1865
PEKING
Mr. Alcock’s first great promotion to be Consul-General in Japan, newly
opened to foreigners by Lord Elgin’s treaty of 1858, though it answered
well enough, was based upon a mistake of the English Government, which
was under the delusion that China and Japan were one and the same thing,
and that experience in the one country must of necessity specially fit a
man to take up work in the other. It was like what Victor Hugo said when
he was asked whether he had ever read Goethe. “Non, mais j’ai lu quelques
traductions de Schiller; et après tout, Goethe-Schiller, Schiller-Goethe,
c’est toujours la même chose.” Well, China and Japan were anything but
“la même chose,” and perhaps Mr. Alcock’s life and experiences in China
were rather a hindrance to him than otherwise, as they undoubtedly were
in the case of some of the first merchants who established themselves
there.
However, Mr. Alcock came well through the ordeal, showing great courage
and determination, and never allowing any affront to England to pass
unnoticed. Never perhaps did he show more moral courage than he did
when one fine day in writing to the Japanese Government he signed
himself Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary instead of
Consul-General, with the intimation to the British Foreign Office that
they might accept or reject what he had done, but that it was necessary
in the event of his rejection that whoever should be appointed should,
in order to hold his own both with the Japanese Government and with the
foreign colleagues, hold that rank. It was a most audacious stroke and it
succeeded, because he was quite right, but it probably is the one and
only case of a man accrediting himself as minister to a foreign Power.
Whether he also named himself K.C.B. history records not. But at any rate
the honour was most deservedly bestowed upon him.
Sir Rutherford Alcock was a man of great ability and high courage. During
his official life in the Far East he had plenty of opportunities to give
proof of both. In early life he had been a surgeon, and had been attached
to the British Legion in Spain, where he earned no little reputation for
a skill which stood him in good stead when the temple occupied by the
British Legation at Yedo (Tokio) was attacked by Rônins in July, 1861,
and poor Laurence Oliphant and others were so badly wounded. Oliphant,
who had nothing but a hunting-crop to ward off the cruel sword-cuts, must
have been killed had it not been for the merciful beam of the low, narrow
passage in which he was fighting, which caught the worst blows. For long
years afterwards the deep cuts on the woodwork were still visible, but
the last time I was in Japan, in 1906, I went to see the place, and found
that the temple authorities had removed the tell-tale beam.
When he returned from the Peninsula he went back to his profession as a
lecturer; but rheumatism, due to exposure, had crippled his hands and
hindered him as an operator; moreover, he was bitten with the spirit
of adventure, and in 1844 he accepted an appointment as Consul at the
newly-opened port of Fu Chou. But it was at Shanghai a year or two
later that he made his mark, and there it was that he achieved what
was the most successful work of his life in the establishment of the
municipality, a new and original venture, needing great tact and judgment
in order to avoid international and other jealousies, besides involving
a distinct talent for organization. It was altogether a formidable
undertaking, but it succeeded, and laid the foundation of similar
institutions throughout the Treaty Ports of the Far East.
When Sir Rutherford returned to China as Minister he was far more in his
element as a diplomatic agent than he had ever been in Japan. He had an
intimate knowledge of Chinese affairs, which it is in no way derogatory
to say that he had not of Japanese politics. In Japan he, like everybody
else, was under the influence of the old Dutch fallacies, and he did
not fully realize the relations between the Mikado and the Tycoon. The
great scholars, such as Satow and Aston and others, had not yet pricked
the bubble and babble about spiritual and temporal Emperors, and all the
other nonsense of those days. Sir Harry Parkes had the luck to profit
by the new-born knowledge. Sir Rutherford was the victim of the old
tradition. But when he arrived in China he was master of the situation.
He was thoroughly at home and up to every move on the board.
He was a kind and considerate chief, and we all liked him except in the
neighbourhood of mail-day. Sir Rutherford’s weakness was the idea that
he was essentially a writer—he would have been a greater man if he had
never written a book about a country which he did not understand, or a
grammar of a language which he could neither speak nor read nor write.
But we all have our weaknesses; his was authorship. The despatches which
he used to write contained excellent stuff, but they were spoilt by being
spun out to interminable lengths of impossible verbiage. To copy those
effusions with the thermometer at 108° in the shade, with a double sheet
of blotting-paper between my hand and the foolscap, and a basin of water
to dip my fingers in from time to time, was like being private secretary
to Satan in the nethermost regions.
At the Tsung Li Ya-mên, the ministry of foreign affairs, Sir Rutherford
was perfect. However knotty might be the point which he had to argue,
however patent the trickery which he had to resent, he was always calm,
always courteous, and so the Chinese liked him as much as we did. He
certainly was _persona grata_ with the Regent, Prince Rung, who was the
very real head of the Tsung Li Ya-mên.[55]
The Prince Regent was at this time a tall, well-favoured man,
shortsighted and pitted with smallpox, which in Chinese eyes would be
no hindrance to his good looks, for indeed a Chinaman hardly thinks
of himself as complete until he has “put forth the heavenly flowers.”
Messrs. Bland and Backhouse quote a decree of the wretched Emperor Tung
Chih in which he announces “we have had the good fortune this month
to contract smallpox”—in the next month he ascended the Dragon and was
wafted on high.[56] The Emperor’s edict might serve as a text for the
anti-vaccinationists, nor would his death in the following month have
injured their cause, for he was such a mass of disease that he was
already foredoomed, so the “heavenly flowers” were not by themselves
accountable for his end.
The first time that I saw Prince Rung was in the month of May, a few days
after my arrival at Peking. He came to the Legation to discuss business
with Wade, accompanied by two other ministers of the Tsung Li Ya-mên. The
Prince was in high spirits, laughing and joking merrily; he was always
good-humoured and genial, but that day there was a special reason for
his cheerfulness; he had just gone through one of those alternate storms
and calms, often incident to Oriental life, but specially frequent where
the government is conducted with “the suspended curtain”—that is to say
by an Empress who may not be seen. To me he was very courteous and kind,
and whenever we met afterwards he had always a little friendly greeting
for me, never failing to chaff me about my single eyeglass which used to
furnish him with an excuse for interrupting an awkward discussion and so
give him time for an answer. He was very clever in availing himself of
it; perhaps that was the reason why I found grace in his sight.
Hardly more than a stone’s throw from the British Legation are the
walls of the Forbidden City. Of what might be taking place inside that
sacrosanct enclosure we knew no more than what that most venerable of
all publications, the _Peking Gazette_, was allowed to tell us. People
used to talk with well-informed superiority of _coups-d’état_ and Palace
intrigues, but it was not until the appearance of Messrs. Bland and
Backhouse’s book, “China under the Dowager Empress,” that the outside
world was made aware of the intimate history of that masterful woman’s
reign; for a reign it was throughout. Her co-Empress was a cipher and the
Emperors whom for show’s sake she enthroned were mere puppets. The pages
of that _roman vécu_ are so fascinating that it is difficult for any
reader to put the book down, but to those who have lived under the black
pall of ignorance in which the foreign community of Peking was shrouded
it is a revelation.
We can now appreciate the heroic courage with which Tsŭ Hsi, then a mere
girl of twenty-two, defeated the conspiracies of the princes who, on the
death of her husband, the Emperor Hsien Fêng in 1861, took her child,
the baby Emperor, from her and tried to usurp the Regency. It was a
master-stroke of craft in so young a woman to paralyse the conspirators
by purloining the seal without the impression of which no nomination to
the throne was legitimate. We know how Prince Kung, the intimate personal
enemy of the plotters, and the handsome young guardsman, Jung Lu, her
kinsman, her playmate, and through life her more than trusty friend, came
to the rescue, and we can understand how it was that the former, her
brother-in-law, though he had to go through alternations of favour and
disgrace, was always summoned back in moments of storm and stress when
she needed his help and advice.
When I was at Peking Tsŭ Hsi was a mystery; no foreigner even knew what
was her origin—some went so far as to say that she was a mere slave
girl; as a matter of fact her birth is now known[57] to have been of the
highest. She was a lady of the Yeho-nala clan, a family descended from
Yangkunu, the great Manchu Prince whose daughter married the founder of
the Manchu Dynasty in China. She was therefore of right royal descent,
and her pedigree was without a stain, though her father had held no
higher rank than that of an officer in one of the eight banner corps.
The first wife of the Emperor Hsien Fêng died before he ascended the
Dragon throne. When the period of mourning for his father, Tao Kwang,
came to an end in 1852, a number of maidens from the chief Manchu
families were sent for, out of whom the widow of the dead monarch was
to choose a certain number suitable for the harem of the Son of Heaven;
among them were the two ladies who as Tsŭ An and Tsŭ Hsi, Dowager Empress
and Empress Mother, were to play such conspicuous parts in Chinese
history.
Those who are interested in studying the last phase of the great Ching
Dynasty must seek its story in Messrs. Bland and Backhouse’s pages.
It will repay them. Few princes have left this world in more dramatic
fashion than the Empress Tsŭ Hsi—the Old Buddha, as she loved to be
called—whose last bequest to her people was the advice never again
to allow a woman to exercise the Supreme Power, and not to allow the
eunuchs of the Palace to interfere in affairs of State; she who had been
ruled by such scoundrels as the two favourite eunuchs, Li Lien Ying and
An Tê Hai!—a mass of contradictions to the last. That she was a woman
of amazing ability is certain; competent authorities have praised her
scholarship and held up her edicts as models of style; she was witty,
though her wit sometimes was cruel, as when she told the murderous
Governor of Tai Yuan Fu that “the price of coffins was going up”—a hint
to commit suicide without delay, lest worse befall him; as, in spite of
her protection, it ultimately did.
She was tyrannical and vindictive, yet she contrived to inspire affection
and to persuade the people that she was kind-hearted; she was false
and treacherous, but her power of attraction was supreme and the love
between Jung Lu and herself, dating from boy-and-girl days, long before
she entered the Palace, never waned. Unless she has been much maligned
she had much the worst side of the character of Catherine the Great;
like our own Elizabeth she was terrible in her rage, irresistible in her
gentler moments. Altogether a woman of infinite variety, a scholar, a
stateswoman, and an artist.
The edict in which she published to the world her degradation of Prince
Kung in April, 1865, is like an Æschylean chorus. Success followed by
insolence; insolence by Nemesis. I have no doubt that his somewhat abrupt
manner might have been very offensive to august ears; but if it be true
that he told the two Empresses that if they sat upon their thrones behind
the curtain it was because he had so willed it, there is no wonder that
an Empress imbued with the spirit of a Tudor queen should have refused to
brook such language as that. In a month, however, the necessary man was
once more called into favour, and then it was that I first saw him.
I had a great admiration for Prince Kung. It was impossible not to be
attracted by his _bonhomie_ and his pleasant manner. To me, as I have
said, he was always specially courteous. I do not suppose that he had any
greater love of the foreign devils than the rest of his countrymen; but
if he hated us he had the wisdom to mask his dislike. The documents which
successive crises have brought to light have taught us many a lesson.
Your Chinese gentleman is a great scribe, and rather than suffer his pen
to be idle he will console himself in difficult moments by writing down
voluminous indiscretions; and so it has become pretty evident that even
those among the Chinese statesmen who professed the greatest friendship
for us in their hearts hated us. The Empress Tsŭ Hsi herself, when she
coaxed and talked soft nonsense to the wives of the Foreign Ministers,
told Jung Lu that she knew how to win them to her side with rich gifts
and honeyed words. How she fooled the dear ladies to their hearts’
content is well told by Messrs. Bland and Backhouse. Nor is this feeling
to be wondered at. We were self-invited guests in her country; we needed
the trade, export and import, of the Chinese who, until we came, were
self-sufficing; opium and grey shirtings notwithstanding, in their view
we brought nothing but trouble upon them.
Apart from his undoubted charm of manner, however much or however little
it might mean, the Prince was a man of undoubted talent and strength of
character. He was a very young man in 1860, not more than twenty-three
or twenty-four years old, and utterly inexperienced in affairs, when his
brother, the Emperor Hsien Fêng, who was dying by inches, bowed to the
storm of foreign invasion and fled to Jêhol, leaving him in Peking as
his representative, with full powers to carry on the Government. It was
a fateful moment. The Allies were victorious. Yuen Ming Yuen, the summer
palace, was in flames; the foreign barbarians were in possession of the
Anting Mên, the northern gate of Peking; a number of prisoners, among
them Parkes and Loch, were in the hands of the Chinese, by whom they had
been shamefully treated; Prince Kung realized the position, and at the
risk of his own life handed over the prisoners to their chiefs. He acted
in the nick of time. Hardly had he done so than a messenger arrived post
haste from Jêhol, ordering the instant execution of the prisoners. Had
Prince Kung carried out the Emperor’s edict it is difficult to say what
the consequences would have been. Certainly Peking would have been razed
to the ground, and the Tartar dynasty would have been exterminated half a
century before its knell was finally rung.
Prince Kung died in 1898. Had he lived a few years longer I believe that
his sage advice and statesmanship, joined to the persistent warnings of
Jung Lu, would have saved the Empress from the fatal step which she took
of fostering the Boxer outrages, and the further disgrace of disavowing
and executing the very men with whom she had conspired, and whom she had
egged on to a doom from which she did not feel herself powerful enough
to save them. But she listened to the dupes and ruffians who believed in
the magic rites of the Boxers, and in spite of all her blandishments to
the easily-gulled Legation ladies before and after, did all in her power
to urge on the destruction of the besieged ministers, even when she was
sending them presents of fruit and sweetmeats!
In vain did Jung Lu try to impress upon her that the bombardment “was
worse than an outrage, it was a piece of stupidity;”[58] had the Prince
been alive he no doubt, with forty more years’ experience of affairs to
his credit, would have grasped the situation in 1900 as he did in 1860,
and her two most trusted advisers would have saved the old Buddha’s face.
No woman, empress or peasant, ever had a more devoted friend than she had
in Jung Lu—but single-handed he was no match for the army of scoundrels
and eunuchs by whom she was gulled.
Prince Kung’s signature was peculiar. I believe that it honestly
represented his character. He did not sign his name or his title, but “Wu
ssŭ hsin,” “no private heart,” _i.e._ “disinterested.”
Prince Kung’s right-hand man was Wên Hsiang, a Tartar statesman of great
ability, whom it was a pleasure to meet. Like his chief, he was always
conciliatory and prepossessing; had he had the Prince’s strength and
moral courage he might have achieved great things—but there he broke
down. The two other ministers whom we met the oftenest were Tung and
Hêng Chi—the former a portly, good-humoured gentleman with a great
reputation as a man of letters, who had turned into Chinese verse a
prose translation by Wade of Longfellow’s Psalm of Life; the latter an
old beau, his tail dyed and eked out with false hair as sedulously as
the head-dress of an aged Court dame in Europe. He was very carefully
attired, generally in a robe of pearl-grey silk turned up with blue. Sir
Plume himself was not more justly vain of his amber snuffbox than Hêng
Chi was of his tiny snuff bottle with its emerald green jade stopper,
and the priceless bead of the same from which his peacock feather hung;
his red button was of “baby-face” coral, and as for the pipe, chopsticks
all studded with seed pearls, and other small treasures which were
hidden in the recesses of his velvet boot and the delicate sugar-plums
and restorative drugs which he produced from the same receptacle, they
baffled description. A dear little old man withal, merry and well
preserved, whom we all treated with great respect in gratitude for his
kindness to Parkes and Loch when in their hideous captivity they stood
sorely in need of a friend. Was he so very fond of the barbarian? Listen!
M. de Mas was Spanish Minister at Peking. He had negotiated a Treaty
which for many months, even two or three years, could not be ratified
on account of the many changes of ministry at Madrid. At last the
ratification came, and M. de Mas, before going home, went to pay a
farewell visit to His Excellency Hêng Chi. Now the said Excellency, being
past seventy years of age, had a little boy, some four or five years
old, of whom he was inordinately proud—he was the apple of his eye. The
polite Spaniard, knowing this, asked to see the wonderful product. Highly
flattered, Hêng Chi sent for the child, who arrived with his thumb in his
mouth, after the manner of all children, Asiatic as well as European.
“Make your bow to His Excellency!” said the proud father. Not a sign.
The order was repeated, not once but twice. At last the little creature,
taking its thumb out of its mouth, solemnly uttered the street cry, “Kwei
tzŭ!” (“Devil!”) The intimate education of the harem was revealed, and
poor old Hêng Chi was smothered in confusion. There is a general idea
that all high mandarins are great scholars. That is not always the case.
Our old dandy friend, for instance, was as little of a grammarian as Mrs.
Squeers. Nevertheless he had all the Chinese gentleman’s reverence for
letters, and kept a learned secretary to read to him and keep him up to
the mark.
* * * * *
The terrible part of winter at Peking is the drought; month after month
the Emperor goes to the Temple of Heaven to pray for rain or snow;
month after month the god, whoever he may be, shuts his ears as fast as
Ulysses’ ship’s crew. The cold is intense, witness the frozen river and
sea; the fierce wind, tearing over the desert of Gobi, dries men up till
their skins become parched, tight and powdery; their lips are chapped and
the black dust, that scourge of Northern China, seems to penetrate the
very marrow of their bones. Russia was not colder; but in Russia we had
the brightness and the kindly snow, and the tinkling of the sleigh bells
gave the winter life and gaiety. In Peking the winter was as gloomy as
remorse. All communication with the outer world was cut off. Twice in the
course of rather more than three months we received mails brought across
Siberia and the frozen Baikal lake. We could not help feeling that we
were caught like rats in a trap. Had the people chosen they could have
made short work of us, and every now and then, by way of cheering us, our
Chinese writers would bring in reports that on such and such a day there
would be a rising against us. To these uncomfortable rumours we paid no
heed. Indeed, in spite of some discomfort and the absence of “fireside
enjoyments, home-born happiness,” I passed the time cheerily enough. I
had plenty to do, and was getting on with the language, which I used to
practise in fair weather upon the curio dealers of the Chinese city.
There was in especial a delightful little man, a bookseller in the Liu
Li Chang—the Paternoster Row of Peking—who was a perfect cyclopædia of
knowledge in all that concerned Chinese art; besides his rare books
he always had a very small but very choice collection of beautiful
objects—pottery, jade, crystal, cloisonné enamel, pietra dura; and at the
feet of that Gamaliel, I used to listen to much antiquarian lore from a
teacher who loved his subject and revered it. Over a cup of tea, or in
summer of an iced decoction of date-plum juice, he would spin stories
by the hour. He would tell how the last potter of the Lang family died
two hundred and fifty years before, and how his secrets and recipes,
inimitable treasures, were buried with him; how the Ming Emperor Ching
T’ai (A.D. 1450) would with his own sacred hands work at cloisonné
enamel, called after him Ching T’ai Lan—the blue of Ching T’ai; how in
the days of Ch’ien Lung (1736-1796), the magnificent, a great patron of
art, if a fine piece of crystal or jade were brought in as tribute from
the western mountains, a committee of taste would sit to appraise its
merits, deciding what shape should be given to it and to what artist it
should be entrusted. A wonderful little man with a huge belly, which, as
all men know, is the seat of learning, and in his case was choke full of
it.
How pleased my small dilettante friend would have been if he could have
foreseen that two or three specimens that came from him would find a home
in the British Museum![59] Not that he ever heard of such a place, but
his ideas were out of all proportion to his stature, and the thought of a
national collection of works of art would have appealed to his large and
æsthetic soul.
“Que la vie d’un diplomate serait agréable sans les chers collègues!”
once exclaimed an eminent ambassador. Peking in 1865-6 would have
fitted his Excellency to a nicety. We were a very small body, and other
foreigners, save a few missionaries, were there none. General Vlangaly,
the Russian Minister, was always very friendly. We used to go prowling
in all sorts of out-of-the-way corners of the Chinese city searching
out works of art. Were we always quite honest with one another on those
excursions? Perhaps we were more so when we were taking a constitutional
on the broad tops of the mighty walls which separate the two cities, when
the General would expatiate by the hour on the great qualities of the
object of his admiration, Sir Frederic Bruce. There I could cry, Amen.
Had there been any of what is called “rank, beauty and fashion” at
Peking, its favourite promenade would have been the wall. There we found
peace and quiet,—for the public invaded it not,—and comparative immunity
from the demon dust. It was wonderful to look over the great city—the two
great cities—to gaze upon the roofs of the inviolable Palace Grounds,
and wonder what mysteries they were hiding. At the southern corner of
the wall were the beautiful astronomical instruments, masterpieces in
the interest of which European science entered into a happy alliance
with Chinese art—the great Emperor K’ang Hsi with the Jesuit Father
Verbiest—in order to furnish after two hundred and fifty years a prey
for Prussian burglary. At intervals rose the great fantastic towers,
threatening, cruel—suggesting unspeakable horrors; for in one of them, as
we were told, dwelt the chief executioner, like Mauger the headsman in
George Cruikshank’s etching, watching over the Five Lords—broad choppers
like butchers’ instruments, on the handle of each of which is carved a
grotesque human head.
Those who have wandered on the walls in the witching hours of night are
said to have heard the sound of weird and unearthly strains, songs in
which the Five Lords are wont to celebrate the bloody deeds in which for
centuries and more they have played their part. Pray that you be not
dealt with by the Benjamin of the Five Lords, for he is still young and
skittish, not more than two hundred years old, loving to dally and toy
with the heads of his victims, unlike his more reverend elders who will
strike off your head at one blow, impressed with the serious nature of
their duties.
No two countries had during the sixties so living an interest in China
as England and Russia; with England it was a question of commerce;
with Russia of commerce and frontier combined. Ever since Peter the
Great’s time there had been Russian missions, political and religious,
in Peking—partly in the interests of the Albazines, a small Russian
colony on the Amur transplanted to Peking, who long since adopted the
Chinese language, dress and customs, but retained their religion. The
northern mission was under the Archimandrite Palladius, the southern
under the Minister. That is how it happened that when the Allied Armies
were before Peking in 1860 the then Minister, General Ignatieff,
admiringly celebrated by the Turks afterwards when he was Ambassador at
Constantinople for his talent in concealing the truth, tried to persuade
Prince Kung that if only the Prince would yield to Russia’s requests,
he would be able to ward off all danger by interceding with Lord Elgin.
Prince Kung, young and new to affairs as he was, saw through the trick;
“Codlin’s the friend, not Short,” was no use, the fly had no mind to
enter the spider’s parlour.
Years after I met General Ignatieff at Contrexéville. How clever he was,
and how well he gauged the Chinese! It was at the moment when the great
Li Hung Chang was in Europe. Lord Salisbury flirted with him, and in the
interest of Krupp and other firms the Kaiser made his children play about
the great mandarin’s knee and call him “Uncle Li.” But it was all no use;
Li went back to China and not a sixpenny order was given. How General
Ignatieff and I laughed over the daily reports of all that sordid,
commercial and absolutely barren love-making!
The Archimandrite Palladius, who had been in Peking ever since 1840, told
me that he had never had any difficulty in holding intercourse with the
people. The intermarriage of the Albazines with the Chinese had led to
many conversions, and he, with the help of his three subaltern priests,
was always able to keep up his services and schools.
There was no French Minister; M. De Bellonet was _chargé d’affaires_, a
clever, very agreeable man who hated China and the Chinese, and cursed
the day on which his fate sent him out of Europe. His chief delight was
in plaguing the ministers of the Tsung Li Ya-mên. Rarely he left his own
house; when he did it was either to “flanquer une pile” at the ministers,
or to pay some inevitable visit of ceremony which he loathed. I asked him
once why he never went to see any of the beautiful and curious sights in
and around Peking. “À quoi bon?” he answered. “Lorsque je rentrerai à
Paris je dirai à mes amis que j’ai vu tout cela; ça revient au même.”
One day I went to call upon him and found him with a small gang of
coolies making some improvements. I asked him how he managed to give his
orders without knowing a word of Chinese. He answered: “Mon cher ami,
j’ai ici le meilleur interprète du monde—le Professeur Bambou”—and with
that the little man viciously twirled a huge walking-stick. The coolies
trembled.
He was very amusing and I liked him much, and was sorry when he made the
great mistake of his life through not realizing the farness of the cry
to Loch Awe. There was missionary trouble in Corea. De Bellonet felt
certain that if he started a punitive expedition he would be supported
by the Church and the Empress Eugénie. Promotion a certainty. But Corea
is a long way off; it was further off in those days than it is now. My
poor friend was disavowed, and after having been _chargé d’affaires_ in
China, was sent as second secretary to one of the Scandinavian courts.
Humpty Dumpty’s fall was not more terrible. As _attaché_ he had a curious
little Flibbertygibbet of a man, very clever but always in hot water, a
never-failing source of amusement and study to Wade. The interpreter was
M. Fontanier, who was murdered at Tientsing in the massacre of 1870. I
shall allude to that story later on.
The Prussian Minister soon went on leave, and the Don had gone home to
Spain hugging his precious treaty. At the American Legation we had as
_chargé d’affaires_ Dr. Wells Williams. He and his wife were a charming
couple; no longer young, but both very handsome, like delightful old
family portraits. They might have been members of the pilgrimage of the
_Mayflower_. Dr. Wells Williams went out to China originally in some
technical capacity in connection with the American missionary press at
Canton; soon he drifted into sinological studies and wrote a dictionary
and other works; but his _magnum opus_ was “The Middle Kingdom,” a book
of great authority upon all Chinese matters up to the date which it
reaches—a perfect cyclopædia of antiquarian, historical and political
lore, a book of reference without which no man who cares for the Far East
is completely furnished.
One evening when I was dining with him the talk turned upon paper
currency. I made a note at the time of what he said, and reproduce it now
as interesting at a time when we are going back to bank-notes of £1 and
10s. During the reign of the Emperor Shao Hsing of the Sung Dynasty (A.D.
1170) copper was scarce, so the Government issued two classes of Chao
(notes), great notes (Ta Chao) of the value of from one thousand to five
thousand copper cash, and small notes (Hsiao Chao) worth from one hundred
to seven hundred cash. Officers were appointed everywhere to issue and
receive these notes. They were renewable within seven years, and fifteen
cash in every thousand were deducted for the expense of making them. They
were said to be Kung ssŭ pien—convenient for both public and private
use—and Marco Polo mentions them with praise. Dr. Wells Williams was
always interesting, and his wife had all the charm of beauty, motherly
kindness and soft gentleness, illuminated by an intellect of no common
order.
Besides General Vlangaly there were at the Russian Legation M. Glinka,
second secretary, a great gentleman, and Dr. Pogojeff, a very clever
doctor and a good friend of mine, hailing from Odessa. That, in addition
to the Russian Archimandrite, was all the foreign community of Peking in
1865. Glancing back over this short sketch of our life in Peking, I am
struck by one very sad thought. Of all the men that I have mentioned so
far as I know not one is still alive. I alone am left, the last of the
Mohicans.
So the year 1865 died, and 1866 reigned in its stead.
It does not often happen to a man to keep three new years’ feasts in one
year. This is what befell me at Peking. On the 1st of January at early
dawn our Chinese servants came to bend the knee and wish us all happiness
and prosperity; twelve days later good manners demanded that I should
go and salute General Vlangaly and the good Archimandrite Palladius;
and finally on Feb. 14th crackers and squibs announced the approaching
birth of the Chinese new year—characters of good omen were pasted on
the doorposts of the houses, from which streamers of pierced red paper
fluttered like lace.
On this day it is essential that there should be much noise and popping
of fireworks, for there are many demons to be exorcized, evil spirits of
the past year—especially the spirit of poverty—to be driven away; on the
morrow Peking must be in gala trim, and in the din and clatter of drums
and tambourines and cymbals and clappers and gongs and other instruments
of percussion and aural torture, there will be much joy. Outside the huge
main gate there will be a great gathering in front of a small temple
roofed with yellow imperial tiles, the shrine of Kwan Ti, the God of
War, where the faithful with many genuflexions and reverent bows will
receive from the priest, for cash, a slip of bamboo drawn at haphazard
to be exchanged for a piece of paper upon which will be inscribed the
fate of the votary for the coming year. In the street of bookshops there
will be a huge gathering with “all the fun of the fair,” toys, quack
doctors, jugglers, beggars, mountebanks, a dentist with a great store
of extracted teeth, mostly sound, above all—noise! and there will be a
peepshow in which all the famous places of the world will be represented,
and St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Bay of Naples will do duty as special
features of the Liu Kiu Islands! Not so very different from the Windsor
Fair of old Eton days after all! “Homo est animal bipes, implume, et
cachinnans”—the same the world over.
By way of varying our amusements we managed with some difficulty to flood
a small courtyard for skating. The ice never held good for long, for
the dust made it impossible, and then we had to begin all over again.
Once we rode out to the Summer Palace to picnic and skate upon the great
lake. That was delightful. We were none of us great performers, but such
as they were, our twists and turns excited the wonder of the Chinese
soldiers. What amazed them above all was going backwards; that they could
not understand, for although skating was part of the drill of the braves
of the Tartar Banners, it was of a very elementary character: just a bone
skate tied on to one foot, the other foot being used to push. I wonder
what they would have said if they could have seen Mr. Grenander, or one
of the great artists in patinology.
Happy as I was at Peking, and delightful as are my memories of the grim
old place, I must admit that the winter was long and dreary enough. But
at last one day, as M. Vlangaly and I were wandering up and down on the
city wall, we spied a small, half-starved weed trying to poke its nose
out of a chink between two stones. The dove was not more welcome to
the Ark. It meant spring. Soon the view from the wall would undergo a
transformation. First all the courtyards and gardens of the temples and
dwellings of the great people would be bright and gay with the blossoms
of peaches and apricots and all manner of flowering shrubs, and later
on—in summer—the huge city would be like one vast park, with here and
there a patch of shabby red wall and a glimmer of yellow tiles—the
Imperial colours—peeping through the wealth of greenery.
The coming of spring was all the more looked forward to by me as I had
in prospect a trip to Mongolia; as a matter of fact, I made two such
journeys, and very delightful they were; but of these I have written an
account elsewhere.[60]
I passed the weeks of great heat in a temple even more delightful than
that of the Azure Clouds—a monastery some twenty-three miles from Peking,
very secluded, hidden among the mountains, in the midst of enchanting
scenery. Ta chio ssŭ, the Temple of Great Repose, stands in a perfect
nest of trees, junipers, pines, firs and poplars. Out of the living rock
behind the Pavilion of the Resting Clouds a delicious fountain plays into
a fern-clad pool, from which it finds its way through a succession of
courtyards past the “Hall of the Four Proprieties” in which there is an
Imperial throne. Could a man wish for a happier spot in which to work and
dream?
Meanwhile I was under orders from the Foreign Office to leave Peking and
go to Japan. At the end of September I started.
How well—let me say it again—Baroness von Heyking understood the magic
of Peking and its power of fascination amid so much that is sordidly
repellent! As I sadly rode out of the gate at which I had entered so full
of enthusiasm some eighteen months before, I met a miserable beggar, a
poor creature so filthy and degraded as to be scarcely human. Ragged and
bare almost of everything save sores and clotted dirt as he was, I almost
envied that unhappy wretch. He was going in, I was going out—and well I
knew that never should I return.