Affairs of State
Prelude
Part I — Getting to Peking
House-boat on the Peiho.—Tientsin.—Chefoo.—A Peking Cart.—Camels.—British Embassy.—Walking on the Walls.
—Beautiful Perspectives.
It was in 1888 we first arrived in Peking, and we felt at once convinced that, whatever wonders it might have to offer, nothing—no! nothing could surpass the wonder of the journey. And when it is considered that every high official throughout the empire had to travel this same way in order to be confirmed in each appointment, the wonder of it is enhanced. From Tientsin you could always ride to Peking, if you were strong enough. Sir Harry Parkes did it in the day, the year before he died. But if not equal to riding eighty miles at a stretch, or eighty miles relieved (?) by nights at Chinese inns, you had in 1888 to travel the way we did, taking boat up the Peiho as far as Tungchow.
We left Tientsin at two o’clock on Thursday, and reached Tungchow at 9 p.m. on Sunday, having been very lucky, as it appeared. We had a south-west wind all Friday, spinning us along certain reaches of the ever wriggling, rather than winding Peiho. Along the reverse reaches the men had to tow or pole us. On Saturday the wind was so high that we had to lie to in the middle of the day, the men being unable to make any way against it by towing. And we only made a very few miles that day. In the afternoon it rained, and was altogether cheerless. But on Sunday we had a fine westerly wind blowing us on. Although a river, the Peiho in this part of its course is decidedly more canal-like and uninteresting than the English canal down which I had had some thought of travelling the year before, till I decided it would be too tedious. But after all there is a charm about this exceedingly slow method of progression. The world does not really stand still with you, but you feel as if it did. You get interested in the boats you pass and meet; some coming down stream, laden with plants in pots—two dwarf orange-trees, with oranges on them, I saw once—or bringing down straw braid, or taking up brick tea—such quantities of brick tea, which had, I suppose, come all the way down the Yangtse from poor water-beleaguered Hankow of the willow avenues and ravening mosquitoes, and round farther by sea from Shanghai to Tientsin, and whose progress on strings and strings of dignified camels Siberiawards we subsequently saw. What brick tea costs in the original instance I do not know. But when I think of the labour expended on its transport I feel it ought to be precious indeed to the Siberians.
Every now and then we got out and walked along the banks, looking backwards at the long zigzagging procession of boats behind us, each with one large sail, or at times each with a bare mast, looking like a long line of telegraph-poles. And beside us was the line of real telegraph-poles, forerunners of the coming railway that has since been opened; and we knew that the foreigners who would approach Peking in the old historic manner were already numbered. For there will be nothing to tempt people to provide themselves with all the necessaries of life for a three or four days’ trip, now that the railroad is open and you can book direct. There is nothing to be seen upon the road that cannot be seen as well elsewhere,—mudbanks, sandhills, millet- and sorghum-fields with poor crops, fairly nice trees, fences gay with convolvulus flowers, mud houses, mud roofs, and level mudbanks crowded with all the disreputable refuse of a poor Chinese village; then wood-cutters (one or two substantial coffins stood out prominently alongside of them; wood seems too precious for anything but coffins in those parts), a mule and a pony ploughing, or a donkey or an ox, never a pair of animals of the same kind. All these one looks at with a pleasant interest as one saunters or floats by. But you can see them elsewhere; or you can never see them, and yet be none the worse for the miss.
It is true that by the old method you could shut yourself into the boat cabin, and study colloquial Chinese according to Sir Thomas Wade, or write letters home to say how you were enjoying yourself, or drink tea, or smoke, just as your previous way of life disposed you to act, there being no restraining influence further than the size of the cabin. A native boat is not quite as luxurious as a Shanghai house-boat, though it is well enough, except in the matter of its being impossible to open the cabin door from the inside. So that when we were shut in, I always thought how, if the boat should heel over, we should be drowned inside like mice in a trap. Another exception must be made—not in favour of the cracks which grow portentously larger, as the boards shrink with the increasing dryness of the air, and which must let in an inordinate draught in winter, when the air is more cold than kindly. Even towards the end of September we found it hard enough to keep warm at night. We had two cabins, but one was pretty well all bedstead, being a raised ottoman sort of a place, under which boxes could be put, and on which mattresses were laid. We had to provide ourselves with everything we wanted, even to a cooking-stove. But then we paid only nine and a half dollars for our boat, including drink money. This at the then rate of exchange was under thirty shillings. The men fed themselves. So did we. It is tiresome that, travelling in China, nothing is to be bought by the way, beyond chickens and eggs, and sweet potatoes (delicious!) and cabbage (horrible!). It is tiresome, also, that the makers of tinned things do not put dates upon their tins; therefore in the outports—which Shanghai fine ladies always pronounce as if they were only peopled by “outcasts”—people have to put up with the tinned milk that somehow did not sell at Shanghai. It is a pity that the local representatives of the Army and Navy Stores do not see to this, and put dates on their tins. It would be well worth the “outcasts’” while to pay extra for recently tinned butter and milk, if they could rely upon the dates. As it was, our milk was very nearly butter, though it could not quite be used for that, and it certainly was not milk.
The Concession at Tientsin is either so far away from the Chinese town, or so satisfactory to its inhabitants, that they never stray away among the Chinese. On landing at the bridge of boats in the native city, while our servants made a few purchases, I found I excited as much interest as if there had not been a European colony within a thousand miles. It was, however, a particularly friendly crowd that accompanied me. A boy danced in front, clapping his hands, as if to bid the people in the street make way; another boy was very eager to point out all the sweet cakes he thought nicest; two old women and an old man went down on their knees to beg; an old man was washing very old shoes upon the bridge; another was selling odds and ends of old things, that looked as if they never had been new. There were sweet potatoes cooking; there were various other buyers and sellers, and crowds passing by, both on foot and in boats. Sometimes the bridge would be opened, sometimes closed to let the foot passengers go by. There was always a crowd; whichever way of progress was open, people were always progressing by it before it was ready for them. Nobody pushed, nobody was rude; every one appeared pleasant. But there, looking down the long straight reach of the river, was the tall tower of the ruined Roman Catholic Cathedral, recalling the massacre of 1870—a massacre that might so easily have embraced all the Europeans in the Concession, had not the rain mercifully come down in torrents and dispersed the mob. It did not seem possible, when we were there, to think of any danger of the kind threatening the exceptionally thriving-looking settlement.
I have not seen any Concession yet I liked the look of so well as that of Tientsin. There is a go-ahead look about the place, with all its goods stored in heaps on the Bund with only matting over them, instead of, as elsewhere, in warehouses; which makes it contrast especially with Chefoo, that sleeping beauty, whom no fairy prince has yet awakened. Perhaps, when he does, the merry wives of China, who used to resort there every summer, may find it hardly as charming as it was in its tranquillity and freedom from all restraint. But it was so tranquil, so absolutely uneventful, that our summer month there seemed only like a dream to look back upon. Its coast-line is beautiful; but it is a coast-line with nothing behind it, as it were—like the cat’s smile in Alice in Wonderland, a grin and nothing more.
But it was at Tungchow in the old days that the tug of war in getting to Peking used to begin. You had bought all your stores, and furnished your boat, and spent days and nights in it; but all that was nothing to the great business of getting to Peking. There were thirteen miles yet to do, and the question was, How did you mean to try to get over them? My own firm conviction now is that the easiest way would have been to get up very early in the morning and walk. But as it was, I came into Peking in the traditional style, feet foremost in a springless cart, holding on hard to either side. We started at eleven in the morning from Tungchow, paused for an hour at a wayside inn to eat and rest, and did not reach Peking till six, only just before the gates were closed. At first starting I thought the accounts of the road had been exaggerated. It is true it was so dusty at intervals I was more reminded of a London fog than anything else. It is true I could not leave go with either hand without getting a tremendous bump on the head. But still I did not think the road was quite as bad as I had expected. Alas! the road was so bad we had not started by it at all, but were simply getting along by a way the carts had made for themselves. At Pa-li Chiao we came upon the real grand stone road, with the grand bridge made by the Ming Dynasty—when they moved their capital from Nanking to Peking, in order better to repel invading Tartar hordes—and never in the centuries since repaired by the Tartar horde of Manchus, who at once conquered them, when they thus obligingly put themselves within easy reach at the very extreme limit of their vast empire.
There was the road, with huge blocks of stone, some of them five feet long, and wide and thick in proportion, but sometimes worn away, sometimes clean gone. Now to hold on like grim death! How the smartly varnished little carts with their blue tops kept together at all I cannot imagine. But I know I immensely respected the mule that could pull us into and out of the holes and ruts, into which we dropped with a veritable concussion, not a jolt. Of course it was a new sensation—but a new sensation it can do no one any good to experience; and before I had had half an hour of it I had had enough, and asked for a donkey. However, the donkey brought was so tiny that, after a rest on its poor little thin back, I tried the cart again. The road did not seem quite so bad as before, until we got nearer the capital. Then—then I got out and walked. There was no help for it. And walking was decidedly less fatiguing. But an increasing crowd followed me. Every one spoke to me—I hope complimentarily. Men selling clothes waved them at me, and sang to invite purchase. It was hard work to avoid the carts, and donkeys, and mules, and camels, and men carrying things, and Manchu women with feet of the natural size, violently rouged faces, and hair made up into teapot handles, sticking out quite six inches behind their heads, or made into stiff wings, projecting about three inches on either side, and always with flowers stuck into their hair. It was hard work to avoid all these, and to keep up with the carts, and disagreeable to be choked and smothered in dust, and to feel oneself all the while appearing to every one as an escaped lunatic—ploughing through dust on one’s own feet, instead of being driven along properly. But anything was better than jolting along that road till the great mock fortress came into view. We were about to enter the gates. The crowd there was too great to try to press through; so I climbed into the cart once more, and thus entered Peking comme il faut, in a springless cart.
It is the custom to say the road to Peking from Tungchow is desperately uninteresting. It may be so. I feel I ought hardly to hazard an opinion, for I was afraid to leave my eyeglasses dangling, and thus only once or twice managed both to get them out and up to my eyes sufficiently steadily to see through them; but to my shortsighted gaze there appeared to be a constant series of interesting graves and gateways and monsters, which I longed to examine more closely. Then the long procession of camels carrying brick tea northwards, or coming south empty to fetch it, did not become monotonous, even after I had seen some thousands or more of them. The men riding upon them had handkerchiefs tied in a very simple way, which, however, I at once saw was the original of the old homely English sun-bonnet. The men walking by their sides had conical oil-paper hats, which were equally evidently the original of the Nice hats of my youth. They had even red linings to them, such as I had so often worn myself in Europe, and three little spots of black, whose nature I could not quite make out, but which on my hats used to be represented by three little stars of black velvet. I had always thought a Nice hat looked Chinese, and, since I came to China, that it would be the very thing to wear in summer; and now here I found these camel-drivers wearing the old original model, which probably the Jesuits carried over long ago to North Italy.
The camels placed their springy hoofs softly on the hard, stony road. Those that wore bells carried their arched necks high. Their grave eyes looked down kindly on the clouds of dust. Between their two humps rode a man, as in a natural saddle. Their yellow necks shone in the slanting rays of the sun, while the great tufts of hair at the tops of their legs stood out darkly. I thought I should grow tired of them, but I had not even by the time we had reached the gate of Peking, at the end of our long day’s travel of thirteen miles.
“Is this inside the city or outside the city?” I asked at last of my stout carter, when we seemed to have been travelling an interminable distance through roads rather like Clapham Common, if there were no grass upon it, and two rows of booths cutting it into three divisions—two of booths and one of road—so wide and uncared for and wildernesslike was this last. “Inside the city,” answered he haughtily. I felt as if I had been very rude to ask, and longed to apologise, if I had hurt his feelings. But the road was so unlike a city street. It was like a large caravanserai, or like the encampment of a savage tribe. The shops that skirted the road had gaily gilded fronts, and every now and then a shopkeeper sent out men to scoop up the liquid filth at either side, and sprinkle it upon the dust by way of somewhat keeping it down. The smell resulting left nothing to be desired. Long before we reached Peking I had decided that the Chinese were a docile, peaceable nation of traders, overrun by a northern horde so incurably barbarous, that not even centuries of contact with the Chinese had been able to civilise them, though it might have made them so effeminate that they would soon become effete. I now began to wonder how long Peking could go on accumulating filth within its walls without breeding a Black Death or other awful pestilence.
We drove on and on. At last we turned down a very disreputable, dilapidated sort of mews; and there was the French Embassy to the right, very smart in fresh paint; the Japanese Embassy, very perky, with a European gateway; the German Embassy, dignified and fresh painted. Round the corner stood the English Embassy, with a massive but somewhat jail-like portal.
In the Middle Ages it often seems as if it must have been very pleasant for the lords and ladies. And in Peking it is very pleasant to live in a ducal palace. From the moment the Embassy servant stepped forward with a fly-flap, and courteously flapped the dust off our boots, everything was charming. We never wished to go outside again to face that vile mews, with its holes, its dust, its smells. We forgot all about it, as we looked at the stately perspective of the inner entrance of the Palace,—its ceilings richest blue and brilliant green, relieved by golden pomegranates and dragons; its mortised beams projecting, all highly painted, green, red—green, red. Not a sound penetrated within its sheltered courtyards. The wood-carvings were beautiful, the galleries long enough to satisfy all desire for walking. The Chinese decorations satisfied our eyes. At last—at last we had come upon something Oriental in China, æsthetic, eye-satisfying. At the same time we were surrounded by every English comfort, enjoying delightful English society! Why ever go outside the Embassy compound? Could Peking possibly have anything to show worth encountering such horrors as those of its entry, a survival from those Middle Ages so agreeable to read about, so disagreeable to live in?
But one evening we took the one Peking walk, along the summit of the walls. There was something pathetic, as well as ludicrous, in thinking of European attachés and their wives, European diplomatists and their families, having for a pleasure-walk the walls of Peking. The horrors of the approach to them can only be realised by those who know what the entourage of the walls of a Chinese city is generally like. They cannot be described in a book, that may lie on an English drawing-room table. Arrived at the top, you find a wilderness of thorns and plants and trees, and there in and out amongst them a narrow way, along which a lady can barely manage to walk without tearing her dress. From the walls you see the yellow roofs of the Imperial Palace buildings within the inner wall, inside the Forbidden City. And you wonder what it must be like to be a Chinese Emperor, brought up under one of those yellow roofs, and never allowed outside that Forbidden City, except for a ceremonial visit to a temple, to pray for rain or fine weather. You see the green-tiled roofs of the princely ducal buildings, far more effective than the yellow by the evening light. On the one side you look at the “Outside City,” the China town; on the other the “Inside City,” the Tartar town, where the Embassies, etc., are. In the centre of this last, four-square, is placed the Forbidden Imperial City. Then you look out into the distance upon the western hills, beautiful in the sunset light. But it is fast growing dark. As we came out, the sun was still too hot to be pleasant. Now already it is too dark to discern distant objects. We turn back to that oasis in the wilderness of Peking, that fairy palace, the Ying-kuo Fu. We reach once more the beautiful perspective, that makes us long for the British Minister to stand in state with his following, holding a reception of Chinese mandarins, that we might see them all grouped according to their dignities against such a picturesque background. Then looking at the blue and green and golden dragon beams, at the sunshine and the stillness of the courtyards, we feel inclined, like Germans, to evolve the rest of Peking out of our own inner consciousness. Oh, rest ye, brother-mariners, we will not wander more!
Part II — The Sights of Peking
Tibetan Buddhism.—Yellow Temple.—Confucian Temple.—Hall of the Classics.—Disgraceful Behaviour.—Observatory.—Roman Catholic Cathedral.—Street Sights.—British Embassy.—Bribes.—Shams.—Saviour of Society.
—Sir Robert Hart.
The “sights” of Peking have not been on view of late years. It seems a pity, considering how many people have travelled thither hoping to see them. And yet I am not sure that it is not a relief. It seems a duty one owes oneself to go and see those one can, and the people even at those behave with an insolence and indecorum such as I am not quite sure if even seeing the sight makes up for. Anyway, the Temple of Heaven has been closed of late years—that Temple in which to this day worship is offered by the Emperor on behalf of his people, in accordance with a ritual more ancient than any other still in use. The Temple of Agriculture is closed; ditto the Clock Tower and the Bell Tower; ditto, they say, all that remains of the Summer Palace. Even the Examination Hall we could not succeed in getting into. Whilst his one great friend advised us not to attempt the Lamaserai, where the living Buddha in Peking resides, such a set of rowdies are the Lamas. They demand exorbitant sums for opening each fresh gate; they lay forcible hands upon visitors, and finally demand what they please for letting them out again. That very thrilling tale of horrors “The Swallows’ Wing” is only a little heightened version of what a traveller who went in might have to undergo. We rode up to the gate, and the expression of the Lamas outside, who thought we were coming in, was enough for me. I have studied the expressions of Neapolitan priests, but they do not compare for vileness with those of these Lamas: the Lamas, too, look fierce—fierce, coarse, and insolent. They of course redouble their demands and insolence, when ladies are among the visitors. The living Buddha himself can only be approached in the guise of a tribute-bearer bringing offerings: a bottle of brandy, a pound of sugar, and a tin of Huntley & Palmer’s mixed biscuits, sugared, are said to be the most acceptable. And we considered sending this information to Messrs. Huntley & Palmer for advertising purposes. But even with the biscuits and the brandy there has to be a good deal of arrangement, all of which demands time. And, after all, the living Buddha is only occasionally en statue; at other times he receives like any other Tibetan. And whether one cares to associate with Tibetans at all, except for missionary purposes, is a question. That Buddhism, which with the Chinese is so pure and humane a religion, they have transformed into something so gross, it seems their very gods are unfit to look upon; the God of Happy Marriage impossible to show to a lady, as said the Russian gentleman who had made a collection of images, Chinese, Indian, and Tibetan! Chinese images are all fit for any one to see, as their classics are fit for any one to read; Indian images are questionable; but about Tibetan there seems no question at all, and he simply asked me to advance no farther into his museum, as my husband examined them. It was impossible for me even then not to think that living surrounded by those horrible emblems of divinity, his whole drawing-room full of them, must have some effect upon the unhappy man’s character. As I stood among them, an evil influence seemed to emanate from them, and the subsequent career of their unhappy collector confirms the theory; for but a few years later he was dismissed from the Chinese Customs for some crime too bad to mention, dying shortly afterwards. The collection has been bought by a German museum. Let us hope those dreadful Tibetan images are not now poisoning the minds of blue-eyed Germans.
Tibetan musical instruments for sacred purposes are made of virgins’ bones (the virgins killed expressly, we were told, but I doubt this); their sacred pledge-cups, of human skulls. They prefer necklaces each bead of which is made out of a tiny portion of a human skull, thus each bone representing a human life. Their idols are represented as wearing human skins, with girdles hung with human heads. So much as this I was allowed to see in this wonderful collection of gods and praying-machines, where meekly pious or coarsely jocund Chinese images sit cheek-by-jowl with graceful, slender Indian deities, and cruel, devilish Tibetan images. After all, no nation’s conception of God can be higher than the nation; but it is at least, as a rule, supposed to be as high. Judging them by their idols, it was better, I thought then, to keep out of the way of Tibetan Lamas—little thinking it was to be my good fortune in subsequent years to penetrate into Tibet itself, nor how rudely there I should find the Lamas treat me.
Even the tomb erected to the Banjin Lama at the Hoang Ssu (Yellow Temple) repelled me, in spite of intricate marble carvings, considered well worth the seeing. The workmanship was good, but the outline was simply hideous. Not even purple-blue sky, and golden sunshine, and old fir-trees, with golden-balled persimmons nestling beside them, relieved it from its native ugliness. But alongside of it was a great two-storied building in true Chinese style, that we indeed admired. It stood four-square, with a grandly massive porte-cochère, answering all the purposes of a verandah, so vast was it. We looked at the simple, graceful curves of its two stories of roofs, the upper definitely but only slightly smaller than the lower, and wished that, when it fell to our lot to own a house in China, it might be after this model. For two stories seem advisable for health, and nothing could surpass in roof-grace those grand curves, modelled, it is said, upon the upturning boughs of forest trees, though more probably upon the tent of former ages.
The Confucian Temple, where there are tablets to Confucius and his four great followers, may be called a satisfactory sight, and has remained open of late years. Viewed as a picnic place, it is delightful. The vast courts, with their old, old fir-trees, gave me far more pleasure even than the marble balustrades, or the ancient granite so-called drums we had gone to see. But even there the behaviour of the people was what anywhere else one would call insolent in the extreme. The importunity, sores, and dirt of the Peking gamins render them also a detestable entourage. Things reached their climax, however, at the Hall of the Classics. The open door was as usual banged to in our faces, as we came near; and we were then asked through the closed door how much we would give to get in. Then as soon as we got in, all the detestable rabble following us were let in too, much though I begged they might be kept out. I do not think I had up to that time seen anything so neglected and dilapidated as the Hall of the Classics, the building in all China which one would most expect to see kept in good order, nothing being so much esteemed in China as learning, and especially the learning of the ancients. Some workmen, with almost no clothing, were apparently employed in making it dirtier; but directly we entered they left off doing whatever it was, and devoted themselves to horse-play of the coarsest description, standing upright on their hands, pirouetting their feet over the heads of the crowd who came in with us, knocking some of them down, and rolling them in the dust. They even went so far as to sit down in their more than semi-nude condition on the same bench on which I was sitting, and as near me as possible; whilst all the while there was such a shouting and noise, it was impossible for my husband and me to speak to one another.
It is all very well to remind oneself one is in the presence of a great work, and to try and feast one’s soul upon proportions and perspectives in the presence of such lewd behaviour of people of the baser sort. To put it prettily, I was distracted by a great pity for people whose chances in life seemed to have been so small; in plainer English, my temper began to rise. The porcelain arch we had come to see was certainly beautiful, a masterpiece, but not soul-satisfying. We duly noticed the elaborate eaves, protected by netting from the birds. But then came the usual question: How much would we pay to get out? They locked the door in our faces, demanding more money before they would let us out. My husband could stand no more. He was just recovering from a dangerous illness; but he took up a big beam, and smashed open the door. It fell, lintel and all, and the latter so nearly killed a child in its fall the crowd was awed. This just gave us time to get on our donkeys. Then Babel broke loose again, and the storm continued till we had ridden half an hour away, our donkey-men nearly indulging in a stand-up fight in the end, one of them brandishing at the other a very gracefully carved sceptre, that I had just picked up at a fair, to my intense delight. “A nice fellow you are,” shouted one to the other. “You ate up all the biscuits, and now you don’t know the road. You are worth nothing at all.” So that was the way the biscuits had disappeared: the donkey-men had levied toll on our luncheons, and we had suspected the Peking gamins. As there are other porcelain arches in Peking, it might be as well for other visitors to avoid the Hall of the Classics altogether, we thought.
It is horrible to write expressing so much dissatisfaction in the presence of the far-famed masterpieces of a great empire, and the more so as we were very sorry to be leaving Peking, and should much have liked to spend a winter there, studying it all more thoroughly. But Sir Harry Parkes, when he came back to it, said it was returning to “Dirt! Dust! and Disdain!” and the only objection the passing traveller would be likely to make to this sentence is that it might contain a few more D’s.
The Observatory is a delightful sight—always barring the behaviour of the custodian, the most loathsome wretch I had yet encountered. And he wanted to feel me all over; did feel all over the Legation Secretary who kindly accompanied us, finally ransacking his pockets for more money than he had thought needful to bestow upon him. The weird, writhing bronze stands of the old instruments, with their redundancy of carving, will be for ever imprinted on my brain. Both those that stand below in a neglected courtyard, and those high above the wall, standing out against the sky, commanding the great granaries and the lovely mountains of the west, with the whole city of Peking lying in between, its courtyards filled with fine trees, giving the whole the aspect of a vast park rather than a populous city—all are beautiful. These wonderful instruments were made under the instructions of the old Jesuits, who so nearly won China to Christianity (would have done so, probably, but for the jealousy of the other religious orders), and who were for years the guides and counsellors of the Chinese Emperors. As to the outside of the pavilions within the Forbidden City, all one was allowed to see of them then, the glittering yellow Imperial roofs are like my childish idea of a fairy palace. There they stand upon their hills, dotted about among the trees, so glittering and graceful, I thought I should never tire of riding past the Green Hill, across the Marble Bridge.
The Roman Catholic Fathers, who have for centuries lived under the shadow of the Imperial Palace, were having then to turn out before the New Year, as also the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, with their innumerable foundling children. For it was said that the Empress herself intended to reside in the Fathers’ European house. It was she who originally so objected to the high towers of the church, as destructive of Fung shui. Then she was saying she observed ever since they were built she had been particularly fortunate, and she begged that church and towers and organ might be handed to her intact, together with Père Armand David’s valuable collection of birds. Fortunately, there are counterparts of these in Paris, for it was feared she might give one specimen to one favoured courtier and one to another, and thus destroy the whole value of the collection. For the shrewd Father, observing the extraordinary pride of the Chinese heart, beside their own somewhat demure-coloured birds and butterflies, had placed a collection of the most gorgeous specimens from Brazil and Java, that he might say drily, when showing Chinese officials round, “See how favoured are the other nations of the earth!” From the towers the Empress may possibly intend to look down upon the Palace garden, as no one hitherto has been allowed to do. For the Fathers were only allowed to retain their cathedral on condition that no one ever mounted the towers, from which a bird’s-eye view can be obtained of nearly the whole Palace garden. The church, it was then announced, she would use as an audience hall, and, it was added, receive foreigners in it. But such great changes as this have not yet come about in Peking. No people better than Chinese understand saying they will do a thing, and yet not doing it.
But, whatever happens in it, Peking, as long as it exists, can never lose its character of a great caravanserai, in which one is always coming upon the unexpected. For instance, a Red Button’s funeral, as we saw it one day, with about a hundred of the greatest ruffians, misshapen, patched, tattered or naked, hideous, yet rejoicing in being employed, each with a long red feather stuck strangely upright in the oldest-looking Jim Crow sort of felt hat, carrying a banneret or a parasol; the red chair of the official carried aloft; then afterwards paper images of his wives, etc.! Or, if not a dignitary’s funeral, one comes across a bird market, every man with a well-trained, red-throated bird sitting on a stick, crooked like a magnified note of interrogation, or a hooded hawk. Then a street row—filth unutterable! Perhaps a hundred camels sitting in little rings round their baggage, and not obstructing traffic in the least; elegant curios laid out in the dust of the street for sale; three carts all at once stuck in the same rut, all their horses and mules resting, panting, after vain efforts to get them out; Manchu women, with natural feet, very long silk gowns of the most villainously tawdry hue; or mandarins in exquisitely coloured silks, with only two wheels to their carts, and those far behind it, so as to indicate their dignity, twenty gaily clad retainers trotting after them on ponies! At one moment squalor and filth, such as to make one think of St. Giles’s as cleanly by comparison; at the next or at the same moment gorgeous shop-fronts, all of the finest carving, with most brilliant gilding.
But of all the sights on view in Peking, the finest sight to my mind was the British Legation—a grand old Chinese palace, at that time perfectly kept up, and gorgeous in colouring, deepest blue, pure green, golden-dragoned, and lighted up with vermilion touches. Whether one looked at the mortised beams, projecting outside as well as inside, and thus forming the most complex, highly coloured eaves, or at the decorated beams in the reception-rooms, each one a revelation of colour to a London art-decorator, the eye was alike perfectly satisfied. And at that time, owing to the exquisite taste of the then British Minister’s wife, as also probably to the liberality of Sir John Walsham himself, the decorations of the Embassy thoroughly harmonised with its architecture and colouring. If Peking outside was an embarrassment of D’s, the Legation was then all cleanliness, comfort, and charm.
One cannot help reflecting sadly on what an object-lesson the capital conveys to all the innumerable officials who have to travel thither, as also to the crowds of young men who go there year after year to compete for the highest honour to be obtained by competition—admission to the Hanlin College. When the distances are considered in an empire about as big as Europe, and also the difficulties of travel in a country without roads and without railways, it is the more astonishing this custom was ever started and can still be kept up. Each expectant is mulcted in a heavy sum, as bribes to the officials about the Palace. Thus the rabble of Peking live by tribute from the whole empire. And so rooted is the custom, even the gatekeeper at the British Legation would demand his toll, whilst the sums that have been paid to get into the Imperial Palace often run into six figures. And all who come to Peking know how things are administered there by bribery and corruption, and see for themselves that nothing there is cleaned, nothing ever put in order. As Sir Robert Hart himself says, but for the clouds of dust continually kept in movement by the winds, and brought in from the ever-increasingly impoverished country round, they must have been all dead men in Peking long ago. The dust serves as a great disinfectant, whilst it so permeates all clothing worn there, that no dress in which one has once gone out in Peking seems fit ever to put on again for any other purpose.
Peking is probably the only large city in the whole world where no arrangements whatever are made for sanitation or even for common decency. The result is alike startling and disgusting to the traveller. But on inquiry it becomes even worse. There were drains—sewers—in the time of the Ming Emperors, and it is now the duty of a special official to report upon their condition every year, and see that they are kept in order. But the drains are all closed up; and though a boy in peculiar clothing is let down into them each year, as it were at one end, it is another boy, though in the same peculiar clothing, who is taken out at the other end.
China is the land of shams and middle-men, and the official from the country sees all this, and, sore with the undue lightening of his own purse, goes home, having learnt his lesson to exact bribes himself, and himself rest satisfied with shams, and report all in order, when he knows that it is not so. Far from feeling ashamed of the state the roads in his own province have got into, he remembers those of Peking, that are so much worse. Indeed, through all the country, since the incoming of the Manchu Dynasty, it has been the deliberate official intention to neglect the roads, thus making it the more difficult for the people to assemble together and revolt against their alien rulers. Probably, too, he sees the Tsung-li Yamen, the office created of late years in order to transact business with European nations. Tsung-li Yamen sounds well, but the building is a dirty, dilapidated shed, that might pass muster for a cowhouse on an English gentleman’s estate, if it were cleaned and fresh painted. To the Chinese mind this building being set apart to hold interviews with the representatives of Foreign Powers sufficiently indicates in what esteem they are held by his Government, and what amount of courtesy he is intended to mete out to them.
The foreigner, on the other hand, travels away, having learnt his lesson too, if he be of a reflective mind, and that is, very briefly, that there is no hope for China under the present dynasty. The Manchus may have been a very fine people when they first entered China; but since then they have lived like gentlemen, according to the common saying, not earning their living, but as pensioners of the State, nominally ready to be called out to fight, if wanted, in time of war. They do not enter into business, they do not study, and they have lost their martial qualities and become as effeminate as Chinamen. The Chinese Empire has been decaying ever since it came into their hands; and ever since I have known China the Chinese have been saying the Manchu Dynasty has ruled its appointed number of years, and that it is now high time for what they call a Saviour of Society to appear, as so often in the past.
This Saviour of Society would probably have appeared long ago, but for the help the nations of Europe, and especially England, have given towards the centralisation of China. In the old days it is true the Viceroys were appointed from Peking; but each Viceroy ruled pretty well as he pleased in his own province, with his own exchequer, his own army, and his own navy. We found it inconvenient to deal with so heterogeneous a mass without any definite head, and threw our weight into the scale of the Chinese Empire. First we helped to crush the Taiping rebellion, which but for our intervention would probably have succeeded, and by force have made the Chinese people at least nominal Christians. Then through Sir Robert Hart the different Viceroys have been impoverished; the money that in former times would have gone to their private purses or to the administration of their provinces has been diverted to Peking. The theory was that it would be used for the good of the nation. But probably we shall some day know how much the Empress has used for her private pleasures, according to the recent indictment of her by the one great incorruptible Viceroy, Chang-chih-tung, and how much has been absorbed by Li Hung-chang, and all the army of Palace eunuchs and hangers-on.
The Chinese are a people of traders, and patient; they look on, and say mentally, “No belong my pigeon,” that is, “Politics are not my business.” But they dislike the Empress; they know the young Emperor has been used merely as a puppet; and as to the idea of a Chinese Empire, it is one that has never made its way into their heads. And thus it is a grave question, when in the last Chino-Japanese war all the great Yangtse was a moving procession of junks piled high with human braves, their pigtails coiled about their heads, and their black head kerchiefs giving them somewhat a piratical air, whether these men of Hunan ever meant to fight the Japanese. They would have been ready enough to fight the men of Anhui; and when the European settlement of Shanghai found itself between a regiment of either force, the position was so evidently critical, that very urgent remonstrances had to be addressed to the Chinese authorities to move away either one force or the other. But the Hunan men never fought the Japanese, and it remains a question whether they ever intended doing so.
Even the passing foreigner must feel at Peking that it is not the throbbing heart of a great country, as London is, as Paris is; but the remains of the magnificent camp of a nomad race, that has settled down, and built in stone after the fashion in which in its wanderings it used to build in wood.