China

China by Harry Alverson Franck

China* by Harry Alverson Franck is a wide-ranging travelogue in which the author conducts an exhaustive firsthand survey of China and its borderlands during the early Republican period of the 1920s, when the country was fractured among competing warlords following the 1911 revolution that toppled the Manchu dynasty. Franck frames China as the oldest living nation on earth, a civilization so ancient and continuous that traveling through it resembles walking through a living museum. He begins his journey through Japanese-controlled Korea and Manchuria, observing the layered colonial presence of Japanese railways and Russian infrastructure overlaid on Chinese population and culture. Crossing into China proper at the Great Wall, he settles his family in Peking for nine months, using the capital as his base. He describes the city in meticulous detail: its vast Tartar Wall, its forty thousand rickshaws, its dust storms, its walled compounds and narrow hutung alleys, the cacophonous street life of peddlers and barbers and cricket-sellers, its imperial tombs and forbidden palaces, its theaters where property men in black wander invisibly among actors. From Peking he ventures into Mongolia, crossing the Gobi Desert by automobile to Urga, the holy Mongol capital ruled by a "living Buddha" who collected Ford automobiles, where Franck and a companion are briefly arrested on suspicion of murder before being released. He travels south into Shantung, birthplace of Confucius, riding wheelbarrows over flooded flagstone paths, climbing the sacred mountain Tai-shan through ten miles of stone stairway lined with pilgrims and beggars, and visiting the grave of Confucius — a simple earth mound, surprisingly austere for China's greatest philosopher. A two-month journey into the far northwest takes Franck through Shansi, governed by a rare "model governor" who spent tax revenues on roads and literacy rather than personal enrichment, and into Kansu, a treeless, drought-ridden province where half the population is Muslim, cave-dwelling is common, the roads are ancient loess canyons worn two hundred feet deep by centuries of foot traffic, and Franck travels by mule litter with a soldier escort whose rifles sometimes need string to hold them together. He documents the devastation wrought by a recent earthquake that slid entire mountain faces across the road to Lanchow and killed thousands living in loess caves. Returning south, Franck traces the Yangtze River from Shanghai through Nanking, Hankow, and beyond, observing the industrial emergence of cotton mills alongside the timeless traffic of bamboo-sailed junks. He makes a grueling four-day trek through flooded rice paddies to Kingtehchen, the porcelain capital where everything from kiln-firing to street transport of unfired "biscuit" dishes runs on ancient hand labor. He descends the Min River through bandit country in Fukien Province, navigating rapids with expert boatmen while bandits level rifles from the shore. He visits Foochow, Canton, Hong Kong, and Macao, documenting the foreign concessions — islands of European law and architecture carved out of Chinese cities — and their complex relationship with Chinese sovereignty. The final overland arc takes Franck southwest through Yunnan and Kweichow, accompanied by a loyal servant named Yang Chi-ting and rotating soldier escorts of diminishing martial credibility. He encounters the Flowery Miao, aboriginal tribal people in gaudy homespun garments who had resisted full absorption into Chinese civilization, and learns of the independent Lolos, a mountain tribe who had never been conquered and who kept Chinese slaves. He descends from the highlands into Szechuan, China's most populous province, riding a horse that survives multiple falls from cliffs with apparent indifference, sleeping in temples and churches, and observing the ancient salt wells of Tzeliuching where bamboo cables and water-buffalo power extracted brine from depths of hundreds of feet. Throughout, Franck attends to the systemic conditions shaping Chinese life: the catastrophic deforestation of northern China that produced treeless landscapes, fuel poverty, soil erosion, and cave-dwelling; the institution of foot-binding, which he finds still widespread despite official prohibition; the opium trade, which permeated Yunnan and the West River commerce despite legal bans; the corruption of warlord taxation; and the dysfunction of a nominal republic whose generals obeyed Peking only when convenient. He also records the human texture of Chinese life with consistent warmth — the cheerfulness of coolies under brutal loads, the ingenuity of peddlers and craftsmen, the hospitality of strangers, the humor of crowds. He is struck throughout by the Chinese capacity to remain equable under conditions of poverty, disorder, and physical hardship that he judges would break Western morale entirely. The book constitutes both a political diagnosis of a civilization in dangerous transition and an intimate portrait of its people at every level of society, from Manchu caretakers of imperial tombs to beggar fishermen on tub-boats on the Yangtze.

By Harry Alverson Franck · First published 1927 · Genre: Travel Literature, Ethnography, Geography · 20 chapters · 52,910 words

First lines

China is the oldest living member of the family of nations. It is the country in which conditions to-day are most nearly like what they were thousands of years ago. The long journey we are about to make through all parts of it will be like going to a great museum. But this museum, instead of containing the relics of people long dead, will look, for the most part, as if it were being lived in by an ancient race. Here and there, however, we shall see things that make us think of our Western civilization.

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Tags

travel · exploration · early twentieth century · cultural observation · ethnography · Asia · social conditions · primary source · memoir · geography · ethnic minorities · indigenous cultures

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China is listed on Textopian as a historical account by Harry Alverson Franck, dated 1927 CE.

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