THE MANG-TAO TREE (see p. 384).
A HALT IN YÜ-CHIA-K'UANG DEFILE (see p. 18).
It must have been the treelessness of the district and the waterless condition of the mountains as viewed from the harbour and the sea-coast that prompted the remark made in an official report some years ago that Weihaiwei is "a colder Aden"; and indeed if we contemplate the coast-line from the deck of a steamer the description seems apt enough. A ramble through the Territory among the valleys and glens that penetrate the interior in every direction is bound to modify one's first cheerless impressions very considerably. Trees, it is true, are abundant only in the immediate neighbourhood of villages and in the numerous family burial-grounds; but the streams are often lined with graceful willows, and large areas on the mountain-slopes are covered with green vegetation in the shape of scrub-oak. At certain seasons of the year the want of trees is from an æsthetic point of view partly atoned for by the blended tints of the growing crops; and certainly to the average English eye the waving wheat-fields and the harvesters moving sickle in hand through the yellow grain offer a fairer and more home-like spectacle than is afforded by the marshy rice-lands of the southern provinces. On the whole, indeed, the scenery of Weihaiwei is picturesque and in some places beautiful.[10] The chief drawback next to lack of forest is the want of running water. The streams are only brooks that can be crossed by stepping-stones. In July and August, when the rainfall is greatest, they become enormously swollen for a few days, but their courses are short and the flood-waters are soon carried down to the sea. In winter and spring some of the streams wholly disappear, and the greatest of them becomes the merest rivulet.
The traveller who approaches Weihaiwei by sea from the east or south makes his first acquaintance with the Shantung coast at a point about thirty miles (by sea) east of the Weihaiwei harbour. This is the Shantung Promontory, the Chinese name of which is Ch'êng Shan Tsui or Ch'êng Shan T'ou. Ch'êng Shan is the name of the hill which forms the Promontory, while Tsui and T'ou (literally Mouth and Head) mean Cape or Headland. Before the Jung-ch'êng magistracy was founded (in 1735) this extreme eastern region was a military district like Weihaiwei. Taking its name from the Promontory, it was known as Ch'êng-shan-wei.
Ch'êng Shan, with all the rest of the present Jun-ch'êng district, is within the British "sphere of influence"; that is to say, Great Britain has the right to erect fortifications there and to station troops: rights which, it may be mentioned, have never been exercised.
The Shantung Promontory has been the scene of innumerable shipwrecks, for the sea there is apt to be rough, fogs are not uncommon, and there are many dangerous rocks. The first lighthouse—a primitive affair—is said to have been erected in 1821 by a pious person named Hsü Fu-ch'ang; but long before that a guild of merchants used to light a great beacon fire every night on a conspicuous part of the hill. A large bell was struck, so the records state, when the weather was foggy. The present lighthouse is a modern structure under the charge of the Chinese Imperial Customs authorities. Behind the Promontory—that is, to the west (landward) side—there is a wide stretch of comparatively flat land which extends across the peninsula. It may be worth noting that an official of the Ming dynasty named T'ien Shih-lung actually recommended in a state paper that a canal should be cut through this neck of land so as to enable junks to escape the perils of the rock-bound Promontory. He pointed out that the land was level and sandy and that several ponds already existed which could be utilised in the construction of the canal. Thus, he said, could be avoided the great dangers of the rocks known as Shih Huang Ch'iao and Wo Lung Shih. The advice of the amateur engineer was not acted upon, but his memorial (perhaps on account of its literary style) was carefully preserved and has been printed in the Chinese annals of the Jung-ch'êng district.
These annals contain an interesting reference to one of the two groups of rocks just named. Wo Lung Shih means "Sleeping dragon rocks," and no particular legend appears to be attached to them, though it would have been easy to invent one. But the Shih Huang Ch'iao, or Bridge of the First Emperor, is regarded by the people as a permanent memorial of that distinguished monarch who in the third century B.C. seized the tottering throne of the classic Chou dynasty and established himself as the First Emperor (for such is the title he gave himself) of a united China. Most Europeans know nothing of this remarkable man except that he built the Great Wall of China and rendered his reign infamous by the Burning of the Books and the slaughter of the scholars. Whether his main object in the latter proceeding was to stamp out all memory of the acts of former dynasties so that to succeeding ages he might indeed be the First of the historical Emperors, or whether it was not rather an act of savagery such as might have been expected of one who was not "born in the purple" and who derived his notions of civilisation from the semi-barbarous far-western state of Ch'in, is perhaps an impossible question to decide: and indeed the hatred of the Chinese literati for a sovereign who despised literature and art may possibly have led them to be guilty of some exaggeration in the accounts they have given us of his acts of vandalism and murder.
During his short reign as Emperor, Ch'in Shih Huang-ti (who died in 210 B.C.) is said to have travelled through the Empire to an extent that was only surpassed by the shadowy Emperor Yü who lived in the third millennium B.C. Yü was, according to tradition, the prince of engineers. He it was who "drained the Empire" and led the rivers into their proper and appropriate channels. The First Emperor might be said, had he not affected contempt for all who went before him, to have taken the great Yü as his model, for he too left a reputation of an ambitious if not altogether successful engineer. The story goes that he travelled all the way to the easternmost point of Shantung, and having arrived at the Promontory, decided to build a bridge from there to Korea, or to the mysterious islands of P'êng-lai where the herb of immortality grew, or to the equally marvellous region of Fu-sang.
The case of the First Emperor affords a good example of how wild myths can be built up on a slender substratum of fact. Had he lived a few centuries earlier instead of in historic times, his name doubtless would have come down the ages as that of a demi-god; even as things are, the legends that sprang up about him in various parts of northern China might well be connected with the name of some prehistoric hero. The Chinese of eastern Shantung have less to say of him as a monarch than as a mighty magician. In order to have continuous daylight for building the Great Wall, he is said to have been inspired with the happy device of transfixing the sun with a needle, thus preventing it from moving. His idea of bridge-building