dawn to sunset’, was Isabella’s conclusion. Yet they were astonishingly resilient, ‘full of fun, antics and frolic; clever at taking off foreigners; loving a joke’.

  If the spectacle of the ascent was sensational, as the great vessels trundled, tottered and reeled up the tumbling waters, threatening at every instant to break loose and go careering on to the rocks below, the method of descent was positively heart-stopping. The huge junks, masts lashed to their sides, came bounding broadside towards the slippery slope of water at the rapid’s summit and ‘make the leap bow on, fifty, eighty, even a hundred rowers at the oars, standing face forwards, and with shrieks and yells pulling for their lives. The plunge comes; the bow and fore part of the deck are lost in foam and spray, emerging but to be lost again as they flash by, then turning round and round, mere playthings of the cataract, but by skill and effort got bow on again in time to take the lesser rapid below. It is a sublime sight. Wupans and sampans, making the same plunge, were lost sight of altogether in clouds of foam and spray, but appeared again. Red lifeboats with their smart turbaned crews, dodged in the eddies trim and alert, crowds of half-naked trackers, struggling over the boulders with their 1200 feet of tow-rope, dragged, yelled, and chanted, and from each wild shore the mountains rose black and gaunt into a cold grey sky.’

  At the highest cataracts, cool, invaluable pilots took command of each vessel and gave orders by drum-beat and gong to trackers and oarsmen. Each pilot, Isabella discovered, was accompanied by ‘a curious functionary … a well-dressed man carrying a white flag, on which was written “Powers of the waters, give a lucky star for the journey.” He stood well forward, waving this flag regularly during the ascent to propitiate the river deities, and the cook threw rice on the billows with the same object.’

  In spite of the flag-bearer, the cook’s rice and the pilot’s skill, disasters were alarmingly frequent, and the whole procedure was accomplished in such a frighteningly makeshift and last minute sort of way, that foreign travellers usually anticipated even more than there were. A Mr Parker, who went Up the Yangtze some years before Isabella, nicely captures this sense of nonchalant brinkmanship: ‘The trumpery old sail and the provoking old sweeps, the sockets which are perpetually slipping off their pins and require a man to wax them with the sole of a cast-off straw shoe, seem to work wonders at most distressing crises. Knots are carelessly tied; pipes are lit when hands should be otherwise employed; cooking utensils are always in the way; blocks wobble about and are so loosely fixed that the already frayed ropes are almost invited to tear themselves; and yet everything seems to blunder somehow round again to safety.’ Nevertheless, the Ichang Consul reckoned that one junk in twenty was lost, and that each year one tenth of the shipments arrived damaged.

  At the approach to each cataract, every boat had to join a queue for ascent, and sometimes this meant a whole night of waiting, moored at the base of the next morning’s glittering challenge. ‘Miserable nights they were. It was as bad as being in a rough sea, for we were in the swell of the cataract and within the sound of its swish and roar.
The boat rolled and pitched; the great rudder creaked and banged; we thumped our neighbours and they thumped us; there were unholy sounds of tom-toms, the weather relapsed, the wind howled, and above all the angry yells of the boat baby were heard. The splash of a “sea” came in at my open window and deluged my camp bed and it was very cold.’

  Sometimes, if the surrounding terrain was very precipitous, Isabella stayed aboard for the ascent and took her chance with the crew; sometimes she landed and spent hours standing about or climbing while her boat went up. At such times, curious, gossipy groups of villagers gathered around her who, she learned, were telling each other that her blue-grey eyes could see three inches into the earth and that, with the additional aid of her binoculars, she could see even deeper to where the treasures of the mountains – precious stones and golden cocks – lay hid. Moreover, a little black devil dwelt in her shrouded camera who came out at night and dug up the golden cocks that she had so shrewdly seen – which of course explained why her boat lay so low in the water: it was ballasted with ‘these auriferous fowls’!

  At length, another rapid conquered, the golden cocks unscathed, Isabella’s boat went scudding into ever lovelier country. They passed ‘spurs crowned with grand temples, below which picturesque villages cluster, and whitewashed, black-beamed, several-gabled, many-roofed, orange-embowered farmhouses; and every slope and level is cultivated to perfection, the bright yellow of the rape-seed blossom adding a charm to greenery which was never monotonous’. They passed coal workings high on the lateral cliffs that were mere holes shored up with timber, ‘out of which … strings of women and children were creeping with baskets of black dust on their backs’. They passed through the “Witch’s Mountain Great Gorge”, an uncanny place of black swirling water and cold rock on a gloomy winter’s day, and the reach above it, ‘The Iron Coffin Gorge’, was no cheerier.