SHANSI

Evening Star, Issue 19802, 28 February 1928, Page 14

SHANSI

THE HEART #F CHINA Shansi, a province in the heart of China, is counted rich, as present-day comparisons go in China. It is shaped like Ireland elongated, about 400 miles long by 200 miles broad. It is mountainous, rising in the centre to a plateau 4,000 ft above sea level, dropping to the Hoang Ho on the west in hills and valleys, river beds and that curious loess country where the friable land is cut_ into huge terraces that make the high hills look like pyramids carved in great clay-colored steps. Not an inch of ground is Wasted. If there is a scrap the size of a pocket-hand-kerchief. no matter how precipitous the way to it, there grows, perhaps, a peach tree, some grass where a goat may be or merely a handful of wheat. Shansi is a wheat-growing country. The rain is in summer, but not much of if. In winter there is hard frost, clear bright days with the thermometer never above minus lodeg at the warmest.

In the spring all bathed in the golden sunshine of China, the sky a cloudless blue, and the wheat, just above ground, turning the laud into vivid green, it is lovely. The air is clear and invigorating, exhilarating as champagne. But man is unclean, ignorant, a serf, poverty-stricken with a'poverty wo hardly conceive of in the West. The fields are well tilled, but they are divided in no way. There is nothing to show where Wang’s land begins or Inn’s ends. The work that goes on from dawn to dark is done apparently for the good of the community. All through this cultivated land wanders the zigzag track of ruts and stones known as the Great South road, impossible for anything on wheels but a Chinese cart, often impossible for that. Along it are walled cities; at least three will probably be passed in a day’s journey of thirty miles. There arc more villages sheltering behind- high walls sometimes of mud, but generally of the grey Chinese bricks, stout and substantial, such as the Israelites made in Egypt. There are no wayside cottages. No Chinese in Shansi dare live in the open. Not infrequently there is a farmhouse built like a baronial castle of medieval times, with look-out towers and room behind the blank walls for the owner’s family unto the third and fourth generation, and all his hinds and their dependents as well. It has been built to last for hundreds of years, and with a view to defence. It will not lightly bo taken.

Everywhere are the pointed mouths of the graves 3ft high, sometimes sheltered by elms and poplars all shorn of their branches save for the poorest possible tuft at the top. .Little grooves mark richer men’s burial places, and not infrequently we come across a more important grave marked _ by_ a picturesque monument, quaint lions and dragons carved in stone, _ always _ uncarod for and never repaired. ]f the monument last it is credited to the dead man; if it docs not, it is his fault in some wav.

On the road—in moderate peace time, just a few brigand bands ravaging the country—there are always caravans. You may hear in the clear air the musical jingling of the bells from a far distance. In the loess country the tracks, winding and narrow, are often sunk so low beneath the surrounding country that even a mounted man can see nothing but the strip of blue sky overhead. Those bells are then an absolute necessity. There come laden mules and donkeys and rough little Mongolian pones; there are the age-old camels, shaggy and bad-tempered, marching as they did in the days of Marco Polo, from Tibet and Mongolia. They travel best in the winter, for all wo think of the camel as an animal of the burning desert. Meeting a camel, caravan, mules generally make desperate endeavors to mount the stoop, walls on either side. This dislike is recognised. Camel caravans are suposed to travel by night, a rule that is generally broken; but the camel inns are always apart. The inn is an important feature on a Shansi road. The rooms run round half the courtyard; the other half has the stalls of the baggage animals; in the centre are troughs for water and food. Here, too, if the weather is line, as it generally is, the loads are stacked. An inn to-day is prooably the same as it was a thousand years ago—much like (ho inns the Babylonish traders used when they carted their goods down from the mountains to the great rivers and the Persian Gulf, They arc thronged, for besides the beasts much goods arc transported at the ends of long bamboos slung over men’s shoulders. A man will carry enough strarv hats to hide a good-sized donkey, and they bring other and weightier things—silks and cotton and linen goods, tea, and all manner of luxuries for the wealthy merchants who dwell in the cities along the route. Yon meet long lines of them along the road; sec them here in the inns having their food, generally something out of a. basin, eaten with chopsticks. Most never, from the cradle to the grave, taste anything more exciting than the paste made from rough whenten Hour—a sort of macaroni with the eggs and .other good things left out. Many inns nr simply a series of eaves in the hillside. Each chamber is fitted with a front door and a window covered with oiled paper. The furniture is a k’ang running hack into the dark, frowsy interior, where is always the stench of human occupancy; cobwebs hide the earthen ceiling; dirt is everywhere. Hero men sloop and women, with their maimed feet, spend all their clays. Shansi has' been ■ raided from time immemorial, and must still ho lamenting for her suffering people, for “the young children that faint for hunger in the top of every street.”—‘The Times.’