Vic in China

Road Travel

    "The pace of travel in West China before 1925 was determined by the pace of a horse or that of a man - "shank's mare," as my Uncle Wesley used to call it ... That meant that thirty miles was a good day's journey." 
The absence of motor transport was due in part to the fact that only the roads in the cities were paved. Roads in the countryside were narrow; their surfaces packed dirt. This meant that they were dusty in the dry weather and impassible in the wet.
"... On these narrow roads, caravans, wheelbarrows, and sedan chairs struggled for the right of way with geese, children, pedestrians, goats and packers loaded with merchandise."

The sedan chair was the luxurious method of road travel. A person traveling in sedan would be carried by two, three or four carriers depending on their weight.

Most people traveled by wheelbarrow, 
"It was a common sight to see a gentleman with his robes drawn up around his knees and a parasol in his hand to shade off the sun, perched above the barrow wheel and bumping along the road at three miles an hour. Or the passenger might be a woman in her long pants nd tiny feet, perhaps holding a toddler in her arms. ... There were thousands of wheelbarrow taxis in Chengdu waiting at the taxi stands. The wheelbarrow men were usually very poor, the barrow being their most valuable possession and their means of livelihood. For many of them, life was so insecure that breakfast could not be purchased until they had found a fare."
Martin W. Johns.  Bamboo Sprouts and Maple Buds.

Sedan chairs could be unsteady. A memoir of "Our Work in China" by Rev. & Mrs. C.J.P. Jolliffe recounts the precarious journeys undergone by sedan passengers.

... For long trips we used sedan chairs but even with these we would walk perhaps half the way. It was not always a safe way to travel for one mis-step of a chairman would send you into a rice field with its chilly waters. Once grandma shot out of the top of a sedan chair but fortunately it was not into a rice field, and also fortunately she was well bundled up for it was in the winter time."
Notes and Incidents", Our Work in China, VII (b).

River Travel

The journey to Szechwan was long and arduous. The ocean liner would sail from Vancouver to Shanghai. From there the missionaries would travel up the Yangtze by steamboat, houseboat and cargo boat. A letter written by Charles Bridgman in 1913 gives a detailed account of river travel.

We came by steamboat from Shanghai to Hankow, then by a smaller steamboat to Ichang. One passenger steamer with little baggage or freight accommodation plies between Ichang and here [Chunking]. The gunboats also come up, but the river is treacherous, and most of the passengers and freight traffic is by houseboat and cargo boat. These are flat-bottomed boats built of 1/2 inch stuff and drawing 21/2 to 31/2 feet of water. They dangle at the end of long bamboo hawsers drawn by trackers which attach their lines much as the dogs are attached in the north country at home. Each has a separate 'trace' as he attaches his own line and his little liberty to select his path. The passage of the larger rapids is slow and somewhat dangerous, but generally extra ropes are put on and the different sets of trackers help one another up the rapids, as there is generally quite a little fleet waiting at the foot..."

Sources:
Martin W. Johns, Bamboo Sprouts and Maple Buds: Recollections of a Boyhood Spent in China. Hamilton: Martin Wesley Johns Publishing, c1992.
Charles Bridgman. "Letter to Howard, February 11, 1913, Chunking Szechwan China c/o Canadian Methodist Mission."
Rev. & Mrs. C.J.P. Jolliffe. "Our Work in China." Mimeographed typescript.