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Less than a dozen years have passed since the guns of British warships first saluted the flag of their country at the Chinese port of Weihaiwei, yet it is nearly a century since the white ensign was seen there for the first time. In the summer of 1816 His Britannic Majesty's frigate Alceste, accompanied by the sloop Lyra, bound for the still mysterious and unsurveyed coasts of Korea and the Luchu Islands, sailed eastwards from the mouth of the Pei-ho along the northern coast of the province of Shantung, and on the 27th August of that year cast anchor in the harbour of "Oie-hai-oie." Had the gallant officers of the Alceste and Lyra been inspired with knowledge of future political developments, they would doubtless have handed down to us an interesting account of the place and its inhabitants. All we learn from Captain Basil Hall's delightful chronicle of the voyage of the two ships consists of a few details—in the truest sense ephemeral—as to wind and weather, and a statement that the rocks of the mainland consist of "yellowish felspar, white quartz, and black mica." The rest is silence.

From that time until the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894 the British public heard little or nothing of Weihaiwei. After the fall of Port Arthur, during that war, it was China's only remaining naval base. The struggle that ensued in January 1895, when, with vastly superior force, the Japanese attacked it by land and sea, forms one of the few episodes of that war upon which the Chinese can look back without overwhelming shame. Victory, however, went to those who had the strongest battalions and the stoutest hearts. The three-weeks siege ended in the suicide of the brave Chinese Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Ting, and in the loss to China of her last coast-fortress and the whole of her fleet. Finally, as a result of the seizure of Port Arthur by Russia and a subsequent three-cornered agreement between Japan, China and England, Weihaiwei was leased to Great Britain under the terms of a Convention signed at Peking in July 1898.

The British robe of empire is a very splendid and wonderfully variegated garment. It bears the gorgeous scarlets and purples of the Indies, it shimmers with the diamonds of Africa, it is lustrous with the whiteness of our Lady of Snows, it is scented with the spices of Ceylon, it is decked with the pearls and soft fleeces of Australia. But there is also—pinned to the edge of this magnificent robe—a little drab-coloured ribbon that is in constant danger of being dragged in the mud or trodden underfoot, and is frequently the object of disrespectful gibes. This is Weihaiwei.

Whether the imperial robe would not look more imposing without this nondescript appendage is a question which may be left to the student of political fashion-plates: it will concern us hardly at all in the pages of this book. An English newspaper published in China has dubbed Weihaiwei the Cinderella of the British Empire, and speculates vaguely as to where her Fairy Prince is to come from. Alas, the Fairy Godmother must first do her share in making poor Cinderella beautiful and presentable before any Fairy Prince can be expected to find in her the lady of his dreams: and the Godmother has certainly not yet made her appearance, unless, indeed, the British Colonial Office is presumptuous enough to put forward a claim (totally unjustifiable) to that position. By no means do I, in the absence of the Fairy Prince, propose to ride knight-like into the lists of political controversy wearing the gage of so forlorn a damsel-in-distress as Weihaiwei. Let me explain, dropping metaphor, that the following pages will contain but slender contribution to the vexed questions of the strategic importance of the port or of its potential value as a depôt of commerce. Are not such things set down in the books of the official scribes? Nor will they constitute a guide-book that might help exiled Europeans to decide upon the merits of Weihaiwei as a resort for white-cheeked children from Shanghai and Hongkong, or as affording a dumping-ground for brass-bands and bathing-machines. On these matters, too, information is not lacking. As for the position of Weihaiwei on the playground of international politics, it may be that Foreign Ministers have not yet ceased to regard it as an interesting toy to be played with when sterner excitements are lacking. But it will be the aim of these pages to avoid as far as possible any incursion into the realm of politics: for it is not with Weihaiwei as a diplomatic shuttlecock that they profess to deal, but with Weihaiwei as the ancestral home of many thousands of Chinese peasants, who present a stolid and almost changeless front to all the storms and fluctuations of politics and war.

Books on China have appeared in large numbers during the past few years, and the production of another seems to demand some kind of apology. Yet it cannot be said that as a field for the ethnologist, the historian, the student of comparative religion and of folk-lore, the sociologist or the moral philosopher, China has been worked out. The demand for books that profess to deal in a broad and general way with China and its people as a whole has probably, indeed, been fully satisfied: but China is too vast a country to be adequately described by any one writer or group of writers, and the more we know about China and its people the more strongly we shall feel that future workers must confine themselves to less ambitious objects of study than the whole Empire. The pioneer who with his prismatic compass passes rapidly over half a continent has nearly finished all he can be expected to do; he must soon give place to the surveyor who with plane-table and theodolite will content himself with mapping a section of a single province.

It is a mistake to suppose that any class of European residents in or visitors to the Far East possesses the means of acquiring sound knowledge of China and the Chinese. Government officials—whether Colonial or Consular—are sometimes rather apt to assume that what they do not know about China is not worth knowing; missionaries show a similar tendency to believe that an adequate knowledge of the life and "soul" of the Chinese people is attainable only by themselves; while journalists and travellers, believing that officials and missionaries are necessarily one-sided or bigoted, profess to speak with the authority that comes of breezy open-mindedness and impartiality. The tendency in future will be for each writer to confine himself to that aspect of Chinese life with which he is personally familiar, or that small portion of the Empire that comes within the radius of his personal experience. If he is a keen observer he will find no lack of material ready to his hand. Perhaps the richer and more luxuriant fields of inquiry may be occupied by other zealous workers: then let him steal quietly into some thorny and stony corner which they have neglected, some wilderness that no one else cares about, and set to work with spade and hoe to prepare a little garden for himself. Perhaps if he is industrious the results may be not wholly disappointing; and the passer-by who peeps over his hedge to jeer at his folly and simplicity in cultivating a barren moor may be astonished to find that the stony soil has after all produced good fruit and beautiful flowers. In attempting a description of the people of Weihaiwei, their customs and manners, their religion and superstitions, their folk-lore, their personal characteristics, their village homes, I have endeavoured to justify my choice of a field of investigation that has so far been neglected by serious students of things Chinese. It may be foolish to hope that this little wilderness will prove to be of the kind that blossoms like a rose, yet at least I shall escape the charge of having staked out a valley and a hill and labelled it "China."

Hitherto Weihaiwei has been left in placid enjoyment of its bucolic repose. The lords of commerce despise it, the traveller dismisses it in a line, the sinologue knows it not, the ethnologist ignores it, the historian omits to recognise its existence before the fateful year 1895, while the local British official, contenting himself with issuing tiny Blue-book reports which nobody reads, dexterously strives to convince himself and others that its administrative problems are sufficiently weighty to justify his existence and his salary. And yet a few years of residence in this unpampered little patch of territory—years spent to a great extent without European companionship, when one must either come to know something of the inhabitants and their ways or live like a mole—have convinced one observer, and would doubtless convince many others, that to the people of Weihaiwei life is as momentous and vivid, as full of joyous and tragic interest, as it is to the proud people of the West, and that mankind here is no less worthy the pains of study than mankind elsewhere.

There is an interesting discovery to be made almost as soon as one has dipped below the surface of the daily life of the Weihaiwei villagers, and it affords perhaps ample compensation and consolation for the apparent narrowness of our field of inquiry. In spite of their position at one of the extremities of the empire, a position which would seemingly render them peculiarly receptive to alien ideas from foreign lands, the people of Weihaiwei remain on the whole steadfastly loyal to the views of life and conduct which are, or were till recently, recognised as typically Chinese. Indeed, not only do we find here most of the religious ideas, superstitious notions and social practices which are still a living force in more centrally-situated parts of the Empire, but we may also discover strange instances of the survival of immemorial rites and quasi-religious usages which are known to have flourished dim ages ago throughout China, but which in less conservative districts than Weihaiwei have been gradually eliminated and forgotten. One example of this is the queer practice of celebrating marriages between the dead. The reasons for this strange custom must be dealt with later;[1] here it is only desirable to mention the fact that in many other parts of China it appears to have been long extinct. The greatest authority on the religious systems of China, Dr. De Groot, whose erudite volumes should be in the hands of every serious student of Chinese rites and ceremonies, came across no case of "dead-marriage" during his residence in China, and he expressed uncertainty as to whether this custom was still practised.[2] Another religious rite which has died out in many other places and yet survives in Weihaiwei, is that of burying the soul of a dead man (or perhaps it would be more correct to say one of his souls) without his body.[3] Of such burials, which must also be dealt with later on, Dr. De Groot, in spite of all his researches, seems to have come across no instance, though he confidently expressed the correct belief that somewhere or other they still took place.[4]

As the people of Weihaiwei are so tenacious of old customs and traditions, the reader may ask with what feelings they regard the small foreign community which for the last decade and more has been dwelling in their midst. Is British authority merely regarded as an unavoidable evil, something like a drought or bad harvest? Does British influence have no effect whatever on the evolution of the native character and modes of thought? The last chapter of this book will be found to contain some observations on these matters: but in a general way it may be said that the great mass of the Chinese population of Weihaiwei has been only very slightly, and perhaps transiently, affected by foreign influences. The British community is very small, consisting of a few officials, merchants, and missionaries. With two or three exceptions all the Europeans reside on the island of Liukung and in the small British settlement of Port Edward, where the native population (especially on the island) is to a great extent drawn from the south-eastern provinces of China and from Japan. The European residents—other than officials and missionaries—have few or no dealings with the people except through the medium of their native clerks and servants. The missionaries, it need hardly be said, do not interfere, and of course in no circumstances would be permitted to interfere, with the cherished customs of the people, even those which are branded as the idolatrous rites of "paganism."

Apart from the missionaries, the officials are the only Europeans who come in direct contact with the people, and it is, and always has been, the settled policy of the local Government not only to leave the people to lead their own lives in their own way, but, when disputes arise between natives, to adjudicate between them in strict conformity with their own ancestral usages. In this the local Government is only acting in obedience to the Order-in-Council under which British rule in Weihaiwei was inaugurated. "In civil cases between natives," says the Order, "the Court shall be guided by Chinese or other native law and custom, so far as any such law or custom is not repugnant to justice and morality." The treatment accorded to the people of Weihaiwei in this respect is, indeed, no different from that accorded to other subject races of the Empire; but whereas, in other colonies and protectorates, commercial or economic interests or political considerations have generally made it necessary to introduce a body of English-made law which to a great extent annuls or transforms the native traditions and customary law, the circumstances of Weihaiwei have not yet made it necessary to introduce more than a very slender body of legislative enactments, hardly any of which run counter to or modify Chinese theory or local practice.

From the point of view of the European student of Chinese life and manners the conditions thus existing in Weihaiwei are highly advantageous. Nowhere else can "Old China" be studied in pleasanter or more suitable surroundings than here. The theories of "Young China," which are destined to improve so much of the bad and to spoil so much of the good elements in the political and social systems of the Empire, have not yet had any deeply-marked influence on the minds of this industrious population of simple-minded farmers. The Government official in Weihaiwei, whose duties throw him into immediate contact with the natives, and who in a combined magisterial and executive capacity is obliged to acquaint himself with the multitudinous details of their daily life, has a unique opportunity for acquiring an insight into the actual working of the social machine and the complexities of Chinese character.

This satisfactory state of things cannot be regarded as permanent, even if the foreigner himself does not soon become a mere memory. If Weihaiwei were to undergo development as a commercial or industrial centre, present conditions would be greatly modified. Not only would the people themselves pass through a startling change in manners and disposition—a change more or less rapid and fundamental according to the manner in which the new conditions affected the ordinary life of the villagers—but their foreign rulers would, in a great measure, lose the opportunities which they now possess of acquiring first-hand knowledge of the people and their ancestral customs. Government departments and officials would be multiplied in order to cope with the necessary increase of routine work, the executive and judicial functions would be carefully separated, and the individual civil servant would become a mere member or mouthpiece of a single department, instead of uniting in his own person—as he does at present—half a dozen different executive functions and wide discretionary powers with regard to general administration. Losing thereby a great part of his personal influence and prestige, he would tend to be regarded more and more as the salaried servant of the public, less and less as a recognisable representative of the fu-mu-kuan (the "father-and-mother official") of the time-honoured administrative system of China. That these results would assuredly be brought about by any great change in the economic position of Weihaiwei cannot be doubted, since similar causes have produced such results in nearly all the foreign and especially the Asiatic possessions of the British Crown.

But there are other forces at work besides those that may come from foreign commercial or industrial enterprise, whereby Weihaiwei may become a far less desirable school than it is at present for the student of the Chinese social organism. Hitherto Weihaiwei has with considerable success protected itself behind walls of conservatism and obedience to tradition against the onslaughts of what a Confucian archbishop, if such a dignitary existed, might denounce as "Modernism." But those walls, however substantial they may appear to the casual eye, are beginning to show signs of decay. There is indeed no part of China, or perhaps it would be truer to say no section of the Chinese people, that is totally unaffected at the present day by the modern spirit of change and reform. It is naturally the most highly educated of the people who are the most quickly influenced and roused to action, and the people of Weihaiwei, as it happens, are, with comparatively few exceptions, almost illiterate. But the spirit of change is "in the air," and reveals itself in cottage-homes as well as in books and newspapers and the marketplaces of great cities. Let us hope, for the good of China, that the stout walls of conservatism both in Weihaiwei and elsewhere will not be battered down too soon or too suddenly.

One of the gravest dangers overhanging China at the present day is the threatened triumph of mere theory over the results of accumulated experience. Multitudes of the ardent young reformers of to-day—not unlike some of the early dreamers of the French Revolution—are aiming at the destruction of all the doctrines that have guided the political and social life of their country for three thousand years, and hope to build up a strong and progressive China on a foundation of abstract principles. With the hot-headed enthusiasm of youth they speak lightly of the impending overthrow, not only of the decaying forces of Buddhism and Taoism, but also of the great politico-social structure of Confucianism, heedless of the possibility that these may drag with them to destruction all that is good and sound in Chinese life and thought. Buddhism (in its present Chinese form) might, indeed, be extinguished without much loss to the people; Taoism (such as it is nowadays) might vanish absolutely and for ever, leaving perhaps no greater sense of loss than was left by the decay of a belief in witchcraft and alchemy among ourselves; but Confucianism (or rather the principles and doctrines which Confucianism connotes, for the system dates from an age long anterior to that of Confucius) cannot be annihilated without perhaps irreparable injury to the body-social and body-politic of China. The collapse of Confucianism would undoubtedly involve, for example, the partial or total ruin of the Chinese family system and the cult of ancestors.

With the exception of Roman Catholics and the older generation of Protestant missionaries with a good many of their successors, who condemn all Chinese religion as false or "idolatrous," few, if any, European students of China will be heard to disapprove—whether on ethical or religious grounds—of that keystone of the Chinese social edifice known to Europeans as ancestor-worship. To the revolutionary doctrines of the extreme reformers Weihaiwei and other "backward" and conservative parts of China are—half unconsciously—opposing a salutary bulwark. They cannot hope to keep change and reform altogether at a distance, nor is it at all desirable that they should do so; indeed, as we have seen, their walls of conservatism are already beginning to crumble. But if they only succeed in keeping the old flag flying until the attacking party has been sobered down by time and experience and has become less anxious to sweep away all the time-honoured bases of morality and social government, these old centres of conservatism will have deserved the gratitude of their country. What indeed could be more fitting than that the Confucian system should find its strongest support, and perhaps make its last fight for life, in the very province in which the national sage lived and taught, and where his body has lain buried for twenty-five centuries?