The great cities of China are very much alike in their general
features. None of them have wide streets, except in the foreign
quarters, and none of them are clean; in their abundance of dirt they
can even excel New York, and it would be worth the while for the
rulers of the American metropolis to visit China and see how filthy a
city can be made without half trying. The most interesting city in
China is Pekin, for the reason that it has long been the capital, and
contains many monuments of the past greatness and the glorious history
of the Celestial empire. Its temples are massive, and show that the
Chinese, hundreds of years ago, were no mean architects; its walls
could resist any of the ordinary appliances of war before the
invention of artillery, and even the tombs of its rulers are monuments
of skill and patience that awaken the admiration of every beholder.
Throughout China Pekin is reverentially regarded, and in many
localities the man who has visited it is regarded as a hero. Though
the capital, it is the most northern city of large population in the
whole empire.
Pekin is divided into the Chinese city and the Tartar one, the
division was made at the time of the Tartar conquest, and for many
years the two people refused to associate freely. A wall separates the
cities; the gates through it are closed at night, and only opened when
sufficient reason is given. If the party who desires to pass the gate
can give no verbal excuse he has only to drop some money in the hands
of the gate-keeper, and the pecuniary apology is considered entirely
satisfactory. Time has softened the asperities of Tartar and Chinese
association, so that the two people mingle freely, and it is
impossible for a stranger to distinguish one from the other. Many
Chinese live in the Tartar town and transact business, and I fancy
that they would not always find it easy to explain their pedigree, or,
at all events, that of some of their children. The foreign legations
are in the Tartar city, for the reason that the government offices are
there, and also for the reason that it is the most pleasant, (or the
least unpleasant,) part of Pekin to reside in. All the embassies have
spacious quarters, with the exception of the Russian one, which is the
oldest; when it was established there it was a great favor to be
allowed any residence whatever.
[Illustration: PROVISION DEALER.]
From the center gate between the Chinese and Tartar cities there is a
street two or three miles long, and having the advantages of being
wide, straight, and dirty. It is blocked up with all sorts of
huckster’s stalls and shops, and is kept noisy with the shouts of the
people who have innumerable articles for sale. Especially in summer
is there a liberal assemblage of peddlers, jugglers, beggars, donkey
drivers, merchants, idlers, and all the other professions and
non-professions that go to make up a population. The peddlers have
fruit and other edibles, not omitting an occasional string of rats
suspended from bamboo poles, and attached to cards on which the
prices, and sometimes the excellent qualities of the rodents, are set
forth. It is proper to remark that the Chinese are greatly slandered
on the rat question. As a people they are not given to eating these
little animals; it is only among the poorer classes that they are
tolerated, and then only because they are the cheapest food that can
be obtained. I was always suspicious when the Chinese urged me to
partake of little meat pies and dumplings, whose components I could
only guess at, and when the things were forced upon me I proclaimed a
great fondness for stewed duck and chicken, which were manifestly all
right. But I frankly admit that I do not believe they would have
inveigled me into swallowing articles to which the European mind is
prejudiced, and my aversion arose from a general repugnance to hash in
all forms—a repugnance which had its origin in American hotels and
restaurants.
The jugglers are worth a little notice, more I believe than they
obtain from their countrymen. They attract good audiences along the
great street of Pekin, but after swallowing enough stone to load a
pack-mule, throwing up large bricks and allowing them to break
themselves on his head, and otherwise amusing the crowd for half an
hour or so, the poor necromancer cannot get cash enough to buy himself
a dinner. Those who feel disposed to give are not very liberal, and
their donations are thrown into the ring very much as one would toss a
bone to a bull-dog. Sometimes a man will stand with a white painted
board, slightly covered with thick ink, and while talking with his
auditors he will throw off, by means of his thumb and fingers,
excellent pictures of birds and fishes, with every feather, fin, and
scale done with accuracy. Such genius ought to be rewarded, but it
rarely receives pecuniary recognition enough to enable its possessor
to dress decently. Other slight-of-hand performances abound; the
Chinese are very skillful at little games of thimble-rig and the like,
and when a stranger chooses to make a bet on their operations they are
sure to take in his money. In sword-swallowing and knife-throwing, the
natives of the Flowery Kingdom are without rivals, and the uninitiated
spectator can never understand how a man can make a breakfast of
Asiatic cutlery without incurring the risk of dyspepsia.
[Illustration: CHINESE MENDICANTS.]
China is the paradise of beggars—I except Italy from the mendicant
list—so far as numbers are concerned, though they do not appear to
flourish and live in comfort. There are many dwarfs, and it is
currently reported at Pekin that they are produced and cultivated for
the special purpose of asking alms. One can be very liberal in China
at small expense, as the smallest coin is worth only one-fifteenth of
a cent, and a shilling’s worth of “cash” can be made to go a great
way if the giver is judicious. Many of the beggars are blind, and they
sometimes walk in single file under the direction of a chief; they are
nearly all musicians, and make the most hideous noises, which they
call melody. Anybody with a sensitive ear will pay them to move on
where they will annoy somebody beside himself. Many of the beggars are
almost naked, and they attract attention by striking their hands
against their hips and shouting at the top of their voices. One day
the wife of the French minister at Pekin gave some garments to those
who were the most shabbily dressed; the next morning they returned as
near naked as ever, and some of them entirely so.
Outside of the Tartar city there is a beggar’s lodging house, which
bears the name of “the House of the Hen’s Feathers.” It is a hall,
with a floor of solid earth and a roof of thin laths caulked and
plastered with mud. The floor is covered with a thick bed of feathers,
which have been gathered in the markets and restaurants of Pekin,
without much regard to their cleanliness. There is an immense quilt of
thick felt the exact size of the hall, and raised and lowered by means
of mechanism. When the curfew tolls the knell of parting day, the
beggars flock to this house, and are admitted on payment of a small
fee. They take whatever places they like, and at an appointed time the
quilt is lowered. Each lodger is at liberty to lie coiled up in the
feathers, or if he has a prejudice in favor of fresh air, he can stick
his head through one of the numerous holes that the coverlid contains.
A view of this quilt when the heads are protruding is suggestive of an
apartment where dozens of dilapidated Chinese have been decapitated.
All night long the lodgers keep up a frightful noise; the proprietor,
like the individual in the same business in New York, will tell you,
“I sells the place to sleep, but begar, I no sells the sleep with it.”
The couch is a lively one, as the feathers are a convenient warren for
a miscellaneous lot of living things not often mentioned in polite
society. In the southern cities of China one sees fewer women in the
street than in the north. Those that appear in public are always of
the poorer classes, and it is rare indeed that one can get a view of
the famous small-footed women. The odious custom of compressing the
feet is much less common at Pekin than in the southern provinces. The
Manjour emperors of China opposed it ever since their dynasty ascended
the throne, and on several occasions they issued severe edicts against
it. The Tartar and Chinese ladies that compose the court of the
empresses have their feet of the natural size, and the same is the
case with the wives of many of the officials. But such is the power of
fashion that many of these ladies have adopted the theatrical slipper,
which is very difficult to walk with. No one can tell where the custom
of compressing the feet originated, but it is said that one of the
empresses was born with deformed feet, and set the fashion, which soon
spread through the empire. The jealousy of the men and the idleness
and vanity of the women have served to continue the custom. Every
Chinese who can afford it will have at least one small-footed wife,
and she is maintained in the most perfect indolence. For a woman to
have a small foot is to show that she is of high birth and rich
family, and she would consider herself dishonored if her parents
failed to compress her feet.
[Illustration: THE FAVORITE.]
When remonstrated with about the practice, the Chinese retort by
calling attention to the compression of the waist as practiced in
Europe and America. “It is all a matter of taste,” said a Chinese
merchant one day when addressed on the subject. “We like women with
small feet and you like them with small waists. What is the
difference?”
And what _is_ the difference?
The compression is begun when a girl is six years old, and is
accomplished with strong bandages. The great toe is pressed beneath
the others, and these are bent under, so that the foot takes the shape
of a closed fist. The bandages are drawn tighter every month, and in a
couple of years the foot has assumed the desired shape and ceased to
grow.
[Illustration: FEMALE FEET AND SHOE.]
Very often this compression creates diseases that are difficult to
heal; it is always impossible for the small-footed woman to walk
easily, and sometimes she cannot move without support. To have the
finger-nails very long is also a mark of aristocracy; sometimes the
ladies enclose their nails in silver cases, which are very convenient
for cleansing the ears of their owner or tearing out the eyes of
somebody else.
Walking along the great street of Pekin, one is sure to see a fair
number of gamblers and gambling houses. Gambling is a passion with the
Chinese, and they indulge it to a greater extent than any other people
in the world. It is a scourge in China, and the cause of a great deal
of the poverty and degradation that one sees there. There are various
games, like throwing dice, and drawing sticks from a pile, and there
is hardly a poor wretch of a laborer who will not risk the chance of
paying double for his dinner on the remote possibility of getting it
for nothing. The rich are addicted to the vice quite as much as the
poor, and sometimes they will lose their money, then their houses,
their lands, their wives, their children, and so on up to themselves,
when they have nothing else that their adversaries will accept. The
winter is severe at Pekin, and it sometimes happens that men who have
lost everything, down to their last garments, are thrust naked into
the open air, where they perish of cold. Sometimes a man will bet his
fingers on a game, and if he loses he must submit to have them chopped
off and turned over to the winner.
[Illustration: A LOTTERY PRIZE.]
There is a tradition that one of the Chinese emperors used to get up
lotteries, in which the ladies of the court were the prizes. He
obtained quite a revenue from the business, which was popular with
both the players and the prizes, as the latter were enabled to obtain
husbands without the trouble of negotiation.
The lottery has a place in the Chinese courts of justice. There is one
mode of capital punishment in which a dozen or twenty knives are
placed in a covered basket, and each knife is marked for a particular
part of the body. The executioner puts his hand under the cover and
draws at random. If the knife is for the toes, they are cut off one
after another; if for the feet, they are severed, and so on until a
knife for the heart or neck is reached. Usually the friends of the
victim bribe the executioner to draw early in the game a knife whose
wound will be fatal, and he generally does as he agrees. The
bystanders amuse themselves by betting as to how long the culprit will
stand it. Facetious dogs, those Chinese.
To enumerate all the ways of inflicting punishment in China would be
to fill a volume. Punishment is one of the fine arts, and a man who
can skin another elegantly is entitled to rank as an artist. The
bastinado and floggings are common, and then they have huge shears,
like those used in tin shops, for snipping off feet and arms, very
much as a gardener would cut off the stem of a rose.
Some years ago the environs of Tientsin were infested by bands of
robbers who were suspected of living in villages a few miles away. The
governor was ordered by the imperial authority to suppress these
robberies, and in order to get the right persons he sent out his
soldiers and arrested everybody, old and young, in the suspected
villages. Of course there were innocent persons among the captives,
but that made no difference; some of them were blind, and others
crippled, but the police had orders to bring in everybody. The
prisoners were summarily tried; some of them had their heads cut off,
others were imprisoned, and others were whipped. Nobody escaped
without some punishment; the result was that the robber bands were
broken up and the robberies ceased.
[Illustration: A CHINESE PALANQUIN.]
[Illustration: A PEKIN CAB.]
It is not easy to go about Pekin. It is a city of magnificent
distances, and the sights which one wants to see are far apart. The
streets are bad, being dusty in dry weather and muddy when it rains,
and the carriage way is cut up with deep ruts that make riding very
uncomfortable. The cabs of Pekin are little carts, just large enough
for two persons of medium size. They are without springs, and not very
neatly arranged inside. If one does not like them he can walk or take
a palanquin—there are plenty of palanquins in the city, and they do
not cost an exorbitant sum. They are not very commodious, but
infinitely preferable to the carts. The comforts of travel are very
few in China. A Chinese never travels for pleasure, and he does not
understand the spirit that leads tourists from one end of the world to
the other in search of adventure. When he has nothing to do he sits
down, smokes his pipe, and thinks about his ancestors. He never rides,
walks, dances, or takes the least exercise for pleasure alone. It is
business and nothing else that controls his movements.
When an English ship touched at Hong Kong some years ago, the captain
gave a ball to the foreign residents, and invited several Chinese
merchants to attend the festivities. One heavy old merchant who had
never before seen anything of the kind, looked on patiently, and when
the dance was concluded he beckoned the captain to his side and asked
if he could not get his servants to do that work and save him the
trouble.
[Illustration: PRIEST IN TEMPLE OF CONFUCIUS.]
One of the great curiosities of Pekin is the temple of Confucius,
where once a year the Emperor worships the great sage without the
intervention of paintings or images. In the central shrine there is a
small piece of wood, a few inches long, standing upright and bearing
the name of Confucius in Chinese characters. The temple contains
several stone tablets, on which are engraved the records of honor
conferred on literary men, and it is the height of a Chinese
scholar’s ambition to win a place here. There are several fine trees
in the spacious court yard, and they are said to have been planted by
the Mongol dynasty more than five hundred years ago. The building is a
magnificent one, and contains many curious relics of the various
dynasties, some of them a thousand years old. The ceiling is
especially gorgeous, and the tops of the interior walls are ornamented
with wooden boards bearing the names of the successive emperors in
raised gilt characters. As soon as an emperor ascends the throne he at
once adds his name to the list.
The Temple of Heaven and the Temple of Earth are also among the
curiosities of Pekin. The former stands in an enclosed space a mile
square, and has a great central pavilion, with a blue roof, and a gilt
top that shines in the afternoon sun like the dome of St. Isaac’s
church at St. Petersburg. The enclosed space includes a park,
beautifully laid out with avenues of trees and with regular, well
paved walks. In the park are some small buildings where the priests
live, that is to say, they are small compared with the main structure,
though they are really fine edifices. The great pavilion is on a high
causeway, and has flights of steps leading up to it from different
directions. The pavilion is three stories high, the eaves of each
story projecting very far and covered with blue enameled tiles. An
enormous gilt ball crowns the whole, and around the building there is
a bewildering array of arches and columns, with promenades and steps
of white marble, evincing great skill and care in their construction.
Unfortunately, the government is not taking good care of the temple,
and the grass is growing in many places in the crevices of the
pavements.
The Temple of Earth is where the emperor goes annually to witness the
ceremony of opening the planting season, and to inaugurate it by
ploughing the first furrow. The ceremony is an imposing one, and never
fails to draw a large assemblage.
One of the most interesting objects in the vicinity of Pekin previous
to 1860 was “Yuen-ming Yuen,” or the summer palace of the emperor,
Kien Loong. It was about eight miles northwest of the city, and bore
the relation to Pekin that Versailles does to Paris. I say _was_,
because it was ravaged by the English and French forces in their
advance upon the Chinese capital, and all the largest and best of the
buildings were burned. The country was hilly, and advantage was taken
of this fact, so that the park presented every variety of hill, dale,
woodland, lawn, garden, and meadow, interspersed with canals, pools,
rivulets, and lakes, with their banks in imitation of nature. The park
contained about twelve square miles, and there were nearly forty
houses for the residence of the emperor’s ministers, each of them
surrounded with buildings for large retinues of servants. The summer
palace, or central hall of reception, was an elaborate structure, and
when it was occupied by the French army thousands of yards of the
finest silk and crape were found there. These articles were so
abundant that the soldiers used them for bed clothes and to wrap
around other plunder. The cost of this palace amounted to millions of
dollars, and the blow was severely felt by the Chinese government. The
park is still worth a visit, but less so than before the destruction
of the palace.
In the country around Pekin there are many private burying grounds
belonging to families; the Chinese do not, like ourselves, bury their
dead in common cemeteries, but each family has a plot of its own.
Sometimes a few families combine and own a place together; they
generally select a spot in a grove of trees, and make it as attractive
as possible. The Chinese are more careful of their resting places
after death than before it; a wealthy man will live in a miserable
hovel, but he looks forward to a commodious tomb beneath pretty shade
trees. The tender regard for the dead is an admirable trait in the
Chinese character, and springs, no doubt, from that filial piety which
is so deeply engraved on the Oriental mind.
[Illustration: COMFORTS AND CONVENIENCES.]
[Illustration: FILIAL AFFECTION.]
In Europe and America it is the custom not to mention coffins in
polite society, and the contemplation of one is always mournful. But
in China a coffin is a thing to be made a show of, like a piano. In
many houses there is a room set apart for the coffins of the members
of the family, and the owners point them out with pride. They practice
economy to lay themselves out better than their rivals, and sometimes
a man who has made a good thing by swindling or robbing somebody, will
use the profits in buying a coffin, just as an American would treat
himself to a gold watch or diamond pin. The most elegant gift that a
child can make to his sick father is a coffin that he has paid for out
of his own labor; it is not considered a hint to the old gentleman to
hand in his checks and get out of the way, but rather as a mark of
devotion which all good boys should imitate. The coffins are finely
ornamented, according to the circumstances of the owner, and I have
heard that sometimes a thief will steal a fine one and commit
suicide—first arranging with his friends to bury him in it before
his theft is discovered. If he is not found out he thinks he has made
a good thing of it.
Whenever the Chinese sell ground for building purposes they always
stipulate for the removal of the bones of their ancestors for many
generations. The bones are carefully dug up and put in earthen jars,
when they are sealed up, labeled, and put away in a comfortable room,
as if they were so many pots of pickles and fruits. Every respectable
family in China has a liberal supply of potted ancestors on hand, but
would not part with them at any price.
Nothing can surpass the calm resignation with which the Chinese part
with life. They die without groans, and have no mental terror at the
approach of death. Abbe Hue says that when they came for him to
administer the last sacraments to a dying convert, their formula of
saying that the danger was imminent, was in the words, “The sick man
does not smoke his pipe.”
When a Chinese wishes to revenge himself upon another he furtively
places a corpse upon the property of his enemy. This subjects the man
on whose premises the body is found to many vexatious visits from the
officials, and also to claims on the part of the relations of the dead
man. The height of a joke of this kind is to commit suicide on another
man’s property in such a way as to appear to have been murdered there.
This will subject the unfortunate object of revenge to all sorts of
legal vexations, and not unfrequently to execution. Suicide for
revenge would be absurd in America, but is far from unknown at the
antipodes.
[Illustration: TAIL PIECE—OPIUM PIPE]