Part 17

Across from the _Zinzin’s_ doorway is a spiked stockade. Inside, where they have been thrust through a hole just big enough for a man’s body, are the miserable criminals. In the big pit dug with their naked hands, the wretches cower, shelterless, under the terrible cold of winter. They live or die there, sometimes fed by the charity of Mongols, sometimes forgotten, sometimes purchasing miserable fragments of offal with the unstolen remnants of the prison allowance. Few waste sympathy on the inmates. The low level of existence of those outside makes the place perhaps less terrible than it would be to people who had known other conditions. It is a grim Chinese jest, this loathsome prison for those who have stolen bread in the market-place, set opposite the palace of the grafting governor who has filched the tribute of Tu-she-tu.

From the Chinese city now, there begins to come the distant throb of drums and clash of cymbals. Three gorgeous Mongols gallop past in their splendid free-reined horsemanship. A sentry stalks to the door of the stockaded prison, and looks toward the gray walls and temples of Maimachen. The procession of the New Moon is to pass to-day.

You leap onto your little Mongol riding-pony, and spurring him into a gallop, hasten along the way to the Chinese city. He tears down the broad road. The resplendent trotting horsemen take the pace as a challenge, and yell joyfully for a race as their whips come down on their own horses’ flanks. Mongol girls walking hand in hand along the highway scatter and call out as the riders clatter by. It is contagious. Soon a score of riders are shouting, shaking bridles, and lashing ponies, and it is a cavalcade of racers that gallops up to the gate of Maimachen.

How different is this Chinese settlement from Mongol Urga! It is a magnified replica of the city at the frontiers. Instead of the straggly avenues a hundred yards broad, with cañon-like alleys flanked by high mud walls, all the streets are so narrow that two strides cross them. They are lined with miniature booths. Through the bars of their paper-paned windows one sees the little delicately-tinted pictures of pagodas and of Chinese girls, in quaint sweeping outlines. Red and black and gold, the New Year placards flame on every post and wall. Lanterns are hung before the gateways; green saplings stand sentinel by the doors; and in the unshuttered compounds innumerable lines of gaudy banners are seen, strung from side to side across the courtyards. From the houses come from time to time a thrumming and a picking of strings in minor music, broken by an occasional clang of cymbals or a drone of beaten drums. You pass a temple of marvelously carved wood, wrought into curves and flowers and arabesques, with eaves turning out into open-mouthed dragons. Everything is brilliant in paint and gilt--a blazing kaleidoscope of color.

In a friendly courtyard the horses are tied, and you walk into the teeming streets. All the Chinese of Maimachen and half the Mongols of Urga have come out to-day. Here is a little shifty-eyed Chinese clerk, in his low shoes, with white soles several inches thick, his white stockings, tied at the ankle, showing below the baggy trousers.

Here is a young Mongol lama, who hails you gleefully with a Russian word which he has learned from a Buriat, and points out where the procession will emerge. A Mongol woman passes, gorgeously dressed in flowered yellow silk, with red, sable-cuffed sleeves so long as nearly to touch the ground, and her head cuirassed with the burden of silver ornaments. She smiles at the burly Mongol camel-driver who so openly admires her.

A Chinese merchant, with red-buttoned cap, attended by a servant, is pushing through the crowd. His looks are surly; perhaps he is thinking of the whereabouts of his own establishment in this carnival.

Though the rich and wifeless Chinese may acquire Mongol companions, they cannot buy or give affection. For a poor Mongol, who has the sincerity and humanness which the Chinaman withholds, one of these Mongol concubines will either deceive her master, or, if he object too vigorously, will strip herself of his presents and go to her lover’s _gir_.

A big Celestial with a fuse comes hastily through the gateway from which the procession is to emerge. The crash of his firecrackers startles the Mongol ponies pushed close along the houses. Beneath the multi-colored gateway, next pour out a score of horsemen with pennanted spears. They ride two by two, in white coats with red letters on their breasts. Then comes a crowd of footmen, who fill the street in a torrent. The curious Mongols press to each side, and watch the procession of their alien overlords. Two ranks are robed in vivid red, and carry poles with big gold knobs. Blue-coated Chinamen, with cymbals and shrilling fifes, follow; then come more horsemen; then the great silken umbrella, and a gray-mustached dignitary on horseback,--the chief of police; next, more fifers and wand-carriers, six abreast. With fireworks and clashing music, the vivid ranks in red and blue, and yellow and gold, and green and purple, and every other conceivable combination of hues, make their way around the stockade and back again through the gated city.

The crowd seems to be trending now toward a brilliantly colored archway spanning the main street. With the Mongol holiday-makers we follow along into a cloistered courtyard flanked by peaked temple-like houses. A crowd of Chinese is pressing around some one clad in blue, who has just stepped out between the beater of a tom-tom and an artist with a big pair of cymbals. A preliminary flourish introduces the performer--a pasty-faced young Chinaman. He starts a rhythmic chant whose cadence is within a note or two of one of the old crooning Negro melodies of our South. Over and over again he chants it. A poet this is. He has conned his verses, and now comes out to sing them. He ends with a special swirl in what is evidently a very comic climax. The drum and cymbals crash out once more, and another chanter comes--this one old and feeble, with a curiously penetrating voice. He drones a long hexameter-footed epic, in which the harsh Chinese _gh_ and _wh_ sounds are not so coarsely enunciated as in the poem of the first reciter. “That is one of the old legend-singers,” you are told. It is such a ballad as Homer sang, or the Welsh bards chanted. It is the poetry and the history of the long past, the immemorial past, far before the infancy of other nations; for China keeps alive her antiquity, and in her old age never forgets.

[Illustration: CHINESE ARCHWAY, URGA MAIMACHEN]

This week there can be no buying or selling. The Moon must be honored, but visits are in order. Your friend brings you to meet a leading Chinese merchant. At the house, a grille of thick wooden bars runs down to the street level from the eaves just above one’s head. Looking through them, one can see over the little square window the most delicately-traced pictures on a white background. The panes are of paper, all save one, which is of glass, so that the owner may see if, coming down the street, any one turns and climbs the three steps into the ordinarily wide-open door of his house.

The home of our host, which is likewise his office, is finely fitted up and faultlessly clean. His light-blue silk robes are immaculate. Two servants wait at table, bringing in the best of China tea and French “petit-beurre” biscuits for our delectation. Everything is appetizing and orderly.

As we are sitting over the cups with the Chinese merchant, the boy comes to announce visitors, and two blue-robed fellow countrymen enter. One has a strip of light-blue silk laid over his two arms, which he stretches out. The host extends his own arms and receives it, then gives it back to the newcomer, who goes down on one knee and again presents it. The merchant takes it a second time and bows, this time retaining it. The two guests bend and leave the room. “New Year’s presents,” the merchant explains. Again the boy comes in and announces a guest. A Mongol messenger enters, goes down on one knee, and presents a red slip, black-lettered. “Visiting-card,” the host explains. Then, with a smile, “White, like yours, not polite.” He accepts this too. “_Ch’ou Ta-tzu!_” (the dirty Tatar!) he says as the latter leaves.

The calls continue, and our visit. The host is charming, cultured, educated; he speaks English well, and lacks in no attention. But you wonder if, when you leave, he is not going to murmur about you, “Yong-kwei-tsz!” (foreign devil!)

Throughout all intercourse with these Chinese, one has always the uneasy consciousness that one is doubtless, as with the card, unwittingly offending. There are three hundred rules of ceremony, three thousand formulæ of behavior, regulated by a classic tradition. The ritual is so drilled into the Chinese as to become instinctive. Celestial breeding would dictate that the little formalism which precedes a rubber, “May I play to hearts, if you please?” be stretched to cover every action of life. The left, not the right, is the place of honor, and to enter a room facing wrongly is a slight. An irregular method of folding a red New-Year’s card, and the failure in writing to raise one character above the level of the rest, are breaches of etiquette.

For our race there is always felt, behind the soul-mask of Chinese eyes, a contempt. The kindness of our host to-day is unfailing. Yet we are not at ease or sure of the ground. Errors, condoned to keep face, are often inwardly resented. If you put your hat on the Mongol’s altar, everybody in the hut will yell out for you to take it off. When you remove it, they will nod understandingly as the interpreter explains that the ignorant foreigner transgressed inadvertently. Forthwith all is forgotten in an enthusiastic discussion of the last case of botts among the horses. But with these Chinese one can never tell if, by taking a chop-stick between the wrong fingers, one has not intimated that the host’s grandfather was a cross-eyed coolie soldier. No one will challenge or set a man right, but the breach will be silently resented, though the tea continues to be smilingly offered.

The old-time Chinese dealers at Urga grew enormously wealthy in the tea-trade to Kiahta. These have mostly gone back to China. But there are still a number of the better-class merchants whose wares are sold to the traders and by them to the Mongols. The house of Liu-Shang-Yuan claims two hundred years of establishment. The Urga people are still prosperous, for great sums in religious tribute come from all Mongolia to this Lourdes of Lamaism. There are also many Chinamen who make large profits from wool.

Of a total trade in Urga estimated at twenty-five million roubles per year, nine tenths is in the hands of Celestials. The remainder is Russian, for the Mongols are entirely without a merchant class. Of the exports, wool is the main item. Some two hundred thousand _puds_ are sent from Urga annually, four fifths of which go to the United States. While cotton cloth, cutlery, kitchen-utensils, and other European goods come down from Russia, the bulk of the imports are brought from China by caravan, through Kalgan. Silks come from Shanghai, and tea from Hankow, passing via Peking. There is trade, too, with Ulasati in western Mongolia. It is the centre of a fur and hide country which is isolated from outlets toward Russia by the high mountains, and must send caravans to Kiahta. Its communication with China is either by Urga and Kalgan, or by the caravan-route further south.

When the holiday-time is over we see more of the Chinese traders. Sitting in the shops, with one of these, and glancing out over the little counter of the sales-room, we converse as the customers come and go.

The Russian in his shop shows all he has of wares, the red and magenta cloths, the enameled kettles, the cutlery and sweetmeats. But the Chinaman wraps his goods in hieroglyphic-covered papers, and all that can be seen are rows of long-stemmed brass-bowled pipes, and an array of silver and bronze teapots on shelves at one side. Very rare things, too, our Chinese host can produce. Shanghai silks of finest texture, ten roubles the _arsheen_; jade mouthpieces for the pipes at a hundred _taels_; Hankow tea culled from the tenderest shoots. Everything is labeled and systematized in the Chinaman’s place, and he goes at once to the packet which he wishes to show.

A dozen Chinese, with bright blue silk jackets over their black surtouts, invade now the home of the merchant. The red knot on their black skull-caps and the length of their queues and finger-nails show them to be men of some importance. They take off the bright-colored ear-tabs as they enter. They are down to buy wool. To-day they visit, next week they will trade. Then all but one will sit in the outer shop, while the spokesman alone will go into the inner room and confer with the merchant. From time to time the spokesman will go back to the party and consult, till in the end the bargain is made. They will all hold to the agreement, too, whichever way the market goes. For in this the Chinese are inflexibly honest. A local Chinaman dispatched a mounted messenger the six versts to Urga, to return to us twenty kopecks which he had overcharged by a slip of his abacus-adder.

Yet the Scotch engineers saw shells in the arsenals loaded with clay when the native troops went against the Japanese. The English miners in the Province of Shan-tung have had their profits cut to nothing by the official “squeezes,” and Chinese have bought in the depreciated stocks.

The ethic code of the squeeze seems to be very nice. It is a point of honor, almost always scrupulously observed, that the first-fruits of official graft go to repaying the one who advanced the money to buy the office. A Chinaman, who could not be trusted to administer honestly a trust fund of a hundred _taels_, will repay this obligation to his backer. Thus must he keep face.

From the tax-appraiser who numbers the sheep to the civil governor who receives the lumps of silver tribute for transmission to Peking, every official gets his squeeze. They say in the _eimuck_ of Ulasati, where sables are part of the tribute, that the officials take out the best furs and put back poor skins to keep the number the same; and in Urga, that the enormously rich administration takes a Tammany third of the tribute. There has never been a viceroy yet, it is reported, who has left Mongolia poor. Yet each official plays straight with his backer, his “belly-band.” Very curious is this race, and there live few Westerners who can at all understand it.

We ride back in the evening from the Chinese city (for none may stay for the night), buried in recurring reveries. How brightly glitters the face, and how barren is the heart in Maimachen! Never the thousand ties of kinship and affection, never the thrill of citizenship, never the love of a home. How little generosity, too, or sympathy for the people of the land! The Mongols are but “tame barbarians,” as of old were stigmatized the tributary Formosans. Now and then one finds a Chinaman out among the nomad Mongols. Perhaps he may be a watcher at a distant temple, perhaps a telegraph-operator on the two lines that go, one to Kalgan and Peking, one to Kiahta and Russia. Always he is something solitary--different. There is an almost sinister splendor in this aloofness--this self-sufficiency of walled cities and compounds where none but Chinese may dwell. What a rebuff of nationhood in the gates that shut out at night all save the alien outlanders! What contempt in the law that no woman of China may come among these Mongol people, as if the very air were contamination! How the natives are silently despised, whose bodies in death go to the dogs, while the Chinaman’s, in a casket, is sent back over the long leagues to his home!

The homeless, wifeless, Chinese city, with the quarter of Mongol women without the walls,--it is in many ways typical of all Chinese rule in Mongolia. For, as the Celestial trader defaults in the duty of marrying the Mongol mother of his children, so China defaults in many of the duties that are inherent in suzerainty. One resents the heavy Chinese yoke on the necks of these simple frank-hearted Mongolians. They are a race of great good-humored children, and they are exploited while disdained.

We are thinking of this unfairness as we ride back along the road to Urga. Behind is the distant Chinese city, the Manchu Viceroy’s straggling palace, the picketed prison-stockade. Before is the drooping tricolor banner of the Czar, and the white and green of the Greek Church, with its far-seen golden crucifix. A crowd of brilliantly-clad Mongols, lamas and laymen and girls and youths, are strolling back from Maimachen. They are laughing and chattering, and in uncouth playfulness are pushing one another about across the road.

Half a dozen of the _Zinzin’s_ Chinese foot-guard are likewise coming from Urga, stolid-faced, superior. As they reach the tumultuous band it sinks into silence, and the men crowd to the side of the road that the Chinese may pass.

[Illustration: THE GREAT WALL]

They tramp by without a glance. Then out from the Russian barrack-gate swings a little Cossack in his great black sheepskin hat, gray tunic, clattering curved sabre, boots and spurs. He is one of the Zabaikalskaia Buriats, whom Russians call Bratskie, the brotherly people. He speaks a tongue so similar to the Mongol that all these people can understand him. They look up to him as a rich relative, fortunate in overflowing measure. For on the pilgrimages of Buddhist Buriats to Urga, their wives have told the wondering Mongol women of the sewing-machines which they have at home to stitch linings, and have allowed the visitors to peep into their mirrors. The Mongol men have admired the Buriats’ breech-loading rifle, worth six horses at current quotations. They have enviously heard tell that in Russia one pays no cow-_alba_, but the young men get a uniform and free food when they ride out to give their Cossack service to the Czar. They have listened to Buriat boasts of the warm houses of Siberia, and stacks of hay, and stored-up harvests. So Mongols smile when the Buriats come to their _girs_. They say, “Rich smooth Buriats! Great lords! Give candle, give sugar, give tobacco, give vodka.”

Has not a little Zabaikalskaia Buriat reason to swagger when he starts from the Russian barrack-gate to see his lady in Urga? And should a Cossack of the Czar step aside for a Chinaman in the shadow of the Eagles? Head erect, with a look to right and then to left, hand on sabre, he swings straight down the centre of the road, and right through the Chinese soldiers. Without dispute they open a way. He chucks a not unwilling girl under the chin as he passes the Mongols, and he is good-naturedly hailed by the rest: “Hello, Cossack! Why so fast? She has gone away with a lama.” And he goes a bit faster toward Urga.

These Cossacks, terrible in war, friends and equals with the conquered in peace, are those who have held the Russian vanguard in this march to China,--the march which began when the two _hatamans_ of Moscow, commanded by Ivan the Terrible, started in 1507 on their long tramp eastward. The Cossacks it was whom Yermak led to the conquest of Sibir. Through them, in storm and stress, despite oppression and convict-gangs, with faults and failings, omissions and commissions, the advance of Russia has been the way of civilization where none could otherwise have come.

“It will mean much when a Russian railway follows our trail from Kiahta,” says Alexsimevich; and André adds: “They will all be glad when the Cossacks come to Kalgan.”

VII

RUSSIA IN EVOLUTION

New times have come to Russia with the events that have halted her armies. The Slav, looking and reaching outward, has been hurled violently back upon himself, and he turns to look inward. The stream of Slavic civilization still flows eastward. But now held back at the frontiers, its tide is rising behind the impounding barriers and is lifting on its wave the level of national life. Its scour is undermining here and there, its laden currents are depositing and filling in the interstices of the social fabric. The struggle is intensified to achieve representative government, to secure administrative reform, to relieve the distress of the peasantry. The people are in evolutionary throes and are sweeping forward in the arts of peace, in the science of government, and in the myriad lines of internal development.

The movements of empire-advance have been noted because they have been conspicuously visualized. But the economic and social growth have been only slightly regarded by our western world, intent upon great events, crises, conflicts lost and won. The seizure of a hamlet in Manchuria has obscured the founding of twenty cities in Siberia.

The continent-cleaving Siberian Railway has now revealed, in the Russian occupation of northern Asia, not an exploiting colonial enterprise, but a race-movement akin to the European invasion of our Aryan ancestors. The upward struggle of a people striving to find itself is embodied in imperial rescripts and armed revolts, in dumas and dynamite, where rival titans grapple for the throw. There is now therefore in the world a more earnest watching of this metamorphosing Russian people. What are the types of civilization, the beliefs, the manners of thought, the institutions that are to hold mastery over the largest area on the globe occupied by a single nation?

To comprehend a people and the course of its evolution one must pierce below the surface of ephemeral and contemporary incident, and probe the primitive racial elements. Russia is to-day iceberg-like. The crumbling, upper ice, honeycombed by eating waves, is exposed; but submerged and unseen is the massive blue block beneath. Because rotten surface-structures are obvious, many fail to appreciate what lies in the depths. There comes understanding for much when one sounds the ancient sources in race-history.

From the earliest times Russia lay across the path of incessant invasion from Asia. In 1224 the Mongols swept down upon the old Scythian plains. There were no mountain fastnesses in which the sparse population could defend itself. The followers of Genghis Khan, through the years that followed, destroyed town after town,--Bolgari, Suzdal, Yaroslavl, Tver,--devastated Volkynia, and Galicia, until all Russia, save Novgorod, was brought under Tatar rule. Their devastations cut off the population of whole provinces, and changed old Russian cities, such as Kiev, to hybrid towns of Asiatics. At Sarai on the Volga, for two centuries Tatar sovereigns ruled; and here from being pagan they became adherents of Islam. Russia’s foreign master was confirmed in a religion as antagonistic as was his race. To these aliens Russia gave humiliating homage and paid tribute, and from their khans her czar received permit to rule. Thus in her infancy she had a foreign race, not as servile members of the humble labor class, but in the wild, fierce scourge of conquerors.