A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  At the port of Kuei Fu, about 1200 miles up-river, the Chinese New Year came upon them and everyone except Isabella determinedly downed tools for a few days. Tremendous, malodorous feasts of salt pork, dried fish and vegetables were cooked up, from a nearby festive ‘sing-song boat’ came the thrum and wail of dancing girls, and Isabella’s lean laopan escaped into a two-day opium-inspired Elysium, ‘his toothless, mummified face … expressive, usually, of nothing but fiendish greed, with its muscles relaxed and its deep hard lines smoothed out’. Most of the crew were opium smokers, and at night the stern of her boat ‘was a downright opium den with fourteen ragged men curled up on their quilts with their opium pipes beside them, in the height of sensuous felicity’. In the western province of Szechuan, where the poppy was grown – its floppy white petals shining innocently in the sunlight – she found that ‘opium houses are as common as gin shops in our London slums’. The prevalence of ‘the foreign smoke’, as the Chinese called it, was deplored by the authorities, and by foreigners who affirmed that it was a main cause for the country’s economic decline. ‘Edicts are still issued against the use of opium,’ remarked Dr George Morrison, the famous Times correspondent who had travelled along a similar route across China some months earlier. ‘They are drawn up by Chinese philanthropists over a quiet pipe of opium, signed by opium-smoking officials whose revenues are derived from the poppy and posted near fields of poppy by the opium-smoking magistrates who own them.’ In these circumstances there was little hope of controlling the drug’s sale. The rich smoked chiefly ‘Canton opium’ imported from India and blended with the home-grown product; the middle classes could only afford Chinese opium mixed with ashes of the drug already once smoked; the poor, such as Isabella’s crew, sucked ashes of the second smoking, adulterated, perhaps, with ground pigskin, and the real down-and-outs made do ‘with eating or drinking the ashes of the third burning’ that were sometimes mixed with treacle.

  Well, for rich and poor alike it was New Year in Kuei Fu, smokers reached for their pipe-dreams, river junks cavorted with bunting and coloured lanterns, shops blossomed with huge red and gold paper flowers, and every tree, well, statue, fence, plough, lintel, coffin was plastered with an appropriate prayer. ‘May I know the affairs of the world for six thousand years’ a scholar might plead; a shopkeeper, less ambitious, might ask that his profits ‘be like the morning sun rising on the clouds’. Everyone wore their New Year’s best, women had flowers in their hair, toddlers had new toys, and rich men, snuggled in sedan chairs, dashed about with card-cases. Firecrackers sputtered, temple gongs and cymbals banged through clouds of godly incense, and one small foreign lady, dressed soberly, not part of the festivities, pottered busily about her little cabin in the houseboat, moored among hundreds of others on the bank. ‘I had Baber’s incomparable papers on Far Western China to study and enjoy, a journal to “write up”, much mending and even making to accomplish, and, above all, there were photographic negatives to develop and print, and prints to tone, and the difficulties enhanced the zest of these processes and made me think, with a feeling of complacent superiority, of the amateurs who need “dark rooms”, sinks, water “laid on”, tables and other luxuries. Night supplied me with a dark room; the majestic Yangtze was “laid on”; a box served for a table; all else can be dispensed with.

  ‘I lined my “stall” with muslin curtains and newspapers, and finding that the light of the opium lamps still came in through the chinks, I tacked up my blankets and slept in my clothes and fur coat. With “water water everywhere”, water was the great difficulty. The Yangtze holds any amount of fine mud in suspension, which for drinking purposes is usually precipitated with alum, and unless filtered, deposits a fine, even veil on the negative. I had only a pocket filter, which produced about three quarts of water a day, of which Be-dien invariably abstracted some for making tea, leaving me with only enough for a final wash, not always quite effectual, as the critic will see from some of the illustrations.

  ‘I found that the most successful method of washing out “hypo” was to lean out over the gunwale and hold the negative in the wash of the Great River, rapid even at the mooring place, and give it some final washes in the filtered water…. Printing was a great difficulty, and I only overcame it by hanging the printing-frames over the side. When all these rough arrangements were successful, each print was a joy and a triumph, nor was there any disgrace in failure’. Knowing the procedure, it is pleasant to observe that the plate that follows her description in the first edition (and is reproduced here as plate 35,) entitled ‘The Author’s Trackers at Dinner,’ is faintly speckled with flecks of real Yangtze mud.

  II

  A few days after these festivities, Isabella’s river journey ended at Wan, the stately Myriad City, its temples, pagodas, ornamented gateways splotched with oriental colours that looked resplendent at a distance, garish on closer view. The Yangtze drops away to the south-west at Wan, and as Isabella wanted to continue due west for three hundred miles to the city of Paoning Fu, she had perforce to leave the boat. Travelling by road put her entirely at the mercy of the country. There was no cabin into which she could retreat from manifestations of local xenophobia – and this, as she discovered, was a considerable drawback.

  In order, as she hoped, to neutralise hostility by conforming to native custom, she travelled in an open chair and wore Chinese dress. At least, she wore loose Chinese robes (the sort of over-all mantle with capacious, quaintly-filled pockets that Mr Walshe described) and straw shoes, but she injudiciously topped the ensemble with a large bowl-shaped wicker hat of Japanese design, ‘the perfect travelling hat’ in her estimation. Neither did she go to the lengths of Dr Morrison who sported a pigtail attached to a skull-cap. Perhaps she should have done, for the peasants appreciated a bit of hamming. Once, when surrounded by an unfriendly crowd, Morrison removed his cap and scratched his head and ‘when they saw the spurious pigtail they began to smile, and when I flicked the dust off a table with it, they laughed hilariously’. It was in any case, of course, impossible to conceal all signs of racial differences, which sometimes aroused the people to fury or revulsion. ‘What ugly eyes and straight eyebrows’, ‘Why is her hair like wool?’ were two of the more printable comments on Isabella’s appearance, and, most commonly, ‘What nasty big feet she has!’ By western standards her feet were very small, but those of her female detractors were deliberately deformed to a length of about three inches, dreadful crippled stumps in foreign eyes, but ‘golden lilies’ to their male admirers.

  This barbarous custom was almost universal in Western China (except among the Manchus) and as Isabella watched the peasant women tripping and toppling over the stony tracks, she wondered again at the deeply rooted conservatism of these people. When the first railway lines had been laid at Shanghai, the Chinese had torn them up in rage, saying the spirits of the earth would be disturbed; when the first telegraph wires were stretched across the paddies, they cut down the posts because the rusty liquid that accumulated on the wires was undoubtedly poisonous, blood of the offended spirits of the air; when foreigners began deep-cast mining in the interior there were riots, because the feng-shui of the whole area was being dislocated. It took a long time for change to wreak its havoc and bring opportunity to China, and meanwhile people travelled by cart and junk as they always had and the women hobbled as custom bade them.

  And yet, as in Korea, this very ‘grooviness’ liberated and challenged Isabella. The challenge of the Chinese inn was similar to that of the Korean, and on her first arrival at one she admitted ‘a cowardly inclination to abbreviate’ her journey. There was the same foul mud-hole of a yard with piles of human and animal excreta dumped near the well; the floor of her room was like a cesspool, its straw pallet crawled with vermin, and next door was a sty full of honking, smelly beasts. However, she girded her loins, told herself that she had ‘degenerated into a Sybarite’, set up her bed on the oiled sheet that effectively repelled frontal verminous attack, ate a bowl of curry and ri
ce and prepared to rest. By eight, all was quiet, except for ‘the slighter noises, such as pigs grunting, rats or mice gnawing, crickets chirping, beetles moving about in straw and other insect disturbances [which] made themselves very audible and informed me that I was surrounded by a world of busy and predatory life, loving darkness; but while I thought upon it and on the solitary plunge into China which was to be made on the morrow, I fell asleep, and never woke till Be-dien came to my door at seven the next morning with the information that there was no fire and he could not get me any breakfast! That was the first of five months of nights of solid sleep from 8 p.m. onwards. I only allowed myself half a candle per day, and after my journal letter was written there was no object in sitting up.’ And in this fashion she soon ‘came to enjoy’ staying in dens which at first had seemed ‘foul and hopeless’.

  Though Chinese inns were little better than Korean, there was a pervasive air of activity and sufficiency abroad – a rasp of water-mills, a plod of ploughing buffalo, a creak of farm-carts – that made a pleasant contrast to the droopy Korean doldrums. The tracks were bustling with baggage coolies laden with opium, rush-wicks, indigo and paper for the Yangtze junks, or bringing from them salt, utensils and the ubiquitous Japanese cottons. The fields blazed with the promise of crops – spring-green rice terraces stepping up the cliffs, flaring yellow rape, grown for its oil, black-purple blossom of the bean, and, laced here and there, groves of bamboo, ‘a creation of exquisite grace, light and delicate with its stem as straight as an arrow’. The bamboo was a universal product: its slenderest twigs were used for writing-pencils, its shoots for food, its roots for carved images of birds and beasts, its arrow-straight stems for sail-ribs, wattle fences, house-joists, spear-shafts, carrying-poles, aqueduct tubes; its leaves were sewn upon cord for raincloaks, swept into heaps for manure, matted into roof-thatch, stuffed into mattresses; its branches were cut and splintered into forms innumerable – of chopsticks, screens and combs, of water-wheels, flutes and stools, of bellows, buckets and bird-cages. And in addition the bamboo was, as Isabella remarked, so very gracious – an ornament in every garden, a shade in every village street.

  So the spring-time countryside pleased and interested Isabella, and though the rural folk were suspicious, they did not openly molest her. But then, unfortunately, she reached the city of Liang-shan Hsien and there endured what must have been one of the most unpleasant and frightening episodes in all her travelling days. Considering that she was utterly isolated from all outside help, she relates it coolly, without a hint of that rather coy playing of the plucky-heroine-in-dire-distress role that was often resorted to by her contemporary ‘adventuresses’. Incidentally, this lack of special pleading on account of her vulnerable feminity often won her commendation. The Spectator, for instance, deplored the increasing numbers of ‘Ladies Errant’ who went into great detail about how their ‘delicacy and womanliness’ had been so nearly violated by the perils and crudities of foreign parts. ‘Mrs Bishop,’ the writer concluded, ‘has never been deterred from any undertaking by its discomforts or dangers, and yet we do not remember ever having heard that she laid claim to or received any special consideration on account of her sex.’ And so here, Isabella’s nasty tale goes plainly, like this.

  As she was carried in her open chair through the city gates, ‘men began to pour into the roadway from every quarter, hooting, and some ran ahead – always a bad sign. I proposed to walk, but the chair-men said it was not safe. The open chair however, was equally an abomination. The crowd became dense and noisy; there was much hooting and yelling. I recognised many cries of “Yang kwei-tze” (foreign devil) and “Child-Eater!” swelling into a roar; the narrow street became almost impassable; my chair was struck repeatedly with sticks; mud and unsavoury missiles were thrown with excellent aim; a well-dressed man, bolder or more cowardly than the rest, hit me a smart whack across the chest, which left a weal; others from behind hit me across the shoulders; the howling was infernal; it was an angry Chinese mob. There was nothing for it but to sit up stolidly, and not to appear hurt, frightened or annoyed, though I was all three.

  ‘Unluckily the bearers were shoved to one side, and stumbling over some wicker oil casks (empty however) knocked them over, when there was a scrimmage, in which they were nearly knocked down. One runner dived into an inn doorway, which the innkeeper closed in a fury, saying he would not admit a foreigner; but he shut the door on the chair, and I got out on the inside, bearers and porters squeezing in after me, one chair-pole being broken in the crush. I was hurried to the top of a large inn yard and shoved into a room, or rather a dark shed. The innkeeper tried, I was told, to shut and bar the street-door, but it was burst open and the whole of the planking torn down. The mob surged in 1500 or 2000 strong, led by some literati, as I could see through the chinks.

  ‘There was then a riot in earnest; the men had armed themselves with pieces of the doorway, and were hammering at the door and wooden front of my room, surging against the door to break it down, howling and yelling. “Yang-kwei-tze!” had been abandoned as too mild and the yells, I learned afterwards, were such as “Beat her!” “Kill her!” “Burn her!” The last they tried to carry into effect. My den had a second wooden wall to another street, through which they inserted some lighted matches, which fell on some straw and lighted it. It was damp, and I easily trod it out, and dragged a board over the hole. The place was all but pitch-dark, and was full of casks, boards and chunks of wood. The door was secured by strong wooden bars. I sat down on something in front of the door with my revolver, intending to fire at the men’s legs if they got in, tried the bars every now and then, looked through the chinks, felt the position serious – darkness, no possibility of escaping, nothing of humanity to appeal to, no help, and a mob as pitiless as fiends. Indeed, the phrase “hell let loose” applied to the howls and their inspiration.

  ‘They brought joists up wherewith to break in the door, and at every rush – and the rushes were made with a fiendish yell – I expected it to give way. At last the upper bar yielded, and the upper part of the door caved in a little. They doubled their efforts, and the door in another minute would have fallen in, when the joists were thrown down, and in the midst of a sudden silence there was the rush, like the swirl of autumn leaves, of many feet, and in a few minutes the yard was clear, and soldiers, who remained for the night, took up positions there. One of my men, after the riot had lasted for an hour, had run to the yamen with the news that the people were “murdering a foreigner”, and the mandarin sent soldiers with orders for the tumult to cease, which he might have sent two hours before, as it can hardly be supposed that he did not know of it.’

  Such an experience would have totally unnerved a lesser woman; as Isabella says, it was generally agreed that ‘no one who has heard the howling of an angry Chinese mob can ever forget it’. This horrendous yowl had echoed in the ears of many a foreign consul and missionary during the past decade. Western homes and offices at the Yangtze treaty ports were looted and burned in the xenophobic riots of 1891; during the Sino-Japanese war there were sporadic outbursts of violence against foreigners who just ‘looked on with their hands in their sleeves’ while the Chinese were being defeated; and, of course, the undercurrent of hatred was swelling into the tumultous tragedy of the Boxer Rebellion, which began about three years after Isabella finally left the country. In the latter case, a plucky show of British unflappability was not to be enough; but it stood Isabella in good stead, and she concludes her account of the Liang-shan Hsien incident by saying that, though ‘half-inclined to return to Wan’, she decided to continue her journey and was glad she did so. Once set upon a course she had the stubborn courage of the explorer and it took heaven and earth to deflect her.

  The accusation of ‘child-eater’, incidentally, that was hurled at her during the riot resulted from a widespread belief that westerners had a taste for Chinese babies. The hated ‘barbarians’ were also accused of burying babies under railway sleepers to give the lines stabil
ity and of grinding infant eyes into a powder used in the manufacture of cameras. A rather sickening corollary of this, vouched for by the reliable Dr Morrison though not mentioned by Isabella, was that the people sometimes offered to sell live female babies to the foreigners for use as stew-meat or rail-ballast!

  The morning after the disturbance, Liang-shan Hsien was sullenly silent, carpenters were repairing the broken doorway, a new pole had been fixed on her chair and she was carried away unmolested by her coolies. These good-natured fellows remained loyal to her throughout her pilgrimage, and she must have retained in her old age that frank and unassuming cordiality which, some thirty years before, had enabled her to jolly along the Scottish emigrants and still helped her to ‘get the best’ from servants of all kinds. The next incident provoking native choler was light relief by comparison, and occurred while she and the bearers were crossing a foot-wide dyke between two flooded paddies and met ‘a portly man in a closed chair’ travelling in the opposite direction. The coolies of each party yelled defiance and ‘came straight on till our poles were nearly touching. The clamour was tremendous, my seven men and his two all shouting and screaming at once, as if in a perfect fury, while he sat in supercilious calm, I achieving the calm, but not the superciliousness. In the midst of the fracas his chair and its bearers went over into the water. The noise was indescribable and my bearers, whom I cannot acquit of having had something to do with the disaster, went off at a run with yells and peals of laughter, leaving the traveller floundering in the mire, not breathing, but roaring execrations.’