RECORDS OF THE JOURNEY
wade knee-deep. The houses are mostly dilapidated. The stench from the sweepings and other offal thrown into the street is often overpowering. — The town is celebrated for the beauty of its women, especially for their small feet, but on a day like this they were not to be seen.
At the invitation of Mr Edv. Larsson, a missionary from Sweden, I was put up in July r5th. an excellent room in the Swedish mission house. The pouring rain forced me to wait Tatungfr. a day, for no arbah driver would undertake to cross the river swollen as it was with rain. In fact, there was nothing for it but to be patient.
In the afternoon Larsson and I called on the local Fu, a pleasant Chinese from Kiangsu, and on Wang Djentai, a lively old fellow of 61, who had studied in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany in the marines, naval gunners and the staff college. He had been employed a good deal by Li Hun Chang, but after the death of the latter had fallen into disgrace with the powerful Yuan Shih-k'ai, been dismissed and only recently been appointed as Djentai of a detachment of 8 tchi, altogether a little over i,000 men intended for fighting revolutionaries. He was so kind as to allow me to watch some exercises with 2 guns by a ying of artillery that was being formed of men recruited three months ago and later of an infantry company, altogether 6o men divided into 3 platoons. The gunners were smart, but the evolutions of the infantry left a good deal to be desired and the men looked weak and badly developed. There is said to be r instructor from the Pei yang army attached to each ying. — The old man criticised the military reforms in China severely. There were practically no officers with real military training, he said, and it would not be possible to secure them in less than ten years, and even then only if the present half-measures were abandoned and the matter taken seriously. — Men would be transferred from the active troops to the reserve for the first time after three years. He seemed to think that the Japanese would play an important part in reorganising the army, greatly to the detriment of the cause, for he considered the Germans incomparably better suited and further advanced. He admired the Japanese for their courage that bordered on the incredible, but had no high opinion of their officers, especially since the war, in which a large percentage of the best ones had been lost. He had attended large manoeuvres in Japan and said that he knew their army well.
I was informed that the population of Tatung fu amounted to 20-30,000 tja. The mandarin estimated it at 167,o00 men and women (this figure is obtained according to the Chinese custom of multiplying the number of tja by 5). There are supposed to be 12o tja (according to the Dungan mullah at Kweihwa ting 300 tja) of Dungans. The greater part of the town is densely populated. — Trade is small, imports consisting chiefly of so-called Peiping goods from the east and flocks of sheep from, or rather, over Kweihwa ting. The latter are slaughtered and the skins made of their hides are exported to the east. — The women, who are famed for their beauty, form an important and valuable article of export. Many mandarins and wealthy Chinese come to Tatung fu merely for the purpose of buying a wife. The local women are very conscious of their beauty and love more than usual to accentuate their charms by means of paint, gaudy dress and ornaments, such as
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IIIFカラー高解像度
