A REPORTER AMONG THE POETS

China's story is not all one of civil war, economic fever and malice domestic. Last week, it was spring in Hangchow, the city of Buddhist temples and merry poets, and Chinese in holiday mood were making their annual pilgrimage thither. Armed with a well-thumbed copy of Herbert Allen Giles's translations of Chinese verse, TIME Correspondent Frederick Gruin joined them. His report:

April has brought some 20,000 visitors daily to Hangchow in the greatest pilgrimage since some long-ago poetaster wrote: "Over and above there is a heavenly abode. Here below, there are Soochow and Hangchow." The city's 40 big & little hotels are so full that pilgrims are sleeping in lake boats, on park benches and lawns, and in temples.

Toward the Mountains. Some of the pilgrims are slick city folk. Others are small townspeople with yellow incense bags slung over their shoulders with the characters chao shan ching hsiang--"toward the mountains to present incense."

The influx has brought problems. Pickpockets (mostly adolescent) are a nuisance. Pimps and prostitutes are on the increase. A score are arrested daily and one bold baggage was caught with a monk who had rented a hotel room for an unmonkish purpose. On West Lake, that lovely shallow blue pool, girt by green hills, watched by graceful pagodas and crossed by willow-draped causeways and moon-bridges, sampans drift full of rubber-necking tourists, earnest young intellectuals, tired officials and fat merchants on holiday. Lolling in one, with the tolling bells of distant temples in your ears and a book of verse before your eyes, you come a bit closer to understanding Hangchow's appeal--and maybe to understanding China and her people.

Toward Goodness. Hangchow was ballyhooed by China's poets from the Sung Dynasty on. They were a fascinating crew, witty, sometimes raffish, often inspired. There was the great Li Po, poet and statesman, who founded a tipplers' club known as the Six Idlers of the Bamboo Brook:

Li Po also got drunk, He saw the moon in the Yellow River And was drowned,

Hsieh Chin, also a statesman, fell into imperial disfavor, was made drunk and entombed under a bank of snow. Tu Fu admired his own admirable verse so much that he recommended it for malarial fever. Fang Shu Shao, knowing his time had come, got into his coffin and wrote: "My pen and ink shall go with me inside my funeral hearse, so that if I've leisure 'over there' I may soothe myself with verse."

Even today, Chinese of all degree may soothe their souls with the old masters' rhymes. A refugee still barred from his northern home by the civil war might wonder with Wang Wei:

Sir, from my dear old home you come, And all its glories you can name; Oh tell me--has the winter plum Yet blossomed o'er the window frame?

They wrote of all the ills and all the moods that humans still suffer--of wars, conscription and famine, love frustrated and vanity indulged:

The world, in name, toward goodness strives, .. .. But what men want is "place" and wives.

Even a modern bandit (not necessarily a common footpad but, say, one of those Hangchow hotelkeepers who right now are charging five days' key money for two days' hotel reservation) might solace himself with Li She's impromptu verse which so delighted the brigands who had seized him that he was set free:

The rainy mist sweeps gently o'er the village by the stream, When from the leafy forest glades the brigand daggers gleam . . . And yet there is no need to fear or step from out their way, For more than half the world consists of bigger rogues than they!

Above all, Hangchow is now a place where many a statesman seeks surcease from the slings and arrows of partisanship. T. V. Soong rested here recently and even the Gimo stopped over on his way back toward the haggle of Government reorganization. Five hundred years ago, Hsieh Chin wrote:

In vain hands bent on sacrifice or clasped in prayer we see; The ways of God are not exactly what those ways should be. The swindler and the ruffian lead pleasant lives enough, While judgments overtake the good and many a sharp rebuff . . . And if great God Almighty fails to keep the balance true, What can we hope that paltry mortal magistrates will do?

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