The Accidental Ethnographer (4c)—A Yankee on the Yangtze III

One year ago on Round and Square (15 June 2011)—Seinfeld Ethnography: Marriage. Jerry—Marriage.
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "The Accidental Ethnographer." (Coming Soon)
Click below for other posts in from A Yankee on the Yangtze:

Yankee 1          Yankee 2          Yankee 3          Yankee 4          Yankee 5

[a] Etched RF

I gave a lecture at the Doylestown Historical Society on June 1st, as part of Doylestown, Pennsylvania's big bicentennial celebration. The subject was the American explorer and evangelist William Edgar Geil (1865-1925). This is part of a larger project that I am working on this summer in Doylestown with the help of Beloit College anthropology major Megan Nyquist '14. As I did a few weeks ago in preparation for another lecture (on another subject), I am posting some of Geil's own writings. This was enormously helpful to me the last time I tried it, and I think it is worth another try. I will, over the course of my summer research, post my lecture and some of the early results of the research Megan and I are doing. In the meantime, though, I want to start the "Accidental Ethnographer" series with William Geil's own words. I will post several readings from each of Geil's dozen books over the course of the summer months.

William Edgar Geil was a world famous figure in his day, and the reasons he has been lost to history (from his death until now) are as interesting as the underpinnings of his fame. Here is a very brief overview. In a day before anthropology or Chinese (or African or Micronesian) studies had a toehold in world universities, William Edgar Geil traveled the world, took extensive notes, returned to Doylestown, and wrote books. Depending on how you count them, he wrote almost a dozen—many of them thick and substantial in ways that a turn of the (last) century reader would understand, even if many people today would not. He traveled across central Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century, spent a year in Australia and New Guinea, and then found an abiding love for the study of China (which is where I "met" him, in a manner of speaking). He traveled the length of the Great Wall, journeyed the Yangzi River from Shanghai into southeast Asia, visited all of China's provincial capitals, and is the only Westerner to have written a book about his travels to all five sacred mountains of China.

[b] Grainy RF

He wrote about it all, and he took pictures. The former is not without problem; the latter is easily his legacy. It is all a fascinating picture of an American abroad in a peculiarly resonant time in American history—from the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 to the end of World War I. This series will grow as my research does, but let's get started with Geil's own words—a little from each of his published books.

 ***  ***

Onto the river goes William Edgar Geil, and the Yangzi's Yankee has an earful for his 1904 reader. Like the other posts in this series written by Geil, the multiple and sometimes discordant themes pepper the reader from all sides. We have his first reference to his P.T. (this is never defined, although I have a strong hunch), and the beginnings of his habit of referring to Chinese names by floral English translations. There is not a great deal of explanation for any of this, and I am led to wonder whether the great orator would ever have been this unaware of the needs of a live audience. Some of the discordant notes in the following text come from the passage of a century of time, of course. Everything from Romanization (Foochow, Hankow) to usage ("fathom") reflect a different time and place. So does Geil's ongoing and intermingled respect and disdain for China and its people. It does not make for easy reading, and not in the usual sense. This is not Heidegger or Foucault, but there is a cultural and linguistic "grainy" quality that confounds many readers.

Take a look, and see what you think. And what the heck do you think a "P.T." is?

A Yankee on the Yangtze[1] 
William Edgar Geil (1904)

中雨煙臺樓少多
Towers and porticoes shimmering in the midst—Spring in Nanking.

 人服以可理惟下天

Of all things under Heaven only Reason can subdue men. 
 

CHAPTER II.

THE MIDNIGHT START—TRAVELLING IN NATIVE 

STYLE—CHINESE FOOD—NANKING—THE EXAMI-

NATION HALL—CURIOUS FEATURES OF THE 

EXAMINATION—MISSIONARY WORK IN CHINA.

My long hegira across China began at midnight. Know, all men by these presents, that in "the witching hour of night when graveyards (and people) yawn," carrying my P.T., I left Foochow Road wharf in "Top Sea"* and went off in a wobbly tender to the "Great Prosperity," lying in mid-channel with her anchor down in eight fathoms of water. My friends who came to see me off went on board with me. This vessel was selected, not because of her name, but because her owners permit foreigners to travel native style. Some steamers running up the Yangtze have a rule against admitting any but Chinese to the native accommodations. *Shanghai in the Chinese language signifies "Top Sea." 

[c] Corridor RF

It was to see China and the Chinese that I was taking the journey and living on native fare, so I managed to secure a cabin on board, designed especially for the Chinese. Shanghai is beautiful at night, with the many coloured lights on the shore and the regulation lamps of the shipping at anchor and in motion. The moist December air was cold and chilly, and we hastily boarded the triple deck river steamer which reminded me of the craft which ply on the great Mississippi. On the main deck, full forward, the Chinese saloon cabins were located, and to these we briskly found our way through a wide corridor with state-rooms grouped on either side. I stopped to read a helpful sign, done in freehand on pasteboard, and hung against the wooden wall on the starboard side:

PLEASE READY

5 Native Cabin

For Fellows Missinaris

This settled my character. It was plain enough that I was being classed by the comprador as a missionary. On board were many Chinese, most of them going deck class. Among the many passengers were several Christian missionaries, all travelling native style to save the money of their society. Economy in this was aggregates a large sum. Take, for instance, the fare from Shanghai to Hankow. For first-class foreign passengers this is forty dollars, Mexican, while the first-class native fare is only ten dollars and forty cents. The value of the Mexican dollar varies; at the time of my sojourn in Shanghai it was worth about forty cents United States money.

[d] Current channels RF

The missionary party was composed of several ladies and University men. The latter wore tasselled pigtails, and their wives and children were among the party.

The quartermaster had struck eight bells, midnight, before I turned into my short bunk, which contained no bedding except my own, purchased in Shanghai for the long journey to Burma. When the weird call of the lead heaver awoke me, I found that we had swung out of the fierce Hwangpu into The River, as the natives term the Great Yangtze. A wonderful river this, that flows midway between the Great Wall and the Chu Kiang. It quietly rises in the perpetual snows of the Thibetan heights, dashes in all its ancient glory through the Gorges of Ichang, and sweeps majestically onward as if conscious of its commercial importance to the world. It is the sustaining artery of eight provinces, and pours the water of half a continent through ever-broadening channels into the Yellow Sea. Coming events, and the Yangtze, cast their shadows before them, for Skipper Everett corroborates the statement that the sea is coloured fifty miles out by the vast volume of yellow brought by the might river down out of the heart of the massive Empire of Kwang Su. The Yangtze undoubtedly ranks first among the rivers of the Old World, and is excelled only by the Mississippi and the Amazon in the New...

"Early Rice" was served up wet at eight-forty-five A.M. in the partitioned-off corridor into which our cabins opened. The room was not encumbered with artistic cachet, but was full of penumbra. Indeed, the room was chiefly furnished with good penumbra. By the lavish use of it the steamship company must have had an unlimited supply of penumbra. There were penumbra everywhere. In the corners, along the sides, and even in the middle of the floor there were penumbra. And it was of good quality, not the pale, thin article one sometimes finds among dark-skinned native races. This penumbra would have delighted the heart of a white ant. On the round table lay a white cloth. Around the edge were the rice bowls and red chop-sticks, and in the middle four chinaware vessels of appetizers. These dishes bore frightful dragon and other terrifying decorations, and contained, first, superannuated and odoriferous shrimps; second, sickly bean curd floating gently on a summer sear of native vinegar and mustard seed oil; the third dish boasted pickled turnip tops and other refuse; and the fourth, bean curd cheese which reminded me of wild-cat's liver soaked in sulphurated hydrogen. It was repast to make one remember that "Plures crapula quam gladius." Before we "pitched into" this Early Rice, the "Gospel Scatterers" sang a "Grace," the heavy bass and the fine tenor of the men blending harmoniously with the cultured voices of the young ladies. It was a strange interlude in the midst of the heathen surroundings. They sang two verses:—

[e] Alluvial RF

"How good is the Lord we adore,
  Our faithful, unchangeable friend,
 Whose love is as great as His power,
  And knows neither measure nor end.


'Tis Jesus, the First and the Last,
  Whose spirit shall guide us safe home,
 We praise Him for all that is past,
 And trust Him for all that shall come."

Then I looked at them closely and wondered which of them would be the first to be massacred, for they were en route to sections of the country from which came rumours of disquiet and rebellion. But for the friendship of the two Yangtze Viceroys, they must have left their bodies unburied on the soil of Western China during the Boxers' orgy of blood. These tranquil mandarins should receive some recognition and expression of appreciation from the governments to which these favoured citizens belong.

When we had finished the Early Rice, which tried to finish us, the river was fully ten miles wide. Rising among the Pillars of Heaven, far off on the edges of that mystical and awe-inspiring country of Thibet, the civilising Yangtze winds around three thousand miles through this land of the blue gown, then falls into the sea by the little village of Wusung. My school-friend, William Steckel, used to say to me that running water was the most beautiful thing in nature, but running water meant to him some fair brook meandering over curiously shaped pebbles, through a lovely meadow near Doylestown, in the state of Pennsylvania, and not this monster, muddy stream. But the river is interesting ever. When not ten nautical miles from Shanghai, by watching the Fair Way Buoy, I noticed that notwithstanding the tremendous mass of opposing water, the tide was in a prodigious hurry and ran up at the rate of three jolly knots an hour. The scenery was alluvial...

[f] Middle RF

The native servants were delightful. At high noon we were served "Middle Rice," a more pretentious meal than Early Rice. I was served by "Last Born" and "Always-with-a-Fair-End. I doted on them and derived a deal of healthy pleasure from the study of them. Last-Born was twenty-two years old, which means that he was really twenty one, and made his appearance on this planet in the eleventh moon. He waited on me most of the time, and I had occasion to wait on him. At certain seasons he displayed a constitutional and frigid antipathy to being hustled. He was a nice, plump Chinese who smiled graciously when, with the monster chop-sticks and divers motions, I indicated that he should serve me with tooth-picks. Off he would go and, soon returning, present me with several home-made tooth-picks five inches long by the tape line and carved from the bamboo handle of a local broom used by various coolies for a lengthy period. The age and quality of the handle were indicated by the antique cast on the outer edge of the wood...[2]

Click below for other posts in from A Yankee on the Yangtze:

Yankee 1          Yankee 2          Yankee 3          Yankee 4          Yankee 5 

Notes
[1] Even though it should not be necessary for me to point out that some of Geil's language from 108 years ago will jar...I will anyway. I am not one to take either interpretive extreme in these cases. Some consider any language we would not use today to be offensive. On the other extreme would be those who say "everyone talked that way back then." I disagree with both extremes—language changes, yet not everyone did talk "that way back then." I prefer to let all of us develop ever-deeper historical sophistication. History is complicated; Geil is complicated. Period.

[2] William Edgar Geil, A Yankee on the Yangtze (New York: A.C. Armstrong and Son, 1904), 12-18.

Bibliography

Geil, William Edgar. A Yankee on the Yangtze. New York: A.C. Armstrong and Son, 1904.

[g] Outer edge RF