by Cecil Beaton
Monday, June 19th, Chungking
The Ministry of Information continues to send telegrams listing ever more subjects for me to cover before leaving China. I am somewhat resentful that so much trouble is taken in London to organize work for me which, once in the files, seems to remain ignored. It is, however, heartening to know that the whole outfit here are impressed with the amount of work I have done. Horace Seymour told me he will write to Brendan telling him that, under the present conditions of ‘flap’, I could not be expected to do more. It seems that the Japanese are advancing in the south, and there has been talk of giving up the British newspaper in Kweilin. The Ambassador said that it was right that we should abandon the hospital in Changsha, but the British must teach the Chinese a lesson in courage. It appears that Hollington Tong has said, ‘The British are again a flying army.’
As a result of an attack of dysentery, added to a certain nervous exhaustion after the strain of the trip to Chengtu, I am a bit on edge. While I was doing a drawing of her, Lady Seymour remarked that I seemed depressed. Perhaps I am, but I thank heaven for her friendship, for her nice home, and its comparative comforts and peace. Her news from England was heartening: apparently the robot bombs are not doing much damage, and the advance continues satisfactorily in France. The Cherbourg peninsula is now cut off.
After the evening meal (tinned sausages and bacon) with Stanley Smith and his heterogeneous household, we discussed the wastage here of effort and money. Because the Treasury took five months to answer a request for 100,000 pounds, the money was worth only a quarter of the amount that it would have been had surety come through within six weeks, etc., etc. Stanley worked out that the petrol alone for sending me to Chengtu would cost 300 pounds. He also remarked that I would never have been able to achieve so much work in Chungking had I not been staying with the Ambassador. If we had had to rely upon the Chinese Ministry of Information for making connections, I would still be waiting, cap and camera in hand.
Tuesday, June 20th
The pitiless rain continues — fog — mist. Early descent, with the Seymours, of the muddy mountainside only to discover, at the Press bureau, that Henry Wong, my cicerone, was unable to accompany me on a photographic outing today. A wait of two hours, reading torn magazines, before a Mr Lu appeared. In spite of leaden light and late start dozens of rolls were taken and gaps filled for the Ministry of Information visiting the Roman Catholic cathedral, all bombed but the spire, the principal fire station (the firemen wear huge Aladdin hats of black and gold straw), and a nursery school for the kids of Government officials, too badly off to afford nurses.
I had wanted, also, to photograph some war orphans but there was the usual hanky-panky and dishonesty. At first Mr Lu was told I had already photographed them. When I denied this, it transpired that they did not wish them to be photographed. This, it appears, was a punishment for the fact that I was alleged to have photographed the New Life building without permission. It seems everything has to be ‘prepared’ before being photographed, so the orphans’ faces must be made up. Lady S. says there are about a dozen brats farmed out to be shown off in different places for official visits. When she went with Madame Cliiang to one hostel they recognized the same little ‘orphans’ serving them tea as at another centre they’d been to previously. At 2 o’clock, I returned to find Lady S. eating a solitary meal, her husband having gone off to the airport to meet Vice-President Wallace.[37] She said, ‘I hope you’ll think of our life here as interesting, and as having a certain amount of charm.’ But, frankly, I am amazed that she is able to think of it as charming.
PROFESSORS IN PENURY
Fuhtan University, evacuated from Shanghai, is now situated within 100 miles from Chungking. It was a shock to see the professors, who before the war were great figures in the world of culture and basked in an aura of esteem and luxury, now living in near-destitution. Professors’ salaries have not been raised in proportion to the cost of living. Today our unappetizing roadside lunch for two cost 300 dollars. A professor is paid 1,000 dollars a month. He subsists on poor quality rice; he sleeps and works in a prison-like cell, with no one to tend him. He possesses no furniture except perhaps a board propped on two dictionaries as a bed, and a case with shelves for the volumes salvaged from his former life. In accordance with the ‘oil thrift’ movement, the lamp must be put out early at night. Living like peasants are the great specialists and experts on French literature or European philosophy; men who have been editors of scientific magazines, who have been the pivot of intellectual life and thought, are stranded here without money for cigarettes, some of them suffering from foot-rot so that they are unable to walk, and others from disease caused by undernourishment and lack of baths. Yet they remain astoundingly cheerful and full of verve.
Dr Liang entertained us with fascinating anecdotes about Paul Valery and his other friends; and he gave us a glass of tiger-bone wine, a potent and invigorating drink.
Another professor talked of Dryden and Maugham with a combination of charm of manner, authority and humility. In the room next door his sister was working, but when called, she would not appear because she had not on her best dress and did not wish to be seen looking like a servant.
Dr Young is an authority on contemporary English poets, and quoted Empson and Auden. He is at the moment translating into English the poems of Dr Liu, not because he considered them good poems, but ‘because he is a friend of mine’. He told us how Dr Liu is of the old school, is accepted by the Government and writes about poetic generals. Dr Liu publishes one book of poems per month. This is not considered excessive.
MADAME SUN YAT SEN
What greater tribute can one pay the widow of Dr Sun Yat Sen, than to say that in present-day China she is poor? She is the most popular woman in Chungking; kindly, sincere, courageous and known to have the welfare of China at heart. In a country where to be outspoken is sometimes dangerous, she does not hide her disappointment at the distance she believes the Government has travelled from the principles laid down by her husband, the Father of the Republic.
This gallant, rather tragic, little figure is continuously breaking into laughter. She screws up her face, like a baby about to cry, with a mirth that is alternately childlike and hearty. She laughs in answer to a compliment, laughs as a lament, laughs as a means of expressing agreement and when to be more precise would be unwise. She is almost peasant-like in her intuitive simplicity. She looks like Mrs Noah; her gestures are slightly masculine, her fingers fattish and pointed; her diminutive feet hang uselessly like a doll’s, not long enough to touch the floor. She lives in a small gimcrack villa, immaculately swept and garnished, where the flowers, sent by faithful friends who possess small patches of garden, are plumped into metal shell-cases. Thence she sallies forth, and learns perhaps more of the public opinion in Chungking than any other member of her family.
Local news is bad; it seems probable that the Japs may cut China in two and capture all remaining Free China. They could even concentrate on stopping our supplies over the ‘Hump’. No one is visibly panicky; the worst has been expected for so long; but everyone is secretly worried as to how the various armies will meet the three Jap thrusts.
CHINESE RETROSPECT
The west of China consists of the agricultural and more mountainous provinces in which transport has always been poor and existence hard. Life in these paddy fields and small dark villages can have changed little with the passing of the dynasties. From early childhood till oldest age, from dawn until dark, every day of his life, the labourer toils for the minimum reward. The carrier-coolie, his head bent sideways, minces, like Agag, under his appalling load. The farmer, almost naked, with legs as muscular as Nijinsky’s and wide apart as a wrestler’s, plants in the swamps, with zealous speed, the small aigrettes of rice shoots. The water-treaders at the wheels, covered with sweat, defy by the hour the laws of gravity and cause water to run uphill. Stolid young women weed in the mire, or thresh vigorously throughout the heat of the day; child
ren, with a wisp of bamboo, drive the herds of goats and gaggles of geese; the old women pick the leaves off the tea-trees, or tie little bags, against the onslaught of birds, over the ripening plums. The river coolies, in the rain, wearing the short capes of palm-tree fibre that, although of a design thousands of years old, are distinctly fashionable, strain at every limb as they fight the unpredictable currents and the evil spirits beneath the water.
With infinite patience, everybody battles against discouragement and disintegration, and in the face of all disasters their spirit remains unbroken and unbreakable. When others would despair the Chinese smile with contentment, for they are of the celestial kingdom. Each farmer, coolie and soldier feels about his lot as did Shao Yung: ‘I am happy,’ he said, ‘because I am human and not an animal; a male and not a female; a Chinese and not a barbarian; because I live in Loyang, the most wonderful city in the world.’
Smiles and laughter are never distant; they are the ever recurrent theme that runs through the overcrowded bamboo villages and newly-bombed towns, along the lines of coolies, human beasts of burden, in the curving mountain passes, down the river-banks where millions make their homes in flimsy, overcrowded sampans. Smiles appear at the misfortune of others, at moments of terror or anxiety; they are a means of ‘saving face’, are present at both birth and death (the two ‘great happinesses’). The Chinese sense of humour, easy recognition of the comic and inveterate optimism combine with the national feeling of resignation to help them bear the misery — sometimes cruelly unnecessary — of present-day conditions.
In fact, the silent, inscrutable Chinese, who moves noiselessly and laconically through the pages of fiction, is an invention that bears no relation to the sturdy, boisterous people I saw fighting for existence. The Chinese are demonstrative and highly strung, easily roused to excitement or anger. They are apt to blush more often than the English, while a rapid change of expression adds much to the charm of these uninhibited extroverts. White teeth flash; eyes are tightly screwed up in an excess of convulsive mirth. I marvelled at the eloquence with which the Chinese physiognomy expresses different emotions, indicating in turn inquisitiveness, surprise, greed, terror or embarrassment. By the grimace he makes, we know how far a coolie has trudged, how rough the way has been, how heavy his load. As he toils up a precipitous slope, his contorted features resemble those of a martyred saint; yet when he reaches the summit to rest for a moment, the expression of relief is beatific. Every police-boy, perched high on a concrete rostrum at the crossroads, gives an heroic pantomime performance. Running the gamut of facial expression, he directs the traffic with the gestures of a great actor. With what scorn does he observe a driver whose engine has broken down; with what unabashed amusement does he witness some ridiculous mishap to a passer-by; with what popping of eyes and wild contortion of muscles does he control the ferocious rush of the approaching traffic!
The Chinese of fiction is always delicately proportioned with an ivory-coloured skin and eyes turned up at the corners. In reality, he is often husky, squat, with overdeveloped muscles and a thick bull-neck, and his skin is of a healthy apricot hue. Although the colouring of his hair is monotonous, his appearance otherwise varies to an astonishing extent. His mouth, being finely chiselled, is his best feature (just as it is an Englishman’s worst), and his eyes, which seldom show any lids, turn down at the outer ends.
Pidgin English is scorned and seldom heard. If the Chinese speaks the English language, it is apt to be with grammatical perfection, a much wider vocabulary than the average Englishman employs, and possibly a strong Chicago accent.
Unlike the ‘other worldly’ Chinese of legend, the people I have met are shrewd and business-like realists. One has only to spend a night in a native hostel to discover just how ‘soft-footed’ the Chinese are! A traveller who wants to sleep must contest against the noise of furniture being lugged over the resilient floors of the rooms above, a Niagara of family gossip that continues outside his door all night, and the singing of a neighbour ‘in good spirits’. The Chinese is no lover of silence — witness the noise in any restaurant, with cooks and waiters hulloaing, babies caterwauling, parties at neighbouring tables playing raucous gambling games, while cymbals are beaten and brass bands bray in the street outside.
During the last painful years China has struggled on, in spite of appalling shortages of equipment (including heavy weapons), transportation (including fuel) and all sorts of medicines. The Chinese genius for the makeshift has stood her in good stead. As the Japanese approach, the Chinese tear up the railway lines to make them into guns. The scarcity of petrol has led to the discovery that trucks and lorries can be run on camphor, alcohol, locally produced wines and spirits, and on crude oil made from the tung nuts that grow on the hillsides. Lorries, that might have been considered to have done good service after travelling these roads for twelve months, are, after four years, in spite of the non-existence of spare parts, seen hurtling along the mountain passes with seven separate pieces of outer tyre bolted on to their wheels; the driver hangs frantically on his door to warn pedestrians, for the horn and brakes are missing. As the truck vanishes round a hairpin bend the air is filled with a pungent reek of mothballs — anyone who has travelled in a camphor-run vehicle for a few hours is recognizable for many days to come.
Merchandise is floated down the rivers on improvised bamboo rafts. The winding roads to the forward areas are flanked by a chain of human carriers, whose strength and tenacity enable them to cover 100 miles of rough mountain path in four days. Young boys of the Transport Corps in pale, chutney-coloured uniforms, with straw-sandaled feet, stagger along under heavy yokes. Old coolies in huge hats, protection alike against sun and rain, push a small mountain of salt on their wheelbarrows, tiny Chinese tots become charcoal porters, cows carry coal.
The power and endurance of the Chinese is proverbial; troops live for days on end exposed to extremes of cold and heat, sustained by the minimum of rice. When a soldier falls ill, he is the most long-suffering of patients. I saw men, all but dead of relapsing fever one day, who three days later had given up their beds to more deserving cases.
The farmer has learnt the habit of complete frugality. In addition to his bowls of rice, he allows himself only a few dice of chopped pork every month. He makes his own oil for the lamp from rape seed, and for fuel, instead of using charcoal, he burns dried grass. Accustomed to disaster, the average Chinese does not worry about his future prospects. Used to suffering, he takes a fatalistic view of personal tragedies. No bad news can lower his spirits for long.
As soon as the floods, which have washed away his toil of years, have subsided, he starts to work afresh. The rebuilding of a bombed town is begun almost as soon as the ‘raiders past’ sirens have sounded. This stoic power of resistance constitutes a formidable threat to the Japanese invader. Such is the scale of the country that a regular army of 6,000,000 Chinese operates behind the enemy lines. The Japanese have learnt, to their chagrin, that the Frenchman spoke wisely when he said that China was not so much a country as a ‘geographical expression’.
Throughout Free China, for thousands of square miles, the villages resemble one another in all the essentials. Houses are dark, smoky, with grey walls and black tiled roofs; the inhabitants, wearing the invariable indigo-dyed cloth that fades through so many varieties of blue to pale grey, move about their business in an inextricable confusion of scraggy chickens, pigs, pye-dogs and babies. The walls of old temples are somewhat unaesthetically decorated with stencilled heads of the Generalissimo. In tea-houses of bamboo matting, the tea-drinkers smoke pipes three feet long, while they listen to the itinerant professional story-teller — a precocious youth who accentuates his points with blood-curdling grimaces and a nerve-shattering clash of cymbals.
In contrast to the darkness and penetrating odours of the village streets, the natural scenery of the country is of an extraordinary grandeur and richness. Fantastic mountains, like upturned stalactites, half-veiled in mist; gigantic wate
rfalls; hillsides covered with fronds of bamboo or with wild azaleas; ascending pale green steps of ricefields, as eloquent as a flight of steps at Versailles; wild white roses rambling in bridal bouquets alongside a stream, or climbing over a tree sixty feet high; sweet-smelling camphor groves and jasmine — these are the natural luxuries of the poor, in a country vastly over-populated, little industrialized, essentially peace-loving, and seldom left in peace.
Part XII: Going West, 1944
Tuesday, June 20th, Chungking
So it seems that I am to leave tomorrow. But I must not be too certain, for any minute the telephone may ring with a message that Dr Kung’s monetary advisor has decided to take all the seats in tomorrow’s plane.
Wednesday, June 21st
Last night I bid a really deeply affectionate and grateful farewell to the Seymours, whom I have come to admire and love. It was dawn, and our highly-perched house — the dark, ugly little villa that had been my haven — was obliterated by a cloud — visibility zero — when Shu and Wong, the always funny, always smiling, Chinese servants waved me good-bye. Stanley Smith heroically got up to accompany me across the flooded canal to the airport. The daylight strengthened, but the mountains were still invisible as doggedly we waited for news of a ‘take-off’. At length word came through that our aircraft was grounded at Chengtu, unable to leave until advised of better visibility. It was tough to have a six-hour wait before facing the perils of the ‘Hump’. However, I enjoyed talking to Stanley. He is convinced we should not break with China, that we should trade with her, but that a different sociological attitude must be adopted. The slogans of praise for ‘Brave Little China’ have made every laundryman believe he is a hero. England and America have already given enormous aid, but the Chinese, instinctively greedy, always clamour for more. No Chinese knows when to stop his demands. But the moment has now come when we should give only for some specific purpose: the ‘Aid to China’ should provide aeroplanes to bring in medicine, clothes and other necessities, and should be distributed through honest sources instead of being squandered in graft. Stanley feels the only saving of this country after the war is to have a revolution. He considers that Chiang is in the grip of gangsters, that the Kung racket has been too strong for him, and that Madame Chiang is an opportunist adventuress without the real good of China at heart.