CHINA
THE
LONG-
-LIVED
EMPIRE
ERSCIDMORE
LIBRARY
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
SANTA BARBARA
PRESENTED BY
MRS.
ERIC SCHMIDT
China
The Long-Lived Empire
THE EMPRESS DOWAGER
SHOWIN(; COSTUME BEKOKE TWENTY-FIVE YEAKS OK ACK
From a iwintiiig on eilk by Li 8bih C'liuan.
China
The Long-Lived Empire
By
Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore
Author of "Jinrikisha Days in Japan," and
"Java: The Garden of the East"
New York
The Century Co.
1900
Copyright, 1899, 1900, by
The Century Co.
The DeVinne Press.
TO
MY MOTHER
MY
MOST PATIENT READER
THIS BOOK IS
LOVINGLY DEDICATED
PEEFACE
In adding to the long list of books about China,
one .can only hope to give another individual expe-
rience and point of view, to add new testimony to
that so abundantly offered. No one can cover the
whole field, give the only key, or utter the last word ;
and during seven visits to China in the last fifteen
years, the mystery of its people and the enigma of
its future have only increased. It is such an impos-
sible, incomprehensible country that one labors vainly
to show it clearly to others. To the hypercritical
residents of treaty ports, aU writers have gone astray
among the plainest Chinese facts ; but as these same
critics often controvert one another, the outsider can
claim a certain privilege, while at the same time beg-
ging their indulgence for his views.
Every effort has been made to attain accuracy, but
in the face of so much conflicting testimony, of so
many contradictory statements, no one can expect
general indorsement. The chaos of all things Chinese
is well illustrated in the spelling or transliteration of
the characters for place-names. One finds Chifu and
Chefoo used with equal authority ; Chili, Chihli, or
Dshy-ly; Taku or Dagu; Kau-lung or Kowloou.
X PREFACE
Each European spells according to the genius of his
own language, and in several instances general Eng-
lish usage does not agree with the form or forms
given by Consul Playfair in his '' Geographical Dic-
tionary." The majority of sinologues are agreed that
the English spelling or trunshteration of place-names
used by the Imperial Maritime Customs on letter-heads
and postal canceling-stamps should be accepted by
foreigners in China. There is no society among Chi-
nese literati for the Romanization or uniform trans-
literation of Chinese characters ; and Chinese delegates
to international Oriental congresses in Europe are
usually silent, wliile German, Enghsh, and French
sinologues argue ferventl}' for or against te or teh, or
other fundamental syllables. The Twelfth Oriental
Congress at Rome, in 1899, left this transliteration
still an unfinished question, although, as one of the
secretaries of Section IV, it was my privilege to make
record of two long sessions of excited debate.
I have a great indebtedness to acknowledge to the
many authors whose works are quoted and referred to
in this volume, and to many residents in treat}' ports
whose courtesies and hospitalities relieved the depres-
sion which Chinese environment and the discouraging
state of China, the nation, too often cause.
E. R. S.
WAsni\(iT()\, D. C,
March 31, 1000.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. The Degenerate Empire 1
II. The Edge of Chihli ..... 13
III. Tientsin 20
IV. Shanhaikwan 30
V, As Marco Polo Went 50
VI. Pei-ching, the Northern Capital . . 61
VII. The Tatar City of Kublai Khan . . .85
VIII. Imperial, Purple Peking .... 102
IX. The Decadence OF the Manchus . . .117
X. TszE Hsi An the Great 127
XI. The Strangers' Quarter 143
XII. Christian Missions 158
XIII. Tatar Fus and Fairs 1G6
XIV. Chinese Peking 188
XV. Without the Walls 201
XVI. The Environs of Peking .... 215
XVII. The Great Wall of China 227
XVIII. The Valley of the Ming Tombs . . . 250
XIX. Suburban Temples 266
XX. To Shanghai 275
XXI. The Great Bore of Hangchow .... 294
xii CONTENTS
PAGE
XXII. In a Provincial Yamun 319
XXIII. The Lower Yangtsze 333
XXIV. The Eiver of Fragrant Tea-fields . . 353
XXV. A Thousand Miles up the Yangtsze . . 377
XXVI. A KwATszE ON the Yangtsze . . 406
XXVII. The City of Canton 430
XXVm. The Chinese New Year 444
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Empress Dowager— Showing Costume before
Twenty-five Years of Age . . . Frontispiece
From a painting on silk by Li Shili Ch'uan.
PAGE
Hunting-eagles Bound for Manchuria . . . .33
The Sea-shore End of the Great "Wall ... 41
Debris of the Great Wall of China . . . .45
A Manchurian Samovar 49
Native Boats on the Pei-ho River 53
"Walls of Peking, with Continuous Stream of Camels 63
"Walls of Peking, and Moat in "Winter ... 63
Map of Peking 67
Pailow at the "West End of Legation Street . . 71
The Manchu Head-dress 75
A Peking Cart 79
Porcelain Pailow before the Hall of Classics . . 89
British Tourist in Disguise 95
Sun-dial at the Hall of Classics 99
The "V^iceroy Li Hung Chang 113
A Manchu Hair-pin, Back View 129
Kang Yu "Wei '. ... 137
From " Harper's Weekly"
Fruit-stall in Front of the French Legation . , 147
At the Old Fu 169
xiii
xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Trained Birds 177
Feather-dusters for Sale— Entrance-gate of Lung-
FU-SSU 181
Honeyed Crab-apples 184
Pigeon Whistles ........ 187
Chrysanthemum Gardener 211
Chrysanthemum Garden— Winter Quarters . 211
Coal Mining and Transportation 217
A Caravan Outside the Walls of Peking . . . 229
In the Nankou Pass 235
The Pa-ta-ling Gate 241
The Great Wall . . .245
Catching Singing Insects 257
Chinese Inn near Peking 263
A Suburban Canal 283
In Old Shanghai 289
A Marble Bridge 296
Map of Hangchow Bay to Tsien-tang River, with
Waterways from Shanghai to Haininvj, Hang-
chow . . 301
The Great Bore 305
Junks Riding in on the After-rush . . .311
On the Bank 323
TjITtle Orphan Island, in the Yangtsze below Lake
PoYANG 343
In the <1k?:en-tea Country AROUND Lake PovANG . 349
The Native Bind, Hankow, at Low Water . . .361
Approach and Masonry Front ok Cavi; Temple near
Ichang 381
The Foreign Settlkment of Ichang and Tiir; Graveyard
Golf-links 387
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xv
PAGE
Stepping the Mast at Ichang 391
Otter-fishing at Ichang 395
Valley behind Ichang; Flooded Rice-fields; Ichang
Pagoda on the River-bank in the Distance . 399
Sails in the Gorge of Ichang, with a Red Life-boat in
the Foreground 403
Trackers on the Upper Yangtsze 409
Descending Ta Dung Rapids 413
Old Wrinkles, the Fo'c's'le Cook 418
Entrance of Ichang Gorge, Upper End .... 427
In the Temple of the Five Hundred Genii . . . 435
The Execution-ground at Canton .... 439
Five-storied Pagoda on City Wall, Canton . . . 443
A Canton Street 445
The Crooked Bamboo, Fa-Ti Gardens, Canton . . 449
The Creek between Shameen and the Native City,
Canton , 453
CHINA
THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
CHINA
THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
THE DEGENERATE EMPIRE
JHINA has been an old country for forty
centuries. It has been dying of old age
and senile decay for all of this century ;
its vitality running low, heart-stilling
and soul-benumbing, slowly ossifying
for this hundred years. During this wonderful cen-
tury of Western progress it has swung slowly to
a standstill, to a state of arrested existence, then ret-
rograded, and the world watches now for the last
symptoms and extinction.
But it lives, nevertheless, the ancestor kingdom
of all the world, the long-lived, undying empire.
Since time prehistoric, its vitality has often ebbed
low in recurring cycles, its history has often been re-
peated in these ages since it gave civilization, arts,
letters, languages to the Far East, saw ephemeral
Persia and Macedon, Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt,
Greece, and Rome rise and fall, watched them built
up and broken up, while it endured.
1 1
2 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
This present " break-up of China," a catch-phrase
wiiich has lately roused Occidental interest and anx-
iety, is an old story, very often repeated in this oldest
surviviii«^ empire of the world, an old-new subject
fittingly dismissed in Colonel Yide's small foot-note
thirty years ago : " It has broken up before."
Such a crisis, a mere break-up or change of dy-
nasty, is nothing new to Confucius's people, and China
will continue to break up at intervals for thousands
of more years to come ; the Chinese remaining the
one same, homogeneous, unchanging, incomprehensi-
ble people— the Chinese, only the Chinese, forever
tlie Chinese, no matter under what alien flag they
toil, by what outer people they are conquered, or be-
nevolently protected in inalienable spheres of influ-
ence. The physical endurance and vitality of the
people as a race are no more remarkable than the
endurance of the nation, of the body politic known as
China, the survival of the decayed, crumbling, honey-
combed old empire long after it should have logically
ceased to hold together or exist.
Defying age and time and progress and the harsh
impact of Western civilization, China continues, and
will continue, to be China— whether "for the Chi-
nese " only some centuries can tell. That same shib-
l)oleth of tlie handful of reformers to-day, ''China for
tlie Chinese," is thousands of j'ears old, too, heard
each time the em])ire was exploited by northern Ta-
tars, each time a native dynasty arose. It is raised
now, as time-honored custom ordains, when yet an-
other Tatar coiKpu'i-or advances from the north, and
vital tlinists are Ix-iiii:- dealt from the south, the east.
THE DEGENERATE EMPIRE 3
and the west. There was a worse state prevailing
when Confucius wandered from state to state, trying
to rouse the rulers and people, and time may have
only swung round again for another great moral
teacher to rise up, scourge and lead this certainly
chosen people.
The Occident is fortunate in assisting at one of the
many great downfalls, but it need not assume that
this is at all the end, the absolute and final ruin, the
last wreck and crash of the old empire, of its curious,
four-thousand-year-old civilization, all because the
present parvenu Manchu dynasty happens to fall. " It
has broken up before."
One may see now the same ancient, original China,
the same conditions as in the middle ages; and he
may have every theory upset, every sense and senti-
ment offended, by an old civilization in rank decay.
This spectacle awaits one everywhere in the eighteen
provinces, and will continue to, through the years, as
historical plays continue for days in a Chinese the-
ater. The spectator need not hasten to his seat be-
cause the curtain has risen. The present ''break-up"
will be more than a long- running trilogy on the
world's stage, and the audiences will go in and out
many times before the curtain falls on even this
Manchu interlude in the empire drama.
The world, our crude, young, boisterous Western
side of it, has only begun to discover Asia. Since
there are no more new worlds to conquer, it must
grapple with the oldest one. The Oriental is the
problem of the century to come, as man was the ques-
tion of the eighteenth century, and woman the mys-
4 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
tery of the one just closed. Our Western world only
discovered actual China in the year 1894, after the
battle of the Yalu River and the other sweeping victo-
ries of the Japanese war. Before that war, an imagi-
nary, fantastic, picturesque, spectacular, and bizarre
sort of a bogy China had haunted European minds
—that indefinable, romantic specter, the Yellow Peril,
that no lessons of previous military campaigns, nor
repeated exposures, could lay. The world wanted to
be humbugged about China. It hugged its delusions
to the last moment of absurdity, read fairy and Mun-
chausen tales, and was deaf to what Gordon and Yule
and Wilson distinctly said.
" One cannot but wonder, " said Abbe Hue, " how
people in Europe could ever take it into their heads
that China was a kind of vast academy peopled with
sages and philosophers. . . . The Celestial Empire
has much more resemblance to an immense fair,
where, amid a perpetual flux and reflux of buyers
and sellers, of brokers, loungers, and thieves, you see
in all quarters stages and mountebanks, jokers and
comedians, lal^oring uninterruptedly to amuse the
public."
"W^ien Oriental met Oriental in 1894, the bubble of
China burst, its measure was taken, and the huge
Humpty-Dumpty of the Far East, General Wilson's
" boneless giant," fell, and relegated the Yellow Peril
of militant Europe's nightmares to the consideration
of comic journals only.
No Occidental ever saw within or understood the
working of tlie yellow brain, which starts from and
arrives at a different point by reverse and inverse
THE DEGENERATE EMPIRE 5
processes we can neither follow nor comprehend. No
one knows or ever will really know the Chinese— the
heart and soul and springs of thought of the most
incomprehensible, unfathomable, inscrutable, contra-
dictory, logical, and illogical people on earth. Of all
Orientals, no race is so alien. Not a memory nor a
custom, not a tradition nor an idea, not a root-word
nor a symbol of any kind associates our past with
their past. There is little sympathy, no kinship nor
common feeling, and never affection possible between
the Anglo-Saxon and the Chinese. Nothing in Chinese
character or traits appeals warmly to our hearts or
imagination, nothing touches; and of all the people
of earth they most entirely lack " soul," charm, mag-
netism, attractiveness. We may yield them an intel-
lectual admiration on some grounds, but no warmer
pulse beats for them. There are chiefly points of con-
tradiction between them and ourselves.
Their very numbers and sameness appal one, the
frightful likeness of any one individual to all the
other three hundred odd millions of his own people.
Everywhere, from end to end of the vast empire, one
finds them cast in the same unvaiying physical and
mental mold— the same yellow skin, hard features,
and harsh, mechanical voice ; the same houses, graves,
and clothes ; the same prejudices, superstitions, and
customs ; the same selfish conservatism, blind worship
of precedent and antiquity ; a monotony, unanim-
ity, and repetition of life, character, and incident,
that offend one almost to resentment. Everywhere
on their tenth of the globe, from the edge of Siberia
to the end of Cochin China, the same ignoble queue
6 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
and the senseless cotton shoe are worn ; everywhere
this fifth of the human race is sunk in dirt and dis-
order, decadent, degenerate, indifferent to a fallen
estate, consumed with conceit, selfish, vain, cowardly,
and superstitious, without imagination, sentiment,
chivalry, or sense of humor, combating with most
zeal anything that would alter conditions even for
the better, indifferent as to who rules or usurps the
throne. There is no word or written character for
patriotism in the language, hardly good ground in
their minds and hearts for planting the seed of that
sentiment, but there are one hundred and fifty ways
of writing the cliaracters for good luck and long life.
And yet in no country have political martyrs ever
died more nobly and unselfishly than those reformers
executed at Peking in 1898. Although Mongol, Ming,
and Manchu won the empire by arms, the soldier is
despised, as much the butt of dramatists as the priest.
There is no respect or consideration for woman, who
is a despised, inferior, and soulless creature, a chat-
tel ; yet three times in these last forty years the
dragon throne has been seized and the country hur-
ried on to ruin by the same high-tempered, strong-
willed, vindictive old Manchu dowager odalisk.
It is a land of contradictions, puzzles, mysteries,
enigmas. Chinese character is only the more com-
plex, intricate, baffling, ijiscrntable, and exasperating
eacli time and the longer it confronts one. Whatever
decision one arrives at, he is soon given reason to
retreat from it.
I gave up the conundrum of this people, abjured
" that oilskin mystery, tlie Cliinaman," more devoutly
THE DEGENERATE EMPIRE 7
each day of six visits to China, and on the seventh
visit the questions were that many times the more
baffling. One can both agree and disagree with the
four-day tourist, who sums up the Chinese convin-
cingly, with brutal, practical, skeptical common sense,
and can echo his irreverent and wholesale condemna-
tion and contempt when he has once seen the land
and the revolting conditions in which the people live.
One agrees and disagrees, too, with the sinologues,
who are usually sinophiles, that the Chinese are the
one great race and fine flower of all Asia, a superior
people, the world's greatest and earliest teachers, its
future leaders and rulers, the chosen people; China
a vast reserve reservoir of humanity to repeople and
revive decadent, dying Europe ; the Chinese destined
tounderlive, override, and outdo all the pale races ; the
whole hope of humanity bound up in this yellow people.
Everything seems dead, dying, ruined, or going to
decay in this greatest empire of one race and people.
There seems no living spring nor beating heart in the
inert mass. Religion, morality, literature, the arts
and finer industries are all at least comatose. Their
three great religions are dead ; two systems of ignoble
superstitions live. Literature is a fossil thing, all hol-
low form and artifice, the empty shell of dead con-
ventions. The arts have died, the genius of the race
has fled. They have lost the powers they once com-
manded, and have acquired no new ones. Tliere is
little joy, light-heartedness, or laughter in the race,
and their greatest virtue, filial piety, is demoralized,
degraded by the soulless, craven cult of ancestor-
worship. China in its present stage, with the desper-
8 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
ate problems it presents, is a melancholy and depressing
place, intensely interesting, full of "questions," but not
enjoyable in enjoyment's literal sense.
While India and Japan, on either side of it, overflow
with tourists the year round, and railways, hotels,
couriers, guides, and guide-books minister to this an-
nual army, China, although open to foreign trade
many years before the adjacent islands, lacks all this
life and industry. Neither Murray nor Baedeker has
penetrated the empire,— they have no need to; none
calls them,— and Cook has only touched the edge of it
at Canton. No pleasure-travelers make a tour of
China, and the round-the-world tourist, the commonly
and contemptuously termed ''globe-trotter" of the
Far East, usually sees Shanghai during the few hours
his steamer anchors at Wusung ; "■ does " Canton as
an excursion from imperial, model, British Hong-
kong, and vies with his fellow-tourists in extravagant
descriptions of its general offensiveness, and the haste
with which he leaves it.
In the spring and autumn there are a few tourists in
Peking, but they are not a twentieth, not a fiftieth,
of the travelers who pass the coasts of China on the
grand round of the globe. No inducements are
offered, no jn'ovision is made, for the tourist in China ;
nothing ministers to, no one caters to, his wants and
needs. The foreign residents in treaty ports look
coldly and listen ])atiently to those who wish to ti'avel
in the interior, and a tourist's zeal oozes away in their
presence. Every dejiarture from railway or steam-
ship routes is like a journey of ex])l<)ration ; })nt
without the excitement, surprises, and rewards of real
THE DEGENERATE EMPIRE 9
discovery, one's energy soon lags in the opening of
personal routes, and one longs to be on a beaten track,
to have a coupon ticket, to be personally conducted
in flocks. The hostility of the people, combined with
a certain fraternity and equality ; the close shoulder-
ing and elbowing of the filthy crowds whose solid,
stolid, bovine stare, continued for hours, unpleasantly
mesmerizes one ; the inevitable wrangling, haggling,
and bribing before one can get in or out of any show-
place, and the awful Chinese voice— in fact, the whole
scheme and plan of the world Chinese — wear upon one,
'' get upon one's nerves," in a way and to a degree
difficult to explain. Then nothing Chinese seems
worth seeing ; one has only a frantic, irrational desire
to get away from it, to escape it, to return to civili-
zation, decency, cleanliness, quiet, and order. The
mere tourist, the traveler without an errand or an ob-
ject beyond entertainment, finds that inner China
does not entertain, amuse, please, or soothe him
enough to balance the discomforts. He soon feels
that he must go, and China's edge is paved with broken
intentions, travelers' plans and itineraries abandoned
with zeal. He may be surprised by many things,
deeply interested, but admiration is a reserve senti-
ment, not often called upon in the course of any
tour. '' Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of
Cathay " understates too eloquently.
The bibliography of China is so extensive that it
should be the best-known country of the East. Since
"Marco Polo, Friar Odoric, Ibn Batuta, and Rashuddin,
a legion of travelers have written ; but Marco Polo
and these others without Colonel Yule would be less
10 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
known to the Western world than Omar without
Fitzgerald, and Colonel Yule's commentaries upon
the Venetian and the other early visitors furnish a
small encyclopedia of things Chinese. The '^ Lettres
Edifiantes " of the Jesuit priests and their memoirs
are a storehouse of contemporary history. With the
opening of China, a little group of scholarly mis-
sionaries began their literary labors, and there have
resulted the standard dictionaries and grammars
and inniimerable translations of the Chinese classics.
Those two solid volumes, " The Middle Kingdom, "
by the American scholar and missionary. Dr. Wells
Williams, hold all of China, and are the treasury for
everything— histor}-, topography, literature, customs,
philosophy, religion, and arts. Archdeacon Gray has
described the social life and customs of the Cantonese,
and Dr. Doolittle those of the Fu-kien people. No-
thing can ever displace Dr. Arthur Smith's " Chinese
Characteristics," the keenest and most appreciative
study of the Chinese human being yet made ; and
his "Chinese Village" is a worthy sequel. Other
Protestant teachers who made notable contributions
are Edkins, Macgowan, Parker, Hart, Milne, Moule,
Morrison, ]Martin, Williamson, Holconibe, and Reid.
Abbe Hue remains first of all travelers in this cen-
tury, his narrative being as vivid and true, as piquant,
to-day as a half-(;entury ago. After the abbe, the
best books of pure travel, the most interesting nar-
ratives, liave been written by women — jNIiss Gordon-
Cumniiiig and ]Mrs. Bisliop.
The Britisli consular service in China is a long roll
of literarv honor, the line of scholars and WTiters
THE DEGENERATE EMPIRE 11
beginning with that most eminent pioneer, Sir Thomas
Wade, by whose method the sinologues of this gener-
ation acquired the Chinese language. Sir Harry
Parkes, Sir Chaloner Alabaster, Sir Robert Hart,
Messrs. Hosie, Baber, Parker, Watters, Margary,
Grosvenor, Bourne, Douglass, Legge, Giles, and Bush-
ell have worthily continued the literary traditions of
that eminent service.
The direct, practical, clear-headed, straightforward
account of China given by the American soldier,
General James H. Wilson, is the most interesting
book for the general reader, and the best contribu-
tion by any military man, while Sir Charles Beres-
ford's broadly compiled yellow book puts commercial
and military China in the clearest light. Political
writers— Lord Curzon, Henry Norman, Messrs. Boul-
ger, Chirol, Colquhoun, Gorst, Gundry, Krausse, and
Morrison— have presented every phase of each Chi-
nese question as it rose, while the reviews and cur-
rent literature teem with discussions of the '^ open
door" and the envied spheres.
Chinese art has been epitomized in M. Paleologue's
admirable handbook, ''L'Art Cliinois." M. Grandi-
dieiT's ".La Ceraniique Chinois," Mr. Hippisley's ''Cata-
logue of Chinese Porcelains" (written for the United
States National Museum), Dr. Bushell's superb " Ori-
ental Porcelain" (the catalogue of the collection of
Mr, W. T. Walters of Baltimore, and a unique ex-
ample of the art of book-making), Mr. Golland's
''Chinese Porcelains," and Mr. Heber Bishop's ex-
haustive work on jade, leave little to be said in the
field of art.
12 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
French, German, and Russian writers in lesser
numbers have been as zealous in exploiting the long
lived empire, and each political crisis brings a trib-
ute of books in all languages. As the West is only
now awakening to China, discovering that unknown
quantity, nothing need be discouraged that helps on
acquaintance with any of its features or phases.
Each book of the moment is an aid to comprehending
the incomprehensible, deciphering the undecipheral)le,
and working at the puzzle which other centuries may
solve.
II
THE EDGE OF CHIHLI
[S one steams in from the Yellow Sea
westward across the Gulf of Pechili,the
muddy waters of the Tientsin or Pei-ho
River come far out to meet one, tinging
the ocean to the same dingy, yellow-
brown hue as the shores of the Great Plain of China.
Twelve miles offshore, out of sight of the low-lying
land's edge, the mud-bars arrest navigation, and at
low tide are covered by only from three to five feet
of water. Even at high tide, large ships must lighten
their cargoes at the outer bar, and often then push
their way and slide over the upper inches of a soft,
sticky ooze that boils from the propeller-blades like
bubbling mud-springs on a volcano's side.
Ships finally enter the river's narrow mouth be-
tween the two Taku forts, solid embankments of mud
and millet-stalks, now containing superior modern
batteries. It was off the mud-flats of the south fort
that the British fleet and troops were fired on in June,
1859, the act which moved the neutral spectator, the
American commodore Tatnall, to say, " Blood is
13
14 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
thicker than water," to lower his boat and rescue
those so perilously placed, and, with his flag flying,
continue to tow boat-loads of British marines into
action. Deep ditches encircle these strongholds at
the rear, " to keep the soldiers from straying away,"
a great viceroy explained.
The Tientsin River, as it is called for sixty miles
from the sea to the city of Tientsin, is a tortuous
stream that calls for a short ship and a skilful pilot
to round its bends and elbows. Before the railway,
one had to endure the tedium of that serpentine sixty
miles' voyage to the city, only twenty-five miles dis-
tant in air-line. All the devices known to the navi-
gators of our Upper Missouri were employed, and
there were exciting times when the ship's bow nosed
the bank and scraped the friable soil away. Often
anchors were set in fields and bow or stern pulled
round or pulled off, the anchor tearing up the earth
and giving Chihli fields their first touch of subsoil-
plowing. From high ships' decks one could easily
survey intimate village and farm-house life in drear
mud hovels, where women with crippled feet, and
ape-like children with bare brown bodies and flying
queues, seem far away from and below any equality
with other humanity.
The Tientsin River has its floods, when the soft
embankments crumble away and the water pours
back upon the low country, forming shallow lakes
miles in extent, wrecking homes, destroying crops,
and ishinding vilhiges of starving peasants in the
midst of their flooded fields. Then wretched people
wade out and grub in the flood and wreck, or pole
THE EDGE OF CHIHLI 15
boats about among the stalks of kao-liang, or giant
millet, seeking to rescue any ear of grain or single
grain, even any bit of leaf or stalk that may feed and
warm them through the dread winter. Starvation
awaits a certain number of these people in years of
flood, and they accept it patiently as the thing always
expected, the lot of some body of toilers somewhere
in China each year.
The river-bed shallows to two and three feet when
the banks have been breached and the flood-waters
have turned fields to lakes, and then for months the
city of Tientsin is without steamer communication ;
even tugs and lighters pass with difficulty, and men-of-
war are securely impounded at Tientsin's river-front.
The mandarins have still the most childish ideas of
engineering works, and the money devoted to Chinese
reclamation and repair of embankments is frittered
away and stolen.
Under such conditions a railway from the sea-coast
was more than a blessing; but its first section was
built by subterfuge, strategy, and deceit, in the face
of the determined opposition of the Chinese officials.
A little seven-mile tramway connecting the Kaiping
coal-mines with the canal at the head of the Pehtang
River, above the Taku forts, was gradually converted
into a real railway ; the British engineer at Kaiping
built his first locomotive by stealth ; and, before the
obstructing officials knew it, there was a narrow-gage
line, fifty miles in length, in actual operation. Diplo-
macy was required to keep the viceroy in the path of
progress after he had unwittingly arrived there ; but
the point was won, and the railway was regularly
IC CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
built from the mines to Tongku, on the river-bank,
and thence to Tientsin, and on to Peking.
Bribes and authority easily secured the right of way
over graves and through fields, filial piety pocketing
its solace or timidly holding its tongue when the rail-
way passed over ancestral graves, and fung-sJud Seeing
before the persuasive dollar. Stupid, careless, and deaf
people were always being knocked down and run over,
—they even lay down on the nice, dry track to rest
or nap,— and the railway people, fearing mobs and
opposition, paid for those lives, but not at interna-
tional indemnity rates. With such a means at hand
of acquiring a fortune for their surviving families, the
track was the resort of speculative suicides, until the
railway managers stopped paying for lives lost,— for
not even a coal-mine could meet that steady financial
drain,— and the suicidal mania ceased as suddenly.
In all travel one meets nothing like the railway-
station at Tongku, where one lands from the steamer, a
microcosm of the dirtiest, noisiest, and most hopelessly
ill-governed empire on earth. We have mushroom
towns in America, hasty and noisome growths at the
end of track and along the line of new railroads, but
nothing can match the Chinese '' mushroom " of new
Tongku, slummiest of slums, more Augean than any-
thing of Augoa's could have been, the last and worst
alfront to the eyes, ears, and nose, Chihli's sufficient
revenge for having i)rogress put upon it. The allies,
in 18G0, exhausted two languages in attempting to
suggest the filth of old Tongku, and time and progress
have but intensified the situation.
The words, " Imperial Chinese Railway," have an iiii-
THE EDGE OF CHIIILI 17
posing sound, and one is ferried ashore from anchored
ships with vague expectation of Oriental splendor—
perhaps of yellow-bodied coaches and dragon-mouthed
smoke-stacks on gaudy engines. One expects a Chi-
nese railway to be different from anything else he has
seen. And it is. The landing at Tongku is an ex-
perience from which even the oldest resident in China
quails, and after which the newcomer wishes himself
home again. China is not to be transformed by a little
thing like a railway, nor thrown from the groove of
ages by the shriek of an iron horse. The iron horse
has been transformed instead, translated, transliter-
ated, Chinese- ed, so quickly and entirely that one
has to admit certain indomitable qualities in the race
that can put its mark so indelibly on the most alien
thing from beyond its world. China is China to the
last word, triumphant over all agents of progress and
regeneration. The locomotive may pant and shriek
on a side-track, but its noise can be drowned by the
ordinary altercation of Tongku coolies when boat-
loads of intending train-passengers approach the shore.
Custom orders that one set of coolies shall take the
luggage from the boats to the bank, and another set
of coolies transport it to the station, where all lug-
gage is weighed and charged for, and, without label
or check, thrown in an open box-car, at the mercy of
the weather and the hordes who crowd into those
same open boxes as the only accommodation provided
for third-class travel.
Tongku station platform was as free as any street
or highway of the empire. The whole mushroom vil-
lage swarmed there at train-time, even criminals in
18 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
cangues strolling up and down and staring one out of
countenance, while hucksters bawled on every side,
and coolies quarreled with one another and elbowed
Europeans with that freedom and equality that is
greater among the greasy and ragged millions of this
unsavory empire than in farthest western America.
A dirty waiting-room received us when we had picked
a way through the slums and sewery runs supposed
to be streets, and itinerant cooks settled close by
the door with their sizzling kettles and nameless
things.
The long cars, like the common day-coaches of
American railways, are fitted with wooden seats, and
at each end closed compartments, or coupes, seclude
Chinese women and great folks at an extra charge.
There are seemingly no springs under the body of the
coach, and the first-class passenger finds himself
thumped about like a load of freight. Without car-
pet or cushion or curtain, carving, gilding, or surplus
splendors, one is jolted along at the rate of twenty miles
an hour. There were curtains and cushions in the first-
class cars at the inauguration of railway travel, but
the Chinese passengers took away every loose thing
when they left the cars, even to the brass catches,
snaps, and springs of window-fastenings. The vice-
roy's private car was looted in the same way when it
first went out, the great man's servants and guests
vying with cacli other in the sack of public property.
Tientsin station is Tongku station ten times con-
founded, and an entire stranger might fear for his
life in the first mad onslaught of the baggage-coolies
with their carrying-poles. One stands aside and
TfitJ EDGE OF CHIHLi Id
watches one's iron-nerved boy deal with the shrieking
madmen, extricate the small traps from the grasp of
unauthorized dozens, retrieve the trunks from the
box-car switched to a far side-track, and finally in
some way get one ferried across the narrow river and
borne to the hotel in a clumsy jinrikisha. The im-
pedimenta follow slung from poles between men's
shoulders, a rapid transfer in which the heaviest trunks
are handled like eggs, and nothing is wrecked or turned
topsy-turvy— an unexpected mercy and gentleness
after the riot and pandemonium that precede it.
Ill
TIENTSIN
jIENTSIN has now become but a way-
station to the tourist, the place where
he gets his passport and a native trav-
eling servant, and makes ready to visit
the Great Wall and Peking. The foreign
settlement, within the crenelated mud wall which
Sankolinsin built as defense against the allies in 1800,
lies beside the most populous and turbulent city of
the north, and is always protected by one or two
foreign men-of-war. The French and Japanese keep
gunboats there at all seasons, and the British and
American admirals detail a ship in alternating win-
ters ; this detail for a season at Tientsin being always
pleasing to naval men. Shut out from the rest of the
world when the river freezes in November, all com-
mercial nctivity at an end until the ice breaks in
spring, the mails coming by slow couriers overland
from Shanghai and Cliefoo, the community gives it-
self over to gaieties of every kind, with the diplo-
matic colony at Peking leading the dance further on.
There is skating on the river, but no sleighing on that
20
TIENTSIN 21
wind-swept plain, whose climate is as dry and ex-
hilarating as that of Dakota for nine months of the
year, followed by intense heat and a short rainy sea-
son of tropical downpours and saturating dampness
in midsummer. An ice-breaker at the mouth of the
Pei-ho might keep the river open, or steamers could
regularly run to some of the small railroad towns on
the coast near the Great Wall; but others than the
Chinese grow conservative when they live long in the
land of the queue.
The old walled city of Tientsin, at the northern
terminus of the Grand Canal, holds with its suburbs
more than a million people, and stretches along the
river in compact mass for six miles. It is built of
gray bricks, has dingy-tiled roofs, and, without space,
splendor, greenery, or cleanliness anywhere about it,
is but a huge warren in whose narrow stone runs un-
ceasing processions of people stream and scream and
scold their way from dawn to dark. A few streets
have been widened or made passable for jinrikishas,
but blockades are frequent and to be remembered.
No stranger doubts the fighting qualities of the
Chinese after he has been a few times blockaded in old
Tientsin's streets.
The two great events of Tientsin's history were
the war and the winter of the allies' camps (1860-Gl),
and the massacre of 1870. The severe lesson taught
the Chinese in the allies' war had not lasted them ten
years when popidar anti-foreign frenzy turned upon
the orphanage of the French Sisters of Charit}', and
the mob massacred twenty foreigners, including the
French consul, all the sisters, and two Russians, and
22 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIEE
burned the cathedral and convent. They were mov-
ing upon the settlement to put all foreigners to death,
when— rain dispersed them ! " I can hear the gongs
and the shouts yet," said one Tientsin resident, who
as a child saw the flames of the burning cathedral,
and the bodies of the murdered nuns floating down
the river past the ship on which the residents took
refuge for a week. A summary punishment, another
occupation of Peking, some actual humiliation, and a
visible lesson of the consequences of such an outrage
would have saved thirty years of lost time in China,
but France was in the agony of its great war. There
were no troops to spare, and home questions were of
such import that things could not be managed with
a free hand in China. The so-called degradation of a
few officials, the execution of twenty alleged ring-
leaders of the riot, the payment of an indemnity, and
the despatch of an embassy of apology to Paris, were
the only results. Since that unhappy summer, Tien-
tsin has never been left without its foreign gunboats,
and Li Hung Chang, who was made viceroy of Chihli
after the massacre, took up his residence in the di-
lapidated-looking yamun by tlie river-bank, and for
twenty years was the real ruler of China as regards
its foreign policy. The war with Japan brought his
downfall, and the unique power he had exercised no
longer appertains to the Chihli viceroyalty.
There was a court in miniature there then, with all
its cliques, cabals, and factions, and intrigues were rife
about the viceroy's shabby yamun. In 1887 Tien-
tsin swarmed with concessionaries of all nations,
seeking to build railways, to establish banks and tele-
TIENTSIN 23
phones, to wake up China and start her in the ways
of progress. British, French, Belgian, German, and
American agents vied with one another for the vice-
roy's favor. The clever Frenchmen laid a miniature
track and ran a miniature engine and cars in the
palace grounds at Peking for the amusement of the
Empress Dowager and the boy Emperor ; and others
sent gilded steam-launches as playthings for the pal-
ace folk. Every night was gay with great dinners at
the foreign hotel on the river-bank at Tientsin, and
mandarin minions from the viceroy's yamun rode to
and fro in sedan-chairs, and made the garden and
river-bank gay with the lanterns of their rank. The
great concession went to an American syndicate that
year, and then all the disappointed ones and the
British press in China united in one long howl and a
chorus of abuse of Li Hung Chang, whom they called
a traitor and another khedive about to ruin his coun-
try and hand it over to a foreign despotism. They
prophesied the dissolution of China if the railways
were built and banks established with the surplus
silver capital then weighing down America. The
American press unexpectedly and unpatriotic ally took
up the refrain and turned upon the American conces-
sionaries. Instead of rejoicing in the victory over
the rivals of all nations, the yellow journals berated
all the Americans concerned, until Chinese suspicions
were aroused and progress was held back another
ten years.
Ten years later the concession-seekers were as
many, but the bubble of China's reputation had been
pricked by the war with Japan, and Li Hung Chang,
24 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
disgraced and deposed from power, was wandering
about Europe at the behest of the great Manehus, who
would not tolerate him at Peking. These greedy-
officials, furious at the profits that foreign intercourse
and concession-seeking had unexpectedly and unsus-
pectedly poured into the Tientsin yamun, had vested
the consideration of railway measures and all conces-
sions in an omnivorous board at Peking, and con-
cession-seeking was a more expensive, a more cautious,
concealed, and strategic game than before ; and over
all was the dread shadow of Russia. With the cus-
toms revenues pledged for decades to come to pay
the war indemnity loans, one certain source of income
was gone, and the imperial hand fell so heavily on
provincial officials that no money was left to spend
on government railway extension. Chinese capital
would not respond to Chinese government a])peals to
subscribe, and it became apparent that only foreign
capital would ever build railways in China. One
progressive Chinese official even said in his despair:
" Oh, why did not the English keep the country
when they were at Peking in 18G0? Then we should
have had progress in an honest and rational way.
Now we have been delivered over, sold to the Rus-
sians, and all Europe will devour us piecemeal. Our
end has come."
Tientsin's siglits and sho})s are few and small com-
j)ared with Peking's, and its specialties are not many.
Its position at the head of the Grand Canal made it
for centuries the great market and exchange where
the Mongol horse-breeders and the camel-trains from
the north brought their i)i-oducts to barter for those
TIENTSIN 25
of the soutli. All the tribute rice from the southern
provinces once passed in endless lines of red junks
up the canal and the river to the imperial granaries
beside the walls of Peking ; but that tribute has been
nearly all compounded now, and with the silting up
of the Grand Canal and its invasion by the floods of
the Yellow River the great traffic from the south has
been diverted to coasting steamships. It carries one
back and away from the modern world to meet the
caravans that still come to Tientsin, bringing wool,
hides, grease, and furs from Mongolia, the soft-footed,
shaggy camels of Central Asia treading and swaying
in single file beside the telegraph and the railway-
track. The great tea-caravans start from the river-
bank, each camel loaded with baskets of brick-tea,
and his slow tread rivals the pace of the coolies of the
cargo-boats, who haul brick-tea up the river to Tung-
chow, where the baskets are loaded on camels for
their slow transit to the heart of the vast continent.
The great shag of the camePs wool is shed and
clipped in the scorching summers, and many weavers
supply the so-called Tientsin rugs for all China and the
Far East. Until recent years they wove a close, firm,
hard carpet, with a long, thick nap, using the wool in
the natural brown color, with two blues and a black in
good old Chinese geometric and conventional designs.
The corrupting touch of foreign trade has given tlie
weavers the cabbage-rose and the picture pattern, lent
them solferino and all the aniline colors, and led them
to produce coarse, thin, loosely woven carpets that
wear flat in a few months and may be punctured at
the first beating. The carael's-hair rug retains for
26 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
months the awful caravan odor, overpowering in damp
weather, but a good airing in sun or frosty air will
dissipate it. From eighteen cents a square foot for a
good, thick, closely woven rug of the old order, the
price trebled in ten years ; yet buyers are ten times as
many as they were before, and one dreads to think
what the Tientsin rug may become in another decade.
The '' Tientsin date," the fruit of the jujube-tree pre-
served in honey, is another specialty, but of Mongol
origin or adaptation. The Tientsin figurines are as
pleasing in their way as those of Tanagra, and as
faithfully represent the people as they are to-day and
have been, together with the cliief figures of history
and legend. The humble modelers in clay are found
deep in the burrows of the walled city, and their
shelves show all the types and costumes, all the classes,
callings, and occupations of the empire. One cannot
buy modern portraits yet, and the wizened old artist
of the inspired thumb looked blank when I insisted
upon having him make me Li Hung Chang, bullet-
mark, peacock feather, yellow jacket, and all. The
figures are so cleverly done, so expressive, often so
humorous, that one buys recklessly at a few cents
apiece— to bestow them all upon tlie '' boy" in the end,
since these solid lumps of dried mud are heavy and
easily broken, stream with moisture, and even resolve
themseh es into shapeless clay again in exceptionally
damp seasons.
There are many grimy temples and a Mohamme-
dan mosque in the cnty ; streets of silk- and fur- and
sweetirieat-shops, and a few curio-sliops, wliere tlie
overflow and the suspicious pieces from Peking shops
TIENTSIN 27
are vended. Peking palace and yamun thieves make
Tientsin their "fence," and strangers about to leave
by the first steamer sometimes find fate flying in their
faces with the offer of treasures that resident collec-
tors seek in vain.
A specialty of the place, known best to the Ameri-
can navy, is the blood-curdling tale of the " Tientsin
ghost." Every ward-room has heard it, until officers
know it by heart; cadets learn it at the Annapolis
Academy, and when, as ofl&cers, they come to Tien-
tsin on a first Eastern cruise, immediately want to
see the house where it happened. The very oldest
foreign inhabitants of the place told me they had
never heard of any such spook, and the new American
consul had been told it once, — somewhere, awhile
ago, — but did not really remember. Naval officers of
literary bent have put it in print in American news-
papers, each giving it a new turn or detail, and each
promptly taken to task for not telling it "as I first
heard it on the Tennessee,'" the Oneida, or the Ashuelot,
men-of-war of ancient and shipwrecked memory. In its
simplest form the story of the Tientsin ghost records
that one autumn a newly arrived American consul
found that the only house for rent in the settlement
was a haunted one, which had been untenanted for
some seasons. The younger officers of the American
gunboat wintering at Tientsin promised to lay the
ghost for him at once and for all. A supper was
served late that night in the dining-room, and at mid-
night the toast-master rose, lifted his revolver over-
head, and holding his glass in the other hand, said :
" Here 's to the ghost ! " At the instant, shriek after
28 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIEE
shriek, the scuffle of feet up above and continuing
down the stairway to the very door, paralyzed the
armed company. As the first man sprang into the
hall, the wind from an open garden door extinguished
the candles on the supper-table, and groping forward,
he fell over a prostrate body, and his fingers slipped in
warm blood. Lights were struck, and at the foot of the
stair lay the body of a brother officer, who, listening
to all the ward -room bravado and talk, had concealed
himself in the upper part of the house beforehand to
surprise them. He had been surprised himself by a
gang of Chinese thieves that used the house for a hid-
ing-place, and was hacked to pieces by them as he fled
down the staircase.
And the most elderly resident had heart not only
to deny the whole time-honored, standard, ward-room
and academy classic, but to go into details f>f expo-
sition and rational arguments, to suggest examining
consular-court records, naval log-books, and archives,
and to support with Scotch firmness his own imme-
diate verdict of " Bosh ! "
Tientsin's gay social life is by no means limited to
the winter season, while the river is closed and the two
or three gunboats add their quota to pleasure-loving
circles. It has the si)ring and autumn races, when
tlie Mongolian ponies win cups, and pools sold after
the most elaborate European racing fashions make
and break investors. It lias its public park, where
whole dinner-companies repair on summer evenings,
their coffee following, while they listen to concerts by
the viceroy's band, which, first instituted by Li Hung
Chang under a Manila band-master, has attained cred-
TIENTSIN 29
itable proficiency. That great viceroy is also remem-
bered by the community as the donor of a dozen or
more pairs of enormous embroidered curtains for the
Gordon Hall, where the gay community dances its
winters away, holds banquets, meetings, and theatri-
cals—the same enormous, bordered curtains, with
maxims or symbolic figures embroidered on red
grounds, which Chinese princes and great ones hang
in their halls on festivals and holidays. An excellent
public library is housed in the same fine town hall,
and the books on the shelves attest the tastes and
culture of the community.
IV
SHANHAIKWAN
^T is only eiglit hours by train from Tien-
tsin down to and along the shore of the
sea to Shanhaikwan, the most pictur-
esque of the many walled towns on the
Chihli coast, and where the Great Wall of
China dips down to the sea. After leaving the Taku
mud-flats and those salt-marshes where the alUes
fought and floundered in 1860, one follows a narrow,
fertile plain between the mountains and the sea, wliich,
in mid-September stacked over with millet, only
needed ripening pumpkins to complete an American
autumn picture. Harvest groups were at work in
every field, and clumsy little wooden-wheeled carts
were being drawn by ponies toward villages with
whitewashed walls. Tall and short millet, buckwheat,
dwarf cotton, and sweet-potato patches were yielding
their abundance all the way to the edge of ^lanchuria,
a land of plenty, in strong contrast to the drowned
and muddy fields, the flooded villages, and the starving
people back by the Tientsin's banks. The kao-liang,
or giant millet, is nearly our sorghum, and it j'ields
'M
SHANHAIKWAN 31
a rich syrup, a coarse sugar, and a distilled drink.
The stalks are fodder and fuel and building-material,
and the grain is the chief food of the people. At
each station, venders of grapes, apples, white pears,
and chestnuts besieged the train. The fruits lack in
flavor, but the big, round red grapes are peculiar to
Chihli, and are kept by skilful farmers in stone jars
through the winter, as well as the long white "finger-
grapes," which are pictures of beauty. My "boy"
Chung, aged about forty, and engaged because of a
strong Sioux countenance and a harsh voice, with
which he could outbellow the others of Bashan, ate
of all these fruits continuously, and of melon-seeds,
peanuts, dumplings, dough-balls, and varnished lumps
besides. But when ten cooked pears may be bought
for six cash, the head of a family may eat heartily
even on wages of seventy-five Mexican cents a
day, and have blue brocade coats and mulberry satin
trousers for common wear.
The women, children, and maid-servants of some
provincial grandees were hurried into the little boxes
of coupes in the first-class car, and the doors quickly
shut upon their rainbow garments, gorgeously dressed
heads, and painted faces. The masters and their upper
underlings sprawled at ease on the seats in the main
body of the car, doubled their bodies in remarkable
fashion, and let their feet climb the window-frames.
Pipes bubbled and smoked all day long, and the harsh
throat-tones of these northern people grated steadily
on the ear above the roar of the trucks. Servants
with second-class tickets rode with us and chummed
with mandarins, and half of the passengers hung their
32 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
uncovered heads out of the windows, indifferent to
the hot sun, the smoke, or cinders. A Russian mis-
sionary priest distributed tracts in Chinese, and told
me the people were much more tolerant, chastened,
and subdued since the war, and that in time the or-
thodox faith would do much with them. A telegraph
operator, a young Chinese graduated from Victoria
College at Hongkong, who spoke perfect English,
was on his way to a new station on the Manchurian
line, and he viewed his prospects as a young New-
Yorker would have viewed a sojourn in the buffalo
country in the far West before the Pacific railways
were built.
In the open box-car ahead of us, cattle, sheep, and
pigs, men, women, and children, and finally a dozen
hooded hunting-eagles, all traveled comfortably to-
gether. The eagles were broad-winged, powerful
birds, fastened by their feet to the ends of carrying-
poles, and were borne, flapping their pinions nobly, as
if in triumphal procession, by the hunters, who were
taking them into Manchuria for hare and pheasant.
When the magnificent birds of i)rey were once in the
box-car and released, they settled down in baskets like
brooding hens.
At Tongshan and Kaiping between three and four
thousand people are employed in the coal-mines and
the railway works, directed by a half-dozen European
engineers, virtually ruling a model, whitewashed,
sanitary town. Distant blue mountains show there;
the hills begin, and, running parallel with the sea,
never more than five miles from it, soon rise and
merge into the steep, bni'e, sharply cut mountain-
SHANHAIKWAN 35
range, with exactly the crags and peaks of ideal
Chinese landscapes. White walls of temples and
monasteries shine on every steep slope, the groves
surrounding them the only signs of forests in all the
region. Two or three towns of this sea-shore plain
are most picturesquely walled, long lines of battle-
ments broken by gabled gate-towers and pavilions,
with pagodas placed so as to invoke a good f ung-shui,
the favorable influences of earth and air.
At Peitaho, the foreign residents of Peking and
Tientsin have summer homes, the fresh, clear air
and the sea-bathing attracting an increasing colony
each year. There the plain narrows between the
mountain and the sea, and several lines of battle-
mented walls show on the spurs and summits of the
range. Soon one really sees that world's greatest
wonder, the Great Wall of China, curving over, across,
and down a steep mountain-slope, and squarely bar-
ring one's advance.
Shanhaikwan lies half-way between the mountains
and the sea, and so close by the Great Wall that its
own city walls are built in with and joined to the
greater line of masonry that extends from the shores
of the sea for more than a thousand miles to the
great desert and the Kan-su Mountains. The wall
succeeded prehistoric stockades, and defended China
proper from the wild Mongolia and Manchuria, from
which its conquerors and rulers have many times come.
It is so picturesque, with its many bastions and tow-
ers, so imposing, so massive, so seemingly endless as
it crosses the plain and winds up, as if for picturesque-
ness' sake only, to the crest of the mountain-range,
36 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
that it needs not imagination nor lifelong acquain-
tance with it as a fact to have it exercise a strong
fascination at sight — the most stupendous work that
the hand of man has ever builded, an existing, still
serviceable structure that can maintain its pretensions
in part with the ruins of Egypt and Assyria.
And it looks exactly like its pictures in school geog-
raphies ! One had half expected that it would not,
coidd not, be so irrationally, impractically picturesque,
so uselessly solid and stupendous ; but Shi-Hwang-Ti,
first Emperor of united China, builded better than he
knew, and all this modern world must thank him for
that enduring monument. One does not really care
whether it is two thousand and one hundred and some
years old or not; whether it is twelve hundred or
fifteen hundred miles long, from twenty-five to sixty
feet high, and twenty- five feet thick, with a broad
terre-plein between parapets, along which one can
walk from the Gulf of Pechili to the desert beyond
Kan-su, from the Yellow Sea to the Sea of Sand ; or if
millions of men toiled for ten years to complete it,
and a lialf-million builders died ; or if government
contractors and engineers "scamped" in 211 B.C., as
they do now, and left great gaps in backwoods places
where earthworks did as well as solid wall. Wan-li
Chang Ching, the '' Ten Thousand Li Wall," or Chang
Tang, the '' Great Wall," is too supremely satisfactory
and eye-delighting as an artistic feature of the land-
scape, as it winds and rambles in its useless way over
the hilltops and far away, for one to split dates and
details and to become precisely archaeological. It is
one of the few great sights of the world that is not
SHANHAIKWAN 37
disappointing. It grows npon one hour by hour, and
from the incredible it becomes credible. Its solidity
and deserted uselessness uplift it, put it forever liors
concoitrs, and give it an atmosphere, a unique dignity,
like only to the Pyramids. One turns to those loop-
ing lines of bastioned wall with increasing sentiment
as long as one remains within sight of it, and it
arouses feeling and evokes ideas as only the great
objects of nature can do.
The engine stopped at the station outside of Shan-
haikwan, the official "rail-head" or end of track at that
time, and a half-mile beyond the Great Wall barred
the way, save for one narrow gap through which the
shining steel rails stretched away into Manchuria.
It was almost sunset, the old pile glowing in golden
light, and, like a lodestone, it drew us straight toward
it, following the hunters who shouldered their eagles
and walked up the track toward Manchuria. Con-
tinued floods made the breach in the wall centuries
before the railway was dreamed of, or locomotives
might never have passed from Chihli into Shing-king.
When fortifications were hastily thrown up at the sea-
front at the time of the Japanese war, no attempt was
made to repair this flood-gap. The topsy-turvy of
Chinese military logic argued that the Japanese would
only land on the beach in front of the forts, of course.
On the Manchurian side, the Great Wall presents a
bold face of gray brick and stone, with towers and
projecting bastions, a formidable defense against the
hordes of wild horsemen in the days of crossbow
warfare. On the inner, Chinese side, the wall is a
sloping earth embankment, stone and bi-ick facings
38 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
and cross-walls cropping out here and there. It has
evidently been a builders' quarry for all the Shanhai-
kwan plain, and there are still bricks to spare by
millions, from ^remnants of walls that run here and
there in aimless way on the inner side. WaU-build-
ing must have been a habit or mania with these peo-
ple in those early days, and they built walls when
there was nothing else to do, to pass the time, to keep
the people out of mischief. Weeds and brambles
conceal the flagging of the terre-plein, parapets are
gone, and many watch-towers have fallen, but a few
towers are occupied by poor tillers of the soil and
their swarming families. One may look far into
Manchuria, the land of nomad Tatars, but he sees no
flocks nor herds nor conical tents on grassy plains—
only the same cultivated fields of millet, lines of trees,
and villages of white houses in Shing-king province as
in Chihli.
The mandarin director of railways, who proved his
fitness for that practical post by passing an exami-
nation in classic literature, and who had never seen a
railway until he became arbiter of this end of China's
first line, occupied a large new yamun beside the sta-
tion. In a far corner of the \amim, two courts of
guest-rooms, with kitchens and servants' quarters,
were reserved for European ti"avelers' use at a nominal
charge, the (hd-h)nu/J(l of India repeated. The rooms
were clean but bare, a wirc-mattressed bed, chairs,
tables, and a washstand being all that were supplied,
since the traveler in North China always carries his
bedding and full cani])-('hest as necessary eipiipnuMit.
From the yamun we could see Chang Tang posing
SHANHAIKWAN 39
ghostly on the mountain-side in the flood of the full
moon's light, and at sunrise watch the rose-tinted,
curving, battlemented line cast intense blue shadows
over the rugged mountain front— exquisite pictui*es
of ineffaceable distinctness in memory yet.
At Shanhaikwan the real mule-cart of North China
jolts one over real Chinese roads, the huge, nail-
studded wheels, on axles the size of kegs, thumping
on unseen stones in the deep ruts worn by all preced-
ing carts— the carter and his walking partner, the mule,
alike tenacious of custom, plodding in others' ruts and
footsteps, and never once turning to new ground. It
is a breath-taking, liver-accelerating ride of two miles
over a tree-shaded road to the sea-shore, past fields
dotted with picturesque ancestral graves, turtle-borne
stone tablets, stone altars and benches. There are
three fine old temples facing the sea just within the
great barrier wall, and that to Kwanyin, Goddess of
Mercy or Queen of Heaven, nearest the town, is in the
best condition, its courtyards, pavilions, and guest-
rooms spotlessly clean, the images brightly shining,
and the altar ornaments in order.
''Who is this?" I asked my hard-featured, mixed-
Manchu servant, who had been often to Shanhai-
kwan, and claimed to know all about everything in
North China.
" China woman," he answered, gazing stupidly at
the gilded Queen of Heaven, Buddhist Goddess of
the Sea.
'' Why is she here in a temple ? "
"China woman, China woman. But dis China
woman no eat meat," he added triumphantly.
40 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
The cart-tracks wind aimlessly over the pine bar-
rens and sandy flats by the sea's edge for a half-mile
to another temple inclosure, where walls and gates
are crumbling and broken, bell-towers dropping to
decay, and altars deserted. The few poverty-stricken
priests, drying their grain, their onions and red pep-
pers on temple terraces and platforms, have parted
with every portable treasure, and only the largest
images remain to them. A half-mile farther up the
beach a third temple is in still more ruinous condition,
the wreck of its once splendid buildings a sad reminder
of those older times when Buddhism was a living
religion, and China had not been arrested in its civ-
ilization, nor begun to retrograde. All the smaller
images and belongings have been sold by stealth to
the tourists whom the railway has brought to Shan-
haikwan, and the gods of these sea-shore shrines now
sit and smile serenely in the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York, and the few priests till salty fields
behind the temple and lead lives of enforced absti-
nence, wliether with or witliout prayer.
The Wall of Ten Thousand Li once dipped down to
the very edge of the sea and ended in a great wave-
defying bastion tower, founded on the reef that
here makes out from shore. The storms of two thou-
sand years breached and battered away the seaward
tower, and only crumbling fragments of the wall now
touch the water. Just before the Japanese war the
old forts on the high bank were hastily rel)uilt and
mud walls of new forts set up. The line of the ori-
ginal masonry is almost lost in these recent fortifica-
tions, but there are enough ancient outcroppiugs on
SHANHAIKWAN 43
the beach to supply tourists with the ponderous Great
Wall bricks for years to come. " The foreigners have
taken all the images from the temples, and now they
are trying to carry away all the bricks in the Chang
Tang," one native told another.
" That is not Great Wall," said my blockhead boy,
looking up from the beach to the mud fort stuck like
a hornet's or a mud-swallow's nest to the side of the
ancient pile. " That is mandarin's house for shooting
Kapanese."
" Where is the Great Wall, then ? "
" Back there on that mountain. This used to be
Great Wall, but now it is general's yamun for shooting
the Kapanese."
" How many Japanese did they shoot ? "
" Oh, when Kapanese find out, they lun away ;
never come this side."
General Grant came from Tientsin in a man-of-
war which anchored off the wall, and, landing him,
gave the great soldier opportunity to examine and to
follow this greatest defensive work in the world—
greatly impressed by the senseless sacrifice of human
toil on such a feat of military engineering. Japanese
surveyors in disguise swarmed this region long before
the war, and when hostilities broke out, the military
authorities at Tokio had detailed maps of every foot
of the Great Wall, and of everj^ dike and path in the
fields, every village street and walled inclosure for the
two hundred miles between Shanhaikwan and Peking.
Twenty thousand soldiers were already on transports
at Port Arthur, ready to land here, seize the railway,
attack the Taku forts from the rear, while the fleet
44 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
bombarded at long range, and march victorious on to
Peking; but the pleadings of the cowardly court at
Peking were heard, and the war ended.
The military mandarin, wlio so hastily built these
sea-shore forts, completed them in thorough manner
after the war, mounted larger and better guns, and
connected them by carriage-roads equal to those of
any foreign concession in China, thus proving that
roads can be built by the Chinese in rural China,
Once at the limits of the military reservation, how-
ever, one's cart-wheels drop into the old Chinese ruts
that pass for roads, and one is jolted and pounded as
usual.
While we rode over these smooth fort roads, a
frowzy old farmer in patched clothes came across the
fields, leading a donkey by a halter, and astride of
the donkey there was a most wonderfully painted and
powdered little girl, in a red petticoat and purple
jacket, with ahead-load of tinsel and artificial flowers.
My zeal to see and to snap a photograph of the strange
trio was checked by the boy, who, in half-frightened
tones, implored : " No, no, no ! That is leading home
new wife. S'pose that man see you look wife, he make
great bobbery"; and the lonely, joyless wedding-pro-
cession plodded on across the field. The old farmer
had gone to market and bought himself a wife, and
was leading her home by a halter, quite as much as if
she had been a calf or a dog.
Shanhaikwan has picturesque gate-towers and pa-
vilions, and where its walls join in with spurs and pro-
jections of the Great "Wall the watery quadrangles
and walled corners would enrapture and oceup}' an
SHANHAIKWAN 47
Occidental sketch-class for many weeks. There are
quaint old brass cannon of the Ming period on the
towers, and the tourist has attempted even to buy and
carry them away. In the tea-shops and restaurants
there were curious brass samovars wrought in grace-
ful Persian shapes, with the fire-box in the body of
the vessel, opening by a butterfly door on the out-
side. Wood chips, charcoal, and coal were used in-
differently in these huge kettles, but all my efforts
to buy one of these decorative Manchurian samovars
were vain. The tea-drinkers lounged on hard stone
or clumsy wood benches, before stone or wooden
tables of the most durable kind, pouring tea from
dingy, battered old tea-pots of coarse green pottery,
and dipping up greasy shreds and bits of pottage
from bowls decorated in elaborate patterns with
menders' rivets. In this land of cheap porcelain and
pottery one is continually surprised to see how com-
mon household pieces are mended and mended as long
as there is room for another rivet, and one rarely sees
a large piece in table use in foreign houses without
its meander lines of copper rivets— the carelessness of
Chinese servants matched by their economy.
There is a mile of picturesque, open campagna be-
tween the city wall and the hills, with ruined walls
and heaps of gray bricks everywhere. These walls are
modern affairs of the Ming period, and their thin,
small bricks, although more convenient and attrac-
tive as tourists' souvenirs, are not the genuine two-
thousand-year-old ones by thirteen centuries. These
half-baked, modern Ming bricks are barely an inch
thick, while the hoary ones of Shi-Hwang-Ti's time are
48 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
over three inches thick, and to be valued more highly
if particles of the hard cement of their day adhere, as
this ancient white mortar is sovereign cure for all
diseases of the eye, and a balm for flesh-cuts.
At a Manchu village among the millet-fields, women
with large feet and huge cross-bar hair-pins ran out
to gaze at us, while their men-folk scampered in from
the fields, got carrying-chairs and ponies, and began
the deafening joy of bargaining to carry us in chairs
up the steep zigzags to the mountain temple. The
priests there were amiable and clean, their labyrinthine
precincts spotless, and from terraced courts in mid-air
one looked out upon one of the finest views in China
—the green and golden plain of the famous battle-
field sloping to the sea, the town in its midst, and
the Great "Wall at the left plunging steeply down and
running its great air-line across the level. The great
battle fought on this sloping plain of Shanhaikwan
at the middle of the seventeenth century was the
last contest in the series of victories which placed the
young Manchu prince Shunchih on the throne of
the Mings. The army, which had marched through
the gates of the Great Wall from Manchuria, marched
on to Peking, and the burned and looted palaces re-
ceived the Mukden ruler, whose race has now run to
ignoble end. While the old priest watches that gap
in the wall beyond Shanhaikwan, he may yet see the
railway carrying the Manchu's successors on to Pe-
king, and note the bloodless conquest of the rolling
ruble that is circling to the winning prize-pocket on
the great game-board of Asia.
A farm-house a quarter of a mile beyond the rail-
SHANHAIKWAN 49
road-track burst into flames that night, illuminating
all space, and the din and uproar from the scene of
action were borne to us at the yamun so appallingly
that one wondered what the pandemonium' would have
been, had the " Kapanese " landed at Shanhaikwan.
The next morning a general and his staff, with
official chair, ponies, and bannermen, a veritable cir-
cus chorus in peaked hats, and ragamuffins of all
descriptions, boarded the train to go to a near town
where a lunatic had run amuck the night before and
killed eighteen people. The Celestial general was a
wrinkled, grandmotherly old creature in petticoats
and short gown, with beads around his neck and
feathered turban tied with cap-strings under his chin.
Nothing more absurdly unwarlike could be imagined,
unless it were the group of grandmothers in satin
dressing-gowns that received the miscellaneous com-
pany of men and ponies when they left the train— a
heelless, collarless, pocketless lot of soft-shod warriors.
A MA^'CHUKIAN SAMOVAR.
AS MARCO POLO WENT
NTIL 1897, when the locomotive shrieked
within three miles of the ancient gray
walls, one traveled from tide-water to
Peking as Marco Polo traveled; sail-
ing, poling, and tracking up the Pei-ho
River from Tientsin in native boats during the sea-
son of open navigation, or following the frightful
land road on ponies, in mule-carts or mule-litters—
ignominy, tedium, and discomfort pushed to the ex-
treme in every mode of progress. There were no
changes in tourist customs or accommodations in six
centuries. While Shangliai merchants on pleasure
bent had been going up and down the rivers and
creeks and canals of their neighborhood in luxurious
house-boats of foreign construction for thirty years,
and every great mercantile house there had its spa-
cious "glass boat" as a matter of course, diplomats,
grandees, noble and princely visitors traveled to Pe-
king meekly in native boats hired for eacli occasion.
None of the legations su])ported boats of splendid
trappings, sacred to ])ersonal, sui)erior European use
only, such as move upon tlie Bosporus.
AS MARCO POLO WENT 51
It was amusing, to be sure, to make the trip once
by house-boat, to travel as Marco Polo traveled, and
journey in the fashion of the middle ages, but truth
compels one to state that after a half-day, the Pei-ho
palled. Every mile of mud-bank was very like the
other eighty miles of mud-bank; each serpentine
bend and set of S's and W's in the river's path was a
little more tiresome than the last. After a day, one
could no longer be surprised and entertained by the
many and elaborate dishes served from the tiny, four-
foot-long kitchen, with the aid of the camp-chest of
table utensils hired for the trip, together with bed-
ding, from the hotel at Tientsin. Such miracles are
too many and too cheap in China.
The house-boat was carved and varnished and mod-
erately gilded about the window-frames on the out-
side, and a tall mast held the single square mainsail
which was to help against the current. There was a
small deck forward, under which the crew kept all
sorts of things, and the cabin opened on it by an
elaborate^ carved doorway that was closed at night
by sliding boards. There were latticed doors and
window-frames, and much gilding, while carved and
lacquered panels, and bursting pomegranates and con-
ventionally riotous gourd-vines trailed all over the
artistic little salon. In the adjoining compartment, a
raised platform formed the bed, and trunks were
stowed beneath it. There was a tiny kitchen and
boys' quarters amidships, and the crew lived and fed
at the very stern. All tliis, with a crew of trackers to
tow by a rope made fast to the tip of the mast, was
to be enjoyed for ten Mexican dollars for the trip, and
52 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
with a good boy and cook, and in company witli an-
other and hirger boat, we journeyed along in very
pleasant fashion. Each boat had books and maga-
zines galore; we dined and tiffined back and forth,
walked the banks in lonely places, and cut across
bends on foot, often having to wander far from the
high dikes of paths because of some back-water flood.
Once we went through a village w^here the misery,
filth, hardship, and horrors of poor country life in
China were so borne in upon one that it seemed as if
the sum of all suffering were centered there. From
that miserable place some fifty noisy and cheerful
youngsters, with and without clothes, trailed us out
and along on the high dike paths for a mile, a queer
procession of silhouettes to those remaining in the
boats' cabins.
At seven o'clock, that first night out of Tientsin,
the boats stopped, the crews fed and turned in to
sleep until one in the morning, when they were to
resume travel. Then at candle-light all eyes were on
the alert to see if the servants had obeyed threats and
orders, had emptied the boats entirely, and scalded
them with boiling chemicals to dislodge the roaches,
inch-long JiaJckerlacs of horror, that inhabit these
gilded boxes. The new boy Liu, who had replaced
the bellowing Chung, was worthy of his boasts, and
not a moving antenna or object rewarded our look-
out, for Tientsin residents can cause the hair to
stand on end with veracious tales of house-boats
that were more nearly entomological museums. The
face of Liu was more than ever that of a well-fed,
ecstatic, worldly buddha, as he served the soup, the
■v-*^
NATIVE BOATS ON THK PEl-HO 1(1 VEK.
AS MARCO POLO WENT 55
crab croquettes, the chops and pease, the snipe and
salad, a frothing souffle, and then hot chestnuts and
fruit, with the clear black, admirable coffee. Each
dish was perfectly cooked, garnished with green
sprigs, and served with the decorum and precision of
the most formal dinner on shore. And all this was
conjured from a four-foot-square kitchen, two tiny-
charcoal stoves, and the few pots and pans carried in
a camp-chest but a little larger than a dress-suit case !
Truly Abbe Hue was right when he called the Chinese
a nation of cooks.
It was three o'clock in the morning before Liu's
voice of rage and command, aided by the majordomo
of the other boat, got the fleet in motion. At six
there was a dense damp mist upon all the world, but
we looked out to see the piers of the railway-bridge
at Yang-tsun, just risen from their caisson works.
" This railroad very curious," said the oracle. " All
these things [the piers] they have built with a wind-
machine [compressed air]. Will missis have tea stout
or thin ? " and through the magic trap-door came a
model tea-tray. The second day repeated the first in
scenery and incidents. We walked the banks and cut
across fields, many of them levels of caked mud,
seamed with cracks as they dried in the hot sun
after the floods. Once we found a woman and four
children crouching in a little shelter built of millet-
stalks, refugees from the flooded districts below, with
no other hope of comfort than this lean-to of canes
for the bitter winter to follow. Tlie landmark of the
day was Hsu-si-wo, site of the allies' camps in 1860,
when the capture of Mr. Parkes and the other com-
56 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
missioners hastened the march to Peking. A row of
open mud booths and shops fronted the river-bank,
where boatmen bought pork and cabbage and offen-
sive things, with boiled and salted peanuts, persim-
mons, and all the fruits of the autumn. In one place,
a blindfolded donkey trod a dreary round, grinding
corn spread on a round stone table, and on the kang^
or high mud platform of a bed, beside it a soldier
of the empire lay fast asleep, mouth open, and body
bent at such angles that we accepted it as the
ocular proof of what Dr. Arthur Smith has said in
his delightful ''Chinese Characteristics," that "best
book" of hundreds written about China, and with
which one only finds fault because there are not six
more and larger volumes : " It would be easy to
raise in China an army of a million men — nay, of
ten millions— tested by competitive examination as to
their capacity to go to sleep across three wheelbar-
rows, with head downward like a spider, their mouths
wide open, and a fly inside."
The third day's journey began at two in the morn-
ing, and we dragged slowly upward in a gray world
of dampness all day. Tliere was the ugly mud vil-
lage of Ma-tau, with its line of broken-down hovels
on the river-bank, where stale things and fried things
were ranged in the shop-fronts, and the village shoe-
maker mended ragged cloth shoes with pulp and
paper soles, the most absurd, senseless, perishable,
impracticable foot-gear tlie whole world can offer.
The white man's scorn and contempt for this flimsy
" cloth-shoe civilization " of the Chinese are surely jus-
tified, for, with a history running back beyond the
AS MARCO POLO WENT 57
ages, these people have never devised a serviceable
nor even a waterproof shoe. A mere bedi'oom slipper
of cloth, with a felt or pith or paper sole, is the regu-
lation foot-covering of the people, and even a general's
campaign boots are but millinery affairs of black satin.
Wherefore a rain-storm can put an armj^ out of action,
check a mob, and, as one can see any showery day in
the settlements, send every Chinese running madly
for shelter— all save the barefooted toilers and the
very few who possess oiled-paper boots, that barely
resist a light sprinkle. The Russian will at least
bring with him his thick, common-sense shoes, and a
raw-hide and hobnail civilization may do much for
this paper-soled race.
By a merciful dispensation, the summer floods,
which drown the crops, turn the fields into fish-ponds
where men and boys catch the small shiners by
hand or with dip-nets, and we saw wretched creatures
everywhere eagerly catching their daily or their win-
ter store of food. Wheelbarrows drawn by donkeys,
tandem leaders to men in harness between the han-
dles who steered as well, passed in absurd processions
along the banks.
At sundown, the ancient pagoda and the new
American flour-mill of Tungchow were in sight, and
the next morning we lay by the river-front of the
town, in line with the hundreds of house- and cargo-
boats that there discharge their freight for Peking
and Mongolia. There is a canal which leads to the
walls of the capital, but there are five levels, and as
the Chinese brain, in all its thousands of years of
fumbling with canal problems, never devised a canal-
58 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
lock, one has to change to a new boat with all his
belongings at each section, and then has a three-mile
cart- or chair-ride into the city from the Eastern
Expediency Wicket, or gate in the outer wall. Other-
wise one may take a donkey or a pony, or a sedan-
chair, or the springless Peking cart for the thirteen-
mUe ride. It was beginning to rain from a thick
gray sky. A dozen tourists and four diplomats, amv-
ing the day before, had taken all the available closed
chairs from Tuugchow, and there was no choice but
to pad the best-looking carts with mattresses and crawl
into those small torture-chambers for what proved
to be an all-day jolt. The mud was deep and noi-
some in the narrow streets of the walled city of Tung-
chow, and we waited long while the head cart of a
funeral procession stuck fast and a balky mule re-
fused to pull it out. There were embroidered um-
brellas and banners, and mock treasures paraded in
state, a string of small priests howling, five carts
full of women wailing, and the great coffin with its
embroidered pall was followed and surrounded by a
group of grieving male relatives attired like pastry-
cooks, in white garments and white paper caps.
Outside of Tungchow we crossed the splendid
carved marble bridge where the Chinese army made its
last stand in 18G0— Pa-H-kao, the "Eight Li Bridge,"
which won for General Montauban the title of Count
Palikao. Then all day there succeeded such ruts and
gullies and muddy ditches, such jolting, thumping, and
bumping, as decided one that Peking was dearly seen
at the price of one such ride in a lifetime. The
actual or recognized, the traditional, conventional
AS MAECO POLO WENT 69
road, a mere cut or ditch worn deep in the clay of the
plain, was a floundering, bottomless mud trough all
the way, and we drove around it, never in it, zig-
zagging at right angles all over the Peking plain.
In every field and millet-patch some man lay in wait
to ostentatiously throw a spoonful of dirt in the rut
or the ditch he had himself made, and then extend his
hand for coin. All the way to Peking our path was
lined with extended, greedy palms, and when, in the
weariness of monotony, we ordered a recess in alms-
giving, a shrieking hag, hobbling on dwarfed feet,
pursued us across the field, raining such curses and
threats at the trespasser on the millet-field that we
threw cash by the handful to stop the clamor. In
every rainy season for uncounted years the same tricks
have been resorted to on the Peking plain, the people
digging holes to break donkeys' legs, and tossing hand-
fuls of dirt in as a cart approaches. A good mac-
adamized road would rob the countrj'- people of their
chief income and would be promptly cross-guUied for
their benefit.
Family graveyards, with temple roofs curving above
dense tree-tops, were oases in the plain, and occurred
more and more frequently until a turn around a mud-
bank showed near at hand the endless lines of the city's
gray walls and the great soaring gateways of the north-
ern capital. But— having walked half of the way from
Tungchow, and, for the rest of the time, balanced on
the cart-shaft at the very heels of the mule, indiffer-
ent to sprinkles of rain and splashings of mud if only
one might escape the awful thumping of the axletree
—there was no enthusiasm to expend upon the scene,
60 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
no possibility of being thrilled, no impulse toward
apostrophizing, Avhen that greatest city wall and the
most massive city gates of the world came in view.
There are nobler, far more beautiful walls and gates
in India, but for mere brute size, overpowering mass,
oppressive solidity, and cubic quantity only the Great
Wall of China can rank with these gigantic walls of
Peking, that shut in the most picturesque and inter-
esting city of China, the most unique of all the world's
capitals, a living, working exhibit of the Eastern world
of the sixteenth and even earlier centuries— an ancient
civilization brought to a standstill, arrested, petrified,
and beginning to turn backward when that of the
Western world only received its greatest impetus and
began to advance by leaps and bounds.
VI
PEI-CHING, THE NORTHERN CAPITAL
'EKING is the most incredible, impossi-
ble, anomalous, and surprising place in
the world ; the most splendid, spectacu-
lar, picturesque, and interesting city in
China ; a Central Asian city of the far
past; a fortified capital of the thirteenth century
handed down intact. It is the greatest contradiction
of our times that Peking is Peking, that such a place
can exist at the end of this century ; but Peking is as
it always was, and will be as it is as long as the queue
and the cotton shoe are worn within its walls— the
one place that can hold its own ancient flavor and
local color, and upon which the demon of progress has
not brought down the dread monotony of the universal
commonplace.
Peking is the capital of all China, yet what interests
and piques one most, gives Peking its own individual
character, and distinguishes it from the other cities
of the empire, are the things that are not Chinese, the
contrasts and the contradictions. Peking is by first
intention a permanent Tatar encampment, a fortified
Gl
62 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIEE
garrison of nomad bannermen surrounding Pei-ching,
the northern palace of the conquering khan of khans.
The Tatar ruler of nearly four hundred millions of sub-
ject Chinese is closely surrounded by his faithful Man-
chu clansmen from beyond the Great Wall, who scorn
and hate and secretly fear the masses of Chinese more
than any outer enemy ; who have thrown themselves
into the arms of Russia through fear of the Chinese ;
who have bargained that Russia shall send soldiers to
their aid when needed ; who have held back and
turned back the wheels of progress, with a certain
prescience that the new order would relegate them to
poverty and extinction. Every Manchu is borne on
the rolls as a bannerman, and receives his stipend,
even if he never bends a bow or hurls a stone in mili-
tary drill. But the Manchu bannermen are no longer
the fierce warriors their ancestors were, nor their khan
even a hardy" huntsman like the early Manchu em-
perors. Like Kublai Khan's Mongols long before
them, these nomad horsemen and hardy shepherds of
the plains, enervated by long peace and idle plenty,
corrupted by the luxuries and vices of Chinese civili-
zation, have degenerated to a type their marauding
forefathers would scorn and scourge, and their capital
is an index of the decadence of the ruling race, whose
end draws tragically near.
There had been three cities there before Kublai
Khan made the splendid capital Marco Polo first de-
scribed for us. The city's plan, the palaces, the walls, all
date from Mongol times, the thirteenth century. The
same quaint military customs of the middle ages are
observed. The soldiers are drilled in archery and
PEI-CHINa, THE NORTHERN CAPITAL 65
quoits, and the nine city gates are clanged to at sun-
set, shutting Chinese subjects out in a separate city
by themselves, as if their conquest were just accom-
plished.
Yunglo, the Ming Emperor, extended the walls and
beautified the city at the beginning of the fifteenth
century, but since then, barring some repairs by the
Emperor Kienlung, more than one hundred years ago,
no one has emulated that early Haussmann. At the
time of the Japanese war, a few parapets were patched,
some crumbling buttresses rebuilt; but otherwise,
Chinese indifference and inertia, slipshod neglect and
shiftlessness, along with a blind worship of '' old cus-
tom," have preserved this unique capital of the north-
ern tribes almost unchanged.
The walls and the gates are the greatest features of
Peking. Although one travels toward it across the
great level plain that extends from Peking's suburban
hills for seven hundred miles southward, the city
walls are not distinguished until one is near them.
Then they loom above and stretch in such long, end-
less perspective that one loses measure of their vast-
■ ness, and the eye accepts them quite as much as it
does a range of hills or any natural feature of the
landscape.
Two cities, the Chinese and the Tatar Cit}', the
outer and the inner city, lie side by side, each entirely
surrounded by a great defensive wall, and the Man-
chus' citadel even more strongly walled and defended
from the Chinese City than from the outer plain. The
Tatar, or the inner city, as it is called, holds in its
center the Yellow or Imperial City, and within that
66 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
again is the Purple Forbidden City, the actual palace
inclosure, the home of the Son of Heaven. One
enters first the Chinese City through a deep arch in
the solid walls, and after two miles comes to the more
impressive walls and gate-towers of the Tatar City,
each gate with a semicircular enceinte around it. A
great waste space extends along the outer side of the
Tatar City walls, where carts stray in lines of ruts,
donkeys wander, and camels move in files like auto-
matic silhouettes, all enveloped in clouds of dust. If
one enters the Tatar City through the deep arch of
the Hata-men, he comes almost immediately upon the
Chiao-min Hsiang, or Legation Street, which runs
parallel with the city wall for a mile, before debouch-
ing on the great square in front of the palace gate.
All the foreign compounds are on or near that street,
but it is a straggling, unpaved slum of a thorough-
fare, along which one occasionally sees a European
picking his way between the ruts and puddles with
the donkeys and camels; envoys, plenipotentiaries,
and scions of la carriere diplomatique liaving lived
along this broad gutter for nearly forty years, and
had just the effect upon imperial Peking that many
barbarians had upon imperial Rome. But for the
matchless climate of this northern, treeless plain, the
same dry, clear, sparkling, exhilarating air of our
Minnesota or Dakota, the surface drainage, or rather
the undrained, stagnant, surface sewage, would have
killed all Europeans by zymotic diseases long ago.
There is no water-supply for this city of a half-million
people, although the Mongol and Ming dynasties con-
structed and maintained a splendid system, and, save
^ 4- ^ ^ ^ i^ t
MAI' OF PEKING.
PEI-CHING, THE NORTHERN CAPITAL 69
for cisterns of rain-water, householders must depend
upon wells, the water of which, impregnated with ail
the salts of the Chihli plain, is as hard and harsh as
that of the Nile at Cairo. The gift of a tin of rain-
water by a diplomatic friend in Peking is more to be
appreciated by the newly arrived tourist than a bouquet
of orchids in Paris. With a tropic summer heat and
deluge rains in that same season, with zero winters
almost without snow, the streets either ankle-deep in
dust or more profound sloughs of noisome mud,
Peking offers more variety and incident in physical
discomfort and the generally offensive than any other
world's capital ; yet it has a fascination and interests
different from them all.
One can best see Peking and fix the idea in his
mind by ascending the walls and taking a bird's-eye
view of the two great cities of low, black-tiled houses
that lie side by side. Forty feet above the streets and
smells one has a splendid, satisfying, inspiring view,
and after one such prospect the ground-plan and the
four distinct walled cities are kept in mind. There is
a quiet, shady, forgotten lane running along the inner,
Tatar side of the stupendous masonry pile, and a gate-
keeper with a greedy palm opens a small wicket in a
blocked-up gate, and lets one ascend a sloping terrace
walk to the terre-plein between the parapets. Up aloft
there, one may walk in peace on a broad, flagged way
more tlian thirty feet wide between the vast projecting
buttresses, and which extends unbroken for fourteen
miles around the Tatar City, and for sixteen miles
around the Chinese City. Great towers like temples,
with curving gable-roofs shining with green tiles, rise
70 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
over each of the nine city gates ; the towers empty,
and squads of ragamuffin soldiers herding in small
stone huts beside the parapets. All that upper walk
is overgrown with weeds and brambles, a narrow
beaten path running between these banks of under-
brush. No Chinese civilians, and never Chinese wo-
men, are allowed to mount or to walk on the walls,
but the privilege was extended to legation families by
courteous old Prince Kung, in the complaisant long-
ago after the allies' war. This one refuge and breath-
ing-place, where one is free from the madding,
infragrant crowd, was closed to foreigners for a time,
when one tourist had spurred his horse past a dazed
gate-keeper and galloped half around the city before he
descended and stilled the clamor and tom-toming at
every guard-house in his rear. Yet another tourist is
charged with scorching around the wall on his bicycle
and spoiling the f ung-shui, or favorable geomantic in-
fluences, by the circle of his infernal machine. The
populace do not relish seeing foreigners on the wall,
and once, while leaning on the parapet directly over
the Hata-men arch, the smoking soldier-in-ohief came,
spoke and gesticulated earnestly, and our servant
translated : " He say must come back liere. People
see you now, and get very mad. Maybe he lose his
job."
From this Hata-men, or Chuug-wen-men (the " Gate
of Sublime Learning "), one looks northward for three
miles across tiled roofs and tree-tops to the towers
over the north gates of the Tatar City. Temple roofs
and yamun roofs soar among the trees in the Tatar
City, and one can trace the long walls and great red
PET-CHING, THE NORTHERN CAPITAL 73
gates of the Yellow or Imperial City, within which
again the yellow-tiled walls of the Purple Forbidden
City are traced for two miles from the great south
gates to the tree-covered knolls of the Meishan, at the
far end of the palace grounds. The magnets for the
eye in all this view are the great, glistening, yellow-
tiled palace roofs that rise in the heart of the bowery
citadel, overlapping as they stretch in long perspec-
tive ; but, after the satisfaction of looking upon these
palace walls and gables, I suffered an acute disap-
pointment in those famous yellow tiles. They do not
flash and glitter with a clear, golden glory, as on the
dragon palace of one's dreams, and the imperial yellow
of these tiles is a coarse, opaque, dingy tint, not the
pure yellow of mustard-flowers, but the gritty, pasty,
powdery, surface yellow of mustard-paste. No tall
towers or great pagodas, no flags or banners, show
from the forbidden precincts, and the shimmer of
these great roofs is all that one sees of truly imperial
Peking. Southward the rectangle of the Chinese
City is a monotony of tiled roofs or waste tracts, the
domed roof of the Temple of Heaven, in its great
park, the only dominating feature.
One may walk the mile from the Hata-men to the
Chien-men, the main, meridional, or front gate of the
Tatar City, which faces the great square, or pT'C^ce
d'armes, before the palace gate, and there find himself
at the very heart of Peking, or at least over its main
artery. The great streams of trade and travel be-
tween the inner and outer cities go through the tunnel
of that gate and the two lateral gates in its semicir-
cular enceinte, carts, donkeys, camels, chairs, wheel-
74 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIKE
barrows, and foot-passengers streaming through from
sunrise to sunset. The main south gates of the
palace are closed and lifeless, no guards, or flags, or
minions going in and out, to give the red doors and
yellow roofs any more value than blank walls. In
winter, picturesque Mongols in long yellow gowns and
quaint fur hats hold a daily horse-market in that
open square, and always a legion of fakers and ped-
dlers are encamped there and about the two little, yel-
low-roofed temples within the enceinte. Arcades of
rich shops surround this palace square, and streets
stretch away under jjailoivs, or skeleton gates of honor
erected by imperial permission to the memory of
deceased ones of great virtues and exemplary lives.
Through them streams of busy life converge to this
focal point, until the hum, the shouts, the movement
and clouds of dust give one an idea of the busy, living
Peking of to-day. The middle gate in the Chien-
men's encircling enceinte is opened only for the Em-
peror's use, and gives dire(;tly upon a marble bridge
crossing the moat, whence a splendid broad street
continues, at first under rows of monumental pailows,
due south for two miles to the parks surrounding
the Temple of Heaven and the Temple of Agriculture,
where the Emperor worships in state twice each year.
Nowhere in China is the street life so busy, bright,
and picturesque as in Peking, with such unceasing
variety of type and costume, incident and spectacular
display. Tlie most noticeable and striking feature,
the peculiarity wliich gives most brilliancy and in-
terest to all street scenes and outdoor life, is the
presence of women — tall, splendid Mauchu women.
PEI-CHING, THE NORTHERN CAPITAL 77
who walk with sturdy tread freely on their full-
grown, natural feet, and balance their magnificent
head-dresses with conscious pride. The Manchu
women's coiffure is the most picturesque, and their
long Manchu robe the most dignified of any costume
in Asia. In my first breathless delight in each of
these striking figures, these far-northeastern living
pictures, I berated all my traveled acquaintances,
who, harping on the dirt and the dilapidation, the
offensive smells and sights, of Peking, had never told
me of these Manchu women, with their broad gold
pins, wings of blue-black hair, and great bouquets
and coronals of flowers, the bewitching pictures in
every thoroughfare. Nor any more had they given
me an idea of the bewildering interest and richness
of the street life, something of which at every moment
catches and dazzles the eye and fixes one's attention
—the real sights of Peking, not the walls and temples
and monuments set down in the abbreviated and
scholarly local guide-book, but the throngs of all
classes of two races, who give continuous perform*
ances all over the twin cities.
At the Chien-men all activity centers, and the open-
air dramas are most diverting. The Emperor's sacred
middle south gate opens upon a broad marble bridge,
carved to the fineness of lace and once snow-white,
but now grimed, greased, battered, worn, and stained
with the dirt of ages, its graceful balustrades half
hidden by the frightful company of beggars and
lepers assembled there.
Where life centered there was death also, and I
never went to this main gate of the Chinese City
78 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
without encountering a funeral. Often my cart was
blocked on the broad meridian street by some grievous
and elaborate parade. And what a motley grief wears
at this capital ! One hears the funeral from afar as the
clang of cymbals and gongs and wind-instruments, the
howls of the hired mourners are borne to one, and all
the air is filled with the mighty hoo-Jioo, hoo-hoo-hoo-Jioos
wheezed from a long horn that looks, and is worked,
like a gigantic garden syringe. The boo-hoos of the
mourners were feeble and in minor keys compared
with this sobbing pump, and the mourners often
stopped dry-eyed, in the midst of a wail, to gape at
us as we thrust our heads from cart-fronts the better
to see them and the "Palstaflfian parade. Abbe Hue
long ago remarked that the Chinese possess "the
most astonishing talent for going distracted in cold
blood " ; and these funeral parades all prove it. For
a first-class funeral, the manager of such pomps and
vanities gathers up street boys and beggars, tricks
them out in uniform coats and peaked hats, and as-
signs them embroidered umbrellas, red-and-gold-
lettered standards and boards, which they hang over
their shoulders at all angles as they straggle along.
Other ragamuffins carry imitations of the dead man's
treasures, which are burned at the grave in order that
he may have them in the world beyond— card houses
and carts, paper men, women, horses, jewels, clocks,
vases, and curios of every kind, heaps of paper coin
and paper money, myriad sheets of false gold and
silver foil, and .vj/rc^s, or shoe-shaped ingots— all these
consumed in magnificent, extravagant show of wealth
and belief in a material future life.
ii
9J'
--^
- ?
'»«%*<-.
^':
ii->
PEI-CHING, THE NORTHERN CAPITAL 81
Lucky days must have been many during the au-
tumn month I spent at Peking, for the gorgeous red
wedding-chair conveying a bride to her home was
another frequent sight. Not a glimpse could one get
of the jeweled treasure within, and one had to speculate
on the unseen, like the bridegroom himself. More
splendid than the red box of the bride was the red.
bodied cart of rank, carrying a palace beauty about
the Imperial City, which I often met near the palace
gates. The first such vision — a young Manchu beauty
in full ceremonial dress, with her hair piled high with
gorgeous flower-bunches, and loops, chains, and tassels
of pearls pendent from the great gold bar balanced
across her blue-black hair— quite took my breath away.
'' Emperor's relatives," said my awe-struck servant, as
he balanced himself on the cart-shaft ; and the glimpse
of that radiant, motionless heathen goddess, clearly
visible in full face and then in profile through the
gauze curtains of her shrine, lifted the Peking cart for-
ever from the realms of the commonplace. At every
red-bodied cart in range I fixed all attention, most
usually rewarded by the tableau of some fat, spec-
tacled mandarin sitting cross-legged in unctuous ease ;
but one vision of a statuesque court beauty repaid
one for many disappointments.
The Peking cart has been dwelt upon with vituper-
ation, ridicule, and abuse by all who have endured its
jolts and poundings, but the half cannot be told.
The lines of the one conventional cart model in com-
mon use have not been changed since Marco Polo's
time, and this primitive, archaic vehicle has solid
axles with hubs like kegs, and nail-studded wheels
82 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
heavier than those of any Roman chariot. A good
road would be ruined in a week by such cart-wheels,
and the cart must go if ever Peking streets are paved
or macadamized. Each mule steps in the last mule's
tracks, each wheel cuts deeper the rut already made
in the dirt road, and as the square platform or body
rests directly on the axle, the occupant gets the full ben-
efit of every jolt and obstacle. The gait of the mule
affects one, too, and if it steps briskly, even on smooth
ground, one begs the carter to say " Wu-wu-wu" to the
mule and slow down its gait. One enters the cart
head first, stepping up on a little stool, putting the
knee on the shaft, crawling in on the padded floor on
all fours, turning, and tucking his heels under him as
he faces front. Anything less graceful or less digni-
fied cannot be imagined, and for mighty mandarins
and ministers, princes, potentates, and foreign envoys
to crawl into a vehicle on all fours, and sit flat on its
floor until the time comes to dismount feet foremost,
dropping one foot on the tiny stool so dangerously
near to the mule's heels, passes all belief. The Chi-
nese have an inimitable way of leaving a cart, shoot-
ing out as it stops, like a jack-in-the-box, unfolding
their legs in air, and alighting evenly on their soft,
thick soles ; but even these experts must mount or
enter in tlie same ignoble manner on all fours. There
is a tradition tliat one can learn to enter and leave a
Peking cart gracefully, if he gives as mucli time to it
as to learning the language ; but I did not hear of
nor see any sinologue whose cart exercises could be
studied as models of grace.
There are variations in carts which modifv the de-
PEI-CHING, THE NORTHERN CAPITAL 83
gree of misery, the official cart being very long
in the body, with the axle placed so far back that
one has a little of the spring of a buckboard, raid
a surcease from the pounding, that is almost equal to
the pleasure of sitting sidewise on one shaft and
dangling one's heels close beside the mule's heels in
clouds of dust or spatters of mud. The official cart
has more black trimmings on its barrel-top canopy,
which is of cloth instead of cotton stuff, and the carts
of highest rank have a broad strip of red cloth around
the base. The official cart has always windows at
the sides, so that the occupant is not restricted to
one tunnel-like view ahead. The windows are cov-
ered with black silk gauze, and it is good form always
to drop the front curtain of gauze, and ride in visible
retirement safe from the clouds of nauseous dust. In
winter, thick curtains shut out the cold, and the cart is
a nest of furs, with Mongol braziers besides, that are
not nnlike the Kashmiri fire-basket. In rainy weather,
the cart is enveloped in oiled paper, and in summer
an extension canopy or curtain is stretched out to
protect the carter and his mule from the blaze of a
desert sun. Foreigners have modified the cart of the
country by cutting an entrance-door at one side and
a hole in the bottom, below which a box or well for
the feet permits one to sit with bent knees. By
making fast an upholstered drawing-room chair with
extra-strong springs in the seat, and using many
pillows, one may be carted about Peking witli some
comfort ; and, moreover, if he stays long enough to
forget the barbarian world and to lose the keen sense
of comparison, he will even be sensible of points of
84 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
style in the two-wheeled mule-cart, with its mounted
outrider in turban hat, that would be side-splitting
features in any circus procession at home.
Good riding-ponies are to be had in Peking, selected
from droves which the Mongol herdsmen drive down
from the plains every autumn, and from the saddle one
has sight over the carts and crowds of people in the
highways. There are donkeys, too, for hire, but they
are looked on with scorn in Peking, only the common-
est people using the despised animals. Sedan-chairs
are restricted to official use at extravagant charges, and
the bearers are slow, slipshod joggers to any one who
has known the perfection of motion behind the steady,
swinging tread of Hongkong bearers. There are
camels, to be sure, and the strings of slow, silently mov-
ing creatures bringing coal and wool into the city are
the most frequent and characteristic sights of Peking,
the swinging, automatic, silent tread of the shaggy
beasts being fascinating and hypnotic, and forever
associated in background with the vista of the end-
less city wall. These two-humped, woolly Bactrian
camels, that cross Siberia in great caravans over the
winter snows, and can only travel during the cool
night hours in summer, are not like the swift drome-
dary of Egypt and Arabia in gait, and are not trained
to the saddle.
VII
THE TATAR CITY OF KUBLAI KHAN
'EKING is sadly lacking in guide-book
sights, in buildings, monuments, public
works of art, or historic spots that can
appeal to one to whom Chinese dynas-
ties and rulers are but empty names,
shibboleths, ciphers, and symbols of the ceramic craze
only. All that is best worth seeing in the way of
temples is barred and forbidden ; each year some
other attractive or interesting place is closed to visi-
tors, and the difficulties and annoyances of entrance
to any of the show-places make the scant sight-seeing
that is possible in Peking a trial and a test of endur-
ance. One must bargain and pay to enter anywhere,
and when one has satisfied the greedy gate-keepers, a
swarm of neighborhood idlers and children troop in
without price, crowd around and elbow one, trip his
feet, and make the air hideous with jeers, catcalls,
and mimickings of foreign speech. One may have
murder in his heart, but he does not do it, does not
dare to notice or lay stick upon a single baboon tor-
mentor ; for a Chinese crowd is an uncertain, uncon-
85
86 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
trollable quantity, with no fear of mandarin, emperor,
or foreign powers.
The great sights are the Observatory on the walls,
the Examination Hall, the Confucian Temple, the
Lama Temple, the Clock-tower, the Drum-tower, the
palace gates, the Temple of Heaven, and the Temple
of Agriculture. The last two objects are sequestered
in vast parks at the extreme south end of the Chinese
City, and one sees them by the aid of opera-glasses
from the nearest point of view on the south wall. The
Observatory possesses quaint old bronze instruments,
mounted on elaborate arrangements of writhing
dragons and clouds— the finest works of ancient
art to be seen at the capital. The old buildings be-
low and the platform on the wall are successors of
the tall tower of the Persian astronomers and astrol-
ogers who came with Kublai Khan. Until the
Emperor Yunglo's time that tower marked the south-
east angle of the Tatar City wall, but that builder of
the present great walls and towers moved the city line
south in order to give room for nobler approaches to
his palace gates. Jesuit astronomers came out from
France, and Louis XIV sent with them a large bronze
azimuth and celestial globe to the Emperor Kanghsi.
In 1G74 Father Verbeist, the official astronomer and
president of the Board of Works, was commanded to
make a full set of instruments, and from his designs
Chinese artists modeled and cast the splendid grouj)
of dragon-wreathed bronze instruments that one ad-
mires tliere now. A water-clock, or clepsydra, is in one
of the buildings in the ground court, but, since the
vandalism of a tourist years ago, the guardiaTis rarely
THE TATAR CITY OF KUBLAI KHAN 87
let one look in at the series of copper cisterns. The
Chinese were apt pupils of both Arab and Jesuit ^
teachers, and the Board of Astronomers is one of the
most important of the government departments to-
day. They compute eclipses and calculate solar and
lunar incidents with precision for the official calendar
or almanac ; but when the moment of the eclipse ar-
rives, the members of the honorable board assemble
in the courtyard in state robes, and frantically beat
tom-toms to scare away the dragon which is about to
swallow the sun or the moon.
The Examination Hall nearly adjoins the Ob-
servatory, a great inclosure filled with tiled sheds,
suggesting cattle-pens. There learning abides and
honors emanate, and civil service, by competitive
examination, is carried to burlesque every third year,
wlien three thousand diplomaed students from all
the provinces are penned up while they write essays
on Confucian philosophy to prove their fitness to act
as civil and judicial officials and squeeze the last pos-
sible cash from the common people. One enters
through tottering yellow pailows and dilapidated
gates to the literary stock-yards, with the rows of
l)rick alcove cells where the candidates are kept in
solitary confinement for three days and two nights.
A central bell-tower overlooks it all, and at the end
are the pavilion and halls where the judges first select
three hundred and sixty papers from the three thou-
sand, from them choose the best eighteen essays, and
then the tln-ee superior ones whose authors are to rank
with the immortals. These three are given the high-
est degree of doctor of literature by the Emperor
88 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
himself, and their names are cut on tablets at the Con-
fucian Temple. Knowing the abject worship of learn-
( ing, the profound reverence for the written word, and
the senseless exaltation of the literati which prevail in
China, one may have believed that these examinations
had remained uncorrupted in this land of universal
corruption, that these triennials were fair and thorough
tests of learning, that the judges were honest and up-
right, and that the wholesale moral and material
decay of China had spared this one feature of the
national life. One learns that the examination-papers
and the necessary essays may be bought beforehand ;
that the judges may be bribed to recognize certain
marks ; that needy scholars, without influence to push
them after they have won a degree, will personate
the dunces of great families, for whom offices, honors,
and emoluments are waiting as soon as they receive
the stamp of the literary examiners ; that not only
fraud and corruption and collusion are rampant in
these classic halls, but that intimidation is also re-
sorted to, and the judges are threatened, hounded,
stoned, beaten, and " hustled " by mobs of fellow-
provincials and family followers waiting upon the
success of individual candidates. Peking is filled
with disappointed scholars who have failed at the ex-
aminations and have a scorn of trade or honest work,
and there are from thirty to eighty thousand waiting
graduates in the empire, successful candidates who
have passed the ordeal, but lack the money or influence
necessary to secure a government office. All these
idle, useless, worthless literati are the bane and terror
of the government. They are not yet enlightened
THE TATAR CITY OF KUBLAI KHAN 91
enough to become political agitators, reformers, or
bomb-throwers, but they constitute a force to be
reckoned with when progress really makes a start,
when China awakens.
One thumps and jolts his way northward a mile
and more, either by shady streets of old Manehu
residences, or along the main street running from
the Hata-men's arch, the latter a broad, busy thor-
oughfare, lined with shops with gaudy fronts and
gables, and double-lined with booths, mat- and canvas-
covered stalls. Carts traverse a raised causeway,—
a dike between two awful ditches of open sewers or
cesspools,— and the traf&c is so great, and blockades
are so frequent, that one is in constant terror of be-
ing backed into these foul ditches and pools of horror
by a locked wheel, a balking mule, or a crumbling
bank's edge. Where a broad, lateral street crosses
at right angles each approach is spanned by a grand
pailow, these commemorative wooden arches in Pe-
king being strangely shabby and rickety compared
with the splendid carved granite and marble pailow
of the Grand Canal and South China. At this cross-
roads of commerce— the Four Pailows— the great
banks, the tea-, silk-, medicine-, and confectionery-
shops of the Tatar City are gathered, and there is
always a blockade of carts, chairs, wheelbarrows,
camels, mules, and donkeys, and an incredible stream
of people— Mongols from the plains, Mancliu notables
and common folk, priests, spectacled Chinese, and al-
ways the Manehu women in their gorgeous coiffures
as brilliant features in this fashionable shopping
quarter. The Four Pailow tea-shop has a front so
92 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
carved and ^Ided that one can hardly credit its con-
secration to commerce and trade; but he buys there
the same perfumed oolong, redolent of jasmine-buds
or Olea fragrant, that is served one at the superior
silk- and curio-shops, until he learns to like it and
forever associate it with certain stone-floored interiors,
the dazzle of splendid fabrics, and crowded displays
of rich art objects. The Four Fallow drug-store is
carved and gilded out of all reason, and the confec-
tioner's shop is as alluring without ail the sugared and
honeyed sweets on the counters. At the Four Fallow
silk-shop one is ushered in, according to his purse and
rank, to farther and farther courts, the tribute of sig-
nal esteem being isolation in a far-back, lonely, stony
sepulcher or little trade temple, with two reserve al-
cove rooms, where braziers and hot tea are needed to
thaw and cheer one between the waits for more and
more baskets and armfuls of silks, satins, brocades,
velvets, crapes, gauze, linen, and furs from their sep-
arate storehouses. Tailors and embroiderers ply the
needle and the goose in long side-buildings, and there
is a room of remnants that would set Occidental shop-
pers wild, while in the mirrored salesroom near the
street Mancliu matrons, in their flowered and gold-
barred coiffures, deliberate over the stuffs for their
future finery.
; At the far north end of this busy main street one
passes the first pailowed entrance and open court of
the Lama Temple, which was for years the great
sight and show-place of Feking, but is now closed
past the most extravagant bribes, no fees sufficing
for the gate-keeper and the horde of vicious, raven-
THE TATAR CITY OF KUBLAI KHAN 93
ing Mongol Buddhist priests. Visitors used to pay
roundly to enter and penetrate the five courts, to
hear the yellow-robed lamas at service, and see the
colossal gilded Buddha, the remarkable bronze and
enamel altar-vases, the books and pictures. ] Then
they paid as extravagantly at each gate of departure
from the dangerous demesne, and such an experience
as Mr Henry Norman relates in " The Peoples and
Politics of. the Far East" is sufficient warning to
tourists for all time.
The place was first the palace of that seventeenth
son of Kanghsi's who succeeded him as the Emperor
Yung Cheng, and who upon his accession made it
over for religious uses, together with an endowment
sufficient to support three thousand lamas. Their
number diminished to one thousand as the great re-
ligion lost life and vogue in China, and there are now
only about five hundred tonsured, yellow-robed scoun-
drels there, a band of sacerdotal villains, whose coun-
tenances suggest that they, like other priests in China,
may be fugitives from justice, criminals of the deepest
dye, who adopt the religious life as a cloak and seek
the monastery as a refuge from the law.
The Lama serai has the same yellow-tiled roof as
the palace, and the lamas were permitted to speak
to the Emperor face to face. Tlie living buddha
who rules the place, subject to the dalai-lama of
Tibet, was for some years accessible to visitors, who
used to converse freely with this holy one, but no
foreigner has talked with this Gagen in recent years.
This temple is the place where occultism and mystic
things were taught, where yogis and mahatmas and
V
94 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
saints with astral bodies practised and imparted their
secret powers ; but occult China is all impenetrable
now, and disappointed investigators denounce the
mystic Buddhism as naught but rankest astrology,
Shamanism, and demonology, its priests in Peking
sunk as low as among the farther northern tribes.
All the cutthroat-looking Mongolian and Tibetan
lamas who come to Peking put up at this temple,
and there are often pilgrims and fakirs like that
Tibetan who wore an iron spike through both cheeks
as a sign of and aid to holiness, and with an eye to
worldly gains posed to all the amateur photographers
of Peking for a consideration.
( The gate of the Confucian Temple is always
slammed shut at sight of foreign visitors, who treat
through weU-worn cracks in the panels for the privi-
lege of entering, poking silver dollars and Peking
tiaos, or bank-notes, through until Cerberus is satis-
fied. Meanwhile the rabble gathers, and when the
gates swing open all the tag-rags, Arabs, beggars,
and neighbors stream in without price, and fairly
prevent one from seeing the first court with their
maddening chatter, jeers, and horse-play. Venerable
cedar-trees shade the first flagged court, where the
deeply bayed gate-house, or antetemple, is raised on a
terrace; and this splendid entrance-porch, with its
stone tablets and two-thousand-five-hundred-year-old
stone drums, is all for the Emperor's use at liis annual
visit. The commoner passes by a humble wicket to
a long, flagged quadrangle, whore ancient cedar-trees
shade yellow-tiled pavilions and stone tablets of honor.
Broad marble steps, with a sloping panel between,
BRniSH ToriMST IN DISGUISE.
THE TATAE CITY OF KUBLAI KHAN 97
carved in high relief with noble dragons, lead to the
grand terrace or platform on which the great red
temple, or memorial building, stands. The crowd
lags, holds back at the terrace steps, and when the
guardian unlocks and swings open the double-latticed
doors, one treads the vast, columned hall in silence-
something of dignity, splendor, and impressiveness to
be enjoyed in Peking at last, without filth, insistent
squalor, and insulting epithets offending one's every
sense. Massive teak columns tower to the shadowy,
paneled ceiling, thick coir mattings cover the stone
floor, and behind the altar-table is the red wooden
shrine containing the tiny, sacred tablet of Confucius.
The tablets of Mencius and the lesser sages are ranged
on each side, and votive tablets from the worshiping
emperors, who have paid homage to China's greatest
teacher, are hung around the dark-red walls. There
is such space, simplicity, quiet, and solemnity within
this memorial hall that one recognizes it as the very
sacred spot where even the gabbling gate-keepers
are subdued and reverent, where the rabble cannot
pursue, where the hideous Chinese voice is stilled.-
Yet, they let me place my camera on the altar-table
and photograph the sacred tablet, the soul of Con-
fucius, the host of the high altar in the cathedral of
the one living faith of the empire ! ;
On one visit to the Confucian Temple we found a
great crowd jeering around a tourist in the gateway
whom the gate-keeper would not admit at any price.
This elderly Englishman, with an unwonted consider-
ation for .the sensibilities of an alien people, had
thought to don Chinese dress that he might go about
98 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
unobserved. Top-boots, a flowing blue silk gown, and
a deer-stalker's cap, with a long raven-black queue at-
tached with a safety-pin, made a combination to which
his rosy English face and stubby white hair added a
last contradictory touch. The guardians evidently
took him for a lunatic, and the people could not be
blamed for their roars of laughter. When he showed
himself in his " disguise " at the Lama Temple a crowd
of holy men fell upon him, took his money, despoiled
him of the gown and the queue, and left him to walk
home bareheaded.
We were baited for a Chinese holiday, however,
when we went out, and by a narrow lane reached the
back gate of the adjoining Hall of Classics. Again
we bargained and passed bank-notes through cracks in
the gate, and a mob of a hundred vicious young
ragamuffins pushed in with us, somersaulting over the
grass and the marble rails. They shrieked and cat-
called in the cloisters as they leaped on and over the
tall stone tablets on which all the nine books of the
most ancient classics are cut in permanent, unalter-
able, everlasting text, a stone library founded by the
great Emperor Kienlung. Within the south gate of
imperial entrance there is first a broad green lawn,
witli tiny pavilions or temples at each side, and fa-
cing it a noble brick-and-stone pailow of three arches,
half covered with glazed green and yellow tiles and
ornamental panels— the most splendid and glittering
monument that learning could wish for. Its arches
frame a charming picture of the central pavilion
within a marl>le-bridged pond, the audience-hall where
the Emperor sits in state on a red throne similar to the
SUX-DIAL AT THE HALL OF CLASSICS.
THE TATAR CITY OF KUBLAI KHAN 101
greater throne and dais of his palace when he comes in
state to confer the great literary degrees. There is an
interesting old sun-dial on the terrace at the back of
the quadrangle, which, like all Chinese dials, has its
summsr face to tell one the standard time until the
22d of September, and the nether winter face to mark
the hours until the 22d of March.
The Drum-tower and the Bell-tower in that north-
ern quarter are two splendid Mongol keeps rebuilt by
Kienlung, one sheltering the monster bell of Yunglo
that used to strike the curfew, and the other holding
a great barrel drum that bangs the hours in good
Mongol fashion. They are in a deserted neighbor-
hood—deserted until a foreigner climbs down from a
cart. Then a dense population springs up from the
ground and the encircling mud-puddles, and to pro-
duce a camera doubles the mob as suddenly as if that
second mass of spectators had fallen from the clouds.
There is positively no admittance to these interesting
old towers, and one is easily consoled by believing that
the drum, the clepsydra, and the burning sandal sticks
that measure the hours are not worth the effort of
seeing. One becomes cautious and judicial in Peking,
weighs the sight, and considers whether the lion is
worth looking at before he worries and haggles and
pays and draws an unfeeling crowd around him.
VIII
IMPERIAL, PURPLE PEKING
I HE great south gate in the continuous
wall surrounding the Imperial or Yel-
low City is the main gate of the palace,
a state entrance used only by the Em-
peror on ceremonial occasions. One
passes from the Tatar to the Imperial City by gates
in the east, west, and north walls, each a towering red
Mongol keep, whose curving gables break the nine-
mile circuit of the Imperial City's yellow-tiled walls.
Each gateway is a busy center of city life, where
beggars wail, grandees strut, and mandarins, generals,
eunuchs, and bannermen, on foot and horse, in carts
and chairs and litters, are continually passing to and
fro. One is nearest the actual palace demesne at the
north or " back gate," where^ at the barracks of Man-
chu bannermen and the headquarters of the governor
of Peking, the Ti-tu, or "■ ^Mandarin of the Nine
Gates," all municipal and civic authority centers. In
that intimate Imperial City there are streets of pal-
aces, public offices and buildings, temples and resi-
dences with imposing gateways and roofs of colored
102
IMPERIAL, PURPLE PEKING 103
tiles. There are even shops here in this imperial
ward, although the Manchu is distinctly forbidden to
engage in trade, and is gathered for defense closely
around the yellow clay and yellow-tiled walls of the
Sacred Purple Forbidden City of the Son of Heaven,
the citadel in its midst.
From the broad avenue leading between the ban-
nermen's barracks one looks directly upon the green
hills and summer-houses of the Emperor's Pei-ta,
or Northern Garden, One may drive beside the
low garden wall for a mile, admiring the green
Meishan, the Prospect or Coal Hill, which Marco Polo
and Friar Odoric both described. This garden was
laid out by Kublai Khan, and the Mongol emperors
stored up supplies of coal against a possible siege
and turfed them over into landscape ornaments. The
Meishan is between one hundred and fifty and one
hundred and sixty feet in height, and, overtopping
the palace roof, sufBces to ward off all evil influences
from the north. The Ming emperors built, or more
probably rebuilt, the fanciful round^ square, and hex-
agonal red pavilions on the hills, and near one of
these temples or kiosks the last of the Mings hanged ^
himself from an acacia-tree when the victorious Man-
chu general had captured the city and seized the
throne. With proper respect for a sovereign ruler,
the Manchu usurper loaded the offending tree with
chains, as punishment for its part in an imperial
crime. One hilltop pa^dlion holds a life-size statue
of Kanghsi, and another is reserved for the l^nng in
state of imperial corpses.
In the days when the religion of the lotus was law,
104 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
this beautiful park and the adjoining Western Garden
with its great lake were adorned by temples, pagodas,
and dagobas. One temple still holds a colossal golden
image of Buddha, and another shelters ten thousand
bronze images of the All-Knowing and his attendant
bodhisattv^as. There is a bronze pagoda covered
with myriad images and reliefs, and a tall white
dagoba, that one sees above the tree-tops, holds the
ashes of a living buddha who died at Peking. There
are monasteries in the palace gardens where legions
of sleek lamas used to minister to imperial souls, and
another of Yunglo's colossal bells swings unrung,
voiceless, in its noble tower. The gi'eat religion is as
dead within the palace walls as elsewhere, the temples
and shrines are only relics and garden ornaments,
and the imperial folk have few spiritual needs that
the great Fo can meet.
The Northern Garden is separately walled, and is
divided from the actual palace inclosure by a broad
highway, continued as a causewaj' or long bridge
across its lake. Until quite recently this road and
bridge were freely used as a direct route from one
side of the Imperial City to the other. For more than
twenty years foreign residents greatly delighted in
this one green and beautiful prospect, this one breath
of fresh, imperial, purple air, and drove frequently
over the marble bridge of nine arches and picnicked
in the deserted pleasure-grounds around the lake.
Suddenly the gates were slammed in their faces, and
no foreigners were permitted to pass through. At
the sight of a foreigner looking from a passing cart
now, the guardians run to shut the gates, and to
BIPERIAL, PURPLE PEKING 105
emphasize their spite hold boards against the cracks
long after the alien has gone his way.
Maps, plans, and detailed descriptions of each
huildiDg in the palace inclosure may be bought at
any Chinese book-store, and Dr. Edkins has condensed
the facts in his chapters in Dr. Williamson's " Jour-
nej'^s in North China." The Jesuit fathers, who lived
beside and overlooked the palace gardens, and had
freest range of the forbidden purple precincts in
Kanghsi's and Kienlung's time, wrote full accounts
of the city, the suburban and the hunting palaces, and
of the life that went on within them. They painted
albums of landscape views and of palace occupants in
their gorgeous costumes, and copies are easily bought
to-day.
From the city wall one can trace and identify the
yellow-tiled roof of each of the pavilions of high-
sounding titles, as they stretch away from the great
south front gate for two miles back to the fairy
pavilions on the green Meishan. Friar Odoric de-
scribed the palace interiors, even to Kublai Khan's
great, dragon-carved jade punch-bowl, which, stand-
ing "two paces high" and hooped with gold, was
always filled with drink, with golden goblets standing
round. The storehouses, magazines of silk, furs, tea,
clothing, jewels, and the treasury of gold and silver
ingots are on the west side of the main avenue from
the south gate, with lesser storehouses of reserve
clothing, drugs, and perfumes on the east side. On
the east side shines the green-tiled roof of the Impe-
rial Library, the chief treasure of all China. This
precious and now unique collection of books was
106 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
brought together by that august patron of letters,
the- Emperor Kienlung, and duplicate libraries were
deposited at the Summer Palace outside the city, at
the hunting palace of Jehol in Mongolia, and at the
old ancestral palace of the Manchus at Mukden. The
library at the Summer Palace was burned by the allies
in 1860, the Jehol palace has not been used for forty
years, and Mukden's library is farther beyond imperial
ken. Earlier imperial libraries treasured at Hang-
chow and on Golden Island, below Nanking, were
destroyed during the Taiping rebellion.
Driving along the west wall of the palace, one may
see the upper portion of the red palace which the
Emperor Kienlung built for his Mohammedan "vvife,
a Turkestan princess, whose religion he regarded to
the extent of adding this unusual second story to a
dwelling, in order that she might look upon the Mo-
hammedan mosque across the way. Her face was
turned to Mecca and to Turkestan at the same time—
"the home-looking building," the Chinese called it.
Near this little Turkish seraglio rise the gables of the
one-story "Palace of Earth's Repose," which the
Ming emperors built for the use of dowager em-
presses, and where Tsze Hsi An, the despotic ruler
for forty years, is supposed to have passed her time.
The immediate dwelling, the intimate living-rooms
of the Emperor, are in this northwest corner of the
palace inclosure, nearest the women's quarter, and a
high- walled passage leads from this private quarter
to the Si Yuen, or Western Garden, a pleasure-ground
disused as long as the tower of the Jesuit church
overlooked it. Tlie residence palace of the first
IMPERIAL, PURPLE PEKING 107
Mongol emperors stood in this western pleasure-
ground, but earthquake, fire, and the ravages of
the first Manehu conqueror left few of the Mongol
buildings standing. The Empress visits the Western
Garden in state once a year to perform the ceremony
of feeding the silkworms at the so-called Silk Temple,
and a few lamas tend their temples and maintain
schools in the garden. The famous Pavilion of
Purple Light is in this outer garden also— a build-
ing where Korean, Mongol, and Looehoo envoys
used to be entertained with feasts and games when
they had offered their annual tribute, quite as the
Great Father at Washington used to receive delega-
tions of noble red men, give them presents of blankets
and tobacco, and pretend to whiff at the pipe of peace.
Ignominious audience was granted there to other outer
barbarians and savages— the ministers and envoys of
the great powers of Europe — when they clamored for
audiences in 1874 and in 1891.
No sovereign lives in such seclusion and mystery
as the Emperor of China, and the least is known in
the general foreign circle at Peking of what goes on
within the palace, of what affects the lives of the
eight thousand people who live and move within the
four-mile circuit of those yellow, dragon-tiled walls.
Everything connected with this Tranquil Palace of
Heaven, the actual imperial dwelling, has a tan-
talizing fascination for the outsider in Peking, indif-
ferently and scornfully as some may regard it all.
Half of the grotesque, absurd accounts of palace life
are manifestly untrue, but the most truthful ones are
often the most absurd, as witness the edicts and me-
108 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
1 morials daily published in the official Peking Gazette,
oldest newspaper in the world. Nothing in comic opera,
in the maddest burlesque or extravaganza, equals the
bombast and grandiloquence of some of the petitions
and memorials it prints, the maudlin raptures and ex-
hortations in the name of filial piety, nor yet the puerile
edicts signed by the "Vermilion Pencil," i. e., the Em-
peror, whose long-drawn bathos ends with a dra-
matic " Respect this." There have even been edicts
commanding grasshoppers to retire from stricken
provinces, and the annual inundation of the Yellow
River produces a crop of imperial inanities.
Where there is so much mystery, imagination at once
supplies material, and almost everything one hears
in Peking about the most exalted Pekingese circle
is immediately contradicted or disproved. Except for
the envoys and their suites on ceremonial occasions.
Prince Henry of Prussia, the Russian princes, and the
ladies of the diplomatic corps, the only foreigners be-
lieved to have penetrated the forbidden realm during
the nineteenth century were one or two physicians,
an electrical engineer, and some musicians, and these
last were carried in and out in closed chairs, past
blank walls, with everytliing screened from view save
what pertained to their immediate errand.
It is known that the palace awakens at twilight and
is busiest when graveyards yawn, and that imperial
owls have long chosen to bestir themselves only while
their toiling millions slept. The liglit of thousands
\ of vegetable-wax caudles, sent as tribute from certain
provinces, has given way to the blaze of incandescent
bulbs, and steam-heat is said to have been introduced
IMPERIAL, PURPLE PEKING 109
in the Empress Dowager's quarters. During the
years of the Emperor Kwangsu's minority he seldom
passed the city walls, but after he ascended the throne
and the Empress Dowager retired to her suburban
palace, the Emperor often made visits out through
the northwest gate to her E-ho Park retreat, and a
part of the ruined Summer Palace was rebuilt for his
imperial pleasurings. Much of his time was taken up
with state worship, and whenever he was about to
perform annual services at any place it was duly an-
nounced in the Peking Gazette, and special notice
was sent to each legation, in order that no foreigners
should venture near the imperial procession. The
route was always curtained and lined with soldiers
for its whole length, every house-window closed, each
door guarded, the street paved, smoothed, and strewn
with fresh sand. Yet every foreigner in Peking who
cared to had seen an imperial procession and enjoyed
a good look at Kwangsu, the Son of Heaven, borne
along in an open chair, or rather canopied platform,
by eighteen or twenty bearers. There were always
bannermen and house-owners to be bribed, and once
the Chien-men tower guards were surprised and
bought up by an energetic Englishman bent on see-
ing the Emperor and his train proceeding by torch-
light to the New Year ceremonies at the Temple of
Heaven. All described the dragon countenance of
Kwangsu as a pale and sickly one, the glance timid
rather than terrifying, and the lonely figure in its
simple dark robes extinguished by the blaze of color,
the sheen of tinsel and gold, in the uniforms of his
suite. Even his chair-bearers wore bright-red and
110 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
yellow satin tunics close-belted at the waist, and
strings of attendants in long yellow satin gowns with
rainbow borders in wave patterns dazzled the peeping
eye. One tourist, looking through a curtain-slit at
the imperial cortege, reported that the gorgeous robes
of the Emperoi^'s train were as shabby and greasy, as
dirty and threadbare, as the worst that the peddlers
ever offer for sale. Tribute elephants from Cochin
China were part of every imperial train until fifteen
years ago, when the supply diminished as more of
the elephant country was lopped off for French colo-
nies, and the ill temper of the few old animals remain-
ing in the imperial stables made them a danger to all
who came near. One mad elephant broke away from
the procession, seized a woman and threw her over
the roof of a house, and then threw a mule and cart
into a doorway.
When the city gates are closed at sunset they can
only be opened by direct imperial command, save the
great Chien-men, between the Chinese and the Tatar
City, which is opened for a half-hour every midnight
to admit the official carts and chairs and mounted
mandarins bound for the palace. The Emperor
Kwangsu was supposed to rise for his day at two
o'clock in the morning, and, after the rites and cere-
monies, to hold councils and audiences, receive me-
morials and reports, and work busily until after
sunrise. He turned to relaxation when plebeian day-
light came, and went wearily to bed about five o'clock
in the afternoon. Audiences were set for the grisly
hour just before dawn, and the assembled ministers
usually waited sleepily on the imperial pleasure.
IMPERIAL, PURPLE PEKING 111
Even the foreign envoys were bidden to their audi-
ence in the ignoble Pavilion of Purple Light at six
o'clock in the morning, as to a French military
court martial.
The Ti-tu, or military governor of Peking, the Man-
chu Guardian of the Nine Gates, does not open the
Chien-men gate nor the Imperial City gate gratui-
tously, nor permit any one to traverse the palace
approaches freely. All who enter the imperial, purple
precincts must pay roundly for the privilege. Rennie
relates that in the early days of Canton trade the
hoppo of that port was expected to pay the Guardian
of the Nine Gates at the rate of ten thousand taels
for each year of office-holding. One hoppo paid
thirty- six thousand taels after three and a half years
of profitable intendancy in the south, and two ver-
milion checks for ten thousand taels each were after-
ward sent out from the palace to be cashed at a bank.
The hoppo's salary had been twenty-four hundred taels
a year. Out of that stipend he spent eight thousand
taels on the necessary running expenses of the Canton
yamun. Leaving Canton with three hundred thou-
sand taels as his savings, half of that amount went
to Peking officials before the hoppo prostrated him-
self before the Emperor, since the eunuchs had also to
be remembered.
In recent times, Li Hung Chang is said to have
disbursed over thirty thousand taels in connection
with the one imperial interview accorded him in eight
years— the audience which preceded his departure
for the Czar's coronation. At such audiences, the
highest official was forced to prostrate himself and
112 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
remain on hands and knees, forehead repeatedly
touching the floor, in the kotow of worship, without
daring once to turn an eye directly on the dragon
countenance. When Li Hung Chang had knelt in
that attitude on a cold stone floor for an hour, he was
unable to rise. Eunuchs lifted him up and assisted
him to an outer room, where a physician restored him
sufiiciently to permit him to totter to his chair in a far-
away court.
Another Pekingese tale tells that, on his return from
his grand tour of the globe, the Empress Dowager
summoned the grand secretary Li to her E-ho palace
in the suburbs, and, as a final mark of favor, he was
shown the improvements and restorations she had
been making. The eunuchs, who hate him as only
Manchus can hate a Chinese, speciously led him to a
quiet arbor to rest, and plied him with tea and pipes-
all in a sacred, set-apart pavilion where only the
dowager dragon herself was ever expected to sit
Then the eunuchs denounced him for trespass and
lese-majesty, and had him arrested— virtually for
walking on the gi-ass— and turned over to the
Board of Punishment, which has absolute power of
life or death to all committed to it. The board was
a unit against the grand secretar}', whom kings and
emperors had courted and presidents of republics
had run after, and they gladly stripped him of his
yellow riding-jacket, of his button aud peacock
feather, and the worst might have followed but for
the iutercession of the Empress Dowager. Li Hung
Chang had just been named a member of the Board
of the Tsuug-li Yamuu, aud the judges decreed that
THE VICEROY 1,1 HUNG CHANCi.
IMPERIAL, PURPLE PEKING 115
he should be fined the half of a year's salary as final
punishment. As the services of this great man were
rated as worth ninety taels a year to the state, he
was mulcted of forty-five taels, or about thirty dollars
in United States gold.
The Russian envoy at Peking had expressly indi-
cated the young Manchu princes whom it was desir-
able to have attend the Czar's coronation ceremony
and be impressed for all time with definite proofs of
Russia's power and riches. But the princes refused
to go, to appear as vassals or tributaries of the Czar,
as their suspicious minds viewed that assembling of
princes in Moscow. The Russians then chose Li Hung
Chang, who had served them well before, and deserved
a reward and an incentive for the future. The Man-
chu enemies of the grand secretary, who hated him
for the disasters attending the war he had protested
against their inviting, hailed the idea of his going
abroad. During his absence they expected to under-
mine him thoroughly, never dreaming of the honors
and distinction to be accorded the ^' Grand Old Man
of China," the absurdities of adulation which all
Europe and America were to heap upon a deposed
and discredited provincial governor, a Chinese poli-
tician out of a job. They were dumfounded and
chagrined when reports of Li's triumphal progress
reached China, and the cry was raised that the great
tourist was assuming honors due a sovereign, that
he was representing himself as the empire— that La
Chine, c'est moi, was his attitude. The United States,
not first among Chinophile countries certainly, and
whose regularly accredited ministers at Peking have
l^
/
116 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
received but the scantiest hospitality and very little
courtesy from the individuals directing the Chinese
government, spent thirty thousand dollars in United
States gold entertaining this passed politician and ex-
office-holder, and fairly outdid Europe in its abject
attitude before this great hypnotizer.
IX
THE DECADENCE OF THE MANCHUS
[HEN the allied armies approached Peking
the Emperor Hienfung and his court
hastily fled from the Summer Palace as
the French advance-guard reached it,
to Jehol, the hunting palace in Mongolia,
more than one hundi-ed miles northeast of Peking.
It was the custom of the Manchu emperors to repair
to Jehol each year for a season of hunting and vigor-
ous outdoor life, for relaxation from the awful tram-
mels of Peking palace etiquette. With the decadence
of that once sturdy race, the outing to Jehol had then
been omitted for more than forty years, nor has the
court revisited Jehol since that involuntary outing of
1860. Hienfung remained in hiding after the igno-
minious peace was concluded by his brother Prince
Kung, and died at Jehol within the year, when his
body was brought to Peking and laid in state in the
pavilion on the Meishan.
The Empress, the one legal widow of Hienfung, had
an only child, a daughter, but the little princess could
not count in the succession. The son of one of Hien-
117
118 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
fung's inferior wives, the child of a concubine of the
lowest rank, was declared heir to the throne in the
Emperor's last edict. The mother of Hienfung was
at Jehol at the time of the Emperor's death, but this
Empress Dowager seemed to have had no part in the
dramatic events, the fierce intrigues and cabals that
went on in the mountain palace, and she returned
quietly to Peking with her retinue and all the widows
of lesser rank, and was never heard of by the outer
circles. The guardianship of the baby Emperor
Tungchih had been left to a board of princely regents
and schemers at Jehol, and the widow of Hieu-
fung and the mother of the little Tungchih fled
in alarm to Prince Kung, as they saw the intrigues
closing around them. An imperial decree raised the
fortunate mother of Tungchih to the relative rank
of empress, and another decree made this " Mother of
the Sovereign," or Tsze Hsi An, the Western Empress,
a co-regent with the " Mother of the State," the East-
ern Empress, or legal widow of Hienfung, both acting
with Prince Kung. The two empresses entered Pe-
king together, little four-year-old Tungchih on the lap
of his handsome and courageous mother. The conspir-
ator princes were seized as they returned from Jehol
and put to death, and the two empresses and Prince
Kung ruled together amicably for the dozen years of
tlie little Emperor's minority. In compliance with im-
perial custom, Tungchih was married with great state
and splendor in 1872, and at the age of seventeen this
child, reared in the harem, with harem ideas only, save
for the dry bones of the classics taught him in the deep
palace seclusion, began to rule. One account made
THE DECADENCE OF THE MANCHUS 119
him out a weakling and a debauchee who left every-
thing in the hands of the eunuchs and degraded and
banished Prince Kung when he remonstrated. Another
described him as being possessed of some enlightened
and progressive ideas, as having resented the routine
of senseless ceremonials and rites, as roaming Peking
in disguise and righting many of the small wrongs of
his people, and it was said that he and his high-spirited
young Empress Ahluta resented the constant domina-
tion and overriding of their wishes by Prince Kung and
the dowager empresses. There were wars and intrigues
between the two factions at court, and soon the asser-
tive, troublesome young Emperor died of smallpox (no
one investigates such deaths), and his independent
young Empress Ahluta quickly and mysteriously fol-
lowed. " Fate is under government control in China,"
says Mr. Harold Gorst, significantly. Disregarding aU
ordinary rules of succession, the astute empresses
chose and named as the Emperor one Kwangsu, the
four-year-old son of Prince Chun. This child, being
a nephew of Hienfung and of the same generation
as the last Emperor Tungchih, could not rightly suc-
ceed him nor worship his tablets ; but the empresses
disposed of that objection by proclaiming a posthu-
mous adoption by the Emperor Hienfung, by which
Hienfung's widows logically became the stepmothers
of his adopted son, who was also their nephew.
The Emperor Hienfung had died ten years before his
adopted son Kwangsu was born, but this break in
genealogy had no weight with the doughty empresses,
who were tasting again the sweets of power.
Etiquette and law being complied with, the two
120 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
stepmothers embarked upon another long regency,
Li Hung Chang ingratiating himseK with the regents
at a time when a palace intrigue to displace them
was checkmated by his suddenly marching troops to
the vicinity of Peking to support their authority— a
lesson not lost upon the shrewd Western Empress.
The Eastern Empress, the less assertive and forceful
of the regents, died in 1881, and then Tsze Hsi An,
only one in a palace full of concubines twenty years
before, began her real reign, became sole and undis-
puted ruler of more than three hundred millions of
people, usurper of the oldest throne and autocrat of
the largest empire of one people on earth, tyrant over
one fifth of the human race and one tenth of the area
of the world— a dizzy pinnacle for one of the sex de-
spised by Buddha and Lao-tsze and Confucius, in the
land where woman is held in least esteem.
Dowager queens and empresses have been court
problems and national difficulties in all time, but the
end of the century has seen them become the special
dilemmas of the greatest of Eastern and Western em-
pires. A conference of young emperors, with the
masterful one of Germany as chief adviser, might
have spared Kwangsu his freedom. There have been
empresses regent before in China, but no precedents
avail for comparison with this masterful Manchu,
Tsze Hsi An, the most remarkable woman sovereign
and the most unbridled female despot the world has
known. She rose from the harem's ranks, unedu-
cated, ignorant of public affairs; but by sheer ability,
by her own wits, will, and shrewdness, she attained
the supreme power. Hers is the greatest of personal
THE DECADENCE OF THE MANCHUS 121
triumphs, her strength of mind and force of char-
acter and dominant personality having won every
step ; centuries of precedent and all the shackles of
Oriental etiquette overborne by her masterful strat-
egy and remorseless will. Her enemies have fallen
away, sickened and died, and scattered as chaff ; no
one has opposed her will and survived ; no plot or
intrigue has availed against her ; no conspirator has
found her unarmed or off her guard ; and hers has
been a charmed, relentless, terrible life.
When Kwangsu had attained the age of sixteen,
his stepmother and' aunt, the Empress Regent, threw
herself with ardor into match-making or wife-choosing
for a second time. The august Tsze Hsi An attended
to the marrying of her nephew as zealously as she
had married off her own son seventeen years before, the
poor little bride and bridegroom being equally pawns
and puppets in her hands. She summoned all the
daughters of noble Manchu families, as before, but
many evaded the summons. The examination and
weeding out of candidates went on for nearly two
years, narrowing down from three hundred original
entries to thirty picked beauties, then to ten precious
pearls, and last to the one Yehonala, queen rose in the
Manchu garden of roses, and daughter of the Empress
Regent's own brother ; whereby the invincible dowager
showed her skill again, and kept imperial affairs in the
family, despite Kwangsu's preference for another.
The unsuccessful candidates at the first matrimo-
nial examination, the hundreds of rejected aspirants
for the throne, are always consoled by rolls of silk
and splendid gifts ; and then the two inferior wives of
122 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
the first rank, the twenty-seven of the second order,
and the eightj'^-one of the third class are chosen from
these same expectant empresses. This Oriental in-
stitution is as fixed and is regulated by as strict rule
and ceremony as any other thing about the court.
Friar Odoric found Kublai Khan sitting in state, with
the first real wife or empress at his left, and two in-
ferior wives a step lower down. All of these impe-
rial favorites have their distinctive dress and marks
of rank, their particular coronals of flowers, their
symbolic plastrons embroidered on their coats. Fa-
ther Ripa describes the Emperor Kanghsi moving
about the grounds, studying and reading in the pavil-
ions in the Summer Palace and in the Jehol gardens,
always surrounded by groups of women. Herr von
Brandt, who was German minister for so many years
at Peking, has published a German transcript of the
memoirs of one of these supernumerary wives or
palace ladies, which gives some idea of the life and
the gilded miseries of those women, widowed, but re-
maining still secluded when the Emperor dies, cut
off from their own families, and sedulously excluded
from all part in the court life of the sovereign who
succeeds. Only a Tsze Hsi An could lift herself from
such an estate and escape the penalties of plural im-
perial widowhood.
The Emperor Kwangsu had no interest in his own
wedding, and heeded little the teachings of the two
women '' professors of matrimony " duly assigned him
in preparation for the long-drawn-out, awesome cere-
mony. The same order of formalities, the processions
to and fro with gifts and tablets and golden name-
THE DECADENCE OF THE MANCHUS 133
cards, and finally the torch-light procession escorting
the bride to the palace in her gorgeous red wedding-
chair, were followed as at the wedding of Tungchih
in 1872. After the little Yehonala disappeared with
her paraphernalia into the palace gates, little was
heard of her. The Emperor was indifferent to the
pliant and pretty niece whom the stepmother em-
press aunt had chosen for him in place of the bride
he wanted, only to fasten the hampering family
chains and claims the more closely around him.
It is said that there are three thousand eunuchs on
the palace staff to watch and guard and wait on the
empresses and the great company of lesser wives and
widows in the palace— repulsive creatures in gorgeous
garments, often to be met at the foreign shops in
Legation Street and in the neighborhood of the east
palace gate. Some of them have been slaves or pris-
oners of war, or were bought from their parents for
such palace service; some retire with old age, and
often with fortunes, since they do all the palace pur-
chasing. There is a special cemetery for the eunuchs
in the northwest part of the city, where the graves
are tended, incense burned, and the tablets worshiped
by pious ones of the palace fraternity. The eunuchs
have been in aud at the bottom of every palace in-
trigue and crime for some nineteen centuries. Kanghsi
and other sovereigns tried to suppress them, to restrict
their numbers and authority, but in vain. One of
the first acts of the empresses regent in 1861 was to
punish and deport the eunuchs who had taken part
in the intrigues at Jeliol, and eunuchs went to the
block after the coup d'etat of 1898 ; but the cliief of
124 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
the eunuchs is still the power at court, the one behind
the throne, to be placated and feared by all.
No individual in the empire had less liberty of ac-
tion than the lonely Kwangsu during the few years
he went through the form of ruling. Tied down by
the ponderous etiquette of his station, he could neither
live nor move of his own volition. Every act from
birth to death, at any hour of the day or night, in the
life of a Chinese emperor is prescribed by custom
and regulated by minute rules ; any deviation para-
lyzes and alarms the retinue. Yet, except for the bur-
den and forms of sovereignty, Kwangsu was a puppet
and a minor even after he had married and had as-
cended the dragon throne. The Empress Dowager, in
the assumed retirement of E-ho Park, still did it all ;
still terrorized and directed, and issued edicts which
the hypnotized one of the Vermilion Pencil, protest-
ing, signed, and sometimes never saw at all. By the
specious pleas of filial devotion she lured him to re-
peated visits to her beautiful retreat at a time when
her influence had waned and the young Emperor was
seeking a means of ridding himself of such petticoat
tyranny. There were quarrels with Prince Kung, and
the faithful old guardian was exiled from court for
years, and all the advisers of progress were degraded
or disposed of less happily.
One great statesman, Liu Min Chan, dying, left a
memorial to the throne which he would not have
dared to present in life. The old general urged re-
forms, railroads, and Western learning, and in a few
paragraphs wrote a warning that sliould liave been
kept always before the imperial eyes :
THE DECADENCE OF THE MANCHUS 125
" We feel her [Russia's] grip on our throat and her i^
fist upon our back, and our contact with her is a source
of perpetual uneasiness to our hearts and minds. But
our long season of weakness and inaction disables us
from making a show of strength, and our only alterna-
tive, therefore, is to bear patiently insult and obloquy.
When a quarrel occurs we have to yield to her de-
mands and make a compromise regardless of money,
in order to avert the dangers of war. . . .
'' Now, Japan is an extremely small country — like a
pill. Her rulers, however, have adopted Western
mechanical arts; and relying on her possession of
railways, she attempts now and again to be arrogant,
like a mantis when it assumes an air of defiance, and
to despise China, and gives us no small amount of
trouble on the smallest pretext.
" The reasons why Russia is overbearing and Japan
underrates us are to be found in the fact that China
has only one corner of her vast possessions protected,
is afraid to face difficulties, and is incapable of rous-
ing her energies because possessed of an inordinately
pacific disposition."
Others felt the same, but dared not speak. The
young Emperor's interest in foreign people and ways
was stilled and thwarted, and the most impossible
ideas of foreigners were conveyed to him. The for-
eign envoys, who had to wait through another long
minority before having audience with the sovereign
to whom they were accredited, had to insist strenu-
ously before that small courtesy was granted. Tung-
chih's famous audience of 1873, the first occasion
126 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
upon which any foreigner in this century had gazed
upon the dragon countenance, was held in the Pavilion
of Purple Light in the detached "Western Garden, with
the deliberate intention of belittling the foreign rep-
resentatives in Chinese eyes— a coarse sort of practical
joke. The same insult was repeated to the supine
envoys by Kvvangsu in 1891, when the ministers again
waited in a cold tent at daylight, and when ushered
into the Pavilion of Purple Light found the Emperor
seated cross-legged like a Turk on a broad arm-chair,
with a low table before him. They themselves were
not allowed to lay their addresses on that table before
the nodding automaton, but handed them to an officer
who did it for them. After this second ceremony,
the diplomats, weighing and appreciating the mean-
ing of each incident, and being very wroth, vowed
one and all never to put themselves in such position
in such a hall of humiliation again. The Chinese
and the Manchus alike have such a genius for hypno-
tizing diplomatic folk unused to Asiatic character
that such audiences might have continued to tickle
the Chinese sense of the humorous for many years
but for the surprises of the Japanese war. That war
and its train of disasters dulled the sense of humor
in court circles, suppressed the Empress Dowager for
a season, and left her under a cloud of humiliation
and unpopularity.
TSZE HSI AN THE GREAT
|0 break the tedium of her life without
visible power, to keep herself in sight,
and to please her insatiable vanity, the
Empress Dowager jumped her age for-
ward a few years, and began prepara-
tions to celebrate worthily her sixtieth birthday, that
age of especial honor in China, and in October, 1894,
she expected to rival and surpass the celebration of the
sixtieth birthday of the Emperor Kienlung's mother.
Buildings were reconstructed in the suburban plea-
sure-grounds she had chosen for her own, and a broad,
level stone road, equal to the old highways, was built
out from the new northwest gate of the Tatar City
to her palace gates. Against the advice of Li Hung
Chang and of every one who knew the strength of
Japan and remembered what foreign armies have
done in China, the Empress Dowager and her reac-
tionary Manchus urged and provoked the war with
Japan. She wanted the spoils and trophies of war
for her birthday triumph, to have the Emperor of
Japan and a few captives brought her in cages. It was
127
128 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
she who inspired the wording of the Chinese declara-
tion of war, a piece of inflated verbiage, long drawn
out, inane, coarse, and vulgar.
Her birthday preparations were rudely intemipted,
and in magniloquent phrases the dowager posed to
the empire and discounted a greater jubilee celebra-
tion after the war by assigning to military purposes
some thousands of taels that had been high-handedly
diverted for her contemplated holiday. As reverses
came, and yellow riding- jackets and peacock feathers
were lifted from viceroys and generals without stop-
ping the advance of the Japanese, the Empress Dow-
ager became frightened— the worst frightened one of
all the imperial clan.
Jehol was not a possible asylum, since the Japa-
nese army was coming from the east ; and Mukden,
the old home and citadel of the Manchus, where it
was said they had been storing treasure for genera-
tions against the day of their expulsion from China,
had already fallen to the Japanese. The Empress
Dowager grew frantic, remembering the flight to Jehol
and all that had followed thirty-odd years before, and
implored the recall of Prince Kung, the intervention
of the European envoys, help from any one— anything
for peace. The Emperor exposed the dowager's
frame of mind in edict after edict, and peace was de-
sired, he said, if only as a panacea to the elderly
lady's nerves. The Empress Dowager and her con-
servative, foreign-hating faction had entirely lost
"face," and all stomach and heart for war. There
was no overbearing pride left in them then.
"When the danger was past, the humiliating peace
TSZE HSI AN THE GKEAT 131
concluded, and the three Heaven-sent allies in Eu-
rope had wrested back from Japan the Liao-tung
peninsula, Chinese insolence and self-sufficiency rose
again, and an audience was given the envoys in a
small outer hall in the palace grounds. The old con-
temptuous attitude was resumed outwardly, while
provinces, ports, and concessions were wrung from
them by the Christian powers, as Christian knights
in the middle ages used to despoil the Jews. The
great viceroy on the Yangtsze urged the removal of
the capital to either Hankow or Nanking, since the
old memorialist's warnings against Russia were more
than coming true. But the chagrined Manchus, still
smarting from their humiliation, and fearing the
Chinese as much as any other outer enemy, fatuously
suggested moving the capital to the heart of the
mountainous province of Shansi, " where the foreign-
ers could not follow," bound themselves faster in
Russia's debt, yielded more and more to her de-
mands.
The war had taught intelligent and progressive Chi-
nese that a change must come if their country was
to survive, and the awakening sense of the long-
sleeping people at last made itself heard in Peking.
Although progressive ones in high places fell ill,
died, or went into retirement, the young Emperor,
once freed from his bigoted, foreign-hating tutor, con-
tinued to read foreign books, and summoned to him
the " Modern Sage," Kang Yu Wei, a Cantonese
scholar of the highest degree, who, as a secretary of
the Tsung-li Yamun, had had an opportunity of mak-
ing himself known. Then the palace filled up with
132 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
progressive yoang reformers, unsuspected advocates
of reform declared themselves, aud the Manchu con-
servatives were in panic.
Prince Henry of Prussia came with his terrible
fleet, took formal possession of the German priuci-
pality-on-leasehold of Kiao-chau, and with a refine-
ment of satire paid his respects to the despoiled
landowner at Peking. The Emperor stood up to re-
ceive the visitor as an equal in the audience-hall of the
Summer Palace, and returned the visit with due cour-
tesy. The traditions of insolent conservatism were
broken, and while innovations were in the air, and all
sacred precedents and customs were being disre-
garded, the Empress Dowager received Prince Henry
face to face, instead of listening from behind a screen,
as she had usually given audience to Chinese officials.
The young Empress Yehonala was not heard of at
either of these audiences, but Prince Henry suggested
to the Empress Dowager that she should receive the
ladies of the diplomatic corps, ignoring the reigning
Empress in a way that could not be thought of in
Berlin, nor hardly in St. Petersburg.
All through that summer of 1898, succeeding Prince
Henry's illuminating visit, reform edicts poured from
the palace, calling for changes by wholesale, for
progress post-haste, and for regeneration overnight ;
for foreign studies to be made the tests in the great
examinations; for foreign drill to be introduced in
the army, foreign system in the departments of the
government. A host of incompetents and useless
hangers-on were swept out of office in brief edicts,
and there was consternation at provincial capitals. It
TSZE HSI AN THE GREAT 133
is said that an edict permitting or commanding the
cutting of the queue and the adoption of foreign dress
was written, but not given out. Schools of Western
learning were authorized, and the many newspapers
and magazines, that had been the first agents in the
work of reform, were subsidized and encouraged, and
others projected. The Emperor announced that he
would end his life of seclusion, go by railway-train to
Tientsin in September and review his army in per-
son, and become a modern ruler.
The Empress Dowager's feelings may easily be ima-
gined ; but that shrewdest woman in Asia, " the only
man in China," as she has been called, having pro-
tested and interfered in vain, soon let it be known
that she was the moving spirit behind the Emperor,
that she was inspiring the new departure. She
showed an ambition to be in the forefront of progress,
to out-reform the reformers, to be more anxious than
they were for railroads, steam-engines, and Western
civilization. She would go to Tientsin by railway-
train, too, and attend the review as European em-
presses do. She would adopt European etiquette
and dress for her own court, hold drawing-rooms,
have foreign ladies presented, and entertain with
fetes and garden-parties like the Empress of Japan.
Peking was dazed ; the Far East was aghast ; but it
was understood that the plans for the new etiquette
were being formulated upon the past experience of the
Japanese in changing from the old Eastern etiquette to
European court customs. Only one Mancliu noble-
woman of the court circle has been educated in a
foreign country in foreign ways, and has permitted
134 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
her daughters to be taught on the same lines, and
orders were given this Manchu family to devise and
take charge of the changed ceremonies of the Empress
Dowager's court. Before that family could reach
Peking, the crash came; reaction reacted; the coup
d'etat fell ; the reformers fled for their lives ; decapi-
tations were made by wholesale, and the whole group
of progressives, who had roused the Emperor to his
country's needs and perils, were exterminated. All
were seized save Kang Yu Wei, to whom the Em-
peror sent a last message to fly for his life. The
Emperor, in attempting to escape from the palace
himself,— to seek refuge at the near-by British lega-
tion, it is said,— was seized by the Empress Dowager's
eunuchs and carried off to the island palace in her
suburban park.
The reformers had been too hasty and had counted
without the Empress Dowager, whom they openly an-
tagonized. Chang Liu, reformer, in one memorial to
the Emperor, had dared to say : '^ The relation of the
Empress Dowager to the late Emperor Tungchih was
that of his own mother; but her relation to you is
that of the widowed concubine of a former emperor."
While they had written essays and memorials and
inspired edicts, she had quietly mustered an army to
the neighborhood; and the unsuspecting reformers
confided in this Tatar general of hers, who imme-
diately informed the dowager. It suited the Man-
chu general and all his kind to keep to the old order.
Moreover, all the reformers were Chinese of the
middle and southern provinces, their leader a Can-
tonese, the most hated of all Chinese by the Manchus
TSZE HSI AN THE GREAT 135
since the war of the allies, when Cantonese coolies
worked for the foreigners and saw the Manchus
defeated and with lost " face." The Empress Dow-
ager had shrewdly bided her time, and her wits re-
seated her on the throne, with her obstreperous stepson
in some indefinite sort of durance, dethroned maybe,
or abdicated perhaps, but at any rate out of her way.
The little episode of Kwangsu's play at ruling was
over, and that two hundred and forty-sixth Son of
Heaven was set aside as easily as a puppet in a
box, all because he had lacked the courage and force
first to set aside and crush the Empress Dowager.
Then, "• by request," the Empress Dowager unselfishly
took up " the burden of rule in her old age," all that
the invalid Emperor might rest ! Not an allusion was
made to the young Empress Yehonala, although two
of Yehonala's brothers, nephews of the dowager, were
among the proscribed and persecuted reformers. It
was not known whether she remained in the Peking
palace or shared the imperial prison at E-ho Park.
As there were no imperial children, the Empress Ye-
honala counted for nothing in the tragic drama
playing on in those thick- walled palaces, and had no
such leverage as the beautiful concubine Tsze Hsi An
made use of forty years before. Eunuchs guarded
her somewhere, as eunuchs guarded the Emperor at
E-ho, and although eunuchs were ruthlessly decapi-
tated with the reformers, Kang Yu Wei doubts if the
government can ever be reformed until the palace is
wholly rid of these pests, these Oriental survivals of
primitive society, who are the arch-enemies of all prog-
ress and reform,
136 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
When Kang Yu Wei had escaped to Shanghai, to
Hongkong, to Japan, and to Europe, he was pursued
everywhere by spies and emissaries told off for his
capture or murder. Only the closest police surveil-
lance protected him, and the price on his head was
raised to two hundred thousand taels when he ven-
tured as near as Singapore. As the last stroke, the
vindictive dowager commanded that the tombs of
Kang Yu Wei's ancestors should be desecrated and
destroyed. Chinese hatred and malice, the greatest
fury of revenge, could not devise direr punishment
than such outrage of all that Chinese hold most
sacred.
The wives of the envoys and the ladies of the dip-
lomatic corps had never been recognized during the
thirty-eight years that legations had been established
at Peking, and after the dowager's ready assent to
Prince Henry's suggestion it took months of pressure
and insistence, and long discussions as to the form and
order, before the audience took place. The Empress
Dowager protested against receiving any but the en-
voys' wives, because of the great number it would in-
clude, and it could not be explained to her that not all
the envoys, nor half the secretaries, were married. The
Chinese brain could not comprehend such a condition,
such unevenness, such iiregularity. It could compre-
hend two, and two only. Proper consideration was
finally accorded, and the wives of the British, German,
Japanese, Russian, American, and French ministers,
comprising the little group of legation chatelaines,
were properly met by yellow chairs at the first palace
gate, and carried to the doors of the reception-hall.
KAN'G YU WEI,
The " Modem Sage " of Chiim
TSZE HSI AN THE GREAT 139
Three reverences in advancing and retiring from the
presence were made as in a European court, and
Lady Macdonald, doyenne of the corps, read a short
address. The soberly attired dowager made gracious
remarks, and the guests were entertained at a feast
in an adjoining hall. She did not sit with them, nor
was anything seen or heard of the little Empress
Yehonala in dethronement. Rolls of silk and pearl
rings wei'e distributed before the visitors took leave,
and none who took part in the affair seemed to show
more interest or pleasure than her redoubtable
Majesty Tsze Hsi An. When the diplomats came out
of that trance they found that the audience of the for-
eign ladies, so thrust upon the Empress Dowager, was
construed as an official recognition of the usurper,
a virtual acknowledgment that the real Empress
was dethroned.
These few who have looked upon the countenance
of the dowager describe her as a tall, erect, fine-
looking woman of distinguished and imperious bear-
ing, with pronounced Tatar features, the eye of an
eagle, and the voice of determined authority and
absolute command. She has, of course, the natural,
nndef ormed feet of Tatar women, and is credited with
great activity, a fondness for archery and riding and
for walking, and with a passion for games of chance
and theatrical representations. With advancing*
years, empresses and Manchu palace women assume
more sober colors in their outer robe, which is always
the long Manchu gown touching the floor, no matter
how thick the soles of their ''stilt" or "flower-pot"
shoes may be. There are curious little shoulder-cape
140 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
arrangements around the neck of their ceremonial
gowns, which have the Manchus' symbolic "horse-
shoe" cuifs falling over the hand, embroidered plas-
trons of rank on back and breast, and the large offi-
cial beads, whose use as insignia of high station
came in fashion with* the Buddhist religion. After
the age of twenty-five, empresses and princesses put
away their great gold bar-coronets with the pendent
showers of pearls and the large bouquets of flowers
and butterflies, and wear instead a broad fluted-gold
coronal set with stiff bunches of flowers, a magnificent
head-dress very like a cocked hat set crosswise. One
may buy water-color sketches on silk, copied from old
albums of court costumes, that ohow one all the varie-
ties and vagaries of court costume worn in the audience-
hall and the women's quarters of the palace. One may
play ''paper dolls" in this way with the imperial folk
and their followers, but otherwise he only gets tanta-
lizing glimpses now and then of the court beauties and
the palace women in their carts, gilded, painted, jew-
eled, finished like works of art and enshrined like
idols in the archaic cart, but unknown.
All the period since 1861 should be rightly re-
corded as the reign of Tsze Hsi An, a more eventful
period than all the two hundred and forty-four reigns
that had preceded her three usurpations. It began
after a conquering army had made terms of peace in
her capital, and with the Taiping rebellion in full swing
of success. The aid of foreign nations crushed that re-
bellion, saved the throne, and propped up the INIanchu
dynasty for a little longer. The break-up of China
was imminent then, but Gordon averted it, as some
TSZE HSI AN THE GREAT 141
other Heaven-sent one will continue to do at every
crisis. There succeeded the Nienfei rebellion in Shan-
tung, and the Mohammedan rebellion in Yun-nan ; the
rebellions in Kan-su and Ili and Hu-nan, the difficulty
with the Japanese in Formosa, and unexampled
floods and famines. Annam and Tongking were
lost to the French J tributary Burma passed under
British rule, and China's prestige vanished for-
ever in the disastrous war with Japan. The mere
peninsula of Liao-tung, claimed by Japan, was saved
by the intervention of Russia and her two confed-
erate nations in Europe, in order that, later, the
peninsula and the whole of Manchuria should be
handed over to Russia as reward. Kiao-chau fell
to Germany at the first pretext, and France took a
Shan state as her price for intervention. Then
England leased Wei-hai-wei, and acquired the Kow-
loon peninsula opposite Hongkong. All China was
marked off into spheres of influence, over which some
double-headed eagle or vulture flew. Italy demanded a
port; Denmark equipped an expedition. In the last
moment an understanding with Japan set the totter-
ing throne erect, warned predatory powers off, but
roused Russia to fresh demands ; and then came the
dramatic stroke when that new world-power, the
United States, appeared as the great and good friend
of Tsze Hsi An in securing written assurances that
the harpy powers would maintain the " open door "
in trade, and therefore the integrity of China. Where-
upon Tsze Hsi An felt herself again saved from the
break-up, and safe in announcing, in an edict signed
by Kwangsu, January 24, 1900, the abdication of
142 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
Kwangsu, and the choice of Pu Chun as heir to the
throne,— son of Prince Tuan, and grandson of the
dowager's own deceased consort, the Emperor Hien-
fung,— a boy of nine, whose father and tutors have
been rabid anti-foreign conservatives of the most viru-
lent, unenlightened kind, leaders of the secret societies
opposed to foreigners and Western progress.
Then a storm arose, and Tsze Hsi An quickly pro-
duced the passive Kwangsu, and permitted him to as-
sume the role of emperor during the brief New Year's
audience with the foreign envoys. In all topsyturvy-
dom surely nothing approaches this petticoat tyranny
and bullying of poor Kwangsu— the one man in palaces
full of women and eunuchs, yet unable to free or
assert liimself ; a manikin majesty, who is put off and
on the throne at short notice ; set up and lifted down
like a marionette or a piece of furniture, without as
much as a "By your leave"; a pitiful "paper tiger"
of an emperor.
Kang Yu Wei, at Singapore, surrounded by a body-
guard of defenders and by colonial police, in a city
full of spies and hired assassins, continued to ful-
minate against " the False One," " the Usurper," " the
Concubine Relict," and the infamous Li Luen-yen, her
sham eunuch, to whom he ascribed all power and all
evil. Kang Yu Wei even threatened to head a rebel
army, which madness would probably precipitate the
inevitable Russian garrisoning of Peking, and the
certain Russo-Japanese war.
XI
THE STRANGERS' QUARTER
[T the close of the war in 1860, the humil-
iated government, accepting the pres-
ence of foreign envoys at Peking as
a necessary evil, offered the Summer
Palace inclosure for a great diplomatic
compound, and then a tract of land immediately out-
side the west wall for a foreign concession. Sir
Harry Parkes led in emphatically repudiating these
offers, and the Liang-Kung-f u (palace of the Duke of
Liang) was bought for a British legation, Duke Tsin's
fu becoming the French legation. A fu always has
green-tiled roofs, stone lions before the five-bayed
entrance-gate, and four courts and pavilions beyond,
and a fu is assigned to each imperial son outside of
the succession. Imperial descendants move down
one degree in rank with each generation, and when
the third descendant has reached the level of the peo-
ple again, the fu reverts to the crown. The occu-
pants of fus may have eunuchs attached to their
establishments, and to the remotest generation they
may wear the yellow girdle of imperial descent. There
8 143
144 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
have been yellow-belted teachers, and even domestic
servants in foreign employ, starvelings of imperial
ancestry who took their few dollars with plebeian
gratitude.
All the legations are in that quarter of the Tatar
City where Mongols, Tibetans, Koreans, and other
tribute-bearing visitors were always lodged, and
where the Mongols still have a street to themselves.
The French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Italian
legations, the club, the hotel, the bank, and the two
foreign stores are grouped closely together, facing
and touching one another half-way down Legation
Street ; and, across a once splendid bridge, the Ameri-
can and Russian legations face, and the British
legation, adjoining, stretches along an infragrant
canal, or open sewer, that drains away from lakes in
the palace grounds. The British is the largest estab-
lishment, the five-acre compound always sheltering
from forty to fifty British souls, or " mouths" in the
sordid Chinese expression. All these European lega-
tions and the Japanese legation have their corps of
student-interpreters, university graduates sent out
for two years' study of the Chinese written and spoken
language, the Pekingese or mandarin court dialect
used by the official class throughout the empire. At
the completion of their prescribed course under their
minister's charge, they are drafted to consulates, are
steadily promoted in line of seniority, and retire on
pensions after twenty-five years' service.
All these official European residences are maintained
on a scale of considerable splendor, and the sudden
transfers from the noisome streets to the beautiful
THE STRANGERS' QUARTER 145
parks and garden compounds, the drawing-rooms and
ball-rooms, with their brilliant companies living and
amusing themselves exactly as in Europe, are among
the greatest contrasts and surprises of Peking. The
picked diplomats of all Europe are sent to Peking,
lodged sumptuously, paid high salaries, and sustained
by the certainty of promotions and rewards after a
useful term at Peking— all but the American minis-
ter, who is crowded in small rented premises, is paid
about a fourth as much as the other envoys, and, com-
ing untrained to his career, has the cheerful certainty
of being put out of office as soon as he has learned
his business and another President is elected, his stay
in Peking on a meager salary a sufficient incident in
itself, leading to nothing further officially. The
United States does not maintain student-interpreters
at Peking, and the legation has so far drafted its in-
terpreters from the mission boards. Such interpre-
ters, having usually given most attention to the local
dialects of the people, must then acquire the elaborate
and specialized idioms of the official class. Dr. Peter
Parker and the great Wells Williams are the only
sinologues, or Chinese scholars, who have lent luster
to the roll of American diplomats serving in China.
The diplomats in exile lead a narrow, busy life
among themselves, occupied with their social amuse-
ments and feuds, often well satisfied with Peking
after their first months of disgust, resentment, and
homesickness, and even becoming sensitive to any
criticism or disparagement of the place. They have
their club, the tennis-courts of which are flooded and
roofed over as a skating-rink, their spring and autumn
146 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
races at a track beyond the walls, frequent garden-
parties and picnic teas in the open seasons, and a busy
round of state dinners and balls all winter.
For the nearl}^ forty years that the fine flowers of Eu-
ropean diplomacy have been transplanted to Peking,
they have been content to wallow along this filthy
Legation Street, breathing its dust, sickened with
its mud and stenches, the highway before their doors
a general sewer and dumping-ground for offensive
refuse of every kind. The street is all gutter save
where there are fragmentary attempts at a raised mud-
bank footwalk beside the house walls, for use when
the cartway between is too deep a mud-slough. " We
are here on sufferance, under protest, you know," say
the meek and lowly diplomats. ''We must not of-
fend Chinese prejudices." Moreover, all the legations
would not subscribe to an attempted improvement
fund, nor all unite in demanding that the Chinese
should clean, light, pave, and drain Legation Street—
that jealousy of the great powers so ironically termed
the "Concert of Europe" as much to blame for the
sanitary situation in one corner of Peking as for
affairs in Crete and Armenia.
The whole stay of the envoys at Peking has been a
long story of trial and fruitless effort, of rebuffs and
covert insults. It was unfortunate that their resi-
dence began without the refugee Emperor being
forced to come down from Jehol and receive them
with honors and due courtesy, and that the long re-
gency of the two secluded empresses continued the
evasion of personal audiences, since precedent and
custom soon ervstallize in fixed laws to the Chinese.
THE STEANGERS' QUAETER 149
In the first years of their disgrace and defeat, the offi-
cials were civil and courteous, gracious and kindly in
their intercourse with diplomats ; but in a few years
they recovered their aplomb, found their lost " face,"
and became as insolent, arrogant, contemptuous, and
overbearing as they had been before the war, and
have continued to be, save in other brief moments of
humiliation and defeat, ever since.
The audience question was just reaching the hope-
ful and enlightened stage when the coup d'etat un-
settled things. There have been no social relations
between the diplomatic corps and the court circle, no
meeting or mingling save for the formal presentation
of credentials, the dreary New Year's audiences in
the palace inclosure, the ladies' audience of 1898, and
the formal exchange of visits with the members of the
Board of the Tsung-li Yamun, and, in general, none
know less of Chinese character and life than those offi-
cially acquainted with the Emperor of China. No Chi-
nese official dares maintain intimate social relations
with the legations, even those who have appreciated and
keenly enjoyed the social life and official hospitalities of
London, Paris, Tokio, and Washington relapsing into
strange conservatism and churlishness, the usual con-
temptuous attitude of the Manchu official, when they
return to Peking. Even then they are denounced to
the throne for " intimacy with foreigners," black-
balled and cold-shouldered at their clubs, and perse-
cuted into retirement by jealous ones, who consider
association with foreigners a sure sign of disloyalty.
Even the needy literati, who teach Chinese at the dif-
ferent legations, would scorn to recognize their foreign
150 CHINA: THE LONa-LIVED EMPIRE
pupils on the street or in the presence of any other
Chinese, and the contempt of grandees and petty
button-folk as they pass one on the streets of Peking
is something to remember in one's hours of pride.
During recent years, Peking has been such a hot-
bed of intrigue, secret conventions, and concession-
seeking, of high-handed and underhanded proceedings,
that a diplomat's life has not been a happy one, nor
his position a sinecure. With coup d'etats before
breakfast, executions overnight, rioting soldiers at
the railway-station, mobs stoning legation carts and
chairs at will, and telegraphic communication broken
whenever the soldiers could reach the wires, the lega-
tions called for guards of their own marines in the
autumn of 1898. Thirty or forty guards were sent
to different European legations, but the Russian lega-
tion required seventy men-at-arms and Cossacks to
protect it. Last to arrive were nine marines to de-
fend the modest premises rented to the great republic
of the United States of North America, the want of
actual roof-area to shelter more guards obliging the
American minister to ask that the other marines
should remain at Tientsin, eighty miles away. By
renting a Chinese house, eighteen marines were finally
quartered near the legation. This would have been
farcical and laughable, humiliating to American pride
only, if there had not been real danger and need for
guards for the little community of foreign diplomats,
shut like rats in a trap in a double-walled city
of an estimated million three hundred thousand
fanatic, foreign-hating Chinese, with a more hostile
and lawless army of sixty thousand vicious Chinese
THE STRANGERS' QUARTER 151
soldiers without the walls and scattered over the
country toward Tientsin.
All international affaii'S are dealt with by the Board
of the Tsung-li Yamun, established as a temporary
bureau of necessity after the war of 1860, and still rank-
ing as an inferior board, not one of the six great boards
or departments of the government. It has not even
the honor of being housed within the Imperial City.
Ministers have always a long, slow ride in state across
to the shabby gateway of the forlorn old yamun, where
now eleven aged, sleepy incompetents muddle with for-
eign affairs. As these eleven elders have reached such
posts by steady advances, they are always septuagena-
rians worn out with the exacting, empty, routine rites
and functions of such high office, and physically too
exhausted by their midnight rides to and sunrise de-
partures from the palace to begin fitly the day's tedium
at the dilapidated Tsung-li Yamun. The appoint-
ment for an interview with the non-committal, ir-
responsible board must be made beforehand, the
minister and his secretaries are always kept waiting,
and the inner reception-room swarms with gaping
attendants during an interview. Once the American
minister made a vigorous protest, and refused to con-
duct any negotiations while there were underlings in
the room; and as it was business that the Chinese
government wished conducted, the minions were
summarily cast out— cast out to the other side of the
many-hinged, latticed doors, where they scuffled au-
dibly for first places at cracks and knot-holes. The
other envoys would not sustain the American protest,
and soon the farce of the empty room was played to
152 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
an end, and the servants came in with their pipes and
fans, tea and cake and candies, as usual ; stood about,
commented on, and fairly took part in the diplomatic
conversations, as before. An unconscionable time is
always consumed in offering and arranging the tea
and sweets, and to any direct questions these Celestial
statesmen always answer with praises of the melon-
seeds or ginger-root— "lowering buckets into a bot-
tomless well," was Sir Harry Parkes's comparison for
an audience at this yamun.
" I go to the yamun by appointment at a certain
hour," said one diplomat, *' and while I am waiting
my usual wait in those dirty, cold rooms, the ash-
sifter comes in and wants to know if I think there
will be war between this and that European power;
because, mind you, some very peculiar telegrams have
just arrived for those legations. Every legation tele-
gram is read and discussed at the yamun, you know,
before it is delivered to us, and the cipher codes give
them rare ideas."
Every servant in a foreign establishment in Peking
is a spy and informer of some degree ; espionage is a
regular business; and the table-talk, visiting-list,
dinner-list, card-tray, and scrap-basket, with full ac-
counts of all comings and goings, sayings and doings,
of any envoy or foreigner in Peking, are regularly
offered for purchase by recognized purveyors of such
news. One often catches a glimpse of concentrated
attention on the face of the turbaned servants stand-
ing behind dining-room chairs, that convinces one of
this feature of capital life. Diplomatic secrets are
fairly impossible in such an atmosphere. Every secret
THE STRANGERS' QUARTER 163
convention and concession is soon blazoned abroad.
Every word the British minister uttered at the Tsung-
li Yamun was reported to the Russian legation with
almost electric promptness, until the envoy threatened
to suspend negotiations and withdraw. Wily con-
cessionaries know each night where their rivals are
dining and what they have said ; whether any piece
of written paper has passed, and what has gone on at
each legation in Peking and each consulate at Tien-
tsin. Every legation keyhole, crack, and chink has
its eye and ear at critical times, and by a multiplica-
tion in imagination one arrives at an idea of what
the palace may be like.
Decorations are freely bestowed upon the diplo-
mats who coerce most severely, and the Chinese or-
ders are very splendid ornaments to court uniforms.
Before the Order of the Dragon was founded in 1863,
to reward the foreign soldiers who took part in sup-
pressing the Taiping rebellion, an emperor had hon-
ored his subjects by bestowing buttons and feathers,
yellow riding-jackets, colored reins, and acacia-bark
scabbards, and by permitting eminent personages to
ride or be carried into some still farther court of the
palace before dismounting. It will be remembered
that General Gordon returned the yellow riding-
jacket as well as the purse and presents sent him ;
and Li Hung Chang's yellow jacket, conferred at the
same time, was thrice taken away from him and as
often restored. The Order of the Double Dragon
was instituted in 1881 ; double, because one set of
decorations— buttons, feathers, and jackets-— is re-
served for Chinese subjects, and the conventional
154 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
ribbons and decorations of European orders are be-
stowed upon foreigners, jeweled and plain gold
medals with plain and bordered yellow ribbon distin-
guishing the five grades of merit. Many decorations
of the Double Dragon were bestowed after the
Japanese war, thank-offerings and ex-votos promised
fervently, when the scare at Peking was greatest.
Many of the favored ones discovered that the im-
perial yellow satin box contained only clumsy brass
insignia, with blue glass instead of sapphires in
the dragon's eyes. A few, whom the gift followed
to foreign countries, accepted the swindle without re-
marks, but one diplomatic decore, happening to return
to Peking, sent his brass bauble to headquarters with
a polite note requesting an exchange for the real
thing. Then it was known what a fine harvest some
one had been reaping from imperial honors.
The most remarkable man in China, the ablest dip-
lomat in Peking, that benevolent despot " the I. G.,"
as he is known in English speech all over the Far East,
or Sir Robert Hart, the inspector-general, the organizer,
arbiter, and many-sided director of the Imperial
Maritime Customs service, maintains greater state
than any envoy in a verandahed villa in the midst of
a high-walled park, which also contains the resi-
dences of his immediate staff. His bureau or depart-
ment is the one financial stay and prop, the one
negotiable asset, the one honestly administered and
creditable branch or hopeful feature in all the Clii-
nese scheme or plan of government. The collection
of the revenue from foreign customs dues was first
put in the hands of foreigners by an arrangement
THE STRANGEES' QUARTER 155
suggested by the foreign merchants to the Chinese
authorities at Shanghai during the Taiping rebellion.
The temporary expedient worked so well, yielding
such an unexpectedly great revenue, and demonstrat-
ing how much of this revenue had heretofore been
estranged by Chinese officials, that the imperial
authorities gladly extended the service, and put it
definitely under foreign control. Every treaty and
indemnity loan has since extracted fresh pledges that
the customs service should remain under foreign
management. Sir Robert Hart left the British con-
sular service in 1861, and in his hands the '^ Chinese
Customs " has become the most admirable civil service
in the world. The officers of this honorable and
well-paid service are university graduates appointed
from each country in numbers proportioned to that
country's share in the foreign trade of China. As
England holds the largest share of that trade, Eng-
lish university men of course predominate in the
customs service, and accounts are kept and business
transacted in Chinese and in English, the accepted
trade language of the East. Each appointee, on
coming out to China, spends two years at Peking
studying the written and spoken language, and is
obliged to continue his studies and pass examinations
from time to time, since promotion greatly depends
on proficiency in the Chinese language. Intelligent
favoritism has always recognized special talents and
abilities, and the men of parts and tact and diplo-
matic ability have always been availed of and put
forward where their qualities could count most for
the service. The fall and demonetization of silver
156 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
in the West sadly reduced the liberal salaries of
those silver-paid employees, who, instead of retiring
pensions, have an increased percentage of pay each
year. They are furnished with handsome residences,
and the commissioner of each port maintains that
state and ceremony which must accompany power
in the East. The increase of foreign trade, the open-
ing of more treaty ports, the addition of the light-
house and postal service of the empire to this bureau,
have necessitated a great increase in the number
of foreign customs employees in this decade, and
greatly complicated the work at headquarters in
Peking, but the inspector-general still directs it all
and has every detail in grasp. He has never offended
Chinese conservatism and prejudices, while steadily
inserting the thin edge of some wedge of progress
and reform. In every dilemma, tlie imperial govern-
ment turns to him, and he has planned coast defenses,
conducted peace negotiations, arranged conventions,
and reduced indemnity demands past counting. The
Chinese appreciate him,— gi-ndgingly, it may be, ad-
miring in him what their own officials lack,— and
have heaped rewards and honors upon him without
stint. Every government in Europe has decorated
him, and when the Chinese had decreed all within
their power they ennobled his ancestors for three
generations back, conferring the button of the first
rank upon his fatlier, grandfather, and great-grand-
father. Chinese wishes for his long life are sincere,
for after him may come the deluge, the break-up,
but not while he lives.
This clever, delightful Irish gentleman is the pet
TfiE STRANGERS' QUARTER 157
and arbiter of Peking society, which he assembles each
week to dance on his lawn and roam his garden alleys
in summer, and to dance in his great ball-room in
winter. Under his direction, a Manila master has
trained a Chinese band, whose brass and reed instru-
ments send the strains of the " Washington Post " and
" Old Town " gaily about that quarter of Peking. The
Chinese of&cials enjoy the band concerts and also the
brilliant illumination furnished by Sir Robert's gas-
plant, one great gas-burner in a conventional city '
street-lamp having flared as a beacon of progress from
his compound wall beside the dark Koulan-hu-tung
alley for a quarter of a century— a blessing to way-
farers, but an object-lesson utterly wasted on the
Peking municipality.
XII
CHRISTIAN MISSIONS
|HEN a first papal embassy came to
China in the seventh century, the
Nestorian Christians had then been
zealously proselytizing there for a
hundred years. Friar Odoric, who
visited Kublai Khan on his way to the realm of
Prester John, found the Mongol Empress a convert ;
and when the first Jesuit, Father Ricci, came up from
Macao, the Ming Emperor Wanli showed him special
favor. Father Schaal, wlio reformed the Chinese
calendar, was tutor of the Manchu Emperor Kanghsi,
and Father Verbeist became his chief astronomer and
president of the Board of Works. Kanghsi honored
these Jesuits in every way, accorded them rank
and consideration at court, and built them dwellings
and a church beside the palace. Through the great
Colbert, the Frencli Academy of Sciences became in-
terested in China, and six Jesuit priests of scientific
training were sent to Peking, where tlie Emperor re-
ceived them with the greatest favor. Tliey ranked
as nobles and literati, and Kanghsi kept them in con-
stant attendance. They designed and decorated the
158
CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 159
rococo pavilions and the Italian villas in the Summer
Palace grounds, directed the artists in the palace
ateliers, produced new colors and decorative motifs
for the potters at King-te-chen, and at their own
glass-works by the Pei-tang, or northern cathedral,
produced many works of art. They surveyed and
mapped the empire, and Father Ripa, who engraved
the plates of the great map, has left a most interesting
account of the daily palace life. The priests cured
Kanghsi of ague by doses of cinchona, or " Jesuits'
bark," then new in Europe, and their influence was
supreme. The Emperor's mother, wife, son, and half
the court were baptized as Christians, and Kanghsi
only hesitated himself because of his worshipful ances-
tors. Those early Jesuits were broad, tolerant, sen-
sible, and far-seeing, and if they had been let alone or
sustained by an intelligent pope during the enlight-
ened reign of Kanghsi there might be a very different
China to-day. They urged the Pope to canonize the
imperial ancestors, and thus do away with the one ob-
stacle to the Emperor's conversion ; but meddling and
envious Dominicans and Franciscans came to Peking,
and reported to Rome that the Jesuits were tolerating
and sanctioning heathen customs and leading lives of
worldly pomp and splendor. The Pope sent legates
to make inquiries and, naturally, trouble with the
Jesuits, and Kanghsi, resenting this interference, and
wearied with the bickerings of the new priests, would
have nothing more to do with the religion or its
teachers after Clement XI had launched his bull sup-
porting the Dominican contentions and denouncing
ancestor-worship as a heathen practice.
160 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
His son and successor, Yung Cheng, was an ardent
Buddhist, and Father Ripa tells how he further
abridged the pri^'ileges of the priests, deprived them
of all honor and rank at court, and tolerated them only
as directors of works and art industries. The Em-
peror Kienlung was more gracious ; he sat to Attiret
for liis portrait, he entered into correspondence with
Voltaire through Father Amiot, and he showed mi-
nute interest in the painters who were further embel-
lishing his suburban home. Toleration ended with his
reign, and under disfavor and neglect and finally open
persecution the Jesuits decreased until, at the begin-
ning of this century, the one Jesuit priest at Peking
sold the church property and left. In 1860 the French
insisted upon the restoration of this church to the
Jesuits, and slipped into their treaty a clause, not in-
cluded in the Chinese copy of this treaty, which secured
full rights and immunities for Roman missions and
their converts. France, at that time the armed de-
fender of the Pope's temporal power in Rome, became
the recognized official protector of the faith in the
East. Under the favored-nation clause, all sects then
claimed the right to reside, own property, and con-
duct mission work in the interior. Strict moralists
may decide whether this introduction of Christian
missions by, diplomatic fraud and deceit, backed up
by gunboats, gave the religion any prestige with the
government.
The Jesuits rebuilt their Pei-tang witli a tall tower
overlooking the ])rivate gardens of the palace, spoil-
ing the fung-sliui of the neighborhood, and so enraging
the regents that in 1885 the Chinese insisted on only
CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 161
one clause in the French treaty of peace — that the
Jesuits should again sell the property to the crown and
build on land given them elsewhere. The new Pei-
tang is a splendid building, having a school, hospital,
orphanage, printing-office, library, and museum con-
nected with it, all presided over by Bishop Favier, an
astute and scholarly Jesuit, an eminent art connois-
seur, and author of the monumental illustrated work
" Peking," last issued from the Pei-tang press. With-
out diplomatic aid, he negotiated a convention in
1899 which secures to bishops and priests of the
Church of Rome equal official rank with viceroys and
provincial magistrates; which enables them to ex-
change visits, demand interviews, and adjust local
difficulties without appealing to French consuls or
the French minister. It discounted the possible aban-
donment of the mission protectorate by anti-clerical
France ; prevented any assumption of a protectorate
of Christian missions by Germany ; cheered the Pope
as an indirect recognition of his temporal power;
and by exalting all Catholic missionaries in provin-
cial Chinese eyes has greatly incensed all Protestant
missionaries, and, some believe, has imperiled them.
The Catholic Fathers, who direct the Pei-tang, have
in their charge the Dung-tang, or eastern church,
the Hsi-tang, or western church, and the old Nan-
tang, the southern or Portuguese cathedral, and also
the chapel in the French legation compound. From
this long establishment of French Jesuits at Pe-
king there has grown a colony of French-speaking
Christian Chinese, who by hereditary custom almost
monopolize certain occupations. The painters in
9
162 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
water-color, engravers on copper, watch- and instru-
raent-niakers, and snuff-dealers are nearly always
hereditary Christians, while the greater number of
domestic servants seeking foreigners' employ speak
French.
The Sisters of St. Vincent and St. Paul have an
orphanage beside the old Portuguese cemetery outside
the west gate, where Fathers Ricci, Schaal, and Ver-
beist, and those earlier scholars and propagandists
who so nearly won imperial adherence to Christianity
and its establishment as the state religion, lie in con-
secrated soil first given by the Emperor Wanli, who
erected an imperial tablet to Father Ricci. The Em-
peror Kanghsi testified in Latin and in Chinese on
other turtle-borne stone tablets to the virtues of
Fathers Verbeist and Schaal. Dr. Edkins has pre-
served, in his account of Peking, the description of
the funeral of Father Verbeist, in which Chinese and
Christian rites were combined ; and near his grave is
a great stone crucifix, with stone altar-tables below
it, adorned with the conventional vases, candlesticks,
and incense-burner of Buddhist altars, provided at
all great tombs for the annual homage or worship —
significant emblems of the tolerance of those early
evangelists and the compromises in the faith's mere
ritual and externals which they conceded for conver-
sion's sake.
The Mohammedans were most numerous in Kublai
Khan's time, and their converts many. Kienlung
built the marble mosque in the Tatar City to please
his Turkestan wife, widow of a Turkish prince of
Kashgar ; and every Friday, noAV, the descendants of
CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 163
her Turkestan followers and other of the faithful
gather there, but they do not welcome the visitors
who ferret them out as one of the sights of Peking.^
The twenty thousand Mohammedans in Peking are
accused of great laxity in their religion, with sadly
mixing Islamism with Confucianism, Taoism, and
fuug-shui. Mohammedan merchants display the cres-
cent on their signs, but the pilgrimage to Mecca
and the green turban do not seem objects of their
ambition.
A Russian mission was established in Peking in
1727 to care for the souls of the orthodox prisoners
from beyond the Amur River. The archimandrite
gave up his compound for legation use in 1861, and
moved to the Pei-kwan, in the far northeast corner of
the Tatar City. Active proselytism has never been a
part of the Russian priests' work at Peking, but of
recent years they have enlarged their college build-
ings, where more and more students are enrolled, and
the magnetic and astronomic observatory and other
departments of science directed by them have a de-
servedly high standing. Because they have no active
missions in China, Russian ministers have always had
a freer and a higher hand in dealing with the Tsung-li
Yamun than those envoys who themselves grow so
weary of their repeated visits on account of mission-
ary outrages and indemnities.
Protestant missionaries, availing themselves of the
surreptitious clause in the French treaty of 18C0, were
soon established at Peking and throughout the em-
pire. The American Board of Commissioners for
Foreign Missions has a large compound in the Tatar
164 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
City, with schools, chapels, and free dispensaries in
other quarters ; and the Methodist Mission includes a
university for the higher education of Chinese youth
in Western sciences, which itself is an object-lesson
of Western progi-ess, and has set more novelties before
Chinese eyes and given native Peking more to talk
and wonder about than all the legations. The
London Mission has a large hospital with outside
dispensaries, and nothing has so opened the way and
advanced the work of these different missions as this
free medical aid. The medical missionary is the
most influential worker in the cause of enlightenment,
and his ministrations do most to allay prejudices, to
prove the unselfishness and sincerity of the mission-
aries' lives, and at least to prepare the rising genera-
tion to receive other truths. I have often heard
discouraged evangelical workers envy the ground
gained, the advances made, and the tangible results
that reward the medical missionaries' work, and lament
that for themselves there seems to be so little hope of
reward with this generation. "It is only with the
children of our first converts, with the second and
the third generation of Christians, that we get great
encouragement, that we see the result of our labors,
something accomplished, something fixed fast in their
hearts and minds past all chances of backsliding,"
say preachers, teachers, and Bible-readers.
There is a chapel of the Church of England in the
British legation compound ; and, besides the mission
schools and university, the Tung-wen College, main-
tained by the Chinese government for the instruction
of young literati in Western languages, law, history.
CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 165
and sciences, necessary qualifications for the diplo-
matic service, has had a certain influence for Chris-
tianity through its president and the instructors, taken
from the staff of different missions. Rev. Gilbert
Reid, in his independent mission to the higher classes,
attempting to reach them socially, has embarked on
a most interesting experiment ; and but for the coup
d'etat of 1898, it was hoped that through his efforts
Christian teachers might again enjoy the power and
regard at court that they had at the end of the seven-
teenth century.
From the sixth to the twentieth century Christian
missionaries have been actively at work in China
with varying fortunes, and any summing up of visible
results gives one many problems to consider.
XIII
TATAR FUS AND FAIRS
jNE may prowl the high- walled lanes of
the Tatar City for weeks and eontin-
fJI ually discover strangely neglected fus
and temples, but there is the greatest
difficulty to learn their history after
one has found a clue. Across the canal from the
British legation is the interesting old wreck of a
once magnificent palace, the Shu-wang-fu, its last oc-
cupant that prince who conspired against the regency
of the empresses in 1861. He was arrested on his re-
turn from Jehol and condemned to death by slicing ;
but the compassionate dowagers commuted this to
decapitation on the common execution-ground. His
family was swept away, and the fu returned to the
crown. The fu was available for and should have
become the American legation, but was not taken,
and a few years' neglect transformed the once splen-
did palace into a wrecked and ruinous estate, its di-
lapidated buildings sheltering families of the very
common people, and its outer court an open thor-
oughfare. Near it is anotlier great inclosure, about
166
TATAE FUS AND FAIRS 167
which I long cross-questioned in vain those who lived
nearest its yellow-tiled walls. After a few years'
residence in Peking the foreigner grows apathetic
over Chinese sights, but a missionary, living farther
away from it, was able to tell me that it was the
" ghost's temple." The beautiful gabled roof, with
imperial yellow tiles glimmering among lofty tree-
branches, shut fast in an inclosure whose gates
seemed forever sealed, "was reared to the spirit of a
court favorite unjustly beheaded by a hot-tempered
emperor, who learned the truth after it was too
late. The headless Manchu haunted the palace, and
threatened to parade his gory trunk there for all
time unless the Emperor should erect a temple to his
memory and worship there every New Year before
kneeling to the imperial tablets. To this latest day,
the erring Emperor's successors have paid state visits
to this memorial hall, prayed and burned incense be-
fore the tablet, and replaced the old rolls of silk with
new offerings.
When my best benefactress in Peking said that she
would take me to see an old Tatar noblewoman with
an irrepressible curiosity concerning foreign people,
ways, and things, I was delighted when we drove
across the neglected common of the outer court of
a dilapidated old fu I had been inquiring about.
The fu had been last allotted to Kienlung's favorite
brother. The family, descending in rank and riches,
were out of favor at court, but had held on to their
old home and maintained their proud exclusiveness
and state within the labyrinth of courts. We left our
carts at one side of the five-bayed entrance pavilion.
168 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
walked around it to an inner court, up steep stone
stairs to a third gate, across another court, and up to
a fourth red-walled pavilion with columned front,
where imperial tablets hung. Inside the lofty hall
were more imperial tablets and shrouded lanterns on
each side of the great carved throne-chair or divan
where Kienlung often sat and smoked, and sipped his
tea, and possibly indited some one of his thirty-three
thousand poems, or even read over his letter to Vol-
taire before he sent it. Certainly he must often have
quoted there his own immortal ''Praise of Tea,"—
which in exquisite characters decorates half the old
cups and plates and fans of his period that one finds
in curio-shops,— one of the best known of later poems :
" Graceful are the leaves of mei-Jioa, sweetly scented
and clear are the leaves of fo-cheou,^^ says Kienlung.
" But place upon a gentle fire the tripod whose color
and form tell of a far antiquity, and fill it with water
of molten snow. Let it seethe till it would be hot
enough to whiten fish or to redden a crab. Then pour
it into a cup made from the earth of yue, upon the
tender leaves of a selected tea-tree. Let it rest till the
mists which freely rise have formed themselves into
thicker clouds, and until these have gradually ceased
to weigh upon the surface, and at last float away in
vapor, then sip deliberately the delicious liquor. It
will drive away all the five causes of disquietude
which come to trouble us. You may taste, and you
may feel; but never can you express in words or
song that sweet tranquillity we draw from the essence
thus prepared."
The wife of one of the younger sons and a flock of
AT TllK OLD KU
TATAR FUS AND FAIRS 171
little children, all rouged, beflowered, and gorgeously
dressed, welcomed us in this imperial pavilion, and
led us on to the fifth great flagged court, where lattice-
windowed dwelling-rooms lined each side, and the
noble ancestral hall or main pavilion on a terrace
filled the end. This great building, with green-tiled
roof, green tiles facing the walls to a height of six
feet, and massive red-lacquered columns supporting
the roof, was all but a ruin, but it sunned itself
against the brilliant October sky with a splendid and
commanding dignity.
In that gray old stone court there was gathered
such a dazzling group of women as made me doubt
my eyes and forget everything in looking. The
gracious old Tai-tai (madame), in long plum-and-
purple robes, had a strong, kindly face and the deep,
rich voice of undoubted command. Her eye and smile
led to friendship, and her cordial greetings had all of
Celestial imagery and intensity. Her dark gown and
sober-tinted hair-bouquets were in contrast to those of
her daughters-in-law and grandchildren, who rivaled
the rainbow, all the gay colors intensified by the
dazzling sunshine. Each pale-yellow, aristocratic
face was rouged and tinted to a work of art; each
lower lip had a prim, piquant stain of deep carmine.
Each beautiful figure bent in a stately Manchu cour-
tesy, sinking low with clasped hands resting on the left
knee, and each then gave us a few cold, thin fingers for
a Western barbarian hand-shake. Each of these blue-
blooded Tatars, Manchns of the purest lineage, was
more brilliantly picturesque than the other ; each lifted
up on stilt or flower-pot shoes, whose three-inch soles
172 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
were hidden by their long gowns. Their robes were
of brocade, embroidered satin, or plain silk quilted in
finest lines and herring-bone rays, and bordered around
with those conventional and arbitrary ribbon bands
in which lies all the style and changing fashion of a
Chinese woman's dress. Short, sleeveless Manchu
jackets gave contrasting touches to some of the gowns,
and each head was a monumental affair of blue-black
hair with zigzag partings, and with a flower-garden bal-
anced beside either end of the broad gold hair-pin. One
Manchu matron caught the sunshine with a glistening,
golden-green, finely quilted gown and a gold-thread
bolero jacket ; another's dull, rich mulberry-red satin
was wrought over with sprigs and circles of flowers ;
and a third wore a black satin robe with clouds of the
most brilliant butterflies winging their way across it.
It was a clothes-show beyond compare, and the daz-
zling group in that sun-flooded old court made one
wonder what the imperial palace groups could be,
since this was but one yellow- girdled, green-tiled
family of dilapidated fortunes.
After we had explored the deserted hall, admired
the pots of ragged chrysanthemums and the white-
aiid-brown Pekingese pugs, and photographed away
all the film in my camera, we were shown the living-
rooms. The cabinet or library of the absent master
was severely simple in its furnishings — scroll-pictures
and texts on the wall, a few pieces of old porcelain on
a console, and books stacked on the shelves above the
long divan, or kang, whicli extended across the win-
dowed end of the room. This stone-and-mud plat-
form of the kang, three feet in height, is heated in
TATAR FUS AND FAIRS 173
winter by brush fires built from an opening on the
outside, the smoke and heated air following intricate
flues which thoroughly warm the kang. It is a Mon-
gol or Central Asian contrivance used everywhere in -^
North China and Korea, and with thick felts and soft
rugs makes a luxurious sleeping- and lounging-place
in winter, while with cool mattings it is equally luxu-
rious in another way in the scorching summers. We
were shown rooms with great carved wardrobes, where
the heaps of fur and silk and summer garments are
stored in turn ; and on that day the ladies brought
out their winter hats for the season's wear, Tatar
turbans with saucer brims, and long ribbon ends
that fall below the waist at the back. The gi-eat gold
hair-pin cannot be worn with this winter hat, and
with a dexterous twist of the red cords a maid lifted
oif the whole great structure on the Tai-tai's head,
fastened the hat in its place, and tucked two small
bouquets just above the ears. All classes in China ^'^
dress by imperial command, and when the Peking
Gazette announces that the Emperor has put on
his winter hat on a day prescribed by centuries' un-
varying astronomical custom, all China does likewise
and turns over the chair cushions, exposing their
''winter side."
When we were seated, with strict regard for prece-
dence, at a square table, the Tai-tai served us with
her own silver and ivory chop-sticks to the half-
dozen kinds of cakes and fruits grouped on com-
potiers around a centerpiece of gorgeously colored
persimmons. A crowd of maid-servants brought tea,
and in turn served us with a delicate cream or sweet
174 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
pur^e of almonds, some steamed dumplings with
minced chicken inclosed, thin sesame wafers, honeyed
fruits, candied nuts, white pears, and big round grapes
worthy of Fontainebleau's vines. The cups of per-
fumed tea were filled and refilled, hot cloths were
passed in lieu of finger-bowls, and then, with shadows
slanting far across the great court, we began our leave-
taking, and repeated it to a diminishing company
at each gateway, until only the little children were
left near the outer court gate to drop us the last
stately Manchu courtesies.
" Three eunuchs came and talked to me," said my
awe-struck servant, brought almost to humility by
this nearness to greatness and my entree to good
society. " They must still be high people here at the
fu, even if the master has lost his job at the palace."
I spent yet another afternoon tea-drinking with
the kindly old Tai-tai and her daughters-in-law, pho-
tographing certain interested friends asked in for
the afternoon to look at us, the Tai-tai's latest curios.
These were haughty and hot-tempered Tatar ladies,
who made little secret of their opinion of us and our
civilization, and led us to appreciate more how rare a
character was our kindly, gracious hostess. They
had opinions, too, these visiting Manchu ladies, and
we had an inkling of the fierce antipathies at heart
when one said of a Chinese diplomatic family : " Oh,
yes ; but he is a Chinese from the south provinces.
You could n't expect his wife have any nice manners."
When a return visit was arranged, the Tai-tai's
carts drew up at the gate at the stroke of the hour,
the mules were unharnessed and led away, and with the
TATAE FUS AND FAIRS 175
cart-shafts dropped, the ladies stepped out with dig-
nity and safety. Notliing could exceed their amia-
bility, their gracious inquiries and compliments, their
interest in all the arrangements of a foreign house?
from which, by the way, all men-servants were ban-
ished for the time. Their own maid-servants accom-
panied them, one bearing a silver spittoon. Amused
as they were with each implement and oddity at table,
they carried themselves with the perfect ease of the
well bred and the people of assured position in any
country. They were so many exquisitely mannered
children, with a naive, unconcealed interest in every-
thing, yet the perfect dignity of Manchu grand dames
never forsook them. The sugar made from the ma-
ple-tree, the chocolate cake built in many-striped
stories, and the rich black fruit-cake were so many
new sensations, verifications of tales told them.
Through one of her progressive sons, who read for-
eign books, had a camera and dangerously advanced
ideas, the old Tai-tai had heard of many queer things
in the Western world. Although old customs and
superstitions were strong, and she would take Chinese
potions, philters, and charm-powders, she yet had a
great respect for foreign doctors, for the earnest, un-
selfish women who conduct mission hospitals and dis-
pensaries in Peking. Her doctor told me of the'
difficulties of attending these women of the aristo-
cratic class, who never walk or take exercise, but sit
in cold, sunless rooms, weighted down with heavy
clothing, consuming quantities of sweets, and smok-
ing opium as steadily as their means allow.
"What in the world can such uneducated, secluded
176 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
women find to talk about all the year round ? " I asked
the little doctor.
" Much," she answered. '^ The last time I went
there they were discussing the X-rays."
" What ! " I exclaimed, " have the Rontgen rays pen-
etrated even the five courts and walls of the old f u f "
" Oh, certainly. Her son had been telling the Tai-
tai of the cathode miracles, and she asked me if it
was true that foreigners had another light to see by
at night, that was so much stronger than Sir Robert
Hart's gas-jets or the ' lightning light ' at the palace
that we could look through the human body and see
all the bones ; and— here was the point— did I believe
that Li Hung Chang had gone to a foreign doctor,
who had turned this light on him and actually seen
that bullet that Li Hung Chang said a Japanese had
fired into himf"
One day the doctor brought to the fu the chate-
laine of a legation who had lived in Peking for thir-
teen years without ever visiting or receiving a visit
from a Manchu or a Chinese lady. Her entree to this
one social circle of the capital that should have openly
welcomed her arrival so long before was informal
and unofficial, but the Tai-tai gave a cordial greeting,
and all went pleasantly. '' How many children have
you, and grandchildren ? " both asked each other, but
when the foreign tai-tai explained that one grand-
son was her son's child and the other her daughter's
cliild, the Manchu matron said : " No, no ; that can-
not be. That is not your grandchild. Your son's
child is your grandchild, yes ; your daughter's child,
no. That child beh)iigs to her husband's parents and
TKAINEU BIKDS.
TATAE FUS AND FAIRS 179
the other family. It is their grandchild, uot yours.
Of course Li Hung Chang and Chang Yen Hoon told
you the same thing."
The point was argued for a while, and then the
hostess, yielding graciously to her obligations, said :
'* Oh, yes ; if you wish, you can, of course, claim it
as a grandchild. An outside grandchild, we should
call it. But if you call them all your grandchildren,
how about inheriting property? Do you want any
of it to go to some strange family, and your sons get
very little f How would you like that ? " assuming
that equal consideration for sons and daughters could
only be an accidental instance of great affection, and
not American law and custom.
"We are friends forever," said the dear old Tai-
tai when I went to bid her good-by. " I spend my
heart upon you. My heart speaks your language,
but not my poor tongue. Come back to me some-
time again. Do not forget the old Tai-tai and the
poor, miserable fu you have honored to enter."
I had, indeed, looked forward to revisiting the same
old, green-tiled fu, and seeing there again groups of
gorgeously dressed, gracious Manchu women ; but
word came at the time of the coup d'etat that the
fu had been claimed as site for a college of foreign
studies by the Emperor's reform favorites, and that
Kienlung's great-great-grandnephew had sought less
splendid quarters out by the Anting Gate. The old
fu was laid low, and nothing has risen in its place.
When one is a little hardened to it, he may dare to
enter one of the local temple fairs, which are always
180 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
occurring somewhere about the city, since each tem-
ple has its anniversary fete-days, and at least once a
month bursts forth with more red papers, lanterns,
and incense-sticks, peddlers and crowds. The best
known of these popular fairs is that at the Lung-fu-
ssu Temple, near the Confucian Temple. On the
ninth and tenth, nineteenth and twentieth, twenty-
ninth and thirtieth days of each month, the street
leading to the temple was taken possession of by holi-
day crowds, peddlers, fakers, and touts, and there
were kaleidoscopic pictures of all Pekingese life.
Bird-sellers offered one every kind of feathered pet
that could swing in a cage or perch on a twig, and one
of the attractive features of Peking streets is in the
numbers of men and boys whom one sees carrying pet
birds about. It is a Chinese custom, at which many
Manchus affect to sneer, but it argues for gentle,
poetic traits of character that one would otherwise
surely deny these hard-featured, unattractive people.
Old poetry and old pictures show men of the lower
provinces carrying their nightingales off for an airing
to some hill temple or classic vale ; but in Peking
grimy and tattered old men, little boys, and even gay
official messengers, go about the streets with tiny
birds on twigs. The grace and fearlessness, the pretty
flights to shoulder and hand of these uncaged pets
are most engaging, and tell of kindly treatment.
"Why don't you get a little bird and carry it
around with you ?" I asked the huge, blunt, bluff
Liu, my manly boy, with the port and mien of pros-
perous rascality, the meditative face and somnolent
features of the Buddha in art.
TATAR FUS AND FAIRS 183
"Because I am not loafer. I am not Manchu,"
came the answer, in measured bass tones of scorn.
On the street approaching Lung-fu-ssu one en-
counters the first of the fair, and there may buy pet
crickets, black little skeletons of things, which are
trained, and fight as gamely as Manila cocks. One
maj^ buy, too, airy bamboo boxes to keep them in in
summer, and thicker boxes which cricket-fanciers
carry in the folds of their garments to keep the tiny
creatures warm in winter.
For some unaccountable reason, the feather-duster
is an important and conspicuous article of trade in
Peking. One sees it hawked at every fair and in every
street, a presence nearly as surprising as if one met
soap in monumental heaps everywhere in this city of
dreadful dirt. There is dire need of it, since all the
year round, save for the few weeks of mud, one moves
in and breathes a cloud of dust, pulverized particles
of the richly composite street soil. Occasionally there
are legitimate dust-storms, when certain winds lift
the surface dirt from the Desert of Gobi, fill the heavens
with a dense fog-cloud, and dim the sun ; and in Peking
there is sound of the gnashing of teeth. These storms
from the desert partly account for the begrimed, dilapi-
dated look of all outdoor Peking, for not even the
Paris municipal council could keep that exquisite city
clean if the Desert of Gobi, or Shamo, lay to wind-
ward.
One has to step quickly in this street before Lung-
fu-ssu, compreliending all in swift glances, buying as
well as reading as he runs ; for if one loiters, the
crowd closes in around him, packed ten and twenty
10
184
CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
rows deep, in a gaping, jabbering circle. Several
times I went into and, by main force only, got out of
a florist's garden, where dwarf trees, ragged chrysan-
themums grafted on artemisia stalks, and some cocks-
combs were shown. Nothing in
Peking was more disappointing
and disillusioning than the vain
autumnal search I made for
chrysanthemums worthy to rank
with those of Japan or those of the
foreign settlement of Shanghai.
Things old and new, for use
and ornament, were spread over
the flagged courts and the terrace
walks and on booths. Fortune-
tellers, money-changers, letter-
writers, professional menders,
cobblers, barbers, and dentists
were there. Quack doctors
spread out their magic pills and
bottles of eye-water, while the
legitimate old school of Chinese
medicine was represented by
apothecaries, who made tempt-
ing spread o^tlie time-honored
roots and herbs, musk, dried rats,
lizards, frogs, and toads, clots of so-called dragon's
blood, and lumps of nameless things warranted to
cure, although powdered tliickly wath the microbes,
germs, bacteria, and what not, that constitute Peking
dust. The liot-chestnut man spiced the air with his
nuts roasted in shallow pans full of black sand set
HONKYEI) CRAB-APPLES.
TATAE FUS AND FAIKS 185
over a mud-oven fireplace— the same institution of all
Central Asia, and which the tourist meets again in the
bazaars of Peshawar. The hot-peanut man was there
too ; and in Peking the American learns that salted
almonds and peanuts are Chinese inventions almost
as old as gunpowder. The cold-slaw man presided over
great bowls of tasseled strips of cabbage, that he
sheared off with fascinating skill with a huge cleaver.
There were mounds of the famous white Peking pears,
of the fine large grapes, that they know how to keep for
• a year by an ancient cold-storage system of pottery jars
buried in the ground, and heaps of gorgeous red-
orange persimmons, that made color-studies of de-
light. The persimmon grown most commonly for the
Peking market is a huge sphere, very much flattened
at the poles, with the most curious fold or seam at the
equator line, as if it had been cut and had grown to-
gether again. The rich, dried fruit of the jujube-tree,
with its narrow, pointed seed like a date, and com-
monly known as the Tientsin date, was offered us in
boxes or beaten into smooth, rich jujube paste. Then
there was the crab-apple man, with a great broom on
his shoulder, that proved to have every straw strung
with crab-apples preserved in honey— a favorite sweet
with the Mongolians beyond the Great Wall, who
knew how to preserve their tart fruits in honey long
before the peasants around Bar-le-Duc began to
immerse their currants in honey. There was the
candyman, with slabs of peanut candy and sesame
^brittle, the latter the same sesame-seeds, cooked in a
rich sorghum syrup and cooled in thin cakes, that
furnish tliat wafer of delight known as giij<ic^> in tlie
186 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
Pan jab, and that one buys in the cold weather all
over northern India. The Mongols and the Moguls
took with them in their conquests the love of
sweets which the Turks, the Persians, and all the
people of Central Asia still manifest, and by their
sweets one may trace the path of the conquering
khans. Besides sesame brittle, one may buy delicate
sesame wafers, the sesame flour beaten in water with
either salt or sugar, and baked in a thin wafer that
might well be introduced at fastidious tables on the
other side of the globe. One sees macaroni, made of
millet or buckwheat flour, in process of manufacture
everywhere about Peking streets, hanks and skeins of
the doughy filaments swinging by doorways in the
sun and wind, and acquiring a fine bloom of the
richly composite dust of the streets.
To the Lung-fu-ssu fairs I went again and again,
bewitched by the life and movement that went on in
the courts of the dingy -red, roofless temple of deserted
altars. I went to watch the Manchu women in their
holiday dress, to look for the fabled sleeve dogs, or
buy chrysanthemums and pigeon whistles, the latter
the most unique and ingenious playthings in Peking.
The pigeon whistle is made of thinnest bamboo and
of little gourds scraped to paper thinness, and when
fastened beneath the tail-feathers of a pigeon the tiny
organ-pipes emit a weird, elfin, ^Eolian melody as the
bird flies. Every morning and afternoon the vault
of the Peking sky is swept with the sweet, sad notes
of scores of pigeon whistles, as the carrier-birds wing
their way across the walls with bankers messages and
quotations of silver sales— a stock report and ticker
TATAE FUS AND FAIKS 187
service older than the telegraph and automatic tape, ^'
a system of market reports as old as time. These
swirls and sweeps of melody were strangely sad and
thrilling, and the whistling flight of these musical
pigeons, the " mid-sk}^ houris " of the hoary East, was
something that I waited and listened for each day.
There are some twenty kinds of pigeon whistles,
ranging from the simple, single bamboo tube of one
stop to those with elaborate sets of pipes which a
musical-instrument maker might admire. Each bam-
boo pipe or gourd whistle is as light as thistle-down,
and if one even holds it in his hand and sweeps the
air, it responds with mellow wind-notes of weird
charm. The pigeon whistle is the most delicate and
exquisitely constructed toy imaginable, a thing one
might expect to find in Tokio or Paris, but never in
half-barbaric Peking, the city of dreadful dirt, of the
clumsy cart and the rocking camel, the dilapidated
capital of Kublai Khan, the racked and ruined relic
of the splendid city of the Ming emperors.
I'lGEOK WHISTLES.
XIV
CHINESE PEKING
jHE contrasts that present themselves
when one passes through the gates from
the Tatar to the Chinese City are not
the least in the sum of dazzling impres-
sions Peking makes npon one, Lord
Curzon's " phantasmagoria of excruciating incident."
Once through the Chien-men's vast, barrel vaults,
across the dirt and beggar-incrusted marble bridge, a
great, broad avenue passes under elaborate pailows,
and continues for two miles southward to the Temple
of Heaven — a noble, flagged w^ay fit for imperial
pomps and processions. But there is not another
broad or paved thoroughfare in all the Cliinese City.
Narrow lanes, with banks of refuse against the house
Avails, where cart-wheels have cut deep mud-troughs,
intersect the crowded city, and there are gates to each
city ward, as in Chinese cities to southward. Few
women are seen, and they hobble on painful stumps
of feet, and glue their hair into absurd and inartistic
imitations of the magpie's or '' joy-l)ird\s" tail,
wretched contrasts to the splendid, free-stepping
188
CHINESE PEKING 189
Manchu women with their picturesque bar pins and
big bouquets. The custom of foot-binding is as uni-
versal here at the gates of the capital as if the Em-
press, the palace, and the Tatar City full of Manchu
women did not take comfort and pride in possessing
natural, useful feet ; as if imperial edicts had not for-
bidden foot-binding centuries ago. It was easy for
the Manchu conquerors to impose the queue as a mark
of subjugation upon all the millions of Chinese men,
and make that appendage almost a matter of religion
with them. To change the Chinese woman's mind
as to the fashion of her foot was another task.
That covered, curving, semicircular bazaar that
follows the line of the Chien-men's great outer wall
is a most Oriental feature, a real Central and Western
Asian bazaar. One may buy there caps and cap-but-
tons, mandarins' belt-buckles of gold, brass, enamel,
and jade, their beads and belts and plastrons of rank ;
also the womanish pipe-, fan-, tobacco-, watch-, spec-
tacle-, and money-pouches of embroidered satin that
the petticoated grandees hang in dazzling bunches
from their girdles in lieu of practical, masculine pock-
ets. One may also buy pipes and snuff-bottles, hair-
pins and ornaments, the toys of the writing-desk,
jade bracelets and ear-rings and charms ; and even in
this day of careful gleaning by professional buyers,
the amateur sometimes finds a treasure. Misery over-
flows from the marble bridge, and beggars, lepers, and
loathsome wretches cling to the sunny curve of the
outer wall like hideous flies. One sees enough in that
one spot to prove that China is the greatest field for
active philanthropy tlic world holds, and the sum of
190 CHINA: THE LONG-LI\^D EMPIRE
suffering, the accumulation of misery there presented,
makes one's heart sick with the hopelessness of it all,
the utter impossibility of relief. Wrecks of men,
emaciated or bloated, in the last stages of starvation's
diseases, crawl to one's very cart-wheels, or lie help-
less with glazed eyes. In the keen, sparkling October
days they huddle together in the sun to keep warm,
many of them with only a bit of straw matting for
bodily covering, and after each piercing night dead
beggars are carted away as a matter of course. Pe-
king claims eighty thousand beggars among its popu-
lation, and it is said that this gild has its officers
and its regulations quite as much as the recognized
gild of beggars in Canton. The so-called King of
the Beggars has his headquarters on the marble
bridge, and there are always several truculent ruffians
there who have more the air of power than of pleading.
One must enjoy the story as the delightful old father
tells it, and not seek to find or know any more about
the famous feather-bed lodging-house of the Peking
beggars tliat Abbe Hue describes. As the beggars stole
the coverings at their lodging-house, some keen one
devised a single great felt coverlet the size of the
floor, with holes for the sleepers' heads. It Avas raised
and lowered by tackle, a tom-tom sounding an alarm
each morning to warn the lodgers to get their heads
in under the coverlet. Beneath this great communal
bedspread the area was covered thickly with loose
feathers. Only a missionary could expect credence
for such a tale on its first telling, and I found no one
who knew more than the charming old abbe relates.
The east side of the great Meridian Street, running
CHINESE PEKING 191
through the Chinese City, is lined for the first half-
mile beyond the bridge with the stalls of the fish,
game, meat, and vegetable market of Peking ; and the
next street running parallel with it holds the nut and
dried-fruit market, where the hot-chestnut man and
the hot-peanut man are triumphant. Beans of infi-
nite variety offer intellectual diet to people to whom
rice is a luxury, and, with the unvaried pork and cab-
bage, constitute their staple food.
Still farther east of Chien-men's broad street are
Bamboo Chair Street and other sewery side lanes,
where* dealers in furs, old embroideries, and second-
hand clothing abide. The old-clothes market, held on
an open common every morning from daylight until
nine o'clock, is one of the sights of Peking that bears
many repetitions. There is a permanent old-clothes
bazaar surrounding the open market space, and the
rows of alcove shops are so many silk- and satin-lined
grottoes, all speciously dazzling with color and tin-
sel. In the early morning the whole common is cov-
ered with piles of silk and furred and gorgeous
garments, that have often been stolen before they
were pawned to these shrewd " uncles." The coup
d'ceil is brilliant and striking, the sheen and shimmer
of rich fabrics in tlie Peking sunshine is bewitching;
but, prowl as he may, the tourist finds no decorative
treasures at the fair, since the professional buyers
have gleaned before him, ready to hawk any desirable
objects around the legations, and flaunt them at the
grand gathering of all such purveyors in the hotel
garden court at noon. Tlie show of furs is a rich
one, but, tempting as the greatcoats and grand-
192 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
motherly cloaks of tlie mandarins may seem, with their
linings of sable and mink, ermine and squirrel, white
fox and Tibetan goat, second-hand Chinese fur admits
of too many possibilities for foreigners to be tempted
to buy. The old-clothes merchants are usually fold-
ing up their goods when foreigners arrive on the
scene, but some uncle will beckon one away through
side slums and garbaged lanes to his own particular
labyrinth of stone passages and courts, and show one
his store-room filled with official costumes, great
curtains, palace and yamun hangings, and plun-
der. Tribute sables, ermines, and finest skins in
bunches as they came from imperial storehouses,
even the yellow satin uniforms of the Emperor's
attendants, the cloth-of-gold robes of the Empress, cov-
ered with seed-pearl dragons, and the plienix door-
curtains of her private apartments, have been offered
for sale with no questions asked. Remembering the
gi'isly tales of what befell certain other dealers in im-
perial effects and palace loot, one buys and flies, and
locks the treasures out of Chinese sight. The neigh-
borhood is crowded with the hidden homes of such
pawnbrokers and the infragrant homes of fur-dealers,
who cure and dress their fine sheepskins and Tibetan
goatskins at their doors, reserving no secrets in the
processes, from the stretching, washing, and scraping
to the final dressing with coarse chalk, which, beaten
out after a few days' bleaching, fills the air with
clouds of poisonous dust.
Although furs are comparatively cheap and are
almost a necessity in this climate, not all the people
can afford them. Each INIanchu bannerman has a
CHINESE PEKING 193
sheepskin coat provided him, but the masses of Chi-
nese wear only wadded cotton, rarely any woolen
garments, and with advancing winter weigh them-
selves down with more and more clumsy wadding,
with " cotton overcoats," as they call them.
Silk rugs and silky rugs of the inner wool of the
Tibetan goat come from Tibet and the Ordos coun-
try—temple carpets or Tibetan rugs, as the dealers
call them, exquisite velvety products of Central Asian
looms, real works of art. The Mongolian sheep's wool
and camel's wool come to this quarter also, and there
are weavers of carpets in Peking who are slowly com-
ing down to the Tientsin level, exchanging the old con-
ventional key patterns, the seal characters, the bats and
butterflies of longevity for leaves, flowers, and scrolls
and pointer-dogs woven in aniline colors. Silk rugs
of long, loose nap are woven also for one dollar and
a half the square foot, and even more for those of
close, firm texture ; but the modern silk rugs flaunt
the aniline dyes at their brightest, and have fewer
stitches to the inch each season.
There is another outdoor clothes-fair in the Chinese
City, but it is held by torch-light in the earliest morn-
ing hours, closes at daylight before the city gates open,
and is appropriately known as the " thieves' market."
As at its Moscow namesake, everything of luxury,
value, and utility may be bought in its third estate.
Beyond the beggars' bridge there is a half-mile of
outdoor shops and booths extending down the west
side of the Meridian Street. Snuff-bottles of every
kind, small objects in jade, crystal, and semi-precious
stones, entrap one's attention, and but for the offen-
194 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
sive, infragrant, gapiug, jeering crowd that presses
around one, he could loiter with delight for hours.
Great tea-, silk-, fur-, porcelain-, hardware-, harness-,
furniture-, and curio-shops stretcli along this avenue
and fill the streets opening from it. Street signs and
street calls are of endless variety and puzzling inter-
est in Peking, and a German anthropologist has made
exhaustive study of them. The streets hang full of
^'beckoning boards," gold-lettered on black or ver-
milion grounds, and the carved and gilded fronts of
medicine-, tea-, and sweetmeat-shops are often so
elaborate that one wants to put them under glass,
•since all around he sees the wreck of them, loaded with
the grime of countless searing dust-storms. The em-
blems of the trades and the images of the wares
within are decorative to a degree. The gigantic
gilded coin of the money-changer, the wooden official
hats and strings of official beads, the feather-duster
signs of brush-shops, the fleur-de-lis of tobacconists,
the brass bowls of barbers, and a host of obscure em-
blems continually occupy one. The fleur-de-lis brand
of snuff, first brought by French Jesuits, has enjoyed
exclusive favor for three centuries, and its use is so
universal that one sees these Bourbon lilies as fre-
quently before Peking shops as one sees tlie Prince
of "Wales feathers in London. The Mohammedan
crescent is another Western emblem seen with sur-
prise in Peking streets, the sign of bath-houses and
butcher-shops, those public purveyors being exclusively
Mohammedans.
Picture and Lantern and Jadestone streets are dis-
appointing, and one easily accepts the assurance that
CHINESE PEKING 195
they have fallen off in recent years. It is a curious
process, however, by which they steam, scrape, stretch,
and bend a common horn until it is a great, trans-
parent bubble like a bladder, a huge horn lantern a
foot in diameter, which, when decorated with vermil-
ion characters and hung with tassels and glittering
trinkets, makes the most admired decoration for a
house-front or garden court. There are endless curi-
ous kinds of "candle-cages" and "candle-baskets"
used in this city of nightly blackness, nothing prettier
in effect, perhaps, than the huge, red-lettered, ribbed,
and flattened spheres of official lanterns, looking most
like gigantic tomatoes, which are held close to the
ground in legation compounds as a light to the feet.
While great sums are appropriated for lighting Peking
streets, one sees only a few faint lamps at long inter-
vals, and any one abroad after dark must light his
own way through the pitfalls, death-traps, and noi-
some niud-holes. The lantern is not a mere decorative
adjunct of Chinese life, but a first necessity, as much
as a fan or a pipe. Even the soldier has his lantern,
and that army that attacked the English at Ningpo in
1842 all stole upon the enemy lanterns in hand. The
Chinese soldier most resents the foreign drill-masters
and officers because they will not let him fan himself
on dress-parade and deny the lone sentry his lantern.
The Liu-li-chang, the booksellers' street, used to be
the Peking deliglit and treasure-house. There schol-
ars and dilettanti still prowl to buy the immortal
classics in ten thousand volumes, rubbings of old in-
scriptions, scroll pictures, painted books, and the con-
ventional ornaments and necessaries for the writing-
190 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
table ; but the eurio-shops, where jade and porcelain,
lacquer and bronze, used to embarrass the visitor's
choice, have suffered a serious falling off, and thus
robbed Peking of its greatest delights and tempta-
tions. Each war, with its vicissitudes among the great
families, flooded the market with treasures galore ; but
between such crises one searches long, and he needs to
be on the alert for the imitations that abound. All the
dragons there now have five claws, all the hawthorns
have the double ring of Kanghsi or the seal of Chenghua.
There are treasures yet cherished in Peking, so great
was the activity of artists and artisans in the centu-
ries just gone, when ten thousands of pieces of porce-
lain were sent annually to the Peking palace for gifts ;
but the owners of such art objects can afford to keep
them until some great political convulsion, the fall of
the dynasty, a foreign war with another sack of tlie
palaces, brings them into the market. Every amateur
is eagerly waiting for some such crash, and dozens
avow themselves ready to take flight to Peking from
the ends of the earth. One is shown the boarded-up
front of a once famous curio-shop, whose owner kept
the fence for some palace servants who tunneled
up under one of the imperial storehouses and took
away cart-loads of treasures. Suspicions were at last
roused by the number of unusually fine pieces of por-
celain this particular dealer and a confrere at Tien-
tsin had for sale. Wlien the lialf-em})tied storehouse
with the underground passage was opened, the of-
fenders were soon found and beheaded, all the mem-
bers of their families put to deatli, and the front of
the big sliop l)oarded u{) as a warning. One looks at
CHINESE PEKING 197
it fearfully, and sees why the great treasures are now
to be seen and bought in New York, London, and
Paris rather than along the Liu-li-chang. Yet col-
lecting has its fascination in face of the law and the
lictors, and such curio-stealing for the market will go
on as long as there are servants in Chinese yamuns
and storehouses worth looting. The recent coups
d'etat did send some famous Chinese connoisseurs to
the block and to exile, but their treasures vanished be-
fore the families could turn a key.
One never gets to the end of the strange and as-
tonishing histories of ancient works of Chinese art,
and I was shown the famous album of water-color
sketches of eighty pieces of Ming porcelains once
owned by the wicked Prince of I. It was this
prince who violated the flag of truce in 1860 and im-
prisoned the peace commissioners, which act brought
about the attack on Peking and the destruction of
the Summer Palace. He was graciously permitted to
strangle himself in prison when the coup d'etat of
1861 had seated the empresses in the regents' chairs,
and all of I's great collections of treasures were scat-
tered. This exquisitely colored album was offered to
one foreign euvoy, who retained it for consideration,
had an artist secretly copy the paintings, and then
returned the album to the dealer with word that he
did not care to buy. Another thrifty plenipotentiary
did the same thing when it was offered to him. The
third customer to whom it went a-begging, being
more British than diplomatic, honestly bought the
original album, which he supposed was unique, al-
lowed a friend to have a copy made, and then took it
198 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
to London, where the original book was burned. Then
the envoys produced their surreptitious copies and
boasted of their smartness. It is a standing Pekingese
parable, too, how the slender little dappled peach-
blow vase, for which American collectors contended
so extravagantly at the Morgan sale, was hawked
about every legation and finally sold for a virtual
trifle to a visiting professional buyer. Not all of
these whom fortune tempted that once are agreed to
berate themselves for short-sightedness, nor yet do all
deny the superior charms of the peach-cheeked trea-
sure which became the sensation and then the mys-
tery of its ceramic season.
Out of Peking came, a few years ago, a most won-
derful collection of jade, acquired at a stroke by an
American collector and connoisseur who enjoys the
possession of the greatest and rarest collection of
jade in the Western world. He spent but a compara-
tively short time in Peking, and when one finds that
there is less good jade to be seen for sale in Peking
than in New York, and that none is now carved there,
that feat of collecting piques curiosity. He learns,
though, that the season of the American collector's
great find was a few months before the Empress
Dowager's birthday, and the eunuchs, in search of
worthy offerings, had commanded the great dealer
or father of all jade in the Liu-li-chang, and his
Tatar City rival by the Dung-tang, to assemble some
"ten-times-number-one" o])jects for their inspection.
The American collector had "such a good heart"
that one dealer let him just look in upon the splendors
laid out for eunuch inspection. The American, after
CHINESE PEKING 199
brief survey, made an offer for the whole lot, with
instant delivery. And it was paid for, cotton- wooled,
and boxed out of the premises so speedily that the
dazed dealer was literally so ^'heavily sick" with
prosperity that he was indifferent to the scorn of the
eunuchs when they looked upon the few trumpery
pieces hastily shuffled into the place of the heavenly
green joys the American had borne off. Eunuchs are
keen bargainers and poor pay, anyhow. The other
dealer, who had assembled a roomful of jade rarities
for eunuch inspection, was also taken by storm,
bought out at sight, and paid within the hour in good
dollars instead of in long-running palace promises.
Two such transactions could not go on in the same
market without some one telling or turning traitor,
and a chain of suspicion was fastening upon the
boxes that heaped up so rapidly in the tourists' quar-
ters. Only the fact that his boy sat on those boxes
night and day, and that the collector had diplomatic
company on his speedy trip down to Tientsin, averted
some kind of an unpleasantness. Sight might have
been proof of stolen property, but as anything worth
having has usually been stolen for the curio-market,
a buyer's sensibilities lose their finer edge when he has
honestly paid for his purchases to some one in the
long chain of rascals.
In the long-ago there was a porcelain-factory in
the Liu-li-chang, whei-e Chihli's clays were shaped
to things of beauty and decorated after the designs
of the best court painters, but it has long been closed.
Tliere is still a crowded fair in the Liu-li-chang at
New Year's time, when the long street is beset by
200 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
scholars and collectors who are there by day and by
night to buy the treasures that the season of debt-
paying brings to light, and to watch their own trea-
sure-seeking purchasers in the hands of middlemen.
A famous sweetmeat-shop in the Liu-li-chang main-
tains its standard and prestige undiminished, and the
honeyed things in glazed pottery jars are each more
tempting than another. While one sips jasmine tea in
some inner curio sanctum, one can send for and make
trial of these Mongol sweets, taking them in Russian
fashion between sips, or dropped into the tea. There
is a factory of cloisonne enamels near the Liu-li-
chang, which produces large pieces after the best old
designs ; and as Chinese taste and artistic invention
seem alike dead in this decade, it is best that they
tread the conventional Avay. They cannot repeat the
softest colors of the old Ming enamels, but the
Japanese deceive Peking connoisseurs as easily with
their artistic forgeries of old enamels as with their
counterfeits of old porcelains, and of both such im-
portations the Liu-li-chang holds full supply. " Be-
ware of the Japanese," say Chinese coniioisseui-s, who
seem easily victimized. If one would study and enjoy
Chinese art, one should go where the great collections
and the great dealers in ''Oriental" are— to Paris, to
London, to New York or Baltimore, to Di'osden, Berlin,
Weimar, or St. Petersburg, but not to Peking.
XV
WITHOUT THE WALLS
^N the Chinese City there is little of in-
terest beyond the shops and streets,
as the great inclosures of the Temple
of Heaven and the Temple of Agri-
culture are fast shut, and one sees
what he may through an opera-glass as he walks the
city wall. No foreigner has ever assisted at the ser-
vices at the Temple of Heaven, and few have entered
its inclosures. For some years after 1860, entry to the
lovely park by the south wall was easily gained, but
after certain vandal acts the entry of visitors was pro-
hibited. Every foreigner became possessed then to
gain entry, and bribery ,trickery, and every other device
were resorted to to penetrate the forbidden realm.
Full illustrations and full explanations of all the tem-
ple precincts and ceremonies are given in the standard
works on China, which sufficiently gratify a normal
curiosity or any legitimate interest, and the majority
of these zealous investigators schemed to enter the
park of the Temple of Heaven to gratify a love of
adventure and that last ambition of small minds, " to
201
202 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
say they have been there." Persistent visitors were
assisted up the walls and dropped down on the inner
side. When discovered and chased by the guards,
they ran for the wall, where their servants stood
with ropes to haul them up, and mounting, rode
away before the guards could reach the outer gates
to stop or identify them.
From the wall one can see the circular white altar
rising in terraces, and, with the full descriptions
given, can picture the scene of the midnight sacri-
fices and the worship of the Supreme Deity by the
Emperor and his great retinue at the time of the win-
ter and the spring solstice. This religion, this wor-
ship of the Supreme Ruler with burnt-offerings and
on an open altar, is the most ancient cult now ob-
served anywhere in the world, far antedating Confu-
cian and Taoist and Buddhist doctrines, and is the
survival of those primitive beliefs that had force in
Asia before the gods were personified, their images
enshrined in temples, and creeds and ceremonies
elaborated. The temples and buildings in the great
park were rebuilt in splendor by Yunglo, the mag-
nificent builder, the Grand Monarque of the Mings ;
and the new Temple of Heaven of tliis decade, roofed
with shimmering azure tiles and with window-screens
of fine blue glass rods, repeats the temple of his day,
which was destroyed by heavenly fire soon after the
war of the allies.
The Temple of Agriculture occupies another great
park adjacent to the south wall of the Chinese City,
which the Emperor and his officers visit in state an-
nually, the Emperor plowing a piece of ground each
WITHOUT THE WALLS 203
spring in reverence for the spirits of earth and his
great ancestors, who first made the earth bring forth
its fruits. The altar or Temple of the Earth outside
the north wall of the Tatar Cit}', the altar of the Sun
in the east suburb, and the altar of the Moon beyond
the west wall, where the tablets of the stars are
placed, are other sanctuaries of annual imperial wor-
ship, as jealously guarded as those within the city
wall, although the allied troops camped in the park
of the altar of the Earth in 1860.)
vThe Po-yun-Kwan, the mother temple and head- i/'
quarters of the Taoist sect in North China, which
was a venerated place when Kublai Khan came, lies
just outside the northwest gate of the Chinese City— ■
the Hsi-pien-men, or Western Wicket of Expediency.
This religion of the indefinite and the impalpable,
this baffling cult of the vague and the opaque, which
has now gone off into mere magic, hocus-pocus,
charms, exorcisms, and wizardry of the cheapest
kind, seems there to have some reality, some dignity,
some form. The great ceremony of the fire test is
performed at Po-yun-Kwan on the third day of the
third moon each year, but quite by chance we hap-
pened upon a great conference and convocation of
Taoist priests on the last day of our Christian Oc-
tober. More than two hundred priests were gathered
at the temple, and a great service or mass had just
begun as we arrived. The priests had taken their
places inside the temple and in the great stone-flagged
court, all attired in loose, dark-blue robes, wearing
Taoist caps with open crowns showing a topknot of
hair held by a single pin, like the Korean and Loo-
204 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
chooan coiffure of to-day and the universal Chinese
fashion in the Ming times. It was solemn and im-
pressive as those blue-robed priests stood in twelve
lines of twelve men each, facing the altar of the
inner temple, each priest grasping a jui, or Taoist
scepter, the symbol of good luck and long life in
common usage. Seven higher priests in brilliant red
stoles stood at intervals down the central path or
aisle of the court, where the great bronze incense-
burner gave out curls of fragrant smoke. The voice
of the high priest far within the temple was lifted in
a chant, the priests on the steps responded, a bell
vibrated in the sanctuary, and all the priests knelt in
unison and struck their foreheads upon the stones.
Three times they made this obeisance and this pros-
tration in concert ; the great sweep forward of all
those robed figures at once was like the bending and
bowing to Mecca in a crowded mosque. At times
they knelt upon one knee, then rose in unison, and
the deep Gregorian chant went on. There were
inner and further altars of the indefinite, impalpable
religion of nothingness in courts beyond, where the
gilded images of the Guardians of the Four Quar-
ters smiled, imperial tablets stood, and rolls of silk
were laid as offerings, and more splendid incense-
burners sent up fine blue clouds of worshipful fra-
grance. Every part of the temple in closure, all its
labyrinth of courts and fantastic gardens of artificial
rockwork, was exquisitel}' clean, and a great glass
pavilion was being made ready for the feast which
was to close the annual convocation of priests. ;
But foreign Peking takes little interest in Taoism,
WITHOUT THE WALLS 205
its masses and ceremonies, its fire-walking or its fire-
eating,' and we were carried on to an elaborate tea in
the high-terraced guest-room of the Tien-ling-ssu,
whose noble old thirteen-story pagoda of the sixth
century holds a colossal Buddha of a commonplace,
gilded plaster countenance. The priests bid one throw
a cash at a metal plate hanging directly over the All-
Knowing one's gilded hand, for good luck and the
good of the temple exchequer.
The Peking race-course is just beyond these two
temples, and the meets give all the Cambaluc world
of Western fashion days of enjoyment out in the
fresh, clear, sparkling air of the open plain, fresh air
blown straight from the hills and boundless Mongo-
lia beyond. On midwinter days, when the sun shines
with desert fierceness from a dry, blue, cloudless sky,
the electric, exhilarating air makes human and equine
blood and muscles tingle, and there are many scratch
races called on the spur of the moment to give spirits
vent and relief from the rush of routine, intramural
and indoor social amusements.
The Mongol horse-traders bring droves of ponies
down from their grassy plains from beyond the Great
AVall each season " when the river has frozen and the
tourists are gone," and the racing man has the plea-
sure of choosing the most promising of these prairie-
bred ones, and training the Asiatic bronco for a
cup-winner. These tough, strong-jawed, and shock-
headed little horses of the plains often develop aston-
ishingly, and surprises are the regular order of the
meets. Gentlemen jockeys ride their own ponies,
which they themselves have trained morning after
206 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIEE
morning at sunrise outside the walls, or light-weight
friends ride for them. Irreverent strangers who see
the lean yellow Chinese jockey in conventional cap and
boots and gaudy satin jacket for the first time are
sure there was never funnier sight before, and the
crowded race-course is a most diverting spectacle. A
few Chinese officials, who have learned the delightful
excitements of racing in European capitals, enliven
the grand stand with their brilliant satins and sables,
and on an autumn day that I best remember, Chang
Yen Hoon, his faithful Liang, and some confreres
gave the brilliant touch of local color and splendor
to the gathering. It was cup-day, and all Peking
was there, arriving by horse and chair, mule-cart or
mule-litter, and making strangest pictures ever a
grand stand saw as they descended or extricated
themselves from such medieval conveyances. A year
later the coup d'etat had fallen, and Sir Chang, barely
saved from the block, was on his way to life-exile in
Kashgaria.
A great concourse of the people, thousands of Chi-
nese, had flocked to the race-course, and stretches be-
side the grand stand and stables and in the field were
solidly blue with their monotonous garments. They
were kept back and in bounds by Chinese grooms
and jockeys who spared not the lash on man or beast,
and all the legation servants and outriders assisted to
preserve the inviolability of the lawn and yard. A
Russian secretary ordered his booted and belted
Cossack orderly to bring something from the stables
at once, and as the clumsy creature touched his cap,
wound his rawhide whip around his hand, and started
WITHOUT THE WALLS 207
down the steps and across the lawn on a run, the
whole mass of Chinese took to their heels before
him, precipitating themselves headlong into ditches,
tumbling over one another, picking themselves up
without looking back, and running entirely across the
field before they brought up exhausted. Even the
Cossack stopped for a second and looked bewildered
around him to see what had started this silent, frantic
flight of this Tatar tribe— scene typical of the rela-
tions and attitudes of those two races, a picture in
miniature of so-called railroad extension in Man-
churia. The Chinese know the Russian. They have
found their master and have felt the whip, and they
stand not upon the order of their going.
After the great race tiffin, with speeches and toasts
and cheers, when the winners in their gay satin jackets
had come up to receive the prizes presented in graceful
little speeches by different ladies, there came the mad
breakneck, steeplechase, free-to-all, great race of the
day, through fields, over ruts and ditches, across lots,
anyhow — the foreigners' race home from the races
before the city gates should close. Those who were in
the saddle could of course wait for the last race of the
program, long before which the grand stand was
emptied. Chair-bearers could rely upon making great
spurts across lots, but carts had to follow the fixed
lines of ruts into the Chinese City, and then plod
through the waste of sand along the walls of the
Tatar City to its gates before the fatal stroke. There
mules were beaten, carts bumped, and carters chir-
ruped and repeated their ivu-ivu-wu tvu-u-u and the
pr-pr-pr-rup like Norwegian skydguts, while one
208 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
bounded about in the upholstered chair and wedged
more pillows beside one. Clouds of dust surrounded
each cart, through which one saw dimly only the barrel
glimpse ahead, nothing but the darkening waste and
the endless, endless walls. With some energetic
whackings, mules were made to go faster, and just
when every joint seemed racked loose, mules turned
in the great arch, with other carts, carters, donkeys,
and camels streaming through the tunnel as the bells'
slower clang and the pipes' shrill whistle proclaimed
the last moments of grace. Then mules and muleteers
and dust-laden passengers stopped to breathe, and car-
acoling knights called into cart interiors their thanks-
givings at such a fortunate escape, for a survey assured
us that all were safely within the walls before the
gates went to with a sound not to be forgotten.
Picturesque medieval customs are better read about
than encountered.
Chi, the anger principle, naturally possesses an out-
sider at that most amazing and humiliating spectacle
of the Peking year. It is the regular spectacle, how-
ever, on all autumn and winter race-days, and the
Chinese must have a secret delight in seeing all the
hated barbarians, titled representatives and honored
officials, the great diplomats of the greatest powers,
running home like school-boys when the curfew tolls,
dignity, self-respect, and that domineering spirit of
treaty-making times all gone. Not a protest, not an
appeal, not a request is made that even one gate
should be left open for the diplomats' use that night ;
and still less does the Ti-tu, or city governor, ever
dream of offering such a courtesy. Yet these abject
WITHOUT THE WALLS 209
ones are the very same envoys of the same great
powers who snatch provinces and ports and islands
at will, and who wrest the spoils of war from a con-
quering nation, slip whole clauses into their own
transcript of a treaty, and hold the Chinese by threat
of war to its literal fulfilment ; who push the privilege
of their coupe-ligne cards everywhere in European
capitals, who insist that their dogs shall go without
muzzles as a diplomatic privilege, in the face of laws
crowned heads must obey in their own empires ; yet
they do not, dare not, ask to have one gate left open
for them on one night of the year ! Truly the ways
of diplomacy are tortuous and past finding out. La
carriere is a path in the dark, and the Chinese are not
the only ones who think backward and upside down.
With all this there has never been a Jameson raid in
China ! With their genius for taming and hypnotizing
the diplomat, the Chinese ought logically to rule the
world.
For a flowery kingdom, one sees the fewest flowers
in its capital city. No sight nor hint of flower-gar-
dens, nor any purposely blooming and beautifying
thing, may be seen in the streets, and the rich tangle
of wild roses and tough morning-glory vines all over
the terre-plein of the city walls is not growing there
by any intention of enjoyment on the part of the neg-
lectful guardians. At Lung-fu-ssu fair and at the
morning market by the west gate, a few plants and
common flowers are offered for sale, but there are too
few to prove that any love of flowers exists with the
masses, and their price is prohibitive to the common
people. In each legation compound one sees hun-
210 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
dreds of flower-pots ranged along the paths, but the
baked-clay soil of the Peking plain does not admit of
luxuriant flower-gardens, although that plain is cov-
ered with wild flowers in spring, and fragrant, long-
stemmed violets bloom there until late autumn. As
the chrysanthemum came from China originally, one
would naturally look for its richest development at the
capital where wealth and luxury center ; but Peking
makes poor show in any floral line, and the chrysanthe-
mum is seen at its best in the foreign flower-shows at
the Shanghai race-course, and at a garden in the native
city of Shanghai. Ningpo claims to have gardeners
who can produce more astonishing pompons and great
incurved and recurved descendants of the " Chusan
daisy" than those of their gild elsewhere, but few
foreigners have chance to judge of this.
All the chrysanthemums in legation courts, even
those at the old fu, were of the commonest varieties,
and nearly all grafted on the shaggy, woody stem of
artemisia, the neglected, untidy, untrained foliage
detracting greatly from the beauty of the flowers.
After persistent questioning on all sides, a literatus
told of a certain chrysanthemum and plum-tree gar-
den where flowers were grown for the eunuchs who
decorate the palace living-rooms. It was a long
drive to the garden, first through the endless Chinese
City, past the public execution-ground— a piece of the
public highway which is blocked while the decapita-
tion or brutal strangling by hand goes on, and where
curious children were then gazing at a robber's head
that had lain for a week in the lattice-box or cage. Then
we went on past slums and suburban tracts, the lit-
^ ?:
WITHOUT THE WALLS 213
eral rus in urbe, past desolate graveyards whose broken
walls showed reeling and fallen Buddhist monu-
ments ; and at last, through the deep-vaulted tunnel of
the outer southwest gate, the cart reached dusty
wastes and the group of gardeners' huts and plant-
houses where the palace flowers bloom. The disillu-
sionment was complete when, in that baked-clay
garden, the tattered and greasy-coated gardener or
imperial purveyor and florist pointed to some shaggy
artemisia stems abloom with white and yellow chry-
santhemums that were to go to the palace the next
morning. The imperial eyes had to be delighted with
the commonest flowers or with none at all, since this
favorite of the eunuchs declared them his choicest
blossoms. His winter plant-houses were being made
ready to store and force the palace palms, oleanders,
dwarf plums, almonds, Jcwei-hwa, or fragrant olive-
trees, and the moutans, or tree-peonies. These houses
of wattle and dab, with mud walls on three sides and
mud roofs laid on a frame of poles and matting, were
being chinked up and mended. Thick white paper
was already pasted over some of the skeleton poles
of the south walls. These thick, dry, warm shelters,
with sunlight glowing hot on the paper fronts, keep
the plants at a safe and even temperature through
the bright but bitter winters of that northern plain.
Other mud storehouses with glass south walls have
underground kangs and flues that force the plants
appropriate to the New Year to bloom on time. If the
symbolic festal flowers lag in the last week of grace,
caldrons of boiling water furnish clouds of gentle
steam-heat that open the most obstinate peonies, and
214 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
then, swathed in paper mantles, they are transported
in closed carts warmed with hand-furnaces or Mongol
braziers. The rarest vases are put to use at the New
Year season, and, with true Chinese shiftlessness,
withered flowers are left in vases for weeks until
the water freezes and cracks the precious porcelain.
In this way have resulted great cracks entirely around
the rarest palace pieces, vases which when broken are
reported as such and ruthlessly thrown away— and
very carefully gathered up and mended, and sent
to the curio-dealer, who may have indicated to some
needy eunuch or eunuch's servant what kind of a vase
it would be most profitable to have suffer a frost-
crack. Such was the fate of one splendid sang-de-
bceuf vase in the palace some years ago, which was
sold to an American, whose collection was soon after
dispersed in a New York auction-room, the glorious
red beaker reserved for sale, however, with the trea-
sures of quite another collector, in order to maintain
the mystery and fraud, and save a suspected Pekingese
head.
XVI
THE ENVIRONS OF PEKING
^ERE there good roads aud more tol-
erable inns, were traveling by land in
China anything but the reverse of
comfortable, safe, or pleasant, one
could spend weeks of the matchless
spring and autumn weather in trips to the interesting
places in the Peking neighborhood. When it is neces-
sary to go by cart or litter, or at least to carry one's
bedding and full camp equipment in such slow, archaic
conveyances, one loses interest in places that are one
or many nights away from Peking. All-day excur-
sions usually suffice one.
The railway, as it approaches Peking, skirts the
wall of the Nan-hai-tzu, or '' Southern Hunting Park,"
an abandoned and unused demesne, where for years
the unique '' David or tail deer," with its huge antlers,
roamed in herds, and other game increased in peace.
The extension of the line beyond Peking brings to
modern light and makes accessible that wonderful
old Liu-ko-chiao bridge, which spans the Hun-lio Eiver
by great stone arches, its carved parapet guarded by
215
216 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
stone lions, so bewildering in number in other cen-
turies that none could keep count of them. Marco
Polo crossed and praised it in the thirteenth century,
and it remains an enduring monument of greater
days, one of the famous bridges in this empire of
wonderful bridges.
The legations and nearly all the customs families
remove in summer to the temples in the western hills,
which rise from the level Peking plain ten miles from
the city, as suddenly as the Alban Hills beyond Rome.
Eight temples are nielied in ravines and built on
spurs of the steep hills, the ascending chain of tem-
ples connected by an ancient flagged roadway. These
beautiful, clean temple compounds comfortably ac-
commodate the diplomatic colony each summer, when
the desert sun scorches Peking for so many hours of
the long northern day, and the city is enveloped in
dense clouds of the finely pulverized, poisonous dust,
or else, with the deluging rains, the streets become so
many rivers in flood, and mules in cart-harness are
drowned at legation gates. The British government
has bought land and built summer quarters for that
legation at the hills, but the other envoys continue
to rent their favorite temples, and enjoy a picturesque
sort of intimate country and camp life in these quaint
old Buddhist precincts.
These western hills and fai'ther hills to the south-
west hold valuable coal-deposits. Although the great
geologists Pumpelly and Richtofen examined and
reported upon their richness thirty years ago, conces-
sions for foreign engineers to work the mines with
machinery and Western appliances have but lately
COAL MIXIXa AXI) TRASSI'OKTATID.V.
(COAI.-I.UADKI) CAMEL.) (SI.AVK DKAWINC BABKKT UK COAL.)
THE ENVIRONS OF PEKING 219
been wrested from the government, Chinese jealousy,
suspicion, and conservatism being exerted to the ut-
most still to prevent the course of progress and the
working of these concessions. The coal, both bitu-
minous and anthracite, is still picked out with primi-
tive tools, and is dragged to the surface in basket
sleds fastened to the necks of wretched workmen,
who creep on all fours along the narrow little run-
ways picked along the lines of the veins. It is trans-
ported to Peking in baskets by camel-train, and
delivered at the consumer's door for less than three
gold dollars a ton.
The road out from the west gate to the hills
passes through the walled town of Pa-li-chuan, which
has as its landmark a splendid old thirteen-story
pagoda, the largest in the Peking neighborhood.
Within twenty years the pagoda has gone to ruin,
and the gold image of Kwanyin, the Goddess of Mercy,
piously enshrined there by one of the Ming empresses,
is no longer on the altar. As worshipers decreased,
and with them the income, the priests grew angry,
sold all the attainable timbers and carved woodwork
for fuel, and all the altar ornaments, and decamped,
leaving the pagoda to the elements and passers-by to
wreck at will.
North of it, on the palace road, stand the ruins
of the outer temples of Wu-ta-ssu, built by Yunglo
to shelter five golden images and a model of the
immortal diamond throne under the sacred bo-tree
of Buddh Gaya, which a priest had brought from
Iiulia to the devout Emperor Chenghua. In one
great hall the roof was alloAved to fall in and crush
220 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
the altar images and the company of lohans, frag-
ments and lumps of which only now remain. The
square marble building of the inner sanctuary re-
mains, its outer wall covered with row above row of
recessed images of Buddha, and the five pagodas on
its flat terrace top are covered with more and more
images of Fo. There are no priests, no keepers to
be seen, but a legion of country folk approach and beg
at sight of a stranger.
This road from the northwest city gate continues
on past Wu-ta-ssu to the bannermen's village of Hai-
tien, at the gates of the Summer Palace and of the
E-ho Park, the residence of the Empress Dowager and
the prison palace of the Emperor Kwangsu. The road
is paved with large, flat slabs of stone, and was built
in 1894 as part of the preparation for celebrating the
Empress Dowager's sixtieth birthday, which the Japa-
nese war so rudely interrupted. There were grum-
blings and loud-mouthed criticisms in Peking that
the palace folk should build such a model road for
their pleasurings, while all Peking's communication
with its markets and the outer world was crippled by
the wrecked condition of the Tungchow road. For
the years that the road was all but impassable for im-
perial wheels, the Celestial, dragon family went to and
fro in barges drawn by men along the canal leading
to the cit}' gates. Steam and electric launches were
next employed, and had the coup d'etat been averted
and progress allowed to progress at the pace it was
acquiring, tlie Emperor would doubtless soon have
been guiding his own automobile over this splendid
park I'oad.
THE ENVIEONS OF PEKING 221
When the French army reached the Summer Palace in
1860, the imperial family had but barely fled through
a side gate, and the French officers found the fan, the
hat, the pipe, and the papers that the Emperor had been
using in his private apartments. The suburban palace
had been made a general storehouse and place of safe-
deposit for the treasures of the court nobles and princes,
in addition to the incredible riches the emperors had
long accumulated there. The French held the palace
for several days before the English troops came up
—looting strictly prohibited, General Montauban
averred, although the camp of his men at the gates
overflowed with satin garments and hangings, and
certain French soldiers had watches and jewels to sell
to any who wished to buy. In room after room,
the walls were built over with divided shelves like
cabinets, and crowded with such pieces of porcelain,
jade, crystal, and jeweled objects as even the
officers had never seen before. "When it was decided
to burn and destroy the buildings, as a direct and
personal punishment put upon the erring ruler, rather
than to punish his long-suffering, misgoverned peo-
ple, and as a retribution on the very spot where the
foreign captives had been tortured to death, the place
was thrown open to the soldiers' pillage. The em-
perors of two dynasties had lavished all the taste,
talent, and treasures of the empire on this favorite
residence. Mogul, Persian, Chinese, Indian, Arab,
Frencli, and Italian architects planned and decorated
the innumerable i)alaces and pavilions scattered
through these parks, and from Kanghsi's times until
the middle of the century the most gifted artists and
222 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
artisans were assembled at ateliers there, where paint-
lug, illuminating, carving, enameling, jade-, gem-, and
glass-cutting, lacquering, and every branch of art and
art industry Avere pursued under imperial supervision.
Miracles of beauty and marvels of cunning work-
manship emanated from these imperial ateliers, to be
retained by the Emperor or distributed as gifts, and
the Summer Palace held the greatest and richest col-
lection of any art museum in the world when the sol-
diers were turned loose in it. Every writer— Chaplain
McGee, General Wolseley, Oliphant, Rennie, and Sir
Harry Parkes— speaks with sorrow of the senseless,
brutal, ignorant destruction of the incalculable trea-
sures the place contained. Not one tenth of the trea-
sures were rescued; five tenths of the precious
fragilities were smashed by the butts of muskets or
hurled about by skylarking soldiers, and the rest were
consumed and shivered in the final fire and explo-
sions. Besides what the men could pocket or carry
with them, three hundred carts were forcibly im-
pressed, loaded with booty, and driven out of tlie
park — booty which has since enriched museums and
private collections in Europe and America. The
English soldiers and officers, who had a poor show
and second culling in the treasure-houses, were made
to turn all their loot into a common store, which was
auctioned off and the money divided among the sol-
diers. The English officers, having waived their share
in the prizes, had then to buy any souvenirs they
wished to take home from China. What the French
had they ke])t, and one understands why the boule-
vard hailed General Montauban as " Due de Pillage "
THE ENVIRONS OF PEKING 223
as often as Couut Palikao, and why French palaces,
museums, chateaux, and the homes of the families of
the French officers taking part in the allies' war are
so rich in gems of Chinese art. Even within a few
years, an exquisite piece of jade, carved to the fine-
ness of lace, was sold by a retired French officer to a
collector, with the promise that he should never show
it nor speak of it in Europe. His superior officer
had wanted it, had taxed him with having it, and
tried to make him give it up, but the sous-officier got
it safely away, and for thirty years knew that they
were still watching to see if he sold it. There were
palace and temple ceilings whose panels were plates
of pure gold, heavy images of solid gold on many
altars, stores of jewels and bullion treasure, and such
supplies of silk garments that sepoys and zouaves
masqueraded in imperial robes and palace uniforms,
and lined their tents and mud barracks with palace
fineries.
Father Ripa has described the palace as it was in
Kanghsi's time, when he and his fellow-Jesuits were
laboring to beautify it. Those artists and architects
and others in Kienlung's time, fresh from the splen-
dors of Italy and Versailles, designed baroque and
rococo and Renaissance structures, as bizarre and out-
landish to Chinese eyes as Chinese pavilions and
pagodas are to European eyes. The Italian artists
set Chinese carvers to work upon the lace-like orna-
ment of marble pavilions, loggias, and horseshoe stair-
ways, and the rainbow tiles of the Chinese potters
were wrought into fantasies of architecture never
equaled elsewhere. Even the officers who had to set
224 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
the torch and touch the fuses to all these pillaged
palaces felt the pity of it. The burning palaces lighted
the sky for two nights and sent black clouds of smoke
drifting toward frightened Peking for days, while the
work of destruction was pushed to the farthest little
imperial Trianon in the folds of the hills. The one
hilltop temple of Wan-shou-shau, and here and there
a rainbow pagoda or a bronze shrine, were sjiared by
a regi'etful British officer, but years of neglect soon
gave the general air of ruin to the whole scene.
The Summer Palace grounds, Yuan-ming-yuan
(" Round and Splendid Garden "), were wholly aban-
doned for the first dozen years of the regency. All
diplomatic Peking used to ride and ramble and picnic
there, and extract souvenirs from the debris-heaps;
but when the young Emperor Tungchih came into
power the work of reclamation and rebuilding began,
and has been carried on intermittently since, so that
the mile-square park, with its eigliteen gates and
"forty beauties," afforded a favorite residence for
Kwangsu up to the time of the coup d'etat. The
suburban palace has again become a treasure-house
of Chinese art, and there have been assembled there
miniature railways and vessels, European carriages
of all kinds, jinrikishas, bicycles, clocks, mechanical
toys, and articles de Paris and Vienna galore, all
sent and brought by returning Cliinese envoys from
abroad and by concessionaries anxious to build rail-
ways, work mines, and regenerate Cliina. The palaces
were so well mapped and described in tlie past, so
tlioroughly photogi-aphed in the years of neglect, tliat
one has a tolerable acquaintance with them in that
THE ENVIEONS OF PEKING 225
way, and from the western hills he can identify the
buildings in the great parks.
The E-ho Park, or Wan-shou-shan {" Hill of Ten
Thousand Ages ")> which the Empress Dowager chose
and restored for her residence with moneys diverted
from naval and railway appropriations, has more im-
portance in this decade than the Yuan-ming-yuan.
Its chief feature is the great hill crowned with a Bud-
dhist temple of rainbow tiles, which was spared in the
general demolition of the buildings that crowded both
sides of the steep, knife-edged ridge. All the build-
ings on this hill are Buddhist and date back many
centuries. From the marble-railed lotus lake, steep
terraces and a lofty stone embankment with diverg-
ing staircases make an imposing architectural show,
and the yellow lamas' silent temple at the top com-
mands the noblest view over the imperial parks and
the plain to the city walls and towers. At the foot
of the hill, a lotus lake is spread out on one side, and
on the other side a larger ornamental water is crossed
by a beautiful marble bridge, with a pretty kiosk
floating over its central arches and a marble junk
moored beside it. An exquisite marble bridge, whose
seventeen oval arches are doubled in the still water,
leads to an island where a temple, once dedicated to
the God of Rain, was the place of detention of Kwangsu
after the coup d'etat of 1898, and where he remained
under the close watch of eunuchs for all the weary
time after progress was strangled by the masterful
dowager.
There is yet another hill of temples in this wonder-
ful park, but all its structures are Taoist. At its
226 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
foot bubbles up the Jade Fountain spring, whose clear
waters feed the palace lakes and the Peking palace
lakes, whence there trickles away a feeble stream past
the British legation, out to the moats and ultimately to
the Grand Canal, which used to communicate with
Hangchow. Kublai Khan saw in his sleep the plan of
tShangdu, the hunting palace inlnner Mongolia, beyond
the wall and beyond Jehol. Many of those realized fan-
tasies of dreamland were repeated in the series of
parks and palaces, imperial demesnes, and princely
villas that extended from Hai-tien's protecting camp
into the far hills, and other monarchs devised unique
features to add to the pleasure-grounds. Nothing more
unique, perhaps, has ever existed than the Summer
Palace and the adjoining parks when the allies
came in 1860, and all of art, architecture, and even
landscape-gardening's triumphs were obliterated in a
trice. It was a blow and a humiliation from which
the Emperor never recovered, which the court nobles
have never forgotten nor forgiven, which rankles in
cultivated Western capitals where appreciation of
Oriental art has come as the latest gift and delight of
this century, and which accomplished not nearly
as much all around as if the wonderful buildings,
the pi-iceless and then unappreciated treasures, had
been spared, and instead the cowardly Emperor liad
been followed to Jeliol, and brought back to Peking
as a prisoner.
XVII
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA
^N midsummer, when the northern sky dark-
ens for only a few hours, an early start
on a country journey is made at two
or three o'clock in the morning, in or-
der to get beyond the walls before the
stamping donkeys and strings of camels can fill
the Peking streets with suffocating clouds of dust.
In the golden October, one always meets strings of
beady-eyed Mongols in snug fur caps, and wonder-
fully ragged Chinese trailing their camel-trains in
from north and west the moment those gates open at
sunrise.
Around the Anting or main north Gate of Peace
and Tranquillity, which the allied troops held in 1860,
and on whose parapets they mounted their sentries
and artillery, the crowd is thickest, and streams of
vehicles, pack-animals, and people file through the
deep barrel vaults unceasingly. Processions of cam-
els and wheelbarrows come in from the plain, loaded
with huge, black, wicker-cased flagons or jars of
grease from Mongolia, which, brought by such slow
227
228 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
transit all that distance, can yet be sent profitably to
France, and — infragrant idea — is said to be used
there in the manufacture of soaps and perfumes.
One grazes scores of scavengers' wheelbarrows loaded
with the city's refuse, which, bought and carried out
each morning, is sold at wholesale suburban depots
to enrich the poor, alkaline clay soil, an ambulant
sewer system that never disturbs Chinese senses.
A sandy common outside the Anting Gate is the
parade-ground of the Peking garrison and field force.
One may see the flower of the Manchu banners put
through their antic drills there any day, their feats
of archery, stone-lifting, stone-throwing, jousting, and
monkey-posturings — puerilities the more absurd
when indulged in in sight of An ting's towers, where
modern weapons and artillery defeated them forty
years ago. Like the doomed Bourbons, the Manchus
have forgotten nothing and learned nothing, and, like
all other survivors of outlived ideas, must go. Every
Manchu is primarily a soldier, a personal defender of
the Emperor. They are the " Old Guard." The Man-
chus are forbidden to trade and to intermarry with
Chinese, and, whether actively in the force or not,
each one is given his rice,— literally fed from the pub-
lic crib, — his three taels a month, and a sheepskin
coat each year. His name must be on the roll of one of
the banners, whether he ever wears uniform or throws
a stone, and even the stalwart head-boy or steward at
the foreign hotel was one of the loyal force, going regu-
larly to headquarters on pay-day, although usually the
stipend of such absentees is swallowed up or squeezed
to a fraction by superior officers. Half the servants
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA 231
in each legation are baunermen, making no disguise
of the fact, and not for that reason necessarily spies
any more than the other servants. Because of these
special privileges and perquisites, the Chinese hate
the Manchus of the rank and file, the fatted, heredi-
tary pensioners, the " old soldiers," far more bitterly
than the ex-Confederate in America hates the Northern
soldier, pensioned at the nation's expense for crush-
ing the Southern Confederacy. The Manchus, blind
to the signs, go on with their medieval drills, stub-
bornly turning out jingals and archaic weapons from
their modern arsenals, and hastening their end. No-
thing contributed so much, nothing in the fevered pro-
gi'am of progress so precipitated Kwangsu's downfall
and constituted the last straw on the Manchu's back, as
the plan to put the army in foreign clothes and wholly
under foreign drill. One watches the bannermen's
antics with mixed emotions— amusement, contempt,
impatience, and the excitement of a theater audience
when the denouement of a tragedy drags, when just
retribution is deferred too long.
Our little procession of mule-litters, donkeys, and
carts wound northwestward from this parade-ground,
in the lines of ruts that straggled everywhere on the
unfenced plain. Strings of camels swung and rocked
their way past us with clanging bells ; and, as the
harvest was just on, every field was dotted with
groups of l)lue-clad workers. Rich bunches of millet
were stacked ])y every mud farm-house, and blindfolded
donkeys dragged stone cylinders around and around
the hard clay thresliing-floors, painfully wearing the
millet kernels out of tlieir husks. We plodded
232 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
through villages where the one street was a deep
trough or ditch between, the houses, half full of mud
and stagnant water. " An old road becomes a river
as surely as an old wife becomes a mother-in-law,"
says the Chinese proverb; and one wonders if the
great system of canals in China was not self-made
instead of by man's intention— the people taking to
boats from necessity when all the roads became and
remained small sluggish rivers. There were ancient
and established mud-sloughs on the way, where the
mules floundered knee-deep, and the carters and
muleteers, helpless in their silly cotton shoes, leaped
along stepping-stones, purposely put beside these
long-established mud-sinks. Women were at work
in the fields and bearing burdens along the road,
hobbling smartly on poor dwarfed feet, each one with
her hair dressed in an elaborate '^ magpie tail " and
decorated with flowers, even to the woman who,
yoked in company with a blindfolded donkey, was
grinding meal on a stone table in a farm-house
yard.
The cook and the boy had been sent on ahead, and
when we had crossed a wrecked stone bridge and
gone half-way up Sha-ho's deep ditch street, a turn
into the yard of an inn found tiffin ready to serve
in the bare room of honor at the upper end of the
court. The yard was filled with the outfit required to
take four people and two servants on a four days'
journey, the mattresses, bedding, food, cooking-uten-
sils, and tableware all having to be brouglit with us
from Peking. Our animals fed in full view as we
fed, and hideous black swine wallowed and rooted in
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA 233
the same central court, which was securely shut off
from the street by ponderous barred gates.
Sha-ho, the Sandy River, flows by another branch
in a shallow bed on the other side of the village, and
was once spanned by a splendid stone bridge whose
middle sections still stand. Floods have swept
around and washed away either approach, leaving a
bridge without ends standing in midstream, islanded
by the little mud-flood called a river. The mythical
marble beasts that once guarded the sloping cause-
ways of approach lie broken with other blocks and
rubbish ; even imperial tablets are half embedded in
the clay banks, and but few carved parapets and
panels remain. The thick stone slabs of this road-
way, which the least care would have preserved for
all time, are now thrown at every angle, and over
their protruding ends and edges the animals pick
their way, and only the iron-bound Peking cart could
survive such wrecks of roads.
The passenger crawls into a mule-litter while it
rests on the ground, it is lifted up, and the shafts at
each end are fastened to the mules' collars. To en-
ter or leave the litter afterward seems a problem, but
the driver bends his knee, and one steps up on it and
crawls in head first, on all fours, as ignominiously
as into the Peking cart. The mule-litter has points
of comfort, and affords a crude sort of luxury after
the harsh bells have been removed from the fore and
aft mule. With mattresses, pillows, and fur wraps,
one may recline at ease or sit erect, watching every-
thing ahead and on either side througli the sliding
glass windows. With the steady, even steps of well-
234 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
trained mules, one can read comfortably, or more
comfortably be soothed asleep by the gentle, easy
motion of the deliberate right-foot, left-foot, right-
foot, left-foot of the long-eared motive power.
As we neared the hills, flocks of sheep and herds
of ponies passed us in clouds of golden dust, driven
by sliaggy Mongols, and endless files of camels, loaded
with furs, wool, salt, and coal, came down from Mon-
golia, the Mang-i-Mang of their bells beating slowly
in the air. Then camels, and camels, and more
camels went up with their loads of brick-tea, the
easy-going, slow-footed, swaying beasts moving in
such automatic regularity that, watching them in the
meUow autumn afternoon sun, one dozed away, hyp-
notized by the steady metronome stroke of the cara-
van's tread.
At sunset, when the hills were at hand, and had
turned sapphire and intensest violet, with a sharp
chill in their long shadows, we came to Nankou, and
stopped at an inn near the massive city gate. The
ruined watch-towers on the hills above and the crum-
bled towers of tlie town wall are but first of the chain
of forts, walls, and defenses which the Ming em-
perors built in the pass to keep back the Mongol Ta-
tars, wliose dynasty they had overthrown. From
earliest times, the ravaging and conquering horsemen
from the plains have poured down through this nar-
row Nankou Pass to the Great Plain of China, as
Greeks, l\n-sians, Mongols, and Afghans have come
down tlirougli the Khyber Pass to India. Nankou's
defenses made it the Jamrud of tliis pass, and in the
heart of tlif df'filc Wwn^ is n, great fort, (•()iT('sponding to
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA 237
Ali Musjid in the Khyber. This narrow Nankou, which
leads through the hills for fifteen miles to the vast
grass plains of Mongolia, is a lesser affair in every
way than the Khyber, but in some of its wilder parts
it quite reminds one of that wild gateway to India. It
is a gloomy, desolate little canon for the greater
part, but travel through it is safe, brigandage is un-
known, and there are no soldiers in evidence along
the line. One goes up the pass on any day without
escort or arms, and the caravans jog their way uncon-
cernedly, not hastening to the shelter of fortified se-
rais before sunset from necessity. No one on the
road glares at the foreigner with such hatred and
ferocity as the Afridis and Afghans do on the two
days of the week that the Khyber is open and
guarded, sentineled every hundred yards, and each vis-
itor provided with an armed sowar. Beyond Nankou,
also, lies Russia ; the northwestern gateway to China
an exact matchpiece for the one to India ; the path-
way of Kublai Khan and all the conquering Tatars
into this rich empire of the East far easier than the
pathway of Alexander and the Great Mogul into
India.
As the hills overhanging Nankou gi'ew blue-black,
a huge, pinkish-white moon rose above the horizon
haze on the eastern plain. The white moonlight
and the long northern afterglow gave us the chance
to explore the dilapidated old town. Under the
great vaulted arch of the city gate the shadows and
darkness were intense, and one had to feel his steps
carefully over broad flagstones, worn smoother than
glass by the spongy bare feet of camels, as oily and
238 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
slippery as if woru by human feet. A shaggy knee
touched me in the depths of the black vault, a great head
swayed over my head, and, without any noise or warn-
ing, we found ourselves slipping about in darkness,
mixed up with a line of camels. They came on and
on irresistibly, with that fixed automatic gait, push-
ing against their leaders, rubbing their packs, groan-
ing, and showing their yellow teeth and frothing lips
as tlieir drivers tried to check and straighten them
in line again. We cared no more for local color,
nor for provincial life ; for seeing if any foreign goods
were for sale, or if any foreign ideas had penetrated
those medieval gates.
The inn-yard was filled with our carts and litters,
and, in the stream of light playing out from the cook-
house, carters and muleteers sat on their heels and
watched the gifted Liu (" Ever-bubbling Fountain ")
evolve the same elaborate dinner of civilization we
should have had in Peking. Our apartments of honor
at the upper end of the court had each a stone plat-
form-bed, or kang, on which our mattresses were laid.
Our inn was tolerably clean, because it, with all the
inns on the way to Siberia, had just been officially
visited and scraped, cleaned, scrubbed, and put in so-
called order for Count Cassini, l)earing to St. Peters-
burg that famous convention by which China signed
away all Manchuria in the guise of a railway conces-
sion, in return for nothing at all— the reward for the
Shimonoseki protest. The cobwebs and rubbish-heaps
were gone from the rooms of honor in every inn on
this end of the overland road to Europe ; fresh ])aper
had been ])asted on window-frames and lattices, and
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA 239
doors had been mended after a fashion. Country-
travel in China is ahnost tolerable when one can have
a dreaded and triumphant envoy as avant-eourier,
and at dinner we formally wished health and long life
to the victor of the bloodless campaign, the uncon-
scious rejuvenator of a long chain of Chinese inns.
Before daylight, the nosing of a donkey roused one of
our party, who found that during the night the de-
crepit door had sagged open, and little four-foot had
also enjoyed the bedchamber put in order for the
great envoy.
A candle-light breakfast and a sunrise start
took us through Nankou's suburbs early and started
us on up the rugged defile that leads to the Pa-ta-ling
Gate in the Great Wall. Recent chronicles of travel
had told of the awful condition of the flood-wrecked
road through this pass, but a progressive mandarin
coming to this Nankou district began road-making in
a serious way, and a toll of a few cash on each passing
animal soon paid for a new road, which was as smooth,
well gi'aded, and well drained as roads were four
centuries ago.
The steep and bare hills rose higher as the defile
narrowed ; walls and towers began to show, curving
over, up, and down the hills— battlemented walls that
came from nowhere and ran there too— purposeless,
disconnected, picturesque old walls that reached down
and encircled a village, ran up and bristled with watch-
towers, and disported their ponderous lines in ex-
travagant loopings and leapings in precipitous places
where only goat-men could have built. Tliere were
views suggesting Italian hilltop fortresses around
13
240 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
Chu-yuug-kuan, the midway fort, a half-deserted
place with double walls and strong towers. One gate-
way of the fourteenth century, elaborately sculptured
on its outer arches, is lined with carved tablets, where
Buddhist inscriptions are repeated in the strange let-
terings of six languages— Sanskrit, Chinese, Mongol,
Tibetan, Uigur, and Niuchih— for the benefit of those
people passing through. Originally, this decorated
arch was only the foundation of a noble pagoda built
by the Mings, but obligingly pulled down when the
Mongols refused to pass under this triumphal spire,
which, standing on the head of the dragon of Chihli,
secured a good fung-shui for the whole province.
Wayfarers drank tea at stone tables outside the inns,
and shaggy Mongols, afoot, munched at the rosaries
of crab-apples strung around their necks, or pared and
cut away at huge persimmons as they walked, strew-
ing the path with great flakes of the red-gold peel.
In serais along the way, camels were resting for a
day behind breastworks of brick-tea, and Mongols
lounged in the traditional black felt tents as if on the
great, grass plain.
The pass grew wilder and more lonely beyond that
once great garrison town ; all signs of cultivation
disappeared, and save for some rock-hewn, pinnacle-
perched temples and holy inscriptions carved deep in
the solid rock by the Ming builders and rebuilders of
the maze of defensive walls, there were no signs of hab-
itation for miles. As the defile grew narrower, the road
became a mere cut or torrent-bed between precipitous
walls of gloomy and savage aspect. Tlien, ahead and
beyond, massive walls began to appear, true Chinese
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA 243
walls, Chang Tangs, Great Walls. Loops, sections,
and running spurs of battlemented walls appeared
here, there, and everywhere, and then disappeared
entirely — disconnected, aimless, unexpected pieces of
masonry, that gave picturesque sky-lines to each bar-
rier range and hill profile.
At the Cha-tao or Pa-ta-ling Gate, at the top of
Nankou Pass, where the Great "Wall actually barred
out and held the nomad hordes at bay for ages, there
is a little level plateau, or amphitheater, encircled by
bastions and defended by massive towers. The wall
crosses the pass squarely, a vast gateway giving one
a view out and down to the green hills and valleys of
farthest Chihli and Inner Mongolia. The bare arch
remains, but its iron-studded gates are gone, and there
is no garrison, not a sentry, nor a sign of life. The
parapets and towers are crumbling a little ; weeds and
bushes grow everywhere, and the silence of the high
pass, the deserted road, and the empty towers make this
upland of the enchanted castles more impressive than
even that far-away sea end of the wall at Shanhaikwan.
The ^vall sweeps up sharply from either side of the
gate, making easy tangents and angles from tower to
tower as it climbs the hills, and with all its colossal
size and huge impressiveness it is most graceful,
winding in long, slow sweeps and curves over the
hills and far-away heights.
The deserted towers are melancholy reminders of
past defenders, who bugled and battled with the Ta-
tar hordes for ages ; and European imagination, by
tremendous effort, can repeople these battlements and
the valleys beyond with the opposing forces. No
244 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
one can fail to be impressed with the Great Wall at
Cha-tao. The civilian feels the charm of its tremen-
dous sweeps and curves, the picturesqueness and
the poetry of the ancient place, while military men
and engineers are possessed and spellbound by this
grand monument of defensive warfare. General Wil-
son declared that, though "laid out in total defi-
ance of the rules of military engineering, yet the
walls are so solid and inaccessible, and the gates so
well arranged and defended, that it would puzzle a
modern army with a first-class siege-train to get
through it, if any effort whatever were made for its
defense." It was plain to him that, in the old days
of the wild horsemen, even men armed with stones
could have held it, only treachery or gross neglect
ever leaving it possible for the tribesmen to possess
or pass it.
This magnificent wall, that bars the great trade
route, is not the old original wall of the Emperor
Shi-Hwang-Ti (215 B.C.), but merely the inner Great
Wall, a modern seventh-century affair, splendidly
rebuilt by the Mings in the fifteenth century, a loop
to provide a second and most effectual barrier against
the Mongol Tatars, who for centuries had crossed the
wall and poured in through that gateway to the Great
Plain of China. That very earliest, original wall,
built by Alexander the Great's contemporai-y, is met
at Kalgan, a two days' journey beyond the village of
Cha-tao, but is so ruined, so nearly a rubbish-heap
and earth embankment, that it is a very poor sight
after this stately wall of Yunglo. A railway line
will surelv be built alon<r this ancient trade route.
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA 247
It is too much a commercial necessity to be delayed
many years after the Trans-Siberian line is completed,
with however much modesty and surprise Russians
in China may deprecate one's prophecy of such an
extension of the great overland road directly into
Peking. Until that railway comes, one must push on
to Kalgan with the same explorer's outfit he brings
from Peking, following the path of the Mongol and
Kin Tatar invaders, passing one large prefectural
town, one ruined imperial summer palace, and that
strange eyehole through the solid rock of a mountain
summit which Kublai Khan cut with a single mighty
arrow. At Kalgan several caravan routes unite, and
at this great trade center and in its caravansaries Rus-
sian sights and signs are conspicuous, the edges of the
two empires there definitely meeting, despite the lines
on geographers' maps. The ruble, the samovar, and
the leather boot appear, eloquent signs of Muscovite
empire.
The trip for a good traveler— not for those whom
John Muir calls " soft and succulent people," fit for
American stage-coaches — is from Kalgan eastward
through Mongolia to the Ku-pei-kou Gate of the
Great Wall, seventy miles northeast of Peking.
Roman missions and a Trappist monastery hid in
the Mongolian hills will shelter a passing European
for a night, but otherwise he camps like the nomad
herdsmen wlio occupy the great ''grass country"
which everywhere stretches away from the edge of
the ancient wall like the ranch lands of western
America. M. Prejevalski and Dr. Bushell mapped
sucli a route in their journeys many years ago, the
248 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
latter establishing definitely the site of the Mongol
emperors' old summer palace of Shangdu, that " stately
pleasure-dome decreed " by Kublai Khan, in realiza-
tion of a palace seen in dreams. A little detour before
reaching Ku-pei-kou will show the imperial palace at
Jehol, and some Buddhist monasteries or lama for-
tresses like nothing outside of Tibet.
It is satisfaction enough for every-day visitors to
sit behind the parapet of the wall at Pa-ta-ling and
let the association and immensity of the great con-
struction at that one point overpower him. The day
I went up the pass, the sky grew overcast toward
noon, the wind blew strong and cold through that
funnel-mouthed gorge, and the gray light and gloomy
clouds lent savage grandeur to the stupendous relic
and its wild landscape setting. There, on the great-
est piece of masonry in the world, the one artificial
construction on the face of the earth that may be
seen by the inhabitants of Mars, the baser things
of this world obtruded, and although Wanli Chang
Ching, the '' Ten Thousand Li Wall," possessed our
souls, we degraded its noblest tower to a kitchen, its
parapet to a picnic-ground. Where warriors had
stood, and the quaint Ming cannon had rebounded, we
basely ate, sandwiches and chicken wings serving as
pointers as one military or picturesque feature and
another of the great barrier caught a fascinated eye.
There must have been giants in those days, if the
old guards used the terre-plein for promenade and
highway, for what looked to be even, ordinary stair-
case steps, as the wall sloped up to a great hill tower,
proved to be steep terraces. In every direction one
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA 249
saw walls and towers, and more and more walls pur-
suing their extravagant, illogical course. Small won-
der the Chinese began wall-building in B.C., if they
ever expected to complete the plan in a.d. Our
athletes, who persisted to the highest tower, became
mere specks to the eye as they slowly ascended, and
when they came back, all spent and battered, they
excitedly protested that the Pyramids were " not in
it, " mere isolated heaps of building-stone that they
are.
XVIII •
THE VALLEY OF THE MING TOMBS
I HE katig was harder, degrees more un-
yielding, than a Philippine ''sleeping-
machine," and a more undeniable plane
table on the second night at Nankou ;
but, rising by the light of dawn, we
were under way by sunrise of the most ideal of
Chinese autumn days. It was the very dream of
our own Indian summer, and after the ripe red
sun had burst through the purple and lilac hazes
around the horizon, it soared into a cloudless, pale
vault, and poured down such a glory of warm sunshine
as transfigured all that hill border-land of the Great
Plain of China. The whole earth was a color-study,
and where the russet, dun, and golden stubble of the
fields was plowed under it only yielded more and more
tones of warm brown and dull amber. The near hills
were as bare as those of our New Mexico, and, like
them, veined and fretted with marvelous transparent
blue shadows, every distance softly, hazily lilac and
azure, and the far hills duskily wine-red and purple.
After all this glow and glory and bloom of earth and
250
THE VALLEY OF THE MING TOMBS 251
air, there were further color-revelations in the belt of
persimmon orchards that bands the foot-hills. Bhie-
clad peasants climbed trees whose foliage blazed with
the richest frost-hues, and whose branches bent over
with the weight of the great golden, red-orange
fruits— riper and richer than the golden apples of the
fabled Hesperides. We had ten miles of such orchard
scenery, everywhere the dull-blue clothes of the peo-
ple giving a last touch to the color-scheme, and every-
where the brown earth heaped with the glistening,
gorgeous fruits. The air was the wine of the year ;
every sound came through it softly; and the blue-
cotton people seemed to have gone abroad to plow the
amber earth, to climb the crimson-and-gold trees, only
to produce artistic effects. Even the mules, plodding
gently through the slumberous October sunshine,
must have enjoyed it. All the world "composed"
itself; everything "keyed" and was in harmony.
Near each yellow-brown mud and thatch farm-house,
yellow-brown farmers in mellowed blue garments
drove blindfolded donkeys around the threshing-floor ;
and, in fields of stunted bushes, whole families were
digging and pulling up peanuts, and sifting the crop
clean in square hanging sieves that rocked and dipped
like huge corn-poppers. These '' goober " farmers
seemed as contented and happy as if taxes were light
and the government good to them, and were friendly
to the stranger, as they usually are out of the cities,
away from the officials and the pestilent literati.
At one place the road streamed with country folk
hastening to a village temple, where a theatrical play
was to run its course. The women and children were
252 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
powdered and rouged, and dressed in their best. Each
poorest one wore tinsel and flowers in her shining
black hair, and green glass mockeries of jade ear-rings
and bracelets. All were smiling and good-humored,
and stepped off smartly with a stiff, stilted, goat-like
gait, some walking two or three miles on their poor
stumps of feet pointing sharply from elephantine
ankles. A few great ladies rode astride of donkeys,
with their useless feet shod in tiny two-inch doll
slippers.
Each hour the sky overhead became a deeper, more
marvelous blue, and, skirting the Peking plain, we fol-
lowed each curve in the hills, and entered the sacred
imperial valley of tombs by a gap in the long-ruined
wall. Crops stood ripening all over the valley's level,
and profane plows were sacrilegiously turning over
the stubble and the sacred soil, the imperial yellow
tiles of the " Thirteen Sepulchers '' glimmering each in
its separate grove of old cedars, niched around the
amphitheater's rim.
Protruding edges of massive paving-blocks told that
there had once been a road, and a dilapidated stone
bridge spanned a ravine and led to a paved avenue
that curved up through a grove of trees to the solid
outer gateway of the temple and tomb of the Em-
peror Yunglo. The three doors in the massive red
tower or gate-house were shut ; not a sound nor a soul
responded to the beating and shouts of our guides and
leather-lunged muleteers. We feared that the cross-
ing out of the words " Ming Tombs " from the Chi-
nese passports obtained from tlie viceroy of the
province at Tientsin, an annoying vagary of the
THE VALLEY OF THE MING TOMBS 253
yamun for that season only, might really mean an
exclusion past bribery. The last descendant of the
Mings and the officials whom the government sends
with him for the annual worship each autumn had
returned to Peking before we started for Nankou, so
that we were safe from encountering any official
retinues. Pounding and shouting brought no answer ;
then one carter pushed open a side wicket, and we
followed in through a grass-grown court and on to
the terrace of the second gate-house, surrounded by a
wonderful balustrade of white marble carved to the
fineness of an ivory jewel-casket. With a wild ki-3d-
iug, the angry yelps of wolves robbed of their prey,
ragged gate-keepers came running toward us; but
we were inside the walls, the chance of hard bargain-
ing was gone, and the lupine keepers could only storm
and rage. There was no chance to bar us out from
any court then, to haggle for any imusual tiao, and our
whole retinue grew jovial at the keepers' lost " face,"
the most enjoyable of all jokes to this hard-natured,
humorless race.
There were venerable cedars and pines in the sec-
ond court, and the usual little tiled furnaces, where
all bits of paper once honored with written charac-
ters are burned. A second yellow-tiled building, with
red-lacquered columns, latticed panels, and bracketed
eaves, stood on a broad marble terrace whose balus-
trade was carved over with dragons and exquisite re-
lief ornaments. This building held the shrine of the
tablet, a simple gold-lettered bit of wood which
stands as the representative of the spirit, the soul of
Yunglo, the Grand Monarque, greatest of Ming em-
254 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
perors. The Marquis Chu, last lineal descendant of
the Mings, might have worshiped there only four
days previously, burned incense and made offerings
on the dingy table, but there was no sign of it. The
altar ornaments were most trumpery, and the guar-
dian paid no heed when a camera was set beside
them and focused on the imperial tablet, the uncov-
ered soul itself. In the last inner courtyard a noble
pailow and a colossal bronze incense-burner, resting
on a great monolithic slab, stand before the mas-
sive, fortress-like tower at the front of the tumulus
of actual imperial sepulture. A dark, sloping passage
leads into this tower, as to the tomb of so many Mo-
gul rulers in India, but there is no inlaid, jeweled
sarcophagus there. The echoing tunnel turns and
leads out and up sloping levels to a broad terrace
on which the tower stands. A tall marble tablet, rest-
ing on an imperial tortoise, is sheltered in the great
arch of the tower, and tourists of all nations have
left their names in this last antechamber of the Em-
peror—Chinese names past counting, Japanese names
by the dozen, many Russian, and, most conspicuous,
the autograph of an English diplomat and of some
sailors from an American man of-war.
" Tell him I want one of the tiles that have fallen
from that place up there," I said, pointing to a great
gap in the weed-grown eaves.
Tlie guide led one keeper aside, and they wrangled
and argued, gesticulated, stamped their feet, and laid
hands on each other's shoulders as tlieir voices rose.
'' Tliat gateman one l)ig tliief. He Avanchee fifty
cents one piecee yellow tile." And the hot discussion
THE VALLEY OF THE MING TOMBS 255
had all been about the prices— not the struggle of an
uneorrupted conscience against temptation by tiaos.
The keeper stood for his extra price because it was
getting late in the season for tourists, and some one
had told him that the mandarins were going to
stop the foreigners from coming there any more.
*' Whose tomb is that next one, over there among
the trees ? " I asked.
" Chiaching," was the prompt reply.
"Whose tomb next to that ?" The convoy looked
dumb. " What emperor is buried behind that second
temple there?" I repeated, and there was talking,
talking, talking, a harsh gabble of consonants and
loud inflections, but no direct answer came.
"What for that lady want to know? What for
she ask about other tomb ? " queried one of them, sus-
piciously. "No foreigner want to know that. No
one ask that question before. S'pose my no sabe, my
lose face."
" Which one of these thirteen temples is Wanli's ? "
I asked my own minion, as he made tiffin ready on a
sunny terrace.
"Wanli? Wanli? Chinese gentleman? My no
sabe," beamed Buddha-Liu, in reply.
" Where is Yunglo's wife's tomb ? Where are Chi-
nese empresses buried ? "
" No sabe."
" How many of these other tombs shall we see after
tiffin 1 "
" No. No go anywliere now but Chang-ping-chou.
Nobody go other tomb— just Yunglo tomb."
"Whv?"
i>56 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
** No sabe other tomb. No sabe why. Why for
missis wanchee know so much thing ? "
And then I let the dead Ming sovereigns go their
splendid way, satisfied myself to go the cut-and-dried
route to this one splendid and satisfying sepuleher
of that enlightened one who rebuilt and beautified
Peking. He must himself have been pleased with
this series of red-walled, yellow-tiled, marble-broidered
halls, with the magnificent avenue of approach which
we were yet to see, having taken the sight in reverse
order, in true Chinese rule of inversion.
The other twelve sepulchers are said to be each a
companion-piece or copy of the other, and none as
splendid as the Yunglo temples. Some of the Ming
tombs have been despoiled to beautify the tombs of
the Mancliu dynasty, seventy miles away from Peking
in another direction. The admirable Kienlung is
accused of this sacrilege, but the Mancliu sepulchers
are so thoroughly guarded that no one knows how
splendid they may be. Thirteen was an ominous
number for the Mings, for when thirteen of their
line had been interred in this valley of tombs, the
dynasty fell, the last of the Mings hanged himself to
a tree, and there was none to build him a tomb in this
valley. The two Ming emperors who ruled at Nan-
king are buried there, and those tombs were models
for these northern sepulchers.
Every one of these golden, tip-tilted, imperial yel-
low roofs around the valley is sagging to decay j
grass, weeds, and small bushes are breaking tlie tiles
apart, and tliey fall like golden leaves. Each ^-ear the
ex(iuisitcly carved white marble balustrades lean
CATCHING SIXGIXG INSECTS.
THE VALLEY OP THE MING TOMBS 259
away, topple to a fall, and it was surely a compassion-
ate American who wanted to buy and take away the
dragon-crusted rail and posts from one of the Yuuglo
terraces. A few years more of Manehu neglect and
these Ming temples will be as the Taipings left those
at Nanking, and it is a place to ponder on the little-
ness of greatness and the brevity of all things, even
in the long-lived empire. The still, mellow autumn
noon, with the wind sighing softly in the old, old
cedars, could dispose one to more reveries if the
Ming emperors were nearer to us, if any one of them
had been a living reality to even medieval European
minds, if a legend or historical incident from one's
school-books in any way identified them or provoked
associations. The detachment is too extreme, and the
mental effort required is too great, to give any one of
these Sons of Heaven form and individuality. Only
by their porcelains, their blue and white, their egg-shell,
their soft paste, their "five-color," and their bronzes
does the Western world know them or recall the
names that ran contemporary with Henry VIII and
Elizabeth, with Columbus, Ferdinand, and Isabella, the
dynasty ending soon after the Pilgrims had landed at
Plymouth Rock.
While we lounged in the sunshine, the muleteers
crept cautiously over the grass, hunting each cricket
or insect musician that set up its little pipe, and by
the time we left, each cricket-catcher had a dozen or
more russet and brown-black little fiddlers tied fast
along twigs, and was gleeful at the prospective profits
in the Peking cricket-market.
When our procession had gone a little way from the
260 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
gates, two keepers emerged from the gi'ove and handed
from their sleeves all the yellow tiles I had wanted.
" Twenty cents one piecee," said the boy, with such a
gleam of triumph in his eye that there must then have
been a considerable profit in the transaction.
The day had grown more still and golden, the whole
earth and air " sang " in the mellow sunshine, and
even the poor ragged hind at his plow stopped to wipe
his brow and gaze upon the great plain that spread
away — white hazes, the lakes of mirage in farthest
distance, and Peking's towers glittering and flashing
heliograph signals in the midst.
The stone road ended in grass-grown ruts, and
twice we wound about to cross dry gullies where stone
bridges stood detached in the ehasra, footwalks and
parapets ending in air. We went under a three-
arched pailow and down that strange avenue of ani-
mals, where six colossal warriors in ornamental dress
stand on each side, and gigantic horses, kilins, ele-
phants, camels, unicorns, and lions face in double
pairs for a half-mile along this triumphant way. A
pavilion with an imperial tablet resting on the back
of a gigantic tortoise, more bridges in ruin, and then
rose the solid tower of the Red Gateway, where the
inner park wall used to stand, and where the imperial
trains rested in great barracks long gone to ruin.
At a farther distance, the great five-arched pailow
stretcliod its marble skeleton of honor across the sky,
the larg<'st and noblest arch or gate of its kind in
China. Tliis quintuple gate stands at the edge of a first
bench or tei-race of tlie higli plain, and when one ap-
proaches the Ming tombs properly from the front,
THE VALLEY OF THE MING TOMBS 261
instead of backward as the Chinese guides prefer to
lead one, it is traced like a gigantic seal character
against the heavens. It marks the edge of the impe-
rial demesne and is the official entrance to the valley
of tombs. One of Kienlung's many poems is cut on
its central tablet, in praise of the dynasty his own
ancestors cast out, although the pailow was erected
two centuries before the imperial poet thus associated
himself with the Mings.
We crept at a tortoise pace to the tall gray walls
of Chang-ping-chou, the '^Jumping Joe" of the globe-
trotter, and wound in through its deep gateway and
across the town to the south gate— a quiet, old pro-
vincial town, with deep roadways, high sidewalks, and
blank walls to the street, but with green shade-trees
giving it some character. It seemed just the retired
old place in which to grow poets and great scholars,
and where philosophers might live in peace, all the
town's activity and excitement centering that day at
a chestnut and persimmon market outside the gates.
We returned to the same inn at Sha-ho with quite a
home-coming sense ; and. after chestnuts and tea, and
a walk to the ruin of the beautiful carved bridge be-
yond the town, watched there the sunset across the
open plain, that was worthy pageant to close such an
autumn day. The full moon rose rapidly, and, in its
silver light and against the lingering red band above
the horizon, there moved the silent, fascinating cara-
vans of dreams. Gaunt silhouettes of camels filed on
and on, each one tlie twin image of the one gone be-
fore, each treading the same measured pace, each
footfall as silent, each scornful lip the same. Ragged
14
262 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIEE
paper cylinders of lanterns showed a feeble orange
glow here and there as they dangled inefficiently
from the packs, and a rude bell clanged from the
shaggy neck of one beast in fifty. All stepped and
kept automatic time to it. Shoi'e-shuff, shove-shuff,
went their soft, padded feet, as they walked beside us.
More and more caravans came by as it grew darker
and cooler— mysterious automata from shadow-land,
surely, that soon disappeared into the rim of frost
haze around the plain, the Ming-Mang of their harsh
bells softening musically in distance.
While we dined at the top of the court, with the
door wide open to the moon-lighted yard, we could
look over into the restaurant office, where the lights
flamed on the dark bodies and yellow faces of mule-
teers and common travelers. We could just discern
shadowy camel-trains passing in the street beyond, a
slow, methodical progress of dark shapes for hours,
with rarely the clang of a bell. Through pillow and
mattress and kang came the strangest sound-sensa-
tions all night, the beat of those soft, padded feet
sending sound-waves through solid earth, stone, and
cement that the air would not carry. ThumbJe, th unible,
thnmhle, fJinmble, went the continuous, rhythmical beat
of their footfalls, unearthly sounds that rang in one's
ears, beat on one's head in time with the pulses— a
sound felt rather than heard, for if one sat up and
strained tlie ears to listen there was only a far clang-
ing bell to be heard. This wireless, underground
telephone communication was so distinct and so in-
sistent that it forced itself on one's attention, excited
and kept one awake more than loud noises could have
THE VALLEY OP THE MING TOMBS 265
done. Our donkeys lifted up their voices one by one
until some one hit them. Then they sobbed them-
selves in diminuendo into silence ; but the mysterious
tJmmble, thunible of the camels' muffled tread came up
through the kang all night — a sound of witchery and
mystery. One felt as if all the camels of Asia were
counterfiliug on the Peking plain ; as if all Mongolia
were afoot; as if the whole Russian army had come
down on that moon-lighted night— and all China none
the wiser.
XIX
SUBURBAN TEMPLES
^E followed bypaths and cut across fields
the next morning, the same animated
groups in the harvest-fields, by thresh-
ing-floors, and in the village markets,
declaring the season's abundant crops,
until China seemed a veritable land of plenty, over-
flowing with grain and fruits ; yet thousands were
then facing starvation by the flooded Tientsin and
Yellow rivers. A glittering object at the back of a
cart crawling northward caught the eye for an hour,
and days afterward we identified it as the woven-wire
mattress of an American tourist, who, having seen
one kang in Peking, hitched his wagon to the patent
bed of his own country and rested luxuriously every
night in Chinese inns.
In the fourth inner court of Ta-chung-ssu, the
Temple of the Great Bell, a fine, red-eaved, hexagonal
building holds that world's wonder, the greatest feat of
artistic bronze-casting to be seen even in China. Ta-
Chung, or Ta-Toong, the Great Bell, swings down to
one's level, its great lip is pointed and recurved like a
266
SUBURBAN TEMPLES 267
flower-petal, and the whole surface, inside and outside,
is covered with gracefully modeled characters. Each
square, strongly drawn seal character is a half-inch
long ; each one of the eighty-four thousand characters
is as true and clear-cut, as sharply outlined, as if
dashed by a master hand with a brush on paper.
The whole of a Buddhist book of sutras is graven
there in a beautiful raised text that a blind scholar
might lovingly read.
This gigantic campanula's cup in bronze is one of
Yunglo's master castings of the year 1400, and differ-
ent writers give different measurements — fourteen,
fifteen, seventeen, and eighteen feet in height, but all
agreeing that it is twelve feet in diameter and nine
inches thick at the rim. One record says that all of
Yunglo's great bells weigh one hundred and twenty
thousand pounds each, and another record gives this
bell a weight of eighty-seven thousand pounds. There
is a companion bell in the palace garden at Peking,
another in the big city Bell-tower, and a twenty -two-
ton monster which Yunglo left behind when he
moved from Nanking to the northern capital. This
big bell outside Peking is said to be the largest hanging
bell in the world. The big bell in the Kremlin at
Moscow is greater in circumference and thicker at
the rim, but that plain, graceless, dumpy lump of
bell-metal with a broken edge is not to be compared
with this beautiful inverted chalice, which from lip to
loop is a mass of finest relief-work, and bell-making
and bronze-casting have never gone, cannot go, be-
yond this masterpiece. The big bell at Mandalay is
twelve feet high, sixteen feet in diameter, and from
268 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
six to twelve inclies thick, and the big bell of the
Chioin temple in Kioto, best known of big bells in
the Far East, is but ten feet high, nine feet in diameter,
and nine and a half inches thick. Chioin's sweet-
sounding monster is only a plain bronze cylinder com-
pared with this fretted flower-cup, but one longs to
hear Yunglo's bell speak before he dethrones Chioin's
enchanter. The bell is rung only at the annual festi-
val or when the Emperor commands his representative
to pray for rain, to call upon Buddha and all the bo-
dhisattvas for aid, and then its voice is said to be heard
all over the city and the Peking plain. Eight men
were killed at the casting, and their spirits, still im-
prisoned in the metal, may be heard in the last vibra-
tions. A small hole at the top of the bell prevents
the sound-waves from bursting the cup when the bell
is struck too hard or the strokes are too near together,
and hawk-eyed priests showed us how to throw cash
through that needle's eye and secure good luck and
good crops for the year — and when a shot missed the
bell's eye it went equally to the good of the temple
treasury.
All the smaller ornaments and images, the desira-
ble temple properties, had gone to the curio-market,
and only the life-size deities, the gilded thrones and
clumsy fragments of the sacred mise en scene, re-
mained. A semicircle of wolfish priests stared stonily
at us as we tiffined in the outer court, and wolfish
dogs did as their masters. The dogs slunk after and
leaped in a snapping, yelping circle around one stran-
ger who ventured to the next court alone, and the
priests only turned apathetic looks that way, indiffer-
SUBURBAN TEMPLES 269
ent whether the dogs ate the foreigner or not. It
was all in a day with them — other foreigners had been
there before, other foreigners would come again.
We went across stubble, sweet-potato and peanut
fields to the set of cart-tracks converging toward
the Anting Gate, and reached the Yellow Temple.
A lama sentry had given the alarm, and at the end
of a long stone passage there was wrangling and
snarling through the crevice of a gate until we paid
the dear admission fee and went in, tagged by a
crowd of filthy loafers whom the lamas would not,
dared not, exclude. We saw but a small corner of this
vast establishment, which has been a headquarters of
Buddhism since its foundation in Kanghsi's time,
the haven of visiting lamas, and place of pious
pilgrimage for Mongols and Tibetans coming to
Peking. In the first shaded court stands the beau-
tiful marble dagoba erected to the memory of the
Tibetan tesho-lama, uncle of the dalai-lama and sec-
ond only to him in that hierarchy, who came to
visit the Emperor Kienlung in 1780, and died of
smallpox after a few weeks' stay. After Kanghsi,
Kienlung, '^ the Magnificent, Great Ruler of Asia,"
has perhaps more of personal identity to us than
other occupants of the dragon throne. The Jesuits
have written fulh'^ of him and his court at Jehol,
where Lord Macartney also visited him, and George
Staunton described the embassy's reception. Kien-
lung sent an expedition to Tibet and across the
Himalayas into India to punish the Goorkhas for in-
vading Tibet, and the barriers he then established
for the lama's land have preserved it as a forbidden
270 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
country. Devout Buddhist as he was, gossip said
that Kienhuig wearied and rebelled against prostrat-
ing his imperial person and worshiping this " Gem
of Learning," and deliberately poisoned his superior
guest. Turnei*'s " Embassy to Tibet " tells of this
banian bogdo and his fortress of a lamasery at De-
garchi, and of the erection of this memorial dagoba
by his pious host. The lama's body was sent to
Lhasa in a golden coffin, and his infected garments
were incased in another precious casket and depos-
ited under the dagoba at the Yellow Temple. The
pinnacled monument of white marble, with its four
attendant pagodas and the fretted white pailow, are
raised on a stone-and-marble terrace, and from its
wave-patterned base to the gilded tee thirty feet in
air, it is as fair and perfect as when finished, chis-
eled all over with reliefs as fine and white as frost
traceries. There are bands of symbols, diaper-work,
and inscriptions, eight panel scenes from the life of
the great lama, and besides the Buddhist trinity in the
high medallion, Kwanyin and the company of bo-
dhisattvas in the cloud-laud of Nirvana are seated on
its successive stories. Each tiny figure is as exqui-
sitely finished as an ivory carving, and the lines of
floral symbols, the bands of svastikas and ])henixes,
medallions and geometrical designs, make it a very
text-book and grammar of Chinese and liiuddhist
ornament. Its perfect whole shows what we know
by the fragments rescued from Amrawati and Gand-
liara ; and the fine carvings, the snowy r('lief of white
on white, recall Mogul tombs and palaces at Agra
and Delhi. It is an object so exquisite and so per-
SUBUEBAN TEMPLES 271
feet that one feels concern at its being left in the
open air, that it is not kept under roof or treasured
under glass in some great Western museum. It jars
on one, too, to see this matchless example of pure
Buddhist art tagged over with scraps of cloth and
paper, to find a clumsy, modern bronze incense-burner
before it, and a grimy glass box of artificial flow-
ers set as an offering before this superb reliquary;
and the jeers and jabber, the insolent elbowing of
the greasy lamas and their apish neighbors, grate on
one just a little more.
We were shown into one great hall where the three
conventional images of Chinese Buddhist altars smile
and brood serene, with their attendant lohans or ar-
hats at either side— the Buddhist trinity of Fo, Fa,
and Seng, or Buddha, the Law, and the Priests ; the
Past, the Present, and Maitreya, the Future Buddha,
or '' Buddha and his wives," as this temple trinity
was once described by an English officer who wrote a
book about his life in China. The clustering roofs
and the two tall flagstaffs of honor at the distant
south gate tell how vast the yellow establishment is ;
but we saw nothing more of its halls of worship or
temple treasures, and reasonable offers could not get
us a sight of the " traveler's palace," whose richly
decorated rooms were the headquarters of Sir Hope
Grant in 1860. Nor would they show the bronze-
foundry where bells, images, temple vessels, and orna-
ments are made for the Buddhists of Mongolia and
Tibet. Only a few years since, the Yellow Temple
foundry cast and shipped away an image of Buddha
over twenty feet high, for which a temple had been
272 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
erected on the Lhasa road— the faith still real and
living in Mongolia and Tibet, however apathetic and
unbelieving degenerate China may have become. The
copper forms which are the base of the brilliant cloi-
sonne and painted enamels made in Peking are fur-
nished from this same foundiy, and they follow good
old conventional forms. The best of the old enamels
date from the early Ming period, the golden age of
Yunglo ; but there was a revival in Kienlung's time,
and his Jesuit artists furnished medallion and other
designs for painted enamels without cloisons, which
resemble the old Limoges work. As in the porce-
lain decorations which they also inspired, the Jesuit
or " missionary colors " distinctly mark the enamels
of this period; and certain intense pinks and the
paler rose du Barry, the rose-of-gold hues that are so
unmistakable, mark the exquisite little pieces of this
later period.
All over the Peking plain are temples and monas-
teries whose revenues have failed, whose worshipers
have fallen away, and in whose solitude a few infirm,
degenerate priests manage to exist. There is the Wo-
fu-ssu, the Temple of the Sleeping Buddha, where
a recumbent image fifty feet in length dreams in Nir-
vana, as in the shrines and cave temples of Ceylon ;
and all along the line of the hills are sacred groves
whose temples are lialf forgotten. Any other govern-
ment and people would proudly preserve these monu-
ments of their nobler past, but the Cliinese reverence
for antiquity is just as false and artificial as some
others of their great virtues when reduced to the prac-
tical test. An architectural treasure of the great cen-
SUBURBAN TEMPLES 273
turies of Buddhism is the Pi-yun-ssu, or Azure Cloud
Monastery, a religious foundation of Kienlung's time,
whose marble pailows, dagobas, pagodas, and temples
are in perfect condition, splendid specimens of Bud-
dhist architecture and ornament. There the great
Kienlung himself sits among the arhats, or expectant
bodhisattvas, in the Hall of Five Hundred Genii, as
he sits with those other gilded companies of saints by
brevet at Hangchow and Canton. Other halls with
their thousands of gilded images gave the Azure Cloud
unique attractions until, with the decay of all things,
material and spiritual, this great treasury of religious
art began to respond to the market demand for ob-
jects of vertu, until the gods of the Azure Cloud have
crossed the seas and gone everywhere in the Western
world.
Once, in going out of the city to the western
suburbs, there was unusual stir and motion in the
city streets near the gates, but nothing could induce
boy or carter to inquire if an imperial procession
was to pass that way. " S'pose I speakee him what
time Emperor go walkee, my catchee big bobbery.
Soldier say, 'Hai ! what for you wanchee knowf
You come yamun side.' And then he lock me in;
bamboo me ; maybe kill " ; and the coward grew so
pale and ill at ease that I gave up insisting and went
on outside for a day of suburban temples. Outside the
walls we met red-satin-clad bearers bringing in empty
yellow chairs shrouded in yellow cloths, and carts as
carefully covered followed. Late in the afternoon
we found the roadside from Wu-ta-ssu into the north-
west gate gay with holiday crowds, Manchu women
27-i CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
and children in carts and litters and on foot, all
arrayed in their most brilliant clothes. Outside the
walls they could view- the imperial train from a respect-
ful distance, and it had been a regular Manchu holi-
day for crowds that watched the modest retinue of the
then retired Empress Dowager returning to E-ho Park
after a two days' visit to the city palace. This was the
only occasion on which we saw anything like idle
pleasuring, or families off for a country jaunt. There
were never pilgrims nor holiday companies encoun-
tered at the temples in the suburbs, and the charms
of country life do not seem to be envied by the mil-
lion and a third dwellers in the two great walled
cities. The love of nature and landscape charms
which the Buddhist religion fostered and encouraged,
and which is so pronounced in the ancient classic
poetry, seems to have died out with the great faith
itself, one more evidence of present decadence.
XX
TO SHANGHAI
^HEN one has endured much of prim-
itive travel in China, the railway seems
surely to be inventive genius's greatest
gift to man. Having delayed too long
in Peking, winter came in one Novem-
ber night, succeeding a dull, hazy sunset that her-
alded a dust-storm. It was a baby blizzard in a
way, with dust instead of dry snow to smother and
blind one, and how our chair-bearers got to Tung-
chow through that featureless, brown world we
never knew, for we could not see. Gusts of icy
wind made the sedans sway and the bearers stagger,
and dust penetrated curtains and wraps and veils
until all were of one color, when the procession filed out
on the broad river-bank at Tungchow, deserted of
its crowds and caravans, while the icy wind from the
desert shrieked across it and whirled its surface in
air. With every crevice and knot-hole of the boats
pasted up, the dust had insinuated itself everywhere,
and although the servants had spent the day clear-
ing awa}" the accumulations, all food was as Dead
Sea apples.
275
276 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
Boats were tied fast ten and twenty rows deep, and
all activity was suspended on account of the weather.
At sunset, when the wind went down and dust-clouds
circled slowly, the envoy's ensign was hoisted on the
scattered boats of the fleet, and by the most ingenious
poling and WTiggling they were extricated from the
jam and strung out in line in the open river. For
the next cold, bleak day we hurried down-stream with
current and sail, and at the second sunrise the vice-
roy's steam-launch found us, hoisted the foreign flag,
and sped shrieking to Tientsin with the fleet in tow—
a certain triumphant convention in the envoy's keep-
ing,- a last victory of his nation in China, and cause
for this courtesy. Cargo-boats cleared away promptly
without any hails or back talk from their skippers or
trackers ; for some half -submerged boats loaded with
brick-tea, run down by the yamun launch the night
before, pointed the usual moral against boatmen dis-
puting right of way with the viceroy's august fire-boat.
One gets idea of the volume of foreign trade in
China as he watches ocean-going steamers clear away
by twos and threes daily from Tientsin for Shanghai,
and vice versa; and with the opening of the Pei-ho
River in spring, twenty ships have left Shanghai in
one day, bound for the northern port. With winter
coming on, Cliefoo, the one seaside summer resort of
all China before Peitaho was known, was a deserted,
wind-swept settlement, coolies on the foreshore, and
the wind-gages and signal-flags on the top of the
hill where the consuls live, the only moving things in
sight. The summer hotels on the farther bathing-
beach were closed, and a few men-of-war lay at the
TO SHANGHAI 277
far naval anchorage. Despite the opening of Kiao-
ehau, on the east coast of the province, Chefoo has
not lost its trade, and straw braid and bean-cake, raw
silks and pongees, continue to pour in from the back
country. Bales of straw braid the size of haystacks,
done up loosely in matting, threatened to fall apart
as they were hoisted on board. " All the braid has
to be repacked in Shanghai," said one depressed
shipper of such cargo. " In all these years we have
not been able to induce them to deliver us anything
but these huge^ untidy bundles." When he was asked
why the ship coaled at Chefoo instead of at Tongku,
the port of the Chihli coal-mines, he wearily replied :
"We get the Japanese coal here cheaper than the
Kaiping or Tongshan coal at their own docks at
Tongku. They always cheat in the weight and
quality of Chinese coal."
The sight of the port, the sign-board and label of
Chinese official intelligence, a handwriting on the
wall that is the last brand of imbecility, is " the great
wall of Chefoo"— a twelve-foot construction franti-
cally built from sea-beach to hilltops east of the city
to keep out the Japanese in 1894. With a harbor
full of neutral men-of-war coming and going, with
an army-corps landed, great guns thundering at
Wei-hai-wei, forty miles down the coast, and Port
Arthur, a hundred miles across the gulf, already
fallen, mandarin minds could just rise to this prehis-
toric mode of defense— a trifling bit of masonry that
troops could surmount at parade in unbroken com-
panies, and naval guns in the harbor could breach by
the furlong. This Chefoo wall of a.d. 1894 does not
278 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
argue much for Chinese intelligence. Fifteen years
ago, Chefoo was renowned for its fruits, among them
being apricots that could have won first prizes at
CaUfornia fairs. These resulted from the efforts of
an American missionary who brought out seeds and
cuttings and taught the farmers how to graft and
improve the quality of their fruit. When that kind
teacher left, the fruit-growers ceased their efforts, and
things drifted back to their original condition. It was
not '' old custom " to graft and fuss with the trees in
that way.
One gets a glimpse of ships and flags and forts as
he passes the narrow entrance of the bay of Wei-hai-
wei, where great deeds were done in the bitter winter
of 1894-95, and the brave Admiral Ting, almost the
one Chinese hero of the war, took his own life when
all was lost. Under British lease, Wei-hai-wei has
been rebuilt and improved, and in summer is head-
quarters and rendezvous for the British Asiatic fleet,
and general sanatorium for the fleet and the Hongkong
garrison.
One sees nothing of Kiao-chau after rounding that
dread promontory of Shantung, where the German
gunboat litis was so tragically lost, and until its new
tenants have carried out their plan of making it a
'' German Hongkong," it will be long before Kiao-
chau comes within the ordinary traveler's ken. When
it has passed this first discouraging, sickly stage of
its beginning, when trade has come and railways are
built inland, many of the interesting places in Shan-
tung will ])e('ome accessible. The birthplace and the
tomb of Conf ludus are in this province, and the res-
TO SHANGHAI 279
idence of his seventy-sixth direct male descendant, ^
the ever-sacred Duke Kung, whom General Wilson and
several foreign travelers have visited. /The great sacred
White Mountain of pilgrimage offers a picturesque
excursion, but the Shantung heart is so hardened to
any and every foreigner that a generation must pass
before there is even chill welcome. Only unrestricted
foreign control of the province and the continued
efforts of foreign engineers with great financial re-
sources can ever restrain the unmanageable Yellow
River, " China's Sorrow," which anniially overflows its
banks and drives thousands of people from their
homes, which has had two outlets to the Yellow Sea,
another on the Gulf of Pechili, and for a time poured
through the bed of the Pei-ho or Tientsin River.
There are embankments of the last century that rise
and reach like ranges of hills across Shantung, but
Chinese destructiveness and stupidity have even worn
and cut through them with cart-roads, and when the
great floods come the gaps are feebly stopped with
millet-stalks, and the weary old Li Hung Chang is the
engineer sent to inspect them ! Any government,
any other despotism, any usurpation would be better
for China than the one from which it now suffers, and
if German militarism can subdue, train, and regener-
ate the people of Shantung, and German engineering
curb and confine the Yellow River, German protection
and absorption of this province will be for Shantung's
and the world's advantage.
Shanghai, while not a place of tourist attractions,
is one of the greatest surprises to the newcomer in
the East. At the Yangtsze's mouth, steamers move
16
280 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
across a glaring expanse of yellow-brown mud, the
Wusung adds another turbid flood, and low-lying
raud shores give poor promise of the laud beyond.
Sixteen miles below Shanghai large and heavily laden
mail-steamers anchor at the Wusung bar, lighter
their cargoes, and send their passengers up by tender.
This "■ Heaven-sent Barrier" was made more effectual
during the French war of 1884 by driving piles and
sinking junks across the narrow channel, while its
protector, the Celestial gunboat, modestly named
'' The Terror of Western Nations/' sailed away to
farther, safer, inland reaches. During the Japanese
war, England warned Japan away from Shanghai
and stationed a fleet at the mouth of the Yangtsze.
When the Japanese declared Shanghai outside the
sphere of military intentions, the foreign community
recognized this exemption by a total disregard of the
laws of neutrality. Shanghai was recruiting-station
and a base of supplies for the Chinese army, the
neutral flag covering every munition and contraband
article. Every foreign resident loudly prophesied
the certain victory of the Chinese and complete anni-
hilation of their opponents. They had lived in China
and knew the people, they said. After exasperating
the Japanese in countless ways, England as coolly
left China to her fate at the close of the war, and
from that period of vacillation and inaction and ap-
parent unfriendliness to both nations date the seri-
ous attacks upon England's supreme influence and
prestige in the Far East.
The first railway in China was built from Wusung
to Shanghai in 187G, and was enthusiastically patro-
TO SHANGHAI 281
nized by the Chinese. After an accident and riots,
both instituted by the literati, it was bought by the
Chinese, who tore up the rails and threw them in
the river, and sent the locomotives to Formosa, where
they rusted on the beach. The railway was rebuilt
in 1898, many Chinese buying shares, and their peo-
ple now crowd the cars ; but in the main, travelers
prefer to remain with their belongings on the tender
until they are landed in the heart of Shanghai.
The river-banks, with their villages and fields of
graves, grow busier as one ascends, the stream be-
comes crowded with anchored ships, and shipyard
hammering and the noises of industry fill the air.
Factories, cotton-mills, and filatures line the shore,
and the pervading hum and roar of progress and mod-
ern industries oppress the ear until one can scarcely
credit that this rushing, hustling, feverjshly busy
place is in Asia at all. But the true flavor of China,
that heavy, half -sickening smell of bean-oil, of incense-
and opium-smoke, and of filthy human beings, per-
vades the air and dispels any illusions.
After the wharves there follows the fine Japanese
consulate with its garden walls, and then the German
consulate shows its flag from a splendid pile of build-
ings on the river-front of the American Settlement.
The British consulate is in a great park adjoining
the Public Gardens in the British Settlement, and the
American consulate occupies the upper floors of a
business block in the side street of the British Settle-
ment—ousted from the suitable compound it once
occupied in the American Settlement, when the land-
lord raised the rent. A rural Missouri congressman, as
282 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
well informed on Shanghai, or European life and con-
ditions in the East, as a Shanghai comprador might
be concerning Missouri facts, ran his pencil through
the item in consular appropriations, and the Ameri-
can flag was hauled down and raised over cheaper
quarters outside the American Settlement.
Shanghai, as the largest foreign settlement in the
East, with a population of 2002 British, 357 Americans,
and 2433 other Europeans, and a foreign import and
export trade of forty million pounds sterling a year,
has a fixed importance, a character and consequence,
traditions and customs all its own. Half the foreign
trade of China goes up and down the Wusung River,
and the city's interests are all commercial, material,
of the moment. Great fortunes are not made with
the dazzling swiftness they were " before the cable "
and " before Suez," but Shanghai is a home of Eastern
luxury at least, and Shanghai society, taken too seri-
ously by those who constitute it to be treated lightly
in any by-chapter, is busy, brilliant, extravagant, and
all-absorbing to its votaries, and is keyed to the pitch
and tone and time of the social centers of the great-
est velocity in the Western world. The tourist with-
out entree to its hospitable circles finds few attractions
or " sights " to entertain him in Shanghai, and the
want of hotel accommodations speeds the pleasure-
traveler on to Hongkong or Japan, so that Shanghai
is, in a sense, almost off tlie tourist's grand route.
There has been a city there since Chinese time
was recorded, but there is nothing of scenery or land-
scape ill all the neighborhood, the nearest hills,
barely hillocks, lying tliirty miles away. One drives
TO SHANGHAI 285
out the Bubbling Well Road, past miles of villas, and
then past miles of dwarf cotton-fields dotted with an-
cestral graves, to the American Episcopal College of
St. John ; and one may drive to the Point, and to
the French Jesuit College at Sicawei, and enjoy just
the same rural prospects of depressing monotony,
Shanghai is the '* model settlement," th« metropolis
and emporium of the Far East. The original British
and American concessions, lying side by side along
the river-front, are now one international settlement,
under the municipal control of a board of foreign
consuls and residents. The original French conces-
sion maintains its separate municipal government, and
its three hundred and eighty-one French citizens are
unwilling to sink themselves in the greater municipal-
ity. In their quarter are qiiais and rues, and each
street-comer has the blue-and- white signs of Paris ;
but through its streets stream a motley crowd of Chi-
nese, since it directly adjoins the native city. All three
foreign concessions were originally intended for exclu-
sive foreign residence ; but the Chinese, fleeing there
for refuge by tens of thousands during the Taiping
rebellion, discovered the advantages of foreign rule,
and have since invaded every part of the settle-
ments. They numbered two hundred and ninety-
three thousand in 1895, all appreciating their immu-
nity from mandarin extortions, amenable for their
offenses to the Mixed Court, where consular officers
sitting with a Chinese magistrate deal with Chi-
nese delinquents. The space, liglit, and air, the clean-
liness of those orderly streets, with their gas and
electricity, water-supply and sewer system, do not so
286 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
greatly appeal to them, nor move them to better
ways. They swarm and hive in the houses, overflow
the doors and windows, and are Chinese to the last
word.
Shanghai settlement is the refuge and headquar-
ters for all the Chinese progressives and reformers.
There they print their audacious newspapers and
magazines that tax the Empress Dowager, the Man-
chus, and the literati with their malfeasances in plain
terms, and in political vituperation out-yellow all the
yellow journals of America. Rich and rascally Chinese
from the farthest interior long to come and do come
to Shanghai to enjoy their wealth in safety, or spend it
in reckless dissipation, as the miners in Argonaut
times went "down to the bay" and flung away their
sudden fortunes at San Francisco. At the time of
the Japanese war, there was an influx of rich and offi-
cial Chinese to the settlement, anxious to safeguard
their families and fortunes. Real estate rose enor-
mously in value, thousands of houses have been built
each year since the war without meeting the demand,
and villas on Bubbling Well Road in which foreign
families of three souls at most were crowded now
shelter single Chinese families of eighteen or eighty
" mouths." The settlement numbers scores of re-
tired tao-tais and magistrates settled there with their
families and ill-gotten gains in prosperous retirement.
Where fashion drives, there " Chineses drive," and
the Bubbling Well Road, once the resort of the high
cart and the closed brougham of British good form
and high life, now rattles with anything that can go
on wheels and be crowded with gay and gilded
TO SHANGHAI 287
''young China," callow sinners and mature scoun-
drels in splendid satins, all smoking large cigars, who
have adopted and adapted all Western vices and
modes of dissipation. They have their theaters and
restaurants and gambling-houses, of course, and, in
fine travesty of the foreign community, their " coun-
try clubs" and tea-gardens, where young China en-
joys cycloramas, spectacles, and distractions, varied
with flower-shows very well worth seeing. This
much of Western life they have approached to, but
nothing so discourages one for the future of China
and the chances of progress as this daily display of
young China in its hours of ease. Combining all of
domestic and imported depravity, these young Chi-
nese of the merchant and comprador class, longest in
contact with foreign ways, well entitle Shanghai to
its repute in their world as the fastest and wickedest
place in China. The Duke of Edinburgh and other
experts and competent judges among foreign visitors
long ago gave the model settlement the palm of the
same unique distinction among foreign communities
east of Suez.
Shanghai is the headquarters station for nearly all
the mission boards in China, and the local directory
lists thirty-five separate establishments under the
head of ''churches and missions," this bewildering
number of roads to Christianity having drawn criti-
cism from Dr. Henry Drummond and led others
to wonder if missions could not accomplish more if
each sect had one separate province or district to it-
self, as mission work among American Indian tribes
has been apportioned to the different denominations.
288 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
The Jesuit Mission at Sicawei has been in existence
for more than a century, and confers benefits upon
the foreign community in the observations and warn-
ings issued from its meteorological observatory.
The time-ball on the French bund, dropped by signal
from Sicawei, regulates clocks, watches, and chronom-
eters for the region, and under the direction of the
learned Jesuits a complete system of observations
is maintained along the China seas. It was the
great astronomer, Padre Faura, of the Manila Obser-
vatory, who first observed and deduced the laws of
typhoons, and from his vantage-ground of Luzon, off
which typhoons are bred and sent circling on their
way, usually toward the Formosa Channel, telegraphed
warnings to the China coast. The benefits to ship-
ping were incalculable, and if the accuracy and time-
liness of the Manila and Sicawei warnings had not
been well enough established before, the memorable
wreck of the P. & O. steamer Bokhara, which went
to sea in the face of Sicawei warnings, taught mariners
a lesson for all typhoon time.
The stranger, of course, wishes to visit the old city
of Shanghai, but he should repress his enthusiasm
in the presence of the foreign resident, and never,
under any circumstances, no matter what powerful let-
ters he may present, what ties of kinship or bonds of
old friendship he may claim, expect the foreign resi-
dent to accompany him there. Nor any more shoidd
he talk about tlie ex(?virsion in polite Shanghai
circles afterward. In all boredom nothing so bores
the resident as the globe-trotter's tales of his slum-
ming in the native city. The resident has usually
TO SHANGHAI 291
never been there, or he may apologetically explain
that he did go once, years ago, when he first came,
when he was a " griffin," otherwise a " tenderfoot," in
the Far East.
Old Shanghai is very little worth seeing com-
pared with either Peking or Canton, and is valuable
chiefly as an exhibit of contrasts, lying there inert,
unchanged, uncleansed, with the model settlement
beside it in glaring contrast for these forty years.
One balances himself on a passenger-wheelbarrow
and is trundled around the gray old walls, passing on
the way a dead-house, where, in one cholera season
that I passed by, some two thousand coffins were
waiting for the favorable day and signs for burial.
One enters the grimy vault of a gate and leaves the
present century. There are a few temples with
cramped and crowded and noisy courtyards to see,
some peony and chrysanthemum gardens, a garden
where fan-tailed goldfish of extraordinary varieties
are reared in crocks of stagnant, filthy water, and a
fantastic tea-garden or gild-house of a company of
merchants. The narrow streets, the filth, the shout-
ing crowds, and the close familiarity of the people
are the same as in all tlie cities of China. There is a
tea-house in the middle of a sewery pond, approached
by zigzag bridges, which is 7iot the house of the wil-
low-pattern plates, despite its claim. This pond is a
center of city life, the one open glimpse of the sky
within the walls, and besides the daily sales of jade
and cheap jewelry, letter-writers, fortune-tellers, cob-
blers, barbers, peripatetic cooks witli portable kitch-
ens, menders, and peddlers hold the crowds there.
1/
292 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
Once I happened upon an outdoor juggler show in
which a woman with dwarfed feet lay upon a rickety
table, and twirled and tossed huge earthen jars in air
with her feet. She twirled and somersaulted a poor,
pale slip of a child in the same way ; then balanced a
ladder on lier feet, and the child crept up and down
the rungs, backward, head first, posing as it clung or
hung to the swaying ladder. It was sickening to
watch, and we moved away, when yells of rage arose,
ladder and child came down at a flash, and the woman
juggler ran after us with the rest. The foreigners
had contributed after seeing the first feat, but were
leaving without paying again, and as no one else in
the open-air audience had contributed a cash, they
could not let us take any such informal leave.
The curio-shops, cleared of everything of merit, hold
only the merest junk, and one most eminent connois-
seur said sadly : " I used to go there once a week, and
always found something worthy to add to my collec-
tion. Now I never go." Another sinologue given
to prowling the old city told of a modern treasure he
unearthed at a book-stall, in the way of a Chinese
manual for house-servants in foreign employ. There
were clear instructions how to pour sherry in the
master's glass, and by sleight of hand continue with
a bottle of inferior wine around the board ; even dia-
grams of how to arrange cigars in a box to conceal
the little larcenies, and so many other minute in-
structions to the perfect servant that the sinologue
studied it himself, and found that he had evidently
stumbled upon the same manual in use in his own
clockwork household. All villainy is systematized
TO SHANGHAI 293
in China, protected by gilds even, and nothing is more \^
logical and reasonable to the Chinese mind than that
the shroffs who examine all moneys in foreign mer-
cantile establishments, in search for counterfeit coins,
should first serve an apprenticeship to the different
counterfeiters of their city or province.
The Chinese theater is well worth visiting, and de-
spite the absurd conventionalities and traditions, the
want of scenery, the din of the orchestra, and the
actors' high-pitched and falsetto voices, some excel-
lent art is manifested there, and the costuming in
the historic and legitimate drama is superb. All the
topsyturvy of Chinese logic is intensified, and the
insanest reversals of the credible are given rein in
comedies, some of them so delightfully farcical that
China is a mine for exhausted authors and adapters
of the Western dramatic world to draw upon. Lost
" face " is the supremely delicious situation, the hen-
pecked husband is the favorite butt and victim, and
the strong-minded woman is the dea ex macMna and
pivot of action. In one favorite comedy, a burglar
prayed to his joss, and when twice pulled back by a
devil in black calico, cuffed the joss soundly, and then
entered the rich man's house as the wife was about
to hang herself. Pie cut the suicide down, and when
the master rushed in to repel the burglar, he thanked
him instead for his opportune arrival, and the joss
was used as club to beat the discomfited devil. Gor-
geous officials thanked the burglar, who tied his queue
to the suicide's noose, and swung in air for three
whole minutes— and the air was rent with the ecstatic
shouts of the audience
XXI
THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW
[HERE are only three wonders of the
world in China— the Demons at Tung-
chow, the Thunder at Lungehow, and
the Great Tide at Hangchow, the last
tlie greatest of all, and a living wonder
to this day of " the open door," while its rivals are
lost in myth and oblivion.
On the eighteenth night of the second moon, and
on the eighteenth night of the eighth and ninth
moons of the Chinese year, the greatest flood-tides
from the Pacific surge into the funnel mouth of
Hangchow Bay to the bars and flats at the mouth of
the swift-flowing Tsien-tang. The river current op-
poses for a while, until the angry sea rises up and
rides on, in a great, white, roaring, bubbling wave,
ten, twelve, fifteen, and even twenty feet in height.
The Great Bore, the White Thing, charges up the
narrowing river at a speed of ten and thirteen miles
an hour, with a roar that can be heard for an hour
before it arrives, the most sensational, spectacular,
fascinating tidal phenomenon— a real wonder of the
whole world, worth going far and waiting long to see.
294
THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 295
Yet how very few go to see it, when it is visible at
Hajning, only seventy miles distant by smooth water-
ways from Shanghai, where luxurious house-boats
and steam-launches may be had by telephone order !
Our two house-boats were lashed side by side as
the launch puffed out up the Whangpu River, past
the British and French settlements, and the rows
upon rows of anchored junks off the gray walls of
old Shanghai. We slowed up at the liMn, or customs
station, above the city long enough for the pilot to
flourish the passports against the glass windows of
the launch. Every few hours that formality was re-
peated, but only one gunboat on the Grand Canal
detained us to read the documents. There was a
superb sunset as we reached the upper end of the
broad, lake-like Seven Mile Reach. A marvelous
pale, pure, porcelain-blue sky shaded to greenish
yellow and pure lemon near the horizon, and was
dappled over with tiny white clouds, that took fire as
the sun sank and tipped every ripple in the Reach
with its reflected flame. As the sun's burning face
fell, a round white cloud in tlie opposite east turned
rosy pink, and in silvery lines and pearly masses
showed all the continent outlines on the full face of
the splendid ninth moon, that was to Avork the wonder
for us.
With shrieks and toots infernal, our launch passed
under the great springing arch of a bridge, tlie laofas
("old ones," or captains) let slip the lashings, and the
two house-boats trailed tandem into the Grand Canal.
We threaded watery suburbs and rounded the moat
of a walled city " half as old as time," where moon-
296 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
light and reflecting waters made witchery with crum-
bling battlements and dragon-eaved towers. All
night the screech of the launch waked echoes from
city walls along the Grand Canal, towns that Taipiug
rebels had besieged and Gordon captured, where
A .M.Ma;I.i: BRIDGK.
battle, massacre, and fire have left their marks-
ruined bridges, towers, and walls eloquent and un-
touched to this day.
It was an ideal autumn morning as we trailed
down the Grand Canal to Samen. The stone em-
bankment, with its smooth granite curb, once ran
continuous for tlie six hundred odd miles of the Grand
Canal between Hangchow and Peking. It was a great
highway, too, and dwelling touched dwelling all the
way; but the Taipings' fury spent itself in this prov-
ince, the last stamping-ground of that rebellion, and
but one thirtieth of the population survived. " The
THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 297
Sungs made the roads and bridges, the Tangs the
towers, the Mings the pagodas," runs the Chinese
saying, and all three dynasties lavished their work
along this imperial highway and river. China is pre-
eminently the land of bridges, and this end of the
Grand Canal once assembled such a collection of
bridges, such a range of types and models, as no other
country of the world could offer. Bridge after bridge
bowed over us, humpbacked, horseshoe, spectacle,
camel's-back, and needle's-eye bridges, their ovals or
arches often springing forty and fifty feet in air-
carved parapets, piers, balustrades, guardian lions,
dragon-mouthed water-spouts, and lettered tablets
nearly perfect, the mellowing touch of time having
worn all angles and edges smooth, and toned the
marble to a rich, warm yellow. Fallows, those monu-
mental carved gateways erected by imperial permis-
sion as memorials to some dutiful son or faithful
widow, are in such numbers now along the canal that
they must once have stood along favored reaches like
continuous rood-screens in a cathedral. They are
now battered and neglected, sagging, tottering, top-
pling into ruins, covered with moss and lichens, that
kindly hide the ravages of their lace-work and filigree
carvings. One longs to transport just one of these
wonderful trophies to some city park in Europe or
America, where such a unique piece of sculpture
would be an ornament far beyond obelisks or cap-
tured cannons.
We were away from the rice and beyond the cot-
ton-fields of the immediate Shanghai section of the
Great Plain of Kiangsu, the '^ Garden of China,"
298 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
where tlie iiiluibitants iiuinber eight hundred to the
square mile. All along the luxuriant green shores
blue-clad figures climbed and worked among the
glowing, crimson tallow-trees, gathering the berries
for primitive household candle-making. Mile after
mile of short, stunted mulberries, pollarded like wil-
lows, bespoke the chief industry of the region. The
green leaves of ling-gardens covered long stretches of
side-waters, squared off in subdivisions like fields on
shore, and ling-farmers paddling about in tubs to tend
their crops gave a holiday air to this culture of
Trapa hicornis, the " buffalo-head " nut. There was
interest along every mile of this splendid waterway,
where the Sung emperors and the Grreat Khan trav-
eled in gilded barges, where Marco Polo, Rashuddin,
and Ibn Batuta exhausted Italian, Persian, and Arabic
in describing the splendors of Cathay centuries before
America was discovered.
At Samen we turned from the broad, embanked
canal and tlie imperial telegraph lines, and pursued
water lanes, narrow gleams between green banks and
hedge-rows, where there was barely room for boats
to pass. Sa-jow, Sa-men-yu, Ko-ti, and towns of lesser
import, huddled by the banks ; arching bridges, tea-
shops with ov^erhanging wdndows, and market spaces
all crowded with the same unattractive yellow people,
who gaped and jeered or hai-yaied, as our launch
went head on, whistling and screeching like mad,
scattering sampans to right and left. The creeks and
canals grew nai-rower, the arches of the bridges lower,
until smoke-stack and kitchen stove])ipes had to
hinge back on the dec^ks to let us squeeze under.
THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 299
Here all the ways are waterways, and land transpor-
tation extends only from creek to creek, across a field
or two. Crops are carried, markets are supplied and
attended, even peddlers and tinkers go by boats, and
the people have learned to row with their feet as well
as their hands. These ^' foot-boats " were the most
comical, laughable things we saw— tiny shells of sam-
pans, each with its crew of one, lounging astern,
grasping the oar with his long, nimble, ape-like toes,
and steering by a short paddle held close under one
arm. There was a grotesque air of ease and leisure
to these boatmen, who kicked their wriggling way
over the water, leaning, and apparently loafing at
ease, steering by the armpits, and openly despising
those who toiled with their hands.
We passed a gaily decked '' wedding-boat " hung
with red cloth and red lanterns, the red-curtained
chair set amidships, and the red boxes and trunks
supposed to contain the trousseau, the corbeil, the
regalia, the showy and borrowed properties, the too
often mock treasures of a Chinese wedding proces-
sion, piled at the stern. There was hubbub on the
banks, boats were tethered in lines, and the cortege
only waited for our shrieking train to pass before
starting off to make the country-side ring with the
fiddles and gongs of joy. This wedding of the keeper
of the chief restaurant at the village of Three Bridges
to the daughter of a rich up-canal farmer was as
great an event to the sets and circles of these oozy
reaches and back-waters of Chekiang as any nuptials
by the Adriatic. Crowds pressed to the Three Bridges
and hung out of village windows, taking us for
y
300 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
a first part of the pageant ; but the whole community
jeered when the mistaken musicians ceased to twang
and thump in our honor on discovering that not a
red lantern, nor a red rag, nor a sign of the joy color
connected us with the great event. Language all
consonants hurtled through the air to the crew of the
launch, well known in the mulberry country by their
frequent visits to buy cocoons for Shanghai filatures,
and there and at two other villages they tried to cast
us off, insisting that creeks were too narrow, too shal-
low, and the bridges too low for the launch to go
farther. Despite protestations and theatric frenzy,
we pointed the way down the green canal ahead, and
the launch laota, with lost " face," went on.
At noon we shot under a bridge, and emerged in
the broad moat at the northwest angle of the walls
of Haining. There were the same gray brick, battle-
mented walls as surround all these provincial towns,
a green bank of grass and trees sloping along the
north side of the moat, that was only a basin, and
ended against a high stone embankment, where a
noble pagoda overtopped the main city gate. The
basin was crowded with cargo-boats loading and
unloading. Coolies with grain-bags and fagots on
their shoulders toiled up and disappeared by flagged
paths among the trees, and coolies with heavy loads of
straw paper and dried fish descended in monotonous
strings like so many ants. The stone slabs were worn
smooth and slippery by the bare feet of generations,
until it was a feat to turn the angles at the city
gates, escaping the lines of grunting coolies, and
come out on the broad, high embankment between
THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW
301
the city wall and the Tsien-tang River. This great
stone-faced sea-wall, with its high embankment of
rammed earth and stone and piles, extends along
this north bank of the Tsien-tang River for more
MAP OF
From U. S. Hydrographic Chart No. 1305, with inland waterways from French authorities.
HANGCHOW BAY TO TSIEN-TANG KIVER, WITH WATERWAYS FROM
SHANGHAI TO HAININQ, HANGCHOW.
than one hundred and twenty miles, a monument of
toil, repeated and repeated, rebuilt and repaired
ceaselessly for more than twelve hundred years.
The Tsien-tang, a muddy, uninteresting stream, is a
302 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
mile wide off Haining, and at that hour of high tide
flowed within a few feet of the embankment's level.
A string of clumsy, flat-bottomed Ningpo junks, gau-
dily painted, and with protruding eyes at the bows, lay
tethered to the bank, exchanging cargoes with the
boats in the basin ; for, owing to the furious tides,
there is no direct water connection between this end
of the Grand Canal and the river. Coolies, idlers, and
shipping circles gathered around us, gaping with that
brainless, aimless, stupid, stolid, maddening stare of
the Chinese millions, that is the last irritant to foreign
nerves and antipathies. They tagged after us into
the fine old Bhota pagoda, built a thousand years ago
to secure a favorable fung-shui for Haining, and to ar-
rest the ravages of the awful Avater-dragon. The pa-
goda, although its lower story is used as a granary,
with no altars visible, is in excellent condition, and
from each of its six galleries, with the fantastic roofs
and dangling wind-bells, there is a better view of the
brown river and the low green shore opposite, with
the vaporous blue outlines of the Ningpo mountains
showing beyond Hangchow Bay, which opens two
miles below.
Farther down the embankment there is a clean,
new temple to the water-god, where junkmen put up
prayers and offer gifts, and the priests try to ap-
pease e\ery high tide with fire-crackers, gongs, in-
cense, and prayers. To all questioning they responded
with a strong sense of their responsibility to carry
on the business they were engaged in, but they
hazarded nothing as to the efficacy of their ways of
dealing and arguing with the bore. The ])riests
THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 303
knew less than any one else about the one bronze cow
that lies adrift in the grass by the city waU ; for all the
bank-side knew that there had once been fifty of these
cows on the broad terrace to watch the water-dragon
and protect Haining, and that the others had all
" walked away " when a more furious bore than usual
washed over the embankment. Lightning had struck
and dehorned this one remaining guardian, and
strange abrasions of the surface suggested the shot
and shell of Taiping times ; but it was '' No sabe " as
to these strange gougings in the solid metal, and
" No sabe " as to what the inscription on its shoulder
meant.
A small rabble tagged after us to our boats, and
youngsters on the city wall maintained a plunging
fire of stones and bits of brick and mortar. They
howled and made faces at us, drew fingers across
their necks in cutthroat sign, lay in ambush and
" sniped " us as long as daylight lasted. Whenever
they saw a hated foreign head they tried to hit it.
We were ten thousand miles away, virtually in Eu-
rope, in the warm, bright cabin of the house-boat, the
silken boy of the velvet foot serving the convention-
ally perfect dinner on a flower-decked table shining
with silver and glass ; but when we came out on the
bank at eleven o'clock, old, gray Haining was there in
the moonlight, as still and dead and turned to stone
as the castle of the Sleeping Beauty, and all around
it lay that unmistakable, great graveyard— China.
Before midnight, the rows of junks had disappeared
bodily from the sea-wall, had dropped twenty feet
with the tide to a broad stone shelf that made out
304 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIKE
twenty feet toward the shrunken river. This junk
platform, or shelter, bordered with double rows of
piling and rough stones, extends along the sea-wall
for a thousand yards, defended by two great curving
buttresses, built out to deflect the bore's fury. The
junks sat high and dry, squarely on their flat timbers,
on this platform, seven feet above the low-running
Tsien-tang, slipping swiftly with a hoarse, stealthy,
treacherous rippling out to sea.
Then distantly, far away, came a soft, long-rolling
undertone, a muffled thumi)ety-thumpety-thumpety-
thumpetyj that continued and continued, grew nearer
and louder ; was now the tramp of a charging cavalry
thundering past at a gi*and review, then the leaden
pounding of surf upon a coral reef ; the unmistakable
sound of falling water ; the booming, dashing rever-
beration of breaking waves, of waves breaking with-
out cessation or interval, beating slowly the mighty
diapason of the sea.
The moon was riding at the very zenith, and it
dizzied us to look up to it. Each one stood evenly
within the circle of his own clear-cut shadow on the
ground, at that moment of the moon's transit, and
the bore was due ; but it was a calm night, and it was
three quarters of an hour after our unaccustomed
ears had caught the first far-distant, muttering un-
dertone before the White Thing was seen, a ghastly
line advancing as evenly over the water, and as
quickly, as the dark shadow of an eclipse sweeps over
a landscape. Nearer and nearer it roared, growing
greater and whiter, until we could see the whole cas-
cading, bubbling, frothing front, with spray-drops
THE GREAT TfOKE.
THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 307
showering from the crest higher up in moonlight.
With the roar of awful waters the dread thing came
on, raising its white crest higher and higher as it
licked the edges of the piles beyond which the junks
lay. There were shouts and yells, and the usual
boatmen's pandemonium let loose on the junks as the
roaring wave approached. A rocket sizzed, some fire-
crackers sputtered and gongs resounded, but all small
sounds of earth's creatures were drowned as the fear-
ful White Thing crashed past, and a frightful hissing,
a seething, lashing, and swirling of still higher billows
succeeded,— the most sinister sound of water ever
heard,— all speeding, rushing, whirling madly, irre-
sistibly on.
As the ten-foot wall of foam reached the edge of
the piling and the junk platform, it floated the junks
loose at the instant. Each junk rode to the flood's
fury bow on, and continued to rise, to lift itself bod-
ily up, up, along the sea-wall before one's fascinated
gaze. In the fierce after-rush the water went swifter
and more swiftly by, until one had a dizzying sense
of danger to come, but past fleeing from. Something
held one fascinated to the spot, although in the fewest
minutes, barely a quarter of an hour, two thirds of
the whole body and mass of the flood-tide had flung
itself against the wall, and, it seemed, might continue
to rise with the same force for hours. A salt, fresh
smell of the sea, the breath of the ocean's coolest,
deepest under-world, came in with the awful tide. A
gliastly mist succeeded. Shreds of vapor scudded
over the triumphant moon, and tlie sea's curtain fell
on one of the most sensational, spectacular perform-
308 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
ances the Pacific Ocean and the moon ever make
together.
The next midday, just at noon, our straining ears
caught the first far-away, long-rolling thump, thump,
thump, as steady as the beat of a dynamo, and we
could see a white line at the farthest distance on the
water. We watched it wdth glasses, and then with
the eye, as it came over the broad level, and then won-
dered why that one long, slow, white breaker should
have been so frightful and awe-inspiring just by the
witchery of midnight and moonlight. But at a dis-
tance of a quarter, and then of an eighth mile, the wave
seemed to gather impetus, to rise, to double, and to
foam still higher, and swTpt past under our feet with
the speed and fury of a whirlwind. It shook the
earthy filling of the great buttress, beat the ear with
a roar that was appalling, and my breathing and my
knees were not normal any more than at midnight.
The old Avi'iters say : " The surge thereof rises like a
hill, and the wav^e like a house ; it roars like thunder,
and as it comes on it appears to swallow the heavens
and bathe the sun."
The front wall of water, one long line stretched
from shore to shore, was a confused, seething white
mass of bubbles, spray, and foam over ten feet in
height, curving four or five feet higher at mid-stream,
while back of this whole front wall the water sloped
up still higher in great billows and tossing spray.
The abrupt white bank of foam did not seem to op-
pose and stem the river current squarely, to turn it
back, to roll it over upon itself, and back it up-stream,
as one might picture it. The swift brown river ran
THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 309
as rapidly as ever toward the sea as the bore advanced,
and the great wave, moving twenty feet a second,
seemed to overrun it, to hurl itself upon and break
over the brown plane of the river as if it were a solid
floor. The great wave is foreshortened and belittled
when one looks down upon it from the twenty-five-
foot sea-wall, and the lens reduces it contemptibly in
photographs ; but while one hears or remembers that
frightful, incredible, awful roar, he is not wanting in
respect for this white terror of the sea.
A long string of junks lay stranded on the platform
below the sea-wall, their bows pointed down-stream,
and bamboo cables made fast to trees on the embank-
ment. At the first touch of the foaming wave's edge
each junk was afloat, and leaping by inches up the
face of the sea-wall in unearthly fashion. Each junk-
man was screeching like mad as he fended his boat
off from the stone wall and from his neighbors, but
no sound could be heard until the roaring wave had
gone by, and the evil hiss and seethe of the after-rush
had subsided. The wave raced up the river, and wild
waters rushed after, at the rate of thirteen miles an
hour. A score of big brown junks, in full sail, hover-
ing in the bay behind the bore, entered the river and
came careering up-stream, riding tlie after-rush as
lightly as cockle-shells. The huge lumbering arks
dipped and danced, spun around in circles, and, help-
less in the sweep and swirl of that flood-burst, made
for every point of the compass, going bow first, stern
first, broadside on, rocking and pirouetting with all
sails flapping in the maddest fashion. It made one
feel dizzy to watch these antics, and one might next
310 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
expect the pagoda to dance across the sea-wall. At
the approach of these bewitched boats every junkman
by the bank seized his boat-hook, and ki-yied at the
top of his lungs. By some magic a few junks finally
swept in lessening circles toward the shore, waltzed
around and around as deliberately as so many dancers
seeking good seats along a ball-room wall, made a last
wheeling turn, let down sails with a clatter, and each
dropped exactly in and stopped in a chosen berth by
the sea-wall. There was collapse and reaction as this
manoeuver and our nerve-tension ended, for never
have I seen a more thrilling or neater nautical
feat. "Wrinkles in Navigation" does not begin to
inform the halyard world of what can be done
with sheet and rudder with a big bore as auxil-
iary. Cat-boat sailing in a squall, or ocean cup-
racing in half a gale, are tame sports compared
with this riding in on the great wild bore's back,
and dropping away from its crest at the desired
moment as precisely as the tiniest naphtha-launch
could do it.
A few of the waiting junks let go, struck out into
the stream, and rode with the other junks on the back
of the bore up the river toward Hangchow, the wave
usually traveling that twenty- three miles up-stream in
two hours. The bore decreases in height as it rolls on
up-stream and up-hill, and if ten feet high when pass-
ing Haining, is usually but five feet high when abreast
of Hangchow, and dies away in the upper river, the
last ripples of the highest bore being observed eigh-
teen miles above the city. All navigation up the swift
river is necessarily in the wake of the bore, and within
JUNKS RIDING IN ON TUE AFTEK-KUSH.
THE GEEAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 313
two hours after it passes Hangchow, junks must start
down-stream or seek a shelter on the junk platforms.
If a junk cannot reach a platform before the tide
leaves the shelf dry, its fate is decided. No vessel
could meet that irresistible wall of water and live,
and for five hours before the bore comes no junks
are seen off Haining. The transport Kite, during the
opium war (1840), touched on a bank at the north of
the river and was instantly overturned by the tide.
A little later the PhlegetJion, reconnoitering the ap-
proaches to Hangchow, broke her cables, and had an
alarming drive with the tide.
The literature ^ of the bore is brief, and for the most
part technical and scientific.
1 "Journal of the North China Branch Royal Asiatic Society,"
January, 1853. A paper by Dr. Maegowan.
"Journal of the North China Branch Royal Asiatic Society,"
Vol. XXIII, No. 3, 1888. " The Bore of the Tsien Tang Kiang,"
by Commodore W. Osborne Moore, R.N.
"Report on the Bore of the Tsien Tang Kiang" (1889),
" Further Report on the Bore of the Tsien Tang Kiang " (1893),
by W. O. Moore, R.N. Publications of the Admiralty Office.
''Journal of the Institute of Civil Engineers," 1893. Paper
by Commodore W. O. Moore, R.N.
" Annalen Hydrogi-aphie," Berlin, 1896, pp. 466-475. "Die
Sprungwelle in der Mundung der Tsien Tang Kiang."
"Century Magazine," October, 1898. "Bores," by G. H.
Darwin.
Milne's "Life in China," p. 295.
Moule's "New China and Old," pp. 44, 45, 279.
Fortune's " Residence among tlie Chinese," pp. 309, 316.
Wheeler's (W. H.) "Tidal Rivers," pp. 106-109.
Darwin's (G. H.) "The Tides," pp. 59-75.
Beresford's (Lord Charles) " Break-up of China," p. 344.
314 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIKE
The city of Haining offered us little of interest,
save the one clean and spacious temple to the local
genii, whose courts and passages were reached through
classic pailows, guarded by lackadaisical lions of Fo
grotesquely coquetting with the sacred jewels. There
are finely cut, stone-tracery windows, and quaint pa-
vilions with carved shrines, and a tine phenix-pan-
eled ceiling in the sanctuary which shelters the gilded
images. The names of Haining's successful candi-
dates at the great literary examinations are immortal-
ized here, but the treasure of interest to the foreign-
er's eye is a great stone chart, an imperishable map
of the bay and river cut in stone and set in the wall.
Some thousands of taels had recently been spent in
the restoration of this temple, from which emerges the
annual procession after the full of the second and
eighth moons, as at the similar temple in Hangchow,
when the officials and thousands of people assemble
at the bank to appease the spirit of the bore by prayers,
offerings of food, sham money, and treasures, accom-
panied by tens of thousands of fire-crackers. More an-
ciently the crossbowmen were called out and fired their
arrows at the advancing flood to drive it back, for the
Chinese know perfectly well what, or rather who, the
bore is.
It began, their most truthful records say, in the
fifth century B.C., when Prince Tsze-sii, of the state
or kingdom of Wu, offended the sovereign Fu-ch'a,
who sent him a sword. Tsze-sii obediently com-
mitted suicide, and liis body was thrown into the
river, as requested. He had promised that at dawn
and at dusk he would come on the tide to watch the
THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 315
fall and ruin of Wu, and the classics relate how the
great tides then came with " a wrathful sound, and the
swift rush of thunder and lightning could be heard
more than thirty li off." Tsze-sii's spirit is the god
of the great tide, and in recurrent rage, in revenge
and reprisal for the way he was abused in this world,
he revisits the scene to wash away banks, flood the
low country, and spread ruin around. " Then might
be seen in the midst of the tide-head, Tsze-sii sitting
in a funeral-car drawn by white horses. Whereupon
they built a temple to appease him with sacrifice." ^
Temples have been built in every town, and between
towns, along the river, to appease his wrath ; prayers
and sacrifice have been offered for these two thousand
odd years; every dynasty has conferred titles and
posthumous honors upon him and his ancestors ; im-
perial epistles have been read and thrown to him :
but it is all too late. Tsze-sii is a good hater, and a
iiw thousand years is a short time for a Chinese
ghost to cherish a grudge.
Tsze-sii's fearful wave has always been recognized
as a great sight, and when Bayan, the conquering
lieutenant of Genghis Khan, had captured Hangchow
and received the jade seal of the Sungs, he was taken
to the river-bank to see Tsze-sii go by, during the
third moon (April) in our year 1276 a.d.
Barring the damage and the restrictions to com-
merce, and the annual expense for fire-crackers, silk,
rice, and "joss-money," what a spectacular, sensa-
tional, splendid old custom Tsze-sii maintains un-
broken ! And if the Chinese had half the wit jthey
1 Translation by Bisliop Moule from the " Hsi-jui-ehi."
316 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
are credited with, how easily could the riverside recoup
itself for all loss and expenditures ! Fancy excursion-
trains to Haining; hired windows and balconies at
Bore View Hotel ; chartered junks for wild rides up
the river on the bore's back ; and midnight illumina-
tions by red fire when the moon failed ! Alas that
this money-coining, dividend-paying wonder could
not have happened to a thrifty Swiss canton, instead
of to the by-parts of Chekiang ! Surely in the next
century it will be different, and the bore will be set
to earning its own living, working machinery for
electric power, and gradually making payments on
the bill of damages running unpaid for two thousand
years ; and the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce, rec-
ognizing its obligations, the cause of Shanghai's trade
importance, will erect some monument or tablet to
Tsze-sii's spirit, who turned trade to the Wusung and
away from the Tsien-tang.
The embankments were built in the eighth and
tenth centuries, the stone-faced sea-wall in the four-
teenth century, and in the last century the Emperor
Kienlung spent the equivalent of some ten million
gold dollars on the embankments of the Tsien-tang,
A thousand coolies are continually at work repairing,
it is said. Even in these poor days of peculation and
decay, the public-works expenditures of the district
are tempting prizes to expectant tao-tais and magis-
trates who have passed the literary examinations.
The Tsien-tang ran low and still, sullenly, stealthily,
in its dying ebb to the sea on the great eighteenth
night. Thei-e was a thin mist on land and river, a
half-liaze over the moon, and unearthly chill drafts
THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 317
blew to us, as we sat straining our ears for a first
sound of our third and final bout with the bore on its
last great night of the year. We had heard it the
first night at 12 : 10, and the wave passed us at 12 : 50 ;
but this second midnight our better-educated ears
caught the faint murmur, the swelling undertone of
the sea, the thump, thump, thump of far-away overfalls
at 12 : 25, at the moment it must have formed in de-
fiant front against the swift river current off Chisan
headland, twelve miles away. There was an hour of
eager, fascinated listening as the great sea-prelude
increased in volume and rose to crescendo in a mighty
threnody. At 1 : 23 '^ the eager raised its horrid
crest," and with the deafening roar of ten thousand
pounding ore-stamps raged past in a great burst of
foam. Then the hiss of ten thousand serpents, a
swish and mighty ripples, and the tide had come in
again, and with it the strange, damp smell of the
under-sea. The bore was certainly greatest that night,
and one million seven hundred and fifty thousand tons
of water undoubtedly thundered past in each minute.
We could see it in the strange moonlight arching
higher toward the middle of the river, foaming whiter
over the platform where the junks lay waiting, and
its whole charge past with that unearthly roar was
more sensational and awe-inspiring than before. The
moon hung directly overhead as the crest of fury
passed the pagoda; a rocket and some sputtering
crackers told that the priests were doing their duty,
and immediately a pall of mist shut down upon us,
and ended the high water's great season night of that
year off Haining.
ni8 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
A friendly old junkman assured us again that these
autumn bores were the best, the greatest of the year ;
that the eighteenth nights of the eighth and ninth
moons were the dates for sensational bores, better even
than the eighteenth of the second moon, unless—
unless an easterly wind or a long storm were raging
outside. " Hai-ya ! " said the old fellow. '' The great-
est sight was three years ago [1893], at big tide of the
eighth moon. The wave came over this sea-wall, struck
the pagoda, and poured sea-water into the basin.
Many people were killed ; many junks broke away
and were lost, many were broken agafnst the stone
wall."
*' That was the year before you went to war with
the Japanese. It was a sign of bad luck." The
junker grunted disgust. '' Now if another big wave
conies and kills people and breaks junks, you may
know there will be another war, and those Manchus
will be driven out of Peking."
" That would be good," said the man of Ningpo,
and future visitors may learn whether that random
suggestion has crystallized into a good, serviceable
legend yet.
XXII
IN A PROVINCIAL YAMUN
[^NCE in the course of time, there came a
letter in exquisitely written characters
from a blue-buttoned official of secretly-
progressive and reform tendencies, in-
viting us to visit him in the gray, old
provincial city which he governed— a city which
shall be nameless. That was passport to what I
most wanted to see in China, but we had also double-
page passports with the neatly pinked seal of the
American consulate, and a smudge of red salve an-
swering for the official vermilion stamp of the con-
senting tao-tai of Shanghai, who besought for us safe
transit in search of health and feathered game down
the Grand Canal and vicinity, " in accordance with
the provisions of the treaty of Tientsin."
It was restful to move by sail and oar and tow-
rope, rather than play crack-the-whip behind a shriek-
ing, cinder-spitting fire-boat, and we floated away in
the afternoon, and were soothed asleep by the slow
thump of the big oars, the easy gurgle and swish of
water, and strange rappings below as beds of heavy-
17 319
320 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
topped water-plants slipped under the keel. The
sickly-sweet fumes of the opium-pipe arose, the oars
beat more slowly, and we were silently drawn in and
made fast to the bank while the faithless laota slept.
We wakened to find ourselves, not by the battle-
mented walls of the city, but still pursuing canals or
ditches across the same green prairie of rice- and
millet- and cotton-fields, of mulberry- and tallow-tree
plantations, with the same beautiful and quaint old
stone and marble bridges curving over the water-
ways. Long slabs of hewn stone laid on stone posts,
with a skeleton hand-rail to steady the wayfarers,
led over the smaller streams, and country folk trooped
over them, loops of little blue figures against the
bluest sky. At one cross-roads, where three bridges
arched across and pailow^s tottered, we landed to
enjoy better the details of all this picturesqueness.
We looked in one mud-walled, thatched farm-house
where people and pigs lived together in one greasy,
smoke-blackened room, with an earthen floor and the
fewest miserable furnishings. The owner, incrusted
with all the dirt of his lifetime, gave friendly greet-
ing, and four women and six children tumbled out to
look at us with the usual dumfounded, spellbound,
bewildered, and voiceless attention and interest. One
boy sat down on the grass to stare at his ease with
just the stolid, bovine, ruminant gaze of a water-buf-
falo, chewing the while a long stick of sorghum,
which was probably his only breakfast. The farmer
grubbed in his flooded bed of water-chestnuts and
found us a few ripe nuts, and his gratitude when we
gave a handful of casli in return was pathetic. A
IN A PKOVINCIAL YAMUN 321
duck-farmer came poling his way to fresh pastures,
surrounded by his docile flock, but at sight of the
strange figures on the high slab bridge, the duck-
farmer was spellbound, and the three hundred odd
birds took fright, quacked frantically, flapped their
wings, and fled up either bank in alarm. The shep-
herd of birds launched out the long bamboo with
which he was poling, and with the crook at the end
hooked a few ducks back through the air to the
water, gave some few exhortatory quacks himself,
and the recreants waddled back sullenly with angry
quackings to one another— the most diverting and
irresistibly funny thing ever ducks did.
Our sails, that staggered aloft on masts nearly as
tall as Colnmhitt's or Defender's, came down at each
bridge, the masts hinged back, and we just slipped
under, and then moved on across the level plain,
where other giant sails were moving in every direc-
tion on invisible waters. We came to the venerable,
gray, battlemented walls of our city, skirted all its
tip-tilted pagoda-towers of defense, afforded a water
pageant to its people, and were then hurried into
chairs and borne away through the same narrow
streets of all Chinese cities— the same signs, the same
shops, the same commodities for sale, the same arti-
sans and workmen pursuing their same occupations
as anywhere else in the land of eternal monotony.
Yamun servants had been sent to pilot our boats,
yamun runners dropped to our decks from the first
bridges to conduct the ceremonies of arrival, and our
own red-tasseled servant ran ahead of our chairs
with a yamun escort to present our red cards of
322 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
ceremony. We were all supposed to be illustrious
ofl&cial doctors, since that was the only plausible ex-
planation to be given to his people for such toleration
of barbarians by an august, blue-buttoned, jeweled
personage.
As the smart-stepping chair-bearers swung in
through the first great gate of the yamun, a long trap-
door window fell and disclosed six pipers who began a
furious tooting, and a retainer in a peaked hat fired
three pistol-shots as salute of honor. Tlie bearers
paced on through another gate to a second court,
where the yamun runners or retainers were drawn in
crooked lines of honor on either side, all arrayed in
the peaked hats and baggy coats of our sawdust ring.
The next gateway was closed, painted across with a
sensational red, green, and blue, fire-spitting, ball-
chasing dragon ; but the bearers walked on with the
same swift, measured tread as if they would batter
the gate open with the chair-poles or end our proces-
sion in a heap. At the moment the first pole was
about to touch the dragon panel, it parted, flew open
like magic, and we were borne through a third court-
yard lined up with retainers, through another magic
dragon gate into a fourth court, where our host, in
his best satins, and button, feather, and beads of oflB-
cial ceremony, stood with his staff to receive us,
shaking his own folded hands in the depths of his
gorgeous sleeves as we each emerged from the cur-
tained chrysalis of a sedan and returned his cordial
" Chin-ohiii " of welcome. He led the way to tlie great
hall, seated us at the blackwood tables ranged down
each side, and refreshed us with tea and sweetmeats,
IN A PROVINCIAL YAMUN 325
while he made the conventional inquiries as to our
health and the voyage.
Then the ladies were led to the last dragon gate,
which parted magically and brought us facing a solid
screen. We rounded it, and saw the pretty tableau of
the Tai-tai of the yamun and her seven young sons
ranged in a row before the bright-red curtain that
concealed the doorway of her own boudoir or living-
room. The Tai-tai stood on the tiniest of pointed
slippers, and from their tips to her throat she was a
mass of embroidered satins of brilliant, contrasting
colors. Full trousers and skirts, each heavily em-
broidered, and coat upon coat weighted the slender
figure, and her blue-black hair was almost concealed
with wing-like pieces, butterflies, pins, and clasps of
pearls. A string of finely cut ivory beads and phenix
plastrons on the back and front of her outer coat de-
clared her official quality, and the fine, pale-yellow face
was alight with an expression of pleasure that lent
emphasis to the cordial, soft-voiced greetings. An
attendant lifted the screen curtain, and she led us
into her lofty, stone-floored room, furnished with deep,
square, carved chairs and round center-table, and hung
with the gold-lettered red scrolls of holiday ornament.
Tea was brought, and the Tai-tai, swaying on her
stumps of feet, served each one with her own ivory
chop-sticks to fruits and cakes of many kinds. Then
sweet champagne, that had, unsuspected, been warm-
ing itself all morning in the sun on the fore-deck of
our boats, was served, and conversation through an in-
terpreter went on, a long dialogue of direct questions
and answers. Her seven sons, ranging from the in-
326 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
fant in arms to charming boys fourteen and sixteen
years of age, were introduced, these larger boys hav-
ing free range of the women's reserved quarter, and
not seeming out of place there in their long satin
robes. A cloud of maid-servants hovered about,
talked audibly, and seemed on a footing of perfect
equality.
We were shown the Tai-tai's bedroom, an adjoining
stone-floored apartment, with the same hard, carved
chairs and stiff tables along two walls, a mirror and
dressing-table before the window, and facing it a
monumental carved canopy or alcove-bed. The walls
were hung with more vermilion scrolls, and the bed
cornice, set with panels of "landscape marble," had
also coin trophies and tinsel charms hung there to
ward off evil spirits, framed pictures and j^oems to in-
vite and detain the good spirits. The bed was a hard
marble shelf with many thick blankets folded at the
farther side. Not a soft chair nor a floor-covering,
not a common comfort, as we consider such things,
was provided for this gentle, delicate, high-bred
woman, despite the considerable wealth of the family.
We were prompted to urge the hostess to lay aside
her outer official coat, easily fatiguing with its weight
of splendid trimming. We were told to urge again,
when it was put aside, and we continued to urge
until five successive garments had been doffed, and
the Tai-tai moved her slight shoulders and sighed
with relief; more wonder that she had not fainted
with their weight and warmth on that hot autumn
day. We were shown the wardrobe, a room hung
round with the common silk garments of every-day
IN A PROVINCIAL YAMUN 327
wear, piled high with the red trunks of her great
trousseau, and holding huge carved wardrobes where
the winter wardrobe and furred garments were stored.
Three maids had the care of these clothes; another
brought out baskets where tray below tray held the
Tai-tai's jewels ; and a fifth maid, the hair-dresser-in-
chief, without warning or bidding, whipped all the pearl
ornaments out of her mistress's hair, and showed us the
effect of the different filigree, jade, kingfisher-feather,
and other sets of ornaments in turn. The autumn
edict from Peking had just turned all the chair-covers
in the yamun to their red winter side, put different
hats on master and retainers, and relegated the Tai-
tai's jade ornaments to obscurity until the spring edict
should allow summer jewelry to be worn again.
There was one dazzling arrangement in hair-dressing
where silver, tinsel, and artificial flowers were massed
in coronals almost as becoming as the Manchu coif-
fure, but it was not etiquette for that to remain, and
the pearl wings and pins were replaced.
The master came for a short call, a remote twinkle
to be seen in his eye as he noted the commotion and
clatter of the women servants at his daring intrusion
when strange women were there. He had but just
left the harem when shouts were heard beyond the
gate, and from behind the great screen curtain we
saw the feet of chair-bearers deposit sedans and de-
part. A Chinese lady in ceremonial dress was as-
sisted out, received just within the red curtain, and
duly presented to us as the magistrate's wife. The
whole harem conversation was repeated for her over
again— ages, children, servants, diseases, clothes, the
328 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
eternal feminine, tea-party topics of all countries.
Our strange garments and huge feet amused them,
but we talked to them rather as one would talk to
nice children ; for these aristocrats of the south were
of far different mold from our old Manchu Tai-tai
in Peking, she with the ready questions concerning
the X-rays.
"We had had two rounds of tea and sweets in wel-
come at eleven o'clock, another round at twelve, a
fourth when this visitor came, a light luncheon at
one, and tea yet again at two o'clock. The two ladies
fell away in a little chat of their own, and we looked
at albums of paintings the master had sent in. The
ladies were plainly discussing us, but otherwise, on
other days, yesterday or last week, what did they have
to talk about, these helpless, crippled women with
their scores of maids, spending all their lives on the
hard chairs, hard beds, and hard floors in these cheer-
less rooms, looking on stone courts and blank walls ?
Without exercise, incidents, books, occupation, or any
social excitements save these stilted visits in closed
sedans, it seemed a dreary prison life at best, and the
oppressive idea made us long to escape from the
harem's walls.
We sent a note to the outer masculine world, and
the raspberry-satin-clad son of the house came and
whispered the English message given the little par-
rot : " Foreign ladies please come my side " ; and we
promptly fled down a side passage that encircled the
outer edges of the court to the master's apartments.
It was the men servants then who were flustered at
such an unexpected irniption, at such an unknown,
IN A PROVINCIAL YAMUN 329
irregular proceeding as women visitors penetrating
to the master's inner sanctum. But we felt more at
home there, and found much more to talk about than
in the harem circle. Our host was visibly wasted
and shrunken, relieved of six or eight coats of honor
at his guests' insistence. Besides his own consider-
able treasures, his friends had lent him their choice
pieces for the day, and the black tables were covered
with bronzes, porcelains, and some charming bits of
Sung pottery. There was a terrestrial globe and
enough foreign books and seditious scientific prints
from the Shanghai Society for the Diffusion of Chris-
tian and General Knowledge to have sent him to the
block in Peking. We had some hope for China when
we saw this official pursuing such studies under such
apparent difficulties ; but less hope when we learned
that these books belonged to the other guest of the
day, a man educated abroad with the intention of
serving his government afterward indefinitely, but
recalled and virtually punished by being kept wait-
ing in idleness, eating his heart out in that provin-
cial town where everything was alien and unfriendly.
Without hope of honors or employment, and always
in danger of being persecuted or denounced to the
yamun by malicious literati, it was a wonderful
chance for him when he found the new governor
sympathetic and interested in every new and for-
eign idea. Political history and economics, Henry
George's theory of land ownership and taxation,
railroad-building and electrical engineering, had
been the topics in the governor's study all morning.
When that worthy welcomed us, he discoursed as
330 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
connoisseur upon the old bits of carved Soochow
lacquer laid out, and mourned with us that the lovely
Foochow lacquers were so sadly falling off in this
decade, with this last generation descended from
that artisan who learned the art of lacquer while a
captive in Japan in Koxinga's time.
The Raspberry Boy and his brother the Blue Boy
took us for a turn in the fantastic garden of the ya-
mun, all rockwork, bridges, and summer-houses with
moon and fan windows, abutting on the battlemented
city wall, and we returned to the women's quarters
for the four-o'clock dinner, the feast to which all
the little nibbles and sips of the day had been fore-
runners. It began and ended with tea, and the little
plates of hors d'oeuvres, watermelon-seeds, pickled
almonds, salted peanuts, and mysteries, remained by
us to the end. A preliminary bowl of shark-fin soup
with egg-curd was followed by shreds of fried duck,
and then came pigeon-egg stew, from whose depths
my chop-sticks brought up thin bits of mountain
mushrooms. There were bacon fritters, as far as
hasty analysis could determine, another sort of stew
with mushrooms, fried chicken, almond-cream cus-
tard, a steamy sponge-cake, a stew of Japan shell-
fish, fresh fish fried, bird's-nest stew, sweet olives,
another soup, another fish combination stew, a deadly
pastry, innumerable sweets and fruits and nuts,
and the final cup of tea. The rice-bowls were kept
full all the time as a running aecomj)animent to
the successive courses, and warm champagne was
poured in full bumpers. The Chinese visitor set the
convivial example by lifting her glass, giving the
IN A PROVINCIAL YAMUN 331
conventional toast in a " Chin-chin Tai-tai ! " and
then clinked glasses round, the Chinese ladies evi-
dently enjoying the warm, sickly-sweet stuff. Tow-
els wrung out in hot water were passed at intervals
in lieu of finger-bowls, and the chattering maids
fanned us assiduously.
When the Raspberry Boy announced that our chairs
were waiting, we made long-drawn and profuse
adieus, and bestowed largess on all the servants —
strings of cash rolled in red paper; the same gifts
were made to our small following, and a roll of silk
wrapped in red paper was sent to the boats for each
guest. The Tai-tai had slipped into her official coat
and beads to bid us adieu, and stood again in tableau
against the red curtain, smiling and shaking her own
hands.
In the next court we made formal speeches, and
took leave of our host, a bulky figure again in all
his layers of coats, shaking his own hands within
his big sleeves, and thanking us in most correct
phrases for the honor of the visit. As the sedans
were carried out, the courts were again lined with
retainers, the trap-door fell again, the Jack-in-the-
box pipers piped, and the gunner fired three times.
The landing-place was blue with people, a silent,
motionless, stonily staring multitude. "We skirted
the walls at the sunset hour, and were soon in the
water mazes of the flat, green plain. Country folk
trooped along the banks and over the bridges ; weary
work-folk rested by their doors or ate in strangely
lighted interiors. A din and thumping on shore
called us from the dinner-table to see a festival pro-
332 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
cession filing alongshore and up over an invisible
bridge, huge round glow-worms of lanterns moving
against the stars and darkness above, and among the
reflected stars in the water below. Poor, forlorn,
dirty, decrepit old China seemed then a land all pictur-
esqueness and charm— so much could darkness and a
few lanterns do for this pathetic old wreck of an
empire.
The next night we dined and danced at a house in
Slianghai suburbs, that might as well have been in
London suburbs, save for the rustling, blue-silk
servants. The company and the talk were cosmopoli-
tan, the gowns Parisian, and the day in the yamun
seemed a half-memory of something that had hap-
pened years ago, the yamun itself more than ten
thousand miles away instead of only a few leagues
off in the cocoon country of Chekiang,
XXIII
THE LOWER YANGTSZE
HE Yangtsze-kiang, the Great Muddy-
River of China, which, by a faulty tra-
cing of the Chinese characters represent-
ing it, has enjoyed such poetic English
equivalents as " Son of the Ocean " and
" Child of the Sea," is one of the greatest rivers, and
its valley the most densely populated and closely cul-
tivated river basin of the globe.
Rising in northern Tibet, on the Roof of the World,
this " Girdle of China " crosses the whole empire in its
three-thousand-mile course to the sea, touching nine
of the richest provinces, draining and giving commu-
nication through a region more than six hundred
miles wide, a basin of six hundred thousand square
miles, with a population estimated at one hundred
and eighty millions. All of British diplomacy is alert
to protect British trade in this her '' inalienable
sphere of influence," to maintain the ancient trade
route to India, Burma, and Tibet against French de-
signs on Yun-nan— the Yangtsze valley a Far Eastern
storm-center, with a future Fashoda somewhere in its
length.
3:53
334 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
The Yangtsze has a different name in almost every
province, and pours a flood of diluted mud through
half its valley, tingciug the ocean for more than a
hundred miles offshore into the really Yellow Sea.
It has built up the plain of Hu-peh within historic
times, and in five hundred years has made the
thirty-mile-long Tsung-ming Island, opposite Wusung,
whose fertile fields support an incredible population.
The tide is felt three hundred miles above the Yang-
tsze's mouth ; it is navigable for one thousand eight
hundred and sixty miles, and is never closed by ice.
It is called the '' River of Fragrant Tea-fields," since
that plant, as well as the bamboo, grows from Yun-
nan to the sea ; while poppy-fields cover great areas
in Szechiian, the mulberry flourishes everywhere, and
orange-groves in the gorges suj)ply the lower ports.
When the snows melt in Tibet and the monsoon pours
its annual flood on the watershed, the Yangtsze rises
eighty and one hundred feet at Chungking, seventy
and eighty feet at Ichang, and forty and fifty feet at
Hankow, sweeping in a fierce flood from June to
October, and then falling as rapidly as a foot a day.
The British besieged and took some of the cities of
the Lower Yangtsze in the opium war, and in the
treat}'' of Tientsin (1861) the ports of the lower river
were opened to foreign trade, the upper ports being
opened by the Chefoo convention (187G) and the treaty
of Shimonoseki (1895). A fleet of river and ocean
steamers maintains communication between Shanghai
and Hankow, six hundred miles from the sea, above
which point smaller river steamers ply regularly to
Ichang, a thousand miles from the sea. Although
THE LOWER YANGTSZE 335
the right of steam-navigation over the fourteen hun-
dred miles to Chungking was conceded at Shimono-
seki, Chinese obstinacy and conservatism prevented
its fulfilment until March, 1898, three months after
which all the internal waterways were open to for-
eign vessels.
The large river steamers time their leaving Shang-
hai so that they may pass the dangerous shoals and
quicksands of Lang Shan Crossing, above Tsung-
ming Island, by daylight and with a favorable tide.
Leaving Shanghai after midnight, our steamer, the
WganMng, was well into the broad river by break-
fast-time ; but, with the Yangtsze there seventeen
miles wide, it was long before shores or any landscape
features appeared. Then a pagoda showed on a dis-
tant islet, a line of green hills approached the river,
and pagodas, forts, batteries, and long-running walls
stood out against backgrounds of intense green, for-
tifications mounted with ten- and twelve-inch Krupp
guns at the time of the war with Japan. It was a
mild, soft, gray November day, half rainy, half misty,
the air sodden and saturated with the depressing
dampness of eastern Asia, typical Yangtsze weather.
The steamer whistled as it neared a cluster of build-
ings at a creek's mouth, and large, flat-bottomed
boats, with passengers and freight crowded indis-
criminately together, came out and made fast to the
steamer's guards. All this way-cargo, living and in-
animate, tumbled or was tumbled in pell-mell, with
uniform celerity and unconcern, joining a confused
half-acre of the same damp, dirty, ill-favored, ill-
smelling boxes, bags, mats, and people. There were
336 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
the same unpleasant type of countenances commonest
at Shanghai, the same greasy blue cotton or glazed
calico clothes seen everywhere in the unsavory em-
pire, the same frightful monotony of life and charac-
ter among this least attractive people of earth. The
cargo and passengers destined for the creek-side land-
ing were hurled into the flatboats with as little cere-
mony, with the bells ringing and the boat in motion
before the last pig-tailed parcel had been shoved off.
The Nganking churned on through the long, damp,
dreary afternoon, boat-loads of common cargo and
common people tumbling off and on the steamer as it
swung to in the stream before each town.
The lower deck was packed with chattering crea
tures, smoking, eating, sleeping, gambling among and
over their heterogeneous belongings— eight hundred
of these yellow beings herded in a space not sufficient
for two hundred white emigrants on the other side
of the globe, a most profitable live cargo, moved
without handling or feeding or risks. The Xgan-
li')ig\^ spacious, spotless upper deck and cabins fur-
nished all the comforts, latest improvements, and
gilded splendors one could wish to find on Hud-
son or Mississippi River boats ; electric lights, lux-
urious upholstery, a piano, potted palms, scattered
books and magazines, and a well-served table secur-
ing one's content. Eternal thrift, the total want
of any fastidious taste or senses, a camaraderie and
equality, a true democracy and fraternity, unseen
elsewhere, often move even rich and official Chi-
nese to herd with the commoners on the steerage-
deck— or send their families there : for I once saw a
THE LOWER YANGTSZE 337
Chinese admiral sprawling at his ease on the silken
cabin sofas, while his wives and children went in the
crowded promiscuity of the steerage. Unbounded
disgust is felt by foreign captains, Chinese stewards,
and menials when mandarins appear in the first
cabin, with their water- and opium-pipes, tribes of
servants, and mountains of small baggage. Rules
of conduct in conspicuous Chinese text are unheeded,
and nothing can prevent their bringing on their own
greasy and malodorous foods, which they strew over
rich carpets, curtains, and couches as unconcernedly
as on a yamun's stone floor.
Unfortunately, it was dark when we passed through
the narrow channel by Silver Island and saw the
lights of Chinkiang twinkling on a hillside and far
along the river-bank ; for this is one of the picturesque
parts of the river, with two landscape ornaments of
sacred islands that have been favorite themdS for
poets, painters, and gem-carvers for centuries. Silver
Island (Tsiao Shan) and Golden Island (Kin Shan),
which lie off Chinkiang, are both abrupt rock masses
which Buddhism sanctified and beautified in the long-
ago. Both islands were covered with temples, tow-
ers, terraces, and carved gateways ; both were visited
by Ming and Manchu emperors ; and the sounds of
gong and bell and chanting priests were continuous.
In Marco Polo's time there were two hundred priests
on Silver Island, and Golden Island was the depository
of an imperial library, the only similar book collec-
tions being at Peking and Haugchow. Old pictures,
precious jade, crystal and ivory carvings, show in
miniature what the sacred islands were, for to-day
18
338 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
they are desolate and in ruins. British forces occu-
pied Golden Island during the siege of Chinkiaiig in
1842, and it is to be regretted that one of the British
officers did not carry out his intention of sending the
library to the British Museum, since those books and
the library at Hangchow were later destroyed by the
Taiping rebels. The Taipings destroyed temples,
shrines, and sacred groves, wreaking their wrath
more especially upon Silver Island, because the priests
had sheltered an imperial official there. After that
the American consul secured the island's immunity
by establishing his residence there, and the "■ flowery
flag " or " gaudy banner," as Chinese call our in-
tricate arrangement of colored stripes and pointed
spots, flew from the sacred summit until ruined and
desolate Chinkiang was freed from the rebels. Dur-
ing the war with Japan, batteries were mounted again,
and all sacredness would seem to have fled, A few
priests maintain a tradition of Buddhism, but the
grottoes and niches and groves no longer shelter saints
and hermits attempting buddhahood, and even the
cave temple of the river-god who checks floods and
rains has lost vogue in this day of dilapidation and
disillusionment.
Chinkiang has always enjoyed commercial impor-
tance from its position at the junction of the Grand
Canal and the Yangtsze. Besieged and bombarded
by the Britisii in 1842, captured by the Taiping rebels
in 1853, and recaptured by the imperialists in 1857,
the city was only a waste space of ruins wlien opened
to foreign trade in 1858. As population gathered it
was rebuilt, trade increased, and there was monoto-
THE LOWER YANGTSZE 339
nous prosperity until one of those insensate anti-
foreign riots occurred in 1889, the mob attacking,
looting, and destroying all the foreign buildings save
the Catholic mission, and driving the foreign resi-
dents to some cargo-hulks, where they defended
themselves until taken off by gunboats. By one of
those fortunate accidents that just save our foreign
service now and then, the United States consul at
Chinkiang was a veteran in consular and Eastern
service, whose courage and sturdy Americanism were
a match for the wiles of the tao-tai, or local governor,
who had short orders from Peking to settle for the
damage wrought. Other consuls accepted minimum
sums for their losses, and obliged their countrymen
to do the same ; but General Jones stood for ample
indemnity or none, and the meekness of the other
consuls in accepting any trifle " for peace' sake," and
" lest it embarrass trade relations," only added fuel
to his ire. The tao-tai made several visits and specious
pleas, without General Jones abating one cash of his
first demand ; and meanwhile Peking inquired of the
tao-tai : " Have you settled with those foreign devils
yet? " " Why don't you pay those claims at once ? "
etc. The ''river" was convulsed with accounts of
General Jones's encounters with the mercenary tao-
tai, and of that final scene where the bluff and belli-
cose American, advancing with uplifted forefinger,
thundered at the tao-tai: " You, sir, are the tao-tai
of Chinkiang" (every word fraught with superb
scorn and contempt), " while I, I, sir, am the Ameri-
can Consul ! " This, delivered with a swelling breast,
a magnificent. New- World, broad-continent gesture.
340 CHIJsA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
the mien and voice of Jove, made the trembling tao-tai
turn pale green and cease his haggling. General Jones
received his full indemnity, and from that time en-
joyed more consideration and influence among the
Chinese than any other foreigner on the river. A
General Jones in every port, and a dozen of his dou-
bles to represent the great but feeble powers at Pe-
king, would have awakened China long ago, and
possibly prevented the sad collapse, the cool dismem-
berment of the moribund empire that we see to-day.
As this kindly old Virginia gentleman, with a person-
ality as lovable and truly Southern as that of the im-
mortal Colonel Carter of Cartersville, was one of the
oldest, ablest, most experienced and efficient American
consuls in China or the East, he was the most promptly
removed by the new administration in 1897 ; but before
his successor could arrive and relieve him of office and
honors, the rare old soul *' thanked the world " and
went where spoilsmen, '' plums," and office-seekers
could never rout him more. The many picturesque
incidents of his life in Japan and China have passed
into the fixed traditions of the East, where an unend-
ing procession of American consuls have come and
gone in quadrennial relays without the whole pass-
ing company making the same impress on their times
as did this one competent and intensely American
consul.
The Grand Canal, which leads southward from
Chinkiang to the rich cities of Soochow and Hang-
chow and the great silk districts of Cliina, continues
noi'tlnvard from the opposite bank of the Yangtsze
to the walls of Peking. The disastrous floods of the
THE LOWER YANGTSZE 341
Yellow River have rendered parts of the canal use-
less, and the tribute rice, the silks of the south, the
tea, and the porcelain do not all go to Peking by
that route now. Steamships convey those products
to Tientsin, and the imperial red rice-boats maintain
some show of their old importance as they creep up
the Pei-ho to the imperial granaries of the capital.
A German railway from Tientsin to Chinkiang may
soon parallel the canal. Twelve miles within the
Grand Canal's entrance, the great city of Yangchow,
which Marco Polo governed, conceals its ancient
walls and a population estimated at from three hun-
dred thousand to seven hundred thousand. It is a
greater city than Chinkiang, a city of great riches
and pride, of fine temples and shops, the home of re-
tired scholars and oificials and of the keenest and
most critical bargainers in all China— an unspoiled
paradise to the cui'io-hunter.
The hills rise to mountains between Chinkiang
and Nanking, where the river breaks through a geo-
logic barrier, and besides the attractive scenery there
is much game in the region. Wild-boar hunts over
the harvested fields tempt Shanghai sportsmen every
autumn, and the peasant proprietors even welcome
foreigners who rid them of the formidable animals.
Nanking, the southern capital of the Ming emper-
ors, and, until Taiping times, a center of arts and
luxury, literature and learning, stands back from the
river-bank, and one sees only its encircling walls and
the waste hillside it incloses within its protective bar-
rier. A modern fort and barracks front the river-bank,
but a carriage-road, where jinrikishas ply, leads five
342 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
miles back to the main city gate. The Taiping rebels,
who started from Kuangsi in 1850, destroyed in turn
all the cities of the Yangtsze, and held their infamous
court at Nanking for ten years before yielding to the
''Ever-victorious Army," which, raised and drilled
by the American adventurers Ward and Burgevine,
was finally commanded by the English Major Gor-
don. While Hung-siu-tsuen, the " Heavenly Prince,"
reigned at Nanking, liis troops were arrayed in the
plundered silks of the rich cities near, and they
reveled in loot and license. They destroyed the
great white porcelain pagoda of Nanking, the most
beautiful tower in China. The mad extravagance of
the Taiping court, the ruthless destruction of myriad
smaller works of art, make the tourist groan as
he prowls among the rubbish and junk of its curio-
shops, and hears of courtyards strewn with powder
and fragments of porcelain, jade, and crystal, of pic-
tures and hangings trodden in mire and deluged
with the blood of the slaughtered.
American missionaries maintain schools and a hos-
pital, and a university for the higher education of
Chinese j^outh; and the viceroy, who could never
spare a cash for such innovations, maintains a naval
school, batteries of Krupp guns, and a military estab-
lishment where German instructors vainly tried to
teach the Chinese how to shoot and march. The
Prussian drill-sergeants were so freely and frequently
mobbed, stoned, and driven from the parade-ground
tliat a perpetual object-lesson in civil war reigned at
the garrison, until the foreign officers resigned. Yet
we read and we read of the Yellow Peril, of the inex-
LITTLE OKPHAN ISLAND, IN THE YAXGTSZE BELOW LAKE I'OYANG.
THE LOWER YANGTSZE 345
haustible recruiting-ground that China offers, of the
millions, of the masses of raw material of armies that
wait only for foreign leadership !
For another day of travel up-stream, the Yangtsze
flowed between green hills, the river-bed bordered with
giant reeds ripened to a rich dull yellow and harvested
by blue-clad farmers, who poled Lilliputian boats in
among stalks twelve, fifteen, and twenty feet high.
Junks with dark-brown butterfly sails made pictures
on the oily brown river that cut through the East
and "West Pillar Hills, which form the Gates of the
Yangtsze, abrupt heights carrying picturesque forts
and walls.
On the third morning we had reached the scenic
stretch of the Lower Yangtsze, and a marvelously clear,
soft, rain-washed atmosphere, flooded with early yel-
low sunlight, made every contour and color-tint tell.
Quaint farm-houses beneath spreading trees, ancestral
tombs like small temples, black cattle browsing on
green meadows or wandering beside gigantic reeds,
made pleasing pictures of rural China. There were
mountains on each side, and where the river came
through a narrow gorge the pinnacle rock of the Lit-
tle Orphan (Siau-ku-Shan) stood in the midst of the
river, a fantastic two-story pagoda topping the cliff
that rose sheer three hundred feet from the water. A
great stretch of '' chow-chow water" about a rocky
point drew flocks of birds to fish in the swift, white-
capped stream, and a few gorged and sleepy cormo-
rants blinked by their nests on the Little Orphan's
sides. The steeper front of this islet facing up-stream
is built over with temples and monastery walls, which
346 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
fit into the great rock mass as if a part of it, red bal-
conies and roofs fiu-nishiug the one high note of color.
The season's high- water mark is traced in a muddy-
band at the base of this tiny Mount St. Michel, and
one with difficulty picks out the lines of staircases and
galleries cut in the rock, by which the lone friars
mount to their aery. The shrines are neglected and
dilapidated, the priests few and poor, and although
once richly endowed by an emperor's mother, with
souvenir poems cut in the everlasting limestone as
record of illustrious and contributing visitors, reve-
nues are now scant and votaries far between.
Legends cling as thickly as the vines around this
picturesque rock which Buddhism beautified in the
early centuries. Tradition tells of a woman swept
away in a flood and cast on this rock, who pei'force
remained, fed by attendant cormorants, until pious
river folk, regarding hers as a holy life, souglit the
orphan's intercession with the gods. Another tells of
a whole family drowned by a capsized boat, save two
small children, whom a big frog put on his back and
swam away with toward Lake Poyang. The little
orphan, grieving and comfortless, threw himself from
the frog's back and was drowned, afterward rising as
this solid rock memorial in the river gorge. The
other orphan, grieving at his second loss, leaped from
the frog's back as he entered Lake Poyang, and the
Big Orphan Island stands as his monument. More
fanciful still is the legend of the lone fisherman, who,
diving for a lost anchor, found a river-nymph asleep
on its fluke. Stealing her tiny shoes, he rudely tripped
the anchor and sailed away for Lake Poyang. The
THE LOWER YANGTSZE 347
angry naiad pursued him, and he threw back one
slipper, which turned to stone on the spot. The naiad
still pursuing, he threw away the other shoe, which
shows in mammoth outlines as the Shoe Rock of Ad-
miralty charts.
The provinces of Anhui and Kiangsi meet on the
south shore of the Little Orphan Gorge, and twenty
miles beyond one looks down a narrow water-corri-
dor to Lake Poyang, the tapering mass of Big Or-
phan Island finished with a fine needle of .a pagoda
filling the middle distance. The city of Hu-kau, or
*' Lake's Mouth," a picturesque, red-roofed and white-
walled, almost Spanish-looking place, balances on the
edge of steep cliffs, at the base of which flows the
river of clear water from the lake. A fine old yamun
and fort at the edge of the town, and a fortified monas-
tery, with rows of ascending and overlapping gables
and roofs and walls, held by a truculent, swash-buck-
ling company of priests to whom all river folk give a
wide berth and bad name, tempt a visit for the sake
of the picturesque ; but not the customs commissioner
at Kiukiang, nor any European there, had ever vis-
ited Hu-kau or the militant monks, to tell me any
more.
Beyond the clear river. Lake Poyang stretched
away in placid blue and pearly distance, a mirage of
islands showing in remotest azure. " I spread my
sail to enter on the mirror of the sky," sighed Li
Tai Peh, and there are poets' groves and classic vales
along the lake more celebrated in verse than any
other in China. It is a sacred lake, too, with state
worship paid its spirits, sacrifices and offerings made
348 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
when the Emperor's annual epistle to the genius of
the lake is read and burned at the chief temple.
The choicest tea districts of China slope from its
shores and tributaries, and the great potteries of
King-te-chen have their port and market at Jao-
chau, on the east shore of Poyang. The potteries,
forty-five miles up the river from Jao-chau, date from
earliest times, the famous imperial factories estab-
lished by the Ming emperors in the sixteenth century
being but a small ward in the great industrial city
of a half-million people that stretched for three miles
along its river-bank. All the materials for porcelain-
making, the kaolin and petuntze, exist in the hills
about the city, which for centuries was one of the four
great marts of China. Chinese records tell of and Jes-
uit priests have written of King-te-chen in its days of
greatness, when inspired workmen were producing the
pieces which have been the delight and despair of the
Western world for three centuries, Dresden, Sevres,
and Delft factories being founded only to imitate them.
With the rapid decay of all the arts, the utter and
complete degeneration of the Chinese people in this
century, the standards of King-te-chen had fallen
low, when the destruction of the city and wholesale
slaughter of the potters by the Taiping rebels gave
the death-blow to the ceramic art in China. Although
King-te-chen has been partly rebuilt and work re-
sumed at some five hundred kilns, the wares are of
the most common and vulgar sort, coarse travesties
of the miracles of beauty and skill that used to come
from its furnaces.
The Jesuits visited the potteries freely for two
THE LOWER YANGTSZE 351
centuries, often by imperial command, and many
triumphs of the kiln — the wonderful "rose of gold"
{famille rose) tints and the intense, clear ruby-red
glaze of the later sang-de-bceuf, all known as " mis-
sionary colors"— -were due to their advice. P^re
d'EntrecoUes, in the " Lettres Edifiantes," described
King-te-chen at the height of its greatness, with de-
tails of the processes employed, for the benefit of the
Sevres workmen.
King-te-chen people are rough and unruly, vexing
their mandarins out of all reason, striking and rioting
at all seasons, and giving hostile reception to any
stranger who may show his head. A few years ago a
Boston and an Australian tourist went up to the pot-
teries in winter and had an interesting visit without
molestation; but when M. Scherzer, the late French
consul at Hankow, attempted to visit King-te-chen,
at the request of his government, in the interests of
the national factory at Sevres, every obstruction was
put in his way before and after starting. The pro-
vincial officials warned him of the ugly and hostile
spirit of the rough potters, of the assaults and indig-
nities sure to befall him, and insisted that he should
visit the factories in a closed chair at night. Even
then he was stoned and roughly used before he got
away, the whole demonstration arranged by the man-
darins to discourage foreigners from visiting interior
towns. During strikes of the potters in 1896, troops
were called out to settle the differences between labor
and capital, and there was great loss of life before the
unruly ones could be made to return to their work.
The great trade route to southern China ascends
352 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
the river at the head of the lake and crosses over the
Mei-ling or Plum-blossom Pass, "the throat of the
north and south of China," and seems as well used
now as in earlier days before open ports and steam-
navigation. This overland route to Canton offers a
most attractive house-boat and walking tour to a
traveler, but, save for Abbe Hue and the missionaries,
few Europeans have attempted it. In the great days
of the East India Company, and when Canton was
the only port open to foreign trade, the black tea and
the choicest green teas went that way from Anhui
and Kiangsi. Until 1898 steam-navigation was pre-
vented from resorting to Lake Poyang, and the offi-
cials refused to allow steam-launches to tow junks or
rafts on the sqiially and dangerous lake, lest cargoes
reach their destination too quickly and ^' spoil busi-
ness"— the governor at Nanchang keeping a steam-
launch himself, however, to tow his own house-boats
and his timber-rafts. The Detroit, U. S. N., made a
tour of the lake during the high water of 1896, creat-
ing the greatest sensation among simple rustics and
irate officials. Free navigation of all internal water-
ways was officially conceded in 1898, but the mandarins
are passed masters in the art of delaying and blocking.
XXIV
THE RIVER OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS
^lUKIANG, in the shadow of the lion bulk
of Lien-shan, is four hundred and forty-
five miles from Shanghai, and presents a
long gray crenelated wall to the river,
along the bank of which continues the
foreign settlement, with its broad bund, its rows of
shade-trees, the imposing French mission buildings,
consulates, important hongs or mercantile houses, and
residences.
It suffered sadly in Taiping times, but has recovered
and become again the green-tea and porcelain mart
of the river. From the floating hulk, from which one
lands, the bund is lined to the city gates with peddlers
crouched behind their baskets of cheap porcelain, hide
ous things in form and color, unpleasant to sight and
touch, the bargains, rejects, and refuse lots of King-
te-chen kilns. Shops within the city show the same
screaming atrocities in pigments and glaze, shameful
travesties of the old designs, woeful debasements of
uncomprehended European ideas. There are attempts
at imitations of old wares that make one long for a
353
354 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
destroying hammer— liawtliorn pieces whose crude
blue is that of the street-dyers' dirtiest indigo wash ;
medallion bowls whose thick, painty yellow is far from
the pure jonquil tints of even Tao Kwang's time;
would-be coral reds that are dingy brick-dust hue, and
smudgy reds that are far removed from the old pitted,
clotted sang-de-bceufs or the later pure ruby-red Jesuit
glaze, the glory of the eighteenth century at King-te-
chen. Of new ideas there are snuff -bottles, small tea-
pots, and pieces for the writing-table molded in relief,
with a pale, poison-green glaze, a related yellow, and an
unhappy blue that are color novelties due to European
laboratories, cheap imported pigments having helped
on the ceramic degradation of King-te-chen. There
are a few careful counterfeiters of the old wares work-
ing somewhere in King-te-chen, but the nearer one
gets to their workrooms the less is known of this fraud-
ulent art, as their output does not seek the local mar-
ket, but goes to dealers in Shanghai, Peking, and Hong-
kong, where in silk-lined teak-wood boxes it catches
the European eye. The cleverest approaches to old
King-te-chen's triumphs are those made in Japan, the
souls of certain old Ming and early Manchu master
potters reincarnated in those wizard ceramists at Ota
and Kioto.
To visit King-te-chen and see even the decay of its
great art was the definite errand I had set myself in
China that year; but the nearer I drew to King-te-
chen, the vaguer the whole subject grew. The hideous
china-shops in Kiukiang told little that one wanted to
know, and Kiukiang shopkeepers seemed to know less.
There were no serious amateurs of porcelain among
THE KIVER OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 355
the foreign residents, but the resident physician, the
one most interested in ancient art, who found his
delight in bronzes, admitted having acquired a few
plates by accident. I shall not soon forget the effect
on that dreary day when I passed from his hallway,
filled with interesting bronzes, and the opening of the
drawing-room door was like a burst of sunshine— a
drawing-room the wall-spaces of which glowed with
great plates and plaques of imperial yellow, each disk
a glory of the purest daffodil glaze, manufactured
during this or the preceding Emperor's reign, and
showing that the achievements of King-te-chen could
be repeated when the Emperor wills.
" Yes, you can go to King-te-chen, if you are help-
lessly bent on it," said the kindly doctor. '' You must
have a special passport and a military escort from the
viceroy, and he will take weeks to grant it, and then
send word ahead to have you scared off; and the
escort will probably alarm you enough at sight. How-
ever, you could get a junk here, and with a hulk-man
from one of the hongs to be responsible for the crew,
you would be safe enough to Jao-chau, where the
French mission and convent would take you in. The
priests can give you every information, get you a guide
and small boat for the river trip ; but the potters are
a very bad lot. There is little to see, and they won't
let you see it — that is, see it peaceably and intelli-
gently, as you might expect to see potteries in Japan.
The game is not worth the candle. Take my advice
and stay away. Come with me to the American mis-
sion, and maybe the ladies there can arrange for you
to visit the yamun of the official who has transmitted
356 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
the Peking orders to the potteries and passed upon
all the imperial palace porcelains for these thirty
years. His yamun is crammed with porcelains, and
he could tell you more about King-te-chen than you
could find out by going there."
It was a long, chilly ride across town to the mis-
sion, through a labyrinth of narrow streets where men
in high boots with hobnailed soles clamped noisily
over the flagstones, holding up their skirts with both
hands, and wearing flannel hoods that fell in long
capes over their shoulders. Waste places told where
some temple or yamun had stood before the Taipings'
sad havoc. When we reached the mission, the one
who knew the porcelain mandarin's family best was
absent, and in any event it would have been a matter
of days to arrange to visit the wives of the family and
talk ceramics to the master, who annually orders and
critically inspects some forty thousand taels' worth of
porcelains, made for the Peking palace. The wives
of this ceramic grandee were not to be called upon
without warning b}^ any casual stranger, nor in hap-
hazard quarter-hours by any old friend, either. Time
must be given to prepare tilings in the women'.s quar-
ter; time to smoke and drink tea with the idea; time
for the women to have their hair built up in elaborate
designs and their best clothes donned— a dozen suc-
cessive layers of best clothes, so that they may gra-
ciously comply with a visitor's insistence that the
hostess shall lay aside her top-coat of ceremony, and
comply again and again until she is peeled of tlie dozen
layers of silk, brocade, satin, and crape. Steamers
and seasons may come and go, but Chinese etiquette
THE RIVER OP FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 357
demands time, and more time ; and so I never saw the
glories of that yamun, what models and duplicates of
imperial porcelains were hoarded there, the rejected
pieces with imperceptible flaws and imaginary defects,
and all the private imperial marks.
The foreign settlement of Kiukiang is one of the
many " ovens of China," the thermometer often mark-
ing 102° and 107°, and this heat continuing in a heavy,
motionless, damp, and exhausting atmosphere for
days at a time during the midsummer weeks, when
commercial life is busiest. The tea season opens at
the end of April, and the choicest teas of all China,
growing in the hilly regions around Lake Poyang,
are marketed at Kiukiang. Kiangsi, like Anhui, was
formerly a great green-tea province, and much of its
crop was carried over the Mei-ling Pass and sold to
foreign traders at Canton. As more and more black
tea was demanded with the increasing intelligence
and taste of barbarian tea-drinkers, more and more
black tea was made ; but it was not until Mr. Robert
Fortune had made his personal visit to all the tea dis-
tricts of China in 1845 that it was known that the
black and green teas of commerce came from the
same bushes, the difference lying in the different
methods of curing the leaf.
Kiukiang, which was at first the great green-tea
port, shipped 230,367 piculs ^ of tea in 1896, of which
only 38,793 piculs were green tea. In 1897 the tea
shipments reached a total of 192,942 piculs, of which
38,734 piculs were green tea. The famous Moning,
1 A picul weighs one hundred and thirty-three pounds avoir-
dupois.
19
358 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
Moyune, or Waning teas, the Ening, Kaisow, Ning-
chow, and Keemuug teas, are grown within five days'
journey, or one hundred miles, of Kiukiang, and na-
tive buyers go to those chosen valleys and hillsides
when the first leaves open, and buy the standing
crops for the great British and Russian exporting
firms at the river ports. One Russian firm, lately
removed from Hankow, manufactures brick-tea for
the Siberian market, and "tablet-tea" of the finest
green leaves compressed into thin cakes grooved in
divisions like chocolate, an article of luxury for
fastidious travelers and campaigners in European
Russia.
The British concession holds the little foreign set-
tlement of Europeans, and farther up the river-bank
is a low mud-flat, inundated every year, which was
conceded as an American settlement, but never used,
as the American mission establishment is in the
heart of the native city. The great barrier of Lien-
shan, which shuts off the south wind in summer, is
one reason for the excessive and sickening heat of
Kiukiang ; and the American missionaries, who have
been pioneers in such exploration and discovery of
available health retreats near their field of work in
both China and Japan, were first to utilize Lien-shan
itself, and find high, cool plateaus and valleys where
they could buy useless and neglected land cheaply,
and put up summer homes. Their primitive camp has
grown to a considerable resort, and Kuling, at an
elevation of three thousand feet, is refuge and sana-
torium for all the heated Yangtsze valley settlements.
It is only ten miles up a steep mountain road to the
THE RIVER OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 359
cool, wind-swept valleys of summer delight, while in
winter, frost and light snow offer tonic and cure to
malaria- and fever-worn systems.
The one hundred and eighty-seven mile reach of
river between Kiukiang and Hankow is justly lauded
as one of the fine scenic stretches of the lower river,
the Yangtsze there cutting through a range of lime-
stone hills that divide it into many lake-like stretches,
richly weathered cliffs rising from the water, and green
hills running in overlapping ridges. The Yangtsze
was fast subsiding in that last week of November, and
navigation becoming safer and easier as the banks
and landmarks emerged from the yellow flood, and
the regular channels were defined. An Odessa tea-
steamer bound down from Hankow had touched on
the flats above Kiukiang a few days before, and with
all efforts the cargo could not be lightered fast enough
to offset the falling river, nor could the strongest
ocean tugs dislodge her from the bed of soft, sticky
mud. Coming down-stream six weeks later, we saw
the ship standing high and dry an eighth of a mile
back from the water, shored up as in a dry-dock,
roofed over, and furnished with outer stairways, like
pictures of ships in the Arctic.
Stranger things yet happen along this river when
all the landmarks and boundaries are submerged, and
some of the riverine incidents match anything from
the ''Peterkins" or a comic opera. One year a pas-
senger-steamer found itself aground in a rice-field far
from the river-bank, and the water fast subsiding.
The rice-farmer raged violently, talked of trespass and
ground-rent, forbade any injury to his property by
360 CHINA: THE L0NG-LI\T:D EMPIRE
trench-digging, and finally forced the ship-owners to
buy his field as a storage-place for the vessel until the
next year's flood should release it. Then the river
rose in a sudden and unparalleled after-flood, and
floated away the impounded ship. Meanwhile, a war-
junk which had been sent for to quell the riotous peo-
ple ran aground in another field while seeking the
besieged ship, and the mad country folk, cheated of
their winter prey and profits, set upon the dread
engine of war with pitchforks, drove off the braves
and the commander of the battle-ship, looted the junk
of every portable object, and made winter fuel of its
timbers.
Hankow, the great tea-market of China, and its com-
panion cities of Hanyang and Wuchang, six hundred
miles up-stream from Shanghai, together present one
of the greatest assemblages of population in China.
Abbe Hue, who passed this way in 1845 and wrote the
most interesting and still useful travelers' book about
China, estimated the combined population of the three
gi'eat cities at eight million, and drew amazing pictures
of the crowded river life of the Han and Yangtsze, a
floating population depleted by thousands in the miles
of burning junks when the Taiping rebels got their
first taste of blood and plunder in the destruction of
the three cities. For half the year the Yangtsze runs
at the foot of a forty-foot stone embankment where
broad flights of steps lead up to the park, or bund, of
the British concession, a model foreign settlement ex-
tending from the walls of the native city for three
quarters of a mile along the river-bank. For the rest
of the year the Yangtsze rises higher and higher,
THE EIVER OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 363
until it often overflows the parapet and the great es-
planade, the settlement streets and the race-course
being navigable by small boats for weeks at a time.
Since the opening of the port in 1861 this British con-
cession, with its smooth, clean streets, shade-trees, and
flower-beds, has been an object-lesson in municipal
order, wholly thrown away on the Chinese wallowing
in the filth of the native city. Only the magnificent,
red-turbaned Sikh police have really impressed the
natives, and with their splendid scorn and contempt
of the yellow race, these men from the Panjab have
maintained order, in fact the most serious decorum,
in the settlement. The Chinese have conceded land
along the river-bank adjoining the British concession
for a Russian settlement, and beyond that tracts for
French and German settlements, which, when em-
banked and improved, will give the great foreign city
of the future a continuous bund over three miles in
length.
Hankow, so long the chief source of supply of Brit-
ish tea-drinkers, with fifteen or twenty tea-steamers
in port at a time loading for London, has undergone
a change in this decade. As Chinese teas deteriorated
in quality and tea-farmers became more careless and
dishonest, India and Ceylon teas began to win favor,
and with the enormous increase of production in those
two British dependencies, Chinese tea has lost its
place in the British market, furnishing only one ninth
of England's import in 1896. At that same time
began the general awakening of Russia. At Hankow
the Russian has come, and to stay, and the shadow of
the Muscovite is over it all. The Russian is not only
364 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
established at the gates of China, but also at its very
heart, the invasion and absorption being as remark-
able in this British settlement at Hankow as anywhere
in Korea or Manchuria. Hankow is fast becoming a
Russian city or outpost, a foothold soon to be a strong-
hold in the valley of the Yangtsze, which China has
given her word shall never be alienated to any power
but England. Some alarmists may even view the Si-
berian merchants at Hankow as emissaries, like those
armed Russian monks who first established them-
selves in the Caucasus and Asia Minor in stronghold
monasteries. Although the Russians have their own
concession at Hankow, they do not care to build upon
it and live there, amenable then to Russian laws and
consular jurisdiction, to Russian restrictions and es-
pionage ; and the consulate and a few warehovises
were the only buildings on the Russian concession in
1896. The Russians prefer the laws and the order of
the British concession, crowding in upon it at every
opportunity, competing for any house that comes
into the market, and building closely over former
lawns and garden-spaces. They compete with and out-
bid the few British tea-merchants who remain in these
days of active Russian trade aggression. Only one
tea-steamer took a cargo to London in 1896 ; two
more British firms closed out and left Hankow that
year ; and, still more significant, only one pon}^ showed
the colors of the one British racing-stable at the
autumn races. In the retail shops prices are quoted
and bills made out as often in rubles as in taels or
dollars, and the Russians have gradually assumed an
air of ownership, of seigniorial rights, as complete as
THE RIVER OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 365
if they held the lease or diplomatic deeds to the place
for ninety-nine years.
This great tea-market of foreign Hankow is a city
of six weeks only, the heads of the great hongs, or
their managers, occupying their residences from the
first of May to the middle of June each year. Leaf-
teas are fired and shipped until September and even
later, and brick-tea is made until January, but the
choice tea is all looked to in those few weeks. For
that first quality the Russians buy only the first
" flush," or crop of young leaves unfolding at the tips
of the new twigs of the evergreen camellia-bush each
April. These pekoe and souchong ^' leaves of the sec-
ond moon " are carefully picked by hand, while the
next crop of tougher leaves is cut with a knife, and at
the third and fourth gleanings the knife takes whole
twigs, woody stems as well as leaves. The first crop
of pale, downy leaflets is cured, or put through the
wilting, rolling, fermenting, and drying processes,
at the tea-farm, the fermentation changing the color
of the leaf to a reddish brown, and converting part of
the tannic acid to sugar, in which regard black teas
differ from green teas, the leaves of which are dried
as they come from the bush. With all the machines
invented and used on tea-plantations in India and
Ceylon, a drier has only once been used in China.
All attempts toward greater care and cleanliness in
preparation have been as vain as attempts toward
introducing machinery at the tea-farms themselves.
Neither declining trade nor prices can stimulate the
tea-growers to any change, and only when the whole
country is open to foreign trade and residence will
366 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
each village or valley have its own tea-factory to cure
and pack the tea for final shipment on the spot.
The dried tea-leaves of the first crop are gathered
up by middlemen and brought to Hankow, and on
some day in the first week of May the Chinese bro-
kers, in silk array, are borne in sedan-chairs from the
native city and set down in the compounds of the
great hongs to offer their first musters, or samples of
tea. The high season begins at that moment, and for
six weeks, in the first scorch and stew of its summer
climate, Hankow runs at high pressure. The musters
are tested by foreign experts, the skilled tea-tasters,
whose acute and highly trained senses render their
judgment and appraisal unerring. A few leaves are
carefully weighed from the muster into a shallow cup,
and boiling water poured over them. The tea-taster
notes carefully how the leaves unfold in the water,
how the liquor colors and deepens to a rich, clear
coffee-brown, and inhales the fragrance of the essen-
tial oil as it is borne off in vapor before he takes his
judicial sip. He carefully analyzes its qualities for
the second it rests on his tongue, and then ejects the
liquid, never by any chance swallowing it. A price is
agreed upon, and the tea is brought in chests and
thick paper sacks and dumped into great bins at the
factory, where it is refired, or toasted slowly in iron
pans over charcoal fires, to dry it thoroughly, then
sealed in air-tight lead cases within wooden chests,
which are papered, varnished, covered with matting,
and hurried aboard the waiting ships. The average
price at Hiuikow for this first-quality black leaf-tea,
which is all shipped to Odessa, is about forty Mexican
THE RIVER OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 367
dollars for each ninety-pound chest. Twenty-five half-
chests of this first crop's pekoe-leaves are sent to the
Emperor of Russia for palace use. Several times it
has happened that the whole crop of some particular
farm or hillside has been bought up by the Russians
and shipped before Chinese connoisseurs, who would
drink no other tea, knew it. At once they cabled to
Odessa, and had the tea bought on arrival and shipped
back to China. Twice on the Yangtsze I used a rich
and fragrant tea from the Keemung hills that had per-
formed that journey to Odessa and return, because
some mandarin knew what he wanted and was willing
to pay for it.
The tea-taster is king at Hankow for the six weeks
of his exclusive reign, and whatever he may do dur-
ing the remainder of the year, he is a most rigid total
abstainer during the high season, when every faculty
of his keenest senses is on the alert. Although he
never swallows a sample sip, the tea-taster's nerves
and digestion are impaired at the end of ten or twelve
years, even the stimulating effect of the strong, vola-
tile aroma in the tea-hongs sometimes giving retired
tea-tasters attacks of that tea-tremens which the Chi-
nese and Japanese recognize as a disease ; while tem-
perance reformers, usually green-tea drinkers, seem
ignorant of the fact that other stimulants than alco-
hol may be abused. The professional tea-taster at
Hankow is said to drink only soda or mineral waters
during the scorching weeks of his exacting season,
and when word goes round the settlement that such
a one of the great experts was seen to take sherry and
bitters at the club, it is a signal that the great tea
368 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
season is declining, that little choice tea is being
brought in. Then the tension relaxes, and a certain
section of Hankow gives itself over to a jubilation and
indulgence that are the scandal and byword of the
other ports. Although the tea firms are all Russians
or Siberians now, the tea-tasters are Englishmen, and,
for reasons not flattering to Russian character, it is
said that the tea-tasters will always be English. No
green or oolong teas, no perfumed or fancy teas, are
included in these great summer shipments, those being
specialties of the southern ports. Several times I was
regaled on pu'erh-cha, the gi*eatly esteemed '' strength-
ening tea " from Pu'erh Fu in Yun-nan. It had a mil-
dew, tobacco, weedy flavor, a bitter draught which
is warranted to strengthen the system, clear the
brain, relieve the body of all humors and bile, and
serves high-living mandarins as a course at Homburg
does European bon-vivants. This plant gi'ows in the
Shan States, and the leaves are brought to Pu'erh Fu
to be steamed and pressed into large, flat cakes, which,
being packed in paper only, soon mildew. The long
viscous leaves are probably from some variety of the
wild Assam tea-plant, and the taste of the dried leaves
themselves is a little like the yerha huena of the Cali-
fornia foot-hills. The Chinese consider the pu'erh-cha
the better by age, and do not heed the mildew flavor.
It promotes longevit}^ along with its therapeutic quali-
ties, and is sent regularly to the Emperor at Peking.
Despite the distinguished consideration implied, I
should not care to have the costly herb offered me
again, and, with all the craze for cures, I doubt if
pu'erh-cha would ever find favor abroad.
THE RIVEE OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 369
The Russians buy the best and the worst, the dear-
est and the cheapest teas in Hankow's market, the
chests of choice tea going to Odessa for European
Russia, and the compressed brick- or tile-tea to Mon-
golia and Siberia. By September the best leaf-teas
are j&red, and some tea-steamers are back at Hankow
for second cargoes, Odessa ships trying to make two
round trips in each season. After that the tea-farmers
send in the bags of coarse leaves, broken and refuse
tea, the dust from their tables, bins, and floors ; the
factories have binfuls of such leavings and sweepings
too, and the manufacture of brick-tea begins, and con-
tinues until January before all such accumulations
are disposed of. Tokmakoff, Molotkoff & Co.'s brick-
tea factory, which is managed by a Scotchman who
invented and adapted several of the machines and
processes employed, is the largest factory in Hankow,
employing fourteen hundred workmen through the
long season, and shipping nearly a million bricks a
year, with an almost equal output from their factory
at Kiukiang. All the way to their compound the set-
tlement is fragrant with toasting tea-leaves, delight-
ful whiffs coming from the rows of windows at that
end of Hankow, where walls are higher and longer,
and chimneys rise significantly. They showed us
first the bins of fine dust, ground and sifted by
wretched, sallow, greenish-hued coolies, whose nos-
trils were filled with cotton-wool to prevent their
breathing in the insidious dust. Two pounds of tea-
dust are weighed into a cloth, which is laid on a per-
forated plate over a caldron of boiling water and
covered for a few minutes, when it is poured into a
370 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
clumsy wooden mold, and a half-pound of finer dust
added as a surface. The mold is covered, put under
a screw-press, and clamped shut. The noise around
this press is deafening as the heavy molds are clanged
about on iron tables and the stone floor, and with the
half -clothed workmen moving in clouds of steam from
the caldron and shouting their hideous dialect about
the dark warehouse, a short inspection of the process
satisfies. The bricks remain in the molds for six
hours to cool, and are then removed, weighed, and
stacked in endless rows in an upper story to dry and
shrink, before being wrapped in paper, furnished with
red labels in Russian, and packed in baskets holding
seventy bricks each. All defective or under-weight
bricks are broken and ground to dust again, and it
takes heavy blows with an iron, or sharp raps against
the stone floor, to break one of these inch-thick black
tiles, which are nine inches wide and twelve inches
long. A larger and a smaller size of green-tea bricks
are also made at this factory, into which the coarse
leaves and stems go entire, without grinding. One
naturally wonders that machinery is not employed for
all these simple processes, and that some Yankee does
not start a factory where a stream of tea-dust would
go in at one end and rows of bricks come out at the
other; but human life is so over-abundant in China
that hand-labor is cheaper than any steam-driven
machinery, coolies' food worth less than engine coal.
The black brick-tea for Mongolia and Siberia, and in
fact almost the whole tea-su])ply of Russia, used, long
ago, to go from Hankow by boat for three hundred
miles up the Han River, was portaged across, and
THE RIVER OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 371
taken a distance up the Yellow River, and then loaded
on camels and carried across Shansi to Kiakhta, on
the Siberian frontier. The caravan trade from Kiakhta
and Kalgan to the Volga was the subject of negotia-
tions by the embassy Peter the Great sent to the Em-
peror Kanghsi, and ever since there have continued,
winter and summer alike, the unending processions of
camel-trains back and forth across Siberia. Nijni-
Novgorod was then the tea-market of Russia, and the
water and land transportation across Siberia was so
cheap that tea could be delivered in Nijni-Novgorod
by caravan more cheaply than by tea-steamers to
European ports. The opening of the Suez Canal
gradually moved the tea trade to Odessa; the tea
brick is no longer a unit of exchange at Nijni, and the
great fair on the Volga has lost its most picturesque
feature with the vanishing of the camels and the great
tea-caravans. When all the Chinese tea came by car-
avan to Nijni, '' caravan tea" had a deserved repute in
Europe. About the time that the Russian tea trade
shifted to Odessa, the name of '' caravan tea " reached
America, and dealers, not always informed them-
selves, played with the catching word. One is offered
''Russian tea," and assured that "caravan tea" is
better than other teas, because a sea voyage spoils the
flavor of tea. One must not inquire how the tea
crossed the Atlantic, evidently. If all leaf -teas were
not sealed in air-tight lead cases, the sea air and ships'-
hold odors could not taint them as unspeakably as
the proximity of camel's wool, pack-saddle coverings,
and the belongings of the filthy Mongol caravan-men
on their three months' journey across Siberia.
372 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
Hankow's trade statistics deal in large figures for
the export of tea. In 1896 there went out from that
port 470,003 piculs, or something over sixty million
pounds, of leaf-tea, and 434,107 piculs of brick-tea.
In 1897 the total tea shipment was 410,01 9 piculs.
These figures, as compared with the 895,031 piculs
shipped in 1886, show how the tea trade has fallen off
since the English are no longer the great consumers.
Sixteen different religious establishments exist at
Hankow, — Catholic, Protestant, Greek, and Quaker,
Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopal,— English,
Canadians, Swedish, Norwegians, Spanish, Italians,
Scotch, Americans, and Russians all striving in evan-
gelical ways, and by their number confusing the
native.
A ride through the native city of eight hundred
thousand inhabitants is an experience no one would
willingly repeat. While Shanghai, Canton, and Amoy
run rivahy, and imperial Peking has some sloughs
and slums and smells unparalleled, Hankow may be
safely entered against the field. The people of the
Yangtsze banks are in general as unlovely a lot as can
be found in China, but never have I seen such dull,
heavy-featured, dirty, and unhealthy-looking faces as
in the Hankow slums.
It is interesting to review by boat the water-front
of the native city, where some futile attempts have
been made at stone embankments, and where brown
boats crowd together and creep about like water-
inseets, while a glimpse up the narrow river Han shows
only a vista of masts, where junks are crowded ten
rcnvs dee]) on each side of the water-street dividing
THE RIVER OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 373
the cities of Hankow and Hanyang. The great water-
population have their shops and marts afloat, each
trading-junk displaying its trade emblem or a sample
of its specialty at the masthead. A bundle of fire-wood
dangled from one mast ; buckets, brushes, stools, bar-
bers' bowls and plaited queues, hanks of thread, gar-
ments, and candles advertised other floating shops.
Every kind of craft that floats upon the Yangtsze
water system may be seen at this great entrepot:
Hu-nan rice-boats, as graceful and slender as Vene-
tian gondola or Haida canoe ; clumsy Szechuan cargo-
junks; ridiculous house-boats; and even the quaint
fiddle-shaped boats from Lake Poyang, the sides of
which, contracted at the middle like the body of a
violin, perpetuate evasions of the ancient law that
taxed boats according to their breadth of beam amid-
ships. Could any opera bouffe ever burlesque China ?
Bewitched by its crass absurdity, I asked to have a
model of the fiddle-boat made ; but the oldest foreign
resident on the river besought me not to begin on
boat models, since his efforts in collecting them had
been so over-rewarded that he had had to desist for
want of storage-room. No models seem to have been
put aside since the deluge— save the centiped, dragon,
hawk's-beak, and four-wheeled junks, descriptions and
pictures of which survive from a thousand years ago,
when the Yangtsze was the dividing-line between two
great empires and naval battles raged. The four-
wheeled junk had two wheels at the bow and two at the
stern— the common water-wheels of their irrigating
ditches, turned by hand or treadmill gangs. After al-
most anticipating Fulton's invention by ten centuries.
374 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
they stood still forever after. Chinese conceit claims
half of Western inventions as mere imitations or re-
vivals of long-forgotten Chinese things. Anything
and everything— stern- and side-wheel steamers, tele-
phones, telegraphs, phonographs, railroads, and elec-
tric lights, almost the automobile— can be found de-
scribed in some book of the immortal classics. Ages
ago a Taoist teacher spoke into a box, put his voice
in a box and sent it to a kindred soul. " Is not
that plainly the foreigners' phonograph ? " ask the il-
luminated literati. '* What could be clearer ? What
more proof do you want when we find it in the books
of the classics ? "
Hanyang, the twin city of Hankow, is no more filthy
and dilapidated than its neighbor,— it hardly could be,
—but it boasts the arsenal and iron-works, those ex-
pensive foreign toys of Chang Chi Tung, the great
viceroy, reputed the one honest official in China, the
one provincial officer of the empire who does not di-
vert the revenues and riches of his satrapy into his
own pocket. His iron ore is brought from a district
seventy miles away, the coal is transported two hun-
dred miles, and often Japanese coal is used, since the
local and export taxes on Chinese coal make imported
coal cheaper along this river of inexhaustible coal-fields.
Rifles and smokeless powder are made at the Hanyang
works, as well as the rails for the intended future great
road from Peking to Canton— a scheme in agitation
for thirty years, that has exercised all the intelligence,
ambition, and rascality in China, brought armies of
floaters, promoters, concessionaries, schemers, specu-
lators, sharks, and sharps of all nations to China, set
THE RIVER OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 375
the diplomatic corps at Peking by the ears many
times, and almost embroiled rival European nations in
war, and now, with concessions granted, is a project
almost as far from realization as ever. The officials
at Peking were slow to learn that concession-granting
was profitable for them. Until it is proved that con-
cession-working is also profitable, railroad-building
will lag. Any amateur prophet can tell that when
this railway is completed it will be to all intents a
Russian railway, a feeder and branch of the trans-
Siberian system, connecting the Russian tea port of
Hankow with Irkutsk, the trade and railway center of
Siberia. A Belgian syndicate holds the concession,
but in China one paraphrases Napoleon's saying, and
it is only necessary to scratch the Belgian to find the
Muscovite Tatar.
There is a picturesque tea-house in the grounds of
an old temple by Hanyang's river-bank, which is the
resort of literati and officials, and where the viceroy
gave a great feast to the present Czar and to Prince
George of Greece a dozen years ago. The " great
dividing mountain" curves back from this riverside
temple point, and is the lucky tortoise which offsets
the dragon hill in opposite Wuchang, and by that
combination secures favorable geomantic influences,
good wind and water for the three cities. Hanyang's
tortoise bears a temple on its back, while far across
the river a needle of a pagoda marks the head of the
Wucliang dragon. Some greasy priests inhabit the
temple on the heights, and from their courts, three
hundred feet above the river, one has a fine view of
the twin cities stretching away, in a huddle of roofs
376 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
covering more than a million people, to the billows of
greenery by the river-bank, marking the English con-
cession.
Wuchang, the " Queen of the Yangtsze," where offi-
cials and literati live, where the viceroy has another
foreign toy in the shape of a great electric-lighted
cotton-mill, and a military establishment with German
iustnictors, and where the American missionaries have
their schools and hospital, is seen in full bird's-eye
view from the temple terraces. One has small wish
to cross the mile of swift, white-capped waters, where
sampans struggle against or are swept away by the
seven-mile current, to see the viceroy's seat, a great
city once Taipinged to rubbish-heaps, and but shabbily
patched up in places in the quarter of a century since
that incident. It reeks with filth, and its people give
scant welcome to the stranger in town, their stoning
of the German minister on his way from a viceregal
visit being a last straw and a golden incident in the
summing up of events that led to the forcible lease of
Kiao-chau.
XXV
A THOUSAND MILES UP THE YANGTSZE
[BOVE Hankow the Yangtsze River tests
all of a fresh- water navigator's skill and
patience ; and changing to small, light-
draft steamers, we were three days in
accomplishing the four hundred miles to
Ichang, sounding and feeling the way among sand-
bars by day, and anchoring at night.
"Bhe picturesque old walled town of Yo-chau, at the
edge of Tung-ting Lake, was declared an open port
in April, 1898 ; but its people have a bad name, and
its future only a stormy promise. The Hu-nan brave
is the most disorderly of all Chinese ; Hu-nan literati
have sent out the shameful pamphlets and led the
anti-foreign crusades for years ; and Hu-nan has so
reeked with the blood of martyred priests for a cen-
tury past that, had France been so disposed, she
might have taken possession of the whole province,
and, indeed, all the provinces of China, more Ger-
manico, long ago. The opening of Yo-chau, with the
free navigation of this inland sea of three hundred
square miles, secures great prosperity for the region,
377
378 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
and some illumination for its bigoted and unreasona-
ble people. An old trade route passes up the Siang
River from the foot of this sacred lake, and by the
Cheling Pass to the West River above Canton. The
projected railway of the American syndicate from
Wuchow to Canton wi\l pass near the east shore of
the lake and cross by the Cheling to the southern
province.
On great Kin Shan, or Golden Island, in Tung-
ting Lake, tea-culture has been made the finest art,
and this tea, possessing, along with other virtues,
the gift of longevity, is all reserved for the Emperor
of China. The first crop of this choice tea of immor-
tality would be worth eight Mexican dollars a pound,
by commercial estimates, if it could be bought ; but the
priests guard each sacred leaf -bud, and send it all to
Peking, though, by common gossip in the Purple For-
bidden City, the Emperor drinks something less rare.
The argument in that imperial topsyturvydom is that,
as the Emperor never visits any one or drinks any
one else's tea, he cannot know the difference, and that
if the Kin Shan tea was ever exhausted, heads would
fall when a substitute was offered. Because of this
imperial connection the Taiping rebels uprooted the
bushes and devastated the island ; but it soon recov-
ered, and the plantations throve again. Tea from the
Ming-shan hills, by the lake, is also sent in satin-
covered boxes fi'om Yo-chau to the Peking palace.
Above the outlet of Tung-ting Lake, the Yangtsze
is a broad, shallow, wandering stream, half the volume
of the river being diverted through the lake by a
canal at its western end. The lead was swung, the
A THOUSAND MILES UP THE YANGTSZE 379
monotonous chant of the man at the line rang all after-
noon, and the tiniest of steam-launches skimmed the
surface ahead like a frantic water-insect, the pilot
probing the mud with a bamboo pole and marking the
six-foot channel by a line of staves.
The next day there were the same monotonous mud-
banks again, protective dikes that run for three hun-
dred miles above Hankow. Country folk used the
embankment as a highway, processions of men, women,
and children, buffaloes, pack-horses, carts, and sledges,
filing along in silhouette against the sky. Lone and
ragged fishermen inhabited burrows in the bank, or
from a platform over the water worked big, square
dip-nets by levers ; and for fifty times that I watched
the big, square cobweb drop beneath the waters, once
a small silverfish was dipped up. Children with fly-
ing pigtails, as near to young apes as their earliest
ancestors could have been, shrieked at the fire-boat,
and ran along to watch the foreigners on deck.
" Look ! see ! Look ! see ! " they screamed joyfully ;
and ^' Foreign devil ! oh, foreign devil ! " they bawled,
with menacing gestures. "Oh, give me a bottle!
Quick ! Give me a bottle, foreign devil ! " other fran-
tic ones cried. Chinese passengers on the lower deck
found amusement in holding out bottles to induce the
poor, tired little apes to run for miles along the mud-
banks, only to have the boat veer away to the baboon
laughter of the inhuman teasers of the wretched little
country children, to whom a glass bottle is a treasure.
In revenge, the children have learned to fasten a mud
ball on the end of a bamboo, and with a quick jerk
shoot the pellet to the steamer-decks. The fusillade
380 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
is unpleasant, often dangerous; and as the young
imps master the science of projectiles, there are bits
of inshore navigation beset with uncharted perils.
We came to larger towns with stone embankments,
conspicuous temples, and yamuns where inverted fish-
baskets on tall poles proclaimed the official residence.
When we reached the Taiping Canal, which cuts away
to Tung-ting Lake and drains the Yangtsze of half
its flood, the lonely river was enlivened. Here two
great trade routes, the land route from north to south
and the river route from west to east, cross. Great
Szechuan cargo-junks came down with the current,
their chanting crews steering by a broad projecting
sweep or oar at the bows, and great junks went up,
sailing and tracking, with gangs of ragged creatures
straining at their bricole thongs, like the beasts of
burden they are. Brown sails and blue-and-white
striped sails ornamented the water, and hills beyond
hills rose in the west, with needle-spired pagodas
pricking the sunset sky, and bold headlands coming
to the river's bank. It was six o'clock and all blue-
black darkness when we crept close to the twinkling
lights of Shasi's bund and dropped the heaviest an-
chors. The current races there at the rate of seven
miles an hour, and passenger-boats that ventured out
for prey came whirling at us broadside on, stern first,
bow first, any way at all, and banged the steamer's hull
alarmingly. A hundred boatmen squawked, screeched,
and chattered madly, and if one of them failed to
grapple the chains and lines along the free-board at
the moment, the current swept him astern and far
down-stream before he could recover headway with
APPROACH AND MASONKY FKUNT OF CAVK TEMPLE NEAK ICHANG.
A THOUSAND MILES UP THE YANGTSZE 383
the oars. The frantic ki-yi-ings of these disappointed
ones, swept away into distant darkness, filled the
night air along with the noises on shore.
Shasi is an old city with a deservedly bad name.
The opening of this port was secured by the Japa-
nese in the treaty of Shimonoseki (1895), and as soon
as a Japanese consulate could be built, the Shasi
spirit broke out and the building was destroyed, the
four ringleader assailants afterward executed, the
consulate rebuilt at local expense, and further con-
cessions granted in reparation. The customs offi-
cers, occupying house-boats moored to the bund,
barely escaped with their lives, and the floating
British consulate was set adrift, and with difficulty
rescued from burning. The town is behind the em-
bankment, and one sees only a few roofs to tell of
a city of seventy-three thousand inhabitants; but
Shasi is, after all, only the port and place of junk
transhipment for King-chau, the provincial capital,
which lies back from the river a mile above the
rowdy water-town.
We had toiled three hundred miles up-stream to
reach this great cross-roads of provincial trade, yet
we could have returned to Hankow by a hundred-
mile journey, either on foot or by boat, through a
line of creeks and small canals. For a last day we
had bright, mild December sunshine. Mud-banks
gave way to clay- and gravel-banks, and conglome-
rate, red sandstone, and limestone cropped out.
Fields were green with winter wheat, tallow-trees
glowed with rich-red autumnal foliage, and men in
dull-blue garments, at work on those trees, added
384 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
another color-note to the picture. Pagodas spired
the crests of near and distant hills. Temples, dago-
bas, and shrines told of the great religion which came
by this route from Ti])et and India. The Yangtsze
is a broad, deep stream in this upper limestone re-
gion ; the landscape is attractive ; and the Tiger-
tooth Gorge, first in scenic attractions, is followed
by a remarkable natural or fairy bridge spanning a
ravine between two rocky hills. (Four miles below
Ichang and a mile back from the river, a palisade
wall rises a sheer thousand feet, extends for a mile or
more, and the Chih Fu Shan monastery crowns a
pinnacle rock that is joined to the palisade wall by a
masonry bridge. This neglected old Buddhist fane
is as remarkable as any of Thessaly's "'monasteries
in the air," and one needs a clear head and steady
nerves to walk, or be carried in an open hill-chair,
up the narrow goat-path on the rock's face and
along a knife-edged ridge, and across "the bridge
in the sky " to the needle rock. ) There is a dizzier
path still up rock-hewn staircases around to the mon-
astery door. A few miserably poor and ignorant
priests crouch on the summit of the rock. The
altars are stripped and deserted, and imagination
must supply any legends or splendors attaching to
this aerial shrine.
A clumsy pagoda on the river-bank is first land-
mark for Ichang, and the gray city walls edge the
water for a half-mile, inclosing an uninteresting city
of thirty-five thousand inhabitants. Junks of all
provinces crowd the water-front, and a tiny British
gunboat, all shining white and brasswork, protects
A THOUSAND MILES UP THE YANGTSZE 385
the handful of foreign residents, Chinese river-
steamers, as gay as cockatoos, with blue bodies and
yellow deck-houses, add to the gaiety of navigation ;
and war-junks, with red standards and pennants, tilt
about stream with beating tom-toms— hundreds of
flags and gala rags fluttering from junk-masts, but
never the official national flag of China. These pro-
vincials have nothing to do with that. It belongs to
'Hhose Manchus at Peking," probably; it is not old
custom to display it.
At low water, one climbs the terraced steps of
a seventy-foot embankment, and at high water is
rowed in the garden gate and over the flower-beds
to the steps of the custom-house. A great grave-
yard extends from Ichang's city walls for a mile
along the river-bank and a half-mile inland, and
the foreign settlement is in the midst of this grue-
some suburb. French, Scotch, Canadian, and Ameri-
can mission establishments, the consulates, customs
buildings, and a few hongs, all solid brick-and-stone
buildings in high-walled compounds, constitute the
settlement, which dates from 1887, although con-
ceded as an open port in the Chefoo convention
of 1876, which made reparation for the murder of
Margary, the British explorer, travehng with Chinese
consent across Yun-nan to Burma. Ichang settle-
ment was once destroyed and twice threatened by
rioters, and the residents find these acres of graves,
this belt of ancestral tumuli surrounding them, an
advantage and protection, these thousands of dead
forefathers more desirable neighbors than their living
descendants. They even manage to play golf in this
386 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
graveyard, a course of a tliousand bunkers and haz-
ards, with fine drives insured from teeing-grounds
fixed on certain superior mandarin mounds. Until
1897, when China joined the Postal Union, each port
on the river had its own post-office and local stamps-
sets of these local treaty-port stamps treasures to
philatelists. The sale of Ichang stamps furnished
funds to purchase the inevitable recreation-ground,
first necessity of British exiles in the East.
The neighborhood is rich in temples, hilltop and
cave shrines, both Taoist and Buddhist, and in con-
tinuation of its legend a colony of otter-fishers lives
by the An-an temple across the river. The fisherman
rows out and casts his huge circular net upon the
water, and as it sinks, the otter slips down the central
cord and brings up any imprisoned fish.
Ichang, one thousand miles from the sea, and in the
shadow of the great central mountain-range, which
crosses China from Siam to the Amur, is the head of
steam-navigation and port of transhipment for all the
products arriving from the provinces beyond the
range. The famous gorges and rapids of the Yangtsze
begin there, the river running through the Mountains
of the Seven Gates, as its flood has cut seven deep ca-
nons through the uplifted rocks, and carved their walls
to a scenic panorama for the four hundred miles be-
tween Ichang and Chungking. Despite conventions
and promises, Ichang remained the end of steam-navi-
gation for twenty years after the privilege of such
navigation was conceded on the Upper Yangtsze. Ob-
structive mandarins resorted to every subterfuge and
device to prevent the march of progress and the in-
A THOUSAND MILES UP THE YANGTSZE 389
evitable end of their extortions, and even that arch-
pretender to progress, Li Hung Chang, gravely assured
negotiators that the monkeys on the banks would
throw stones at the steamers in the gorges, and he
could not let foreigners run such risks ! The privilege
of steam -navigation on the upper river was again con-
ceded in the treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, but clumsy
junks and Jcwatsze continued to mount the rapids at
the end of bamboo tow-ropes, with all navigation sus-
pended in the weeks of flood, until, in March, 1898, Mr.
Archibald Little, who had clung to the intention for
twenty years, took a small steamer to Chungking.
In June, 1898, the free navigation of all waterways
was enjoyed through British diplomacy, and steam-
whistles have echoed in all the great gorges.
The prize in view on the Upper Yangtsze has been
the trade of Szechuan, the richest, most fertile, and
best-governed province of China, the seventy million
inhabitants of which have been praised by every
traveler from Marco Polo to the present day of Lord
Charles Beresford's commercial mission. Szechuan's
fertile plains and valleys have earned it the name
of " the Granary of China," and proverbs relate that
^' Szechuan grows more grain in one year than it can
consume in ten years," and the boast is made that
" you never see an ill-dressed man from Szechuan."
It is one of the great silk provinces, and the seat of
opium-culture in China, patches of poppies flaunting
in the gorges, and great plains and valleys above
ablaze with the seductive flowers which furnish three
fourths of China's opium-supply.
Since Abbe Hue wrote his account of the province
390 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
and the people, Szechuan and all this far west of
China have been the goal of travelers and scientists.
Richtofen, PumpeUy, Von Kreitner, Hosie, Baber,
Blakiston, Little, Gill, Hart, Parker, and Pratt, Mrs.
Little and Mrs. Bishop, have published at length and
seriously, and Dr. Morrison, the inimitable " Austra-
lian in China," has diverted his readers with his ad-
ventures on his happy-go-lucky trip up-country.
With the assistance of all kindly and hospitable
Ichang,— and they offered and brought, sent and lent
and gave, every possible thing that could be thought
of for our comfort,— our kwatsze, a lumbering Noah's
ark of a house-boat, got away late in the afternoon of
our first day ashore. On a flatboat fifty feet long a
two-room cabin had been built amidships, leaving a
space at the bows for the crew to work, cook, sleep,
and eat, and a space behind the cabin where our boy
and cook lived and worked, dodging the sweep of a
giant tiller, which reached up above the roof of our
cabin, where the master stood to command the craft.
A projecting cabin at the stern, the most ridiculous
flying-poop, was the captain's cabin, where he im-
mured a rather pretty, flat-faced wife with small feet
and a dirty blue coat, whose life seemed spent in sit-
ting on a stool and smiling at space.
This tipsy, top-heavy, crazy craft was ours for so
much each day that we chose to keep it, and a crew of
ten men were engaged to take us the thirty-nine miles
to Kuei, through the three greatest scenic gorges and
back, any farther travel a matter of fresh bargain,
the whole expense of boat, crew, provisions, and gra-
tuities for the week's trip being less than thirty dol-
> g
A THOUSAND MILES UP THE YANGTSZE 393
lars in silver. All books of Yangtsze travel are full
of delayed starts and long waits by the way, because
of the dilatory and missing cook, and we were com-
placent at sight of our chef smilingly picking duck-
feathers as we poled out into the stream, to cross and
tie up far from city temptations, and enter the Ichang
Gorge at sunrise. While we had tea the boatmen
crept up and in among the maze of junks off the city
front, and began to make fast for the night. Then
we found that a cook in the boat was not everything.
The captain was not on board— buying rice, the sub-
stitute said, and plainly intending to put us through
all that our predecessors had endured of missing
crews and delayed starts. The captain's " cousin," a
Szechuan soldier with the word " brave " sewed in
gory red letters on the back of his coat, was playing
captain overhead, and, at our discovery of the situa-
tion, went leaping along from junk to anchored junk
to find his relative. We held parley with our com-
panion kwatsze, and to the amazement of the crew,
they found themselves rowing across the river and
tying up to the bank beyond the otter-fishers' village.
We had a delightful dinner on board, as regularly
ordered and perfectly served as if on shore ; and in
our snug fore-cabin, with its carved and gilded par-
titions and window-frames, our rug portieres and
American oil-stove to offset the pitiless drafts of
river-damp, we congratulated ourselves on a first
naval victory. At daylight the lost captain himself
roused the crew, the octogenarian fo'c's'le cook dealt
them bowls of rice and green stuff, the braided bam-
boo ropes were uncoiled, and the draft-creatures began
394 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE
hauling us up-stream. The captain greeted us smil-
ingly, without embarrassment or apologies, and no
strained relations followed the incident of the night
before ; but the Szechuan soldier with his red-lettered,
decorative back was missing, still hunting for the
lost captain on the other shore.
The first or Ichang Gorge begins two miles above
the city, the river, narrowed to less than three hun-
dred yards, flowing for nine miles in a deep chasm
five hundred and a thousand feet deep. Two great
conglomerate cliffs form an entrance gateway, at one
side of which a torrent has cut out the picturesque
San Yu Tung Ravine, at the mouth of which Ichang
residents maintain a summer club on a large house-
boat moored in the cool drafts of the gorge. There
is a cave temple of great antiquity in the side-wall of
this ravine, and by following a path along rock-hewn
shelves and through tunneled archways that fur-
nished three gateways of defense in militant times,
one comes to the broad balustraded space at the front
of the shrine, a noble loge commanding a set scene of
classic Chinese landscape, the very crags and clefts
and stunted trees of ancient kakemono. The cave
arches back in a great vault with a central column or
supporting mass, and in the farther darkness there is
a sanctuary full of gilded images, guarded by carved
dragons, gnomes, and fantastic bird-creatures, that
peer out from dark crevices. Poems and inscriptions
are carved on the walls, and incense-burners. Urns,
and bells tell of better days when Buddhism flour-
ished from Tibet to the sea. The few poor priests
boil their miserable messes of pottage, and live in
irTEi;-FI.SllIV(i AT ICIIA.NC
A THOUSAND MILES UP THE YANGTSZE 397
small chambers at one side of the vaulted hall— mere
dens and cav 
