shacks. The German who took over the magistrate's yamen plastered the walls of the inside court and painted there a bold panorama of Tsingtau in its earliest aspect, which remains an interesting record. It had faded sadly by 1914, and the first Japanese occupant called up a painter in the Reserves and had the pic ture restored. With a clear plot and no inheritance of old streets, roads, buildings, or slums, the Germans could plan the ideal city. They leveled hills, filled up gullies, reclaimed the foreshore, and extended dry land far out over the old mud flats. The ocean side, facing southward on blue water, was reserved for official constructions and villa sites, with the crescent beach beyond for a bathing resort, summer hotels and villas, park, and racecourse. Within the bay they allotted a quarter for Chinese running back from the junk harbor, and the level land stretching away from the commercial harbor was destined for railway yards, factories, and godowns. They built a mole three-quarters of a mile long to deflect the silt streams from the chosen harbor area of 1 1/6 square miles, dredged out a great harbor with a depth of ten and thirteen meters, surrounded the inner basin with stone docks, warehouses, and railway lines. There were a giant crane and a floating dock, and every modern harbor facility. Twenty million gold marks went to harbor works alone; as much more to the town site its public works and utilities asphalt streets, macadam roads up to the edge of Chinese territory in every direction, sewers, water-works, electric light and power plants, abbatoirs, ice factories, schools, hospitals, clubs, police and railway stations, villa and apartment houses to shelter German officials and employees, even a sanitarium up on the side of Laoshan. They carved the doubleheaded eagle deep on the Diederich Stein, the sheer face of Harbor Hill, with a grandiose inscription in German text. More millions of good gold marks went to build twelve forts, on the beach and on the circle of hills around the town, each of granite and reinforced cement, with steel cupolas, underground magazines and labyrinths, besides barracks for one hundred and two thousand men each; forts that were the latest and loudest word in defense until the siege of Liège, since which they are but relics, souvenirs, laughed at as obsolete and antiquated by military men. They built a veritable castle for the Governor-General's residence on a breezy hill-top overlooking town and ocean, and there I was violent debate in the Reichstag at the 800,000 marks it cost. But the big spending, the initial outlay, was ended in that first seven years, and there remained only the equivalent of 250,000,000 marks' to be supplied by German taxpayers for the annual budget of the purely military and official station. The 1,000 German civilians of the first years grew to 2,500 by 1914, and the garrison of nominally 3,000 men was increased to more than 5,000 when all the Reservists and Austrian ships' crews were gathered there for the siege. The Germans planted trees and trees and trees all along the water-front, the streets and terraces, and the country roads; trees to the top of every hill and along the dried-up watercourses, and a double line of acacias all the 256 miles of the railway to Tsinanfu, with dense groves around each station house. All the scorching rock faces in the town were concealed by cool green vines and 1 This figure seems excessive. Our information puts expenditures for 1914 at $4,762,000, of which $2,015,000 came from local revenue.-The Editors. bushes, and rambler roses festooned themselves along park rails by hundreds of yards. In the forest behind the bathing beach there were nursery gardens and a forestry school. There were free seedlings for all and free instruction for Chinese, but only paid employees benefited. The native mind does not yet understand or accept the forestry idea. "If my ancestors never planted trees to leave to me-only trees for their own coffin planks-why should I plant trees just to look green for my children?" It was a model garden-city suburb worthy of Dresden or Frankfort. I had seen it in its earliest years, when it was only a harbor and a skeleton of its ground plan, and its future trees were all tied to sticks, and again in an intermediate stage. By 1914 it was the completed dream, the perfect thing, and all Teutons, blatantly, chanted of this monument to German Kultur. The Prinz Heinrich and the Strand Hotels were the best on the China coast, and there were forty-two miles of motor roads. There were direct Norddeutscher Lloyd steamers to Europe every fortnight, and fast trains with sleeping and dining cars took one to Peking in twenty-four hours, and to Pukow, on the Yangtse, in the same time, for connection with Nanking and Shanghai. Two military bands played and a thousand foreigners strolled on the beach each summer morning, and it was Deutschland über alles surely. There was always the grand idea in each German head, too, that that double line of acacia trees would follow the twin rails on and on, across all Asia to junctions at Bagdad and Berlin und Weltmach! Then all the world went to war, and the ultimatum of the Emperor of Japan, August 16, 1914, numbered the days of German Tsingtau. The port was blockaded, the railway was cut, and the Kiushiu regiment, landing at Laoshan Bay, was joined by the British contingent-800 Wales Borderers and 800 Indian troops under Col. Barnardistonwho fought with those Satsuma soldiers up over the rear slopes of Laoshan to the destroyed sanitarium and down to unite with the main Japanese forces (30,000 men of all arms) advancing along the railway line to the final assault. This was the "British army" of which the Senators ranted and blamed equally for "the conquest of Shantung." The graves of eleven British soldiers killed before Tsingtau have places of honor in the little English cemetery on the road to the water-works. The tablets of 1,214 Japanese killed before Tsingtau are preserved in a memorial temple on a hill near the reservoir. That Tsingtau campaign was a military promenade-mere "autumn maneuvers" the stay-at-home officers called it-a methodical affair, carried out exactly as prearranged in the war games at the military college, a parallel to the French battle of the Couronne at Nancy. The Japanese had to repair, restore, A PANORAMIC VIEW OF THE MODERN CITY OF TSINGTAU CREATED DURING THE GERMAN AND JAPANESE OCCUPATIONS and reconstruct everything on the face, of their new inheritance. The ravages of war were obliterated within a year, and the model settlement was made to blossom with more rambler roses and more thousands of cherry trees on top of the prophetic gift of a thousand cherry trees to the new park by Marquis Komura in 1905. They literally made two of everything grow where one had grown before. They cut a record of their victory on the face of the Diederich Stein, the line of Japanese sea! characters chiseled straight down across the swelling breast of the double-headed eagle. They built schools, hospitals, and a much-needed market house, literally miles of dwellings and factories, extended roads and sewers; and, after repairing the wrecked water-works, constructed a new water station on the boundary of the territory that doubles the supply. One sees no water at either the old or the new water-works, only the reverberation under a motor's wheels telling that one has left the flat macadam road and is running over a stonepaved dry river-bed, which becomes a roaring torrent when clouds empty themselves on the barren hillsides. A row of gigantic steel buttons on the bank are the tops of artesian wells, from which the powerful electrically driven machinery sucks the water, and forces it to city reservoirs. the Mme. Semionoffs rather-down from There have been more than 20,000 Japanese resident in Tsingtau these eight years-officials, great and petty merchants, and lesser folk-all enjoying the summers but shivering at the mention of the long, hard, cruelly cold win ters. Officials of the Colonial and other offices have been waiting in Tsingtau from year to year for relief, for the war to end, for the treaty to be made and ratified, and for the Chinese to begin negotiations. Half their children are at home "with his grandmother in Tokyo," "with my sister in Osaka," and other relatives in the home islands-for schooling. When the Germans had turned over the Tsingtau records and archives in Berlin in February, 1920, all these were sure of going home before the autumn. But the Chinese flatly refused to open negotiations for the territory they were wailing to possess, for the country was in the midst of the socalled. Students' Movement then, and passionately patriotic youths and very young school-children were screaming in street processions, raiding shops, and making bonfires of any one's Japanese goods, and having the time of their lives. No Chinese official dared risk his Count Otani, former lord Abbot of the head by discussing things with the Hongwanji Temple in Kyoto, was an- Japanese then, and a Shantung Gover. other distinguished recluse, and Russian nor who told the children to attend to refugees of the better class, relics of the their school-books, and their parents old Court circle, found asylum too. In would attend to public policies, promptly the summer of 1920 the Italian aviators lost his job. But for the Washington in their Rome-Tokyo flight made a long Conference they would still be howling repair stop at Tsingtau, and held aerial for "Shantung." as they too came to high jinks over the beach and bay every call the little leased territory, and at day. Also came Mme. Semionoff-one of the same time refusing three times Tsingtau has been a happy refuge for retired Chinese officials to enjoy their fortunes in safety. Prince Kung and other Manchus fled there after the revolution that ended the Empire, and, although they retired to Tientsin during the siege, they were glad to return and enjoy law and order under the Japanese flag. The present transfer to Chinese control may be a dilemma for them. over requests to name negotiators and begin work to that end. German property-owners began to gather immediately after ratifications in 1920, and tourists like myself, scenting a possibly picturesque ceremony, were in Tsingtau in May and June, but to no account. There have been more Chinese in Tsingtau of late than in German days20,000 resident and 20,000 floating population-drawn first by the great demand for labor in reconstruction after the surrender, and since employed in the many industries and works instituted by the Japanese. The Chinese quarter was hardly their very own, or run in their way ever. Their houses had to be built according to German specifications, whitewashed, numbered, and, in the early morning only, ornamented with neat garbage-bins. There were sanitary regulations savagely enforced, inspertions without cease (no evasions were possible), and there were always the fines, the big stick, the mailed fist, and the German language! The Chinese saw the sad joke, and hoped for some respite from the new masters; but, alas! the Japanese were madder about sanitation and smells than the others, and could think up a lot of things the Germans didn't know. The newcomers built a market house and shooed them and their baskets of produce in off the curbs; and built tenement-houses at smallest rent. als to reduce the crowding; and big barracks for the thousands of laborers passing through the port at the seasonal exodus to and return from Manchuriar bean fields. No more sleeping as the coolie might please, on docks and rai! way tracks, in parks and doorways No slums, no open mud wallows, were per mitted; no cesspools or garbage heaps at back or front doors. No dead animals or mangy dogs could lie in the streets. no drying skins and heaped entrails from household slaughtering could cumber the principal streets, as in happy Kiaochau City across the bay. A charity hospital for Chinese gathered in as many extraordinary and unknown cases as in any part of China. Some succes attended efforts at compulsory educ and playgrounds were provid street children. Rows of granite flagstones were laid at either side of the immaculate street pavements, and ironshod cart wheels and knife-edged wheelbarrow wheels soon learned to keep to those stone runways strictly. Even the had arrived. Germans and Japanese have set a high civic standard, and the Chinese should respect its traditions and keep Tsingtau the perfect thing, the model city of the Far East. II-SHANTUNG BY CHARLES HODGES ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF THE DIVISION OF ORIENTAL COMMERCE AND POLITICS, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY FTER a battle royal, in which Japan's capture of the key to North China from the German leaseholders at the opening of the Great War was but the first skirmish of a struggle that extended from Far Eastern Foreign Offices and the Versailles Peace to the Washington Conference itself via the American Senate, the Japanese are evacuating the prize of Kiaochau. The international hue and cry over the question of Japan's control of Shantung was not raised merely because of the leasehold of Kiaochau Bay and the charming Teutonic-Nipponese watering. place of Tsingtau. Japan did not have to "own" the 55,984 square miles of Shantung Province or govern some easily seized from the Germans in Shantung a new Japanese preserve that would have affected the future of all North China. Japan had done this once before in the case of Manchuria, just across the Gulf of Pechili from Shantung. THE ECONOMIC STAKES When the Japanese military occupation of the German interests in Shantung was completed in 1914, the tangled skein of hard-handed diplomacy, business, and a new nationalism in the East was brought before the world for unraveling. When the German Empire occupied this corner of the old Middle Kingdom during the "battle of concessions," ostensibly as reparations for a missionary outrage, it was for the very purpose of effecting the economic penetration of China. The object of Japan was the same, and was clearly evidenced from the first days of the Great War. It was The 400 square mile leasehold, includto make out of the privileged position so ing Tsingtau engirded by the 2,500 A MAP PREFARED BY THE AUTHOR OF THIS ARTICLE IN 1919, SHOWING THE POINTS CTALYS BUILDINGS CONSTRUCTED BY JAPAN IN THE HEART OF THE SHANTUNG PENINSULA, 250 MILES FROM TSINGTAU. THESE REPRESENT (LEFT) THE MILITARY BARRACKS AND (RIGHT) THE JAPANESE BANK AT TSINAN, THE CAPITAL OF SHANTUNG PROVINCE square miles of neutral zone about Kiaochau Bay, does not tell the whole story, The lodestone drawing the Mikado's land into the Shantung adven. ture consisted of (1) coal deposits much overrated; (2) iron resources of considerable magnitude; and (3) new commercial opportunity promising to relieve the pressure in part on Japanese industrialism. An accurate understanding of the Japanese stakes here would include, therefore, a 256-mile shoestring of railway stretching from the city of Tsingtau as the railway terminus and harbor to Tsinan, the capital of the province, where the hinterland of North China could be tapped by existing connections with the Chinese Government trunk line running north and south-which were to be fortified by subsequent concessions. Japan, it must be remembered, occupied this railway zone from the sea to the interior as though it were Japanese territory. A gore ten miles wide was driven through the heart of Shantung, the only modern communications within the province itself being garrisoned, policed, and politically administered with Japanese civil courts along the railway and its branches to the mines. Within the full extent of the zone, the Japanese succeeded to all the special rights of exploitation wrung by the Germans from China in 1898, and even revived many concessions voluntarily relinquished by the latter prior to the World War. DIPLOMATIC FORTIFICATIONS The present settlement has been reached only because one by one various agreements upon which, as diplo matic fortifications, the Japanese depended for their tenure in Shantung have been broken down. The recession of Japan's position is marked by four stages. First, Japan forced on the Chinese the ill-advised Twenty-one Demands of 1915 as an ultimatum to stifle diplomatic efforts to oust the Japanese from Shantung, leaving the Mikado's land for practical purposes master of the situation. Second, not satisfied with either the secret treaties of 1917 under which the Allies assented to Japan's programme or the grip on China developed during the Great War, Japan maneuvered the Peking Government in 1918 into two new agreements. These marked a turning-point in the Japanese policy. On the one side, they strengthened the grip of Japan on Shantung through new railway rights. On the other side, they yielded to the Chinese the military control and civil administration of the existing railway. Third, the Peace Treaty signed at Ver sailles gave everything to Japan with the unwritten commitment that she was eventually to restore Chinese sovereignty while retaining material economic advantages. Fourth, the negotiations just consummated to carry out the provisions of the Washington Conference settlement provided for a retrocession to China of political control exercised by Japan; the nationalization of the disputed railway communications; the turning of the strategic extensions over to "an international financial group;" the surrender of the original German cables, the Japanese wireless stations at Tsingtau and inland at Tsinan, and public properties; and Japan's renunciation of "all preferential rights" claimed from Germany. THE REAL MEANING OF THE SETTLEMENT The significance of the Shantung settlement cannot be overestimated. Japan, it is true, gains material and moral compensation for doing the right thing: but China assumes obligations which she has yet to prove her ability to meet. Japan has accepted a foreclosure of public opinion East and West upon her actions. They involved the perpetuation of the old order in the Orient, a breeder of war through militant political and business aggression from a dangerous use of military power. In this picture of the outcome of a bold bid for a new dominion in the Far East there is no hostility toward the Japanese people. Yesterday Japanese statesmen perhaps had reason to think this was the surest way to prosper the Mikado's land. Today those in the high places of Tokyo wisely sense the costly futility of the whole approach to position in the East based upon international ill will and distrust. These leaders of Japan, shaking off the burden of War Office diplomacy, are realists in world politics still; but they understand that the politics born of the Great War have been far too costly to serve further useful ends. Great as has been the lesson of Shantung to China of the dangers of national backwardness, it has meant far more to Japan. Disillusioned as to the dividends from abuses of national strength, awakening from the alluring dream of empire, workaday Japan is now bent on capitalizing the more certain returns from neighborly friendship and confidence. |