AN IMPERIAL HAPPY NEW YEAR
I was called at six on the eventful morning, and as soon afterward as
was consistent with that meticulous personal attention befitting an
imperial audience I was whisked away to the palaces in the automobile of
my sartorial benefactor. Those who have suffered similar experiences
need not be told the feeling of interloper, of usurper, with which I
wore my borrowed plumage, though to the naked uncritical eye I must have
showed little of this, for the bemedaled stiff-necked officials deep in
the seat beside me showed no signs of finding me incongruous. All had
gone easily, except in the matter of disguising my feet. Look as I
would, not only in the merchandising part of the hotel but among all the
native shops, there was not another pair of shoes in Hué that could be
stretched over those extraordinary extremities. In my desperation I had
turned my brown ones over to the head “boy” with orders to blacken them
every half-hour during the intervening days, and nights, orders
emphasized by promises of great reward and by threats of corresponding
punishment. It had not therefore been merely the rain that confined me
to my chamber. When the crucial moment came success seemed to have
crowned my persistence. The shoes were not only black, they had a hint
of luster. If only the false color did not rub off before the show was
over! It did, as a matter of fact, but not so completely, I flatter
myself, as to call widespread attention to the deception.
The ceremony was set for eight sharp. I suppose it might have been at
Peking Manchu hours, and all over before daylight, but for the
bed-loving French. A score of Frenchmen were already herded inside the
door by which we entered the imperial courtyard, a side door, by the
way, a detail not without its significance. Another dozen or two dripped
from other automobiles not long behind us. The French officials had come
in their best uniforms and their most numerous medals; some of the men
in civilian dress wore gold medallions about their necks. All were not
equally resplendent in the requisite court dress. Visitors must be _en
tenue_, but that, it became at once evident, did not mean that one must
strive for the elegance of a Beau Brummel. Some of the costumes had all
too plainly been shaken free of their moth-balls too late to be pressed;
others had arrived in the colony when the Franco-Prussian War was still
a burning question. The group was sternly confined, however, in one
respect: only the reputedly more manly sex was present, in any form,
capacity, race, color, or condition of servitude. No woman, the sponsor
for Annam’s security himself assured me, has ever seen this imperial New
Year’s ceremony. Only persons in good standing, which in Annam does not
include females, may by any hook or crook be admitted. Once two
Frenchwomen had sneaked in by some still mysterious deception, and it
had been the painful duty of the chivalrous chief of the security of
Annam personally to drag them out of their hiding-place and chase them
outside the grounds. Surely, whispered the incorrigibly skeptical spirit
within me, there must be peep-holes known to the more enterprising of
the emperor’s wives; but on second thought I decided that their
superstitions probably accomplish what the sternest husbandly
admonitions might not.
We had been greeted one by one at the side door to the courtyard by two
mandarins in the flowery costumes of old Chinese times, topped by the
same stepping-block head-dress with absurd side-pieces to be seen on
statues at the Ming tombs of China. Inside, scores of other mandarins in
the same garb flocked together. All wore black knee-boots, ancient robes
of varying colors, silks decorated according to rank—but you can see it
all in old Chinese paintings or on the Chinese stage. Like so many
things which last longest where they have been introduced with the most
difficulty, the costumes and manners of Ming days remain officially
correct in Annam centuries after they have been abandoned in China. Not
merely do back-waters show the greatest stagnation, but the Manchus
never conquered Annam, though they now and then got tribute from it. It
was just as well that photography was forbidden; the absence of the
colors in the developed films would have made them too bitterly
disappointing. If there was any color in the spectrum missing in the
gathering, or in the building and its decorations, I do not know its
name. All the prism seemed to have been invited to the ceremony; and as
if to supply any tone that had inadvertently been omitted, and to cause
my gorge to rise with wrath after all the trouble I had taken to live up
to the sartorial rules, who should come slinking in at the last moment,
with the air of a cat returning to the comforts of an old-maid home
after a night of dissipation on the housetops, but a Frenchman—though in
his conspicuousness he looked more like a Swede or a Hollander—wearing
the loudest check suit in the Ghettos of Christendom and carrying a
camera! It is true that this last was promptly taken away from him. The
French exploit their own colonies even in photographic matters, and this
ceremony had been officially filmed some years before. Yet he not only
was admitted to the courtyard but was allowed to sneak under cover of us
respectable members of his race into the palace itself; and so help me
if he didn’t even have on tan shoes! All through the ceremony he stood
forth from our courtly throng of Westerners like a splotch of red ink on
a white suit, though he made every effort except the two obvious ones to
be inconspicuous. Political or social pull are powerful institutions,
and audacity is not confined to American reporters.
The great audience-chamber in which the New Year’s ceremony is usually
held having been covered with a network of bamboo scaffolding for more
than a year, his Majesty awaited us in the somewhat smaller but more
sumptuous throne-room. The little “résuper,” in a uniform worthy of the
admiral of the European fleet, had arrived with some of his staff last
of all, as befitted his standing; and, piloted by the receiving
mandarins, we had filed in by twos behind him and lined up on the right
side of the richly decorated chamber—on the left or heart side of the
emperor, be it noted, which is the place of honor in the Orient. Dazzled
by the forest of pillars climbed by yellow dragons, I was at the very
foot of the throne before I saw that the emperor was already there. He
stood so still, and his garb and the racial and sickly yellow of his
face blended so harmoniously into the ensemble of the imperial
decorations, that even then I was not sure for a moment that I was not
looking at a lay figure in his place. Yet he was not inconspicuously
dressed. Again I plead my incompetence in the matter of inventories, but
some of his garb could not have escaped the most unobservant eye. He
wore an imperial robe of such richness of embroidery and decorations
that even a woman, had her sex permitted her to behold it, nay, were
she, by profession, both a dressmaker and the concocter of social
columns, could not adequately have described it. Whether or not some of
the imperial wives had put in a safety-pin here and there at the last
moment I have no means of knowing, but the wearer himself could not have
adjusted it to such a nicety without expert assistance of one sex or
another. He stood in the embrace of a chair that the lineal descendant
of St. Peter himself might have envied, two golden dogs half hiding his
feet, which were incased in high boots of the Ming period and turned out
at right angles, as if he were in imminent fear of tottering. They were
so exactly such boots as those of his predecessors in a glass case
near-by that they might indeed have been borrowed from it. On his
imperial head sat an indescribably magnificent openwork crown of gold
and precious stones, beneath which, later developments disclosed, he
wore the ordinary black band-turban of the Annamese male. Many jewels
gleamed from various parts of his person; on three fingers of his left
hand he wore clusters of enormous diamonds, and as he constantly held
that hand over the other, these stones drew the eyes like a flash-light
in a darkened theater. In his clasped hands he held before his face an
ivory wand containing a mirror, just such as are to be seen in old
Chinese statues and paintings, and which has something to do with the
holder’s unworthiness to look upon the spirits of his ancestors, if I
have not bungled my theogony. His almost golden-yellow face was somewhat
chinless, his form slight, even under the imperial robes, his general
appearance so effeminate that he suggested Mei Lanfang, China’s most
famous actor, aged by a decade or so and with the slight changes between
Chinese and Annamese features, playing one of his inimitable female
rôles.
Evidently this chief ceremony of the ordinary Annamese year is one of
the rough spots in the kingly career, for everything pointed to the
suspicion that the emperor did not enjoy it. His face remained as
motionless throughout the throne-room service as if it had been made of
wax, but his body shifted nervously on his legs, as though the ancient
boots were too tight for him, or the right angle at which etiquette
required his feet to be set made standing difficult; and his little eyes
roved constantly from side to side, especially toward the Europeans,
until at times he suggested a trick poodle constantly in fear of doing
something that would bring a whipping after the performance from the
trainer who could only stand blandly by while it was going on. Though it
was not unpleasantly warm so early in the morning, he wiped his face
every few seconds with a folded snow-white handkerchief. Two men in
musical-comedy costumes stood at the front corners of the throne and
fanned him throughout the ceremony. It was not the hasty careless
fanning of mere modern mortals; they stood at the strict attention of
the old days when a head was lopped off for a grimace, and one after the
other raised his fan of feathers on a handle taller than himself and
waved it once downward at a dignified speed, continuing to alternate
with such exact time between the strokes that they must have mentally
counted the seconds.
Two princes of the blood, dressed in robes of exactly that color, and
whom I understood from a whisper from the owner of my raiment to be
brothers of the recently exiled emperor, stood each on his mat on
opposite sides of the wide-open front doors, ten yards or more from the
throne. No other Annamese were allowed inside the throne-room so
effectively graced by our broken double row of motley Europeans
festooned about the first line of pillars on his Majesty’s left. All the
nobility of Annam was gathered in the sun-drenched, flagstone-paved
courtyard outside the open doors which the emperor faced, but for the
moment all one’s attention was needed inside. Amid deep silence and
formal attitudes the _résident supérieur_ stepped nearer to the throne
and read in French a greeting in which he referred to his Majesty’s
ascent of the same in 1916, recalling that he himself had been present
on that auspicious occasion, that he was overwhelmed with pleasure and
honor at his recent return to a place so near his Majesty’s sacred
person, and in a capacity now that implied a recognition of his constant
diligence in his Majesty’s service, and so on and so on, to the depths
of French political rodomontade, with many references to the _Nation
Protectrice_ thrown in.
Then a young mandarin stepped up beside the “résuper” and read in the
querulously singsong Annamese language what was evidently a translation
of this masterpiece, written in Roman letters. Thereupon the emperor
dived down into one of his voluminous sleeves, this very first motion he
had voluntarily made since our arrival seeming to bring him a relief
similar to that of a “living statue” at the drop of the curtain, and dug
out a document written in Chinese characters on a long strip of
cardboard folded accordion fashion. This he read in a better voice than
his physique suggested, though not without a nervous break now and then
in his unmelodious native tongue. From behind a dragon-climbed pillar on
the other side of the throne appeared an old mandarin with a straggling
gray beard, looking in his New-Year costume exactly like an ancient
Chinese portrait cut out of its frame, who read, in an almost perfect
pronunciation that seemed strangely incongruous coming forth from such a
figure, a French translation of the emperor’s speech. This fourth act of
the exchange of platitudes over, the emperor bowed low, the “résuper”
bowed a trifle less low, and we Europeans moved grudgingly back, not so
far but that we could still easily hear and see the chief actor in the
ceremony, who now for the first time sat down, with an air which seemed
to say that at least that was that. Every one else, including even the
_résident supérieur_, stood throughout the entire throne-room part of
the ceremony.
Meanwhile in the courtyard outside attention had turned to activity.
Scores of mandarins in the gay and fanciful attire of Ming days began to
fall into ranks. The Annamese troops in blue, with brass-topped mushroom
hats and imperial yellow leggings, but under command of a French
officer, and carrying their long rifles with needle-sharp fixed bayonets
French fashion, high on their shoulders, backed to the edges of the
court and out through the gateways. For some time a great to-do reigned
in the courtyard, but at length restored order disclosed six rows of
mandarins lined up according to rank on as many strips of matting, each
holding before his eyes in clasped hands a somewhat less splendid
wand-with-mirror than that of the emperor. It was typical of human
society East or West that three rows of still lower rank, no doubt the
hard-working old souls on whom the real labor of government fell, were
lined up outside the courtyard, where they could neither see nor be seen
by the emperor, but where they went through the same maneuvers as those
inside. Standing within arm’s length of one another in exact rows some
two paces apart, the assembled nobles of Annam so vividly suggested a
company of soldiers or a gymnasium class about to begin its setting-up
exercises that one might easily have been struck by the absence of
dumb-bells. On the side-lines throngs of flunkies in conspicuous
garments began to make those loud discordant noises that represent music
wherever the Chinese character is written, while others, in simpler
costumes, added a weird vocal dissonance in voices of which fully half
suggested eunuchs.
The gymnasium-class aspect of the situation was not entirely accidental;
the nobility of Annam was about to take its yearly exercise. Loud noises
not unlike the “music” that incessantly assailed the ears rang out in a
series of semi-military commands, at each of which the rows of mandarins
in their flowered robes threw themselves face down, slowly, as if, what
with boots, the wands in their hands, and the insufficiency of annual
practice, they found it no easy task, and touched their noses to the
pavement. Just inside the main doors the two princes of the blood, also
facing the emperor on his throne, were doing the same exercises, their
movements evidently serving as a signal to those outside and keeping the
prostrations in unison. There were several series of these, three at a
time, amid much hullabaloo, the emperor meanwhile sitting motionless on
his uncomfortable throne, except that he now and then mopped his face,
yellow as the ensemble of throne-room decorations with the filtered
tropical sunshine upon them, with the still folded pocket-handkerchief.
Each time there was a dazzling flash of the many diamonds on his left
hand, which he always folded again over the diamondless right.
In theory “ten thousand” mandarins of Annam—_ee wan_ is a number so
easily said in any tongue that reads Chinese—come to prostrate
themselves in the great courtyard of the palace of Hué on the day of
_Têt_, but something less than that number beat their foreheads on its
flagstones that morning. _Lam lie_, the Annamese verb to prostrate one’s
self, means this stretching out at full length on one’s face and is
still descriptive in this great yearly ceremony, though at other times
the Annamese nowadays usually contents himself with bending the bust as
if he were hinged at the waist, and shaking his own hands. As they
finished, the mandarins backed a couple of steps toward the side of the
courtyard, then turned and marched to the side-lines, while others took
their places. All was done in very good unison, though not in perfect
military precision, and everyone seemed to take the matter very
seriously, as if a slip would be as dreadful as during a guard-mount in
our regular army.
Then came retired mandarins, in bright-red trousers under gowns reaching
to the knees, and _no boots_. This, a whisper told me, is the sign of
retirement; “I have taken off my boots,” means to the Annamese mandarin
what cutting off his _coleta_ does to the Spanish matador, what the
writing of his memoirs means to an American pugilist or politician. Each
and every one of these old chaps was in stocking-feet quite plainly made
in France, most, though by no means all, of the same color. They threw
themselves down the same number of times as had those who had preceded
them, some aged faces contorted as if they found the effort quite a
trial. Two ragged rows of poor old fellows of low degree at the rear had
not even been provided with mats, but had to bump their heads on the
bare flagstones.
Between the two front doors almost directly in front of the emperor,
where he could not have taken his eyes off them if he had tried, stood a
hat-rack bearing aloft all the tropical helmets and uniform capes of
those Europeans who did not carry their hats in their hands. A servant
had taken that of the “résuper” himself, but many others had refused to
run the risk of having some royal retainer make off with theirs. It
seemed as if the hat-rack might have been put in some less conspicuous
corner, but perhaps it was an intentional symbol, a constant visible
reminder to his Majesty of who made him emperor, and who could unmake
him again in twenty minutes if he bungled his rôle. I could also make
out through a door at the back of the throne-room the imperial rickshaw.
It seemed to be at least half of gold, with richly yellow cushions; and
the imperial rickshaw-man—who with a few other low-caste hangers-on
peered in now and then, after the custom at all Oriental ceremonies—was
in an incredibly ornate livery, also mainly of imperial yellow. Though
he uses an automobile outside the palace walls, the emperor needs a
rickshaw within, for it is nearly a hundred yards from the throne-room
to his semi-European living-quarters.
When the larger audience-chamber is available at the lunar New Year,
trained elephants are brought from the imperial stables to do homage on
bended knees before the Son of Heaven, but this sight was denied us. The
kowtowing of the retired mandarins ended, his Majesty Khai-dinh stepped
down from his throne, evidently no easy task in his heavy boots, for he
moved on the polished floor like an octogenarian crossing smooth ice. He
shook hands with the _résident supérieur_, then with the purple-robed
old archbishop, and behind these three we all filed out into a
semi-foreign dining-room at one side of the courtyard. There the emperor
once more sat down at the back of the room, facing doors wide open on
the yard, and again flanked by his two fanners, though these were not
working now, possibly because it was after union hours. A young mandarin
interpreter stood against the wall behind him; the superior resident of
Annam took a seat on his left, and the rest of us subsided into the rows
of chairs facing the emperor sidewise that filled the room. Khai-dinh
knew some French, but like many others in the same boat he never
ventured to speak it in public. Sometimes, before the interpreter had
passed on the “résuper’s” remarks, he gave a sign of having understood,
but he never seemed to attempt to reply in French. He now looked more
human, permitted some expression to play over his features, among which
that of relief was the most prominent, even smiled now and then. This
showed that, unlike nearly all the mandarins that now mingled with us,
his teeth were white, but that he probably chewed betel-nut. He smoked a
cigarette as if he were accustomed to devour them but was now on his
good behavior.
The band played the “Marseillaise,” after which the emperor evidently
made a brief speech, though in a voice that could hardly have been heard
by the superior resident himself. The two more manly looking princes of
the blood, both wearing glasses, seemed to speak French fluently and to
be in many respects quite up-to-date, as they went about greeting their
many friends among the Europeans. Evidently there was nothing wrong with
his Majesty’s voice when he wished to be heard, for he went on talking
to his respectful master even after the fire-crackers had been set off,
which feat was as difficult as conversing in a subway express. The
_pétards_ were tied in thick continuous bunches from top to bottom of
bamboo poles terminating in a few leaves that had been set up at the
four corners of the courtyard, and they kept up a deafening bombardment
unbrokenly for at least twenty minutes, until they suggested the
applause for a favorite candidate at a political convention. The yard
was filled with white smoke and the flagstones carpeted with bursted
crackers, and still the bombardment went on. A little earlier the
booming of artillery had come from somewhere within the citadel,
probably an imperial cannon salute, but if this still continued, as was
likely, we could not hear it, so like the firing of thousands of rifles
was the bursting of fire-crackers.
Meanwhile we had all been served iced champagne, in which we drank the
emperor’s health standing; and there were passed around plates of cakes
and sweetmeats so elaborate that no one seemed to dare to touch them,
though the Son of Heaven himself munched a bit. A fat Frenchman beside
me wanted to know in a voice almost loud enough to reach the emperor
whether there was _pas moyen avoir un cigare_, and a moment later these
and cigarettes were passed in jeweled boxes, which contained also the
ingredients of the betel-nut habit for those who preferred that to
smoking. Some of the servants who passed these things had the strained
eyes and high cheek-bones common to eunuchs, and looked on as if the fun
of life meant nothing to them, as if they were still wondering what had
happened to them in boyhood that they could not be like other men, much
as a blind man must wonder what sort of sensation is sight. Or they may
merely have been tubercular.
There was evidently some way by which the initiated could tell when the
bombardment was to cease, for the emperor arose and we all filed out
after him just in time to hear the last fire-cracker explode as we
reached the courtyard. We went on to the door of the throne-room, and
there this queer medley of East and West ended with the Son of Heaven
standing and shaking hands with each of us as we filed past him. I
murmured New Year’s greetings from the United States in his ear, but
either he did not catch my French or he had never heard of so
unimportant a place. His fingers were slighter than those of a
school-girl, and his grasp weak and without cordiality, though this may
have been due to lack of experience with our queer Western form of
greeting. We filed out between ranks of gaily dressed flunkies,
musicians, probable eunuchs, past the troops in the outer courtyard, to
our automobiles and rickshaws and sped away through palace and citadel
gates and across the big seven-arch steel bridge, soldiers at the
gateways saluting as we passed, and the populace looking after us not so
much with envious as with curious faces, as if the thought had never
occurred to them that they might also be admitted to the great imperial
ceremony. The last glimpse I had of his late Majesty Khai-dinh was of a
slight form in ornate Oriental get-up, framed in the doorway of his
throne-room and shaking hands with a fat and pompous French merchant who
wore a golden Annamese decoration about a neck on which a once stiff
collar had wilted beyond recognition.
I returned thus hastily to the grocery-hotel both because I could not
decline the seat reserved for me in the chief’s automobile and because I
wished to restore the borrowed plumage before something fatal happened
to it. Moreover, my shoes were rapidly changing from their false African
to their natural Asiatic hue. But that duty and the eleven-o’clock
_déjeuner_ over, I hastened back across the river. The last few days had
been very busy there, the market and the shops crowded, every one buying
new mats, paper and real flowers, red paper lanterns, red strips of
paper with Chinese characters written on them, and great quantities of
other New Year’s necessities. As in China the people of Annam must have
money for the _Têt_; not only must they pay their debts at the lunar New
Year, but they must have new clothing, redecorate their houses and the
tombs of their ancestors, feed well those departed souls and themselves,
and gird themselves for another Sundayless year of labor or indolence.
Now the market was closed, though more shops kept open than in China,
perhaps because many of the merchants were not real Annamese. On the
other hand theaters were working overtime; temples were crowded with
newly dressed throngs; in sampans, hovels, and houses the ancestral
altars were laden with flowers, fruits, pork, fish, fowl, and boiled
rice. The evening before they had scintillated with gilded and silver
things that gleamed under candle, kerosene, and electric lights.
Everywhere there was a great going and coming, every one making New-Year
calls. A green bamboo pole, with a few feathery leaves still at the top,
had been set up before each house and temple, a woven-bamboo ornament
far up most of them as a kind of roosting-place for the spirits of the
air. The theory is, if I understood an explanation couched in far from
perfect French, that these invisible flying wraiths will accept this
homage to them and do no harm to the inmates of any house before which
such a bamboo stands.
The rickshaw-men had little chance to celebrate; their holiday resembled
that of an Irish donkey on March 17. One of the chief New-Year sports
even of those Annamese who usually walk was for once to ride in
rickshaws, two and even three passengers in each vehicle. The women
especially were in their newest and most resplendent garb—light and dark
green, purple, rich brown, small children in every tone of red. Negro
soldiers from other French possessions, their black faces emphasized
under their white helmets, were hobnobbing with the poorer people in the
outskirts, evidently held in as much honor among them as their white
masters. A number of ordinary-looking young conscripts from France also
mingled freely with the populace, and here and there one met a negro and
a white soldier arm in arm, as one may see them side by side in the same
squad on the drill-grounds of Indo-China.
The Annamese seldom drink to excess, and they are not by nature
quarrelsome or violent, but they dearly love gambling. So serious is
this vice among them that the French now forbid games of chance except
during the week or so of the lunar New Year season. Now one saw them
gambling everywhere, men, women, and children. Women, even boys of six
or seven, had set up gambling-boards in the streets, in the doorways of
their houses, in the courtyards of those homes which had them, in the
main rooms before the family altar. It was a simple game that engrossed
most of them. A board was marked with chalk or paint into several
squares, sometimes with numbers, some with crudely drawn animals in
them. When all those who wish to take a chance have laid their money in
the squares, the proprietor of the board throws out a handful of little
disks from a bowl and counts them off four by four, the remaining number
winning four times the amount of the bets on the lucky square. Besides
this primitive form of fan-tan there were dice in a saucer with a cup
turned down over them. When all the money is laid the cup and saucer are
shaken and the result disclosed. In the public streets wagers ranged all
the way from perforated brass “cash” to paper piastres; inside the
larger houses especially much more serious stakes were the rule. Many
French colonials criticize the government for gathering revenue through
its opium monopoly and forbidding the lesser vice of gambling except
during _Têt_.
Within the citadel much the same ceremony, on a smaller scale, as that
at the palace, took place in each mandarin’s home, with his relatives,
friends, and the lower orders bringing the greetings. Among other New
Year’s decorations there were many flags all about this forest-shaded
town, the tricolor less in evidence than a red and yellow flag that was
evidently the imperial banner. Scores of the homes of the mandarins
within the citadel displayed over their gateways the flags of all the
Allies, that of France double size and in the middle. All the rest of
the day I met mandarins coming out of their low houses in garden groves,
or from those of others of the same rank, or along the roads and streets
on both sides of the river, usually in rickshaws. Some even of high rank
did not scorn to ride double, after the common Annamese custom. They no
longer wore their ancient Ming head-dresses or their knee-high boots,
but still had on the gay garments of festival, such as cerise robes
embroidered with flowers. I met several mandarin servants carrying home
a pair of boots strung over a shoulder, with a cloth-wrapped bundle of
holiday garments in one hand and the strange head-dress left over from
the days of the Ming in the other, as if some of their masters also had
been obliged to borrow _le smoking_ in its Annamese form, before they
could bring their annual greetings to their emperor.
[Illustration: An Annamese mandarin all dressed up for his New Year’s
honors to his emperor; his servant behind]
[Illustration: Servants of the mandarins carry home after the ceremony
the ancient Ming accoutrements of their masters]
[Illustration: Emperor Khai-dinh of Annam on his French-supported
throne]
[Illustration: Some of the most effective of Annamese tombs are covered
with pictures and designs made of broken porcelain dishes set in cement]
One recognizes a mandarin of Annam by the somewhat better material of
his clothing and by a little wooden or ivory baggage-check on his
starboard bowsprit, bearing his title or grade in Chinese characters.
Some of them had been so brave, or have obeyed the French so well, that
they wore on the other side French decorations enough to rival a
staff-officer. Not all the mandarins surrounding the emperor of Annam
are noted for either their physical or—the experienced eye could not but
note—their moral beauty. Many were pitted with smallpox, and more of
them were stoop-shouldered with loafing than were horny-handed with
toil. Like Chinese above the laboring-class, these tax-gatherers from a
hard-working people give no attention to their muscles, scorn indeed to
use them when there is any way out of it, and are flabby and ungainly
accordingly. Yet some of the staid old retired mandarins looked like men
who had led a kindly and a scholarly life. Each generation the grade of
a mandarin drops a notch, so that the privileged class does not remain
perpetually the same, a scheme that might perhaps advantageously be
applied in other centers of the human maelstrom. Titles of nobility are
sometimes given for distinguished services—such, no doubt, as betraying
to the French rulers independence movements among the natives—but these
are no longer hereditary. I met one of the princes of the blood on a
suburban road that New Year’s afternoon, still in his blood-red robes of
ceremony, so out of keeping with his modern nose-pinching spectacles and
the very ordinary rickshaw in which he rode. Here and there a coolie or
a boy took off his palm-leaf hat to him, but that was the only visible
evidence that his rank meant anything much to the populace, or to the
prince himself.
The people of Annam still treat their puppet emperor as the true Son of
Heaven, however, though they cannot but know that he is chosen by the
French. It is as if they considered the French merely an instrument of
fate, as some Christians manage to regard anything that happens as God’s
hand working in strange mysterious ways. Whatever he may have thought of
this attitude of his loyal subjects, Khai-dinh did not by any means
disdain the material conveniences of our upstart Western civilization.
He never went outside his palace grounds except by automobile—a big
imperial-yellow limousine with black top and red wheels, of French make
naturally, and which had its blow-outs and other mishaps now and then
quite like the Fords of the garden variety of mankind. Over on the
French side of the river he had a suburban palace, a rest-house far from
his crowded domestic circle. It is a very showy establishment in
foreign, more exactly in continental European, style, with graveled
driveways, _portes cochères_, plate-glass windows, the walls bright
yellow with the intertwined letters AD on the gates. That afternoon it
was gay with yellow flags, a color forbidden the ordinary people, though
now and then a small child wears it with impunity—or it may be that this
means the emperor once called upon its mother. Even in his palace within
the citadel Khai-dinh had his apartments installed in European style,
they say, though I cannot of course report this on first-hand evidence;
his domestic realm was closed even to his French superior, for after all
Annam is still Oriental. When the spirits moved him to spend an evening
entertaining any cronies he may have had among the French colonials, he
called his yellow limousine and repaired to his transfluvial palace. He
drew and sculptured, not in the traditional Chinese-Annamese fashion,
but after the manner of a not too talented pupil of the Beaux Arts. The
French insist that he also was very happy, and they may be right. His
salary for doing nothing was five thousand piastres a month; he had ten
wives—his predecessor maintained a hundred, but economy is the watchword
in official Annam since the war—and his dancers and all such necessities
were paid for by the government. The “résuper” who really rules Annam
and its emperor gets only fifteen hundred piastres a month and has only
one wife, and as far as is officially known not even one dancing-girl.
On March 19 there was to be an even greater ceremony in Hué—the
emperor’s all-night vigil at the Temple of Heaven. Similar, though by no
means comparable, to the imperial rite that took place yearly in Peking
until the revolution of 1911 turned that Temple of Heaven into a
tourists’ picnic-ground and China into a masquerade-ball republic, this
ceremony has long been given every three years; but the French had
decided that this one was to be the last. Thus do the pageantries of
olden days drop unnoticed one by one under the trampling feet of time.