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| 0075 |
Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2 |
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employment about the town and hamlets for work in the
dreaded 'Great Gobi.' In any case I should never get
even these hapless loafers living from hand to mouth to
accompany me into the wintry desert unless I took them
there in carts. For me who knew what marching in
waterless desert meant, the idea of my caravan moving
with coolies on carts, like a snail with its shell, was comical
and depressing beyond words.
But it was as well to have one's eyes fully opened to
the radical difference in the relations between administra-
tion and people since we had exchanged Turkestan for
these Marches of China proper. There, as the repre-
sentative of a conquering power and set to rule over a race
of inferior civilization, no Chinese Amban would have
admitted any limits to his ability to order out labour, as
long as the men were likely to receive a reasonable
recompense. The task of collecting them would fall on
the petty bureaucracy of Begs and village head-men, who
had the will and traditional means of making their orders
obeyed. Here among true celestial subjects all this was
changed. As I realized more and more the farther we
moved into Kan-su, the fundamental principle of administra-
tion appeared to be a sort of mutual toleration between
nominal rulers and ruled, supported chiefly by that all-
pervading factor, vis inertiae.
With this indolent but highly democratic public, practical
experience must have taught the officials to restrict inter-
ference to the minimum compatible with the collection of
such taxes as would suffice to keep the provincial machinery
going and — to leave modest nest-eggs for the office
incumbents on retirement. The people, while tolerating
authority for the sake of tradition and general security,
seemed to take good care to enforce such prudent reserve
on the part of their administrators. What petty local
officials we ever managed to get hold of invariably bore
themselves more like representatives of defence unions of
guilds and land-owning communities than as agents of the
civil authority. That there was now in these westernmost
parts of Kan-su practically no military force to back up
the civil, became abundantly evident in the course of my
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