The International Famine Relief Committee meeting in Peking heard reports of bungled food shipments, of incompetence and graft among officials and of profiteering in grain. The Committees took the “hopeful view,” however, that official China had at last awakened and “will leave the work for foreign committees and the American Red Cross, trusting no more to county and provincial officials.” This was the pattern of Western activism and Chinese acceptance. Appealing to the American public for the Chinese Famine Relief Fund, President Wilson in a classic statement of the American point of view said, “To an unusual degree the Chinese people look to us for counsel and for effective leadership.” The Chinese themselves never confused material aid which was what they looked to America for with either counsel or leadership. Spurred by the missionaries, the campaign in the United States brought such an outpouring of funds that a surplus resulted and this made possible the road-building program.
Stilwell himself believed that the missionaries deliberately exaggerated reports of the famine, justifying themselves on the ground that by bringing in money and food in a time of distress they were furthering the cause of Christianity. Having to work “against the passive resistance of officials,” he wrote, they had a chance “to do something for the people that the government could not or would not do.”
Out in the field where the provincial interest was paramount, he found the local officials of Shansi more ready to help than hinder the work of the road-building. This was owing to the influence of the Tuchun of the province, Yen Hsi-shan, a progressive and practical materialist who enjoyed the title of “Model Governor.” He had the wit to see that he could draw more strength and wealth from the province by improving its conditions than by squeezing it dry. When he explained the benefits of the proposed road to landowners whose property stood in the way, they made no resistance and allowed the road-builders to cut through old grave mounds and even, in the case of recent deaths, willingly moved the graves.
The projected road link was to be 82 miles long, starting at Fenchow and finishing at Jung-tu on the Yellow River. Stilwell’s instructions were to make it 22 feet wide with a gravel surface, keep the grade under 6 percent and finish the job by August 1. He had twelve foreign assistants including a Standard Oil civil engineer, a Swedish mining engineer, two Norwegian missionaries and an Anglo-Indian reserve officer. The country was rocky and mountainous with rich agricultural valleys where crop failures were unknown. Everywhere the Chinese farmer could be seen “with his patient cow and B.C. plow,” as Stilwell wrote, turning over furrows on hillsides so steep that “the daily struggle even to reach his fields would appall a white man.”
The trace ran along a river valley, over a pass, down into another valley and “after that to be determined.” Riding or walking miles every day, sleeping in a different place every night—often outdoors to avoid bedbugs and lice—Stilwell directed the work of 6,000 men, showing the Chinese surveyors what to do, helping the section engineers, locating the work gangs, deciding on grades, crossings, cuts and fills, and trying to master the local dialect. Fortunately many spoke Mandarin.
Homes in the area were mostly caverns in the hills lined with stone arches and closed by stone walls in front. Stonemasons were plentiful. Stilwell dealt with small contractors for rock-breaking, lime, marking stakes, mules, water buckets and road labor, avoiding the sleek, silk-gowned businessmen from the towns who offered to take on the whole contract. He preferred to deal with Li Mou-lin, in patched breeches and dirty shirt, than with the fat gentry “so refined and elegant that they cannot walk up six steps without puffing.”
Most of the pick-and-shovel men were small farmers earning extra money. They were organized into work groups of about 30 men with an overseer and one or two cooks. The tuan chang or overseer carried a cane, wore a straw hat and clean clothes and usually snoozed in the shade with sentries posted to whistle at Stilwell’s approach. When the work was poor the battle of face began. Stilwell would reproach the overseer, who in turn would roar at the work gang, who in their turn “rather enjoy the play: they know it is all for effect and if favored with a wink from the foreigner from behind the overseer’s back will break into broad grins.” When “the Chief Engineer meets man after man who can see through a joke, even when it is on himself and laugh as heartily as the bystanders, his heart warms to the whole race.”
In Yungningchow Stilwell was welcomed by the local colonel and magistrate and served an honorific banquet of 57 known and unknown dishes alternating with thimble-glasses of raw alcohol. He was invited to review the cadets of a local military school who paraded to the blare of bugles “blown up and down the scale regardless of consequences.” In the morning he was conducted ceremoniously to the city gate while the colonel in spic-and-span uniform and the burly magistrate in brocade gown “bow low as the foreign devil departs in old clothes on a scrawny horse wanting his morning coffee but surfeited with honor.”
In Shansi Stilwell could see, unfiltered through the pleasant life of Peking, the raw wants of China: all that it lacked, all that it needed and how one local strong man was attacking the problem. Yen Hsi-shan had carved his way to power by an exemplary and successful opportunism. Appointed Military Governor of Shansi by Yuan Shih-kai in 1912, he chose the right moment to make arrangements with the Anfu clique, and as a result in 1917 took on the added post of Civil Governor. As a rule the civil and military governors of a province acted as a check upon each other but, as Stilwell later wrote in a profile of Yen Hsi-shan for the Infantry Journal, “When one man occupied both offices, he had control of all the machinery of government and could do exactly as he pleased.” For the next ten years Yen Hsi-shan kept himself and his province out of the struggle for national power and devoted his efforts to producing a healthy revenue from his own domain.
He constructed roads and bridges, laid miles of irrigation ditches, encouraged reforestation and cotton and silk culture, borrowed methods tested in California for arid land reclamation, imported merino sheep and grains and grasses from various countries, promoted literacy and public health, established primary schools and trade schools, campaigned against queues, foot-binding and opium, and published a manual of citizenship which all of Shansi’s ten million population were supposed to read or learn. Material welfare was a concept of the new China. Traditional Chinese reform concerned itself with conduct and morals. Not neglecting this aspect, Yen organized a “Heart-Cleansing Institute” with himself as president. His program for the people’s welfare did not go so far as to include reduction of land rents and taxes.
Amid the general anxiety to discover a possible leader for China, Yen attracted much attention. “Has China Found a Moses?” queried an American journal. “Will he lead his people out of the wilderness?” Many foreign visitors came to see and were entertained by the “Model Tuchun,” a big man of obvious culture with hard eyes in a puffy face. Flanked by his Oxford-educated Chinese secretary, he presided at a dinner table set in foreign style with damask, silver, garnet-colored crystal wine glasses and napkins intricately folded in the shape of roses, birds and pagodas. After dinner, guests were escorted through moonlit gardens by servingmen carrying lanterns of painted gauze suspended from tall poles. Governor Yen told them he hoped to make Shansi a leavening agent for his country but added realistically, “China is a very large loaf.”
Out in the dust and heat of the road, traveling with chopsticks, sweater, canned food and a change of socks in his musette bag, Stilwell enjoyed none of these amenities. However, in the spring-fed valley of Yu Tao Ho, a summer resort favored by missionary families, he found a pleasant place to bring his family for the summer where a temple or an old mill could be rented for the season for about $40 in American money.
He returned to Peking in June to bring the family back with him. After reaching central Shansi by train, the trek continued in a stripped-down old Ford with wife, children, amah and baby in a basket installed on wooden planks for seats, bracing themselves while Stilwell at the wheel maneuvere
d over ruts and holes. Servants and household luggage followed in carts. Farmers came running over fields ripe with grain, trampling the wheat in their excitement to see the “firewagon.” At stops along the way, as Mrs. Stilwell wrote, “we were surrounded by gaping awestruck faces; whenever I nursed the baby, which was often to keep her from screaming, the populace surrounded us to see if the foreigner did it the same way.” When the truck got stuck, the country people pushed it up steep grades or hauled it out of ditches, laughing at its misadventures. “Whenever they helped, Joe would pass out coppers and they never failed to try to give them back.” Smiling faces, dirt and disease were the rule; one cheerful old lady had a goiter under her chin the size of a bag of oranges.
The Stilwells settled in a mill with large, airy, whitewashed rooms, rough beams and morning glories climbing the wall. Outside were trees and songbirds, a spring of clear drinking water, grass spotted with buttercups, and flocks of sheep and goats. At the end of July Stilwell turned over what remained of the road job to one of his assistants and retired to the mill for the rest of the summer. In the time between picnics and tennis with other foreign families, he pursued his habit of writing short stories and sketches of foreign life as he had seen it. He sold an article on the road-building to the magazine Asia for $100. But a second one on “Glimpses of Chinese Life” was rejected, which may have discouraged him from further attempts at publication. Nevertheless, he continued to write, and in these sketches of Chinese life the circumstances of his own travel come through vividly: at a railroad station arriving and departing passengers meet in two streams, “screaming and struggling,” yelling for coolies, throwing boxes, baskets and bundles out the window while others throw theirs onto the train and force their way aboard. Somehow the chaos settles, the passengers “stow themselves and their baggage away and begin politely to ask one another their names, home provinces and businesses.”
At an inn “the courtyard is full of mules, packs and pack-saddles, chickens and pigs….The patrons at various plank tables in a single big room crouch over their bowls of noodles, drawing the food into their mouths with the aid of chopsticks and suction….The cook dishes out noodle stew from a tremendous iron pot a yard wide, serves it in a bowl which has just been used by a previous customer and which he cleans by wiping with a dark object like a piece of garage waste. He wipes a pair of chopsticks on his trousers, puts them in the bowl, hands it to a serving boy who presents it with a flourish to the customer.” The foreigner prefers to clean his own bowl with boiling water “which he pretends to empty on the cook’s head. With this wonderful joke he is accepted by all present as a great fellow with a keen sense of humor and thereafter can do as he likes, even to scraping the chopsticks with a penknife before using them….Avoiding the k’ang with its inevitable bedbugs, he sets up his cot in the courtyard and watched by an interested crowd, dozes off lulled by the squeal of pigs, haw-haw of mules, yelling of coolies and occasional tinkle of camel bells as the night traffic passes by.”
He wrote about the Chinese people, not sociologically or analytically but directly out of his own encounters, with such simplicity and pure ear for dialogue that they come alive as humanly and visibly as Chekhov’s peasants.*2 There is the mayor of Ch’i K’ou who wants the new road to come through his town instead of the neighboring town, because if it went there, Ch’i K’ou’s fame as a Yellow River port would be overshadowed. There is the old grandmother who runs the inn at Kao Chan and draws the foreigner into a room filled with flies and curious onlookers with confidence that he will know what to do for a sick child. There are the people of the countryside: the quiet polite farmers of Shansi who graciously reply to his request for directions and invite him to stop and drink hot water before he travels on. There are the road children with baskets who scramble out after the pack trains have passed “and hunt down with unerring eyes anything that the animals may have dropped. Each road-apple is picked by hand and gently dusted off before being put in its place in the basket. When the road is thoroughly looked over, the treasure trove is carried to the old women, who carefully spread it out to dry.”
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Social life in Peking was as agreeable as Stilwell’s temperament would allow. The Military Attaché and Assistant Attaché were friends from West Point until the latter was succeeded by Major John Magruder whose career in Chinese affairs was often to cross Stilwell’s. New language officers and their wives and others in the American community, including the daughters of the American Minister, Jacob Gould Schurman, and their friends and suitors, provided a circle for exchanging dinners and visits. But Win did not play bridge nor her husband polo and they were regarded by the regular Legation set as somehow “different.” Stilwell enjoyed dancing with his wife at either of the two hotels and he even contrived to get drunk one night on crème de menthe at the Hotel Wagons-Lits. An evening of Mah-Jongg proved “not so deadly as anticipated” and a dinner for twenty-five at the Schurmans’ was actually “a very pleasant affair.” As always, he was quickly bored by dull or pretentious people. “He’s a pompous ass and she’s a complacent numbskull,” he wrote of one couple.
He preferred the company of his family. His occupation and pleasure as a father had increased as his children grew older. He taught the two eldest, Joe and Nance, at home, worried about their illnesses, took them for walks on the city walls and on trips to the Ming tombs, composed an illustrated bestiary in rhyme and directed the children in homemade plays.
In November Stilwell took a group of journalists and members of the Relief Committee in the first party of motor cars over the road. Eleven years later his friend John Goette, correspondent of the International News Service who had been in the group, sent him a clipping from the North China Daily News on the habitual Chinese failure to keep roads in repair. It reported that Stilwell’s road from Fenchow to the Yellow River, having never received the slightest attention, “has practically ceased to exist.”
In 1922 the road’s Chief Engineer was an object of interest to the warlord of the neighboring province, Feng Yu-hsiang, the Christian General of Shensi. This province, the earliest center of Chinese civilization, was a region of hills and caves and terraced agriculture where in the next decade the Long March was to bring the Communists to settle around Yenan. With cotton, wool, wheat and mountains rich in minerals, Shensi should have been prosperous but was not, owing to opium-smoking and banditry, but fundamentally to lack of good communications. There were no railroads in the province and only one “so-called road” about 90 miles long from T’ung Kuan at the bend of the Yellow River to Sian, the provincial capital. This was hardly more than a track shoveled out without any surveying. Negotiations ensued between Feng and the Famine Relief Committee which undertook to build a proper road from T’ung Kuan to Sian with Stilwell again as Chief Engineer.
He traveled as far as he could by train which came to an end in Honan about 100 miles from the border of Shensi. From here he continued in a convoy of 50 mule carts plus assorted camels, pack animals, wheelbarrows, pedestrians and an escort of twenty soldiers to conduct them through bandit country. “Off we go in a cloud of dust, a chorus of yells and much cracking of whips….We look like the flight of the Kalmucks or a squad of 49ers on the way to California.” Moving at a slow pace over a horrible road, the convoy constantly tangled with wheelbarrow traffic coming in the opposite direction. The barrows carried loads of cotton with babies tied on the side, mothers sitting opposite, fathers pushing, and one or two little boys out in front pulling. Congestion was thickened by beggars lying along the road and farmers’ boys with four-pronged forks and baskets picking up the droppings of draft animals and humans. Progress was a “constant succession of struggles between straining, sweating chinks and their unwieldy machines and unwilling beasts.” When amid shrieks and vituperation two wheelbarrows conflicted, the remaining traffic “just stops and waits for them to get through. How anyone gets anywhere is a wonder until you see them do it. It is simply because everyone is willing to wait a litt
le or give way a little to help the other fellow along.”
It took four days of such travel to reach the border of Shensi and four more days to reach the capital. To escape the awful jolting of the cart Stilwell walked eight, ten or twelve miles a day, trudging through ruts and mudholes and swallowing dust. Nights were spent in a “dirty flea-bitten town” or a “filthy inn” or in one case in an opium den where hard-worked coolies “kept trooping in for ten, fifteen, or twenty coppers’ worth, put their money and their little pots down and got their poison.” Ten coppers, Stilwell noted, was 30 percent of their daily wages, representing a “terrible drain on their resources to say nothing of their health.” The poor of China took to the drug because it dulled the pain of hunger. From surcease it grew to addiction and where it obtained a wide hold, drained energy and spread apathy. “Why doesn’t Feng stop it?” Stilwell wrote angrily. “Seize the opium and burn it and lead the sellers out and shoot them.” He supplied his own answer: Feng would have a revolution on his hands if he tried, and besides he obtained a large revenue from the opium tax, of which he sent a percentage to Wu Pei-fu and used the rest to pay his men.