MAROONED IN HUÉ
The river at Hué runs parallel to the sea, some twenty miles inland, and
there is a screen of mountains to the south, the direction from which
evil spirits come in Annam—just as the north, the reservoir of bitter
cold and conquering Tartar tribes, is the quarter from which they are to
be guarded against at Peking. There are also two islands near-by, known
respectively as the White Tiger and the Blue Dragon. Hence it is not
strange that the royal geomancers of several generations ago considered
this the proper place to establish a new capital.
It is a very roomy town, like all those of any size and importance in
Annam, probably not so much from Annamese custom as from French
influence. On the foreign side of the river, where the traveler is set
down, are all those things properly pertaining to the French superlords.
From the railway station a wide grass-sided boulevard along the
river-bank passes in its mile or more of existence a rather imposing
school, hospital, barracks, and government buildings, many comfortable
French residences, the _cercle_ where the ruling race gathers of an
otherwise empty evening over its coffee and wine, its dominoes and
cards, and brings the traveler at length to another grocery-hotel named
for the tropically energetic Morin brothers. Just beyond, only across
the street from the French windows of the room assigned me, stands the
palatial residence and offices of the _résident supérieur_, real ruler
of Annam.
The whole machinery of the actual government of the “protected”
kingdom is confined to this side of the river, the south side,
direction of evil influences. Probably the river was kept between the
real and the puppet rulers purposely; the French have as good reason
as the emperor of Annam to keep up the fiction of his sacredness and
unapproachability. Yet space is still so plentiful in this French
section of Hué that almost any official—and there are virtually no
other European residents—has his own garden and greensward among
trees, large enough to be called, with a little stretching of the
southern Gallic imagination, a private park. In any habitable
direction these shade away into thatched huts that may be tailor-shops
and the like as well as native residences. Up a creek tributary of the
river bulks forth on its knoll the tropical-weather-worn old
cathedral, under a nap of fine vegetation, a contrast to the low
insignificant buildings of the missionaries of Tourane. Not the least
conspicuous thing on the French side of the river is the Monument aux
Morts, in Annamese style, the names of the French heroes who went home
from Annam to die in the World War facing the boulevard, where the
passer-by can scarcely overlook them, those of the Annamese who made
the great sacrifice for the “mother-land” around on the side facing
the river. Of course he who takes the trouble to go behind the
monument can read those also; possibly the emperor can even make them
out with a powerful field-glass from the flagpole of his citadel, if
he ever climbs so high; or it may be that the placid river is more in
keeping with their memory than the road with its broken stream of
Oriental and Western traffic.
I found the weather in Hué quite different from that of Saïgon. When
rain falls in Cochinchina it is dry in Annam, and vice versa, thanks to
a high range between them. Ever since I had left Canton the weather had
been bright and equatorial in temperature, but as I came northward the
humidity had steadily increased in density, and now the rainy season
this so plainly augured overtook me in earnest. For the first time since
leaving Hong Kong I was comfortably cool, though white was still my
favorite garb. It did not seem to be so with the French of Hué, however,
perhaps because of some connection between that color and the sacredness
of the emperor. There was an attention to dress worthy of descendants of
Beau Brummel and his spouse, if he had one; but white suits for men were
rather looked down upon, and of course to so much as step out of a
bedroom without a coat on was almost as incredible a breach of
civilization as in Brazil itself. A thick Scotch mist reigned all my
first, and what I had planned to be my only, day in the capital; and
that evening at the very height of the motion-picture tale on the wall
of the outdoor covered sitting-space in the grocery-hotel courtyard
tropical rains began to fall in earnest. Hardly did it let up again as
long as I remained in Hué—except for the all-important day that
justified my stay, during which the weather behaved _à merveille_. It
poured without cessation, confining me to my hotel room, making even a
dash across the courtyard to the other parts of the establishment a
shower-bath with mud foundation, forcing me to put off my visit to the
real Hué across the river, the “citadel” with its palaces, bringing
forth again the cloth suit for which I had so roundly berated myself at
Saïgon, and leaving me none too warm at that. Everything took quickly to
mildewing, and in less than forty-eight hours pocketbooks and the extra
shoes of those who owned them were covered with a delicate vegetation.
Soon stories began to come in of dikes giving way, of thousands of
coolies being rushed to save this or that town, built several meters
below the river, so that a broken embankment would mean disaster.
Nowhere could the rainy season have overtaken me with less cause for
resentment, however, for I had to tarry several days in Hué rain or
shine. I did not know this when I arrived, but found it out next
morning, when I went to present to the “résuper” the letter of
introduction I had won from some other official along the line. The real
ruler of Annam, less telegraphically known as the _résident supérieur_,
received me in his palatial dwelling and bureau a few steps beyond the
grocery-hotel with a perfect Gallic mixture of courtesy and that
something which leaves one no chance to presume upon one’s fancied
importance. Yet the writer of that letter must have been either an
important personage or the “résuper’s” boon companion in school-boy
days, for it certainly could not have been my own virtues that won me
the precious privilege the superior resident of Annam offered.
In the course of our official platitudes he mentioned that the ceremony
of the lunar New Year greeting of his loyal subjects to the emperor of
Annam across the river would take place the following Tuesday morning.
It was then Friday, and by Tuesday I had hoped to be leaving Hanoï for
the Chinese border. But the most important personage of Annam went on to
mention that, while only French officials were ordinarily admitted—which
I found later not to be sternly true—he thereby invited me to remain for
this crowning feature of the Annamese _Têt_. This very special favor, I
gathered from his meticulous deportment, was not so much in my own honor
as to that of the then still gratefully remembered country to which I
belong.
Expert as I was in my academic days at ministering to the gastronomic
demands of my fellow-students, I have never been a good waiter. For some
inexplicable reason the loss of time brings me more bitterness than the
loss of money, though of the first I have habitually far more to spare
than of the second. Certainly I did not care to squander wantonly in Hué
the better part of a week that I had planned to spend in hurrying back
to my family in Canton, with whom communication had been rare and
precarious. Yet I felt it a duty to my curiosity, if not to my country,
to attend one royal levee before the time comes to settle down to a
respectable life of immobility. There are few such ceremonies left in
the world, and still fewer of them are open to Europeans—as the East
insists on considering Americans. I murmured a polite acceptance.
But life is an incessant series of ups and downs in this vale of tears.
The next words of the ruler of Annam turned my satisfaction into
disappointment. When I—or it may have been the “résuper” himself—brought
up the obviously important question of court costume, he remarked, “Of
course you have with you your frock-coat and _chapeau de forme_?”—in
other words the ceremonial head-gear of politicians and other successful
exploiters of the general public. Or if not, it seemed, I could get
along with _le smoking_—which as a Frenchman he of course pronounced
“smocking.” Now _le smoking_ ordinarily means our more modest form of
dinner garb, disrespectfully known as “soup and fish,” and not only that
part of my wardrobe, but the even more absurd long-tailed livery of
night life, I had left at Canton. The motive for this dreadful oversight
had seemed sufficient in the days when it occurred. I did not care to
have the Chinese bandits I was almost sure to meet on my way home have
just cause for wreaking Bolshevik vengeance upon me by catching me in
possession of such unsightly things, or give them the false impression
that I was worth holding for ransom, or, more likely still, endure the
painful experience of seeing one of them bedeck himself in that unseemly
garb. I could of course not weep openly in so official a predicament,
but it looked indeed as if for my carelessness in packing, my failure to
remember the oft-learned lesson that the equatorial regions of the earth
by no means forgo the perspiring amenities of social intercourse, I was
to miss something which very few of my countrymen have seen. True, the
“résuper” murmured something to the effect that some way would be found
to _me tirer d’affaire_, but I took this to be merely a kind way of
softening my unavoidable disappointment, and having received official
permission to visit the palaces across the river under less interesting
circumstances I took my leave.
I had barely broken my first French roll and tasted my wine at the
eleven o’clock _déjeuner_ when one of the black-turbaned “boys” in snowy
white laid before me the card of the “Chef de Sûreté d’Annam.”
Misfortunes certainly come in clusters. The chief of the security of
Annam, police-head extraordinary of the land, suggested trouble, with
emphasis on such persons as spies and unwanted visitors; hence it was
with something akin to trepidation that I hurried out to the grocery
division of the hotel and presented myself before him. Perhaps I had
somewhere neglected to have something done again to my passport, and was
to be ordered out of the country, which would not greatly matter, now
that I had lost the privilege of hobnobbing with the emperor, except
that they might send me back the way I had come, or perhaps from Tourane
as the most convenient port, and spoil my plan of going all the way from
Angkor to Canton by land.
I found the bearer of the dreaded title an upstanding, soldierly, yet
genial fellow, in the act of sampling a newly opened keg of olives. The
_résident supérieur_, he remarked, after the customary words of
greeting, had sent him to see me. So I was in for it, even as I had
feared! But to my astonishment and growing relief the chief of Annam’s
security showed no signs of official wrath. Conversation ran along in a
perfectly neutral manner until my fellow-guests in the dining-room must
have been nearing the sad French substitutes for apple-pie. Then at
length, in a very tactful way—which was fortunate, since I am nothing if
not sensitive—the guardian of the security of Annam introduced the
apparently irrelevant and immaterial theme that he and I were of about
the same build; to which, so long as he did not also charge me with
rivaling him in manly beauty, I acquiesced. In short, he interrupted
himself in the midst of some genial story based on the natural spiritual
affinity between republican France and my own Republican land to say
that he had come at the suggestion of his superior to offer me clothing
for the coming ceremony. He would be glad to assemble the requisite
outfit from his own wardrobe; he had already done as much, some years
before, for another _journaliste_ from my country—what a barbarian and
unprovided nation he must have thought us!
[Illustration: Overlooking, from his flagpole, the palaces of the
emperor of Annam]
[Illustration: China itself cannot outdo the old bronze urns before the
main palace of the Annamese emperor]
[Illustration: The throne-room of the emperor of Annam, on the afternoon
before the New Year’s ceremony]
We began forthwith to take stock. For a moment it seemed that I would
after all need only to wear his trousers, for the conference disclosed
that in Annam _le smoking_ means black pantaloons topped by a white
tuxedo coat giving up its duties abruptly at the waist, what is quite
fittingly known in the dancing circles of the Far East as a “monkey
jacket.” Nay, even a full-length white coat would do, and that I had. I
was even the possessor of black trousers—if ever the baggage I had
checked at Saïgon should catch up with me. But further discussion
brought to light the annoying fact that those straying trousers had a
faint stripe in them, and that would never do; it would be almost
equivalent to _lèse-majesté_. Then that white coat—did it have one
button or two? Two, as far as I recalled. “Sapristi!” The chief of the
security of Annam threw up his arms in a gesture of dismay. A coat with
two buttons would be worse than no coat at all in Annamese court
circles, I gathered from his excited demeanor. Also I should have to
have a vest,—beg pardon, purists of the editorial function, I mean a
w’s’c’t—and that curse in any climate, let alone in the tropics, a stiff
collar. All these things the chief expressed his delight to be able to
furnish, and the day seemed to have been saved—until he glanced down at
my feet. They were incased in brown shoes. Moreover, though I am not
perpetually conscious of that fact, they must be large feet, compared at
least with those even of athletic Frenchmen of my own build, for the
chief not only disclaimed any ability to provide me with shoes of such a
size from his own wardrobe, but doubted the possibility of finding a
pair as large as that in all Hué. Plainly I have overlooked the
opportunity of becoming a great popular comedian and riding in my own
limousine. But surely Buddha would provide, in so small, or even large,
a matter as that, and I planned to settle down in Hué for five days
rather than wend my way homeward bitter with disappointment.
Once I had reconciled myself to losing several days, Hué was by no means
the worst place on earth in which to pass the time. My hotel room was
more home-like than those for which we pay several times as much in our
own beloved land; food, wine, and ice were in keeping with French
standards, and if the evening movies in the hotel courtyard were not
worth going to the Orient to see, the types of French colonials and the
natives they attracted were, not to mention the numerous crosses between
those two races. Then too the rain did now and then slacken, though so
weary did the senses become of hearing it pour on the graveled road
outside that it never seemed to do so. One briefly clear evening I took
a walk in Hué itself, the walled but very much Frenchified imperial
residence across the river from the newer foreign section. The river is
so wide that seven big incongruous steel arches are needed to lift the
modern bridge over it, and the town beyond proved to be extensive,
though from the farther bank it looked merely like a façade of shops
backed by forest. A whole village of queer boats, most of which spend
their lives in bringing produce to the big half-covered market-place on
the northern bank, were anchored about that end of the bridge. At first
there seemed to be no great population. But gradually this impression
gave way, as the town, orderly with wide right-angled streets, stretched
leisurely on and on out various directions, long after one expected it
to succumb to jungle or fields, until I began to wonder if there could
be as much city scattered among the trees here as in the forest of
Angkor-Thom.
Whatever the French have left of shops and native handicrafts is outside
the wall and moat of the imperial residence. Once, they say, these were
labyrinths of narrow dirty streets; now they are neither labyrinthine
nor unclean, and much of the picturesqueness one expects is lacking. In
the wide-open shops that lined the principal extramural streets one saw
Madrasis in little red fezzes, most of them with black-toothed Annamese
wives, and children with the luminous eyes of the Hindu. But there
seemed to be few Chinese merchants. The Annamese themselves evidently
kept shop here more than is normal, perhaps because the capital with its
swarms of loafing functionaries had impressed them with the ease of this
sedentary occupation. Between the river and the mountains that shield
the capital from evil southern influences there are many waterways, and
sampans and humped bridges were frequent. But on the whole the charm of
the Orient had been cleaned and modernized away.
Much of the old atmosphere remained, however, within the _citadelle_
which the native city partly surrounded. In Annam towns of any
importance are encircled by ramparts and are known as citadels. Once,
and in some cases still, the rather roomy residences of native
officials, the citadels of Annam have little in common with the walled
cities of China, teeming with jostling humanity. The crenelated walls of
Hué inclose a space a mile or more square, but it is a newer, lower,
much less imposing wall than the ancient ones surrounding Peking and
most Chinese cities. A moat stagnant with water-lilies and other
broad-leafed vegetation protects the wall, and short stone bridges older
in appearance than they probably are in years give entrance to it in
three or four places through Chinese-style gates. Inside is an
astonishing spaciousness, trees and greensward and shaded boulevard-wide
streets, a veritable park scattered with dwellings, as if nothing were
so plentiful as space. With overcrowded China always in mind, I was
constantly astonished at the roominess of Annamese cities. Within the
citadel, Hué is a city of gardens, less a capital than a great inhabited
park, more an Oriental Versailles than a Paris, not so much a center of
hard official duties as a perpetual summer residence of Eastern
potentates. As those on this side of the river really have very little
to do with governing, the atmosphere is in keeping with the facts, and
the ostensible rulers of Annam can spend their time growing flowers and
parading their singing-birds.
Never, surely, was another walled city so bucolic as this residence of
the sacred emperor of Annam. Quiet and calm reigned everywhere along its
wide roadway under trees that joined together overhead into an almost
concealing forest. Lotus ponds, as covered as the moat with flowers and
big green leaves, lay here and there through the half-forest; many of
the houses—most of them, I was to learn later, the homes of
mandarins—were set in roomy gardens surrounded by low walls with
imposing gateways. With its broad river and its canals, bordered with
water-palms, its flower-decked bungalows, its wide silent roadways, the
chimeric roofs of its palaces, the splendid circle of its forest, its
quiet and cleanliness, Hué was indeed a great contrast to China. One day
when for a little while the weather was clear—no, not that, for the
humidity was thick as cream, but at least the sun was doing its best to
shine through it—I evaded the royal guards and mounted the iron ladder
of the Eiffel Tower of a flagpole, which stands at the front of the
citadel. From it the royal palaces stretched away among the trees one
after another in a straight line, impressive by their colors, perhaps by
their architecture, but never by their height, as if their builders
scorned to take advantage of that cheapest means of exciting admiration.
From this elevation little else than the palaces and the tree-tops are
visible, but down beneath the foliage the stroller will find many humble
huts made of poles and thatch, not only within the citadel but only a
short walk from the palaces of the sacred Annamese emperor. Yet about
some of these simple, but probably on the whole as comfortable, homes of
the ordinary mass of his loyal subjects, there were some fine clipped
hedges, as if these faded-thatch hovels were merely a means of
disguising wealth still naturally modest from centuries of envious
mandarins. Rich and poor have the same little squared garden, the same
dwarf trees growing in pots of baked earth, the same water-jars sweating
in the sun.
He who is privileged to visit the home of a mandarin enters the
principal room directly from the garden, without steps, and finds it
furnished with a big bed of naked wood, with no other bed-furnishings
than a porcelain pillow and a reed mat. Besides that there is a round
table with stools, and the altar of the ancestors. This now sometimes
bears a photograph of the deceased in the place of the ancient
tablet—the one evidence of progress, and an unpleasant one, for it is
far more agreeable to picture a bygone member of the human race from no
other data than his posthumous name in Chinese characters on an upright
stick than to behold him photographically in all the moles and wrinkles
he left behind him in the grave.
All this I did not of course see in one day; the rain was too incessant
for that. Long as I remained I could not have seen it all if I had not
defied the rain, helped thereto by the attitude of the natives toward
it. A rainy day does not keep the Annamese indoors; like the inhabitants
of most southern countries where deluges fall for days at a time, they
make the most of it. I had only to glance out my hotel window to see
scores of both sexes, bare to the knees, even to the loins, all ages
wearing their mushroom hats and the palm-leaf rain-coats that turn so
easily this way or that, according to the slant of the storm. On they
went, carrying their shoulder-pole loads or doing whatever else the
pursuit of their rice required of them, quite as if the sun were
shining. It is so hot when it does that in some ways a rainy day is a
more pleasant time to work; and what is mud when you can wash one foot
with the other at any water-hole? Thus Hué on those wet days was a vista
of broad graveled streets, lined by trees and grass and spaciousness,
and dotted with human figures dressed only in palm-leaves, so far as the
eye could see, like some strange Eden that defied any but the most
practised eye to tell the sexes apart.
As there seemed to be no prospect of the rain halting, I dived into a
rickshaw one afternoon and went to visit the palaces across the river.
It was as well that I had brought along my special permit from the
“résuper,” for soldiers in the now familiar Annamese uniform of khaki
rompers and blouse below a mushroom, brass-topped hat and above bare
feet—here however with imperial yellow rather than the ordinary red
wrap-leggings—expect a permit from Europeans, though coolies of both
sexes were going freely in and out. A fine pretense this that the French
are merely protectors; and incidentally it keeps other Western nations
from finding out too much of what goes on in the privacy of the
emperor’s own department of the governing of Annam. There is nothing
very exciting about his palaces. So low that they are not seen at any
distance, they are few and unimposing compared to the Forbidden City of
Peking. Yet small as they are beside their Chinese counterparts, like
the same thing not too exactly done in miniature, they are in general
artistic and in some ways perhaps superior to their more pretentious
Chinese models. One’s impression of them and of the dynasty they
represent improved with seeing.
Workmen on a bamboo scaffolding were repainting the exterior of the main
audience-chamber, and Saturday afternoon being pay-day, even as in other
lands, a group of mandarins with ladylike hands, on some of which
cat-claw finger-nails still remained, sat at a table keeping books in
French style and paying out French paper piastres to the men and women
as they filed past. Building after building, Chinese wood-and-paper
buildings under top-heavy tile roofs, all of imperial yellow, stretched
lengthwise one behind another, like squads of soldiers with a passageway
through the middle of them, as do those of a Chinese yamen, back to the
main and finally the more private edifices. All these were inclosed
within a walled compound. Under the incessant rain the polished tiles of
the courtyards between them resembled great lakes of uncertain depth, in
which all the surroundings were mirrored as in a broad horizontal
pier-glass. The old bronze lanterns before the palace verandas, exactly
full of rain-water, were as beautiful, as graceful, as any I had seen in
China; and being carefully preserved in this still imperial land, they
showed their fine points to better advantage. They are hardly the
favorite lanterns of his Majesty, however, who is more French than
Chinese in his tastes and thirsts.
The gaudy audience-chamber was on the whole more conspicuous than
lovely. The real throne-room, on the other hand, was a gorgeous place
well worth seeing, in spite of a goodly supply of those chandeliers
which seem to be Europe’s chief contribution to the splendor of Oriental
kings. From a vast expanse of varicolored tiles gleaming as if they were
made of glass, rose a forest of red pillars with imperial yellow
five-clawed dragons climbing them. Decorations of every conceivable
Chinese form and color, but with red in the ascendancy, added to the
rich yet not chaotic ensemble. There were many fine vases, quite
evidently Chinese, though the “guide” who saw to it that I chipped off
no souvenirs and slipped nothing into my pockets called some of them
French and contended that many of the others were made by the Annamese
themselves, in earlier days, before those of his countrymen capable of
such things had all died off. But they looked to me so much like
Kingtehchen ware, the best of Kingtehchen at that, that for once I might
have been tempted into a wager if one had been offered.
Naturally there was the throne, and all the other things that go with
emperors’ throne-rooms, but all those I was to see better during the
ceremony that was keeping me in Hué. Suffice it to say that the
throne-room of Annam was the most gorgeous place I had seen in many a
moon, on the whole artistically pleasing, and—that the rank and file of
Americans may understand just what I am trying to say—worth several
million piastres, or about half as many dollars.
Beyond came more long tile-covered rooms, shed-like in shape, in which
were many spirit-tablets and tables covered with porcelain fruits. There
were even some small baskets of real fruit, perhaps because it was now
New Year time, when the spirits of the departed cannot be deceived with
pretended food, and when their descendants are surest to remember them.
All these things and many more stood in imposing array before the six
shrines of the present dynasty. I fear, however, that with my
incorrigibly plebeian mind and tastes I found most interesting of all
the flocks of ordinary coolies with dusters and brooms, who roamed about
all the buildings among these king’s playthings and slept on mat-covered
boards beside them.
The story of the emperors of Annam, since Gia-long asked through the
bishop of Adran for the assistance of the French against his dynastic
rivals at the end of the eighteenth century, is not an entirely happy
one. Some of them have even lost their jobs entirely for not behaving
themselves, or for disobeying the French. There was Thanh-thai, for
instance, deposed in 1907. He had been cutting up—among other things one
of his concubines, merely to try his hand at surgery. So the French, not
realizing perhaps that such things happen even in Philadelphia, nay, in
Paris itself, sent him into exile and called in a doctor to help pick
out one of his many sons to take his place. The eldest they passed over
as a plain idiot, and chose a boy in prison, who howled because he
thought he was being led forth to have his head lopped off. By the time
they had washed and dressed him in the imperial robes, however, and
seated him on the throne with the jade scepter in his childish hand, he
had reverted to type and was an emperor both in appearance and demeanor,
scorning already the common people among his kowtowing subjects. But in
1916, coincident with a certain busyness of the French at home, an
independence movement broke out under this youthful king, which the
French naturally insist was engineered by the Germans. The scheme was to
have servants poison all the foreigners in the colony some evening, but
some one “squealed.” So Jy-su, born in 1902, was also exiled to Réunion,
a French island off the east coast of Africa, which he still graces with
his surgical father and one favorite wife. There they are both very
happy, according to the French colonials, who regard Réunion as a second
Garden of Eden, and where the ex-Sons of Heaven “have all the women they
want”—a French as well as a Mohammedan notion of paradise.
All this gave the then reigning emperor, Khai-dinh, his chance. This
French-ruled king of Annam, a rather distant relative of the man and boy
he succeeded, came to the throne in 1916, when he was nearly
thirty-five. He must have been troubled with something akin to vertigo
by his accession, for until then, though he had been a kind of prince,
he had enjoyed by no means the income or the importance of a railway
station-master. If I have inadvertently called him king I apologize; his
official title is Koang-de, Son of Heaven, written with the same
characters as those for the Chinese Hoang-ti, son of a similar celestial
realm. In fact the emperors of Annam claim descent from an imperial
family of China, which had descendants to spare. Khai-dinh visited
France in state in 1922, influenced perhaps by an American president,
for that was the first case of an emperor of Annam leaving Annamese
soil. It was even more important for him to go, however, for in the
Indo-Chinese pagoda on the outskirts of the Bois de Vincennes he
performed a ceremony to release from the necessity of wandering
perpetually through eternity the shades of thousands of Annamese who had
fallen in the World War, unsaved either because they had not been able
to comply with the final rites of their religion or because their bodies
had not been recovered. He also placed in a French school his son and
heir—the only one, I believe, for all the wives Khai-dinh maintained.
Khai-dinh was nearing forty when I graced Hué with my impatient
presence, and was already anemic with tuberculosis. The other day he
died, and twelve-year-old Vinh-thuy, the crown prince, ascended the
throne under the name of Bao-dai (Greatness Sustained). But he returned
at once to France to continue his studies, and Frenchmen will tell you
that Annam is now governed by a Conseil de Régence, presided over by the
mandarin Ton-that-tan. For in theory the emperor governs. In
Cochinchina, which is admittedly a colony, a French lieutenant governor
is the supreme functionary, but in the four protectorates the native
sovereigns are still nominally the heads of the governments. Annam and
Tonkin are under the Annamese emperor; Cambodia and a part of Laos still
have kings. The native laws apply, unless a foreigner is involved, when
the Code Napoléon is used. The protectorates maintain almost intact the
laws and administrative machinery of the days when they were independent
of French authority. The native sovereign appoints all officials, but
the French _résident supérieur_ can reject any candidate; the native
rulers dare not ignore his smallest suggestion, and the lesser
_résidents_ keep a sharp eye on native functionaries in the provinces.
New laws may be of either French or native initiative, but both sides
must agree, which of course means that the French have the final word.
All royal ordinances are drawn up, not only the French but the native
texts, in the _Résidences Supérieures_. In Annam the old Chinese system
of choosing officials and mandarins from among those who have shown the
greatest proficiency in scholarship still more or less prevails, rather
than the Irish system of our Western world.
One wonders what the thoughts of Bao-dai will be when he comes back
really to take his father’s place. Educated in French schools, Parisian
during all his formative years, he will suddenly be plunged into this
old-world atmosphere, to the customs, the ideas, the ideals, even the
spirit of which he will surely have become a stranger. Will he regret
the ardent life of the Occident he will have left behind, or will the
old soul of the palace of his ancestors penetrate and possess him, and
insensibly make him an Oriental potentate?
I softened my enforced stay in Hué by also three times visiting the
imperial burial-places some ten miles from the citadel, on the French
side of the river. The low rolling hillocks close about the Annamese
capital are covered with graves of the rank and file by the many
thousands. Nearly all these mere mounds of earth were cleared and
rounded off now for the New Year, the few still covered with grass and
weeds suggesting very unfilial descendants or, more likely still, a line
died out. As many Annamese as possible have themselves buried near the
tombs of their sacred emperors, as the Hindu who can manage it has his
body burned on the bank of the Ganges at Benares. The French are
gradually restricting the grave-lands, but they must move slowly in a
matter so important to an ancestor-worshiping race.
All important Annamese make preparation during their lifetime for their
burial, some building their own tombs, where they often come to sit in
meditation. While he is still on the throne each emperor has a
geomancer, or a consultation of geomancers no doubt, choose the site for
his last resting-place, always in the shelter of a natural screen, a
butte or hillock that will protect the dead from the evil spirits that
are forever flying about through the air. In such a garden several
buildings are constructed, their number and arrangement fixed by ancient
custom, superstition, and rites. There is an inclosure for the material
remains, a pavilion for the memory, a temple for the soul; our miserable
way of putting all these together, so that we cannot commune with the
memory of the deceased without seeming to smell his bones, is not the
Annamese way. Thus things were conceived by the sages who erected beyond
the gates of Peking the mausoleums of the Ming, and the Annamese
sovereigns have since changed nothing of what they got from their
Chinese masters.
The royal tomb is the last residence of the sovereign, and in some ways
the most sumptuous, as befits a palace of eternal repose. He may come
back in spirit at any moment; therefore his loyal people are always
prepared to receive him. Here is his great wooden bed, with its mat and
cushions and porcelain pillow, not only for himself but for his favorite
wife. Here is the tea, the rice, the _nhoc-nam_, or salty sauce in which
the Annamese dip their food on the way to the mouth, cups of _chumchum_,
or rice whisky, the arec-nuts, betel-leaves, and the little pot of lime
that goes with them for his favorite minor vice, even cigarettes,
everything he will need when he arrives. All these provisions are
renewed every morning of the year, generation after generation, so that
he will find nothing stale on the day when he finally comes. He will
find again, arranged under glass, his royal playthings, the trinkets and
gew-gaws, the jade shrubs, the precious crystals, the coffers inlaid
with mother-of-pearl, the weapons he loved, even those great Sèvres
vases which the ambassadors of a more respectful France sent him as New
Year’s presents; more things perhaps than the living emperor has now in
his living palace. Perhaps the worst punishment of Thanh-thai and his
son, deposed in 1907 and 1916, respectively, is that they cannot have
their tombs here among those of their ancestors—unless the French relent
after they are dead, which for politic reasons of influence on imperial
conduct in the future they probably will not do. That Khai-dinh
succeeded in dying on the job was probably the most successful
accomplishment of his life.
Nothing in Indo-China has the charm of these old royal tombs; in them
lives intact the melancholy beauty of old Annam. One can walk or
rickshaw all afternoon about them, and never tire of seeing them.
Perhaps the tomb of Tu-duc is the most striking; another can be reached
only by boat. That of Gia-long, epic sovereign of Annam, founder of this
dynasty and of Annam’s present subordination to the French, is not the
most elaborate. He was so very busy getting back his kingdom that
perhaps he did not have time to prepare properly his last place of
repose, for with the aid of the French he chased out his usurpers and
grouped under the rule of his jade scepter all the land of Annam, being
the first native son to govern as master from the frontiers of China to
the banks of the Mekong. Even the tomb of Tu-duc is unimposing compared
to those of the Ming emperors of China. But they all have a setting in
solitude among unexploited forests, and are kept in a state of
cleanliness and repair rare in the great land to the north.
Weather-blackened structures in a hot, rainy, and often humid climate,
though originally reddish, blue, green, multicolored, some overgrown
with a fine vegetation, these Annamese temples of the dead do not impose
upon the heavens like those of China. They blend themselves harmoniously
into their densely green surroundings, the fleeing lines of their low
walls barely cut out against the sky. As in the palaces of the living,
it is not in the elevation of verticals that their builders looked for
beauty, but in the prolonging of unreflected lines, in the grace of
colonnades, terraces, superimposed roofs nonchalantly stretching to the
horizon. Nothing dominates except two slender grayish pillars lost in
the verdure before each tomb, the symbolic camel’s-hair brushes of the
man of letters. In the large court of honor stone mandarins mount
perpetual guard, in a row on each side of the entranceway, their saddled
horses and their little elephants beside them, all dull and
weather-tarnished and sometimes crumbling away.
But the stone mandarins, the horses, elephants, and mythological
monsters guarding the royal tombs of Annam are only pathetic little
things compared to those of China. Once I stood a living caretaker in
the place of a missing stone one, and only by looking closely at the
picture can one distinguish him from those of stone or plaster, whereas
in China my head hardly reached to the knees of many an imperial
guardian, and the horses, elephants, and camels of the Ming tombs are
fully life-size. Nor are the materials so rich in these tombs. The
dragons that unroll their coils on the roofs of glazed sun-polished
tiles show signs of crumbling away; the bricks tend to disintegrate into
the earth from which they came. Some of the most effective of these
royal Annamese tombs are covered with pictures of scenes and people made
entirely of broken crockery, pieces of porcelain cups, plates, bowls of
Chinese design, and of many colors set in cement, much as the Annamese
inlay their furniture with mother-of-pearl. Even fragments of broken
bottles—nothing is so plentiful as bottles in French-ruled
Indo-China—have been used in this way. These monuments recall the rags
torn up and sewed together into the saffron robe of the Buddhist priest,
because poverty is blessed. Yet even in this decoration the
resting-places of the royal Annamese dead are beautiful.
In the woods, as we were driving homeward from the tombs—my first visit
having been by automobile—we met a boy carrying on his head bananas and
some other fruit, his grandfather kneeling beside him at the edge of the
road and burning incense in a bush. The chief of Annam’s security
stopped his car. He was, I may have neglected to mention, in some ways
an unusual Frenchman. Big and handsome, a soldier at Peking in the Boxer
days, he spoke excellent Annamese and still knew some Chinese, and his
interest in the natives was more than official and perfunctory—so much
so in fact that one got a hint now and then that he sometimes felt the
recent loss of his bachelor privileges, for all his enthusiasm as a new
benedict. He spoke to the pair, and in the tone of an interested friend
rather than of a martinet official. The result was a naïve frankness
instead of a taciturn imitation of stupidity. It seemed that the son of
the one and father of the other had “taken the sickness” while gathering
wood, and they had come to implore the spirits of the forest to pardon
him any harm he may have done them. They had come twice before, and now
the father and son so much better that they were sure their amends had
been accepted, but they were performing the effective rites once more,
in order to be on the safe side.
Though it is getting ahead of my story, such as it is, I came out to the
tombs again on the afternoon of _Têt_ and found every one very busy
about the royal mausoleums. The soldier-like caretakers whose permanent
duties are there had freshly washed the very red coats they wear over
the usual black Annamese garments. Men in these bright red tunics, some
holding imperial yellow umbrellas over the trays covered with red cloth
borne by others, were bringing the dead kings their New Year’s food.
Mandarins, some of them evidently descendants of the emperors, came and
donned transparent deep-blue cloaks over their black gowns, much
decorated with French orders and the ivory plaques that denote the
mandarin’s estate, and kowtowed inside and outside the tombs. Some of
these ceremonies were elaborate, that at the tomb of Thieu-tri, which I
chanced upon at the right moment, including a procession and
incense-burning rites in the courtyard, with yellow and faded white
parasols very much in evidence. Old women in purple, green, and other
conspicuous head-bands and cloaks crowded the interior, where a high
mandarin was master of ceremonies. There seemed to be no great objection
to the presence of a European inside, except during the actual interior
ceremony of greeting to the royal spirits, when the mandarin opposed my
entrance in a resolute manner rare, especially toward the ruling race,
among this easy-going people. Though I was the only foreigner nearer the
tombs than the capital itself, I was no doubt perfectly safe from
physical interference even had I persisted in entering, and perfect
Oriental courtesy was shown me; but once again I sensed the probability
that the Annamese do not love the French, from whom of course few of
them distinguish the rest of us of the white race.
[Illustration: The waterfront of Hué, capital of Annam, offers a
contrast between its native craft and the French bridge]
[Illustration: Once a visitor surreptitiously snapped this glimpse of
the mandarins of Annam kowtowing before their emperor on New Year’s Day]
[Illustration: The scores of homes of mandarins within the “citadel” of
Hué were all richly decorated for the lunar New Year]
[Illustration: Inside the “citadel” and near the sumptuous palaces of
the emperor of Annam are the perhaps more comfortable homes of his
humble subjects]