by Carl Crow
The fact that Chinese officials stubbornly refused to give concession for the building of railways and telegraph lines was often looked on as evidence of an implacable hatred. The methods of the Chinese officials were exasperating to the last degree. With irrefutable logic the foreigners proved that the building of this railway or that telegraph line would be a good thing for the country. The Chinese officials never argued about the matter but told ghost stories. They told the foreign diplomats of strange demons that live in the ground and are likely to rise in fury if their resting places are disturbed, and of ghosts in the air and others that made their homes in the placid pools of water. The leveling of a right of way or the digging of a ditch might arouse these ghosts to fury in which they would burn buildings, destroy crops by drought or bring a whole neighborhood down with sickness. For these good and sufficient reasons the concessions asked for could not be granted.
It is strange that foreigners of that day - even stranger that foreign historians of a later day should have taken these ghost stories seriously - that is, should have thought that the Chinese officials believed them. They were very disconcerting to the diplomats, about like introducing the theory of relativity into a discussion of the price of cotton or wheat. Certainly the suave, placid-faced officials who told the stories were not unduly frightened by their own ghosts. The taotai who had advanced all those terrifying reasons why Shanghai and Woosung should not be connected by a telegraph line was, a few years later, feverishly building telegraph lines of his own in another province.
The truth of the matter was that the Chinese were desperately afraid of any further foreign encroachments. While as keenly alive as the foreigners were to the value of these modern gadgets such as railways and telegraph lines, they were afraid that the price they would have to pay for them would be too high, and history has indicated that they were entirely right. If China had allowed the foreigners a free hand in developing the country, there would have resulted a prosperity in which both Chinese and foreigners would have shared, but the problems created would have been more unsolvable than those which have aggravated Sino-foreign relations for more than a century. An Imperial prince unwittingly stated China’s position when he angrily blurted out, “China will build her own railways when she is ready for them.” That is what she did later though under the conditions made necessary by the fact that she had to build them on borrowed money.
When thwarted in his plans the foreign devils broke the laws and ignored the regulations of China with cheerful insolence. The proposal to bring a cable from Hong Kong to Shanghai was approved by the Chinese government with the provision that the end of the cable should not be landed in Chinese soil but anchored on a lightship some miles out at sea where presumably the fury of the demons would be expended. The cable was laid under what appeared to be meticulous regard for these conditions but in the meantime a bootleg telegraph and cable line was constructed from the lightship to the International Settlement. It was never officially brought to the attention of the Chinese government and so nothing was ever said about it.
Attempts to build a railway were less successful. Land was bought for what was announced would be a carriage road to connect Shanghai and Woosung and when the promoters had their right of way completed as far as Kiangwan a shipment of steel rails and a small locomotive arrived from England consigned to a British firm. It then was admitted that plans were on foot for the building of a tramway and it was more of a tramway than a railway that was actually built. The tracks were only thirty inches apart and the locomotive weighed just a little more than a ton. When two proud promoters were photographed in front of it they had to sit on the ground to keep from completely obscuring it.
The road was an immediate financial success as were all railways built in China. It was so much of a success that news of it penetrated the courts of the Forbidden City. There the ghosts were stirred up, but they were foreign ghosts - ghosts with red faces and billycock hats who would own all of China if they were allowed to run this devilish contraption over the country. A Chinese patriot obligingly committed suicide by throwing himself in front of the train as it roared along at about fifteen miles art hour. Then the ghosts of China appeared in the persons of enraged peasants who threw rocks at the train just as Englishmen and Americans had thrown rocks at the trains in an earlier day. The tumult continued and the Chinese government bought the line. In a fine gesture of contempt the rails were torn up and with the toy locomotive shipped to Formosa and thrown on the beach where they finally disappeared in rust.
A generation later the road was built as a Chinese government enterprise and extended all the way to Nanking.
Boycotts against one nation or another or general anti-foreign demonstrations were for some years so common that when the noise of one had died down we always wondered how long it would be before the next one would break out. On every occasion of this sort there were always Chinese friends who would explain that the trouble was being caused by students, or “loafers” which was frequently the case. In the meantime personal contacts between foreigners and Chinese grew in volume and cordiality. The prosperity of thousands of Chinese firms depended on the prosperity of the foreign firms. The wages paid in foreign factories were not high but they were the highest in the country. In the important task of making a living the foreigner and the Chinese were bound together. The missionaries established other ties. They built schools and hospitals and took an active part in the life of the community in which they lived.
In all matters of municipal government the foreign-controlled city of Shanghai set an example tardily followed by the Chinese cities. The Shanghai Municipal Council put on publicity campaigns against smallpox, flies and mosquitoes, and the authorities in places like Soochow or Wuhu copied their posters. Prejudice of the Shanghai Chinese against vaccination or against taking the life of a fly or a mosquito were first broken down by the S.M.C. and from that focal point the light spread to far distant places. The hard-boiled taipans who ran the city government of Shanghai certainly never thought of themselves as reformers but they must share with the missionaries credit for helping to destroy prejudices, combat ignorance and make possible the progress of China.
Admittedly the Chinese have in the past suffered much from the foreign devils - political injustice and a certain amount of social ostracism. Neither affected personally more than a very small percentage of the population and those in isolated groups. There was a wide difference between the conduct of the white foreign devils and that of the dwarf brown devil from Japan. The studied system of terrorism which is a part of the military policy of the latter has filled the hearts of the Chinese with a hatred that will endure for generations. On the other hand the attack by Japan has drawn Chinese and the white foreigner closer together. The latter has been given a new concept of China while watching her fight bravely and desperately against overwhelming odds. The cynical old China Hand softened in spite of himself and for the first time in history gave wholehearted approval of the Chinese government. He is now willing to admit that John Chinaman is not only a gentleman and a scholar but a very brave man. Although British and American missionaries were the leaders in relief work for the Chinese war sufferers, they were supported by funds contributed by China Coast business men. The Chinese have forgotten the injustice of the past in the face of the greater injustice of the present. It is on the basis of this new understanding that the foreign devils and the sons of Han will live together in the future.
XVIII
The roast duck of old cathay
“Though lamb may be good, it is difficult to cook it to suit everyone’s taste.”
One of the treasures Marco Polo took back with him to Venice was the knowledge of how to prepare macaroni, spaghetti and noodles. Chinese had been eating them for centuries before Rome was founded. But they became so popular among Marco’s countrymen that they are now better known as Italian than as Chinese dishes. They were so far superior to any of the crude and half-cooked foods of that period
that macaroni became the symbol of gastronomic luxury just as caviar is today. “He tied a feather in his hat and called it macaroni.”
Marco Polo learned about these and other wheat dishes in Northern China for there is where he spent the greater part of his time during his quarter century in China. Later he learned something about Southern food, including rice, when he served as governor of Yangchow. On his return home after enjoying the best food in China he must have found the fare obtainable in Venice rather sorry. The stories he told of the meals he had eaten in China stirred the imagination of the cooks of Venice as they had never been stirred before and the profession of chef came into existence. As they worked with different materials they produced different dishes but the inspiration for good food came from China.
Spaghetti and macaroni, although they were great delicacies when introduced to the Italians, were among the cheapest and commonest dishes at the Court of the great Khan. In fact Marco had better food in China and a greater variety of food than he could possibly have enjoyed any place in Europe. There were a hundred other Chinese dishes he or the Venetians who followed him to China learned to prepare. They were undoubtedly responsible for revolutionizing the kitchens of Europe, though for a long time only their neighbors on the Mediterranean enjoyed the benefits. It was not until two hundred years after the death of Marco that Catherine de Medici improved the barbaric food of France by the introduction of Italian cooks.
Not only did Marco Polo learn about delicious new dishes but he also brought back with him a lot of refinements of the table, for even the poorest Chinese ate from porcelain bowls with chopsticks. As a bucolic substitute for chopsticks the Italians introduced the use of the fork, a two-pronged instrument copied after the fork used for pitching hay to cows. The use of this fork instead of the fingers for conveying food to the mouth was looked on by the French and later by the British as an affectation on the part of the Italians, just as napkins are still considered in some rugged parts of the world. At the time of James I, Englishmen who ate with forks were considered sissies and the vulgar told ribald stories about them. There were a great many people who thought it was a silly affectation copied from the Italian dandies and that forks would probably go out of fashion in a few years.
The thousands of foreigners who went to China from the Mediterranean in the early part of the thirteenth century found what was to them something entirely new - a people of discriminating taste who ate for the enjoyment of food and not for the sole purpose of appeasing hunger. More than a thousand years before this the Chinese had thoroughly explored the food resources of the country and cooking had gone through the cycle it follows everywhere. Poverty drove people to search out everything that could be eaten that would assuage hunger. There is no animal or vegetable product of the land, the air or the sea that has not at one time or another been popped into a Chinese pot and the results tried out by hungry people. It was only in this way that they discovered that the lips of otherwise inedible fish and the fins of sharks were delicious, that there was nourishment in the fungus that grows on trees and that in the back of the locust is a tiny but quite delicious bit of white meat. It was a similar search for food that led the Pennsylvania Dutch into so many strange culinary adventures and triumphs culminating in the invention of that noble dish, scrapple. What poverty had discovered, wealth improved. From the emperor down, everyone encouraged his cooks to strive for recipes which would tickle his appetite. Cooking cannot be perfected as an art without these two incentives to endeavor, first poverty and then wealth, and each was found in China in a superlative degree.
The British and Americans who later went to live in China could have provided themselves with individual chopsticks and adopted a purely Chinese diet with no harm to themselves. But food fads and prejudices are not easily changed. The Englishmen who set up housekeeping in China scorned the many delicious ways in which the Chinese cook fish. He stuck to the tasteless boiled fish with the one sauce the Englishman knows, a sauce which he had imported in large quantities. He turned back the culinary clock in China by insisting that the Chinese learn how to cook British dishes. The idea of the English teaching the Chinese anything about cooking was really absurd for they were the poorest cooks in the world and the Americans were not much if any better. When the English discovered that meat could be roasted over a spit so that it would be cooked without scorching, they thought they had just about reached the ultimate in cookery and they learned little more and learned that slowly. It was not until 1539 that they knew enough different recipes to compile a thin cookbook. But the Englishmen who came to China from India did make a genuine contribution to the joy of living for they brought a taste for curry and that indispensable adjunct - chutney. This was the kind of dish the Chinese could understand - one that required infinite attention to details - and they became expert in its preparation. Some foreigners were famous in Shanghai because of the ability of their cooks to prepare curry. What a princely dish! And what a mockery it is when prepared by cooks in America!
Chinese who cooked for Englishmen in Canton were amazed at a diet which required nothing but boiling and roasting, of a taste for condiments that could be satisfied with either horse-radish or mustard. It’s too bad some Chinese cook employed by an Englishman during that early period didn’t keep a diary. It would be very illuminating to read what he thought of the strange habits of these red-faced barbarians who insisted on spotless napery and shining silver but knew nothing about the niceties of food. The Americans were just as bad with their insistence on hot cakes for breakfast. It wasn’t until several generations later that Americans began eating a light cereal breakfast which is almost identical with the breakfast of all Chinese. The cooks the foreigners employed could have prepared wonderful Chinese meals but were compelled to learn how to cook these dishes which the cooks themselves would not eat. After more than a century in the foreigner’s kitchen they have never acquired a liking for his food. The servants in a foreign household will shamelessly pilfer from the sugar bowl but they never nibble from the food in the icebox. But the foreigner never got any gravy. The cook always kept that for his own rice. After years of residence in China I almost forgot what it was.
The Englishman might search the food stalls of Canton and find little to tempt the appetite. There was pork, to be sure, but no great cuts of beef for roasting. As the pigs were scavengers, foreigners rarely ate pork. One thing that he did eat until the very name of it nauseated him was chicken. The Chinese chicken is not the pampered pet of the American farmyard with regular meal hours. The Chinese rooster exultingly calls to his flock of hens but he rarely has anything more than a few grains of spilled rice to offer them. Chickens have to scratch for a living, and all they have to scratch for is food that has been overlooked by their owners. A hen is never fat and never killed until too old to be an egg producer. The foreigner in China always hopes that the chicken will be good but it never is. But in spite of its dense population China abounds in game, and there are always pheasants and other game in the markets. I ate my first pheasant, my first wild duck and my first venison in China and I suppose there are thousands of others who had the same experience. Pheasants which can be had for the expense of a charge of shot are cheaper than chickens and are also better fed and make better eating. But how tired one gets of them for they are always turning up on the menu.
The foreigner gingerly sampled Chinese vegetables and found new delights in the Chinese cucumbers and cabbage. Shantung cabbage is now grown in America, but apparently the crisp and tender Chinese cucumber can only be produced on its native soil. To one who has grown accustomed to the Chinese product, the American cucumber is wooden and tasteless, fit only for pickling. One of the most pleasant memories I have of my recent visit to Western China was the enjoyment of the first really good cucumbers I had eaten for more than two years. The Chinese vegetable marrow was another delight but was perfect only when cooked and served Chinese style. The huge squash is used as a container in which chicken soup is c
ooked, delicately flavored with the fresh seeds of lotus.
The foreigner was rarely tempted to try Chinese food and many of them lived a lifetime in China without ever tasting roast duck or sweet-and-sour pork. The local restaurants were not attractive. To the Chinese, food is the important thing and the furniture of a meal received scant consideration. Having invented chopsticks and porcelain bowls they were content with those implements and devoted the rest of their time to the exploration of food. The surroundings in which it is served are often indescribably filthy. The floor of the restaurant is rarely swept and the tablecloth will almost invariably reveal mementoes of previous meals served. To the hungry man these things mean nothing, and the Chinese assume a hearty appetite to be a natural state of man. It was not until American returned students began fussing about such things that Chinese restaurant keepers started cleaning up their places and making them attractive. As soon as this was done foreigners suddenly discovered that they liked Chinese food but that was not until a few years ago.
Once they learned what kind of food the foreigners wanted to eat the Chinese cooks did a very satisfactory job of feeding them. Most of them were brought up in the British tradition because the first Chinese cooks were employed by the British and there is still a trace of that influence to be found in most of them. Roast beef with Yorkshire pudding is a dish which every one can prepare. To most Chinese cooks the most satisfactory employer is one who follows the old mid-Victorian tradition of a big joint of roast beef on Thursday with cold slices all the rest of the week. Generations of French, Americans and other nationals have smashed that tradition but there is another one which is made of hardier stuff. The most aggravating of the British traditions is the idea held by every Chinese cook and houseboy that the only way to serve toast is on a nice silver rack where it will have an opportunity to get cold with the least possible waste of time.