are mixed up in this wonderful city? There are modern steam rollers;
donkey and camel trains, blue-turbaned couriers on Mongol ponies;
springless, hooded Peking carts, the mule wearing a velvet cloth;
bouncing mule litters; camel trains swaying up and down like the
billows of the Yellow Sea; modern water tanks borne by steel towers;
a modern zoo with a dragon-carved gate; automobiles; victorias drawn
by swift Mongol or black Szechuen ponies; Russian droshkes drawn by
three ponies going different paces; men tugging single-axle carts by
long ropes and harness; coolies with baskets and boxes balanced from
the bamboos on their sweating shoulders; wheelbarrow men transporting
huge bags of millet or salt; men throwing water on the streets with
big wooden spoons; rickshaws, and passenger chairs with ventilators
and windows. There is a great military camp outside the walls. In the
Portuguese cemetery outside of the west gate lie the famous Jesuits
who nearly made the Manchu dynasty Catholic in Kang Hi’s day. In the
revered British cemetery lie the bodies of the famous pioneers of
our race, who, during the centuries, have fought forward the most
advanced line of our civilization. Many of the graves and memorials,
the trees and walls were desecrated in the “Boxer” outrages of 1900.
There is a cemetery for that notorious tribe of palace eunuchs in the
northwest of the Tartar city, and sons had to be bought, or “forged”
for them so as to pay the necessary grave worship of Confucianism.
There is the new Peking Club, the second in cost in the Far East; the
Tsung Hua College, which trains students who are to go to America and
England; and where the old examination stalls and the Hanlin College
stood under the ancient “literati” system, are the modern parliament
buildings (Tzu Cheng Yuan); also National University, and the Wai Wu
Pu (Foreign Office) halls, where Yuan Shih Kai had his headquarters in
the exciting days of 1911–12. Towering over the Tartar city are the
Gothic towers of the French Pe Tang Cathedral, which was successfully
defended by Bishop Favier during the 1900 siege. The white marble
pailoo arch to the German ambassador, who was assassinated in 1900,
is notable, as are also numerous other marble, porcelain and painted
arches, and marble bridges, balustrades and statues of lions. The
statue to the German was erected under foreign compulsion and is hated.
The wonderful street bazaars of Chien Men gate, Lung Fu Temple Street,
wide Kaiser Street; the important Methodist and Union Hospitals of
Hatamen Street; Legation, Tsung Pu, Tung Tan, Liu Li, Koulan, Butcher,
Fan Tan, Lantern, Jadestone, Bamboo, Meridian and other leading streets
should be visited. There is a Peking Tiffany; the firm name is Hsing
Lung Tien. The city’s kilns and weavers are famous for their porcelain,
cloisonné and tapestries. Pedlers, however, bring almost everything,
from the cheapest to the costliest, to one’s door. There are many
native papers like the influential _Chun Kuo Pao_.
Some of the legations have been rebuilt since the 1900 siege, the
Americans in particular occupying near the Chien Men gate a series
of costly, but not architecturally proper buildings for artistic
China. The British legation near the Wu Men gate is notable for two
reasons: because it occupies Duke Liang’s Chinese palace, and because
its compound was the center of the foreigners’ quarters in the Peking
siege of 1900. The French legation rented Duke Tsin’s palace. In the
sacred urns in the Temple Park in the south of the Chinese city, the
bodies of the Sikh soldiers, who died or were killed in the 1900 siege,
were cremated. The Art Gallery in the imperial city is of particular
interest. The Lama (Tibet Buddhist) Temple, with its ornate pailoo
arch, should be seen. The priests wear orthodox yellow robes and hats,
and a red cloak with squares, which represent the rags of poverty as
realistically as art cares to go. There is an immense statue of Buddha,
and some small obscene statues which have been draped by the request
of the legations, to the great and joyful surprise of the priests, who
have discovered that they are now able to make more money in fees than
when the statues were undraped, so perverse is tourist curiosity! A
walk on the walls should not be neglected, especially where, between
the Chien Men and Hata Men gates the American, British and other
foreigners made their long stand in 1900. The ponderous fort-temples on
the walls, with their interesting exhibit of columns and galleries, are
characteristic. Red is the color of the Chinese, yellow and green the
color of the Manchus, and the tiling of the roofs indicates where each
predominates.
Peking has its many military memories. In 1900 the Ninth and Fourteenth
Infantry, the Sixth Cavalry and the Marines of the cruiser _Newark_ of
the Americans fought their way here from the coast in General Gaselee’s
union column of relief. The Wei-Hai-Wei Regiment of British Chinese
in blue and white, came, too, with quotas from the forces of France,
Germany, Russia and Japan. The Sun Wui Club brings leading Chinese and
Occidentals together; that is, those Occidentals who have a maximum of
good sense and national ambition and a minimum of out-of-date, insular
“snobbery”. We once had a similar international club in Canton, which
did good work in destroying difference and welding approximation.
The Russian Mission in the Pei Kwan section of Peking is almost the
only effort of the vast Greek Church to missionize China. Good music
is now available, for both the National Customs and native armies,
and all the foreign legations have trained bands, and there are some
orchestras. The Union Medical College and Hospital on Hatamen Street
is most notable, not only because of its effectiveness, but because
the various evangelical denominations have first united in far away
China. Some writers, like Lord Salisbury’s son, Lord Cecil, think this
is the forerunner of union elsewhere. The example has been copied
generally in China, as at Nanking, Tsinan, Canton, etc., and before
long all medical, hospital and teaching work will be on the union plan
in all the large centers. The Chinese are eager to assist, and join in
with a whole heart. Reform started in Peking in 1898, when Kang Yu Wei
and other Cantonese, trained at Hongkong, got the ear of the Manchu
emperor, Kwang Hsu, and induced him to issue the famous reform edicts.
The peony gardens are notable, and the courts and gardens of the many
temples, inside and outside of the walls, exhibit many horticultural
treasures, but Northern China in general is more notable for wild
flowers than hothouse products. There are Manchu tombs, and the Manchu
palaces and gardens of Yuan Ming, Wan Shou and Ih Ho to the northwest
to visit, and temples in the western hills, where the foreigners
resort during the blazing summer of the plains, if they do not care to
take the railway down to the bathing resort of Pei Tai Ho, or Chifu.
The scenic railway running north takes one to the glorious Nankou
pass in the Great Wall and to the Ming tombs. The station is at Liu
Tsin outside the walls. To the northwest are the villages where
the Manchu pensioners or bannermen were kept in idleness, which was
one cause of the 1911 rebellion. As in many of the Chinese cities,
there is a clepsydra water clock to be seen. Mints, banks, engraving
plants, printing presses, electricity, modern water-works; primary,
intermediate, trade and high schools, have all come to the reforming
capital. There have been large hoards of bullion in the imperial city.
The empress dowager, Tse Hsi, left many millions of silver, which were
used to run the government for weeks during the rebellion in 1911–12.
This money was collected by the eunuchs, compelling every official to
pay for his daylight audience and honors, and crimes were “planted”
on officials so as to have the excuse of fining them and thus adding
to the Manchus’ imperial reserve. Great granaries exist where the
tribute rice from the southern provinces was stored for a million or
more subsidized Manchu soldiers and hangers-on. This rice formerly
came to Tientsin and Peking by the Grand Canal and Pei Ho River.
It was later brought north, through Li Hung Chang’s intervention,
by the China Merchants’ Steamship Company, in which the government
held the majority of the shares. The history of spying, intriguing,
concession-hunting and diplomatic contests swells its largest at
Peking, and old Legation Street and the Wai Wu Pu have heard perhaps
more secret stories than any other diplomatic quarter of the world. Men
of all nations, Manchus and Chinese, eunuchs, women, human parrots,
dictographs secretly placed, waste-paper baskets, keys to private
codes, the kitchen cabinet, keyhole sentinels, tapped telephone wires,
field-glasses masked behind curtains, letter sweaters and those adders
in the bosom, society detectives, have all had their part in the old
Peking game of intrigue. Foreign trusts have come over the water to
battle with local distrusts! Understanding has not always honestly
wooed misunderstanding. Evasion has alternately successfully and
unsuccessfully battled with invasion. “When is a promise not a promise”
has been answered by, “At Peking, on both sides of the ethnological
pale”.
Culture, learning, fashion and fools have often mixed in the
drawing-rooms which face Legation, Meridian and Great Wall Streets. In
dignity, the National Customs Service, managed by foreigners, takes its
way somewhat apart on Koulan Street. With the British Legal, it is the
best civil service in the Far East, the other legations depending in
various degrees upon missionaries for their knowledge of Chinese. The
American legation in recent years has equipped its staff with student
interpreters. Foreigners learn attachment for the life, as their wits
are kept at work. It has been a wonderful capital in exciting life, as
it is in physical appearance. Foreign press bureaus have vied with one
another in sending out men fitted to obtain privileged information. In
summer, the working Pekingese throws away all the clothes that the law
will allow; in winter, he puts on so many cotton-wadded coats that he
looks like a balloon ready to ascend, if he were not weighted with a
charcoal brazier tucked under his coat or up his sleeve. He has a stone
or brick kang (stove), but he must lie close to it to get its meager
warmth. He, therefore, uses it for a bed, and so does the whole insect
race, who make it warm for him, even if the brick stove does not. When
the schoolboy wrote his ambiguous essay that “crowded China is too
thickly populated to be comfortable”, he may, therefore, have referred
to other inhabitants than the men and women. The furs of Peking are
famous, and many black chow-dog farms have been started in Mongolia to
supply the foreign fur markets. Peking has been so looted by war and
by collectors of its ceramic prizes that the shops and potteries of Liu
Li Street contain less that is valuable than the museums of America
and Europe. For the ordinary traveler who wants something beautiful,
even if it is not old, there are thousands of shops and bazaar tables
that display their tempting wares. As China reforms, and art is not
sweated out of the provinces by grasping officials and courtiers, the
traveler will be able to follow his quest back to the many old centers
of production in the central and southern provinces; and this will be
better for art, and better for the traveler. The whole nation used to
tremble when an official, dowager, baby emperor, prince, regent, etc.,
had a birthday or one of their various anniversaries, because it meant
that jade, jewels, costly furniture, tapestries, porcelain, etc., must
prove the sincerity of congratulations, and as we fill the papier-mâché
rabbit with candies on Easter Day the vase had to be filled with coins
of worth. These presents were no sooner received than they were pawned
by the indigent Manchus to the shopkeepers of Peking, or they were
stolen and sold by the palace eunuchs. The Chinese system of keeping
art in drawers instead of in glassed cabinets, in view, aided this
thievery, for the rascally eunuchs were not soon found out.
Many wonderful stories are told of the mysterious ceremonies of the
Manchu court at night; how soldiers suddenly lined Meridian Street,
and no Chinese could leave his house but on pain of death. Then the
Wu Men gate of the Forbidden City was thrown open under the smoking
torches, and the pale Emperor Kwang Hsu was carried forth, robed in
yellow, and his courtiers in red, gold and blue. Down Meridian Street
they noiselessly marched southward, the soldiers turning _volte-face_
along the street. The Chien Men gate into the Chinese city was thrown
open, and through its Meridian Street the procession continued south
for two miles to the temples and the open altar of Heaven, where
midnight sacrifices of a black bullock, burned silk, grain and wine
were made; a worship as old and as simple as that of the patriarchial
days of Abraham. It was the worship of the ancestral Chou clan, which
Confucius chronicled and the Manchu adopted so as to keep himself
in veneration; and this right of sacrifice he has maintained in his
abdication. The Pope Mikado has also retained his right to make
similar sacrifices. Surely if the main hold on eastern peoples is to
be a superstitious one, it is not so strong a hold as the republicans
of China intend to set up in the minds and hearts of the new nation.
God’s name was simply called “Tien”; i. e., heaven or sky. Then the
procession hurried back long before the non-Manchus were awake. Other
mysterious things happened in the night. The Wu Men gate was opened,
and all courtiers and ministers then alone had their audience with the
screened crown head. During the long regency of the Dowager Empress
Tse Hsi and her predecessors, China was a land ruled by midnight
decisions, and justice was as dark as the muffled and mysterious hour.
Executions of the prominent were held at night on the common Meridian
Road, which had been blocked off by soldiers. You never know at Peking
when your passenger cart is standing over the altar of a life which
was persecuted and sacrificed for opinion’s sake. No wonder that the
Chinese, like other long-suffering reformers, are saying under their
breath: “We have had enough of ‘plants’ and deeds done in darkness; let
there be light.”
This wonderful walled capital of Mongol, Ming and Manchu dynasties, is
not so old as the Great Wall of China, for it has been rebuilt several
times, the imperial portion being about 1,000 years older than the
inferior Chinese section to the south. It was as though the Chinese
traders camped before the southern Chien Men gate to supply the Manchu
court, and the Emperor Kia Tsing rose up and said: “Let us now take
thought, and throw a wide wall around our purveyors’ bazaars also.”
There is only one good thing about absolutism; i. e., to say is to do,
and it was done. Peking has had many rivals as the capital of China:
Nanking, the southern capital of the Mings, in particular; Hangchow,
of the Sungs; and Canton, Wuchang, Chingtu and Shanghai have all put
in their claims and maintained their flag in the breeze for a regal
season. Geographically and strategically, Chingtu would be the proper
capital of a united nation, and Wuchang would be almost as central and
afford better trading facilities, a London of China, but it would not
be so strong a strategic center. From a Chinese republican point of
view, Canton, Nanking and Shanghai are foremost in their claims. Peking
is weak because it is always within striking distance of Russia’s and
Japan’s mighty armies. Almost alone of the world’s capitals, it is not
at the water’s edge.
There are temples to nearly everything in Peking, a “Brooklyn of
Churches”, but most of the altars this time are heathen: temples
to Buddhas, sleeping in Nirvana, recumbent in Cingalese style; a
splendid Lama Temple with wonderful carvings in wood and stone; God
of War; Confucian; Taoist; Catholic Cathedral; Evangelical of every
denomination of the three Protestant nations; Mohammedan mosques; God
of Literature; God of Fox; Russian Greek Church; Portuguese Church;
shrines over Buddha’s skin, teeth and a score of other things;
Ancestral temples; Altars of the Sun, Moon, and Gods of Grain and Rain;
temples to Buddha’s mother, and Gods of Success, and “World Peace”
(not the recent invention of an armed peace!); Gods of Title Deeds,
Dragons, Wind and Water, the North Star; Gods of Dead Elephants and
Strong Tigers, etc. When the jolly men of Canton and another southern
city heard of all this, glorious humorists that they are, they said
they could “go it one better”. They erected with a rush a “Temple to
Ten Thousand Gods”, all of whom look alike, even the images named for
Marco Polo and “Chinese” Gordon. Chided with all this, a humorous
Cantonese retorted: “Well, haven’t you Occidentals an Eden Musée and
Madame Tussaud’s wax works; don’t take our idols as seriously as you do
the Indian ones.” There are superbly carved marble dagobas in the Lama
and Pi-Un-Se Temples. The Peking Lama is second in authority in the
Buddhist world, and since General Chao Ehr Feng drove the Dalai Lama
out of Tibet into India, the Peking Lama has now probably most power
in the Buddhist world. The Pali Chuan pagoda outside the west wall is
the most ornate in China. Burmese Buddhists brought their art influence
thus far north, and under patronage of the Ming emperors cast it up
like a pearl wrecked upon a barren shore; for the Manchu, who succeeded
in the dynasty, is not an architect nor an artist. He has had to call
in Chinese, Indian, Persian, Mohammedan and Jesuit architects from time
to time to adorn his capitals and his graveyards at Mukden and Peking.
There are towering, priceless bronze censers; stone and metal tablets;
delightful octagonal marble mausoleums with circular second stories,
topped with conic fluted roof, which is copied from the perfect act
of the incomparable blue Temple of Heaven, and like the second story
of the divinely beautiful choragic monument of Lysicrates at Athens.
In his book, _The Chinese_, the author has referred to many other
similarities between Greek and Chinese art and architecture, which are
as wonderful as the dissimilarities. The ponderous gate forts, Manchu
Drum and Ming Bell towers, with the largest bells in the world, sixteen
feet high and nine inches thick, and the delightful compound or palace
gates, are notable. The Buddhists have bell and statue foundries in
the Tartar city, and there are potteries for dainty cloisonné. There
are said to be some lost Jewish Chinese at Peking, as at Kaifong. They
are now butchers, and worship with the Mohammedans, having lost nearly
all their religious, if not their phrenological distinction long ago.
What proof is stronger that the phylacteries of any conviction should
be worn day and night on the forehead, as well as engraven on the
heart, “lest we forget”. The trees and lakes of the city and suburbs
are conspicuous, because all Chinese buildings, except pagodas, are not
over two stories in height, and do not dwarf the lovely landscape.
There is one dead foreign city in China, Cathay’s “Deserted Village”,
immortal Port Arthur. Where are now the streets of palatial Renaissance
palaces which eight years ago nestled under Golden Hill and lined
the bund of the Eastern Port? Where are the massed battalions of
Alexeieff’s troops, white-capped, white-tunicated and high-booted,
which used to dress ranks on the broad parade ground behind Golden
Hill? What stilled forever the music of the ringing glasses, drained of
their sweet Roederer by gold-braided arms that lifted them quickly to
harsh lips in Saratoff’s gay restaurant on the sunny bund? What hushed
the song of the musée and Odessa ballet girls on the small stage in
smoky Nicobadza’s Café in the New Town? Over the breakers that lash
the Tiger’s Tail Peninsula do the ghosts of Admiral Makharov, the
court painter, Verestchagin, and seven hundred and fifty others of the
mine-sunk _Petropavlovsk_ battleship still whisper their mournful
names like a dirge of St. Andrew, as on that sad gray morning of
April 4, 1904? Where are the battleships _Sevastopol_, _Peresviet_,
_Poltava_ and _Nicolai_, which used to lie safely under Golden Hill,
while terrific war harmlessly hurled fire and shell from Kikwan Hill,
Pigeon Bay, where we used to shoot snipe, and Wolf’s Hill? Surely they
are not the salvaged and transformed _Sagami_, _Tango_, _Iki_, etc.,
flying now the rayed, red sun instead of the white, blue and red flag
of St. Andrew. On second view, they certainly are; there are the high
freeboard of a Baltic-built vessel of the Kronstadt navy-yard.
We search in vain for the newspaper office of Alexeieff’s official
organ, the _Novo Krai_, and we miss from the gay bund the dashing team
of the richest Chinese compradore army-purveyor, Chih Fun Tai, Esquire.
The naval dockyard across the harbor from Golden Hill is, however,
developed better than ever, though you can not get near it because of
the watchful Japanese picket, unless you wish to be incarcerated under
the international spy act! The fine white hospital buildings to the
west of the inner harbor are also improved. The wrecking crews are
still working with derricks and drags at the narrow harbor entrance
only two hundred yards wide upon the rock-filled hulls which Captain
Hirose, the Hobson of Japan, sank there at the cost of his life, under
the fire of Golden Hill on a hazy morning in April, 1904, so as to
cork up the navy of Russia and allow Togo to scour the seas with his
British naval preceptor at his side on the bridge, instead of being
held in blockading leash. Around the harbor tower the great forts of
strategically essential 203 Metre Hill, stubborn North Hill, Kikwan
Hill, Ehr Lung (Two Dragons) Hill, Sun Shu Hill, “H” fort, Palung
Hill, and Wan Tai. Not a large tree waves on them, though some stubby
firs for masking purposes are being set out stealthily. Everywhere is
desolation; choked tunnels and saps underground, filled war galleries
above ground, broken gun carriages, burst Krupp and Armstrong guns
piled up in titanic wreckage. Heroic Kondrachenko and gallant Stoessel
on one side, and Grant-like Nogi on the other, sowed the hundred
valleys and hillsides hereabout with rusting bayonets, belt buckles,
medals of glory and skulls of death. Thousands and thousands of men,
known not by their names but by their number tag, like prisoners,
dropped before the ruthless and fame-obliterating fire of range-fixed
guns operating behind searchlights. It was the steady mowing of the
grim reaper himself, until Nogi determined to reach Kondrachenko, and
North and 203 Metre forts, underground instead of by bombardment and
assault. Nickel-nosed bullets, soft-nosed spreaders, broken sabers,
rusted buttons, bleaching bones, water cans, leather knapsack bottles,
slowly rotting walnut rifle stocks, four-inch and eight-inch shells,
camp-fire equipments, pots, match-boxes, frames that held sweetheart’s
picture next the heart, star orders of the heathen emperor and cross
decorations of the Holy Tsar of Peace (!), numbers that were tagged
on the neck to take the place of the name of a man, breeches of
quick-firing guns, barrels of Gatlings and Nordenfeldts, cartridge
cases, porcelain saki bottles, metal clasps of Y. M. C. A. Bibles, all
fill up these powder-upheaved furrows of Death, where not a Chinese
building stands of the once beautiful Chinese suburbs.