CHINA IN 1865-1866
In “Un Pèlerin d’Angkor,” which for the sake of its wonderful
descriptions of tropical scenery is to me one of Pierre Loti’s most
charming books, he tells us how when he was a little child he was held
in chains by the idea of the mysterious temples hidden away, forgotten,
buried in the teeming jungles of Cambodia, and how at last his dream was
realized in that long pilgrimage up the Mekong river of which his poetic
descriptions, carrying us with a magician’s wand into the mysterious
silences of tropical forests, are tinged with that melancholy which
seems inseparable from his genius, even when he calls up the happiness
of reaching the long-wished for goal of a cherished ambition. I once
asked him why he was so pessimistic—why that persistent note of sadness?
He answered very simply, “La vie est triste,” and his eyes had that far
away, yearning look, a characteristic of his, which seems so strange in a
man whose life has been one long chain of brilliant successes.
Well! I too, as a child, had dreams which carried me far away. A kind
aunt had given me a set of so-called rice-paper pictures of lovely
imperial ladies with architectural structures of hair on their heads,
gentlemen clad in purple silk robes with ephods embroidered with
five-clawed golden dragons, drawings of vividly-coloured flowers and
fruit, of horror-striking tortures, unheard of out of Tartarus, being
inflicted upon bleeding criminals. But beyond all was the story of
Aladdin falling in love with the Princess Badroulbadour on her way to the
bath at Peking. My young brain was aflame with the longing to go to China
and see all these things. How to manage it? Should I ever get nearer to
that land of wonders than a certain fascinating curiosity shop in Hanway
Yard—now Hanway Street—a beloved and much-haunted place full of bowls
and jars, eggshell china, rosebacked plates and lange Elizen, which now
would fetch several pounds for every shilling that they cost then. That
dream never left me. It haunted my boyhood and my young manhood and, like
Pierre Loti’s cherished dream, it came into life at last.
One day in the month of February, 1865, Mr. Hammond came into the French
Department of the Foreign Office evidently rather uneasy. He told us
that he was very much put out by not being able to get a man to go out
to Peking, to take the place of St. John who was coming home at once
across Siberia. He had tried in vain to find someone and was in great
difficulties. A sudden thought struck me. “Will you send me out?” I
asked. He hesitated for a moment and said, “Well, if you are really
willing to go, we might arrange a transfer. How soon could you be ready?”
“As soon as you please,” I answered. “Can you be ready in a fortnight?”
I jumped at the offer and went out then and there to start on getting
together my outfit. It was rather a sudden surprise to my people when I
reached home that afternoon laden with a sun-helmet and various small
purchases of which the purpose did not at first sight seem quite clear to
them.
The last few days before my departure were spent a great deal with Sir
Frederic Bruce, our minister at Peking, who was at home on leave, and
who gave me all the advice that would be of value to a novice going out
to the Far East. He was one of those men whom it is good to have known,
singularly handsome, with a smile and laughing brown eyes which seemed to
carry sunshine into every room that he went into; he was a diplomatist of
rare ability. Lord Elgin, indeed, with whom he first went out to China,
used to say of him that he was by far the ablest of the four brothers,
all of whom were certainly men of mark.
At Peking he was an unqualified success. The Chinese, impressed like
all Asiatics by a fine reverence for lineage and blue blood, saw in him
a great gentleman whose transparent honesty they could trust. There
were not very many legations in China in his time, but the ministers
who were his colleagues, men like M. de Bourboulon, the Frenchman, and
General Vlangaly, the Russian, were devoted to him. They listened to him
with the most profound respect and affection, and General Vlangaly told
me that whenever any knotty problem cropped up the first question was
“Qu’en dira Sir Frederic?” His own staff from Wade downwards worshipped
him. “Wade is a great mimic,” he said to me once, “mind you ask him
whether he has added me to his Gallery of Illustration.”[51] He had done
so, for when I asked Wade the question at Peking, he went off at score
and told me how on one occasion he was interpreting for Sir Frederic at
the Tsung Li Ya-mên (the Foreign Office) when he, Wade, who was pepper
itself, got extremely angry, while Sir Frederic was quietly puffing away
at his cheroot. “But,” said the Prince Regent, “I see that you are very
angry—yet I believe that you are interpreting for Pu Ta Jên (Sir F.
Bruce); he, on the contrary, appears to be quite calm—not a bit angry.”
“There, Sir Frederic,” said Wade, furious, “the Prince says that you
are not angry—that it is only I who am excited.” “Oh! Damme,” drawled
Sir Frederic in his large, good-humoured way, taking the cheroot out of
his mouth, “tell him I’m deyvlish angry,” and with that, beaming upon
Prince Kung and the assembled mandarins, he smoked away as contentedly as
before. Wade was telling the story against himself, and as he told it I
could almost fancy that Sir Frederic was in the room.
The day before I left I went to say good-bye to Sir Frederic. When we
shook hands he said, “Remember that when you come back from China you
must come to me wherever my post may be! That is to say,” he added with a
sigh, “if I survive the age of fifty, which seems to be fatal to all of
my family.” The sad “if” was justified! He went out as Minister to the
United States, won all hearts there as he did everywhere else, and died
of heart failure at some small railway station. I was told afterwards
that a tablespoonful of brandy might have saved his precious life! His
death in 1867, at the age of fifty-three, was mourned in the East and in
the West.
1865
I reached Paris on the 8th of March; I was obliged to spend forty-eight
hours there, as there were certain matters to which I was compelled to
attend, also I was anxious to see Mr. John Dent, the head of the famous
China house, and Baron Overbeck, the Austrian Consul General in Hong
Kong, who was going East by the same mail. It was no great penance having
to pass two evenings in Paris with them, for there was much going on, and
Offenbach’s “Belle Hélène” a delight, with Schneider and Dupuis, was in
full swing. Was there ever a piece half so gay, half so witty, or half
so impudent! The face of Paris when Helen showed him “mes portraits de
famille,” Jupiter and Leda, Jupiter and Europa, Jupiter and Danae, etc.,
was something to remember!
The 10th of March, 1865, was a fateful day for the Napoleonic Dynasty,
for on that day the Duc de Morny, Louis Napoléon’s half brother and
most devoted friend, died. He was attended by Sir Joseph Olliffe, the
physician of the English Embassy, arousing great jealousy among the
French doctors, who of course swore that his life might have been saved.
Morny was the son of the Comte de Flahault, an old friend of my father’s
whom I knew when he was ambassador in London, and Queen Hortense. When
Louis Napoléon became President of the Republic the two brothers met
for the first time, and the deepest affection immediately sprang up
between the two. Under the Empire, Morny who with Maupas, Persigny, and
St. Arnaud, had been one of the chief actors in the _coup d’état_ of
1851, became President of the Corps Législatif, and held that office
until 1856, when he went as ambassador to St. Petersburg, and in great
splendour represented Louis Napoléon at the coronation of the Emperor
Alexander the Second. On his return to Paris in 1857 he again took up the
post of President.
He was a dandy and _viveur_, a man of many accomplishments, and a
capable if rather erratic statesman, but he was one of those members
of the Imperial group who were fiercely accused of gambling on the
Bourse. However that might be, he was immensely popular. Paris loved
him, fascinated by his reputation of irresistibility, and even by the
contemptuous, haughty look with which he strode through the world;
when he died, the grief was general and unfeigned; and poor Sir Joseph
Olliffe was very cruelly attacked by the Faculty who were sure of the
applause of the mob. The story of Morny’s life and death furnished the
“motif” of Alphonse Daudet’s book “Le Nabab,” which was certainly not
written in the Napoleonic interest, for indeed Daudet was a partisan of
the old régime. When Morny offered him a post in his private office he
felt bound in common honesty to say that he was a legitimist. “Ma foi!
L’Impératrice l’est aussi,” answered Morny, with his quiet, impertinent
smile.[52] The frivolous side of Morny, the “Richelieu-Brummell,” as
Daudet called him, was always very much in evidence, and it was said,
not without truth, that he showed far more interest in the rehearsals of
_M. Choufleuri restera chez lui_—a rather poor operatic farce of his for
which Offenbach wrote the music—than ever he did in the discussions of
the Corps Législatif. Indeed, while _M. Choufleuri_ was in preparation he
was neither to have nor to hold, he would attend to nothing else.
Louis Napoléon went to take leave of his brother on his death-bed.
When the moment for leaving came, the dying man, holding the Emperor’s
hand in his, summoned up strength enough to say: “Sire, méfiez-vous de
l’Allemagne!” Those were his last pregnant words to the Sovereign and
brother whom he loved so well. This was told me by one who was present
at what he described as a most touching death-bed scene, for the love
between the two men was very real. That dying speech was prophetic.
Had Morny lived things might have been very different; but his death
left a blank which could not be filled; Louis Napoléon was fast growing
old, martyrized by the disease which ultimately killed him; he needed a
strong man at his elbow—a man with political prescience; failing that
he fell into the hands of a gang, Ollivier, Gramont, Lebœuf and others,
with female influences at work behind them, who led him to his ruin.
Morny in spite of his gay, devil-may-care dandyism, could see clearly
ahead; he and he alone among the Emperor’s surroundings might have saved
the dynasty. But that was not to be; it was doomed. The passing bell for
Morny rang the knell of the Empire.
The intimacy between Morny and Sir Joseph Olliffe, an old friend of ours
whom we all loved, was something more, if possible, than that between
physician and patient. There was a very firm attachment between the two,
and they were engaged in an affair in which they both took the greatest
interest. It was they who built Deauville upon a site which I remember a
flat wilderness of sand, with a few scanty bristles of rushes cropping up
here and there, opposite Trouville, on the other side of the outlet of
the river Toucques. It is only fair to say that if Mora in the “Nabab”
was a more or less faithful portrait of Morny, Jenkins, the quack Doctor,
was certainly not drawn from Sir Joseph Olliffe, who was as upright and
transparent an English gentleman as ever entered the medical profession.
He was respected and loved by all who knew him.
On the night of the Duc de Morny’s death I left Paris for Marseilles. A
terrible voyage on board the P. & O. s.s. _Massilia_. The Gulf of Lyons
was in a perfect fury, and the passengers sea-sick and mostly sulky at
having to go out to “meet” the hot weather on the other side. This made
ladies out of season, but my cabin-companion—one of those grumblers who
are such a misfortune in the East—told me that even if it had been to
“meet” the cool weather he should have left his wife and children behind;
according to him India was not a fit place for an English sow, let alone
an English gentlewoman. The sea was so high that even the live stock on
board suffered. Bets were going as to whether one bullock would survive
the night of the 17th of March—odds against were laid freely. I do not
remember which won—the sea or the bullock.
When the railway deposited us at Suez (there was no Canal in those days)
we were shipped on board the _Simla_, a crack ship. I had the luck to be
separated from my grumbling ship-mate of the _Massilia_, and was doubled
up with Colonel Gloster, who was going out to command the —— Regiment in
India. He and I and Overbeck with one or two others made a very pleasant
little coterie. How much more delightful were the ships of those days,
with their beautiful, free, white decks and a view of the sea all round,
than the modern floating castles, with all their extravagances and
luxurious discomforts. Everything was spick and span, the metal fittings
and binnacle shone like the gold in a Regent Street jeweller’s shop. The
decks were so clean that you might have eaten your dinner off them, and
the quartermasters, as smart as blue-jackets in the Navy, were always on
the alert to put the crooked straight or render some small service. It
was like yachting in its highest perfection.
A few days of lovely weather in the balmy air of the Indian Ocean,
lounging, dozing, dreaming, watching the wild leaps of the flying-fish
escaping from the dolphins, speculating upon the unknown that lay
ahead—those were days of which every hour was precious. The four or
five of us older men who had made friends sat together in a well-chosen
corner. The griffins and youngsters bound for the far East left us
severely to ourselves; we were told that they called our corner the
lions’ den. Well, we were very happy and did not growl too much. At
Pointe de Galle Overbeck and I bade Gloster good-bye.
At Hong Kong, after three or four delightful days, thanks to the
hospitality of Messrs. Dent, I parted from Overbeck, and the last link
with the “lions’ den” of the _Simla_ was finally broken. He, Gloster
and I corresponded fitfully, but we did not meet again for nine years,
and then in rather a curious way—indeed, if it were not for the wish to
record the meeting later on, and to explain its significance, I should
not have ventured to write about the voyage.
All the “old China hands” of the sixties will remember with affection
Captain “Ikey” Bernard, who commanded the _Ganges_ which carried me from
Hong Kong to Shanghai. Captain Bernard was a great character in the China
Sea. He was the son of a former professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, from
whom he had inherited literary tastes of which the choice little library
in his cabin gave proof, and he kept glowing more than a small spark of
that sacred fire which burns upon the University altar. He made me free
of his cabin, and I spent many hours there in great comfort, and with
some profit.
He was, moreover, something of an epicure, and he and I and two other
passengers dined and had luncheon in his cabin, where we had the best
that the ship could afford: it was a coasting voyage through narrow
island passages, where one could almost hear the fury of the sea dashing
itself against the black rocks frowning on either side, we passed many
fishing junks with their busy crews, and the skipper, who never could
resist the temptation of fresh fish, would stop and buy quantities of
pomfret, all alive, paying for them in ship’s biscuit. Those were the
halcyon days of monopoly. Fancy stopping a mail steamer to buy fish in
these times of ocean-racing and competition! Fifty years ago, “Ikey”
Bernard did not hesitate. His father must have been a very cultivated and
remarkable man. I remember a book of essays upon various subjects by him,
full of wise and clever thoughts, amongst others one on Inspiration which
fascinated me. I often met my friend “Ikey” during the years that I spent
in the Far East, for, welcome whenever his ship touched the shore, he was
one of those much-invited men, whom everybody is glad to secure, and we
had many pleasant talks about all things and some others.
Often I wondered what took him to sea; with his literary tastes, which
must have developed very young, he would have been so perfectly suited
to a student’s career, so entirely at home installed in the comfortable
arm-chair of some common room, sipping his port after a good dinner in
hall at the end of a day congenially spent in the thumbing of folios and
quartos. He would have been an ideal Don—he _was_ a splendid seaman.
My old shipmate has probably long since gone to his rest. If he be yet
alive, my duty to him! If not, may that rest be peace! He was a genial,
honest, cultivated gentleman, and there are many less worthy names whose
memory has been celebrated by far defter pens than mine.
When I left Shanghai for Tientsing on the 11th of May I was at last
alone in the world. Up to that time I had had a succession of pleasant
companions on board; now, besides the very offensive native families
huddled in the steerage, who, when the sun shone, spent their time in the
hunting of fleas—and worse—there was but one other passenger—one of the
curious waifs and strays of Europe who at that time used to float about
the China Sea, hoping to get a job, if not out of the Peking Government,
at any rate out of some provincial Governor or local mandarin. I suppose
that they sometimes succeeded; at any rate they were always ready to
stake their small capital upon the venture; if they failed, when the
hundred or two of dollars were spent they went under and joined the
seething mass of undesirables who used to loaf about the open ports,
picking up a meal and a drink—oftenest a drink—wherever the fates would
be kind.
It was a dull voyage through a leaden sea into which we steamed after a
thick fog had sent us hard and fast aground on one of the treacherous
shoals of the Yang Tsě Chiang. Then came a spell of dirty weather, till
we reached the fine broad headland of the Shantung promontory with the
outlying rocky islands, which are the danger of this part of the China
sea. There was a strong colony of rats on board, and in the great river
we had shipped a host of the most ravenous mosquitoes, whose singing was
almost as bad as their biting. Altogether a trip that is best forgotten.
There was plenty of time to think over all the wonders that I had seen
since leaving Suez—Mount Sinai—the yellow desert of Eastern Africa; the
fiery rocks of Aden; the palm groves of Ceylon, lapped by the waves of
the Indian Ocean; the nutmeg orchards of Penang scenting the air; the
pineapple hedges of Singapore; brown huts teeming with even browner
life, lifted above the fever-swamps like the old lake-dwellings of the
men who lived before history was; Canton, with its narrow streets and
many-coloured, gilded perpendicular signs, as if a pantomime procession
had been suddenly arrested and turned to stone by the head of a Medusa.
But above all, the boundless hospitality and kindness of the merchant
princes of Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Those were the last of the days when the China trade was in the hands
of a few great houses; when the wonderful yearly ocean race took place
to land the first cargo of tea in London; when the opium-clippers from
Bombay would lie under Pok-Fa-Lum, land the supercargo and wait till he
and the house to which his ship was consigned had made the price and
then sail gallantly round the corner into Hong Kong. Vast fortunes were
made in opium, silk and tea, and right royally were they spent. The men
who used up their lives in unhealthy climates, far away from home and
family, sacrificing much and often suffering much, felt that they had
a right to find what compensation they could in making their banishment
tolerable; but what they seemed to delight in more than aught else was in
welcoming those fellow countrymen whom duty or pleasure carried within
possible range of their kindness.
There were no hotels in the old days, but any man who had a letter for
one of the great houses would be sure of as hearty a welcome as if he had
been an old and a dear friend.
Our one port of call was Chifu, a quaint little seaside town with rather
a pretty background of hills, used as a sea-bathing place by some of the
Europeans in North China. Here it was that a few months before a not very
large packing-case was delivered, which, on being opened, was found to
contain human fragments which were the remains of the traitor Burgevine,
an adventurer who, having been first in the service of the Imperial
Government, went over to the Taiping rebels, and finally falling into the
hands of the Imperial army, was sentenced to death by Ling Chi—hacking to
pieces in small morsels, the punishment of high treason.
Here I made the acquaintance of a notable man, one of those heroes who
disappear, unknown and unrecorded, swallowed up by some cataclysm of
fate before the world has had a chance of knowing what it has lost. Mr.
Thomas was a missionary sent out by the London Missionary Society to
China; he had a real genius for acquiring languages—speaking French,
German, Russian, without having had any facility save his own talents
and industry. It was not long before he attained quite a considerable
proficiency in the spoken language of northern China, but when he had
been eighteen months in the country he was called upon by the Society
to preach in Chinese. This he refused to do, for he was too clever
a linguist not to be aware of the pitfalls created by a modicum of
knowledge, and he declined to make Christianity ridiculous. So he and
the Society parted, and he continued to work, living upon a miserable
pittance as best he might.
In the meantime he had become bitten with the desire to learn Corean—a
language of which practically nothing was known. He made friends with the
skipper of a Corean junk trading with Chifu, on board of which he lived
for some weeks. He urged his friend to let him sail with him for Seoul,
but the Hermit Kingdom, as it was called, resolutely shut its gates
to all foreigners, and to approach it was death. Nothing daunted, Mr.
Thomas ended by gaining his point, and the skipper consented to take him,
on condition that he should wear the native dress, in mourning, which
meant that a veil should hang from the brim of the tall hat, completely
concealing the face. The voyage was successful, the venturesome
Englishman was not discovered, and it was not long after his return that
I met him. He was a singularly attractive personality, handsome, clever
and, in spite of a certain modest reticence, very interesting.
There is an old French saying, _Qui a bu boira_. Mr. Thomas was not
contented with his unique achievement; he must needs go back again. He
could not rest. At last, after many vain trials, by holding out prospects
of great gain, he persuaded the captain of a small American ship to sail
for Corea with himself as interpreter. It is known that they reached
Chemulpho and anchored in the Seoul River. In the night the Coreans came
down in force and set fire to the ship. “The rest is silence!”—not a soul
escaped. It was at Peking that I heard the news some months later; and it
was there that I realized how wise he had been when he refused to degrade
our Faith by attempting to expound it to a people singularly alive to the
dignity of letters.
There was in Peking in my time one of the best men that I ever knew. He
was a Scot, possessed of some means of his own, besides a salary from the
Society which sent him out as missionary. He worked like a slave at the
language, and translated the “Pilgrim’s Progress” into Chinese, which he
published with pictures of Christian and all the great characters dressed
in the Chinese costume with pig-tails. Alas! in many removals my copy,
which he gave me, has been lost. He also wore the native dress, lived on
a _tiao_, something like sixpence of our money, a day, and gave the rest
of his ample means to the poor. He had no particle of linguistic talent,
and yet he would preach! I have heard him address a crowd of Chinese
outside the Chien Mên, the great gate of the Tartar city, from the top of
a cart, preaching in Chinese pronounced with a strong Aberdonian accent,
and when he had finished call out “_Ni mên tung tê pu tung tê_” (“Do you
understand?”), and with one accord the crowd cried back, shaking their
hands from side to side: “_Pu tung tê!_” (“We don’t understand”).
And now try to realize what this means. Fancy a Chinese missionary
standing on the top of a taxi-cab at Charing Cross, preaching Buddhism
in pidgin English to a cockney mob, and you have the analogy. Here was a
good man, a very good man, whose whole life was an example of the purest
Christianity, turning that Christianity into a farce, for the “heathen”
to mock at.
How well I remember a few days after my arrival at Peking, as I was
riding out of the Legation gates, being greeted by a gentleman in Chinese
dress, who was sitting on the bench by the escort’s guard-room, in
the broadest Scotch. It was my friend the missionary. He had a little
church of his own at which his few converts attended, and there was one
little boy, by whom he set great store, who was by way of acting in
some sort as attendant. When the good man was engrossed in his sermon,
John (for he had been baptized) would quietly run out and indulge in
foot-shuttlecock—a very pretty game, by the bye—or some other sport dear
to the Pekingese street arabs, until the voice of the preacher ceased,
when he would be sternly called back to his duties.
Mr. Thomas knew better than to risk the ridicule of preaching. When the
Society insisted, they lost the services of a saint, a devoted apostle
who was, above all other men whom I came across in the Far East, fitted
by genius, by learning, and by courage, to have done the work which they
and he had at heart. Few personalities that I have met in the long days
of my life have impressed me more. He was a young man, about eight and
twenty. Had he lived he must have made his mark; he fell a sacrifice to
ignorance and stupidity, the two demons which have wrought so much evil
in the world.
We left Chifu in the afternoon of Monday, the fifteenth of May, and on
the Tuesday morning took in the pilot who was to steer us up the tortuous
course of the Pei Ho river. The first sight of the Taku Forts filled me
with pity for the two garrisons—the one British, the other French—which
had occupied them since 1860 lest the disaster of 1859, when Sir Frederic
Bruce tried in vain to reach Peking for the ratification of the Treaty
and two of our gun-boats were sunk, should be repeated. The desolation
of the place was chilling. On the side of the fort occupied by our troops
were a few mud huts and a sort of wretched inn, the rendezvous of pilots.
On the French side it was even worse—nothing but an endless bleak tract
of mud, flush with the filthy water, all of one colour with the land, so
that it was hard to say where the mud ended and the sea began, and even
the wild fowl seemed sad and desolate, and I wondered why, having wings,
they did not fly to some more cheerful home. No more filthy little stream
than the Pei Ho ever defiled a sea. As I wrote at the time: “Mud forts,
mud houses, mud fields, and a muddy river discharging its daily burthen
of mud into a muddy sea—everything is mud.” It is difficult for water,
especially running water, to be ugly and uninteresting, but the Pei Ho
accomplished that feat. Higher up the stream there were some stunted
trees and green fields, but the country was utterly dull and featureless.
The navigation of the river was difficult enough; perpetually shifting
mud-banks in mid-stream made the channel as crooked and uncertain as
Chinese diplomacy.
Several times we collided with junks, and on more than one occasion our
pilot had to send men ashore with a hawser which they fastened round a
willow tree to let the ship swing. She was a queer little tramp, stout
enough and fast enough, as times went, for she could do her eight knots,
and perhaps a half, in the open sea, but the strangest thing about her
was that, although nominally belonging to a German firm, she was really
owned by a Chinese merchant in Tientsing, to whom the whole of her cargo
was consigned. That fifty years ago the Chinese, so stiff-backed against
all that was European, should have owned a foreign-built steam tramp
seems almost incredible. But the little _Yün tsě fei_, “Walkee all same
fly,” as a Chinaman translated her name, did her little commercial patrol
of the Gulf of Pei-chi-li with great regularity.
I found Tientsing holiday-making. Saurin, my old friend and colleague,
had come down from Peking for the races with M. Glinka, an attaché
of the Russian Legation, and they were staying with M. Buitzow, the
Russian Consul, who very kindly put me up also; I met him again eight
years later, on the occasion of my second visit to Japan in 1873—a very
agreeable man.
It was a stroke of luck falling in with Saurin, for we left Tientsing
together the next day and so I had a friend under whose auspices I was
able to reach Peking in far greater comfort than I could have expected.
We wriggled up the ugly corkscrew stream in three boats; up one reach
we had the wind with us, in the next it would be dead against us, and
we could only get along by towing and punting. The shoals were as
innumerable as ever and so we were constantly crossing the river along
a course mapped out by twigs of willow stuck in the mud. However, at
last, at two in the afternoon of Sunday the twenty-first, we reached
Tungchou—famous for the tragedy of the capture of the English prisoners
in 1860—and outside the walls of the city, under the pleasant shade of a
great tree by a wayside inn, we found our horses and an escort which had
been sent to meet us. My horse was a grey Arab that had been the charger
of my gallant friend Colonel Fane of Fane’s Horse who, like my friend now
of more than half a century, Sir Dighton Probyn, had played a conspicuous
part in the war of 1860.
The country between Tungchou and Peking is absolutely flat, very
populous, with many villages and endless graveyards, the most sacred
of all objects to the Chinaman. There are plenty of fine trees and a
wealth of greenery in the richly cultivated fields, so that I was rather
agreeably surprised, for I had expected nothing so refreshing to the eye:
to be sure, it was the early summer, before the scorching heats and long
droughts had come to tan the crops to one uniform brown. All of a sudden,
at a turn of the road close in front of us, quite unsuspected, invisible
until we were immediately under it, I saw before me the city of Peking,
the city of my dreams.
There at last were the grim, dark grey walls just as I had fancied them,
formidable, frowning; behind them the mystery of centuries. At intervals
rose the great towers, rearing their fantastic roofs with curved eaves
above huge gates in and out of which the yellow crowds were hurrying,
jostling, eagerly busy. Coolies carrying their burdens at each end
of a bamboo pole slung across one shoulder, merchants, small gentry,
carts tenanted, some by mandarins surrounded by retainers with their
red-tasselled caps, others by much-painted ladies with gaudy ornaments in
the edifices of their quaintly-dressed, shining black hair; old women in
charge of babies; a prisoner guarded by two jailers, his head protruding
out of the heavy wooden _cangue_; the beggars, quite worthy of their fame
for filth and repulsiveness—just such a crowd as existed in Kång Hsi’s
time two hundred years ago, nothing changed, save that the city has grown
a little more shabby, with more ruined spaces caused by fire and neglect
in a country where nothing is ever repaired; above all, a whole series of
seemingly familiar pictures—the rice-paper drawings of my childhood in
the flesh!
But the dust! I have seen dust in many lands—one of the meannesses of
Providence, poor Alfred Montgomery used to call it—notably in South
Africa which, in that respect and some others, is bad to beat; but Peking
outdoes them all. Fancy riding up to your horse’s hocks in a fine black
powder, which, when the wind blows over the desert of Gobi, pervades
everything; insidious, ineluctable, streaming in thin rays like the motes
in a sunbeam through unsuspected chinks and crevices until you may trace
your name with your finger on any single thing in your most cunningly
protected room.
In one of those dust-storms, thick as a London fog, I have known a boat
leaving a ship outside the Taku forts, forced to pull round and round
in blind circles until the black veil should lift, or rather fall, and
daylight once more break through the gloom. And when the rainy season
comes, then the streets of Peking are like canals in which what once was
dust is now a noisome Acherontian slime.
Peking stands in need of forgiveness for much. Smells that must be smelt
to be believed; sights such as the Beggars’ Bridge, which are sickening
horrors; squalid houses, suggesting indescribable interiors, for the
manners and customs of the Po Hsing[53] are not attractive; streets
ill-paved and never cleaned; much to offend the senses at every step,
and yet, abuse it as we might, Peking as I knew it fifty years ago had
about it a certain mysterious charm which I think most people felt, and
which has never been so well described as by Baroness von Heyking in
“Briefe die ihn nicht erreichten.” How cleverly, without any attempt at
description, by a few magic words scattered here and there, she makes us
feel the magic of the old, sad-coloured, grey, ruinous city!