A Collection of Short Stories

By Caroline Maddock Hart 

   Steve & Terri Crawford, June 1992 Ridgecrest, California

  Table of Contents 

 

It Is Wuhu In September 

Honeymoon 1907 

Honeymoon In China 

Village Of 99

Anking 

Pirates  

Wuhu Ho Cheo Honeymoon 

Village Near Iche san 

She Saved Her Face 

The Shantung Guild 

The Little Orphan 

Ching Tek Cheng 

Captain Hogg 

Yangtze River

Alone 

      Preface.   In June/July 1991 during the Crawford reunion we discovered Grandmother Hart's wonderful stories for the first time.  Seeing their deteriorating condition and realizing their family and historical significance, we borrowed them from Grandmother Crawford intending to transcribe and "publish" them for all family groups, e.g., Crawford's, Reynolds, Harts, Eikelmann's, and Greens.  With grandmother's visit this month, we needed to finish this project. 

 

      The stories were written in the 1950's and were originally typed by Betty Hart.  If not for her efforts then, these wonderful stories might have been forever lost.  This story collection is very close to Grandmother Hart's proofed copy.  Since they were written over a period of time, personal names, especially Chinese names were often capitalized and hyphenated differently.  Therefore the Chinese names are all the same throughout the book using Virgil Hart pinyin names.  As you read through and enjoy this part of our family's history, please note and contact us about any questions, we can then research and correct any errors. 

 

      The intent is to preserve a part of our family's past.  We hope you enjoy these stories as much as we have. 

 

Steve & Terri Crawford, June 1992 

Ridgecrest, California  

It Is Wuhu In September

 

                                        

                                                   Estell below Ichi can, Wuhu, Anhuai

      At last my preparation of years were rewarded, for I carried in my pocket a half-read letter that appointed me to China.  That early afternoon in the Spring of 1904 found me hurrying toward the operating rooms of Chicago's huge Cook County Hospital, at that time said to be the largest charity hospital in the world.  Its patients represented many nationalities, who had unusual diseases and met with a wide variety of accidents and medical emergencies, I had elected nurse's training there.  Its military-like discipline and long hours had been hard at times to accept, but on that Spring day, all that was soon to be in the past. 

      A brief luncheon period and a rush day in surgery had allowed only a glance at the letter, but it was my uppermost thought as I scrubbed up, put on cap, mask and gown and entered the room where an operation was already under way.  I moved silently to my station and after a few moments, the chief surgeon, alert always to the personnel and efficiency of his assistants, looked up.  He said teasingly, "So the little red-headed missionary is here to help, looking for all the world as if she had seen a vision.  Just when and where are you going?" 

      After months of incredulous banter, it was good at last to reply, "I found the letter this noon.  It is Wuhu in September."  Keen amusement glanced from eyes above the masks at the euphonious

name, and then silence fell over the swift movements of the three surgeons.  Finally, the operation was over.  As I relieved the chief surgeon of his mask and gown, he grumbled, "Lots of need right here.  Can't see why you want to go half-way around the world.  You never will find a more deplorable specimen of disease than our last case.  Better reconsider, nurse, and stay here." 

      His having left gave an opportunity for the intern’s and nurses to gather round me as I snatched the free moment to finish reading my letter.  "Yes, I go to Wuhu in September and I am to have a house of my own."  Dismayed as I grasped the significance, I repeated, "A whole house!  What will I do with a whole house to myself?" 

      Many times in the next ten years I was to hear other equally bewildered workers put the same question of the management of a house in the Orient with its endless variations and ramifications.  Those houses were built for spaciousness in hot weather, but were drafty and inadequately heated in cold and damp seasons.  Moth and rust perpetually corrupted furnishings.  Large groups of house staff whose  collective faces "must be saved" (spared embarrassment).  Always some unenlightened ones persisted in "the squeeze."   Over it all, there is a leisureliness that could never be hustled and bills that inevitably had to be paid in a currency which was never stable.  I have known many persons, who surmounted the difficulties of their special vocations with signal success, but who quailed under the irritations of the avocation of maintaining a household.

      So, one evening, after having sailed two hundred and fifty miles up the Yangtze River from Shanghai, I came to my long expected home at Wuhu.  A cordial welcome awaited me. During dinner my Doctor host said casually, "We have engaged three servants for you.  You can begin housekeeping in the morning."   I gasped, "I can't even speak a word of Chinese, and why do I need three servants?" 

      The Doctor resumed, "That will not be hard.  Your Chinese teacher has been here for a week.  The quickest way to learn a language is to use it.  As to the three servants, you have to have a cook, then there is a coolie to do many things a cook will not do and for your own room and washing an older woman is essential.  She will give respectability to a young unmarried woman living alone."  I silently accepted. 

      The next afternoon the doctor and his wife had some calls away from the compound, so they left on my doorstep for tea an unexpected guest.  He was a Scotsman, a man long in China, who came from that mysterious place, the Interior.  I had never heard of him before and never saw him again, but I have blessed my fortunate stars that he came my way that day.  Over our scones and tea he humorously said, "Do not let the household set-up vex you, Miss Maddock.  Many women, and men too, worry because they cannot hurry the Oriental.  When you are tempted to say, 'In America one servant does all these things,' remember that out here you pay your cook ten pennies a day.  When you think of that pittance be content with his nickel bit of work."  He showed me too, how easily I could be diverted from my real reason for coming to China and, that wherever possible, I should hand unimportant details to others, leaving me to give attention to the specialized type of service for which my Mission had sent me to this strange land. 

      So I accepted the house and the three servants.  Three years later I married Dr. Hart, a widower with five children, and our household staff was increased to nine. 

      Our compound was unique in that it was a rocky promontory that rises one hundred feet above the Yangtze.  It was indeed "a place by the side of the road," only the road's pavement was two miles of muddy water flowing three miles an hour between its shores.  Of that mud, W. Robert Moore says, "It is estimated that the Yangtze dumps into the Yellow Sea 400,000,000 tons of mud annually."[1] 

      The Chinese from time immemorial have saved their lives by drinking tea.  Tea making cannot be done by using warm water, which they call "reh shui," but must be done by vigorously boiling water called "kai shui."  Kai is the word for "to open."  It is only when the bubbles gather and burst, of kai, on the surface that the water is safe to drink.  The muddy taste is offset by the addition of tea leaves.  I once, while having walked the dike, stopped to talk to a flood refugee who lived in a tea-matting shelter scarcely thirty inches high and not broad enough to protect feet and head at the same time.  With imperturbable calm in calamity she was coaxing water to boil over a bonfire of leaves and grass and with innate hospitality she said. "The water has now opened.  Please have a cup of tea." 

      The river with its slow current seemed deceptively peaceful on fair windless days, but many a sorrow lay hidden in its mighty stream.  When high water came in late summer we had a rise of twenty seven feet at Wuhu.  Often dikes were broken and crops destroyed.  There was one channel off our hill where a Navy Captain said that his chain ran one hundred and eighty feet and had not found bottom.  One day, when two native junks collided, the one bound up-river sank, masts, sails,

hulk and passengers, never to be seen again.  Another time I watched with horror while a venturesome ferry-boat essayed to cross when all other boats were tied up by boisterous weather.  It was overturned and of its forty eight passengers, only six were saved.  Our children were never for a moment away from the guardianship of an older person.  And still, with all its hazards, this great highway of traffic was our friend. 

      On clear days the elevation of our compound gave us a view across the river to mountains four thousand feet high which housed vast quantities of un-mined coal.  We looked down river to Si Ho shan (Dead Priest's Hill) where many years later the Japanese sank our gallant American gun-boat, the Panay. 

      Wuhu was an old walled city with a population of over one hundred thousand persons.  It was the largest rice shipping center in the world.  It also exported soy bean products, silk, sesame oil, dried eggs and wrought iron works.  Its iron flowers were famous throughout the Empire.  I have often seen thirty ocean-going vessels lay in port at one time.  Its landmark, the Wuhu Pagoda, said to be the oldest in China, had stood for thirteen centuries.  Legend had it that on New Year's Eve all the other pagodas came to pay it homage. 

    

                                                

                                                 Wuhu Harbor and Pagoda in background with cross river ferry

This great river highway brought much of interest into our daily lives.  My marriage to Dr. Hart added a wealth of his old friends and associations.  He was born in Kiukiang above Wuhu on the Yangtze, and had lived there until he went to America for college and medical training.  The officers on all the passenger boats knew him from boyhood.  At that time, the British, French and German ships were in regular service on the river as well as the China Merchant Marine.  At the time of our Civil War American shipping largely retired from Eastern inland waters, but a few of the old Yankee skippers remained.  One of these was brought to the hospital one morning with Cholera.  After forty years he had let his desire for fresh fruit override his prudence, and had eaten a pear bought on the street.  Twelve hours later he died.

 

      In later years, refrigerator steamers half loaded with shad from Vladivostok would put into Wuhu and fill the rest of their holds with duck and pheasant for the London market. 

      There were native junks engaged in inland traffic on the small tributaries of the river.  Often these, loaded with pilgrims going to one of China's sacred mountains, passed, headed upstream with singing, the clamor of ancient musical instruments and squawks of fowls being made propitiatory offerings for fair sailing around the hill. 

      Doubly welcomed were our American gun-boats on the Asiatic station.  Many of the officers, then young in the service, have since risen to the highest rank in the Navy.  Ships of light draft such as the Villalobos, the Quiros and the Panay operated at all times of the year.  In the high water seasons old veterans like the Wisconsin and Helena came too. 

      I remember one August with its terrific heat when the doctors had been called by emergencies to other ports.  I was the only foreigner on the Hill.  For two days I had lain weak and feverish with one of the many oriental diseases, and had come in my pain and loneliness to feel that I would never recover.  My old Amah sat beside me saying, "Aiya, Aiya."  Suddenly I heard music, band music.  The strains sounded heavenly.  Weakly, I thought, "This is delirium, this can only be a fiction of a sick mind, the end cannot be far away."  The insistent air made me drag myself to the shuttered window.  There off the Hill lay the Wisconsin,  The Stars and Stripes waving from her mast and her band playing in serenade.  "Hurry," I called to the Amah, "Hurry, tell the gate-man to dip our flag."  This was Home, this was American soil!  My recovery dated from that hour. 

      Hospitality was mandatory as well as a delightful oasis in the day's work.  Outside of a few large port cities, there were no hotel accommodations for foreigners.  Our mode of life required helpers.  I daily gratefully acknowledged the need for a competent staff. 

      "What in the world did so many servants do?"  I am often asked.  The only difference is that in America we never see so many of those who serve us.  Think of our water supplies, our hydraulic engineers, the great storage reservoirs, the chemists who protect the purity of the water and the architects who pipe it in to our dwellings.  The admiring wondering Chinese call it. "Silai tihhsui,"  the self-arriving water.  At Wuhu the water carrier, Lao Liang, went down the one hundred foot hill and filled his buckets from that silt-laden river whose heavy mud content I spoke of earlier.  Balancing his two buckets on a carrying pole, he climbed half-way up the path and emptied them into the "Kangs," which were great glazed earthen-ware jars.  Then, by stirring generous amounts of alum into the water, the silt was caused to settle to the bottom.  Later he dipped the cleared water into clean buckets and carried them up to the kitchen Kangs.  From there it was boiled and filtered for household use.  This preparation of the water was one man's work.  In the great heat of the summer several men worked day and night at this one task.  You awoke in the morning to the chant of the water carriers as they shouldered their heavy loads.

      Hsa Si Fu was our cook.  As the Chinese say, raising the hand while doubling the four fingers into the palm and leaving the thumb extended, "He was the head Man."  He was usually the go-between for complaints from the other servants.  Even if they came to us directly, we usually called him in.  His advice was sought, too, to employ new servants, for nowhere on earth are the old clan, neighborhood and guild systems so widely observed.  Hsa Si Fu went to the street and changed money into whatever currency was needed.  From farmers he bought eggs, chickens and vegetables which were to be cooked.  We never ate raw vegetables and fruits except those carefully supervised in our compound gardens.  Fish was bought during the cold months but never in the Cholera season.  They were always brought to the kitchen door swimming alive in buckets of water.  As cook, Hsa Si Fu baked bread, pies and cakes besides all the other dishes.  Any servant, who accompanied a guest, was importuned for fresh ideas in cooking.  I recall a Bishop's cook, who could make excellent cream puffs.  For days after the Bishop's departure we had cream puffs with every dinner until our cook had acquired the skill.  Hsa joyously welcomed guests either expected or surprise.  He was my cook before I was married, he went with us on our one thousand mile honeymoon trip in our house-boat and he was the last of all those faithful to close the doors of the empty house with me at midnight, when I came away for the last time.  By lantern light he guided my tired foot steps down the hill to the houseboat where Wang Si Muh had hours before taken my little children.  Hsa went with me to Shang-hai and helped in a hundred ways until the boat weighed anchor for America.  Nine years later, when he heard that my two step-daughters returned to China, he left his work, traveled three hundred miles to Shanghai and waited till their boat docked to see if he might serve the house of Hart once more.  

            

          Hsa Si Fu: Cook  for the           The Estella sailboat

          Hart family

      Chang Si Fu did all of the laundry.  From May until October everyone wore white and changed often.  Wuhu had no cleaning establishments so sponging and pressing also fell to him.  Guests, who were perennial, always were glad to be freshened up by Chang.  He had a small octagonal room at the top of the Hill with windows on all sides.  Here he rubbed and watched the river traffic, ironed clothing, table and bed linens and saw that fresh long gowns were ready for the other help.  In times of stress he was competent to assist in cooking or table service. 

      Song Teh Shao was our table boy.  He kept the living rooms and study in order and set the table and waited on us at meals.  He had learned little peculiarities of service such as, the British liking a spoon and fork for dessert.  If in doubt, he would ask if the guests were European or American.  Teh Shao washed the dishes and silver and accounted for every piece of silver each night.  He opened the door for guests and served afternoon tea.  Chinese guests, at any hour of the day, always expected refreshments.

      Lao Pan was our coolie.  He was a protégé of the cooks and was so simple that once taught one way of doing a task, never had ingenuity enough to devise another method.  He daily washed all of the Ningpo varnished floors.  That lovely varnish, which with all our use and abuse, retained its high luster for years.  It is the varnish that requires two months in damp weather to dry.  Lao Pan cleaned the lamps and lanterns.  No matter how brilliant the moonlight, it was not respectable to go out without lantern bearers.  He washed windows, swept walks and cleaned shoes.  Then there was always bath water to be carried in or dipped out of the tubs.  He had keys to the locks on the rain water Kangs at the four corners of our house.  If any presumptuous soul took a dipper of that water, when the lock was off, Lao Pan would yell like a mad-man.  He was everybody's lackey and worked hard for enough dowry money to acquire a wife.  When I first saw his chosen one, she was perched on a stool, quite the homeliest person I had ever seen.  Yet he pointed with pride and said, "See her little feet!"  As I look back on it now, those helpless women tottering about on their bound feet, seem to have reached the ultimate in slavery fashion.  We gave Lao Pan's pathetic wife the task of mending. 

      Cheng Tsai Feng was the tailor.  We acquired his services by degrees; at first, to make my modest trousseau and later to tailor all of Dr. Hart's suits, the family coats and clothing.  Then there were always slip-covers and drapes to be made.  My two beautiful silk gowns made in Chinese style from a roll of "tribute silk" given Dr. Hart by a son of Li Hung Chang, were made by Cheng.  After forty years, those same gowns are still worn as hostess gowns by my daughters. 

      Many persons, especially in hot weather, used the Chinese cut and materials.  The lovely grass linens were a favorite for informal summer wear.  The Chinese are quite ingenuous in meeting the fearful heat and at the same time being formal.  I remember once in crossing the wide hall, that the front porch was crowded with callers.  I said to Teh Shao, "There are guests at the door."  "I know," he said, "but they have not officially arrived."  As I watched from my screened end of the hall, I saw the men wore cleverly woven mesh shirts of fine bamboo cane.  After wiping face, neck and arms with damp towels, they were assisted into fine silk gowns which their bamboo undervests protected from moisture.  Then, taking their fans, the servants announced them as arrived. 

      Wang Si Muh, a very fine woman who spoke a good Mandarin, cared for the children.  As I have pointed out earlier, because of river hazards and also because of hundreds of patients came to the hospital with serious diseases, the children were under constant supervision. 

      Our final servant was a man who cared for Dr. Hart's horse. 

      As wages were then we sometimes paid more than others for our helpers.  Rather spoiled the custom some old-timers reminded us.  Records packed after leaving China thirty five years ago, remained stored because of other more pressing work through the years.  I exhumed them recently and they show that: 

Hsa Si Fu, the cook, received    $10.00 Max. per month 

Chang Si Fu, the laundry man        8.00    "       "       " 

Song Teh Shao, table boy             5.00    "       "       " 

Lao Pan, coolie                            4.00    "       "       " 

Lao Pan's wife, mending                3.00    "       "       " 

Cheng Tsai Feng, tailor                12.00    "       "       " 

Lao Liang, water carrier                 4.00    "       "       " 

Wang Si Muh, A-mah                     6.00    "       "       " 

Yard man                                     4.00     "       "       " 

                                               56.00 Mexican 

In 1912 the Gold standard for $56 Mexican would amount to approximately $27 in U. S. Currency.  To add to the embarrassment of recording these sums, our help ate native food entirely, which they

bought and prepared.  However, their living quarters were furnished by us.  We had the services of nine persons for $27 Gold a month!  I blush to record this. 

      Our sources of food supply were many.  We had no refrigeration.  In cold weather this was not so great a hardship but during the long summer months, eternal vigilance was the price of living.  No meat was ever served a second time.  Indeed, in hot weather our only meat came in tins.  Chicken was always available and sometimes a short walk from the Hill with a gun, would add snipe or duck to our fare.  Between May and October, which was cholera season, we never ate fish.  In cold weather our Wuhu Compradore Chun Yik, supplied us with beef (which might be water-buffalo) and good mutton.  His pass-book, exhumed from oblivion this year, shows a purchase of a seven and one half pound leg of mutton for $ .72 (72 cents) Mexican!  On imported goods his prices were exorbitant.  Once there was a charge of $11.25 Mex. for one case of forty eight tins of milk.  By buying it directly from abroad, we paid only $4.75 Mex. per case, in one hundred case lots.  Four thousand eight hundred tins of milk were quite a store, but many others were glad to share in the purchase at the lower price.  There was no pasturage in China away from the mountain resorts and, therefore, fresh milk was unobtainable. 

      Most Americans at that time, bought all of their staples from a store in San Francisco which catered to Oriental trade and packed its goods to insure safe delivery.  When the catalogs came out in the Spring it was recognized social occasion to gather at some home, spread the dining table to its fullest and explore the next year grocery lists.  All of these things could have been bought in Shanghai but at increased prices.  Therefore, from San Francisco came most of our canned goods, our dried fruits and vegetables, our jams, tinned meats and fish.  We ordered several hams and sides of bacon, huge cheeses, coffee, flour, cereal, raisins, and always citron and lemon peels for the Christmas cakes and puddings.  The seasonal preparation of these was a rite in which every member of the household shared.  Many loaves were packed away to last from Thanksgiving until Easter.  Though sent in the Spring, the orders were not filled until new fall stocks were in and they did not reach us until late October.  Then again all participated in opening, checking and storing, for this meant most of our meals until the next May. 

      A tea buyer came from a New York importing house to Hankow during the tea picking season.  He too, was an old family friend and through him we bought our year's supply of tea.  We chose a rich amber Keemun.  It was perfectly beautiful when poured, even though this adjective is not prescribed for food.  We bought a white tea for Chinese use, some of it with the jasmine flower in it.  Tea came in three and one half pound boxes and weighed a Chinese "catty."  Often the weight has been confused with the container and corrupted by us to a "tea-caddie." 

 

      Great Britain was our market for pie-plant, orange marmalade and black currant jam.  From there, too, came pickled herring, Finland haddock and occasionally a small Wiltshire ham.  Then there were the tea biscuits from Huntley Palmer's, sealed in two pound tins, and the various chutneys, of which Major Grey's seemed the favorite.  Every old far-Easterner aspired to the invention of his own chutney recipe, rich in mangoes, raisins, ginger root and spices.

      Sugar came from Hong Kong although grown in the Philippines.  In cool weather the butter sent from Australia was packed fifty-six one pound bricks to the box but the lack of refrigeration in warm weather compelled us to buy either French or Danish butter in one pound tins.  Reduced to an oily liquid, we served it in tiny bowls and just "dunked" our bread. 

      For the hot six months the usual fare was chicken.  Every householder, either man or woman, sought eagerly for new ways to present this fowl to tempt jaded appetites.  They carefully hoarded any special method of preparation and exalted when guests were surprised.  Hsa Si Fu de-boned chickens, then dressed and roasted them.  When strangers came he lingered near the dining room door to hear the ripple of excitement as Dr. Hart commenced to carve across the breast.  Another delicious variation resulted from separating the meat from bones and skin and grinding it fine.  Then, adding seasoning of salt, pepper, lemon juice, grated lemon rind, a trace of nutmeg, mace and flour enough to make a cohesive roll, he would steam it slowly in a pudding cloth resting on the bones but clear of the water.  It was a gourmet's dream.

      I always wondered, until I went to China, just what "Pilau" was which Joseph Sedley in "Vanity Fair" insisted upon making for Becky Sharp.  Even, after I learned the formula, I was dubious about eating it.  After one trial it became a favorite.  For this, rice was boiled to preserve the kernels, raisins were fluffed up in boiling water, small cubes of bread were toasted and white fish boiled and flaked.  After mixing all those ingredients, they were sautéed in hot butter until golden brown.  Served with chutneys, coconut, spiced fruits and mustard, it was really delicious. 

      There were many varieties of rice and for a limited season each year, an especially gluttonous kind might be bought.  It was called, quite descriptively, if not ecstatically, "lily-foot" rice.  This rice was enclosed in a woven reed container shaped like a woman's shoe.  After boiling, each person disentangled the reeds and ate the gluttonous mass.  The reed gave a peculiar flavor but, while Dr. Hart and the children welcomed it, I never indulged a second time. 

      Many strictly Chinese foods like water chestnuts, lotus seeds and bamboo shoots made for variety.  Duck and pheasant were plentiful and cheap during their season.  Peanuts, oranges and pumelo were eaten by all.  Oranges came in great variety from tiny kumquats to large and luscious Mandarin. 

      We were constantly welcoming expected and unexpected guests.  There were no foreign hotels outside of the coast cities, so we were careful to entertain strangers and often found them angels unaware.  Many times I blessed the canny advice of my Scot caller and thanked Providence for a well trained staff.  Our guests were a delightful tie with the outside world, but there always remained, as Sir Anthony Eden once aptly put it. "A job of work to be done."  That job of work was crowding our elbows twenty four hours of every day.  It was our reason for being in China and with our colleagues, we shared it, and no hour found it absent from our concern.  The great river brought many a traveler of delight to our door, never on schedule, for time and tide, storms and cargoes determined the movements of all boats.  We thought in terms of boat transit so much that long after we were back in Chicago and taking a suburban train, one of the children might ask, "When do we sail?" 

      About two o'clock one night a telegram arrived from Kiukiang, a day's trip West on the river, asking us to tell Mrs. X, the wife of an American Army Colonel in Manila, that she could not proceed to visit her friends in Kiukiang but must leave the upriver steamer at Wuhu.  Sudden riots had flared up in Kiukiang and all local foreigners had taken refuge on gun-boats off shore.  A bitter winter storm buffeted our little boat as it made its hour long trip to the Company's bulk but it required a harder effort for a lady to be awakened and to hastily disembark in an utterly unheard of place, even though the Captain assured her it was all right. 

      Another time a telegram was delayed two days in delivery.  When it came the boat was already in sight.  The Bishop had sent word from Hankow saying, he could not sanction a young couple, new to the Orient, trying to make the trip up through the gorges at that time of year.  Would we please entertain them for nine months until travel was better?  Dr. Hart was operating and an attendant read him the telegram.  After ordering a man to hurry and meet the steamer with a sam-pan, he sent a message asking me to devise some way to take them in.  I canvassed the possibilities.  Temporarily, while I hoped for a new nurse to take my old suite of rooms in the hospital, we had used them for our school.  I sent a note to the teacher who told her pupils to each carry their desk and books and set up school on our front porch.  Faithful helpers took furniture from storage, made beds and hung curtains.  When the sampan arrived, we met our unknowing guests as if we had a week to prepare. 

      As I sort these old papers, packed long ago, I find all sorts of forgotten treasures and reminders of happy though hectic days.  I have pasted into the book, "The Break-up of China", letters of appreciation from the author and signed briefly, "Beresford",  others, too, from his secretary, Robin Gray.  A letter from our American Legation at Peking says, "Dear Dr. Hart, I enjoyed my stay with you last year so greatly, that I have decided to ask if Mrs. Conger and her niece may visit you for a week or two." 

      The last guest we entertained was a member of the Swedish Army Engineering Corps.  He was in charge of the Whangpoo Conservancy Board, which kept open the harbor at Shanghai.  I earlier mentioned the terrific load of silt carried down the Yangtze each year.  Shanghai was at that time, in point of tonnage, the second largest shipping port in the world.  Situated on the Whangpoo River a few miles from the mouth of the Yangtze, the bar, caused by sediment, constituted a very difficult engineering problem.  When Dr. Hart told me Mr. Von Heidenstam might come to advise on local flood prevention work near Wuhu, if we would entertain him, I was overwhelmed.  For months we had a succession of guests and my youngest child was only a few weeks old.  I protested, but he came.  Each day he worked tirelessly surveying the needs.  I might add that his prescribed methods of dike repair and flood control held for years. 

      My worries about entertainment were needless for at dinner and into the evening we listened enthralled as he told of methods used in far places where he had been.  Feats of engineering on the Thames, Mississippi, the Nile at Asswan and on the Euphrates.  In return, he was delighted with Hsa Si Fu's boned chicken with water chestnut dressing.  He relished the snipe so common in our Wuhu marshes.  We served him chicken roll, nut bread, pop-overs and all the other hot breads that Hsa had mastered.  Our guest constantly penciled recipes in a little notebook and just as assiduously embarrassed me because so often I had to move about, thus causing him to spring to his feet at attention. 

      Such delightful, varied and charming people!  I wonder often where their paths have led them these years?  

      Just this week my friendly mailman exclaimed before I reached the door, "This is the first time I have seen a letter with sixty thousand dollars worth of postage on it."  It was an Air Mail from Wuhu. As I  looked at the sixty thousand dollars in postage, I wondered how I would ever struggle with the Chinese inflation of 1948, when it seemed insurmountable thirty five years ago.  I am forced to admit that living was considerably cheaper in those days!  though let me tell of some of my struggles with exchange.  Food, work and goods had to be paid for varying currencies caused suspense and surprise.  

      The Chinese coined copper money in the time of Abraham.  The familiar cash piece with the hole for convenience in stringing, dates back three thousand years.  They have used the decimal system for that long also, not only in money, but in weights and long and land measurements.  The Arabians brought in the use of silver.  The largest denomination is called a Tael, which is one and one half ounces by weight.  It is not a minted coin, just a term.  In some regions persons carried a chunk of silver from which they would chop off a part and weigh it on the small scale always carried with them for this purpose.  In some of the Southern Port cities small silver coins about the size of our dimes and quarters were minted.  Their values were based on the money table: 

 

10 li (cash)            make      1 candareen 

10 candareen           "          1 mace 

10 mace                  "          1 Tael 

I have a dime sized coin marked 72 candareens and another of the same size marked 1 mace and 14 candareens.  When first in China, I so often distinguished the idiom at ie phrase "cha puh dou" which I learned meant, "not quite, just about."  This flexibility seems to carry over into the monetary values which are not exact but "just about." 

      Upon arrival in China, I was advised to open an account at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.  There I was paid $2.07 Mexican for each gold dollar deposited.  During my residence I saw exchange vary from $2.05 to $2.18 Mexican.  We always waited expectantly to learn at what rate our Mission Treasurer would exchange our Quarterly compensation. 

      But that was just the beginning.  We would give the cook a check in Mexican which he exchanged into cash for local buying.  Here again there was fluctuation, all the way from 998 cash to over 2000 for one Mexican dollar.  Our Winter's coal and wood were paid for in Spanish dollars.  My old check books show that when we paid forty-seven cents gold for a Mexican dollar, the Spanish dollar cost fifty-nine cents gold.  At times, when we imported goods from abroad, we had to pay the Imperial custom's duty in Taels.  I found two checks, written consecutively dated on the same day, the one that paid the import tax to the Government, cost $1.03 Mexican per Tael, and the other to pay the shipping company for carrying the cargo from Shanghai to Wuhu, was in Shanghai Taels and cost $1.29 Mexican each.  Our method was to write a check for the particular Tael specified and later the bank sent a note tallying the differences. 

      Marco Polo spoke of bank notes in his "travels", and the British Museum is said to have one from China dated three hundred years before they were used in Europe.  The only time we used bank notes was in paying chair and baggage coolies in going up to Kuling, our mountain summer resort.  These coolies would accept nothing but 100 cash notes. 

      The last night in Wuhu, two months after Dr. Hart's death from the dreaded Typhus Fever, Hsa Si Fu and I stood in the dim lantern light.  He said, "We must still 'suan kiang'." (Take accounts) I protested that I was quite satisfied and knew that there had been no time to listen to the accounting for money used in household expenses, but there again the 'kue chi' (established custom) prevailed. 

The cook's face would be lost if he did not render a statement for money advanced.  In all, fifty-two thousand cash were involved.  Like a good steward, Hsa made his reckoning.  The door closed on a decade of constant surprises and baffled feeling that ten times ten years would never exhaust the infinite variety of the Orient.  That exchange between the East and the West varied in far more ways that in currency.  That perhaps in their endurance in calamity, in their frugality, in their reserve and their refusal to be rushed, they have much to teach us.  In the vital things, such as the "open water" for their tea, may they always be watchful, and may the door to helpful intercourse between countries always be "Kai."  

Honeymoon 1907 

 

      Early in the spring of 1907, we decided we would be married in October of that year.  It was our plan to defer our vacations until fall and not before spring; I was entitled to mine with pay, so this would provide the clearance of any debt incurred in my training days, and in buying my outfit for China. 

      Happily a young couple destined for West China, came to stay at Wuhu until Autumn, when making the trip up the Rapids was safer for a young mother.  She, therefore, provided chaperonage, so I would not be alone on the Hill with Edgerton, Jr.. 

      Before the River level fell too low, Edgerton had a trench dug, and floated the houseboat ashore.  There, it was stayed up, as in dry-dock, and thoroughly caulked, and later painted.  As nearly as I can estimate, the boat was from 42 to 50 feet long and ten to twelve feet wide.  It was flat-bottomed and drew four feet of water.  Because often it was used in tributary creeks, the boat draft was made for navigating in shallow water. 

                                           

                    Hart Children on Estella sailboat                                     Interior view of Estella with Caroline & Dr.                                                                                                                          Edgerton Hart

      Forward, there was a deck about ten feet long and just where it met the cabin, the mast was centered.  The cabin, down four steps from the deck, had a double bunk on the port side and single bunk Starboard, with storage drawers beneath these.  A chest of drawers, a drop leaf table, and a few chairs were the furniture.  Racks lined the sides beneath the port holes.  Opening from the cabin, a small bath-room and a tiny kitchen with its dishes all in racks.  On a raised place, the smallest wood cook stove stood, which the cook made to perform miracles, including the sterilizing of the river water daily for our household needs.  The deck aft, had the great sweep-oar set on its support and operated through the center of the stern, as is done in sculling.  It was used, too, as steering blade when under sail.  It was called a "YA LU", and when used to propel the boat needed several men to handle it.  The aft-deck boards were lifted at night, and the crew slept below, bolting the boards down tight, while at anchor. 

      The large square sail had slots at intervals and was hung to the mast near the center of the top.  Sometimes, we sat on top of the cabin, but we were watchful for wind shifts lest we be swept off by the veering of the sail.  After the outside of the boat was caulked and painted, the upper part of the cabin inside was painted white, and the lower part Ningpo varnish. 

      I might say here, that years before, some one in America had given money to Dr. Virgil Hart to buy a boat upon which to itinerant.  Dr. V. C. Hart first bought from a sportsman in Shang-hai, a beautiful boat, which he named the "Stella."  However, the Stella's draft was too deep, and her lines too slender for use in shallow streams. 

      The Stella was sold and four house boats purchased, broad in beam and only four feet in draft.  Three were used in the districts by evangelists, and the other one belonged to the hospital.  The Hospital boat was always maintained in good condition and as a source of revenue, was at times rented to outsiders for trips into the interior. 

      The 1907 summer was very hot, and a very bad Cholera season.  I stood at my hospital window, one morning, looking down the foreshore towards the city.  The cook told me that in the area I could see from my rooms, the night before, twenty persons had lain down and died of Cholera. 

      That summer too, we had several foreign patients, from the Customs, business firms, and the foreign navies, as well as missionaries.

      As ours was a General Hospital, I had not been able to train women nurses along with the men.  So, for any foreign women patients, I had to supervise their care.  Up to the 24th of October, I could not be sure I would be able to leave, as our French lady still awaited discharge.

 

      I should have liked to have been married at Wuhu, but our Doctor and wife were new to China, and had a small baby, so it seemed too much to ask her to do. 

      Early in the spring, I asked my sisters to have made a traveling suit, and dress for receptions - These with hats, gloves, and shoes, Dr. Mary Stone brought out with her, when she returned from America.  My sisters also had an engraving plate made leaving date of marriage vacant, and of these Dr. Stone brought two hundred to China.  Later, when I cabled home the date and place, the engraving was finished for those which my parents sent out in America. 

      The place of marriage as well as time remained uncertain. 

      Captain Perrill, of the American Gunboat "Quiros," was a frequent dinner guest of ours.  He urged us to be married on his boat, which would be "American Soil."  It might be at Wuhu or at Nanking.  Our marriage had to be made in the presence of the American Council.  Just at that time the Council had to go to another Station, and Judge McNally took his place.  Then, later, Captain Perrill was transferred, so a "Quiros" service was impossible. 

      Early, too, in the summer, Mrs. George Stuart, whose husband was President of Nanking University, wrote to me.  She said they wished to observe their twenty-fifth anniversary, and that they would be glad to have us come to their home and be married at that time.  I felt keenly the kindness of Dr. and Mrs. Stuart.  I had gone to China with them in 1904.  I had visited in their home for a week in 1905, when I had the privilege of seeing the historical places in that great city.  But, at the same time. for this great event in my life, I did long for an hour which should belong to Edgerton and me, alone. 

      On the afternoon of October 24th, my patient recovered, and her family came by launch and took her home. 

      For the first time I was sure I could be married on time. 

      At once we had the "Lau teh" call his crew of three men and get the boat ready to sail.  I had my own table linens and silver and the tea set Captain Hogg had given me, put on board.  Also, my dinner set of China, my cha fing dish, trays, and small things to create a home atmosphere in this our first home, were hurriedly sent down - along with my trunk and steamer rugs.  The boatman set sail, at once, so as to be sure to meet us at Hsa Kvan, which was the river port six miles from Nanking.

      Then, I set hospital affairs in my department in order for my month's absence.  This work kept me until late in the night.  I then lay down without having undressed to snatch some sleep, until the watchman would call that the boat was in sight.  On clear nights, we could see the mast lights, miles away, across a bend in the river.  This gave us an hour to row up to the Hulk from the Hill.

      I can still smell the fumes from the old kerosene lamp, swinging above the dining table in that old China Merchant steamer, as I entered about three o'clock in the morning.  Hsa Si Fu, my cook, put my bags in my cabin, as he was to go to Nanking with me, and to be our cook on the houseboat.  The laundry man came down with Edgerton the next day, and acted as "boy" for our voyage.  Our other combined servants remained on the hill in charge of our house.  We had to pay our staff, so there was every reason to have help.  Now, in 1957, in retrospect, it seems a very luxurious way to live. 

      I bade goodbye to my hospital suite, a sweet place, that had been heaven and home for two years.  When Edgerton waved "goodbye" from the sam-pan going back to the hill, and the boat started down river, I went back to the empty dining room table.  There, I spread out my engraved announcements and for the next few hours crossed out the place "Wuhu" and wrote in Nanking.  I also put in the date October twenty six and addressed the envelopes.

      Then I went to my cabin and brushed up for breakfast... and Nanking. 

      At Nanking Hsa Si Fu called a rickety old carriage and putting the bags in we started for the city.  On the way we stopped at the American Consulate and left a letter for Judge McNally about our marriage the next day.  I never can forget that mad ride past the Drum Tower. The mafoo lashed his horse and we careened down the hill past the Christian Mission Compound, barely avoiding spilling any and all bags on the road-side. 

      I went first to the Stuart's where I left my bags, but she was not home.  I then went to the Wilson's, the wife of our Mission Treasurer.  Later, hearing that the Rowe's were back from

America, and knew they had seen my Chicago family, I took a ricksha and went across town to see them.  The Rowe's were just back from furlough and some of their baggage was delayed.  A fearful storm blew up and my ricksha man wouldn't come out to take me back to the Stuart home.  So we sent a message, and again I lay down without having undressed on a mattress and covered myself with my coat.

      In the morning I returned to the Stuart's who had a large family and a large house.  As President of the College he often had to entertain guests.  They also took in four unmarried young persons into their home.  They had a circular dining table that seated eighteen persons.

 

      All day the household was busy - tailors trying to finish clothes for the children; rooms being prepared for the evening reception, which included all the foreign community; of business, customs, Councilor as well as missionaries.  My bedroom opened at a corner of the house, by French windows onto an outside galley.  Servants wandered in bringing things to store.  Dr. Stuart came in one time with an arm load of books.  There seemed no leisure or place for preparations for the evening ahead.  At the great round dinner table, Dr. Stuart told me I had a caller in his study.  There to my great joy and relief I found Edgerton. He had just come from the Japanese Steamer, the only down-river boat that day.  He had sent a message that he would be a passenger.  Any other line, British, French, German, or China Merchants, would have held their boat for him, but not the Japanese.  They were underway, and he had to take a rope, flung to his sampan, and go up the "Jacob's Ladder" over the side. 

      I told Edgerton again, how I wanted an hour just our own.  I wanted to go quietly that afternoon with Dr. Beebe and one or two close friends, to the American Consulate and there be married, then later that evening see all the friends at Dr. Stuart's.  Edgerton went on to Dr. Beebe's, and ___ came with Edgerton.  They were sure if we went to the Consulate, the whole community would rise up and also go.  So, we gave it up. 

      All day long Miss Laura White, head of the Music Faculty at the university, played over and again Wedding Marches.  Later that evening, when Dr. Stuart took me in, on his arm, to meet Edgerton, Miss White played the Mendelssohn's March from Midsummer Night's Dream.

      There was to be no meal served at the Stuart home that evening.  So, Dr. Beebe, invited Edgerton and me to dinner at his home.  He was a widower, living alone, but had kept the

beautifully trained staff of servants Mrs. Beebe had around for years.  It was a quiet, serene, beautifully restful hour after the hurry and confused day.  His grounds were separated from the Hospital Compound by a high brick wall.  This was ground and buildings Father Hart had secured money for, and built.  Dr. Beebe was Dr. Virgil Hart's dear friend.  He once said, "Dr. Virgil C. Hart was the most cultured gentleman, the most conscientious worker, the most Christian Scholar, the rarest of spirit, I have met in my many years in China."  Dr. Beebe had opened his arms and his heart to Edgerton when he came back to China.  We opened the gate that evening, and followed the brick walk in the misty rain that fell.  A most lovely fragrance followed our every step.  A fragrance we found later that came from thousands of English violets in the bed against the wall - They were double, and had stems over twelve inches long, carrying the color into the stem. 

      Several weeks of rainy weather had beaten down all garden blossoms.  But, Dr. Beebe had gathered a huge bunch of these blooms, quite ten or twelve inched across, and these I carried that night. 

      All the years after that, whenever Edgerton went to Nanking, Dr. Beebe gave him violets to bring to me.  He was a princely man with Dr. Houghton and one or two others, one of our dearest friends.

      The dinner was perfectly planned and served.  That quiet hour was never forgotten resting like a benediction on my tired spirit. 

      After dinner, we went back for Dr. and Mrs. Stuart's reception.  I moved about in the crowded rooms until about half past nine, seeing Edgerton across the rooms at times, also talking to others.  Both of us in hearts longing for the time to come when we might do as we pleased.  Then I went towards the door, meeting Edgerton, who said low, "You will not fail me."  It was our first word in that crowded room that night. 

      I went on upstairs, and refreshed my face and hair, and then down to find Dr. Stuart waiting for me.  As Miss White played Mendelssohn, the Wedding March from Midsummer Night's Dream, Dr. Stuart led me in, and then Dr. Beebe had the service.

      It was the twenty sixth day of October, 1907.  We had just been united in marriage by Dr. Robert Beebe, at the home of Dr. and Mrs. George Stuart in the City of Nanking, and in the official presence of Judge McNally, United States Council at Nanking.  

Honeymoon In China 

                     

                           Wedding Carriage

                            Receipt

      It was the occasion of the Silver Wedding Anniversary of Dr. and Mrs. Stuart.  So, all the Nanking community were there.  I was glad to leave the laughing, loving, well-wishing group and find ourselves at least in a rickety old carriage headed for Hsa Kuan and the house boat.  The treasurer of the City had sent the Key to the Gate of the Wall, in care of messengers, we went through the gate, and down to the Yangtze, were we found our house boat.  The boatmen pulled up anchor, lifted sail, and we were off, for a thousand miles of play.

      It seemed unbelievable that work would be set aside for a whole month, with nothing to do but idly sit on deck and drift before the wind.

      In my fondest imaginings, I can think of nothing more ideally exhilarating than the feel of wind, in a sail, and cutting through running water, long lazy days in the most perfect time of year, late October and November, on the lower Yangtze and Boyang Lake.

      In March, we had ordered much of our food for our trip, from San Francisco and England, from Denmark, we had butter in tins.  We added duck, snipe, chicken, and fish at local stops.  Our cook, Hsa Si Fu was with us, and he carefully guarded the safety of water and food. 

      We had not a care in the world.  Before dark each evening, Edgerton and Cheo Lao Ban selected a place of anchorage away from nests of pirates.  For pirates did exist and did still descend on unwary boatmen to rob and mistreat them.  When sailing, we carried the American flag at the mast, and that helped as a deterrent to assault.  

 

Village of 99

 

      I wish now I had kept a journal of dates and places, but I was so tired with my hard year's work, that I never looked toward this day when it would have meant so much. 

      One evening between Wuhu and Anking, we anchored on the east shore of the Yangtze to avoid a nest of pirates on the south side.  We were near a little village, and very soon the villagers came down to the boat.  Our old Cheo Lau Ban was there, as always, feeling important with his parsonages.  "Where are your honorable roots?"  The people asked.  Cheo Lao Ban quickly replied, "Do you not know that this is the great Dr. Hart.  Why he is so distinguished, he thinks nothing of cutting off your leg if it is crooked and putting it on again in a straight line."  Edgerton protested modestly that Cheo's praise was over zealous.  We then listened to questions;  "Could he make the blind see?"  "Could he make the lame walk?" 

      Edgerton finally asked how many there were in the village.  There were ninety-nine.  While Cheo had boasted, Edgerton had counted; so he asked, "Where is the other honorable head?  There are only ninety-eight here."  So they said, "One had been left at home.  He was blind and old."  Edgerton asked them to bring him; and then examining him as he lay on his stretcher, he told them, "This was a case he could care for, but he would have to use the knife... but later the man could likely see."  It was a case of cataract, so they promised to bring him to the hospital when we came back.  ( They did, and he did regain his sight.) 

      The people crowded around for examinations and several were cared for that evening, for we carried medicines and a surgical kit.  As twilight emerged, they went back to their simple houses, and we sat and watched the stars, and were grateful that at almost every stop we could witness the spirit of the "Great Physician".  

Anking 

                                   

                                    Anking magistrates office with pagoda in background: There was some difficulty to

                                    the identification of just where this photo was until I met Mariam Wong, who had an

                                    identical photo with Anqing written on it.

 

      So, our boat sped on against its four mile current up the wide reaches of the Yangtze.  We saw little intimate glimpses of life that steam-boat travel never gave.  One night we reached An-king, capital of Anhuai Province.  Many good friends were there, with whom we wished to visit.  But, at Anking they locked the city gates at sundown, so we could not enter - years, two or three or four later, those gates were locked for several days.  It happened after the interdict against raising poppies.  That was a time when Prohibition prohibited!   The Edict worked, but there was still the Treaty with Great Britain, by which China was compelled to buy its quota of Indian Opium.  The Governor of our Province took his quota.  Paid a million Taels for it.  Paid the Imperial import duty.  Then felt it was their own to do with as they pleased.

 

      One afternoon, Edgerton came hastily over from the hospital and said,  "The British gun boat __________ has gone up river.  It is flying the flag of the British Vice Council of Shanghai.  I will ride down to the British Consulate for there must be trouble."  Soon, he came back. The Shanghai Official was on his way to Anking.  The Governor there had taken one million taels worth of opium and had burned it in public in an open bonfire.  That was boycotting British trade, so, the British official, second only to the Minister at Peking, had gone on one of their largest boats to protest. 

      Edgerton tried to reason that when they had paid for the opium, surely they might do as they pleased with it.  Well, we heard later when the vessels came down river, the rest of the story. 

      In China, news flies by some mysterious magic beyond belief.  By the time the British warship reached Anking, the gates were locked, and ordered kept locked day and night.  Had the Governor known an official was there, courtesy demanded he should call upon him.  But the gates were locked, no one came in or went out.  The Governor could not see over the wall - so, no call was made.  After waiting some days  - I now do not recall how long - the British took up anchor and returned down river. The Oriental does have a different approach to life to what we do. 

      So, this early November night, looking at those massive walls and locked gates, we know there was nothing to do until morning but wait.

      At dawn as we lay outside the city of Anking, the ropes for the sails began to flap, flap against the mast long before the sun's first color was seen - often now, when I hear leaves rustle while darkness still holds, I think of those houseboat days - That first rustle of wind is the first notice night is over. 

      The cook and crew were astir.  Dr. Hart spoke to them.  "Ah!" the old boatman said, while he watched the clouds, "the 'feng' (wind) would carry us far today."  So, Edgerton said, "Kai Teo" and before the sun was up, we were off - leaving Anking to our return trip.

      Such a day!  The wind blew up along - except for meals, we sat on the deck all day, our backs against the low cabin wall.  The sail billowed full, never once sagged in ten hours - I have never felt such exhilaration in my life - beat against that mighty four mile an hours current, from six to four, we made sixty miles...an equivalent of one hundred miles, to consider the current we breasted in ten hours.  The old boatman always watched the hours of 16:00 and then assayed his breeze.  The wind was his power.  He knew its every mood - He loved it as a youth now loves his car.  He feared it because it was beyond his control.  The wisdom of the ancients was in his eyes an he scanned the sky and clouds, and listened to the whisper of trees. 

      I wonder if I do not have some Viking blood in me - I could lie down gladly and put out to sea in the evening of life, the wind humming in the ropes, the breeze lifting the sail until one seems to fly - that breasting of the waves, the old irresistible force of water, the cleanness of the air, from all that fouls it up on shore.  No man made device except this skiff, there is nothing in all the world so uplifting.  My heart, now nearly at eighty, yearns for the breeze over water. 

      An evening after this, we anchored early, Edgerton took his rifle and I took the shotgun and went ashore.  We climbed some hills, perhaps 1500 feet, whose side towards the river were perfectly bare,  When we reached the top, we looked down into an enchanting little valley.  Stepping down the slope, I touched something with my foot.  Faster than I could see, a little deer leaped up and pranced off across the hillside.  It stopped just once to look back, such a slender

graceful creature, then by long bounds disappeared.  

      It was sunset.  Below, a little stream widened out to make a lake, and on its waters floated hundreds of swans.  Beyond was a small village, and the men were going home in the dusk - Their songs serenaded us - The hillsides had many trees, some of them oak with autumn coloring - It might have been a New England village, with its trees and smoking chimneys and home-coming workers.  Some roofs were thatched, but some were tiled, because we were coming into the Kiangsi pottery country.  

Pirates 

 

      One night when a favored wind caused us to sail late and made us anchor in an untested spot, I heard Edgerton whisper, "Pirates, quiet."  We heard their craft slide up alongside ours, hear them pick at the locked shutters of the port holes, stealthily trying them from window to window.  Edgerton took his rifle and handed me a revolver.  Shots in the air would likely have driven them off, had they forced a shutter.  That star-spangled banner with its red, white, and blue, a small oblong, which flew at our mast in the day, was a mightier deterrent that any gun, we felt.  They cruised all around our boat, tried all the shutters, then Edgerton said, "One is coming on deck to try the door."  The locks held - The crew safely below deck, made no sound or movement, but we knew they were terrified.  In an hour, Edgerton put the firearms back in the rack.  His hearing acutely wiser than mine to foreign sounds, told him they were leaving.  I did not sleep again that night.

 

      "Aiyah, Aiyah!" exclaimed the servants and crew in the morning that was "puhdeh lian." Old Cheo added, "Tha Tai Tai has a liver as big as a water buffalo's," which was the highest praise he could give.  Here in America, one does not often discuss one's liver in social talk, but, in China, it is supposed to be the seat of courage, and so complimentary.

 

      But big or little "tau zo's" we thereafter decided to find safe anchorage above favoring breezes.

      That next day, too, as we glided along, Edgerton told me of how many times as a boy in Kiukiang, when his father was away itinerating, his mother had been awakened.  He stood silently by her side as they heard stealthy footsteps go from window to window trying shutters.  The thieves, or pirates, for they usually lived in communities reached by boats, would not openly assault.  They had no desire to come within range of gun fire.  And that brave pioneer mother in Kiukiang kept her rifle ready for its moral support more than for its physical effect.  

Wuhu Ho Cheo Honeymoon 

 

      Fifty miles above Nanking we anchored at Iche san, Wuhu to greet our friends and to pick up mail.

      Thirty miles farther we came the next day to Ho Cheo, a very small village, by the river side, but where we had a chapel and a Chinese pastor.  The dikes had broken there, and the lower part of the town was flooded.  Upon calling at our pastor's place, we found the front door open, with boards laid from table to table.  We sailed right up to the front door.  We crossed the trestle and stepping on the upper stairs found ourselves on the second floor.  However, the family was there, surrounded by all the movable things from below.  Cooking was managed on a charcoal brazier.  Washing was threaded on bamboo poles and hung out the windows.  We were invited to have a cup of tea, kept hot in a quilt lined pail. 

      On sympathizing with their discomfort we were told it was "Puh iao kin."  So often in China, one hears that, over many various calamities and disasters.  The patient Chinese say "Puh iao kin,"  "It is not important."  

Village Near Iche san  

 

      An afternoon walk we often took on the dike leading to Wuhu, led us past many little family villages.  The one in the picture was especially picturesque.  These family groups were the foundation of Chinese society.  They centralized all their interests.  Each member shared its prosperity, they were governed by the elders of the group, and in trouble all shared the calamity. 

      Often as the sun was going down we would see the young boys riding the water-buffalo home from the fields.  These clumsy, coarse-hided creatures with long horns were at times quite vicious.  We often treated boys who had been hideously injured by an angry buffalo's horns.  The Chinese said the animals did not like the smell of foreigners.  They always appeared belligerent.  They still are the work animal in central China, in plowing and tread-mill work.

      The little village shown looked idyllic with its thatched roofed houses clustered on a small island a few hundred feet in from the banks of the Yangtze.  The pond was a natural depression, and it was deepened in times of high water by cutting a channel from the river.  It acted as a moat about the village, securing a degree of safety as the farmer retired to his island taking his tub with him. 

      In the picture the women pounded their wash at the water-side, laying the wet garments on a flat stone, while they beat them with another stone or stick, turning and squeezing as they rinsed.  The Chinese do not mind squatting, doing it hour after hour.  They never seem to sit flat on the ground.  I remember one moonlight evening walking into town with Dr. Hart to make some professional calls.  As we passed beside a village we came to some graves marked by head-stones.  These stones stood perhaps 15 inches from the ground, were about a foot wide and two inches thick.  On top of adjacent stones, squatted two men gossiping in the moonlight.  When we returned two or three hours later the two were still there apparently unwearied on the precarious perch. 

      Beside using the water of these ponds for washing, they make a reservoir from which the farmer floods his fields for rice culture, and other irrigation purposes.  This is done by treadmills operated at times by one man alone,  and often by five or six working side by side, holding on to a horizontal rail.  It is an exhausting labor, to cover a field several inches deep with water, into which rice is transplanted.  Later as the rice is ready for harvest the water must be pumped out.  At times of such tremendous effort the workers ate raw eggs for quick energy. 

                              

                                Chinese men operating a treadle water pump

      These ponds also made a fish hatchery.  Scores of times I have seen a boy drifting about in a tub, hanging over the edge and catching fish by his hands.  Sometimes to make sure the fish did not flop out of the tipped craft, he would seize its throat by his teeth, as his hands again swept the water.  Do you remember the old cock robin story?  We often use phrases in such tales without analyzing them.  "Who caught his blood?"  goes the old rhyme.  I often thought of that, as I observed the frugality of the Chinese fisherman to its extreme point.  Beside being moat, reservoir, washtub and fish hatchery, the pond gave the ducks a place to swim, and the buffaloes in which to wallow. 

      Picturesque as this view seems it had its smells and discomforts.  Each farm house had its hard-earth floor, beaten smooth for threshing.

The flail was used.  After the grain was separated a large woven cane tray about three feet in diameter would "fan" out the chaff, making a choking dust.  But it is by such exhausting primitive methods that the grain is prepared for storage in millions of homes.   When the harvest is over some of the straw is used to re-thatch the house.  Some of it goes into work sandals.  Some is sewn to make skirts and capes to shed rain. 

      At times villages have four generations in them.  The sons marry and bring home their wives.  Another room is added or a small house built.  Many houses have earthen floors.  The furniture is a square table with rough stools, or perhaps only "bon tongs", like our familiar saw-horse.  Their bed-boards are supported on "bon tongs", they use them for chairs.  Each person has his own quilt, which he rolls up in at night, when it acts both as mattress and cover.  The stove is usually built of bricks, with the iron kettles cemented in holes at the top.  The rice and vegetable kettles are scraped once a day when the fire is low, and then the crust sticking to the bottom is pried off.  When I was in Shanghai that first winter, about eleven o'clock each night a peculiar sound occurred.  An old timer told me the rice shop man is scraping his "Ko", or kettle.  The hard crust is called "ko bao" or kettle-baked.  Some years later after I was married I saw the three boys suddenly disappear through the gate towards the hospital kitchen.  I said to the cook "The children must not go to the hospital."  With a smile he said, "Just this once, do you not hear the cook scraping his 'ko'?"  Imagine a child in America eating the brown hard shell of a burned pot of rice!  Though in China nothing is wasted. 

      The land is never idle.  In central China they have three crops a year.  In the fall they planted winter wheat and rape.  Two or three days after this was harvested in May, the fields were flooded and the rice transplanted from the nursery beds.  At the end of August quick growing crops of "peh tsai" or celery cabbage for winter greens were put in.  When ripe, they would be hung on racks or lines to dry, or else put in deep brine in "Kangs."  The Chinese love their vegetables.  When one is a guest the hostess says, (or host);  "dai pu la gi, muhiu she mo tsai," "Excuse me for I have so poor a variety of vegetables."  I have heard it in simple family meals with only turnips and celery cabbage, and again at elaborate feasts, where there were eight courses, each consisted of a central bowl and eight side dishes, all different, all delicious, and at the end the rice would be served.  They are wonderful cooks, extremely sensitive to taste and seasoning, exceedingly critical of texture and flavor, but never a grain of rice was wasted.  Still millions with their delicate awareness of what is appetizing go to bed hungry each day.  Today it is common for Chinese to leave a portion of food from each plate, so not to give the appearance of still being hungry.

      To return to the little farm village.  The boys of the families gather about an old school-master to learn their lessons.  The teacher's first lesson would require each child to fold its coarse paper to make an exercise book.  Each child had to make his own pen.  Taking a short piece of bamboo, just rightly seasoned, he would moisten one end and then pound it gently with a stick, slowly turning and pounding until the connective tissues were broken down and only the long fibers left.  With their fingers they would shape these into a pointed brush like a pen.  The ink slab would be placed in a shallow dish of water and the brush, or pen would rub that until an inky consistency made writing possible.  As each child wrote the character he would repeat aloud its name.  They began with simple characters, having only one or two strokes and go on to the more complex ones.  Some had as many as seventeen strokes. 

      The Chinese held the written word in great honor.  Many a foreigner has offended by unthinkingly using printed paper for common uses.  I often saw men with baskets and wooden tongs, going about the streets picking up papers with characters printed on them.  They expected thus to "lay up merit" for themselves. 

      Fifty years ago the scholar was honored above all men.  A man coming back to his village after long absence had first to make his courtesy call on his teacher. 

      Do you recall the little rhyme of the "Thank you" theme, common among the Chinese, which I taught you?  It brings in the "bon tung" and trestle on which they sat, and upon which their bed-

boards were laid, and a dozen other uses. 

Sie sie lih tih cha  (tea) 

Sie sie lih tien  (salt, or smoke) 

Sie sie lih tih bon tung 

Tsoe (to sit) liao bon tien (1/2 day) 

      During the Revolution of 1911 Lord Li, the son of Li Hung Chang had to flee to Japan with his family, leaving his beautiful home and gardens in Wuhu, along with many business ventures.  His eldest son had spent many years in England at public schools and university.  He came back in 1912 with his "queue" cut and quite strange to the people of Wuhu.  One day the son came to Wuhu, dressed in a plain cotton gown, to see what damage had been done to the family property.  He went about the town as a peasant, but years before as a small boy he had had English lessons with the Hart children.  So the "Kwei chi" (custom) held, he must call upon his teacher.  This ceremonial call was done with hazard and fear of exposing his identity.  He managed to come to the Hill and saw Dr. Hart and did escape detection.[2] 

The mothers in all villages were never idle.  Cooking, washing, tending children, added to this the making of shoes for the whole household.  Shoes, except rain shoes or sandals, were made of cloth.  For the soles each mother had a rough pattern.  She would paste small scraps of cloth on coarse paper, then sew many layers together.  The good house-wife was supposed to have five pairs of soles ahead for each member of the family.  The shoes lasted at best two or three weeks, in wet weather perhaps ten days.  In the brick chimneys were found little depressions in which shoes could be set to dry.  I was amazed to watch a mother with 8 or 9 feet to keep shod - still lovingly embroider little motifs of applied fine braid-work.  This longing to adorn or make fine extended to cross stitch on belts of eye-shields for their men folks.  I have seen beautiful needle-work on an eye shield work by a poor peasant man in the fields. 

      Sometimes a loom would be set up on the threshing floor and coarse cotton cloth woven on it.  I have seen it block-printed too, in these simple door-yards. 

      At times, slack in the year's work, the village girls would come to our house, to bring with them their design patterns, in cross stitch.  Each mother taught her daughter the designs she learned as a child.  There would be a running border, one or two corner "motifs" and center designs.  It was the same as in France or Belgium where lace designs belong to families and are handed from mother to daughter.  Under direction quite lovely effects could be achieved. 

      To us who knew the old China, with its self contained households comes a feeling of nostalgia that all this must pass.  I cannot help but feel that it will take a long long time of living under conquerors to destroy that sense of family unity, that has existed for thousands of years.  Some things must be endured,  but the sense of loyalty to kin, of respect for ancestors is hard to eradicate.

      "Man man tih," go slowly - slowly - is not an idle idea.  Ideas live.  

She Saved Her Face  

 

      "It's Iao Kin Tih" (very important) exclaimed the old gate-man at the Wu-hu Hospital as he burst excitedly into the operating room waving a large red calling card.  "It's Iao Kin Tih - the City Official is sending a very sick person in a litter." 

      One of the Chinese attendants took the card, while easing the gate-man in his dusty gown outside the door.  Returning, the nurse reported to Dr. Hart, "The official is sending a critically ill patient, asking if you will use your most honorable skill to save her life." 

      It was late afternoon in June 1907, and having just completed a fourth serious operation, we were hot and weary.  "No need for you to wait, Miss Maddock.  Dr. Ting and I can care for this case," said Dr. Hart.  I slipped gratefully away to my upstairs hospital apartment, anticipating a bath and change of clothing.  The idea of rest was quickly dispelled by my personal servant hurrying in from the porch where she had been listening to the uproar in the courtyard below. 

      "It's a sick woman" announced Wang ma; "she is about to die." "A woman patient.  They will need me.  I must go back," I thought.  As I reached the receiving room, skilled hands were lifting to the table a terribly emaciated young woman.  Her eyes were sunk deep in her face.  Her hair was matted from sweat and dirt.  Her two hands, like claws, were clenched beneath her chin as she lay on her side, while her anguished face looked in terror on the strange place and alien people. 

      Gently we loosened her garments, soaked them with warm water to soften the clotted blood and exudate, thus to lay bare her shoulders and back.  What we found outraged all sense of decency.  From her neck to her thighs great welts had torn the tender flesh, leaving in many places the bones exposed.  Days of neglect had resulted in suppuration and maggots swarmed amidst the filth and clotted blood.

      As the doctors worked, cleansing these wounds, they exchanged horrified glances.  "There is something ominously criminal here, Ting," in a low aside Dr. Hart said in English to Dr. Ting.  "Tell the official he must constantly detail a woman at the hospital to see all we do." 

      I asked one of the girl's friends, "How they called the patient?" "Her name is Lan Hua," said the woman.  Mentally translating, I choked over the poignancy of the meaning - Lan for blue, Hua for flower.  Blue Flower, such a beaten, crushed blossom of humanity huddled there in utter misery. 

      When the doctors had done all they could, we put clean garments on her wasted body.  A woman nurse brought a cup of tea to moisten the parched mouth and throat.  But no entreaty could persuade Lan Hua to take a drop of it.  Bending close to that feverish face, I caught the words, "Let that old one eat bitterness." I heard that phrase repeated scores of times in the next few days. 

      The ubiquitous Wangma hovering in the background whispered, "She wants to die to spite the old Tai Tai."

      Carrying her to a clean bed in a private room, we saw she was a girl about sixteen years old, who had been beautiful.  Delicate cheekbones, long, slender hands, and unbound feet were definitely not of peasant origin.  But the skin, like parchment, and entire shriveled flesh, cried out for water.  Her ceaselessly searching eyes watched our every movement, frustrating any attempt to relieve her clamorous thirst. 

      That night, as we finished hospital rounds, I pleaded, "She is absolutely dehydrated.  Can't we do something to force liquids?" Dr. Hart, long resident and therefore wise in Oriental ways, quickly interposed, "This is China, Miss Maddock.  She must acquiesce in all we do.  There must be no hint of coercion.  The undercurrents of unrest in this land warn us to weigh every action.  Sinister elements would be quick to twist our intent and bring disaster on the community." 

      Thus admonished, I resorted again to persuasion.  Going to my china closet I chose a fragile, native style tea cup.  Butterflies, denoted "continuous welfare" and a single lotus blossom, meant "long life, " decorated its surface.  Brewing the fragrant jasmine tea, I carried the cup  held it in both hands, and stooped beside the famished Lan Hua.  Her eyes gave a flicker of appreciation for the courtesy of my gesture.  The thin hand reached, turning the cup still resting on my palms, while she traced the decorative motif.  Just a glimmer of a rueful smile brushed her lips as she recognized the symbolism of design.  Designs from times immemorial were embroidered on thousands of baby shoes by women alike in luxurious homes or in mud-floored hovels, to express the mother's well-intentions.

      "Kehki tien" (the ultimate courtesy), she murmured, responding involuntarily, as do all Chinese, to a polite approach. In a moment her face hardened as she refused the tea, saying "Let that old one eat bitterness." 

      Thwarted by her inflexible refusals and aghast at the extreme brutality which had caused this suffering, I demanded "Is there no law prohibiting these heinous floggings?" "No," Dr. Hart replied.  "In China an owner may beat a slave, he even, legally may beat his wife, but if the victim dies there has to be an inquest.  For ourselves, we must be scrupulously careful that the cause of death is not laid to our treatments."

 

      While we knew the town buzzed with gossip about the case, we only, bit by bit, solved the mystery.  A native friend gleaned from one of the Official's retainers that the girl had a dim recollection of a far-away gentle home from which brutal hands had snatched her and sold her into slavery.  It was vague, so vague, that she long ago resigned herself to - the inevitable.  She tried to please and flatter her querulous mistress.  She realized her own delicately molded face and long, slender fingers made her different from the other slaves in the household.  Her gentle nature prevailed and made her want to please and shed happiness around her. 

      Later Dr. Hart, riding in from some professional calls in the walled city, brought more enlightenment on the pitiable case and implacable resolve of the slave girl.  After seeing and prescribing for the grandfather in a wealthy Chinese home, the head A-mah had escorted him to the gate.  There she asked in low, furtive tones about Lan Hua.  Surprised by her interest, Dr. Hart urged her to tell him what she knew.  He learned that only a few days before the A-mah had been dismissed from the home where for years she and Lan Hua had been trusted servants.  The A-mah was reticent, but eventually she told the whole story. 

      "It is a matter of the familiar triangle," Dr. Hart told us, "only this triangle is pentagonal." When Lan Hua came as slave to the Tai Tai there were already two concubines in the house, their miserable, difficult lives dominated by the old wife's whims and carping jealousy.  In some way Lan Hua's coming had altered things.  The slave employed many little artifices to make the cantankerous old shrew comfortable; even at times when the woman could not sleep, Lan Hua had crouched in the bed making a responsive back-rest to ease the termagant's restlessness.  She massaged the lines in the woman's face, rubbed her arms and back, and flattered her by tucking flowers in her hair. 

      "Gradually there had been created an atmosphere of tranquility in place of the outbursts of temper and tantrums which had racked the days before Lan Hua came."

      I interjected, "What a sadist the old fiend was to punish a slave who was so kind." 

      Dr. Hart resumed, "It's true the world over about the fury of a woman scorned."  One of the concubines, overhearing the Official praise Lan Hua about his wife's improved temper, wrongly

interpreted his motive in addressing the slave.  She lost no time in telling the number two concubine, thus stirring up her jealousy.  Together they took the tale to their mistress.  Goaded by these secondary claimants to her husband's attentions, the enraged Tai Tai clapped her hands to summon all her women.

      Calling Lan Hua forward, she asked, "Who are you to have words with the Tao Yeh?  That is done only by the head Nai Nai "elder  woman".  You shall be beaten until you learn your place." "Mercy, mercy," cried Lan Hua, prostrating herself and knocking her head on the floor. 

      "But helpers pulled off her jackets, while others held her across a chair.  Then began the merciless flogging of shoulders and back with knotted cords." 

      The woman telling the story said it broke her heart to hear Lan Hua's cries and moans as she writhed under each stroke.  At last, because she had served there so long, the A-mah begged the Tai Tai to stop the ordeal.  Angered by interference, the virago continued the punishment as long as she dared.  Then turning on the A-mah, she ordered her to pack and leave the place at once. 

      Hours and days of anguish followed, as Lan Hua's frail lacerated body tossed in agony on her cot.  Her lips were torn with the effort to suppress her groans.  In place of a desire to please came a fierce longing for vindication - not revenge, as the Oriental knows it, rather an implacable, inexorable intent to impugn the justice of this torture.  Of transcendent importance to this Chinese girl was the indefinable, evasive, enigmatical idea of "the loss of face." 

      Lan Hua could survive physical injury, but this indefensible, subtle psychical hardship she could not endure or forgive.  Stronger than hunger, more urgent than pain, was her fixed determination to restore her "lost face." 

      Time passed.  Waiting women begged her to eat or drink, but she steadfastly refused.  At length, frightened by Lan Hua's growing weakness, the Tai Tai commanded her to drink.  Not succeeding, she hid her pride and entreated her to comply, but neither food or water passed Lan Hua's lips.  Life meant nothing now that her "face was lost." 

      Nurtured in this land long civilized by Confucian moral law, though curiously long delayed in developing humane civil law, Lan Hua knew if death resulted from a beating there would have to be a public inquiry.  Only by that tragic sequence could the little slave's reputation be restored.

 

      Terror seized the old mistress.  She sent Lan Hua to the hospital hoping the "foreign devil" of a doctor could compel submission.

      All efforts failed.  The intense suffering ended in death.  As long as her cracked dry lips could move she repeated "Let that old one eat bitterness." 

      As Lan Hua had foreseen, death at last vindicated her.  An inquest had to be held before her frail body could be moved. 

      The Hs'ien came.  At such times women did not appear, so we gathered in my rooms and watched through closed shutters the drama of the trial. 

      Protocol required that the Hsien first make a social call on Dr. Hart as head of the hospital.  That concluded, the doctor excused himself, meticulously avoiding suspicion of interfering in the process of native law. 

      Coolies meanwhile had brought special chairs and a table which were set up in the courtyard.  Slight poles, driven in the ground, supported a silk canopy, thus making a brilliant, ornate pavilion.  The Hs'ien, coming from Dr. Hart's study, took off his social gown.  Hovered servants handed him an elaborately embroidered silk judicial robe and his hat with buttons and trailing peacock feathers. 

      Word of the impending trial had spread and curious patients and towns-men crowded into the hospital courtyard.

      After viewing Lan Hua's body in the morgue, the Hsien took his seat in the pavilion.  The testimony was given in tones too low for us to catch the full meaning.  Recognizing some of the Chinese who laid briefs on the table as legal experts, Dr. Hart identified them for us.

 

      The scribes of the court wrote the evidence as it was given.  After it was concluded, the Hs'ien made a brief statement.  Instantly all his attendants sprang to their feet, and pushed the crowd back, leaving an open space about the pavilion.  The Hsien arose, paused a moment, then raising his foot he gave a mighty kick to the table, overturning it, bringing poles and canopy crashing to the ground.  The papers and all the evidence were scattered in wild disorder in the dust.  The Judge's servants scrambled after the papers and stored them with the other paraphernalia of justice in boxes. 

      We had witnessed the astonishing oriental method of clearing the table of evidence. 

      After he changed again to his social hat and gown the Hsien departed in his sedan-chair. 

      The case was officially closed.  No one was publicly punished.  In that land, expert in squeeze, we were confident the Tai Tai's husband did not escape extortion.  Such a trail in itself was punishment. 

      Lan Hua had been vindicated.  Death and the publicity relieved her of the indignity of the old woman's actions. 

      She had lost her life, but she "saved her face."  

The Shantung Guild 

 

      One hot midsummer night in 1907 I was awakened in my Hospital suite by loud cries of "Kai Men" (open the gates) and many fists beating against the locked barrier.  At first thinking it must be medical emergency I started to dress.  Yet there was no stretcher, and the crowds poured into what was called the Palm Walk, and so up the incline, around into Dr. Hart's backyard.  My rooms in the Hospital were twenty-five feet above the level of the Hart Compound, so I could look down into that terrace.  There must finally have been two hundred tall men gathered, speaking a dialect of which I knew nothing.  So other than by gestures and tones I could gain no idea of their visit.

 

      They were angry, speaking in vociferous voices, gesticulating, sticking their carrying poles on the ground.  Every word carried an idea of venom and hate.  They carried a few lanterns - the only lights by which to watch the vehement gestures, and at times wild roars of rage.

      Dr. Hart stood there, talking to them.  At first I had a horrible fear that they were threatening him.  He never raised his voice, but using their dialect he answered them or asked questions.  In Chinese one does not modulate the voice in making a query - though there is a little expletive "mah", often used at the end of a question, which seems in use by all dialects.  Accents and negatives, too are much the same.  So I could gather some idea of approval or rejection of what Edgerton said.  For over an hour the angry discussion went on.  It kept me completely bewildered, and at periods of heated argument, I was trembling fearfully for Edgerton's safety.

      At last they grew more calm, and then Dr. Hart said something amusing.  If one can face a Chinese mob and make them laugh the argument is won.  Slowly they turned and went towards the gate.  Dr. Hart talking, started to accompany them.  They said, "Puhiao sung."  (Do not perform the courtesy of escorting us.)  He said, "Man man tseo," (Go slowly, slowly) as they faded away down the dike, and the old gate-man locked the gate. 

      Edgerton, knowing I must have been disturbed sent a hastily penciled note by his house-boy, saying he would explain it in the morning.

      It developed that the men who loaded and unloaded cargo from the riverboats were from the Northern Province of Shantung (Shandong Province).  Shantung men and women are all larger framed and taller than the southern Chinese.  These men were employed almost exclusively in Wuhu in this stevedore work.  In fact for years they had a monopoly on it.  They were knit together as the Shantung Guild and would allow no intruders from other Provinces.  The foreign shipping companies, sometimes found it to their disadvantage, and had been trying to infiltrate their ranks with local men.  This the Shantung men fiercely resented and all cargo loading had been stopped for several days.

 

      Dr. Hart had been born in China and grew up there as a boy.  The Chinese called him, "a pentih ren"; a man with his roots in the soil, a native.  So they carried many a grievance to him for settlement.  He had known of this feud for days.  It was awkward to be asked to negotiate with foreign shipping companies, many of them powerful, and for decades in the China Trade.  The next few days were spent in discussion with both sides, and some compromise arranged.  The companies learned how savage and bitter a fight with a Guild could be, if the Guild members were thwarted in China.  Intrigue and bodily harm were averted, and finally a settlement was made. 

      Later the Shantung Guild which for years had owned a small cemetery on the eastern slope of our hill; which was the last plot of land that we did not own on Iche san, gave us permission to enclose it, upon our promise to allow them entrance and exit privileges.  They used it as a temporary burial site, until the bodies could be carried back to their native Province, which was their ancestral home.

      I often wonder what the Communists have encountered with the Guilds.  I cannot think this centuries old system can be changed in a generation.  One had to recognize it and work with it in China, not work against it.   Iche san was a perfect knoll 100 feet above the surrounding fields and on the River bank.  For this reason the Navy officers had felt it would be the best place to fortify and hold in case of trouble.  So, all foreigners of all nationalities had been ordered to repair there if persecution came.  For these reasons we desired to have the Shantung Cemetery as part of our enclosure.  

The Big Orphan 

     

My great grandmother actually has the names switched, the above photos are of the"Big Orphan" or Da-Xia

My dear Helen: 

      It was October and we sailed a thousand miles on the Yangtze River and Boyang Lake.  After forty years, I can think of no way I would rather choose for a honeymoon.  Every day the news papers revive interest by mentioning those places seen so long ago.  Today I am writing about the Little Orphan, one of the loveliest sights in that one thousand miles. 

      Five hundred miles inland from Shanghai, the Boyang Lake flows into the Yangtze River.  Shortly before reaching the mouth of the lake, we came in sight of The Little Orphan.  The island lies in mid-stream and on the down river side, rises a sheer rock face four hundred feet out of the water.  As we passed and went beyond we found the incline sloped slightly and in clefts in the rock, hardy evergreens made a scant coverage.  Only in one tiny cove, where the current divides, to flow

around the island, can a small boat approach.  Even there, the precipitous face looked forbidding and inaccessible.  About half way up, a narrow ledge held the foundations for the first temples.  Above them another smaller group clung to the rocky side and at the summit was the third and last, a single pagoda.  From the house boat deck, those temples with their white paint and tiled roofs, appeared utterly remote and unapproachable.  The whole aspect of the little isle was one of enchantment and mystery.

                                  

                                   This is the "Little Orphan" or Xie Xia in Boyang Lake

      "Ah," the old China traveler tells you, "there are two orphan islands.  This is the Little Orphan and the Big Orphan lies in Boyang Lake."  And then I was told a story that runs like this.

      Long, long ago an aged Chinese official lay dying.  He had been serving his Emperor at a place near the sea coast, but his thoughts turned ever toward his home in a little village in Kiangxi Province on the shores of the Boyang Lake.  When he knew that he could never again see this loved town, he called his head man to him and gave his last directions.  He told him that years before he had bought fine thick board and that now the head man must call carpenters and have his coffin made.  He outlined all his wishes for his vestments and funeral ritual.  He made this servant solemnly promise to dispatch a retinue with his coffin to his ancestral village in Kiangxi.  His voice faltered as his two daughters stood by his bedside weeping copiously.  His last words were that the faithful servant must escort the two lovely girls safely to the village home where their family roots were. 

      There was great mourning for the old official.  Priests chanted, drums beat and incense burned.  The coffin was made of boards five inches thick.  These were heavily lacquered and gold and silver trimmings and handles were put on.  Within, luxurious silk quilts were placed and the cockcrow pillow put under his head.  The official was dressed in rich silken robes with the insignia of his office embroidered both on the front and back.  On his head was placed his hat with flowing feathers, and in the center of the crown, the button denoting his rank.  In each hand he held the ornamental jewel encrusted rods he had grasped when he approached the Emperor. 

      After the boat bearing the coffin moved away, the servant turned to the weeping children.  He had to "suan chang" as they say in China, or "take accounts".  Only then did he discover that his money was nearly gone.  In bitter sorrow he told the little girls, "The spirits must care for us.  I cannot hire a boat but will ask them to turn me into a big turtle and you may sit upon my back while I swim up the great river." 

      The spirits granted the request and day after day they traveled west in the mighty waters.  When they had gone twelve hundred "li", the youngest girl said, "I am so tired I cannot hold on any

longer."  In spite of her sister's help, she slipped into the rushing waters.  The older sister lamented loudly and the faithful servant wished he might die from grief.  But the ever loving spirits whispered, "Do not grieve.  We will turn your sister into a lovely island rising straight from these waters and there she will always stand, aloof, noble, and her name will be the Little Orphan." 

      So the turtle comforted the older sister saying, "We must go on.  Not far away we shall turn into Boyang Lake and soon you shall be at your honorable father's home."  But this lake has very sudden and violent storms.  As one of these broke in fury and the winds beat coldly against the lonely sister's face, she gave one cry and slipped into the depths of the boisterous waves.  The kindly spirits again hovered near and they turned her, too, into an island, not so startlingly lovely as her little sister, but serene and sentinel, facing ever southward towards her father's home.  And they call her the Big Orphan to this day. 

      With a sad heart the old turtle swam on to the ancestral village.  Long since the last rites had been performed for his old master.  And now that he could do no more for the two lovely daughters, he turned his face toward the places where they stood and sat down on the west shore of Po-yang Lake.  There one beautiful evening at sunset as we sailed toward Nan-chang, I myself saw him keeping his vigil, a great rock turtle, looking ever back toward the Big and Little Orphans. 

      That is the story as it was told me long ago, and now I want to tell you about the day we climbed the Little Orphan.

      As we were sailing in our houseboat and with the landing place being so small, we anchored above the island and hired a fishing boat to put us ashore.  There were no seats in the boat, the boards being level with the gun-whale.  Fear seized me as we moved out into the swiftly running stream whose waters were ever more turbulent as they divided to flow around the island.  Suddenly we shot into a little cove, the only place the island can be approached.  Then began the long climb up the steps cut into the solid rock, with rises about sixteen inches and treads three or four inches wide.  By grasping a stout iron chain anchored in the rock, we pulled ourselves slowly upward.  In the picture can be seen a light almost vertical line.  This is where the steps were cut.  The sound of the rushing waters below and the meagerness of the foot hold made me falter.  Your father had been here as a boy with your grandfather and it was only his reassuring voice which prodded me on step by step. 

      Our approach was noticed by the temple attendants and presently a boy acolyte ran down the rocky stairs to inquire our errand.  Your father handed him his large red paper calling card with his name in Chinese characters inscribed in black.  Holding the card high above his head, the boy leaped up the steep flight like a mountain goat.  As he did so, he repeatedly called aloud, as is the custom, "Huei Ren, lai liao". 

      Thus heralded, we were met at the first temple group by the old Abbot, his priests, and acolytes.  The Abbot was the same one who had received your father and grandfather years before.  He readily recalled the family connections from Grandfather Hart's long residence in the province.  In forty years he had never left the island and, as he looked down its steep side, he said, "Hsiu tsai o pup huei", meaning, "Now I shall never be able to leave".  However divergent our beliefs, we could not help but admire the aged man's devotion to duty.  He possessed a benignity and serenity of character which was shown in the manner in which he directed his assistants.  Certainly, he had the respect and love of them all. 

      In the court yard was a huge incense burner several feet in diameter.  Numerous assistant priests were reciting rituals and tending smaller shrines.  Many of their altar candle holders and incense burners were costly bronze pieces, beautifully wrought.  Acolytes caused me to gasp as they ran up and down between the temples on almost perpendicular paths.  In one of these temples still is a series of rooms lined with shelves which hundreds of ship models in many sizes, lavishly fitted, intricately carved, all of them native offerings for safety from pirates or shipwrecks.  On such revenues have these temples survived.  We went on to the second small cluster of temples, but because the gusts of wind blew so fiercely as we went higher, we dared not go to the top pagoda. 

      As we said good bye to the old Abbot, he spoke the usual Chinese farewell, "Mau mam tseo,"  or "Go slowly, slowly" which we literally heeded.  As I looked down, I thought I could never make it, but by facing the rocky side and keeping my eyes away from the water, I let myself down step by step, clinging to the stout iron chain.  Even the little boat with its flat floor and no hand hold seemed refuge after the descent.

      It was good to reach the houseboat, which for over a fortnight had been my first home with your father.  The evening breeze came up and we made sail up river for Kiukiang, the Boyang Lake, the

Big Orphan, and Nanchang.  

Chintekcheng / Jingdezhen

 

My dear Betty and Herbert: 

      I am sending you today, the little Emperor's Cup.  Card, box, and tissue wait beside me, as I sit turning it about in my hand.  I am reluctant to let it go.  Its balanced symmetry, its fragile airiness, and exquisite coloring have been a joy to possess.  The lovely Imperial yellow that predominates in the background, recalls Poes' lines:  "Banners yellow, glorious golden - On its roof did float and flow - But this, all this, was in the olden - Time long ago."[3] 

I have read somewhere that these were the loveliest words in poetry.  I have thought many times since I first saw the yellow, sacred to the Emperor that it was the loveliest of all colors.  I hold the cup on the palm of my hand while my mind goes back to those days in the first decade of the century, and repeat again.  "This, all this, was in the olden  Time long ago."[4] 

I try to visualize the artisan in his humble surroundings, fashioning the form on his potters wheel.  Then mixing the colors, adding delicate pastel shades of rose and blue for contrast and design.  He inscribes the legend, "For the hand of the Emperor."  At last he consigns it to the fires of the kiln.

      Yet other fires were burning in that ancient land.  Before the boy Emperor reached his fourth birthday, for which the cup was prepared as a gift, the Imperial yellow flag flew as war over the palace in Peking.  The Revolution of 1911 overthrew the Monarchy.  Carlyle's words of the French Revolution could be repeated over the Chinese one; "Thousands of individuals, on the sudden, find all their old paths, old ways of acting and deciding, vanish from under their feet.  And so, there go they - headlong into the new Era."[5] 

      The Porcelain Commissioner of the Imperial Potteries at Chingtekcheng feared to be found with these cups belonging to the Imperial Household in his hands.  to rid himself of their possession the Commissioner gave them to a foreign Naval Officer.  Later the Officer kept two and gave the other two to Dr. Hart.  With them came the understanding that they would never to be sold.  When you receive the cup the obligation rests on you. 

      The little black-wood stand was made by the students of Sicawei Observatory School near Shanghai.  The Sicawei Observatory was conducted by priests of the French priest order and was founded in the 1600's. 

 

                                                   

                                                                                             

      Chingtekcheng in Kiangxi Province was a ceramic center as early as the Seventh Century.  In 1111 A. D. the pressure of invasion in the North compelled the removal of the Sung Capital to the South.  At that time Chingtekcheng was made and has been ever since the Imperial Pottery. 

      While on our wedding trip by houseboat, I was mystified to hear your father tell the cook to delay the supper hour until dark,  We were sailing south in the Boyang Lake, and I assumed the delay was to catch the beauty of the sunset behind the Kuling Mountains.  As we went back on deck we were rounding a point The October moon was full in a clear sky, when suddenly the point was cleared, and we looked on a scene of unearthly beauty.  I exclaimed, "Snow drifts."  It was the sand dunes, high, white, drift on drift that were more like a Canadian winter scene than anything else.  This lovely sand told us we were now in the terrain which made the manufacture of porcelain possible.

 

      That evening we had to decide.  Should we follow our long cherished plan to visit the potteries at Chingtekcheng, the gateway to which lay beyond these dunes, or should we go due south to Nanchang?  That autumn the country was flooded.  The long overland trip by sedan-chair seemed unwise, as the chair bearers would have to walk in water at places where dikes had broken.  Reluctantly, we said, "Some other time,"  and sailed on to Nanchang.

      The civilized world three times a day eats its meals from dishes whose origin and history are not widely known.  Neither are the different names applied accurately scientific; because of the basic variations in composition.  China was the land of this ware's discovery and invention.

      Marco Polo brought word of the hard white surfaced material when he returned home.  Later, in the sixteenth century, many Portuguese traders brought great quantities of bowls and plates.  Because in Portugal is found a round backed crab, whose hard white shell resembled the back of a little pig, or "porcus," the crab was called "porcellana."  So when the Portuguese discovered these dishes they applied the name of the crab to them, and called them Porcellana.  The other name Ceramic comes form the Greek, "Keramos" meaning potter.

      Several ancient nations made earthenware.  Greece and Egypt used the potters wheel.  Familiar with glass making, they used a method of overlaying pottery vessels with a thin glassy glaze, which made it less absorbent.  But the transition from pottery making to the making of porcelain occurred in China.

      Authorities do not agree on the exact date.  Some say as early as 185 B. C.  "Probably the first kiln whose work rose above the quality of earthenware was in the Province of Chehkiang in 269 A. D."[6]  This pottery in Chehkiang was soon followed by others and by the time of the Sung Dynasty, 960 - 1280 A. D., there were many famous kilns in Chih Li, Chehkiang, Ho-nan, Fukien, and Kiangxi Provinces.

      Pottery had been made from ordinary brick-making clay which would endure mild heat.  "True porcelain is a material intermediate between pottery and glass being formed of two substances, fusible and in-fusible, the latter enabling it to withstand the heat necessary to vitrify the former, thus, producing its semi-translucency.  The in-fusible material is alumina, called 'Kaolin', the fusible substance is feldspar, and is called "petuntse", both of which are Chinese terms."[7] 

      Kaolin is composed of two words, the one "Kao" meaning high, and the other "lin" meaning mountain range.  this range rises back of the ancient town of Ching Tek Cheng, the world famous porcelain city in China.  Various languages have adopted the term Kaolin to designate technically a particular clay with the peculiar qualities needed for porcelain making.  In so using it few know of this range of mountains which rise from the shores of Boyang Lake, Kiangsi. 

      It was an unforgettable experience to sail around a point in that lake, and be amazed at the beautiful white dunes lying like monstrous snow drifts in the light of the moon.  Here the precious clay was found and named, and here for seventeen hundred years the potters wheels have never ceased to turn.  In his poem, "Keramos," Longfellow has immortalized Ching Tek Cheng, where in the tenth century more than one million workmen were employed.   "And bird-like poised on balanced wing above the Tower of Ching Tek Cheng, A burning town, or seemed so,  Three thousand furnaces that glow incessantly, and fill the air- with smoke uprising gyre on gyre. Painted by the lurid glare of jets and flashes of red fire." 

      Since bringing of porcelain to Europe, these two essential ingredients have been discovered in many parts of the world.  In 1731 a German chemist named Bottger, while searching for the Philosopher's Stone stumbled on them.  The story of Bernard Palissy in France, who for sixteen years sought the secret of porcelain making, chopping up his furniture and even the floorboards to fire his furnace, while his wife gave her moral support, provides us a classic example of faith and devotion. 

      Curiously these two are the same earth, only petuntse is millions of years older that Kaolin.  "Two substances by nature allied when fired together in a considerable heat, form absolutely homogeneous body which breaks of cracks, but the glaze does not chip off."[8]  This homogeneity is one of four quality points that Europeans look for.  When the china is broken they demand that a glassy fracture be found, showing a homogeneous body, with no demarcation between glaze and biscuit.  Beside homogeneity, the standards require hardness, translucency and resonance.  The Chinese do not insist on translucency though many lovely specimens are found with this quality.  Even a humble coolie will hold a piece to the light to test its transparency, but the true test is it resonance.  Holding the piece on the outstretched palm, the finger of the other hand snaps the rim and if the piece is good porcelain, it will ring with clear bell-like tone.  "So fine was certain porcelain made at Yreek Chow in the tenth century," says a historian, "that it was described as transparent as jade and so resonant as to be used in sets of twelve to play tunes upon."[9]  By hardness, is meant that a knife could not scratch the surface.  Their appreciation of the advantage of this glaze is described by a student of their literature.  "Tea drinking in ancient times was a cult - a ceremonial observance - with which the cultured taste of the day wished to associate all pleasure possible.  The blending of the Chun Yao glazes with the colors of the tea was considered to give the most pleasing color that the potters art had achieved.  This glaze was also considered to have the power of preventing, or rather retarding, the process of evaporation, and for this reason the wares were sometimes called 'the slow drying cups'."[10]  To understand the Chinese appreciation of this quality one must know that the "tea contest" was merely a process of watching cups owned by different individuals to determine whose cup would retain moisture longest.  He, whose cup was able to show a trace of moisture after the others were entirely dry, was the winner of the tournament.

 

      The celadons are the earliest porcelain wares which have color that were made in China.  The shades are described by various writers as "onion-green," or the "green of the ice," or gray blue tone line "the blue of the sky after rain."  Many of the early wares were made to imitate ivory, and certain shades of white are highly appreciated by Connoisseurs.  The white most prized is known as Ting ware, and was made at a pottery in Chihli.  Later the making of white ware was done in Fujian Province, and now it is the headquarters for this goods.  Following the celadons, a vivid blue was the next color to stand the heat of the furnace, and to emerge with the desired shade.  It has always been a delicate chemical consideration to determine the effect firing will have on color.  Green coloring was achieved in the seventh century, and was later followed by red, yellow, and violet.  By the time of the Ming Dynasty, 1200 - 1600, the five colored porcelains were being made.  The brilliant strong reds and blues, characteristic of the early Ming Rulers, were softened into rose and pale blue shades in the succeeding Chian Lung period.  This was either through a change in the

source of color supply or a lack of knowledge in firing the kilns.  Another characteristic of some porcelains is the crackled surface of some pieces.  This crackle is highly prized in fine specimens, and resulted from a sudden chilling of the ovens after the firing had begun. 

      Most of the decorative motifs used are symbolical, and a suitable choice of a gift of porcelain requires a knowledge of who the recipient is to be, as very delicate shades of meaning are conveyed in the flower or animal decorations employed.  The characters on the bottom of pieces which are old, indicate the dynasty and sometimes the pottery where they were made.  At times the name of the reigning Emperor was added.  In recent times there has been much forgery in this matter, modern Potteries using old marks.  However, the age and authenticity are determined aside from these marks and require a special expertness which few possess.  If a piece is centuries old, the mere handling of it through the years gives a certain quality to the surfaces, which cannot be successfully imitated. 

      Each piece, too, when put in the oven has to rest either on its rim, or its base, and this leaves a roughened, unglazed surface.  In the course of years this smooths away, and a surface is created which cannot be produced except with age.  The Chinese gentleman, when at leisure, often polished this edge on the moist palm of his hands and this, with the years, leaves a velvety smoothness or patina in no other way obtainable. 

      No other article is so universally used as the food receptacle, so it is highly desirable that women, who are the purchasers of family china, should know more of the qualities, historic decorative design, and the durability of color and biscuit involved.  If the aesthetic enjoyment be added to the utilitarian, ceramics deserve a large place in our art study. 

      Five years after that sail boat trip on Boyang Lake your father died.  We left the beloved familiar hill-top at Wuhu.  I transplanted a family to a strange city in America, with all the problems of schooling, finance and loss of help to face alone.  Each day brought inescapable duties and responsibilities for beloved children.  But deep within me I searched for some avocation that would carry over a mutual interest, and lend courage and sustenance to my spirit.  Our isolated life away from large centers in China had never held one hour of shared great music, drama, or viewing of great pictures.  Every day's urgent duties prevented time for reading together.  The one interest mutually enjoyed in the midst of busy professional, social and family life, had been porcelains.  Of these your father knew, and taught me much.

      So, I send you my treasured "little Emperor's Cup" today, and as I do it I explain for the first time why "Mother likes her dishes."  It has meant the remembrance and continuity of shared experiences.

 

      Thirty-six years;  The years of providing school tuition took all the choicest pieces, and there were many rare lovely ones.  At one time Chuo Feu, the old Viceroy at Nanking, who had a fabulous collection, said he like best the white Ting piece with the lizard in relief on it.  Dr. Laufer, of the Field Museum in Chicago, chose the tea colored vase as a choice piece.  My favorites have been the Chi'an Lung pieces and the old Satsuma vase.  Do you know the Japanese borrowed the secret of Satsuma making from the Chinese?  One interior decorator told me, "What I can pay you is one third of what I expect to receive."  Another time when my bread was ready to go in the oven the telephone rang and a dealer said, "I should like to have the powder blue vase today."  So they went, but many happy memories remain.  They secured material advantages,  I hope the ones left to you children will help you to carry on a love and appreciation of fine porcelains.  I trust you will cherish them as heirlooms for your children and grandchildren.  Remember "A thing of beauty is a joy forever."  

Captain Hogg 

Commander of S.S. Tuckwo 

 

                                                                     

                                                                      Captain Hogg

 

My dear Betty and Herbert: 

      I have sent you the sugar and creamer given me by Captain Hogg of the S.S. Tuckwo of the Jardine Mathesen line on the Yangtze River.  The silver work was done in Kiukiang which is the headquarters for silver-work in Central China.  I have seen in Nanchang, south of Kiukiang a whole mile of nothing but silver shops. 

      I felt you would be interested in hearing the old Captain's story.  Born in Scotland, he was left an orphan when he was seven years old.  At the time I knew him a niece was the only relative of whom he was fond of.  When he was about nine years old, he was taken by a sea Captain, shipping out of Glasgow in the China Trade.  He began life on the ship as cabin-boy to the Captain.  From that time until he retired, his life was on the sea.  By hard work he advanced in responsibility until he became Commodore of the Jardine fleet operating in China waters.  His boat the Tuckwo ran from Shanghai to Hankow, 600 miles. 

      He was a stern, dour Scotsman and demanded the same perfection in service and discipline that all through the years he gave his Commanders.  He was intensely loyal to his friends, terse and short to strangers or inquisitive passengers, but he had a rare sense of humor.  A casual acquaintance would never imagine this.  One has to know the stern traditions of the old-time seafarers to appreciate the devotion to routine and order, that meant safety and at last port, to those; as the British sing each Sunday evening, "To those in peril on the Sea." 

      When I arrived in Wuhu in 1904, I found one of the missionary women very ill.  Three days later it was decided I must accompany her to a hospital in Shanghai.  At that time there were no empty beds in the hospitals for foreigners.  St. Lukes Hospital for Chinese-men had just been opened that day.  It was under the direction of the American Episcopalian Church, and Dr. Boone offered us space there.  We scarcely thought then that those two rooms would be used by us for three months. 

      In leaving Wuhu we went on board the Wuhu Hospital house-boat and sailed up to the Hulk where the Tuckwo came in about three o'clock in the morning.  It was not easy to transfer a seriously ill person from the house-boat to the river steamer, but there was something the way my good training had taught me that held the attention of Captain Hogg as the patient was carried on board.  To me, it was routine to supervise moving helpless patients, but without realizing it at the time, it won the old Captain's approval and admiration.  From then on he was my friend and champion.  We spent over three months in St. Luke's Hospital, and when Captain Hogg's boat was in port, he would call to inquire for our welfare and bring Mrs. Hart some rare delicacy to tempt her appetite.  He had been a long-time friend of Dr. Hart.

      I finally had to accompany her home to America, on the Pacific Mail S.S. Korea, the boat on which I had come to China.  I took Mrs. Hart to Johns Hopkins Hospital, and then went to my home in Chicago.  In May 1905, I again sailed for China, and again found passage on the Trans-Pacific S.S. Korea. 

      Oddly when I booked passage from Shanghai to Wuhu, I found the Tuckwo Captain Hogg was the one sailing that day.

      Here I must digress a little to say that tradition or "protocol" played a very strict part in boat etiquette.  The Steward would give the Captain the passenger list, and the Captain would choose who were to be at his table.  This time there was a Mrs. W whose husband was the "Taipan" or head-man of the Jardine's office in Shanghai.  Of course she was seated at the Captain's right, and he graciously put me at his left.  But, Mrs. W too was steeped in protocol; so she told Captain Hogg she could not consent to be seated opposite the American nurse.  British class distinction!  Well the Captain told her I was there to stay.  So, after a meal or two she came to the table and we became good friends.  One of the last callers I had nine years later when I was leaving Shanghai in 1913 was this Mrs. W.

      After ___ left the ___ for U.S.A. and after I returned, I settled into the routine of Hospital Supervision at Wuhu.  One morning a year or two later I was startled while at breakfast to hear the insistent whistle of a steam-boat just off the Hill.  Our Hill was over a mile below the usual steamer landing.  On going to the porch signal flags were flying saying, "Illness aboard, help needed." The Doctor knew the language of the ship signals.  He went out in a small-boat and found Captain Hogg desperately ill upon leaving Han-kow.  As they came to Kiukiang he ordered his first officer to not stop for cargo, but go full speed ahead for Wuhu.  He said, "If Dr. Hart is back from America he will take care of me.  If he is not there, the little red-haired American nurse will take me in and give me the best care I can get on the River." Dr. Hart was there and we did nurse the old Captain through a critical illness back to health. 

      When he left the ship he brought his "China-boy" and his valuables with him, in a great metal "dispatch box." As convalescence progressed, the Captain one day opened the box and spread his valuable papers about the bed and table.  He was proud that honesty and hard work paid and that after years the lonely penniless orphan cabin-boy could accrue such wealth. 

      It was after this illness that he had my silver tea-set made.  When it was finished he telegraphed from Kiukiang that he would hold his boat three hours the next day and come down to our Hill to have tea and give me the set.  He came up to my hospital sitting-room and I made tea, using the set for the first time.  He called our attention to the fact that he wrote my initials on the bottom in his own writing.  Explaining this, he said I might some day change my name, and then could engrave the new name on a side panel.

      Later on I carried it on my honey-moon houseboat trip and used it constantly with great pleasure.  I hope whichever one, Karen or Susan, has the set will carry along this story and the old Captain's picture.

      Soon after this Captain Hogg retired to Scotland, but he often wrote to me from there.  I let this correspondence lag at the time of your Father's death, because life was too strenuous for a few years.  When I did answer his last letter later I never had a reply.

      When I came down river in 1913 for the last time on my way to America, I found myself again on the Tuckwo.  The Captain's faithful "China-boy" was still there, and while I did not know the new Captain, his cabin-boy rendered every service he could for those two days in memory of our care of his old Master.  It touched me deeply.

      Sometimes as you use the silver, think of the staunch old Captain, who was the little Scots lad who spent sixty years in the China Trade.  Above and beyond his memories are the thoughts of all Commanders and Commanded who hold so true to deity on the wide seas. 

Lovingly

Caroline Maddock Hart 

                                                                                                        There seems to be some question as to the real name of

                                                  this boat. In my great grandmothers writing, she talks

                                                  about a USS Tuckwoo, but in a photo album she said the

                                                  name of this particular ship was the USS Quiros.

                                                            

                                                

 

Yangtze River 

 

      While writing last week about our friend Captain Hogg, I recalled what a deep influence through the years at Wuhu, the Yangtze Jiang (River) had on my life.  I want to write some of the things I know about this mighty waterway, hoping that sometime a competent historian will do it adequate justice.

      Someone has said that high in the Himalaya Range three rivers run side by side for almost a hundred miles.  Kept close in a mountain corridor scarcely fifty miles wide, the three small streams suddenly come into a wider place and separate.  The great Mekong and Salween flow south and find outlets thousands of miles away, while the Yang-tze turning sharply north and then east finds its way to the high plains of Szechuan, and through the gorges, carrying its silt hundreds of miles to the

Pacific Ocean.  This yellow silt, which at Hankow, six hundred miles from its mouth, is estimated at five billion cubic feet of soil per annum!  In this six hundred final miles the Yangtze drops 132 feet.  At its mouth it is ten to thirty feet deep and forty to sixty miles wide. 

      I recall as I approached China from Japan quite out of sight of any land, seeing the lovely green and blue of the Pacific Ocean take on a yellow color from this silt, and soon we were in the Yellow Sea. 

      The last year we were in China, Mr. Hugo Von  Heidenstam, a member of the Swedish Army Corps of Engineers, spent a week with us.  Mr. Von  Heidenstam was the engineer in charge of the Whang-poo Conservancy.  The city of Shanghai is on the Whangpoo River near its confluence with the Yangtze.  At that time Shang-hai was the second largest port in the world in point of shipping, so the clearance of sand-bars to keep the channel clear for boats was very necessary.  This tremendous amount of silt contributed to a most costly and difficult engineering feat.  Swedish Army engineers were known the world over for their ability to solve these hydraulic problems; just as one often found Scottish engineers on great steamships of all nations. 

      Mr. Von  Heidenstam came to us at the request of a flood relief committee which had $100,000 of American Red Cross funds to spend for rebuilding dikes in our neighborhood.  He stayed with us at Iche san, and went with Dr. Hart and others over the scene of recent floods, deciding that the greatest good could be done near the Hwai River area. 

      Many were the stories he told of great projects he had seen at the Assuan Dam in Egypt, on the Mississippi, the Euphrates, and the Thames in England.  Many other far off places too, but the Yangtze with its great volume of water exceeded them all. 

      At Chungking, fifteen hundred miles from Shang-hai, there is a rise of one hundred and eight feet at high water.  This is caused by melting snows in the Himalayas and heavy rains in the western provinces from March to August.

     The Yangtze, six hundred miles from its mouth at Hankow, has a high water level of thirty feet.  This is augmented by other large streams joining it there.  In the six hundred miles below Hankow

there is a vast plain where a four to six mile current exists during high water.

      When I arrived in Wuhu in October 1904, I stepped from a sam-pan directly onto the shore at the foot of Iche san.  Three days later I unexpectedly went back to Shanghai, and later to America.  It was June when I again reached Wuhu, and again I drifted from the river steamer in a sampan to Iche san.  To my bewilderment I had to climb a long flight of stone steps, twenty seven feet in all, to the same shore line.  In confusion I asked; "What has happened?  These steps were not here last October."  Thus I learned the difference between high and low water.  Can you visualize a river two miles wide rising twenty-seven feet in height?  Think of the cubic tons of water that means.  Think of the depth of disaster and despair when all that vast weight of water, pounding on the farther side of the river, has broken the dikes.  I have seen farmers and their wives and children climb to their thatched roof tops, and finally, in tubs and rafts and boats, have found their way to a refuge near us.  They had striven frantically, when the first small breaks came, to save some of their almost ripe harvest of rice.  Wading waist deep in water, they had pulled the heads of rice and put it into tubs, but the waters come in with a rush and much had to be abandoned. 

                                          

                                                      Wuhu Flood of 1909

      The small voice of these despairing Yangtze valley people is a small voice when one thinks of the hungry millions of the world.  It seems a small voice after all the terrors and displacements of war and occupation, the lost hopes and human misery.  Yet the blasted efforts of honest endeavor, and agonizing starvation of dear ones create the same bleak despair the world over.  The Chinese have seen it happen so many, many times throughout the ages.  Still, with their patience and dogged persistence, they do not complain but proceed to live on.

      "Muhiu peh tifah tse," they would say.  It seemed to me when I was first in China that I heard a few phrases over and over again.  This was one of them.  "Muhiu peh tifah tse," which means "There is no other way." 

      It might be well if we could learn not to beat ourselves against the inevitable, but to take up uncomplainingly the day's - this day's task.

      The depth of the river at Wuhu varies.  I once saw two large junks collide off the hill.  The one coming up river just sank from view: hull, masts, bulk, cargo, and passengers.  Not a trace remained. 

      In America the Government sponsors the control of large waterways, but the resources and skill needed to control the Yangtze will be tremendous.  In carrying the silt sea-ward there are often deposits in creek beds or in the coves of the river banks.  When the water fell we found it an amusing and interesting experience to walk upon the deposit.  It undulated under one's feet as would a rubber mattress, but still we did not sink into it. 

      Often typhoons ("tai" for great - "feng" for wind) blew off the coasts, and at such times cargo loading had to stop.  Few boats would venture out.  One day a boat attempting to ferry forty-eight persons across the river was overturned. after which time no Chinese would attempt to launch a boat.  Our house-boat was away.  Only six of the forty-eight people were saved.  It was horrifying to stand helpless.  We had as guest a man just arrived from America.  We stood watching, while the storm beat down on us and the wind howled.  The newcomer was frantic.  He took me by the shoulders and shook me, and implored me to make the Chinese do something, but no boat we had

could have survived in that current and storm.

      For nine years I awoke every morning and looked out upon the River.  Down river, nine miles to Siho Shan, (Dead Priests Hill) the river bent and was lost to sight.  It was just there that the Japanese fired on and sank our American gunboat "Panay" in the early part of the War.  I often wonder if we had taken a firm stand then if things might not have been different? 

      Across the river hills rose to four or five thousand feet and housed quantities of coal.  A coal field would do much to industrialize China. 

      Then we depended on the River for our water.  All through the day, and in hot weather all the night, coolies came chanting up the hill-side, with a pail of water on either end of their carrying-poles.  To avoid slopping over they had coarsely woven mats of cane on top of the water.  They would be emptied into huge earthen ware jars bigger than a barrel.  These were at the halfway stop on the hill.  The coolie would then stir a handful of broken alum into the water.  When it dissolved the silt would settle to the bottom, two or three inches in depth.  Then the clear water was ladled into other Kangs, and for drinking, dish washing, preparation of food, or washing of faces, it must be boiled and filtered.  Only in meticulous care lay safety.

      Ordinary warm water was "reh hsui," but the safe, boiled water was "kai hsui."  The kai for "open", the water that had opened in bubbles, was the same word kai we used to say for "open the door" or "open the mouth." 

      We had a wind mill and deep well, but that well water was too hard to use without the addition of soda ash.  This water was piped to the kitchen, and coming that way the Chinese called it "si-lai tih-shui," the self-arriving water.  It often comes back to me as I open a faucet now, and I hear again in memory the chants of the water carriers, the water that did not arrive by itself.  I still feel parsimonious about throwing out water, so hardly bought in the old China days. 

      I never can forget my amusement in Shanghai my first winter in China, as I looked from the hospital windows in the early morning.  As dawn broke the Chinese and Japanese would hurry to the nearest hot water shop to buy a little hot water.  Usually their tea-pots would rest in a wash basin.  The shop keeper would put kai hsui in the tea-pot and reh hsui in the wash basin, which answered the function of keeping the tea warm until they reached home.  Then, later at home the family, facing strict protocol as to rank and age, would be washed.  The Japanese as they met one another were formal.  They would balance their basins precariously and bow from the waist; after passing they would turn and again bow.  The Chinese would say to one, "Hao", or ask the question "Chi fang"? which is "Have you eaten your rice"?  Hundreds of hot water shops flourished in that great city.

 

      Shanghai is not on the Yangtze River, but on a tributary called the Whampoo River.  It was fascinating to watch traffic then:  great ocean-going steamers, naval vessels of many nations, junks with painted prows and figureheads, launches, rafts, and sam-pans.  It seemed as if they could never disentangle themselves, and as if the large ones would run down the smaller ones.  Now (1953) only native boats remain. 

      While we were on Iche san we often made hasty calls for the glasses.  Steamers, in commerce of the British, French, German, and Japanese, made regular passenger and cargo runs on the River, as did the China Merchant lines.  The steamers were usually captained by foreigners.  Several of the old New Englanders stayed on after our American trading vessels largely left at the time of the Civil War.  They commanded the China Merchant boats.  One of the oldest captains on the River died in our hospital of cholera.

      We had the pleasure and excitement of visits from our American Naval vessels.  British gunboats, too, always stopped for tea or dinner.  Other nations' navies came but the strong friendships were British and American.  We cared for sailors too ill for "sick bay," from American, British, French, German, Italian, and Japanese gunboats.

      It was exciting in the Tea Season to watch the tea vessels racing down River from Hankow and Kiukiang.  The first vessel to reach the Home Port was paid a special bounty.

      Then there were times when boats would come months or years apart, the same staunch vessels with the same friendly captains, registered from countries in all the continents.  Dr. Hart recognized

and remembered these boats.  He would take the glasses and say, "I think that is the such-and-such from Oslo or Rio or Melbourne."  It seemed uncanny to me.  They dipped their flags and we returned the courtesy.  If Edgerton were free he would have "Boho" saddled and ride into town to call upon them.

      The last few years great refrigerator steamers came from London.  They would have put on half in pheasant and half in duck at Wuhu.  These were huge ocean-going steamers and their captains had to watch the water-gauge.  I have seen them hastily pull up anchor and leave before loading was finished, if the river level was falling and their draught was too deep.  Sometimes we felt the tide at Wuhu.  I have seen a steamer pull up river against her anchor when the tide came in, even though we were two hundred and fifty miles from the sea.  

Alone 

 

Dear Carolyn: 

      As long as you children can remember, I have been alone.  I had to make the decisions, pass the judgments, reward or censure, guide and sympathize, without the compensating counsel, advice and restraint your Father might have given me.  More times than I can tell, it would have been better to have had in conference his criticism or championship.

      The anecdote I am telling now refers to a time and place, when I sorely missed a husband's escort and protection.

      Last summer when "Bud" was to be married, I entered into the plans and preparations for the event, yet suddenly I wanted to evade the public Church service. 

      I was not afraid of any health accident.  I likely gave that impression by asking Dr. Norbury if he would excuse me from going.  Inwardly, I felt as if after forty-two years I had reached the limit of endurance of doing things alone.  I tried to analyze my motives.  As nearly as I could decide, it seemed, after forty-two years, to be an incremental outburst of combating by myself the perplexities and emergencies arising from the growth and development of eight children. 

      In marriage, one unhesitatingly and joyously accepts ones husband, be it health or sickness, wealth or poverty.  Though, in anticipating the building of a family, we often fail to consider all the contingencies that may arise in meeting the needs of the diverse, unique personality of each individual child.

 

      Further, in social life, one predicates always, that husband and wife will act together; and forgets the stark bleakness if one has to walk alone. 

      So last August I confessed inwardly that my resistance was fused from my incremental solitariness in a social world.

      Tonight, not in excuse, but in explanation, of my revolt, I am writing of one time when I was agonizingly by myself. 

      Within a few hours after your Father died, our hospital carpenter had made a coffin.  Our tailor had covered and lined it.  Our tinsmith had fashioned pewter emblems for the carriers and attached metal handles.  All the preparations, which in America are handed to professional care, were carried out by loving, grieving members of our hospital family.  Many friends went out on the hillsides and gathered wild lilac and long stemmed violets, the only obtainable floral offerings. 

      Before the day ended, there was a simple service in our home, attended by the one hundred foreigners and many Chinese friends.  Then the casket, covered by the Stars and Stripes, was carried on the shoulders of others who loved him, three and one half miles to the Foreign Cemetery. 

      A few weeks later, a wide circle of Chinese in Wuhu decided they would hold a purely native memorial service.

      Wuhu was the walled city of one hundred and twenty thousand people.  The merchants, the gentry, the officials, the guilds, the schools and churches all joined in this;  Christians, Buddhists, Taoists, Confucians and Muslim shared in it for Edgerton had served all alike.

 

                                                       

                                                        Wuhu: Dr. Edgerton Hart Memorial Service

      They secured the local theater, the largest auditorium in town.  Each organization planned its own tribute, entirely in Chinese.  The service lasted several hours.  Many white banners carrying laudatory tributes hung in the hall.  White is the Chinese color for mourning.  Music was furnished by a newly organized brass band in a Chinese Boys School.  The Chinese use string, reed and percussion instruments, but up to this time the use of brass instruments was novel in Wuhu.  The conductor of the band had carefully drilled his boys in music suitable for this occasion.  At intervals, they rendered it beautifully and decorously.  Their new uniforms were much admired in this first public appearance.

      As men and women never sat together in public places in old China, the large gallery was reserved for women, while the men had the main floor. 

      I found it hard to go.  First, because it was several miles from our Hill, and except by horseback, the pace would be a walking time, about three miles an hour.  The Chinese expression for haste is; "Ma shang chu," or go on horseback.  One used this literal expression when asking a table-boy to hurry with dessert.

      The distance and the service would mean many hours away from my small children.  My three month old Herbert needed me, but, I knew I must recognize this wonderful loving tribute to Edgerton's long years of service among these people.  It was obligatory that I should go.

      I shall digress a moment to speak of a member of our mission whom I shall call Mr. X. 

      Your Father's last illness began on Sunday.  The preceding Friday evening Edgerton said; "There are some Mission matters I must discuss with 'X'."  So after supper he went down to the Lower house.  It was late when he returned, seeming quite exhausted.  Our conversation before retiring was brief.  Edgerton did say; "I am distressed to feel this way, but I am convinced the moral fiber of that man is slipping.  I cannot trust him as I did." 

      That was all he said that night.  Work on Saturday engrossed his time, and more than that, his strength.  Sunday, the fatal Typhus came.  From then on, only a few broken sentences passed between us until the end came in eight days.

      But as Mr. X was acting head of our mission in Wuhu, I had to defer to him in many matters after Edgerton died.

      When I recognized my presence was necessary on the Street at this meeting I knew I would have to accept Mr. X's arrangements for my escort. 

      A year or two earlier, Edgerton had discarded the use of the sedan-chair except for formal calls on officials.  We still had suitable cotton uniforms used by the bearers at such times.  When needed, the old gate-man would stand at the entrance and Ha-lloo to the farmers who were usually glad to respond as it meant pay "in cash."  In ordinary occasions Edgerton went on horseback, or used a rickshaw. 

      This day, Mr. X, preoccupied with other thoughts, hired an unclean chair, called nondescript bearers and did not use the uniforms.  I was somewhat dismayed but made no comment.  Relying too, on Mr. X I did not have a servant accompany me, as ordinarily I would have done. 

      We arrived at the theater and I went to my reserved place in the balcony.  If ever I craved courteous thoughtful escort it was that day.

 

      It was hard to go through several hours of emotional strain, as these grateful people paid their tribute to one they loved.  So often that day I heard the expression "a ben tih ren," meaning one who had his roots in their land.  They never forgot that Edgerton had been born in China and so they felt he was a native, one of their own people.

      At long last the service was over.  Listening to the eulogies which touched me deeply, I had found it hard to control my feelings.

      I had been constrained to control by a curious incident that happened the third day of Edgerton's illness.  I was setting out a wastebasket for Wang Na to empty from a room where the nurse who relieved me in Edgerton's care sometimes sat.  Some torn scraps of paper, in her handwriting, lay in the basket.  I could not help but see the words "Typhus, which is synonymous with death." 

      I stood stricken.  Had the doctors told her it was hopeless?  Had they told her what they thought?  She could not, alone, have arrived at such a prognosis.  Dr. Beebe had told me it would be likely three weeks before the crisis.  He urged me to conserve my strength.

"Synonymous with death."  A wave of despair swept over me.  How could I face life without Edgerton?  How could I meet the needs of the older children alone?  How could my three little ones grow up without a Father?  A thousand fears gripped me.  Then suddenly I knew I could not accept that outlook.  I must have courage to face my husband.  I would fight to the last moment for his life.  One could never know where the line crossed from hope to hopeless.  I would not yield.  If I, just once, for a moment gave way it would mean two lives.  Edgerton's.  Herbert's.  For Herbert depended on me for his food.  I stood there and prayed for courage.  It came.  It had all been but a moment.

      I had to man gu ra(?) empty the wastebasket, and never until now have told anyone of those terrifying moments. 

      This time in the theater my resolution held true and kept me outwardly calm. 

      The ceremonies over, the crowd turned to the doors.  I moved slowly.  As I went down the stair-case I looked for Mr. X. He was nowhere in sight.  A few steps up I stopped and waited as the hundreds surged around me on their way out.  As time passed I was almost panic-stricken.  What could I do?  I knew the chair-bearers had likely found some dark corner in which to gamble as they waited.  I could not walk down the street and "Ha-lloo" for the chair bearers to come back.  Scores of strange faces, but not a familiar one in sight.  Our own foreign group had hurried away to resume duties laid aside from the service thinking Mr. X was looking after me.  Distressed and alone I felt desperate.  Suddenly the crowd coming from the main floor parted, a pause and a restle, and I surmised some high official must be coming.  Then I recognized Mr. C. C. Le, a son of the great statesman, Le Hung Chang, and a brother of Lord Le. 

      Instantly, he sensed my situation and deployed his attendants to hold back the crowd.  Some of them he sent to call my chair bearers to bring my chair.

      Chinese courtesy did not permit him to address me, nor should I speak to him.  He led the way to the chair, had the men tip the chair poles and waited until I was seated.  Then he gave the men directions to go. 

      A surge of relief and gratitude swept over me, as I felt the security of care.  Thankfully I relaxed with the ordeal of the hours in the theater behind me.  Now, just to reach home in quiet and be with my children. 

      We had over a mile of very narrow, crowded town streets to go through before we could leave the walled city.  The long carrying poles of sedan-chairs resting on the men's shoulders are always a menace to pedestrians.  As we proceeded, the chair-bearers shouted warnings to make way while the crowds flattened themselves against the walls or squeezed into doorways to let us pass. 

                                                      

                                                       Caroline Hart in a open sedan chair

      Relief came.  In a little over an hour I would be home with my little ones.  Away from the humiliation and gross carelessness of being placed in such a predicament I did not know the hardest hour of the day was to come.

      Presently the bearers broke into a trot.  Just ahead was the band.  For the boys it was now a triumphal parade.  Their somber duties of the day were over and they marched jauntily in their bright new uniforms.

      I long since have forgotten the tunes they played, tunes equivalent to "Hail, hail, the gang's all here," or "There will be a hot time in the old town tonight." 

      Whole families oozed through the doorways when they heard this boisterous, provocative outburst.  Boys yelled at the brazen serenade, chickens flew squawking from the gutters, while scores of dogs barked at the band men's heels.  On the band strutted as the swarm of persons came running to hear these novel sounds.

      Heedless of my protests, my chair-men kept pace until we were part of the clamorous parade.  The bearers swayed to the time of the music and my chair in turn responded to the rhythm of the flexible poles.  There was no way to extricate myself from the macabre, grotesque position.  It was the ghastliest and longest two miles of my life. 

      On we went, the chair poles like a waving baton in the hands of a conductor, as these men heard for the first time in their lives the provocative urge of a brass band. 

      We left the walled city but there was still a mile before we reached the road that turned to the Boy's School.  Each little village had its staring, laughing people and barking dogs. Deep in my heart I felt the shock to any of them if they recognized the occupant of the chair.

 

      How unlike their conformance to "Kwei chi" (accepted customs) and observance of conventions that ruled this conservative nation.  What a shattering lack of decorum, this discordant proceeding.  How utterly out of character in a widow's behavior when she had lost the lord and master of her life. 

      "I yah" I could hear them exclaim, "How dreadfully these foreign devils behave.  She does not ride in a white chair.  She parades in public with this ear-splitting noise.  These out-landers offend all the established customs of decency."

      After twenty years of Edgerton's living so meticulously to avoid violating their sense of the fitness of things, it was agonizing to have this happen.  At last the shattering experience was over.  A nightmare-like ending to a day that in the beginning seemed more than I could bear.

 

      Do I need to be chided if I grew weary of the days Alone? 

 

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

[1]W. Robert Moore's "Along the Yangtze, Main Street of China" Geographic Magazine, March 1948. 

[2]Rose Hart told me that later this boy, when an official was beheaded in Shanghai. 

[3]Poe 

[4]Poe 

[5]French Revolution, Thos. Carlyle; Book 5, Chapter 5, Page 173. 

[6]Ceramic Wares of the Tung Dynasty by Rose Sickler William’s. 

[7]Encyclopedic Dictionary, edited by Robert Hunter, A. M., F. G. S. and 100 other.  Syndicate Publishing Company, Philadelphia, 1898. 

[8]Early Chinese Porcelain and Pottery, S. C. Bosch, Reitz, Curator Metropolitan Museum, New York. 

[9]Shings Chinese, Porcelain by J. Dyer Ball, Hong Kong, 1899. 

[10]Ceramic Wares of the Sung Dynasty, R. S. William’s.