Anything that can be used for fuel, whether wood or straw, cotton stalks or reeds, has doubled or tripled in price. Villagers stand along the banks of the creeks, holding out small baskets of produce -- eggs, or oranges, or bits of pork -- but they are principally old people, with countenances showing their suffering and despair. Other villagers, encountered along the way, have the four characters Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace tattooed deeply into their faces, proof that they have fled from combat and been recaptured by some Taiping general, and thus been warned not to stray again. Some have scarred and pitted cheeks, where they have tried to cut the same words out with a knife. Refugees pass by the travelers, some in small groups, others in crowds of as many as 350 people, men and women, old and young, children and lame, some carrying their possessions, some flags or spears, some empty-handed. Western missionaries traveling by road or track walk through deserted villages where only animals pick among the ruins and the bodies lie scattered by the road. Those traveling by water find at times that their boats have to push their way slowly through the bodies of the dead, which float, decomposing, in the channels. For one missionary traveling in the country near Suzhou, worn by the sight of human bodies till my heart was sick, the image that he knows will haunt his brain the longest is that of the wasted form of a little child which had been starved to death, as it sat propped up in a king of chair or crib, such as the Chinese use for children who are unable to walk.
Posted on: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 23:03:03 +0000