A JOURNEY TO CHINA
OR
THINGS WHICH ARE SEEN
by
ARNOLD
J.
TOYNBEE
Seek knowledge, were it even in China.
Hadith
I girdled Asia, bore her blows,
Her summer suns, her win ter snows,
Trod plain and hill from Rum to Ts'in;
Yet all I learnt I found within.
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LONDON
CONSTABLE & CO LTD
CON'l'ENTS
CIIAP1&R
"AGE
I. THE TALE OF THE ROAD
5
9
13
17
21
II. A SECOND IMPRESSION OF AUSTRIA
Ill. FORD V. JUPITER
IV. OVER THE BRINK
V. TRANSYLVANIA
VI. ISTER ET HAEMUS
VII. WORLD'S END
33
39
46
51
60
VIII. GETTING INTO TURKEY
IX. ANGORA,
x.
19 29
-
A FOURTH IMPRESSION OF TURKEY
XI. ANCIENT AND MODERN IN TURKEY
XII. ON THE FRINGES OF PALESTINE
77
81
XIII. THE BEST WAY TO JAPAN
XIV. ' BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON. , •
xv.
KERBELA
XVI. DATES
XVIlI. ISLAM FACING THE WEST
XIX. BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
THE BLAMELESS ETHIOPIANS -
XXI. ANCIENT AND MODERN IN INDIA
XXII. THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS?
XXIlI. THE ISLES OF THE SEA
XXIV. RUNNING INTO CHINA -
xxv.
94
100
105
110
116
129
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XVII. 'IRAQ
xx.
,
SHANGHAI IX
-
134
140
145
15 0
154
160
CONTENTS
x
PACE
CHA PTER
165
XXVI. LAPUTANS OR HOUYHNHNMS?
170
XXVII. TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK
176
XXVIII. TOP-HATS AND CHRYSANTHEMUMS
182
XXIX. THE CONTINENT
xxx.
194
ON THE FRINGES OF RUSSIA
200
XXXI. LIFE AND LIFE-IN-DEATH -
207
XXXII. THE W ALL
XXXIII. CAPUT MUNDI -
211
XXXIV. YIN AND YANG
216
XXX~
220
THE HAUNTED TEMPLE
227
XXXVI. 'SINCE BRASS NOR STONE ••• ' XXXVII. WEI-HAl-WEI
232
-
239
XXXVIII. THE SHANGHAIED SUIT-CASE
XXXIX. NANKING
246
XL. ENVOI
253
254
XLI. TS'IN AND TA-TS'IN XLII. ANCIENT AND MODERN IN CHINA AND JAPAN
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XLIII. THE HYPERBOREANS
XLIV. 'BARABA OR HUNGER STEPPE'
XLV. MOSCOW:
ARRIVAL -
XLVI. MOSCOW:
DEPARTURE
XLVII. 'MULTAS
PER
GENTES
AEQUORA VECTUS • . . '
DIARY
MAP
ET
-
-
MULTA
276
292
299
319
PER
332
343
See end of book
I
THE TALE OF THE ROAD
the motorist en route from London to Constantinople may reckon that he has put about one-third of his road
behind him. He must not boast of that, for no doubt this is
the tamest third-a third soon to be forgotten, or only to be
remembered like some dream of a golden age, as he trundles
through the middle third and labours through the last. StilI,
even this tame and gentle stage of the journey leaves some sharp
impressions on his mind the day after it is done; and it seems
only provident to take a pen and write them down quickly before
they are blotted out by more sensational experiences in the terra
incognita that lies beyond Vienna and Budapest.
When all our plans were made and all the prophets of evil
had said their say, we sought consolation by looking up statistics
of the number of inhabitants per car-or cars per inhabitantin the different countries of the world. There was California,
for instance, with cars enough to mount the whole population
on wheels at one and the same moment if only there had been
enough road-space for all the wheels to move along at the same
time. Well, any way we were not going to California; and if
Europe cannot boast of quite so many concrete roads, at least
(we consoled ourselves) we should have room to drive on what
roads there were; and the further east we went, the more we
should have those roads to ourselves. Look at the statistics.
France is the only Continental country that can at all compare
with England. The rest are not in the running. Once across
the Rhine we can pick our way between the ruts and potholes
without having to worry about passing or being passed by other
cars.
So we flattered ourselves, as we bumped over the pave in
French Flanders between clouds of push-bikes and over an
AT MUNICH,
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infinite succession of level-crossings; and when we had left that
country behind us at St. Quentin, it seemed, too good to be true.
From St. Quentin to Rheims, from Rheims to Metz, from
Metz to the Vosges, it was the open road indeed; long straight
avenues stretching away over hill and valley as far as the eye
could see; and, as far as the eye could see, not another car in
view. We burst three tyres by continuous speeding before we
learnt the unwisdom of going full tilt just because there was no
obstacle in the way.
These French roads were Roman in spirit, whether or not
they really followed the track of roads which Roman engineers
had first laid out. They gave one the feeling of some masterful
Napoleonic mind setting its impress on the country according to
its sovereign pleasure. That is how empire-builders drive their
roads through 'new countries' where there is nothing to say
them nay; and indeed these French roads looked as though they
were waiting for future generations to rise out of the earth and
make traffic on them. Yet the curious thing was that all the
places by the roadside were redolent of the past. As we drove
through Arras in the dusk, the Corinthian columns in the nave
of the baroque cathedral stood out like splintered bones through
the gaps in the cathedral wall. Along the straight road east of
Rheims, the dismal plain, seen through the pelting rain of
thunderstorms, was still all charged with the atmosphere of the
War, as though the I I th of November, 1918, had been yesterday. Verdun stood erect like an old warrior covered with
honours and scars. It seemed as though the city only existed
in order to be attacked and defended, and as though the surrounding hills had known no human action other than war. Metz rose
up next like a trophy of victory; and all the road was strung
with the names of sieges and battles, like some tattered regimental flag hanging in a church aisle: Valmy, Mars-la-Tour,
Gravelotte, Phalsbourg, Saverne. France had been invaded
and mutilated; France had been invaded and victorious; the lost
provinces had been recovered; and that was the end of the story.
The roads were built for the future, but the country was living
in the past....
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When the spire of Strasbourg cathedral came in sight over the
last spur of the Vosges, we parked our car by the roadside and
started to picnic on the bank before dropping down into the city
for the night. Well, if the French roads are as clear as that,
how shall we find the German roads to-morrow? The words
were in our mouths when hoosh, clatter, a great car came
swinging round the corner at a speed which would have raised
the hair on the head of any conscientious English driver; and
then another and another; and then-O Lord, was this to be
the end of our journey to Constantinople? For here was a
great lorry coming up the hill and a great car coming down, and
neither would give way to the other, and they were going to pass
just where our car was standing. Would they crash into it?
They missed it by a hair's breadth.
So this is Alsace, we said to ourselves. Well, one knows that
the Alsatians have plenty oflife in them. After all, the French
are finding them as hard to handle now as the Germans found
them before. The local character evidently comes out in their
driving. But to-morrow we shall be in Germany, and there the
wicked will cease from troubling....
Two days later we were picnicking by the roadside again,
this time between VIm and Augsburg; and the road was as
populous as the Kingston by-pass. Not that the statistics of
cars per head in Germany are wrong. There may not be
many cars in Germany compared with France, but those that
there are seem to be on the road all the time. And people who
cannot afford to take the road)n cars take it on motor-bicycles,
or else on push-bikes (with a child or two on the handle-bars),
or else on foot with rucksacks-men and women, young and
old.
Here is a nation abounding with life and energy. The roads
are more old-fashioned in Southern Germany than in France.
They wind as perversely as English roads, and are much
narrower; and they are strung with towns and villages so
ludicrously picturesque that they might have been built by
Holywood architects after an exhaustive study of Durer and
Cranach. Was not that Rottenburg that we crawled through
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just now? And was not that Tlibingen? The places reek
of the past, but the people belong to the future.
These ' old-world' Swab ian towns and villages do their best
to make driving through Germany impossible. In each of
them the road makes at least four turns at right angles round
blind corners, often at a gradient of about one in four. And
surely Lord Cecil must have been touring in these parts when he
made his proposal to check the speed of English motorists by
constructing periodical ridges and furrows across our English
roads. For that is precisely what they do in Bavaria. Through
the whole length of every village they deliberately leave the road
unmended, so that even Jehu himself must needs slow down a
little as he passes through. But it is all to no purpose. The
German motorist speeds along as though his car were completely
proof against jolts and jars. His cure-all is to sound his hornand such horns! Our poor English horn is silenced by their
bellowing. The little boys laugh at it as it bleats through their
streets. The first thing that we have done in Munich is to buy
a great big' Bosch-Horn,' in the hope that, when we take the
road again to-morrow, we may begin to hold our own....
This is the tale that the road has told us about Germany and
France. What, we wonder, is it going to tell us about the
countries that lie between Munich and Constantinople?
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A SECOND IMPRESSION OF AUSTRIA
crossed the bridge over the stream from the German
Customs post at Freilassing to the Austrian Customs post at
Rott, I took down from the net, under the roof of the car, my
old pre-war Baedeker's handbook of Austria-Hungary. The
green book-marker was still at Ragusa, the red marker at
Trieste; and, as the pages opened, my first impression of Austria
flooded back into my mind ....
The Austrian Lloyd mail-boat swung round to the right, as
if it were going to butt straight into the iron-bound Dalmatian
coast, when suddenly the amazing fjord of the Bocche di Cattaro
opened out and took us in; and as we wound up one reach after
another towards the head of the gulf, a profound change se,:!med
to come over the face of the land. For ten months I had been
abroad in the Balkans, and now all at once I fclt myself at home.
What was it that gave me that feeling? Certainly not the landscape, which was a grimmer version of the limestone crags of
Greece. The things that were homelike here were the works
of Man-something about the roofs on the houses and the metal
on the roads and the fences between the fields; something quite
indefinable, yet something which made me feel that I had passed
a greater frontier than I did when, a few days later, I crossed
from Flushing to Folkestone. And indeed it was a greater
frontier. It was the frontier, not of one country, but of a whole
world; it was the frontier of Western civilization.
All the same, this home-coming was not altogether reassuring,
for it was the West in armour that I encountered here. For
this was August, 1912, and there was war in the air. (A few
weeks earlier, in Greece, I had been indignant at being arrested
as a spy for walking over a railway viaduct, and I had never
dreamed that we were on the eve of the first Balkan War-the
AS WE
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prelude to the great cataclysm.) I felt the war in the air at that
little wine-shop at Cat taro, squeezed in between the head of the
Bocche and the foot of Mount Lovcen, whose summit stood in
Montenegro. Why was that dark-eyed, rather truculentlooking Austrian officer at the next table gazing like that at the
road which zigzagged-out of the West into the Balkans-up
the mountain side? And I felt it again, next day, at Ragusa,
when, in the cool of the evening after a burning, cloudless day,
every street in the cramped little mediceval town was thronged
with Imperial-Royal soldiers taking the air in those beautiful,
fantastic uniforms, with the cut of 1848 and the colours of the
Italian Quattrocento: impossibly high shakos of shining black,
and impossibly ample cloaks of ethereal blue. And then I felt
it once more as I sat, high up over Trieste, at the gate of the
Castello. Who were those soldiers in fezes looking out over the
walls? The little boy was as mystified as I was, and the old
man was beginning to tell him all about it in Italian. Why, that
is the Bosnian battalion that came into garrison here the other
day; and the old man knows all about the Bosniachi; for he had
been doing his military service in 1878 when the ImperialRoyal Government occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina. Such a
country! Such fighting-men! Ping-ping from the right; poppop from the left; and mountains everywhere! It was no joke,
that Bosnian campaign! And now here they are, those Bosnians,
garrisoning Trieste. The Imperial-Royal Government is a
mighty instrument of civilization....
And here and now, on the 30th of July, 1929, at Salzburg, I
cross my track of seventeen years ago. As we drive under the
railway bridge, I remember how I rode over it, early in the
morning, in the train that had brought me from Trieste. I
remember my pleasure, as I woke, when my eyes fell on the
rushing river Salzach; I remember the taste of the coffee
crowned with foaming cream-so welcome after the Turkish
coffee that I had been drinking on my travels ....
The cream brings up another thought. Of course, that was
before the War, when Austria was still a land of plenty. Since
then, I know, she has been a land of famine and despair. I have
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7
talked of that with Austrians whom I have met in England; it
is burnt into my mind; but I have not seen it with my eyes, for,
since I left Austria at Salzburg on that August day in 1912, I
have never set foot on Austrian soil again till now. And now I
have re-entered Austria by the same gate by which I left it then;
and here I am, with Salzburg behind me, driving towards
Vienna. What Austria am I going to see this time? The
Austria of 1912? Or the Austria of 1920? Or some
unknown Austria that is different from either? I will take
an omen from the first Austrian whom I encounter.
Here he is, and quantum mutatus ah illo whom r encountered
at Cattaro and Ragusa and Trieste on that other journey. It is a
boy who hails us from the roadside and asks us for a lift-faintly
and timidly, as though he hardly expected that any motorist
would really give him one. He has been at work in Geneva,
found himself with the work at an end and no money in his
pocket, and has been six weeks tramping homeward towards
Vienna. Like us, he crossed the frontier to-day; but, on foot,
it would be a week before he saw the spire of the Stefanskirche,
which we hope to see to-morrow. Are we going to Vienna?
Yes, and on to Budapest. Then perhaps we are Hungarians?
And the words change on his lips from German to Magyar, for
he has worked in Hungary as well as in Switzerland; yes, and in
Rumania, too. If there was anything in my omen, this boy
might well be the new Austria incarnate: a fair-haired, slender
fellow, in open shirt and shorts and socks rolled down to the
ankle and with a pilgrim's staff in his hand and no other possessions in the world, sojourning in far countries, his skin burnt
brown by the sun. H e looks sixteen; we learn that he is
twenty; but then he was a war-child-five years old when the
War began, just fifteen years ago, and nine when it ended. In
Vienna, the starvation must have hit his generation cruelly hard;
yet he loves Vienna and feels himself a citizen of no mean citya Wiener, not a peasant or provincial. As he talks to us of the
Stefanskirche and the Ring, his spirits revive; and when, next
day, he rides into the city in the car he becomes like a bird
released from the cage or like some wild animal freed from a
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