New Forces in Old China | Page 7

Only a daring spirit, the explorer of the type that is born, not made, could have pierced those vast solitudes and wrested from them the secret of their existence. That Hedin had no money for such a costly quest could not deter this Viking of the Northland. Kings headed the subscription and others so eagerly followed that ample funds were soon in hand. Princes helped with equipment and counsel. The Czar made all Russian railways free highways, and every local official and nomad chieftain exerted himself to aid the expedition. Hedin does not claim to give anything more than an ordered diary of his travels, together with a description of the lands he explored and the peoples he found. But what a diary it is! It takes the reader away from the whirl of crowded cities and clanging trolley-cars into the boundless, wind-swept desert and the solitude of majestic mountains where the lonely traveller wanders with his camels through untrodden wildernesses or floats down the interminable stretches of unknown rivers, while night after night he sleeps in his tiny tent or under the open sky. The author failed to reach the long-sought Lassa, the suspicious Dalai Lama refusing to be deceived or cajoled and sternly sending the inquisitive traveller out of the country. But the expedition of three years and three days was rich in other disclosures of ruined cities and great watercourses and lofty plateaus and majestic mountain ranges. The population is sparse in those desolate wastes, and the scattered inhabitants are wild and uncouth and free.
Manchuria, however, is far from being the barren country that so many imagine it to be. It is, in many respects, like Canada, a region embracing about 370,000 square miles and of almost boundless agricultural and mineral wealth. The population, save in the southern parts, is not yet dense but it is rapidly increasing.
But in central and eastern China, the conditions are very different. Here the population can only be indicated by a figure so large that it is almost impossible for us to comprehend it. Consider that the eighteen provinces alone, with an area about equal to that part of the United States east of the Mississippi River, have eight times the population of that part of our country.
``There are twice as many people in China as on the four continents-- Africa, North and South America and Oceanica. Every third person who toils under the sun and sleeps under God's stars is a Chinese. Every third child born into the world looks into the face of a Chinese mother. Every third pair given in marriage plight their troth in a Chinese cup of wine. Every third orphan weeping through the day every third widow wailing through the night are in China. Put them in rank, joining hands, and they will girdle the globe ten times at the equator with living, beating human hearts. Constitute them pilgrims and let two thousand go past every day and night under the sunlight and under the solemn stars, and you must hear the ceaseless tramp, tramp, of the weary, pressing, throbbing throng for five hundred years.''[2]
[2] The Rev. J. T. Gracey, D. D., ``China in Outline,'' p. 10.

There is something amazing in the immensity of the population. Great cities are surprisingly numerous. In America, a city of nearly a million inhabitants is a wonderful place and all the world is supposed to know about it. But while Canton and Tien-tsin are tolerably familiar names, how many in the United States ever heard of Hsiang-tan-hsien ? Yet Hsiang-tan- hsien is said to have 1,000,000 inhabitants, while within comparatively short distances are other great cities and innumerable villages. In the Swatow region, within a territory a hundred and fifty miles long and fifty miles wide, there are no less than ten walled cities of from 40,000 to 250,000 inhabitants, besides hundreds of towns and villages ranging from a few hundred to 25,000 or 30,000 people. Men never tire of writing about the population adjacent to New York, Boston and Chicago. But in five weeks' constant journeying through the interior of the Shantung Province, there was hardly an hour in which multitudes were not in sight. There are no scattered farmhouses as in America, but the people live in villages and towns, the latter strongly walled and even the former often have a mud wall. As the country is comparatively level, it was easy to count them, and as a rule there were a dozen or more in plain view. I recall a memorable morning. It was Friday, June 28, 1901. We had risen early, and by daylight we had breakfasted, and started our carts and litters. In our enjoyment of the cool, delicious morning air, we walked for several li. Just before the sun rose, we crossed a