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 . .UML 2 for Dummies
by Michael Jesse Chonoles and James A. Schardt ISBN:0764526146

Hungry Minds © 2003 (412 pages)

This plain English guide on building complex architectures with UML 2 shows how to
adjust to the UML 2 standard, extract key information from UML models, object modeling,
case modeling and more.

Table of Contents

UML 2 for Dummies

Introduction
Part I - UML and System Development

Chapter 1 - What’s UML About, Alfie?

Chapter 2 - Following Best Practices
Part II - The Basics of Object Modeling

Chapter 3 - Objects and Classes

Chapter 4 - Relating Objects That Work Together
Chapter 5 - Including the Parts with the Whole
Chapter 6 - Reusing Superclasses: Generalization and Inheritance
Chapter 7 - Organizing UML Class Diagrams and Packages
Part III - The Basics of Use-Case Modeling

Chapter 8 - Introducing Use-Case Diagrams

Chapter 9 - Defining the Inside of a Use Case
Chapter 10 - Relating Use Cases to Each Other
Part IV - The Basics of Functional Modeling

Chapter 11 - Introducing Functional Modeling

Chapter 12 - Capturing Scenarios with Sequence Diagrams
Chapter 13 - Specifying Workflows with Activity Diagrams
Chapter 14 - Capturing How Objects Collaborate
Chapter 15 - Capturing the Patterns of Behavior
Part V - Dynamic Modeling

Chapter 16 - Defining the Object’s Lives with States

Chapter 17 - Interrupting the States by Hosting Events
Chapter 18 - Avoiding States of Confusion
Part VI - Modeling the System’s Architecture

Chapter 19 - Deploying the System’s Components

Chapter 20 - Breaking the System into Packages/Subsystems
Part VII - The Part of Tens

Chapter 21 - Ten Common Modeling Mistakes

Chapter 22 - Ten Useful UML Web Sites
Chapter 23 - Ten Useful UML Modeling Tools
Chapter 24 - Ten Diagrams for Quick Development
Index
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Listings
List of Sidebars
Back Cover
When it comes to modeling, this book is not just another pretty face! It guides you gently through the complexities of
UML, helps you adjust to the UML 2 standard, shows you how to extract key information from UML models, and more.
Before you know it, you’ll be communicating and developing systems like never before.

About the Authors

Michael Jesse Chonoles is former Chief of Methodology at the Advanced Concepts Center (ACC).

James A. Schardt is ACC’s Chief Technologist. Both belong to OMG Task Forces.
UML 2 for Dummies
by Michael Jesse Chonoles
and James A. Schardt

Published by
Wiley Publishing, Inc.
909 Third Avenue New York, NY 10022
www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2003 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
Published simultaneously in Canada

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under
Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the
Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance
Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8700. Requests to the
Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Legal Department, Wiley Publishing, Inc., 10475
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[email protected].

Trademarks: Wiley, the Wiley Publishing logo, For Dummies, the Dummies Man logo, A Reference for the
Rest of Us!, The Dummies Way, Dummies Daily, The Fun and Easy Way, Dummies.com and related trade
dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of Wiley Publishing, Inc., in the United States and other
countries, and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their
respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in
preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness
of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a
particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales
materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should
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For general information on our other products and services or to obtain technical support, please contact our
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2003105654

ISBN: 0-7645-2614-6

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Dedication

Michael dedicates this book to his wife Susann and to their son Zev, for their love, support, sacrifice, and
silliness.
Jim dedicates this book to his wife Martha for her sustaining love and encouragement, and to M. R. Bawa
Muhaiyaddeen as the guiding inspiration in his life.

Authors’ Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the students whom we have taught over the years for their help in shaping our
ideas, and all the members of the Advanced Concepts Center, both past and present, for the chance to work
with some of the best practitioners in the business of systems and software development.

Together we acknowledge the absolutely necessary help, encouragement, and moral support of our Wiley
editors Terri Varveris and Kala Schrager.

Michael would like to thank a whole bunch of people who have helped him over the years, and specifically with
this book: Susann Chonoles for teaching him how to write better and for help in proofreading; Zev Chonoles,
for being a Test Dummy For Dummies and reading his chapters; his managers Bob DeCarli, Mike Duffy, and
Barbara Zimmerman, who encouraged him even when he messed up; and his high-school buddies Joseph
Newmark, Jeffrey Landsman, and Barry Salowitz, who keep on telling him what he’s doing wrong. It goes
without saying that he’s grateful to his parents for everything.

He’d also like to acknowledge Jim Schardt for his work toward understanding UML in all its forms, and Lou
Varveris for his insight, recommendations, and for access to the Popkin’s System Architect tool. He’s also
grateful to all the members of the OMG ADTF and the UML Gurus for their technical advice, encouragement,
and support over the years—especially Cris Kobryn, Jim Odell, Jim Rumbaugh, Philippe Desfray, and Bran
Selic.

Jim would like to thank a number of individuals who helped him develop his knowledge and skills over the
years: David Oliver for his systems perspective; Michael Kamfonas for his data-warehouse development
insights; Michael Chonoles for his work toward understanding UML in all its forms; Jim Rumbaugh and Fred
Eddy for their mentoring on object-oriented analysis; and Michael Blaha and William Premerlani for their
guiding hand in developing database-design techniques using UML.

Publisher’s Acknowledgments

We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments through our online registration form located at
www.dummies.com/register/.

Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:

Acquisitions, Editorial, and Media Development

Project Editor: Kala Schrager

Acquisitions Editor: Theresa Varveris
Senior Copy Editor: Barry Childs-Helton
Technical Editor: Lou Varveris
Editorial Manager: Kevin Kirschner
Media Development Supervisor: Richard Graves
Editorial Assistant: Amanda Foxworth
Cartoons: Rich Tennant, www.the5thwave.com

Production

Project Coordinators: Kristie Rees, Dale White

Layout and Graphics: Seth Conley, Kelly Emkow, Carrie Foster, LeAndra Hosier, Stephanie D. Jumper,
Michael Kruzil, Mary Gillot Virgin
Proofreaders: Laura Albert, Susan Moritz, Dwight Ramsey, TECHBOOKS Production Services
Indexer: TECHBOOKS Production Services

Publishing and Editorial for Technology Dummies

Richard Swadley, Vice President and Executive Group Publisher

Andy Cummings, Vice President and Publisher
Mary C. Corder, Editorial Director

Publishing for Consumer Dummies

Diane Graves Steele, Vice President and Publisher
Joyce Pepple, Acquisitions Director

Composition Services
Gerry Fahey, Vice President of Production Services
Debbie Stailey, Director of Composition Services

About the Authors

Michael Jesse Chonoles: An established system developer, educator, author, and consultant, Michael has
done just about everything that you can do in software and system development—business, requirements,
and software analysis; software, system, and architectural design; coding in many languages; testing and
quality control—right through marketing, packing, and shrink-wrapping the software. His titles include Chief of
Methodology for the Advanced Concepts Center (ACC), Software Development Practice Area Director,
Consulting Analyst, Software Standard and Practices Manager, Test Director, Senior Software Engineer,
several varieties of Team/Project Lead/Staff, and (his personal favorite) Wizard. At the Advanced Concepts
Center, he was responsible for the content and direction of its Object-Oriented and Requirements-Gathering
Curricula as well as its Software Development Practice. Together with his co-author, he constructed a
software/ system-development methodology, CADIT, which was an early attempt to combine agile techniques
with aerospace discipline. He continues his quest to make the complicated simple, while increasing the
professional rigor, quality, and productivity of his audience’s working lives.

Michael has been involved in many aspects of UML, even before there was a UML. He’s been an active
member of the UML RTF (Revision Task Force) at OMG—and frequently writes, lectures, speaks, and
suggests UML topics.

Michael has an MSE in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and BSs in Math and
Physics from MIT. He can be contacted at [email protected].

James A. Schardt: As the Chief Technologist with the Advanced Concepts Center, James provides 24 years of
experience and a firm grounding in object-oriented development, data warehousing, and distributed systems.
He teaches and mentors Fortune 50 companies in the U.S. and abroad. His many years of practice in
object-oriented systems, database design, change management, business engineering, instructional design,
systems-architecture assessment, business engineering, and team facilitation bring a wealth of experience to
his assignments.

He authors papers on data warehousing and object technology and also wrote a column for Report on
Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. James speaks at The Data Warehouse Institute’s world conferences on
a regular basis. He delivers a two-day presentation on collecting and structuring the requirements for
enterprise data-warehouse development.

James is always looking for ways to improve the way that we develop systems and software. Clients request
him by name to deliver his exceptional knowledge transfer skills, both in the classroom and as a mentor on
projects. Over the years, James has managed major research and development programs, invented new
systems methods, developed “intelligent” information-access systems, and provided unique insights into
clients’ difficult development problems.

James has an MSE in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He can be reached via
[email protected].
Introduction
If, like us, you’re a software developer or computer professional of some sort, you probably have to deal with
the stereotype that developers can’t express themselves among normal humans about normal things.
Unfortunately, this book may not help you with that particular challenge, but it can help improve your ability to
communicate with other developers about technical matters. UML (Unified Modeling Language) is a graphical
language that is suit-able to express software or system requirements, architecture, and design. You can use
UML to communicate with other developers, your clients, and increasingly, with automated tools that generate
parts of your system.

If you’re already familiar with UML, you know how powerful and expressive it is — but don’t be surprised if
you’re impressed all over again by the new features of UML 2. Perhaps you found some parts of UML too
complicated or the apparent benefit too obscure. Well, the UML gurus have revamped UML in many areas —
making easier to express yourself exactly and clearly — and they have also added fresh capabilities for the
latest software- and system-development problems that you’re facing.

But because your problems are complex — and your solutions are some-times even more complex — UML is
not always simple to learn. It’s a large and multifaceted language, capable of helping in all areas of
development, from analysis to test as well as from database to embedded-real-time. To some, it’s a
bewildering array of diagrams and symbols. Sometimes it might appear to you that the UML gurus purposely
make it too complicated (and with UML 2, even more so) for the rest of us to understand.

Bottom line: You need a practical, experience-based guide to the ins and outs of this new language. Let this
book be that guide. We boiled down our experiences with UML (in many environments) and our skills as
educators to focus on key UML capabilities that you need first to be more productive.

So, with straightforward English and concrete examples, we give you a leg up on expressing yourself and
being more creative on the job. (Hey, it could help you get a raise — just don’t expect us to help you get a
date.)

How to Use This Book

There’s a right way and a wrong way to use this book. Luckily (like its subject, UML 2), this book is
remarkably versatile. If you’re a traditionalist, you can read it from cover to cover (although you’ll probably stop
at the index). That’s a great approach if you’re really new to UML. If you’re familiar with earlier versions of
UML, you can skip around looking for the new UML 2 stuff. You may miss our (ahem) great insights into the
rest of UML, but you know why you bought the book — do what works. Using any of these techniques will get
you familiar with your book so that you can count on it to help unstick you if you hit a snag with UML.

After you make friends with your book, you’ll probably find yourself taking advantage of its just-in-time
features. With just a bit of page flipping, you’ll be at a section that’s full of examples, tips, techniques, and
warnings that will help you with your UML modeling.

There are other ways to use this book . . . and some of them are wrong ways. It’s not going to work that well
as a doorstop (wrong size), and it probably won’t impress your date (unless you’re dating a developer who’s
new to UML). However, it’ll look great on your bookshelf — silently conveying to your boss your desire to
improve — but if you never open it, you won’t get the full benefit.
 Some Presumptuous Assumptions
If you’re reading this, we can safely assume that not only have you already opened the book, you’re probably
also a developer of software, systems, or databases, and you want to read or write UML 2 diagrams. Perhaps
you’re a manager or business analyst in the same boat.

We won’t assume that you know any particular computer language, although knowing one will certainly help.

For the most part, we assume that you fall into one of two major categories: Either you’re a modeler (with a
yen to communicate requirements or how you think the world works), or you’re a developer (looking to explore
alternative designs or communicate your results). Either way, this book is for you.

We assume that you’re capable of using a tool to draw UML diagrams — we don’t care which one. If the only
tool that you have your hands on is in your hands (as opposed to on-screen), you won’t be at a disadvantage
when you use this book (although your diagrams won’t be quite as tidy if you’re drawing with a stick on wet
sand). You may even be better off doing some diagrams by hand; electronic UML tools are often expensive
and may not yet be up to date with all the neat UML 2 features that we cover. If you’re itching for a high-tech
UML tool, take a look at Chapter 23 where we list of some of the more useful examples (in all price
categories).
 How This Book Is Organized

Here’s your first practical hint about using UML: Put about five to nine major elements on a diagram — no
more. Studies have shown (we’ve always wondered who does this type of study) that most people have a hard
time comprehending more than about nine elements at a time. Likewise, when designing this book, we
decided to follow our own advice and to divide the book into just seven parts.

Remember that you don’t have to read this book in order. Just choose the parts and chapters that you need at
the time.

Part I: UML and System Development

If you want to know what UML is (and why knowing it is useful), this is the place to go; it covers the basics of
UML and how it can be used. You’ll also find some common principles for communicating or developing
systems with UML. These principles guided the UML gurus when they created UML; the same principles can
guide you to effective use of it. Ways to apply these principles crop up throughout the book.

Part II: The Basics of Object Modeling

When you model by using UML, the basics are the things (or objects) that you draw and the relationships
among them. You’ll find information on classes, objects, associations, inheritances, and generalizations. No
matter what type of development you do, understanding this part will probably be essential.

Part III: The Basics of Use-Case Modeling

Use cases (detailed real-world examples) allow you to understand and communicate the purpose of a system
or its components. They are great for organizing your thoughts — and your system — when you want to get a
value-added product out the door.

Part IV: The Basics of Functional Modeling

When the objects in your system get busy and you want to explain the details of their complex behavior,
you’ll need a technique to do so. UML supplies several to choose from — and this part explains and compares
them. You’ll see several different types of interaction diagrams (such as sequence, communication, and
activity) in action, and discover how to combine them to create solutions, patterns, and frameworks. If you’re
experienced with UML, you’ll find lots of new UML 2 stuff in this part.

Part V: Dynamic Modeling

Your objects are more that just clumps of data stuck together with a few functions. The objects that you
develop are more like living things; they remember the past and live their lives by changing their states in
response to incoming events. In this part, you can make sure that they get a life — and that you know how to
explain it. Come to this part for state charts.

Part VI: Modeling the System?s Architecture

Whether you’re an architect, programmer, or construction worker, you build complex architectures. Computer
systems and software applications distribute themselves across different hardware platforms — and spread
throughout the Internet. This part outlines steps that you can use to design your systems for their mission by
using system plans, packaging, and subsystems.
 Part VII: The Part of Tens

Everyone enjoys making lists (and daydreaming that they’ll be read aloud, backward, on late-night talk shows).
Here are our top-ten lists of useful tips, tools, Web sites, and diagrams. They’re likely to be your top-tens, too.
 Icons Used in This Book
Appropriately for a book about graphical communication (even if it is software-oriented), there are signposts
throughout to help you find your way.

UML2 This icon identifies the really new stuff in UML 2. Not every modified feature will get this flag, but it does
alert those who are familiar with UML 1.x that something’s really different here.

Tip Here’s a simpler way of doing something that can make it easier than the typical approach. Think of it as
a shortcut to better UML.

Remember UML can be a maze — and it can be amazing. These are gentle reminders to reinforce important
points.

Warning If you see this icon but ignore it, you’ll be in good company but a bad mood.

Technical Stuff When you see this icon, you know that we thought the associated material really interesting
— but every time we tell people enthusiastically about it, they fall asleep. Skip these sections if you want.
 Where to Go from Here
Okay, you’re now ready to explore the world of UML 2 modeling. Relax. You’ve got the tools that you need in
your head and your hands (one of them is this book), and it’s safe to explore.

So, go ahead and express yourself with the power of UML 2.

Part I: UML and System Development

Chapter List

Chapter 1:What’s UML About, Alfie?

Chapter 2: Following Best Practices

Part Overview

In this part . . .

Building systems or software isn’t that tough if you can communicate with your clients, co-workers, managers,
and tools. Unfortunately, as your problems get harder and more complex, the risks that emerge from
miscommunication become greater — and more severe when they do crop up.

Fortunately, there’s a straightforward, visual language that you can use that will help promote more precise
and more efficient communication about the nature of your system in all its aspects — software, requirements,
architectures, designs, design patterns, and implementations. This language is UML, the Unified Modeling
Language. The newest version, UML 2, has become more powerful and more useful than ever.

Starting here, we cover the basics of UML. You find out how it may fit your situation, how and when you can
use it, and what it’s good for. We give you just as much background in history, terminology, and basic
principles as you’ll need to take advantage of UML’s highly productive features.
 Chapter 1: What’s UML About, Alfie?

Overview
In This Chapter

Understanding the basics of UML

Exploring the whys and whens of UML diagrams

So you’ve been hearing a lot about UML, and your friends and colleagues are spending some of their time
drawing pictures. And maybe you’re ready to start using UML but you want to know what it’s all about first.
Well, it’s about a lot of things, such as better communication, higher productivity, and also about drawing
pretty pictures. This chapter introduces you to the basics of UML and how it can help you.
Other documents randomly have
different content
had entered the precincts of another alien religion. The “Hwei-Hwei”
establishments looked outwardly pure Chinese partly because of the
fear of persecution in the past; the “Ching-Nien-Hwei,” I believe I am
safe in saying, did so mainly because it had been forced to house
itself in such quarters as it found attainable.
It would, by the way, be unfair to the score of men and women, a
few of them our fellow-countrymen, who are giving their best efforts
to educational, medical, and, not disproportionately, I trust, to
denominational matters in the several Christian missions scattered
in and about the Shensi capital, not to make mention of them, even
though they may not vie, in the minds of those of us from the West,
in picturesqueness and local color with the mutton-sellers in the
market-place. They live unmolested, even befriended now by most of
the rank and file and by nearly all the higher officials, and in a
comfort befitting modest human beings; but the time is not so far
distant as to be by any means forgotten when they came nearly all to
being martyrs to their cause. The man who stood all night to his neck
in a pond, holding his baby girl in his arms while the rest of his
family was murdered by the mob that circled for hours around him,
is still there at his post, with a new family to certify that he still has
faith in those to whom he has chosen to give his life’s work. Lest
neither side forget entirely, however, there is a modern brick
Memorial School in the western suburbs, with its bronze tablet in
memory of the victims,—one mother, one young man, and six
children ranging from eight to fifteen. It was no antiforeign feeling,
in the accepted use of that phrase, which gave the missionaries of
Sian-fu their most dreadful experience; that is, they were not
attacked either as missionaries or as Westerners. The revolution that
was to bring the republic had come; the hated Manchus were fair
prey at last; and while some of the rougher element no doubt took
full advantage of their sudden brief opportunity, there was honestly
no distinction in the minds of the uneducated masses between
Manchus and any other “outside-country people.”

The temple of Confucius out near the south wall was as peaceful,
as soothing a spot as could have been come upon within sound of
human voices, with that aloofness from the world so befitting the
philosophy of the great sage. But here, too, there was something
beneath the surface not inherent in the ancient architecture or the
rook-encircled tree-tops. A modern touch had been introduced; one
suspected the hand, or at least the influence, of Feng Yü Hsiang, the
“Christian General,” who had only lately ceased to be Tuchun of
Shensi to become that of Honan. Feng’s penchant for anything,
ancient or ultra-modern, which will bring the results he seeks is well
known. The Confucian Hall had several walls covered with very up-
to-date placards in colors, ranging all the way from illustrations of
the awful depredations of the fly—it was hard to imagine the Chinese
worrying about a little thing like that—to the graphically pictured
assassination of Cæsar and such scenes as the Nativity; for
Confucius, of course, has nothing of the intolerance conspicuous in
Christianity or Mohammedanism. In another section there were
portraits of many famous foreigners, Washington, Lincoln, and
Franklin being the only Americans among some forty. There is surely
nothing reprehensible, though something more than incongruous, in
trying to make Confucius a modern teacher and his temple a place of
propaganda against the merely physical ills.
So near the temple of Confucius as to be dully audible from it all
day long is the famous “Forest of Monuments.” Centuries ago, you
will remember, a Chinese emperor ordered all the classical books to
be burned. In order that such a catastrophe should never be possible
again, all the important texts in those classics, gathered together
from odd volumes that had escaped the flames, or from the
memories of old scholars, were carved on scores of stone monuments
—hundreds, I believe one might safely say, after wandering through
the several long temple-sheds or shed-temples in which they stand
close together in long rows. There all day long, from the end of the
New Year’s debauch of loafing until the New Year comes around
again, stand dozens of men taking rubbings of the famous texts. The
head-high monuments are covered over with big sheets of what is
almost tissue-paper, and coolies and boys, perhaps not one among
whom can read a single character of the many thousands about
them, pound and pound with wooden mallets until copies, covered
with a kind of lamp-black except where the indented characters have
left them white, are ready to be added to the stock of shopkeepers
near the entrance to the grounds. The consumption of these flimsy
facsimiles throughout the Far East is evidently enormous, for the
dullish rap-a-rap of many mallets is seldom if ever silent from sun to
sun.
Off by itself in a conspicuous spot stands the Nestorian Tablet,
most famous of them all, at least to those from the Western world.
For on it is carved the story of the first coming of Christianity to
China, long before even the Jesuits included that land in their field of
operations. To the ignorant Occidental eye it looks quite like any
other turtle-borne stone carved with upright rows of intricate
characters, except that above them there is cut a well defined Greek
cross. The Nestorian Tablet, I believe, was not considered much of a
find when it was first dug up out of a field in the neighborhood of
Sian-fu; but the fame of that jet-black slab has since grown so great
that the not over-distinct characters are likely to become even less so
with the constant taking of rubbings.
No less ebony black is the stone at the far rear of the same
compound on which a few thin white lines sketch what is widely
reputed to be the only authentic portrait of Confucius. The austere
simplicity of the execution and the not unkindly severity of the
portrayed face are at once a contrast and a rebuke to the silly
gaudiness of demonology that clutters almost all Chinese temples.
Then, before Sian-fu can be left behind, there are the famous stone
horses, mere bas-reliefs of galloping steeds done centuries ago, yet so
full of life and action as to be the despair of any living sculptor. These
race low along the outdoor wall of a corridor in the local museum,
and imperfectly now, for a vandal all but destroyed them. He was a
Frenchman, and the love of art was so strong within him that he
resolved to steal the famous horses of Sian-fu and carry them off to
his native land. The big stone slabs were impossible to transport
entire; the art-loving Gaul broke each of them into several pieces, of
course with the connivance of bribed Chinese, and the carts bearing
them were already many miles on their way when they were
overtaken. It is such little adventures as this, justly distributed
throughout China, which make it strange that “outside-country
people” are so generally treated with respect by nearly all the four
hundred million, and only very rarely as “foreign devils.”

Perhaps the major would have been detected through his incognito
of a man on a purely personal jaunt anyway, but it was that wire from
Tungkwan concerning motor transportation that gave the game away
entirely. We had barely begun to deplore with our host in Sian-fu the
difficulties of filling portable zinc bath-tubs with hot water that must
be purchased and carried in from the outside, when two Chinese
officials called. One was merely a magistrate, but the other was high
up in the “foreign office” of the province, as well as no less fluent in
our tongue than in his own. He had come at once to pay his respects,
to welcome us to the province, and to bring the startling information
that we were expected to lodge in some yamen or palace which the
Tuchun’s soldiers had spent all day in preparing in a manner
befitting the American military official who was unexpectedly
honoring Shensi with his presence. I was not grieved that the delicate
task of declining these accommodations fell upon the major’s broad
shoulders. We could not, of course, put the Tuchun to any such
trouble; we were already installed in the capacious dwelling of the
postal commissioner, who not only was British but had innumerable
other qualifications to recommend him, who was keeping bachelor
hall and was entitled to company, who was a very old friend—the
major did have, I believe, a note of introduction to him—and who
from time immemorial had been the accepted host of any visitor to
Sian-fu whose native tongue was English and whose evolution had
passed the eat-with-your-knife stage. There was no necessity of
divulging such further facts as the fear that even the Tuchun’s ideas
of supreme hospitality would probably include wooden-floored beds,
unswept corners, and a perpetual crowding by curious and
irrepressible retainers, and that civilized toilet-facilities, effective
heating-arrangements, and freedom to come and go without
formality were quite as sure to be lacking. The chief emissary, being
versed in foreign ways, probably knew that all these thoughts were
none the less existent for remaining unspoken, and accepted our
declination in what seemed to be good spirit after far less than half
the usual number of repetitions required by full-blooded Chinese
courtesy.
But that did not prevent us from being overwhelmed with official
formalities during our stay in Sian-fu. Formality is fully as sturdy
and omnipresent a crone in China as in Latin America. It would have
been the height of discourtesy, of course, not to make a formal call
upon the Tuchun soon after our arrival; this, in the case of so
distinguished a visitor as the major, a fellow in arms, had to be
returned; there was old precedent for giving us an official feast,
which could only properly be reciprocated by getting our host to
invite the Tuchun to an elaborate luncheon; the civil governor and
the corpulent head of the “foreign office” must at least be honored
with a call, which we must be prepared to have retaliated; it would
have been discourteous not to return the kindness of our first two
callers, even though the magistrate was so low in rank that we could
not remain with him more than five minutes; each group of
missionaries in town expected us to dinner, or lunch, or tea, or, if
worse came to worst, to breakfast; the Chamber of Commerce and
other bodies of important citizens expected speeches—fortunately
some engagements hopelessly conflicted—and, not to go particularly
into details, there was a complete round of farewell calls that could
not under any circumstances be omitted. Looking back upon it, I am
amazed to realize that we spent only three full days in Sian-fu, and
even at that managed to see most of its worth-while “sights”; and
that we left it still in tolerably good health in spite of the fact that we
accomplished as many as five incredibly heavy meals, not to call
them “banquets,” in a single day.
This feat was made possible by the fact that Chinese feasts come at
about eleven in the morning or four in the afternoon. Thus we could
stagger away from either of these just in time to sit down with a
deceptive smirk of pleasure at the repast prepared by some of the
foreign groups with a special view to assuaging our ravenous road
appetites. In anything concerned with the Tuchun at least, we were
obliged to save “face” both for him and for ourselves by bumping
about town in a “Peking cart” such as all Sian-fu residents of
standing regard as one of their most indispensable possessions. In
fact, the Tuchun sent his own for us. There were two of them,
gleamingly new, but nicely graded as to caste in details invisible to
us, yet as plainly publishing to the Chinese the distinction between a
great foreign official like the major and a mere traveler like myself as
if their blue cloth sides had been daubed with red characters. A huge,
well groomed mule drew each of them; they were upholstered,
padded, and cushioned not only within but on the sort of veranda
where those of lower caste may sit, while the two wheels were
magnificent examples of that universal to-hell-with-the-public
attitude of China which dictates great sharp iron-toothed tires that
would destroy any road in record time, yet which have absolutely no
justification except swank—and perhaps the fear of skidding on wet
corners during the three-mile-an-hour dashes about town.
In calling upon a Chinese official one first sends one’s Chinese card
over by a retainer, in order that the great man may be prepared.
Within half an hour or so one may follow, presenting another card to
some underling who will be found waiting where, in the case of a
Tuchun, one might otherwise be casually run through with the naked
bayonets which the swarms of soldiers about such a place so
generously display. The underling disappears for some time, because
the great man is sure to hold forth in the far interior of the flock of
buildings filling his long compound, where he could be reached only
with difficulty by an unauthorized visitor, even though he knew its
devious passages well. In time he returns, and marching before the
visitors and holding their cards above his head spread out fan
fashion, names to the rear, like a hand at poker, he conducts the way.
Gradually more important functionaries take up his task, until the
callers are invited to seat themselves in a sort of ante-guest-room by
a man who may even be of high enough rank to dare to open
conversation with them. This anteroom is usually furnished with a
platform built into one wall and upholstered into a divan littered
with red cushions, with a somewhat raised space, or a foot-high
table, in the center. Tuchuns, however, even of the far interior, have
in most cases adopted a foreign style in this as in military uniforms,
and one finds oneself instead in a larger and very commonplace
room furnished with a long, cloth-laid table surrounded by chairs,
with at most a Chinese scroll or two on the walls as the only hints of
local color. But a flock of servants and orderlies, setting a little
handleless cup of tea before each guest and under no circumstances
permitting him to empty it, keep him reminded of his latitude and
longitude. If he is of any importance, he is also furnished a cigarette
—by having a single one laid on the cloth in front of him—which, if
he shows any tendency to consume it, some one lights for him before
he realizes it. If he is a man of extraordinarily high rank, such as a
military attaché from “Mei-guo” on the other side of the earth, the
principal flunky offers him a cigar. This invariably is of some sad
Manila brand—the Chinese word for cigar is “Lüüsung-yen,” or
“Philippine tobacco”—this time in the box, and usually a full box,
whether in the hope that he will not be so bold as to disturb the
symmetry of the precious contents or because cigar-smokers are so
rare in China that the box seldom loses its pristine fullness. At length
the great man himself appears from behind a blue cloth door
reverently lifted by several soldiers; there is a general uprising about
the table; the host and his guests each fervently shake hands with
themselves and bow times innumerable, like automatons hinged only
at the waist; and at a graceful gesture of the Tuchun’s hand the
gathering finally subsides into the chairs and proceeds to converse
on things of no importance as fluently as the guests’ command of
Chinese or the ministrations of an interpreter permit. If the call is
nothing more than that, it ends in the anteroom where it began. After
another long series of bows the guests are accompanied to the door,
and as much beyond it as befits their rank. This is one of the most
delicate points of Chinese etiquette, the one on which the foreigner,
at least if he is newly established in the country, is most apt to
stumble. For there is an intricate gradation of ranks in society even
in “republican” China, with many factors modifying each under
different circumstances; and not to see one’s guest far enough is as
serious a social blunder as to accompany him beyond the point to
which his caste entitles him. In a Tuchun’s yamen—in theory they
call such a place gung-shu, or “people’s house,” since the rise of the
republic—there may be nearly a dozen doors or openings of some
sort between the inner depths and the front p’ai-lou, and at each of
them courtesy requires much “you first” stuff and pretended protests
from the guest against his host’s going any farther, so that when the
final leave-taking is far out on the threshold of the last gate, as in the
case of an official representative of great America, a glance at a watch
is likely to be startling when one finally does at last break away.
Our first call on the Tuchun of Shensi was at his military
headquarters in the ex-Manchu quarter of town. Here his
predecessor, Feng Yü Hsiang, had turned the largest available open
space within the city walls into a drill-field with long rows of modern
brick barracks. On the big stone-and-mud wall enclosing all this
there were painted at frequent intervals huge Chinese characters. But
these are not the shoe and tobacco advertisements the resemblance
to a baseball-field might lead the uninformed stranger to conclude;
they are some of those moral precepts with which the “Christian
General” is famous for surrounding his soldiers. Much of the
material for wall and barracks, by the way, was said to have come
from the palaces in which the Dowager Empress of sinister memory
lived with her pet eunuch during the year following her flight from
Peking in 1900. The former military governor saw no good reason to
keep up this imperial establishment under a republican régime, and
now there remains but little more than a field scattered with broken
stones where less than a year before our visit there had been
something mildly resembling the Forbidden City in Peking. Speaking
of the crafty old shrew in question, we no longer wondered so much
at her cantankerous disposition when we realized that she rode all
the way from Peking to Sian-fu in a “Peking cart,” eating the dust of
the loess cañons, and spending her nights at the odoriferous inns
along the way, some of which still boast of that fact by their names or
decorations.
The Tuchun’s dinner in the major’s honor was an exact replica,
except in location, of the call of respect we had made the day before—
up to the time when we had begun to take our departure on that
occasion. This time the whole party began about five o’clock to drift
toward the “banquet-hall” at another end of the compound, with as
much contention at every portal along the way as if each had been a
dead-line upon which a nest of machine-guns had its muzzles
trained. The guests included all the foreigners in town—that is,
adults of the male gender—even to a Japanese official who had come
to collect an indemnity from the province for the killing of a stray
cotton merchant from Nippon; and the flock of Chinese officials
mingled with them lacked no one worth while in the political circles
of Sian-fu. The three provincial military chieftains with whom we
dined during our western journey all go in for foreign-style dinners
on official occasions, and attain their intentions in this respect as far
as local information and the extraneous learning of their cooks can
carry them. The result is an entertaining gustatory hybrid resembling
its alien parent perhaps a bit more than its Chinese. Of the
irrepressible swarming of persistent flies over all the sumptuousness
of that lengthy table I really should have said nothing, for it is surely
not the duty of a Tuchun to squander his military genius against such
insignificant enemies. That the soldiers flocking almost as thickly
about us should have passed slices of bread in their hands instead of
using a plate was as genuinely Chinese as were their several other
minor faux pas, and merely improved the local color. At least the
great Oriental institution of gam-bay-ing held its unaltered own,
even in the presence of half a dozen Protestant missionaries and a
chief guest of honor who lamentably failed to hold up his end of that
pastime.
The east gate of Sian-fu, by which we entered the
capital of Shensi, rises like an apartment-house
above the flat horizon

All manner of aids to the man behind the

wheelbarrow are used in his long journey in
bringing wheat to market, some of them not very
economical
 The western gate of
Sian-fu, through which
we continued our
journey to Kansu

A “Hwei-Hwei,” or
Chinese Mohammedan,
keeper of an outdoor
restaurant

The privacy of the military governor—and therefore usually the

dictator—of a Chinese province must indeed be slight. When he has
guests, swarms of soldiers and servants crowd every doorway and fill
every window with staring faces, if, indeed, they do not flock into the
room itself. Every joke, every slightest scrap of information picked
up from the conversation is instantly, and often more or less audibly,
passed out into the yard and relayed to the last coolie within the
compound. Most Tuchuns have the reputation of double-dealing to
feather their own nests; how on earth they ever succeed in privately
arranging any of their little deals is a mystery, for there must surely
always be some underling about to listen to the conversation. This is
not eavesdropping but the frank presence of servants and the like,
even of mere strangers struck with curiosity, in situations where the
worst bred ignoramus in the Western world would never dream of
intruding; and as the Chinese desire for privacy is as slight as their
sense of it, such intrusions are not only seldom rebuked but probably
in many cases not even noticed. Even a private home is little more
respected than a public office. When the Tuchun came to lunch with
us his soldiers poured into the house of our host, crowding the
doorway of dining-room or parlor and, as we ate or chatted, fingering
their Lugers, unconsciously perhaps, but as if they were expecting us
at any moment to attempt the assassination of their chief.
Shensi’s ruler at the time of our visit had been civil governor of the
province under the “Christian General.” Upon his own accession to
chief power he retained, and apparently honestly attempted to keep
up, many of the reforms and policies of his predecessor, though he
made no profession of Christianity. Feng, for instance, had abolished
the “red light” district and actually driven the inmates out of the
province, a very unusual and to most of the population an
incomprehensible action. Several times the Sian-fu chief of police
had petitioned the new Tuchun to allow these places to be
reëstablished, because they brought large increases to the provincial
treasury—to say nothing, of course, of the liberal “squeeze” to all
officials concerned. His refusal was still apparently genuine at the
time of our visit. But pity the poor officials of present-day China who
wish to be honest and progressive, and perhaps even moral in the
Western sense; a Tuchun must at least have money to pay his troops,
must he not? When Feng took over the province of Shensi it had
been for some time under the rule of a former bandit, who had
followed an honored precedent in collecting all land and other
possible taxes for years in advance. This left the new Tuchun the
rather scanty likin taxes and a few minor sources of income on which
to run his government and keep his troops up to their unusually high
efficiency. It could not be done; and after he had appealed to the
Christian missionaries to show him any possible means to avoid
resorting to that extreme, Feng fell back upon the lucrative tax on
opium exported from his province or passing through from Kansu
beyond, however illegal such traffic is and whatever his personal
feelings toward it were. A mere local detail this; but it is symbolical
of hundreds of problems facing those who really wish to work for the
future betterment of China, and it is not difficult to guess what
happens in the case of the many more weak or indifferent men who
have attained to some degree of power, with still no vision beyond
the universal corruption which sank its roots deep into Chinese
society in the old imperial days.
 CHAPTER XXI
ONWARD THROUGH SHENSI

O ur good British host of Sian-fu conceived the nefarious project

of sending us on to Lanchow in “Peking carts”; but the few
unavoidable churnings in those of the Tuchun had firmly convinced
us that anything else was preferable. Anything else boiled down to a
single choice,—the transformation of pack-mules in the postal
service into riding-animals by the simple expedient of disguising
them as such with the American army saddles and bridles we had
brought with us. For militarists had drained the provinces of horses;
good riding-mules could be bought, if at all, only for a fortune, and
could not be hired for so long and hazardous a journey under any
circumstances. We took two carts also, it is true, a “large” and a
“small” one in Chinese parlance, though the difference in size was
not great and the three mules of the one hardly better than the two of
the other. But these were for the baggage and our two servants.
An inventory of the whole expedition may be mildly of interest, not
so much for the information of other travelers as to show that the
most modest of foreigners can scarcely escape a princely retinue
when they travel in the interior of China. The “large” cart exacted
forty-four dollars; the small one twenty-seven dollars; each pack-
mule sixteen dollars, with a dollar “tea-money” at the end (specified
in the contract). This included a driver for each cart, a mafu, or
groom, on foot to attend to the riding-animals—for most of the way,
it turned out, we had two of them—all self-sustaining, except their
mere lodging at inns and, of course, a certain inevitable “squeeze”
through understandings with innkeepers. For a journey of fifteen
hundred li, or four hundred and fifty miles, the sum total did not
seem excessive, particularly as it was merely in “Mex” and but little
more than half what it would have been in American currency. The
trip, we learned, was usually divided into eighteen stages and could
scarcely be made with such an outfit in less than sixteen days. We
took the precaution of promising a dollar a day cumshaw to each of
the cart-drivers for every day they bettered the ordinary schedule.
Fifty li beyond Sian-fu the alleged road went down into the broad
river-bed of the Wei, a sturdy tributary of the Hoang Ho and in
certain seasons several times wider than it was now. Far out at the
edge of the water was gathered a mighty multitude waiting for the
very inadequate ferry to set them across to the large walled town of
Sienyang on the further shore. A typical Chinese ferry is a marvelous
example of the worst way to cross a river, and this one was no
exception to the rule. Out in the sand close alongside the still broad
stream there were densely crowded together, in all the disorder of
which the Chinese, who are adepts at it, are capable, carts piled high
with all sorts of awkward cargo, mules, donkeys, and a few old hacks
of horses, all under cumbersome packs, laden wheelbarrows by the
score, and coolies without number, each carrying with him a donkey-
load of something or other. All this assortment, not to mention
dozens of mere Chinese travelers of less good-natured mien than the
coolies, and all sorts of journeying odds and ends scattered through
the throng, was lying in wait for one of three clumsy, home-made
barges which at long intervals poled and singsonged themselves from
shore to shore. Wherever a Chinese crowd gathers there quickly flock
those eager to minister to its wants, so that out here on the bare sand
there had sprung up several straw-mat restaurants, a shoemaker’s
hasty establishment, a blacksmith-shop, which could have been
packed up entire in five minutes and carried off over the smithy’s
shoulder, for those who wished to take advantage of the delay by
having a horse shod or some unavoidable repair done, while the
hawkers of everything hawkable to such customers struggled through
the chaotic mob chanting their wares in all the tones from
diphtheritic hoarseness to the shrillest of falsettos. Then of course
there were the inevitable beggars, young and old, sickly and sturdy,
slinking in and out through every possible opening.
It would have been un-Chinese to take turns or conform to any
other system that might have made easier the task in hand, so that
when the first of the three craft, more overloaded than any American
“trolley” in the rush hour, began to show signs of where it purposed
to land, there was a helter-skelter in that direction which resulted in
many personal discomfitures. Luckily foreigners are usually given a
wide berth in such stampedes; whether it is out of sheer respect or
merely due to some old tradition of one of these strange-looking
“outside-country people” suddenly “making his hand into a ball” and
chastising in an unprecedented manner those who were so
unfortunate as to jostle him, there is almost always alacrity and
generally respectful cheerfulness in giving one of them full right of
way. Personally we might not have taken advantage of this attitude
and made chaos more chaotic by demanding first place; but Chang,
like any Chinese in the service of a foreigner, could not resist
impressing that fact upon his fellow-countrymen; and before we
realized it he had somehow forced our expedition to the front at the
spot where the boat at last concluded to ground. For it would not
have been conventional to prepare a place where the craft might
actually land, any more than it would have been for it to carry a real
gang-plank in place of the two warped and writhing slabs that were
at length disentangled from the welter of everything on board and
slid over the side. For one thing, a real gang-plank could probably
not have survived some band of thieves for a single night; for
another, how could the swarms of tattered men hanging about either
shore earn their meager food if carts and wheelbarrows could be
gotten aboard without their assistance? Had there been any
suggestion of authority to keep the one throng back far enough for
the other to disembark, the boat’s stay might at least have been cut in
half. But China is preëminently the land of individual rather than
communal liberty, and there ensued something superior by many
times to any college rush. That a few who wished to disembark had
been swept back again upon the boat, and vice versa, was of course
no unusual experience. When at last comparative quiet began to
settle down about us, and the half-dozen polemen at the stern took
up their weird chantey, we found that while we ourselves and most of
our animals were on board none of our carts had won the mêlée.
Carts could not get on board under their own natural motive-power,
but, having been unhitched, they must be bodily lifted and
shouldered up the crazy substitutes for gang-planks.
Though the opposite shore was a stone-paved road close under the
city wall, landing facilities were far worse than where we had
embarked. For one thing, the craft grounded fully ten feet from shore
and could not be coaxed to move in either direction until all the
coolies, who made up three fourths of the passenger-list, had been
driven overboard, packs and all, and left to scramble as best they
could up the stone facing of the bank. Many of them were carrying
cotton in loose bundles or in high cone-shaped baskets, and now and
then in their shrieking, disorganized struggles a boll or two of the
precious stuff fell into the muddy water. The dismay at such a
disaster, though only on the part of the owner or carrier, who
screamed with excitement until he had rescued the threatened bit of
property, was not merely both absurd and pathetic, but a striking
commentary on the poverty of China’s great masses. Eventually the
boat was poled close enough to what should and could easily have
been a stone runway so that the frightened animals could be forced
to walk the teetering plank without more than two or three of them
falling overboard, and some two hours after we had reached the river
our own carts were manhandled ashore from a following boat and
our expedition was once more organized.
Thousands of people, and probably at least hundreds of carts,
cross the Wei at Sienyang every day in the year, and have done so for
centuries; yet the several simple little improvements that would
make the crossing a brisk matter of routine have evidently never
been thought of—except by critical foreigners—much less ever
attempted. No Chinese concerned would feel really happy if the thing
were not done in the very hardest possible way consistent with its
being accomplished at all; that would make him feel out of touch
with his worshiped ancestors. Besides, whom do you expect to make
those improvements? Not the local authorities, for they probably get
more “squeeze” under the present system; not the boatmen, for the
longer the boat is in loading the fewer times they will have to pole it
across; not, certainly, the flocks of hangers-on who find in the
difficulties of embarking and disembarking their only source of
livelihood; and surely not the passenger, for his only interest is to get
across, not to make it easier for other people, for whose weal or woe
he has a Chinaman’s supreme indifference.

Beyond Sienyang the whole dust-hazy landscape was covered as

far as the eye could see with graves, not the little conical spatters of
earth to be seen in myriads all over China, but immense mounds by
the score, some of them veritable mountains—and nowhere a touch
of any color but the yellow brown of rainless autumn. Once perhaps
there had been small forests about these tombs, but at most now
there was left a rare broken stone horse of clumsy workmanship and
perhaps the remnants of a few other more or less mythological
beasts. What noble beings had been worthy the heavy task of piling
these great hills over their mortal remains, or when they had graced
the earth, no one along the way could tell us. Once or twice a day we
passed a huge oblong old bell of elaborate design that had once hung
in a temple, and was now rusting away in some moistureless mud-
hole, like the abandoned sugar-kettles which litter several islands of
the West Indies. Perhaps the temples themselves had fallen entirely
away again into the dust from which even holy edifices are
constructed in the loess country, and left these abandoned bells as
the only remembrance of their former existence. Sometimes one of
these had been rescued, whether out of piety, superstition, or some
lucrative inspiration, and hung in the one and only tree of which an
occasional larger village boasted.
On the second midday we lunched in a cave, and paid even for the
water drunk by the mules, as well as their chopped straw and beans;
or at least their owners did. In fact, cave dwellings had become
almost universal, and were to remain so for many days to come;
villages, whole towns of caves, stretched in row after row up the face
of great loess cliffs, like the terraced fields that covered every foot of
the mountainous world from river-bottom to the crest of the farthest
visible range. In all this tumbled expanse often the only touch of
color was the persimmons, like big orange-tinted tomatoes—
persimmons by the ox-cart-load; wheelbarrows creaking under their
double straw boxes of persimmons; baskets of them hanging from
the shoulder-poles of jogging coolies; wandering persimmon-sellers
everywhere singing their merits; millions of them for sale, millions
more being dried in the sun. Even the dust which covered everything
and everybody without distinction could not disguise the
persimmons’ splash of color, nor hamper the natives from wolfing
them entire as often as their worldly wealth warranted the
acquisition of one. Dust and skin aside, we also found them the best
thing late autumn had to offer—a drink, a lunch, and a dessert all in
one.
 We crawled out of our sleeping-bags at five each morning and were
off at six, except on the few days when we varied that program by
making it an hour earlier. With the sun so low that it only overtook
us some twenty li away, those daily departures were not only dark
but increasingly cold. For though men working in the fields were still
sometimes stripped to the waist, at least when the cloudless sun was
high, as late as the tenth of November, any suggestion of shadow or
of night air became more tinged with serious meaning as the earth
underfoot rose higher and higher above sea-level. The roads for the
most part were still cañons, sometimes mightier cañons than we had
even yet seen; at others they clambered over loess ridges and hills,
gashing themselves deeply into these wherever time, traffic, and soil
coincided sufficiently to do so. In strict speech there were no roads at
all, as there seldom are anywhere in China; not that they were merely
atrocious routes of transportation, but because the Chinese scheme
of things does not make provision even for a place on which to build
a road. Every foot of territory pays a land-tax; the unfortunate
landholder on whose property the public chooses to trespass in its
strenuous struggles to get itself and its produce from one place to
another must pay for that which belongs to him only in name. The
result is that a road is a homeless orphan, welcome nowhere, driven
from field to field, and ruthlessly done away with by plow or shovel
whenever an opportunity offers. The attempts of each of China’s
myriad tillers of the soil to chase the un-public highway off his own
precious little patches of earth, added to the fact that a driver has
only a limited control over the wanderings of his lead-mule, and has
no training in directness and time-saving himself, make the average
Chinese road the most incredible example of aimless wandering on
the face of the earth. There are no fences in this land of walls; the
Chinese walls in his home, his towns, his country, but never his
fields, which would seem to need it most. For traffic has not the
slightest consideration for the damage it may do. It marches serenely
over newly planted grain or ripening crops whenever there is the
least incentive to do so, and the only redress of the owner is some
such feeble protest as digging traverse trenches at frequent intervals
along the edge of his land in the usually vain hope that carts will be
obliged to keep outside them, or to take advantage of some favorable
season of slight travel to uproot the pesky road and throw it away
entirely.
 There were defiles so narrow through the great loess cañons that
carts could not have passed a sedan-chair; and through these came
such a constant train of traffic that it is strange the lighter west-
bound travel moved at all. Ponderous two-wheeled carts, weighing
several times as much as our farm-wagons, drawn by six or seven
mules, were not uncommon. All had at least three animals, one in the
shafts—and many of these shaft-mules were splendid specimens of
mulehood—the rest in front in pairs or trios, with perhaps a lone
lead-mule setting the pace. Rope traces running through a large iron
ring suspended from each of the shafts attached all the animals
directly to the axle. A Chinese shaft-mule’s life is no sinecure. At
every incessant bump and lurch of the massive cart he is similarly
jolted by the two cumbersome logs that imprison him; if the cart
overturns he must go with it; and all day long his head is held
painfully erect, not by a mere bit, but by a rawhide thong between his
upper lip and the gums. The other animals get off little more cheaply,
and with the wicked loads of wheat in long slender bags which
endlessly poured in past us from the west, the gasping of the animals
as they toiled in the deep sand-like loess, particularly when the
cañon led steeply upward over the high ridges which here and there
cut across the route, was like the death-rattle of beasts suddenly
stricken down.
Under each axle of these carts hung a long bell of cylinder shape,
and the dull booming of scores of these could be heard for miles
before or behind them. Apparently these wheat-trains traveled day
and night. We met them at dawn with all the signs of having already
been on the road for hours; all through the night the booming of
passing carts could be heard by any one who cared to lie awake; very
rarely did we come upon them halted long enough even to feed the
jaded animals. There were at least two men on every load, one,
whom we suspected to be the driver off duty, stretched out at full
length and apparently sleeping as soundly as if the jolting, careening
sacks of wheat were a sailor’s hammock. There was really nothing
strange in this; the Chinese are trained from birth to sleep under all
manner of catch-as-catch-can conditions. With the loess soil
constantly swirling about under the least disturbing circumstances,
and with a high wind often blowing, the Chinese on their carts, as
well as those astride or afoot for that matter, looked ludicrously like
an endless procession of clowns with flour-powdered faces, or of
mimes wearing death-masks.
Here and there the file was broken by some more leisurely
conveyance,—a cart with an ox in the shafts and perhaps a steer and
a donkey in front, sometimes with still more incongruous
combinations. The narrow cañons were often so congested with
beast-drawn traffic that the hundreds of wheelbarrows had to join
the pole-shouldering coolies and other pedestrians on the paths
along the cliffs high above. These tui-chu (push-carts), as the Chinese
call them, had every manner of aid, from a child to a donkey, which
we had seen in use in the wheelbarrow brigades east of Sian-fu, and
one ingenious fellow had rigged up a large sail over his load and was
creaking along nicely before the strong west wind. I never ceased to
wonder where the never ending stream of coolies was coming and
going from and to, and why. Their toilsome tramps to change places,
bag and baggage, seemed a mere waste of effort, like carrying sand
from one river-bed to another.
The coolies of Shensi, or at least most of those we saw in that
province, seem to long to be mistaken for scholars—an honor, of
course, which would bring joy to any Chinese heart, in contrast to the
insult it would often convey in some other lands. Some clever
salesman had profited by this strange Celestial longing by selling to
more than half the coolies we met a huge pair of rimless spectacles
made of plain plate-glass, and of course of no optical value whatever.
Had they been in the form of goggles, one might have concluded that
they were merely a protection from the dust, but there was nothing
about them that could by any stretch even of a coolie imagination be
considered anything but ornamental.
Cues have appreciably decreased in China since the fall of the alien
dynasty which required them as a badge of submission; but once a
custom is established among the conservative Chinese it is harder to
eradicate than ragweed, however uncomplimentary may have been
its origin. It may be a slight exaggeration to say that every other man
we met on our western trip wore a cue, but certainly there is still
wound about coolie heads material enough for all the hair-nets that
America can consume in another century. Old men, though only a
tiny gray braid may be left them, would, it is said, “rather lose their
heads than their tails.” In this west country boys are as likely to be
adorned with them as not; in any busy street the itinerant hair-
dresser may be seen combing out the long black tresses of his coolie
clients, calmly seated out of doors even in the depths of winter, and
often adding a switch for good measure. Among upper-class Chinese
the cue has largely disappeared, but with the masses it is as common
a feature in many provinces as the long pipes protruding from the
backs of coolie necks when not in use.
A corpse journeying to its ancestral home between two pole-joined
mules, the white rooster demanded by ancient custom sitting on top
of the ponderous coffin in a little wicker cage, was one of the
infrequent, though not rare, sights of the journey. Sometimes we met
a long file of black pigs moving slowly eastward under the impulse of
several patient men, one marching in front unarmed, the rest with
very long but rather harmless whips, and all singing to coax on their
charges. It was an addition to my slight knowledge of natural history
to learn that hogs are moved by music; but there is no telling what
Chinese music may accomplish until it has been tried. We rode, of
course, or rested our cramped legs by walking, up out of the cañons
as much as possible. Here the variance in the point at which a man or
a mule registers dizziness sometimes led to serious differences of
opinion between ourselves and our mounts. Along most of the cliffs
high above the sunken roads there are several paths, some of them
already appreciably wearing down toward the ultimate common
level, others narrow ridges of a rather harder streak of earth with
barely room on them for two feet at a time. Invariably, whenever
there was a choice in paths, the mule would choose the one closest to
the edge of the road chasm, the very edge of it, if possible, often with
a sheer drop of a hundred feet or more directly under the off stirrup
—and the loess soil everywhere seeming ready to collapse at any
moment. Sometimes a path worked its way out on the face of the cliff
before one noticed, to where it would have been as impossible to
dismount as to turn about, and the helpless rider could only
prayerfully intrust his future to the mule, wholly free apparently
from any suggestion of the trepidation which ran in hot sprays up the
human spine. Certainly a mule has no worry-bacteria in his system—
and probably has fewer troubles in a lifetime than almost any other
living creature, which should be food for reflection to worrying
humanity. Once I had the hair-lifting experience of seeing most of
the rear end of the major’s mule just in front of me go over the cliff
with a crumbling bit of path, but the animal never for a moment lost
his mulish poise, nor hesitated when the next chance offered to take
the most edgy of the paths again.

On the evening of the second day out of Sian-fu our muleteers

respectfully sent word that they would like us to start “ten li earlier”
next morning, “because the road went up-stairs.” That was one of the
contrasts between Chinese mule-drivers and those, for instance, of
South America. Here they were always ready to start at any hour we
named, and sometimes asked us to advance it. We accordingly got up
three miles earlier, and before the day was done congratulated
ourselves on having done so. All morning the road, freeing itself from
loess cañons and taking to river-valleys and ever higher plains,
ascended at so gradual a pace that we hardly realized we were rising
unless we glanced back at the lower and lower world behind. But just
beyond the village where we made our usual hour-and-a-half
noonday halt, the earth surged up like some tidal wave suddenly
commanded to stand still. The road did indeed go up-stairs; nothing
could have been a more exact description of its zigzagging course,
which at length, hours after we had left the village, brought us in
straggling formation to the summit, four thousand feet above it, then
plunged even more swiftly down into the bed of a slight stream which
trickled away through a region of huge rocks and a formation for a
time more solid than pure loess. But this was only a brief and
imperfect respite. The crumbling soil soon monopolized the
landscape again, and for many days afterward filled our eyes and
nostrils with its stifling and all-penetrating dust. Peculiar sights,
indeed, the loess often gives. Fertile enough with sufficient water,
one might easily have concluded that not a drop of rain had ever
fallen here. Mud would have meant more prosperity, but when it
does rain these already ankle-deep roads at the bottoms of the great
cañons must surely be in close proximity to the infernal regions.
Any suggestion of this was spared us, however, as we were denied
any hint of the great transformation that spring brings to the loess
country, turning it from the delicate light brown that is as unbroken
during the autumn and winter as the blue of the cloudless sky
overhead to a vernal green which those who have seen it say is
seldom surpassed in beautiful landscapes. Such loess cliffs as no
words can describe became commonplace, almost unnoticed sights
along the way, cliffs falling gradually from sky to abyss so far below
as almost to seem bottomless. All the population for long distances
burrowed in human rabbit-warrens dug in these cliffs, row above
row of caves, like cities of ten- or twelve-story cliff-dwellings. Many
of the caves proved at close sight to be ruined and abandoned;
usually these were fallen in, with a great round hole in the roof. Of
course the former inhabitants had dug a new home elsewhere—
unless they were buried in the old one—and the population was not
so dense as the myriad holes in the mountain-sides suggested. There
was a great difference, too, in the grades of dwellings even among
such unlikely homes as these. A cave could be as noisome a hut as
any hovel out on a plain; sometimes a mere hole in the cliff looked
like nothing in particular, until a closer glance showed it to be the
entrance to a long passageway leading to several courts that were
surrounded by a dozen or more arched cave-dwellings, perhaps all
well below the level of the sunken road. Sometimes the proud family
had even gone to the trouble of putting an elaborate inscription over
the doorway, and had fitted it with wooden sills. But this was
unusual, for with such slight exceptions literally everything was
made of the quickly crumbling earth,—the “devil screen” across the
way from the entrance (though this very important feature of
Chinese architecture was rare in the west), the wall filling up the
great arch of the cave, with a small door cut in it, even the k’ang, or
stone-hard family bed, inside.
Thus everything, walls, houses, cliffs, terraced hillsides, even the
dreary cave-dwellers themselves, had the selfsame monotonous
color, and in all the autumn landscape there was nothing to break it,
to give it the faintest contrast. A sad place surely was this for man to
live, like an aged world that was wearing out and would soon be fit
only to be discarded. Indeed, the process of dissolution was going on
under our very eyes. There were often places where the road had very
recently dropped away into a mammoth cañon so deep that to peer
over the brink was to catch the breath in what might easily have been
a spasm of dizziness; yet heavily laden carts still shrieked and lashed
their way along the sheer edge of it, and all the miscellaneous traffic
passing the spot where the next crumbling might carry it to perdition
gave it no more attention than Chinese give to the open, unprotected,
curbless wells that abound all over China like gopher-holes in our
western prairies.
A world wearing away, and apparently there is no cure for it. The
trees which might have held it together with their roots, to say
nothing of the rain they would bring, were completely grubbed out
centuries ago by those very ancestors whom the wretched modern
inhabitants so highly honor. Those short-sighted forebears were all
for the past, or at best for what was to them the present; and their
living descendants have no choice but to follow the same short-
sighted course, for the present is an unremitting struggle for mere
existence now, and the future surely holds out little promise. To
repair the fatal tree-wastefulness of their revered ancestors would
require something like forcing every man in China to plant a tree a
week, promptly lopping off the head of any one who cuts one down,
and keeping this up as long as their ancestors took to grub out the
forests that once graced the land; that is, for hundreds, if not
thousands, of years.

We think we know something of poverty and physical suffering in

America, but in crowded, despoiled China we realize our ignorance.
Here are perhaps the lowest forms of human beings, creatures in the
image of man who are not merely akin to beasts but a kind of living
offal. Nor are the dregs of the population to be found in this more
roomy western part of the country; there the poorest might be called
a middle class, though they are so poor that they burrow in caves and
are out long before dawn and late into the night with basket and
wicker shovel wandering the roads ready to fight for the droppings of
passing animals. Perhaps there are some of them who take life by the
forelock and force it more or less to do their bidding. But though
here and there were what we would call “tough-looking characters,”
even they seemed to be harmless, at least where foreigners were
concerned. We hear much in these days of the anarchy of China, and
in so far as a responsible, effective government goes the word is not
ill chosen. Yet there is a cohesion, a momentum in Chinese society, in
the great masses that populate the land, which makes a failure of
formal government mainly a surface manifestation, with often
scarcely a ripple disturbing the even flow of life in general, as it has
gone on for centuries and perhaps will for centuries to come. In all
west Shensi we saw hardly a soldier, and almost as little of any other
coercive force; yet though there may not have been any bandits left in
the province, as its Tuchun boldly asserted, nothing would have been
easier than for any group of these thousands upon thousands of
sturdy coolies for ever plodding to and fro, or the village crowds
which gathered in the inn-yards to watch us eat modest noonday
lunches which must have seemed to them princely, to fall upon a few
stray foreigners lost in the great sea of Chinese humanity and despoil
them of what in this land of utter poverty was their great riches. Not
only was there no suggestion of such a thought, not only did they
show us all the respect which the most haughty participant in
extraterritoriality could demand; they were frankly friendly, neither
out of fear nor hope of favor. Given the slightest provocation and
they invariably smiled; the men, that is; the cripple-footed women
never, and small wonder. Behind us lay a constant trail of childlike
comment on our appearance, and especially on the stirrups of our
army saddles. The Chinese are so minutely conservative that even to
wrap a patch of leather about something which they have always
hitherto seen without it is to arouse amazement. Often this
amazement expressed itself in a burst of laughter, but never once was
there anything about its unforced heartiness which could have been
taken for ridicule. Possibly they did find covert ways to make fun at
our expense; they nearly always called us moo-sha, for instance,
which means missionary. But there was every reason to believe that
this startling error was due to pure honest ignorance, perhaps once
in a while to a desire to be complimentary; never, I feel sure, was
there a deliberate attempt even to be unkindly.
The major likened the rank and file, the coolies at least, to our
Southern negroes, with whom his army experience had given him a
considerable acquaintance. There is a certain similarity of
temperament; one might, indeed, follow up the thought and find a
resemblance between the more morose, yet still Chinese, non-
laboring classes and the mulatto or lighter types of negro, who so
often have an air of brooding over their intermediate state of
heredity. But one could easily carry the thought too far. There is
much the same easy-going view of life—laughter easily provoked,
often in the face of things which seem rather to call for tears; but
beyond that the two races part company. The negro still loves his
African leisure; if there is any one on earth without a trace of laziness
in his make-up, surely it is the Chinese workman—though this be due
merely to centuries of bitter competition for existence. Nor do the
poorest of our cabin-dwelling blacks suffer anything like the poverty
of the toilsome masses of China; even those of Haiti do not approach
it. There are worse places in China, but even in this comparatively
thinly populated northwest thousands of people quite willing to toil
from sun to sun at anything promising them the slightest
remuneration live under conditions in which it would literally be
illegal to keep pigs in any well governed section of the Occident. You
can always get men to do anything do-able, on short notice, in China;
there is such an enormous surplus of them. If there is a little stream
across the trail, there are sure to be men waiting to set those who are
shod across it for a brass “cash” or two; if there is a load too
cumbersome or too heavy for a donkey or a pack-mule, you can
easily pick up men to carry it. Most of us have the comforting
impression that, being inured to them for countless generations, they
do not feel their hardships and sufferings as we should. No doubt
they do not, for if they did it would be beyond human power to
produce that cheerful atmosphere, as wholly devoid of surliness as of
melancholy, with which they seem to surround their bitter lives.
It was one of the surprises of our journey that feathered game was
more than abundant where every other thing, down to the last grass-
blade and the tiniest bit of offal, is laboriously gathered and fully
utilized, where hunger drives into the pot everything that can
possibly be made quasi-edible. Wild ducks and geese all but
obscured the sun along every important river-valley; partridge, quail,
and beautiful pheasants covering many a bushy slope, often even the
planted fields themselves, as thickly as sparrows a barn-yard, were to
be had almost for the shooting. Cliff-sides blue with pigeons, the air
filled with drapery-like swirls of them, ceased in time even to draw
the attention. Were the major less sensitive to the difference between
this and big game stalking, I might mention that single shot which
brought down eight of these silky-blue birds; though that, to be sure,
was before the attempt to coerce a recalcitrant mule with the butt of
a not too young and sturdy—not to say borrowed—shot-gun resulted
so disastrously. There seldom was a time during all our long journey
out through the west that a little exertion could not add wild fowl to
our canned larder; yet, as far as we were ever able to discover, the
hungry people of that region made no attempt to kill or capture them
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