A Battlefield of Humanity
It was New Year’s Eve when we left Lanchow, two weeks after the earthquake. The streets looked strangely deserted and a smell of gunpowder was in the air. All the city had been firing off crackers, early though it was, and thousands had gone out with the Governor to take part in a ceremony at the river-side in the hope of appeasing the gods. For earth tremors still continued. As many as fifty had been felt in a single night, and people were distracted with terror. Where the river-bank broadened out below the hospital, a tent had been erected which was the centre of proceedings. There priests were chanting and beating drums and gongs amid much letting-off of crackers, while far up and down the river onlookers were burning the great sticks of incense they had brought in handfuls. The climax of the ceremony was reached when the Governor knelt and made public confession of sin, taking upon himself the blame for all the evils from which the people were suffering. The earthquake, doubtless, was a judgment for many offences against heaven, and who but he was responsible? The paper, for it was a written confession, was read in the presence of the assembly and then burned for transmission to the spirit-world. Other officials, both civil and military, read like documents, which were also burned. The whole proceedings were costly and impressive, the incense alone representing an outlay of about a thousand dollars.
As we reached the cross-roads in the heart of the city, we met the long procession coming back. The Governor was riding in a magnificent chair, followed by many officials in full dress and an escort of mounted soldiers. Troops, police, and wealthy citizens returning from the river mingled with throngs of business people intent on the work of the day. Passing slowly through the crowded streets we left the city, crossed the bridge, and set out on our seven days’ journey up the great road that leads to Central Asia.
And now we were approaching, though we hardly realised it yet, that part of the province which has the greatest mixture of races as well as the most tragic past. Driven like a wedge between Mongolia and Tibet, and affording the only practicable line of communication between the rich plains of China proper and the Tartar and Moslem hordes of Turkestan, it has inevitably witnessed the strife of races, religions, and armies through the centuries. Scenes we were to see and types we were to meet in far-off Liangchow and Sining were arresting in their suggestiveness, bringing before one hints of that terrible past and glimpses of a great Beyond — vast areas yet to be won to allegiance to our Master.
It was of this Beyond we were thinking, as we set out from Lanchow that New Year’s Eve. Seven days’ journey — it was but a step, one stage only on the longer journey we would fain have taken all the way to Ti-hwa-fu. For there two brave pioneers, Messrs. Hunter and Mather of our Mission, had for years been holding the fort without seeing a fellow-worker. But Ti-hwa-fu, capital of the new province of Sinkiang, was more than forty days beyond the city to which we were travelling — across the great Gobi Desert and well on the way to Kuldja on the frontiers of Russia. Long had our hearts gone out to those neglected regions with their mingled population, multitudes for whom there were so few to care! But even to have spent a week with Mr. Hunter and Mr. Mather would have meant a costly journey of several months. Other work was appointed us, and very reluctantly we had to convince ourselves that it must not be thought of. But it was something that the friend who accompanied us for the first few miles, cheering our way with brotherly kindness, should have been Mr. Arthur Moore — the only fellow-worker who has visited Mr. Hunter in his far-off station, when he escorted Mr. Mather up to join him in 1914. Riding on the front of our cart he had many a story to tell of following the great road out through the Western Gate of China, of the dangers of the Gobi Desert and the wilds beyond, as well as of the less adventurous stages that lay between us and Liangchow.
One impression only must be given of that seven days’ journey, the very one for which we were largely unprepared. The cold, intense, almost unbearable as it was, we had anticipated, for was it
Photos b y Frederick Brown.
(1) A typical inn in the Great North-West.
(2) Road and inn between Lanchowfu and Liangchowfu.
(3) View from the roof of the Mission House at Liangchowfu, showing the three famous pagodas.
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not the dead of winter? The dangerous crossing of high mountains, where the road at that time of year is often exchanged for a frozen torrent-bed, was nothing unusual. Kansu is everywhere a sea of mountains. But we were not expecting what lay beyond the mountains, when the extensive plain of Liangchow at last was reached.
Setting out in the dark, long before daylight, we saw the sun rise morning after morning, when we had already been hours on the cart. The cold of those hours was indescribable, especially when a head-wind was blowing, but it made one appreciate all the more the transformation when the snow-covered mountains flushed into rose, and sunshine flooded the scene with warmth and light. Then one could breathe more freely, realising that the worst was over for another day. It was somewhat humiliating to discover, in those inclement regions, how dependent one was upon shelter at night and such food as the inns could afford. Even on the heated k’ang (brick bed) the boiling water with which we filled our teapot froze into a solid lump before morning. We became accustomed to chipping off bits of frozen bread and thawing them in our mouths before we could eat them. This was our daily breakfast on the cart, with scraps of frozen meat or cheese. But sometimes hot soup was to be had — mutton-broth, specially prepared for travellers — and promising hamlets were scanned as meal-hours drew near with no little interest. Thus it was that on reaching the Liangchow plain after several days of “bitterness, ’ as our carter expressed it, among the mountains, we were conscious of somewhat eager anticipations — anticipations destined, however, to be disappointed.
Emerging at Kulang from the labyrinth we had been threading, we obtained our first view of the wide reach of level country that stretches away a hundred miles to the north-west. The plain was far larger than we had expected, and we hailed with joy the sight of towns and villages along the road as well as dotting the country in all directions. Surely at some of these provision would be waiting for hungry travellers! It was only as we went on hour after hour, increasingly cold and hungry, that we found we were in what seemed to be an enchanted region. The walled villages we came to, and there were none un walled, were finer than any we had seen elsewhere. Their ramparts might have belonged to cities, and the portals where gates had been were massive. But -no encouraging wisps of smoke rose on the frosty air; no dogs ran out barking; no children were at play. Silent and deserted, place after place proved to be nothing but walls. There were no roofs at all — only a maze of walls so thick and solid that the earthquake had not disturbed them. Anything more weird, more bewildering, it would be hard to imagine. They were ruins, evidently; but so massive, so many, so entirely deserted!
Then the dwellings we did come to that were inhabited were of a most unusual appearance. They looked like fortresses rather than homesteads. Doorways, usually the one conspicuous thing about a Chinese house, there seemed to be none. The outside walls were long, blank and unbroken.
How they were entered at all was a mystery. And inside, wall rose above wall, twenty and thirty feet high, to a massive tower at the back. It was only later we learned that these were the habitations of clans rather than families. In them the scattered homes of an ordinary village are gathered together for protection. Entrances are as low and hidden as possible. The iron door, studded with nails, gives access not to a courtyard but to a tunnel, guarded by fierce Tibetan dogs. Each court protects the one within, and the tower of refuge is for women and children in hours of peril.
All this tells its own tale; for we had reached that “battlefield of humanity” described by d’Ollone in his recent remarkable work on Mohammedanism in China. Of the very journey we were taking, we found he had written:
“Travelling from Lanchow to Liangchow one advances over ruins. This route, a narrow ribbon of fertile land between the deserts of Mongolia and Tibet, the one and only connecting link between China and the Occidental world, has been from the beginning a battlefield of humanity. The Chinese, depending on this route to reach far back in their deserts the insatiable nomads — scourge and terror of the Empire — and to extend not only their domination but their commerce, for it is the famous route de la sole, have covered it with fortifications. Chief among these is the Great Wall, one arm of which is in sight near the road most of the time. Then there are fortified places like the city of Pingfan... backed by castles, towers, and sig¬ nalling posts. Here all breathes war — war which beginning with history has not yet come to an end. For upon accumulated and successive ruins have arisen ramparts ever more formidable.”
We had wondered at the fortresses and the Great Wall as we travelled day by day, and now we were indeed among the ruins. “The place was silent and aware.” What campaigns and bloodshed, what massacres and retaliations had it not witnessed! What stories it could have told of the past; what warnings it held for the future! Memory was busy, as we jolted over the stony road skirting the mountains, with the last Mohammedan rebellion and the experiences of our friends Mr. and Mrs. Ridley in the city of Sining, south of those very mountains, during the siege and reign of terror twenty-five years ago. Anything more ghastly than the doings they witnessed and of which they themselves had told us it would not be easy to imagine, but here on every hand were evidences of similar tragedies, enacted on a scale far more terrible.
For in successive wars and rebellions the possession of this highway has been an essential condition of victory. It had to be held or retaken at any price; and the strength of the great rebellion of last century (1862-1874) was that for six long years the Mohammedans retained their supremacy in that region by incessant coups de main. “The result was the complete annihilation of the country population and the destruction of city after city.” This then was the meaning of the extensive ruins that amazed us, and the explanation of the fortified farmhouses with their long blank walls. And one could not but realise that the horrors of the past are the dangers of the present. But for the earthquake, we might at that very time have been witnessing an uprising more menacing to China’s integrity than any that have gone before, under the fostering influence of a neighbouring power ever ready to supply arms and ammunition.
It was a relief to turn from such reflections to another characteristic of the Liangchow plain, its almost Egyptian or Arabian aspect under that cloudless sky. The same impression had been made upon the traveller d’Ollone, to judge from his illustrated pages. He speaks of the fortified dwellings on the plain — “those feudal castles in the midst of a sunburnt country” — as resembling Palestine in the time of the Crusades. To us they had, at a distance, more the look of flat-roofed villages near the Nile. For all the lines were straight; no roofs were to be seen; and the trees about them, bared of branches till near the top (also for purposes of protection) had the effect of palms in the brilliant sunshine.
So through an unfamiliar country, knowing no one in the city before us, with something of the heart of strangers in a strange land we drew near Liangchow and one of the most beautiful experiences of our lives.