Читать книгу Lion and Dragon in Northern China - Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston - Страница 9

"Shan yü shan pao O yü o pao Jo shih pu pao Shih-ch'ên wei tao."

This being translated means:

"Happiness is the reward of virtue; misery is the reward of wickedness. If virtue and wickedness have not brought their due recompense it is only because the time has not yet come."

This man, whose name was Yang, is said to have been so upright and clean-handed an official that when he was relieved of office he found himself without funds sufficient to take him home to his native place, which was a long way off. However, being connected by marriage with the Li family of Ai-shan-ch'ien,[37] he took up his residence with them and there spent the remainder of his life. He was buried in the graveyard of the Li family, where his tomb is still to be seen.

The abolition of the Wei necessitated military changes of some importance, but the descendants of the old military colonists remained where they were and kept possession of their lands. The only difference to them was that their names as land-holders were now enrolled in the ordinary civil registers instead of in separate military registers. The chün ti (military lands) became min ti (civilian lands) and the payment of land-tax was substituted for military service.

The country appears to have remained unmolested by external foes until 1798, when a fleet of pirate-junks made its appearance with the usual disagreeable results. The years 1810–11 were also bad years for the people, as the eastern part of the province was infested with bands of roving brigands—probably poor peasants who, having been starved out of house and home by floods and droughts and having sold all their property, were asserting their last inalienable right, that of living. Whatever their provocation may have been, it appears from the local records that during the two years just mentioned their daring robberies caused the temporary closing of some of the country-markets. The robbers went about in armed bands, each consisting of seventy or eighty men, and complaints were openly made that the officials would take no active steps to check these disorderly proceedings because the yamên-runners—the ill-paid or unpaid rabble of official underlings by whom Chinese yamêns are infested—were in league with the robbers and received a percentage of the booty as "hush-money." The usual method of attack adopted by the miscreants was to lurk in the graveyards—where in this region there is always good cover—and lie in wait for unprotected travellers. Unlike the Robin Hoods and Dick Turpins of England they shrank not from robbing the poor, and they spared neither old woman nor young child.

Human enemies were not the only adverse forces with which the much-harried peasant of Weihaiwei had to contend. Famine, drought, earthquake, pestilence, all had their share in adding to his sorrows. Sometimes his crops were destroyed by locusts; sometimes his domestic animals became the prey of wild beasts. We find from the Annals that the first visit of British war-vessels to Weihaiwei, which occurred in 1816,[38] synchronised with a period of great misery: famines and epidemics in 1811 and 1812 had been followed by several years of agricultural distress; and during the years from 1813 to 1818 a new scourge visited the people in the shape of packs of ravenous wolves. The officers and men of the Alceste and Lyra might have had the pleasure, had they only known it, of joining in the wolf-hunts organised by the local officials.

The published chronicles do not carry us further than the middle of the nineteenth century, though the yamêns of Wên-têng and Jung-ch'êng possess all the information necessary for the production of new up-to-date editions of their local histories as soon as the higher provincial authorities issue the necessary orders. A new edition of the T'ung Chih, the general Annals and Topography of the whole Province of Shantung, is at present in course of preparation at the capital; and to this work each of the magistracies will be required to contribute its quota of information. If the work is brought up to recent times it will be interesting to read its account of the war with Japan in 1894–5, and of the capture of Weihaiwei. Before the outbreak of that war the fortifications of Weihaiwei had been entirely reconstructed under the direction of European engineers. It was not, however, so strong a fortress as Port Arthur, upon which six millions sterling had been spent by the Government, and which was regarded by the Chinese as impregnable. Yet Port Arthur fell to the victorious Japanese after a single day's fighting, whereas Weihaiwei, vigorously attacked by land and sea, did not capitulate till three weeks after the Japanese troops had landed (on January 20, 1895) at the Shantung Promontory.