by Pat Barr
The upkeep of these ‘roads’, no more than elongated quagmires, devolved like much else upon the district mandarins. In Isabella’s view, some of the mandarins (unlike the yang-bans of Korea) tried to do good, ‘but the system under which they hold office has a strong tendency to make them bad’. The mandarins were allowed, indeed expected, to use various methods of peculation in order to supplement their modest official salaries, and so ‘squeezes’ were again clamped upon the peasantry. Many of the mandarins worked hard, Isabella thought, and each represented in his plump and padded person the whole gamut of local government – executive, fiscal, judicial. If there was a flood or famine (and there often was) the mandarin had to organise relief; if there was a disturbance he had to quell it; if there was crime (tax evasion, robbery, murder) he had to judge it, and if there was a disruptive foreigner nosing about he had to examine her passport and arrange for a two-runner escort to the next district. So Isabella spent hours waiting outside the various yamens (district offices) and watching the bustle of pomp and circumstance in their little courts: ‘People came and went – men of all sorts, many in chairs, but most on foot, and nearly all well dressed. All carried papers and some big dossiers. Within, secretaries, clerks and writers crossed and recrossed the courtyard rapidly and ceaselessly and chai-jen or messengers, bearing papers, were continually dispatched…. At last a very splendid person in brocaded silks and satins came out and handed me my passport and we were able to proceed.’
In the evenings, Isabella often chatted (through Be-dien) with the village headmen to find out how this administrative system worked at rice-roots level, and her conclusion was that, in comparison with the peasants of Korea or Persia for instance, the Chinese ‘are very far from being an oppressed people’. Over a cup of tea and a pipe, the villagers grew eloquent on such matters as carriage charges for goods, litigation delays, the hilarious habits of foreign missionaries (of which, unfortunately, she gives no examples), the venality of some minor officials (‘rats under the altar’ they were called), and how this mandarin was a fine fellow who’d just built them a stone bridge across the river, and that one was a rapacious swine who decided every lawsuit in favour of the most liberal palm-greaser. Fluctuations in prices were a burning topic everywhere, for the Chinese loved to talk about money and goods, even when they didn’t have much of either.
In the sparsely-populated agricultural areas further west she found that the only markets operated on a sort of Mad Hatter’s tea-party pattern: ‘In travelling along the roads one comes quite unexpectedly upon a long, narrow street with closed shop fronts, boarded-up restaurants, and deserted houses, and possibly a forlorn family with its dog and pig the only inhabitants. The first thought is that the population has been exterminated by a pestilence, but on inquiry, the brief and simple explanation is given “It’s not market day”.
‘A few miles further, and the roads are thronged with country people in their best, carrying agricultural productions and full and empty baskets. The whole country is on the move to another long, narrow street closely resembling the first, but that the shop fronts are open and full of Chinese and foreign goods; the tea-shops are crammed; every house is full of goods and people; from 2000 to 5000 or 6000 are assembled; blacksmiths, joiners, barbers, tinkers, traders of all kinds are busy; the shouting and the din of bargaining are tremendous, and between the goods and the buyers and sellers locomotion is slow and critical. Drug stores, in which “remedies for foreign smoke” are sold, occur everywhere.
‘The shops in these streets are frequently owned by the neighbouring farmers, who let them to traders for the market days, which are fixed for the convenience of the district, and fall on the third or fifth or even seventh day, as the need may be…. It is much like a fair, but I never saw any rowdyism or drunkenness on the road afterwards, and I never met with any really rough treatment in a market, though the crowding and curiosity made me always glad when it was not “market day”.’
And so Isabella jogged happily on, past markets open and closed, past flat-bottomed barges loaded with coal and salt, past pools where buffaloes wallowed with only their horns and flesh-pink noses poking above the water, past village schools whence whined the dreary shout of boys repeating the ancient classics which, as yet, they did not in the least understand. And at last, in the distance of one sunny afternoon, appeared Paoning Fu, her immediate goal. ‘Built on rich alluvium, surrounded on three sides by a bend of the river, with temple roofs and gate towers rising out of dense greenery and a pink mist of peach blossoms, with fair and fertile country rolling up to mountains in the north, dissolving in a blue haze, and with the peacock-green water of the Chia-ling for a foreground, the first view of this important city was truly attractive.
‘In the distance appeared two Chinese gentlemen, one stout, the other tall and slender, whose walk as they approached gave me a suspicion that they were foreigners, and they proved to be Bishop Cassels, our youngest and one of our latest consecrated bishops, and his co-adjutor, Mr Williams, formerly vicar of St Stephen’s Leeds, who had come to welcome me.’ The two men, the first Europeans she had seen for about a month, conducted her to the city’s China Inland Mission, with ‘some very humble Chinese houses built round two compounds, in which two married couples, three bachelors, and, in the bishop’s house, two ladies were living, and at some distance off there is a ladies’ house, then occupied by five ladies. There are several guest-halls for Chinese visitors, class and school-rooms, porters’ and servants’ rooms. The furniture is all Chinese and the whitewashed walls are decorated with Chinese scrolls chiefly. I never saw houses so destitute of privacy, or with such ceaseless coming and going. Life there simply means work, and work spells happiness apparently, for the workers were all cheerful and even jolly. Studying Chinese, preaching, teaching, advising, helping, guiding, arranging, receiving, sending forth, doctoring, nursing and befriending make the mission compounds absolute hives of industry.’
By thus approving of this type of mission, Isabella was taking a deliberate stance in the evangelical arena. Her allegiance was with those missionaries who lived entirely at the mercy of the country, who conscientiously tried to conform to native custom, etiquette and dress and by so doing rejected the common, tacit assumption of western cultural superiority. (Religious superiority was another matter, of course: they were still intent on bringing the light of a higher creed to the benighted heathen.) These were the guiding principles of that doughty, fanatical institution the China Inland Mission, which had been established by Dr Hudson Taylor in 1865. It was an undenominational body without fixed places of worship; its members were affiliated to other Protestant groups and its links with the Church Missionary Society were strong. Thirty years after its foundation, nearly six hundred missionaries were working under its auspices, living in remote Chinese towns in the interior, cooped up in filthy attics, taking the brunt of intermittent hostility, facing a long series of setbacks and difficulties. As a modern commentator has remarked, ‘Only a man whose theology was like a rock could have long withstood the ceaseless washing of that vast sea of Chinese indifference.’
Many of the C.I.M. missionaries were exclusive to a fanatical degree in the matter of spiritual salvation and believed that oblivion was the best that the unconverted could hope for. ‘There is a great Niagara of souls passing into darkness in China’, proclaimed Dr Taylor during a recruitment campaign, and adds that those who had been offered redemption and spurned it were beyond all hope. Dr Morrison, casting a cold eye upon one of the C.I.M. missionaries he met, remarked that ‘It was a curious study to observe the equanimity with which this good-natured man contemplates the work he has done in China, when, to obtain six dubious conversions, he has, on his own confession, sent some thousands of unoffending Chinese en enfer brouiller éternellement.’
Morrison went on, ‘It is generally recognised that the most difficult of all mission fields – incomparably the most difficult – is China’ and on that point at least he and the missionarie
s agreed. There were immense doctrinal difficulties, because those natives who were converted to the total spiritual allegiance that uncompromising Christianity demanded had, perforce, to reject the creed of ancestor-worship on which the structure of Chinese social life was based. This meant that converts refused to pay the communal taxes towards local ‘idolatrous festivals’ and took no part in familial ceremonies that enshrined the sacred concept of filial piety. Consequently, charges were often brought against native Christians in the local courts and less than justice was often meted out to them. In such cases, missionaries (Roman Catholics according to the Protestants and vice versa) sometimes took it upon themselves to intervene on their disciples’ behalf, and this aroused fresh dissension. However, in the view of some evangelists, dissension was itself a healthy sign of success, for Christianity was an intrusive, aggressive force; had not the Lord himself said ‘I come not to send peace but a sword’?
The upshot of all this was that many converts became social as well as spiritual outcasts, and had to be generously supported by the missions where they worked as hospital cleaners, servants and bearers. In the layman’s view, therefore, a considerable proportion of the scant missionary harvest was made up of ‘rice Christians’ – unskilled, layabout opportunists who were, to put it bluntly, in it for the perks. Certainly, most of Christianity’s recruits were from among the meek and lowly who had little to lose; the vast majority of the mandarin class regarded this upstart and disruptive doctrine with suspicion and contempt. Nevertheless, some missionaries had become identified in the people’s minds with the ruling upper class, because they had built grand ‘Europeanised’ houses for themselves inside walled compounds. The 1860 Treaty of Tientsin had granted missionaries extra-territorial rights to build or rent premises suitable for their labours, and a few missionaries had taken advantage of this right to commandeer temples or assembly halls, or raise their edifices upon sites that seriously disrupted the local feng-shui. In such cases, riots often ensued in which missionaries were attacked and their compounds looted. The victim-evangelists then sought the protection of their national governments and occasionally demanded that retribution, in the form of a heavy indemnity, be exacted from the people. This convinced many Chinese that missionaries were indeed political agents in disguise. Why else should their governments be expected to protect them?
In some areas, the Chinese showed their growing distrust and fear of missionaries by the circulation of scurrilous and obscenely-illustrated propaganda in which Jesus was represented as a crucified hog surrounded, says one reporter, ‘by male and female worshippers indulging in licentious merriment’. Christianity was described as the ‘pig-goat religion’, its propagators were ‘primary devils’, its native converts ‘secondary devils’, its prayers the squeak of the celestial hog’, and so on. The missionaries retaliated by disturbing quantities of biblical translations, widely used, said their detractors, as draught-excluders and sandal-soles by the ingenious Chinese. Still, much thought and controversy went into the preparation of these versatile effusions, as, for instance, over the so-called ‘terminology question’. The Jesuit fathers, earlier proselytisers on the Chinese scene, had used the native word meaning ‘Lord of Heaven’ to describe their Christian God; the English Protestants, anxious to sharpen a distinction in the heathen mind between themselves and the Catholics, gave God a different name, meaning ‘Supreme Ruler’; the American Presbyterians, whose common ground with the other two bodies was small, chose ‘The True Spirit’; the Chinese, hearing that all these foreigners worshipped different deities, wondered why they could not be left in peace to do likewise. For it has been suggested that the greatest barrier of all to the spread of Christianity in the Far East was the intolerant ‘monopolism’ of both Protestants and Catholics; the Chinese, never themselves proselytisers, were by contrast of polytheistic – and indeed polydaemonistic – inclination.
Isolated by all these problems from the bulk of the populace, scorned by many of their lay compatriots, the successful missionaries must have survived, as Isabella suggests, by the creation of busy, godly little compounds where ‘preaching, teaching, advising’ and so on went on apace, and the workers seldom paused to remember that, as Morrison put it, ‘their harvest may be described as amounting to a fraction more than two Chinamen per missionary per annum’. Bishop Cassels, who met Isabella at Paoning Fu, was probably the right sort of man to put heart into such a group. He was of the Church Missionary Society, recently consecrated ‘Bishop of Western China’, a former Cambridge athlete, burly, bold and jovial. Some of his converts had just presented him with the hat of a Master of Arts and high boots, which, Isabella says, gave him ‘the picturesque aspect of one of the marauding prelates of the Middle Ages!’
After financing the establishment of a small ‘Henrietta Bird Memorial Hospital’ to help the Paoning Fu Mission, Isabella continued her westward journey-by-chair for another three hundred miles to the city of Mien-chow, where she stayed with the Reverend Heywood Horsburgh and his wife in a dilapidated, squalid house in a noisy thoroughfare. Horsburgh had nothing of Cassels’s muscular Christian heartiness; he was a highly-strung, intense, prickly proselytiser through and through, a lean man with burning eyes, every ounce of bone and spirit dedicated to Christ’s service. He sought a return to primitive, apostle-style “missioning”, and would have none of churches, Anglican prayer books or white surplices such as Cassels sometimes sported with his M.A. hat. Cassels, in Horsburgh’s view, was ‘too churchy’ for China, where more pastoral simplicity was required. But nor did Horsburgh approve of the nonconformists, with whom he fought a running battle over territorial rights. ‘If one Mission,’ he complained, ‘after infinite labour and even suffering has at last succeeded in getting a foothold in a new city and been able to begin settled work – it is most unfair for another Mission which is working on altogether different lines, to take advantage of the efforts of the first Mission and come to that very city and, to a great extent, neutralise their work.’ This excerpt, which refers to the intrusion of the Canadian Methodists upon his scene, is taken from Horsburgh’s correspondence with his ‘Parent Committee’ in London, to whom he also states his opinions on Cassels, and to whom Cassels put his views on Horsburgh. Both called the other ‘an admirable and worthy man’, but while Horsburgh deplored Cassels’ ‘C. of E. style pomp’, Cassels deplored Horsburgh’s ‘exclusiveness’. ‘A most difficult case’, Cassels concluded, and, let it be whispered, one who kept such a tight rein on expenses that he once asked a young lady missionary to provide full details of her annual expenditure on underclothes!
Isabella gives no hint of these internal squabbles, but as she stayed with both men, she must have heard something of them, and it was the sort of evangelical bickering that greatly depressed her. She had heard so much of it, since those days over twenty years before, when she sat on the verandah of Titus Coan’s Hawaiian home and listened to his diatribes against the Roman Catholics and the plagues of Mormons. So much missionary discord was the same the world over, and neither mature experience nor the most ardent dedication seemed to alleviate it. Nevertheless, she rightly thought that there was a gradual lessening of interdenominational tension, a slow thaw from the old-fashioned dogmatism of the fire-and-brimstone boys. Early in the twentieth century, Christian effort in China was increasingly directed along broader humanitarian lines and missionaries were less contemptuously ignorant of the native culture – developments that Isabella would have welcomed.
Upon leaving the Mien-chow Mission, Isabella simply kept going westwards, until, one day in early April, she reached Kuan Hsien on the Chengtu plain. Again she stayed with missionaries and, looking out from the back of their house, she saw that ‘the clear, sparkling Min, just released from its long imprisonment in the mountains, sweeps past with a windy rush, and the mountain views are magnificent, specially where the early sun tinges the snow-peaks with pink. Why should I not go on, I asked myself, and see Tibetans, yaks and aboriginal tribes, rope bridg
es, and colossal mountains, and break away from the narrow highways and the crowds and curiosity and oppressive grooviness of China proper?’
III
Why not indeed – and also why? There were no more missions to ‘inspect’ or generously endow, so she could no longer justify her travels on these impeccably worthy grounds; but there were those aboriginal tribes and a very remote region about which useful anthropological and geographical observations should be made. The essential particular was that, as she says, mountains, snow-peaked and pink in the sunrise, lie beyond the Chengtu Plain as the Rockies lie beyond the prairie, the high haunts of the Kurds beyond the Persian plains, the Himalayas beyond Srinagar. The mountains drew her to them; they always had. And, in the fastnesses of these mountains she might come again upon Tibet, with its amicable easy people, its pure clear air, its empty, untrammelled spaces. If she reached it, she would have been full circle. So she determined to follow that sparkling Min along its north-westerly Siao Ho branch into the mountains where the primitive tribes of the Mantze dwelt and then, perhaps, to strike for the Chinese-Tibetan frontier.
She hired five new porters who carried her chair, two bamboo baskets and camera, and she replenished her stock of loose native robes beneath which her ample body was pleasantly at ease and kindly camouflaged. She retained the services of the sulky, proud Be-dien, but as his brand of polite Chinese would be of little use in these uncouth parts, she also had the company of Mr Knipe, disguised as ‘Mr Kay’ in her book, a melancholy-looking young lay missionary who knew something of the local dialects. As soon as she left the plain, she found the sort of scenery she loved. Dramatic mountains soared skywards tipped with ‘ghastly snow-cones’, chasms of scrambled greenery gashed the valleys and the only sounds were of torrents crashing over rocks and the occasional clop of mule or man. ‘There was a decided Tibetan influence in the air which I welcomed cordially. Red lamas passed us on pilgrimage to Omi Shan, and numbers of muleteers in sheepskins and rough woollen garb, their animals laden with Tibetan rugs and, better than these, some “hairy cows” (yaks), which had not yet lost the free air of their mountain pastures and executed many rampageous freaks on the narrow bridle-path. Lamas and muleteers were all frank and friendly, asked where we were going, how long we had been on the road, enlightened us on their own movements and cheerily wished us a good journey. Most of the mules had one or more prayer-flags standing up on their loads, for the Tibetans are one of the most externally religious peoples on earth.’ The houses, like the people, were workaday, rough, shorn of the gaudy ornamentation beloved by most Chinese; the women strode big-footed like the men; village inns, hung high on wooded slopes, were marvellously secluded and empty, with that bare, chill, clean emptiness of the mountains.
