A TRAH-LAH IN CHINA.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6936, 27 October 1900, Page 4

A TRAH-LAH IN CHINA.

A FAT LAND AND A PLAGUE-LIKE ARMY IN THE INTERIOR, (% -JULIAN RALPH, author of "Alone in China.") (Daily Mail.) The English national vice is trah-lah-ing. Any Chinaman will tell you so. He will tell you that the English trah-lah on foot all <Sver the land and in " glass boats " up and down all the rivers and canals. They do not journey, like the Chinese, to get a job of work, or to sell their wares, or to visit their parents. Such movements | are reasonable and intelligent, and are called journeys txr travels. ■ But the English trah-lah ; that is to say, they go about for tife mere enjoyment of moving, having .no other purpose that any sane Chinaman jean understand. They do not even care where they go, so long as they do go. They have been heard to call their peregrinations by the names of exercise, getting a change of air, ifcaking oonstituticjials. Such words deceive none But foote. The truth is that the English; are bitten by a bug that makes them restless. I have trah-lah-ed a ILt+le, here and there, in China. Come with me, and we will reI peat one of any trah-lahs. | THE RICHNESS OF THE LAND. Middle Chiriaj made opulent by its girSat rivers, iis as fair a laid to see as any in this world ; a rich, green, laughing land, where most of the acres are tilled and most of their earttt is literally handled by the farmers— passed .through itheir. fingers to soften it before tie sowing. Rice and beans and melons* grow everywhere except in the water. . Vines caress the pretty yellow and black ' houses, flowers are • plentiful, and at 6ach tiny farm a. little boy or girl sits minding a buffalo, who. walks round and round to bring up endless chains of buck-efts filled with water for the irrigating ditches. The water is almost* as rich and kindly as the soil. Wherever you trali-lah you see the women and maidens dredging up the weeds from the water bottoms for manure, you see the streams used as pastures for millions of ducks, you see tie great nets of the fishermen lowered arid raised from the banks, you gee w6men gathering waternuts and men fishing with trained birds. It is a rich ,and beautiful land, more full of colour and more admired by travelled artists than any other land on earfch. It ought fo be a SritiSh colony, jf China ia to be dismembered, for China has a teeming population, which consumes mountain? of English and American cotton, a river of American petroleum,, arid already' begins to hanker after " Yankee notions" and English arid American patent medicines. It is the fab part of China, and a fat land is ever so much easier to govern than a lean one. SWARMING POPULATIONS. . As for tie people, there never can have been in any parb of the world iriofe people on the same, .amount of acreage thari> are now in Middle China: The country roads arid paths— usually by the sides of the water ways—are ahriosfc as populous as Piccadilly, and there are a quarter as riiariy riiore people in the boats. A ceaseless tramp of feet, an endless ddußle line of figures' in blue cottdh greet your ears arid eyes' wherever you are. Arid when you near a. town—swarming like an anthill— tKe sound of voices is always a diiH roai\ Whenever you meet Chlrianieri out -of their qvm country they are silent, noiseless, triptiselike. Nob $p where they are at horiieX They are! a loqiiaclous, chattering, romping, fro&lickirtg people— full of fun and play, full of humour and music, crowding the shops, t&L-b\6uses, theatres, wayeide inns. ■ I like the Chinese. . I believe dn. them, and I see a future for them that is to be greater than their past— once they are awakened. They have better slroped heads than the Japanese, and better ideas in their heads; better principles proceeding from their beads and hearts ; better bodies, ateo, by 200 per cent. Above all, fhey are. an honest, fair and square-dealing people. The grea* white commercial firms? and the English banker's in China witli bear me out iii that. ' SAVED BY :A SMILE. Ofteh the Chinese held aloof from, me Mien I trah-lah-ed among than. SometiriieV they were sullen* ; twice they cdirtempla'ted violence, dn districts where they were stirred against the missionaries. But I was armed*, with a mighty suit 'of mail, called good huriiour. . I laughed, and this obliged them to laugh also. They cannot resist a jest, a bit of horseplay, or a laughing face, and I think that, is saying a great "deal in the way of praise of any people. I carried English sweets' in bottles, and fed them to children, men of affairs, and octogenarians. I scattered " cash " (worth something like twentyfive to 'the farthing) as one scatters corn before pigeons. I liked the Chinese, and we were happy together. Pray heaven we do not d<o with them as we have dorife with thb Japanese : bungle our work so as td leave them without their religion or ours either. A people without a religion is like a ship without a, ruddeY. What but shipwreck lies before them. But the Chinese have better shaped heads than the'people of Japan. " Look out ! Run ! Here come the soldiers !" It is my boy who cries this. ., But why should we run irom soldiers? Well,dori't italk— but get- to a place of safety, he says. We go to our " glass boat," so called because the windows are glazed— riot made of oiled paper like the Cttinese windows. Th 6 boat is warped to the shore close. -to a little town, and we take our camp chairs and seat ourselves on the'deek, disdaining t6 push off irit6 the stream. A REGIMENT OF TRAMPS. The regiments come, on their way to the war with the Japanese. They are riot soldiers, but vagabonds, paupers and trairips. Their guns are curios^-flinfclocks, old! Arnerioan rifles, out-of-date rubbish gathered anywhere and sold to mandarins, who charged Pekin for them at the high prices of modern weapons. No two soldiers appear to carry their guns in the same way. Even fheir tawdry cotton bahin«Ts are trailed top downwards. All the men, are ida'd in faded arid dirty cotton. Instead of marching like soldiers, they swarm all over the region— opening garden gates, pillaging the gardens, thieving from the shops and houses, behaving like a plague of locusts. It was such as they who /at Fobcbow that year, told their captains that they were, tired- of drilling one afternoon', took his came froni 'him, whipped him with it, and .went 'back to their barracks and their games of cards. No man (who has- seen\he riffraff soldiery of some of tho interior provinces can have failed to imarvel when, he read of the far different 'iorce that figures in. tho present trouble at Pekiri— apparently a disciplined army, evidently having modern, weapons, and using them with more or less show of courage. There must foe something more than the husk of the ancient principles of government up there. The iarther from the capital, the more there is of "squeezing" (oi 1 corruption, 'as we say—sp it- would appear. And yefc when those same northern trd&ps were left to (fight the Jdpanrse — because most of the provincial viceroys either refused or neglected 1 to send their soldiers— these .modern arid valorous reghnenits of today made a pitiful exhibition of themselves. Arid 1 it cannot have been more than a year ago that I read in the" Times " how the Mancfiuriari troops were arming with a new musket that was like a long piece of gaspipe, yet waa confidently relied upon as a weapon ca.pa'ble of " making a terrible noise thtat would frighten any except a Chinese heart;" t "A soldier," said a mandarin to me, "is the least amd lowest of men. First in dignity is the' farmer, next the literary man, third the .merchant, and last the meanest c'? H l .?- ff'.ir r[3F?fK into which socictj- is divided rs the soldier. No man will e'r.-lis't until he is stafvirig. No- mato will beedriie' Arid ii M^as to* /H\ pSicet or.

nothing, he takes the place aad " squeezes " with both hands to make up for the disaippohrtment he suffers."