China Revolutionized

The mainstay of Chinese revenue, and the main security as yet for foreign loans, is the National (formerly Imperial) Customs of five per cent. duty ad valorem. The organization was started at Canton in 1859 by Sir Robert Hart, an Armagh Irishman who was transferred from the British consular service. He served as head from that year until his retirement with a fortune of $500,000 in 1910. Sir Robert Hart lived in princely style at Peking and managed the service honestly. He has been criticized for taking so large a reward from straitened China by members of the India civil service, who are satisfied to retire on $1,000 a year after even more arduous service. In 1901 Sir Robert Hart wrote his book, These from the Land of Sinim. He was a brilliant propagandist for things Chinese, the most popular Occidental who ever served China, though he was not so heroic a figure as “Chinese” Gordon. Sir Robert Bredon was next in office, and in 1911 Sir Francis Aglen was put in charge. The son of an English clergyman, a well equipped sinologue, trained under Sir Robert Hart, Mr. Aglen is a thorough leader of this great work, which includes loan departments, lighthouse service, a cadet school, a pension bureau, and an internal revenue organization to a degree. As British commerce is the largest in China, being nearly four times as large as America’s trade, the British name the head of the customs service. Many Americans, Germans and French are also employed, and a thorough knowledge of Chinese and its dialects is insisted upon by Sir Francis Aglen.

In the region about Shanghai and Nanking, the name of “Chinese” Gordon (General Charles) still lives for his victorious leadership of Li Hung Chang’s army, which crushed the Taiping rebellion, and saved the Manchu throne for the time. General Gordon had many bitter quarrels with Li Hung Chang, insisting that assassination and murder must not follow a victory. That the rebels of 1911 in this same region did not forget Gordon’s precepts was shown by their leniency under great provocation, after capturing Nanking from the Manchus. No foreigner who has aided in forming the ten divisions of China’s Northern army has had the personality or exercised the influence that Gordon did, and in the great trial of the revolution and the mutinies of 1911–12 the army showed frequently that no strong personality had inspired the men with a fixed purpose, honor or patriotism.

About 1869 a nephew of President Van Buren, John Sheffield Van Buren, went out to Yokohama as an assistant in the consular office of his uncle. He was soon in Hongkong as agent of the Pacific Mail, Occidental and Oriental, and Toyo Kisen Kaisha trans-Pacific steamship companies, and was in touch with the Chinese of that great crown colony for thirty-three years. He had an intimate knowledge of China, and trained many of its commercial men who have risen high in the commercial and diplomatic affairs of the new republic. In Hongkong he was looked upon as one of the ablest minds that linked the West and the East. He was devoted to Southern China, developed its trade, dry docks and shipping, and formulated China’s first trans-Pacific steamship line, the Chinese Merchants’ Steamship Company of 1903. The famous Chinese guilds of Kwangtung province looked upon him as a sage, and sought his aerie retreat over Robinson Road on the cliff for many a conference under the swaying punkahs. He was a very tall thin man, with a long countenance, great eyes, and a slow, full, round voice. It was impossible to irritate him to heated expression. Like the mills of the gods, he ground slow but exceedingly fine. He used to bemoan the fact that Americans who managed Oriental companies generally do so from America, before being first experienced in the Orient, and he was a strong advocate of the British system of moving partners who would serve their seven-years term in the Orient, seven at home and then back to the Orient again. He was decidedly in an inferior field in commerce. If American diplomacy had been steadier in the East, freed from the spoils system, his mentality and training were perfectly fitted for a great American minister at Peking, or a great consul-general at Canton. He was a deep student of the Filipino, as well as the Chinese, but was altogether in favor of the latter. He was more pessimistic perhaps than was justified regarding what America will be able to do with the Filipino and the Philippines. A thorough student of the Far East, and the representatives of all nations who gathered there, smiling like Buddha in his vast but reserved knowledge, nothing irritated him so much in his official duties as listening to the conversation of the official American globe-trotter, who dropped into Hongkong for a week, and then drove contrary opinions down the throats of such sinologues as he was, and wrote books, most of the prophecies of which remain as a joke when compared with events. There was one American senator and another American official who wrote books of Far East prophecies whose “cocksureness”, like that of the Kanaka surf-rider, used to strike to the core of the resentment of this usually placid Solon of the East, who died in the terrific heat of the Red Sea in 1910, worn out with his long life near the equator, and never having written the books that were within him, and which he really owed the world. His sister married an Austrian nobleman. The family homestead was at Englewood, New Jersey, and on his mother’s side he was connected with the Sheffields and Phelpses, of Yale College memory.

There have been other notable Americans who served in China. Colonel John S. Mosby, the Confederate guerrilla leader, was consul-general at Hongkong from 1878–85, and General E. S. Bragg, of the Wisconsin Iron Brigade of the Civil War, was consul-general at Hongkong from 1902–4. The general had a sharp wit and tongue, and is known world wide for these two phrases which got into domestic and international politics: “We love Cleveland for the enemies he has made;” and, “You can as easily make a citizen of a Cuban as a whistle out of a pig’s tail.” The contretemps can be understood when it is explained that the general was at the time consul at Havana. Like the Arabs of Longfellow, after this incident and the receipt of some mail from Washington, he “folded his tent and silently stole away” for Hongkong! General Bragg, at Antietam, was approached by General Gibbon’s aide, with orders to push the enemy as long as it was safe, and the former’s famous reply was: “It has been d—— unsafe here for the last half hour. Forward again, Wisconsin.” Mr. Rounsevelle Wildman, author of China’s Open Door, and editor of Overland Monthly, consul-general at Hongkong, where he amused the staid Britons by his energetic efforts to sell his worthy book, lost his life aboard the Pacific Mail steamer Rio, which sank with all on board just outside the Golden Gate, San Francisco. Daniel Webster sent his son Fletcher as secretary of the famous Cushing Commission, which visited Hongkong, Canton and Macao. Secretary William H. Seward later passed over the same waters, and I have seen Admiral Greeley, of Polar fame, picking out the great war secretary’s steps at Wanchi, Hongkong. The Tibet traveler and author, A. H. Savage Landor, I knew at Hongkong. Some of us believed his thrilling tales of escape after torture and some of us were cynical. He was a worn man then, grateful for favors that are usually accorded to the traveler, an enthusiast, a student of the Western Chinese, and a courageous fellow.

In 1911, America, Britain, Germany and France arranged to loan China about $100,000,000 for railways and new currency. A neutral financial adviser was found to be necessary, and President Vissering, of the Dutch Java Bank, was agreed upon by the four nations, with Japan favorably impressed. If the loan agreements go through, and when affairs assume their normal course in China, Doctor Vissering will have opportunity to leave his mark in a wider sphere in the Far East. Mr. Hillier has long represented the British financial interests in Peking; Mr. Straight, the American; and Doctor George E. Morrison, of the London Times staff, has been adviser to both imperial and republican governments at Peking.

One of the most remarkable imperialists who ever came to China was Paul Doumer. He was a French newspaper man, and came East as consul, later becoming governor of Indo-China, which he sealed to France with an iron hand. He made Haiphong, Hanoi and Saigon remarkable centers of civilization, sanitation, music, art, architecture, commerce and French imperialism. Cost was nothing to him. He seemed to make or hypnotize money after he had hypnotized governments and financiers with his eloquence and ambition. He formed Legionary troops and held a strong navy in the East. He brought the great Messageries Maritimes steamship line from Marseilles to Saigon. He grasped Kwangchou Bay in Kwangtung province, and made Hongkong tremble for her prestige over Canton and the southwest, her old imperial sphere. Then he dreamed great visions of imperialism, as Rhodes was dreaming in Africa, Curzon in India, A. Colquhoun in Burma, Kitchener in the Soudan, and some Americans like Roosevelt and Taft in Panama and the Philippines. He, “le petit Paul Doumer,” would build a six hundred-mile railway, much of the right of way where men had never been before, from Haiphong to Yunnan, in the heart of Southwest China, turn the British flank at the headwaters of the Yangtze River, and link Yunnan, and some day Chingtu, with Marseilles and Paris. What if fever, one hundred bridges in fifty miles, a cost of $100,000 a mile of road, and a little traffic had to be conquered, he would build to the center of China, dividends or no dividends. By 1910 he and his men had done it. The British, fired by Colquhoun and Curzon, raced him from Burma, but he has beat them by fifteen years. The Chinese do not love the French, and they are building from Yunnan to Nanning to reach Hongkong; but it is largely French for the present at Yunnan. Hongkong and Mandalay have been flanked. The Chinese would have preferred the Americans, or the British, who do not covet Oriental land. The French aim to push that railway up to Chingtu, and cut China in half. Yunnan City, on its high plateau, once the farthest from Peking and civilization, is now a center of remarkable modernity, the Chinese emulating the French in lighted streets, water-works, factories, modern prisons, trade schools, uniformed police, and a provincial army and arsenal of modern type. If you ask how has Paul Doumer influenced China, circumspice at Yunnan City. Before Paul Doumer came East, following the dream of empire, if you had been asked which was the last city of China that would adopt progress, you would have said “inaccessible Yunnan,” whereas it has been almost the first. Doumer’s most notable book on China is L’Indo Chine Française, with the emphasis on the Française!

For two decades the name of Mr. Rumor (I shall call him that for the purposes of this sketch), of Hongkong, was synonymous with the rocket which seemed to have become a fixed star. He was a Canadian, born in the little riverine town of Belleville on the St. Lawrence. Adventure found him in Hongkong, a clerk in the Public Works Department of the Colonial Government, at a child’s salary in a land costly for the foreigner. The Chinese were beginning to use wheat flour in place of rice, which had become valuable for export. Rumor acted as their adviser during lunch hours, when the fervid sun of the Orient burned up the tamarind’s shade and fried the papaw’s thick leaves. In time he himself quietly imported consignments of Oregon flour. His Chinese compradore was honest and divided the profits, though the compradore did all the work. Rumor grew richer, and became an agent for Northern Pacific American mills. As the years passed, the able and honest Chinese compradore brought him orders sufficient to load many full ships that breasted the slow waves of the Pacific. The Chinese compradore lived plainly, and saved enough money to become a financial power in the great imperial colony. Rumor then went into military, naval and diplomatic society, built one of the finest aerie mansions in the Far East on Hongkong’s peak of palaces near the unique tram on Barker Road, where a thousand feet of picturesque cliff fell from its foundation. He imported Kentucky saddle horses and racers, and at great expense put Canadian sheep on the foothills of old China to see if they could conquer the bamboo grass. He owned a steam yacht and a sailing yacht, gave musicales to the military of the garrison station at both his down-town chambers on the Praya and at his mountain château, and entertained an American governor of the East who became a president. He was a handsome man, the mirror of fashion and manners in the cosmopolitan colony. His was the easy bearing of those who associate with princes and know their standing. Like Beau Brummel, of Piccadilly, he could make a griffin’s social fortune by being seen walking with him down the Praya. Stories were told of his recklessness in hours of play. He was a dashing character, altogether. He made annual trips to the great cities that line the equatorial belt of the world and to capitals of the North. He seemed to have tapped the mines of Eldorado.

At last, he would add fame to riches. Hongkong was about to enter the great educational arena in the awakening of the Far East with a splendid university. Hormusjee Mody, the Prince of Parsees, gave the land. Who would give the endowment and thus perhaps secure a knighthood? Why, Rumor, who at last was truly popular and not envied alone, for he was now about to do something for others than himself. In the meantime he had started a Chinese flour mill at Junk Bay, Hongkong. He would startle the whole economic world, as Harbin did, by grinding Chinese grain on the spot, and he would import less Australian and Oregon flour. There seemed to be no end to Rumor’s extension or the glamour which he cast over his compradore and the Chinese bankers, as well as the American mills. Many tried to emulate him and steal his trade, or imitate his “chops” on the flour bags; but the Chinese, “olo custom”, clung to Rumor, who alone expanded, came, saw and conquered. San Francisco was shaken by an earthquake, and New York by a financial panic. The twin waves went round the world, and met in Hongkong harbor one dark night, just as Rumor, purposely unaccompanied by a white man, was returning in his yacht Canada from his flour mill at Junk Bay, all the long miles of the famous harbor to the landing under his mountain palace and the university site. No one knows much about it, except that the crew at last missed him overboard. The tidal financial wave had swamped him. He could ride its crest no more in splendor. The great university will bear many names, but probably not the name of Rumor as its endower when the accounts of the estate are balanced. Three Chinese, of Singapore, stepped forward and endowed the university with nearly $500,000 gold, although they were at the same time holding up the hands of the exhausted Chinese republican revolution.

Sir Matthew Nathan came to Hongkong as governor from hot and feverish Nigeria. Hongkong is a moist hot place, very near the direct sun of the equator, and men who wish to live long go slow in the luxuries of work, liquor, etc. It is a good place to send your victim, as David disposed of Uriah “in the forefront of the hottest battle”. Sir Matthew’s enthusiasm was to be every inch a “knower” (mandarin) of the people, and a governor. He wore his staff out. He was up at unseasonable hours in addition to his regular duties. He worked as hard on the hot Praya as another man would on cool Piccadilly in March. Every emergency and occasion found him at hand, whether an awful fire, a new railway, or the launching of a great ship. The memorable typhoon of September, 1906, struck the unprepared colony which has been visited so often with these circular hurricanes. Sir Matthew seemed to superintend the rescuers at every spot of the long beach and harbor. When the steamboat Hankow holocaust occurred in October he worked, axe and arm, with the firemen. Little wonder that he died, really of exhaustion. He was a typical example of the grand old British civil service in China. He was heroic, unselfish, tireless, sympathetic, a man whose example lives to fire China with zeal and altruism.

Doctor C. D. Tenny, an American educator, has been connected with the American Peking legation and has served on many American political missions, such as the inspection in 1912 of Doctor Sun Yat Sen’s government at Nanking. His influence in the northern provinces with Yuan Shi Kai has been great. Pai Yang Technical University at Tientsin, and Paoting Fu College, both Chinese, have known the worth of his guidance, and therefore they stand as models. Doctor W. A. P. Martin, the dean of American Presbyterian missionaries for thirty years, has done almost a similar work in the north in connection with the Chinese Tungwen College and Peking University, and moreover, Doctor Martin is a famous translator of American books into Chinese. Wells Williams, of the American Peking legation, is famous not only because his father wrote that noble basic work, The Middle Kingdom, but for his own work as a diplomat in America’s diplomatic advance in the Far East. The American minister at Peking, Mr. W. Rockhill, carefully and bravely explored Mongolia and Tibet, and wrote a diary of his travels in the debatable lands where Russia, Britain and China face one another.

Doctor H. H. Lowry, for many years president of the Methodist College at the Hata Men gate, Peking, has long exercised a strong influence upon Chinese officials and students. He is a man of great tact, enthusiasm, wisdom and scholarship, and is known both to have enlisted Yuan Shih Kai on the side of religious tolerance, and to have confirmed him in modern educational methods. The American Methodist bishop, J. W. Bashford, of Shanghai, is a mighty militant man with the southern republicans. The students adore him. The patriots of young China worship him. Fiery zeal, idealism, and the courage of a lion are characteristics of this influential, learned and sacrificing man. Doctor F. D. Gamewell, of Peking, is a Methodist missionary who has been in China for thirty years. He is world-famous for his engineering skill in directing the fortification of the legations in the awful siege of 1900. He is a man of great physical courage, calmness of mind, and sanity of judgment, and is a tower of influence among the Chinese officials. He hails from Hackensack, New Jersey.

C. W. Kinder, a Briton, of the Kaiping mines, built the first locomotive, and instituted the successful railway and mining policy of North China. He has done nearly as much in technical education at the Tongshan shops and school. For thirty years he has led the Chinese in mechanical development, and has reconciled officialdom to modernity in utilitarian matters. Mr. Kinder’s assistant has been Mr. Alston. The British engineers who have established China’s great railway development are Messrs. Collinson, Tuckey and Pope. The engineers in charge of the Hanyang smelting and mining development are the Germans, Ruppert and Leinung; and the German, Herr Dorpmuller, constructed the northern section of Tientsin-Pukow railway. Doctor G. E. Morrison, the Australian at Peking who represents the London Times, has long held the world bound to his prompt despatches regarding Chinese politics, of which he is past master. With all the currents which have been dragging and crossing in Manchu Peking, a man who can steer the ship of prophecy must be a master hand, and Doctor Morrison is a master hand, both in acquiring and digesting difficult news. His book, An Australian in China, speaks for itself.

The influential and typical authors who have lived in China for long terms are known by their books and by the prominent positions they have held. The genial and humorous Professor Parker, of Manchester University, was a British consul at Fuchau, Canton, etc. His books reveal his deep knowledge of antiquity, religion and the language. Professor Giles, of the University of Cambridge, was British consul at Ningpo. No man has done more to reveal the East to the West. His books speak for themselves. My old friend, Dyer Ball, with whom I sat for many a year while we questioned Chinese emigrants in the musty old harbor office at Hongkong as to whether “they sold themselves like a pig” (the Chinese idiom for contract slavery), and with whom I have taken many a walk over Hongkong’s noble peaks, was for thirty years in Hongkong’s civil service as registrar, protector of the Chinese, etc. His text-books on the dialects of the language are well known, and among others his book, Things Chinese, is an encyclopedic authority. The late Professor Legge, of Oxford, lived for many years at Hongkong, where he translated the Chinese classics. He opened a window which let the light of Cathay shine out on our surprised Western world. Shanghai, too, has had its many authors. The American, Jernigan, wrote China in Law and Commerce, a most illuminating work in a sadly neglected field which is coming into prominence with the modernized times. Canon Moule wrote brilliantly of his surrounding provinces, and many other Shanghai men have taken up a gifted pen, notably the late Robert Little, who for sixteen years was the scholarly editor of that sapient authority, the North China News and Herald. Mr. Little was succeeded by the eminent editors, Montague Bell and Owen Green. The National Review, a brilliant illustrated weekly, is ably conducted by Mr. Walter Kirton, of Shanghai, and G. B. Rea, M. E., conducts the famous Far Eastern Review, of Shanghai. Professor Hirth, of Columbia University, a German, served in Hart’s Chinese customs service, and has written interesting books on his experiences. Sir Henry Blake, of Hongkong, married into the British court, governor and author, was a ponderous type, once of the stern Irish constabulary, an ideal disciplinary officer, a splendid type of the strong Briton not unlike Lord Cromer in temperament. Up at Mukden, Doctor J. Ross, of the Scotch church, does wonderful things in authorship, medicine, education and theology for the Manchus; and over all the land the scholarly, indefatigable Alexandria Hosie, one time British consul at Newchwang in its strenuous days, wanders, collecting accurate trade data and making maps for the guidance of diplomacy, trade and letters. Two of his books are, Three Years in Western China; Manchuria, Its People and Resources. Chester Holcomb, interpreter and secretary at the American legation, Peking, in the eventful Boxer days, wrote an illuminating book, The Real Chinese Question. I regret that he died while in America in 1912.

Russia has her own scholars and explorers like Prejevalsky, whose works should reach us in greater abundance than they do. Doctor W. M. Hayes, the American Presbyterian, guided Yuan Shih Kai in founding his Provincial College at Paoting Fu. Stewart Lockhart, up at Wei Hai Wei, has been governing that crown colony for Britain for many years and writing books. I knew him at Hongkong as the brilliant colonial secretary, and indefatigable student of the exceedingly difficult language and written character, worthy in his scholarship to bear the name of Scott’s son-in-law. Under Lockhart serves Johnston, author of Lion and Dragon in North China, who was one of our Hongkong cadets, Sir Henry Blake’s secretary, and an Oxford man. All of these men, and scores more whom we knew, have been interesting types of the West in China, all the while they were, in their own way, interpreting China to Europe and America. The Chinese have copied, and will copy, their faults and their virtues. Until lately one has seldom heard of a defalcation by a Chinese. In the rubber panic of 1910 at Shanghai, the Chinese taotai, Tsai Nai Huong, absconded, owing several million dollars, and financial China was shaken to its foundation. Whether the fault was ignorance or cupidity, no one can say. He was given the loan by the government to sustain the Chinese banks which were beginning to fail because of speculation in the rubber estates (and the estates that existed only on paper!) of Malaysia. Would that more Chinese were admitted to Manila, where they might note the methods of the leaders in the splendid paternalism now being developed there in manufacture, building, education, road-making, hygiene, and every department of progress and government.

Doctor C. W. Mateer, who founded the leading American Presbyterian University, situated at Wei Hsien in Shangtung province, is perhaps best known as the translator of the New Testament into northern (Mandarin) Chinese. President A. J. Bowen, an American, of the great Nanking Union University (Presbyterian, Methodist, Disciples), wields a vast influence with the rising republicans and officials of Middle China. Doctor Paul W. Bergen is president of the great Presbyterian College at Wei Hsien, Shangtung province. These men have vast power to influence the East in favor of the West, if the western business men were not so parsimonious in providing funds for the colleges and hospitals in China. An endowment of $30,000 is given for a university where at least $100,000 should be given, because the missionary of the educational and medical class is the pioneer of trade. Cure a Chinese, teach him modern methods, and he will in his gratitude favor western trade and intercourse. The debt American and British expansion owes to the missionary educator and medical man is greater than is owed to the man behind the gun, or the diplomat behind the flag and the protocol, who, while they serve, often serve harshly. Doctor J. H. Judson is president of the American Presbyterian College at beautiful cultured Hangchow, and has great influence with the sons of officials and leading merchants of Southern China. The most influential and interesting foreigners in China are the medical missionaries. There are too any names to quote, but all the church boards in America and Britain will furnish scores of names, if the inquirer is interested in the men and women who are doing the forward work of his denomination. Next to these men come the translators and educators, the great college presidents and professors in China, like Doctor Pott, of St. John’s, Shanghai. Missionaries of the old type, diplomats, merchants, travelers, treaty port editors, etc., are also performing their interesting part as types in interpreting the West to the great East, and ten thousand Chinese are gathered around each, eagerly watching every act and listening for every word. As one travels into different sections of China, some foreign name or personality stands there for good or ill, more prominently than the native’s own pailoo arch, before the eyes and in the speech of the awakening people, who are weighing the types of men who, coming among them, have excited their emulation in most and their revulsion in some cases. No course of reading can afford more material for thought than the hundred books devoted in recent years to things Chinese, and written by various types of foreigners during their long sojourn or exile in Cathay. The traveler who goes to Africa generally writes about animals, for they seem to be more interesting than the old races that are there, but the sojourner in China writes, not about monkeys, but about men and women who have been thinking in a continuous civilization which is at least 4,000 years old. As to the Chinese monkeys, there are a few of them in Szechuen and Yunnan provinces but since there are 400,000,000 men and women in China to write about, if one cares for works on monkeys, one must go to the literature on Africa! As for me, I confess to partiality for Cathayan literature because of its absorbing humanities and many types, which distinctly facet interesting differences.

No foreigner in China was as accurate in his prophecies of coming political events and massacres as the Roman Catholic Bishop of Peking, Monsieur Favier, who recently died. This was partially owing to his remarkable judgment, and partially owing to his wide sources of information, as Catholic converts are four times as numerous as Protestant converts. Monsieur Favier, ahead of events, was the best informed foreigner in China regarding the “Boxer” movement of 1900, and if his advice had been followed by the legations, the foreigners would have left Peking for the coast before the siege was instituted. He did not intend to leave himself, as he felt it to be his duty to die if necessary with his converts. Every one has admired his successful defense of the Pei Tang cathedral.

The following prominent American educationalists in China visited America in November, 1912, and spoke for China at the World’s Oriental Congress at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts: Vice-president Williams, of Nanking University; President Edmunds, of Canton Christian College; President Goucher, of the University of Chingtu, and Professor C. W. Young, of Union Medical College, Peking. It was regretted that President Sheffield and Doctor Arthur H. Smith, the eminent author, of the American Congregational College of North China, were not present.

Late advices state that the Chinese government at the close of 1912 has taken into its employ in the administration of the salt gabelle, J. F. Oiesen, a Dane of Tientsin; and as legal adviser, Monsieur Recouse, a prominent Belgian. Wherever Belgians are used, it is generally for the purpose of hiding the hands of France, and sometimes of Russia.