{040}
_The mud walls of Kublai Khan--Only place for a comfortable
promenade--The gardens on the walls--Guarding the city from devils--The
dirt of the Chinese--The gates--The camels--In the Chien Men--The
patient Chinese women--The joys of living in a walled city--A change in
Chinese feeling._
|Are they like the walls and gates of Babylon, I wonder, these walls and
gates of the capital city of China. I thought so when first I saw them,
and the thought remains with me still. Behind such walls as these surely
sat Ahasuerus, King of Babylon; behind such walls as these dwelt the
thousands of serfs who toiled, and suffered, and died, that he might
be a mighty king. They are magnificent, a wonder of the world, and it
seemed to me that the men of the nation who built them must glory in
them. But all do not. I sat one day at tiffin at a friend's house, and
opposite me sat a Chinese doctor, a graduate of Cambridge, who spoke
English with the leisurely accent of the cultivated Englishman, and he
spoke of these mighty walls.
“If I had my way,” said he, “they should be levelled with the ground. I
would not leave one stone upon another.” And I wondered why. They shut
out the fresh air, he said, but I wondered, in my own mind, whether he
did not feel that they {041}hemmed the people in, caged and held them
as it were, in an archaic state of civilisation, that it is best should
pass away. They can shut out so little air, and they can only cage and
hold those who desire to be so held.
Kublai Khan outlined the greater part of them in mud in the thirteenth
century, and then, two hundred years after, came the Ming conquerors who
faced the great Tartar's walls with grey Chinese brick, curtailing them
a little to the north, and as the Mings left them, so are they to-day
when the foreign nations from the West, and that other Asiatic nation
from the East, have built their Legations--pledges of peace--beneath
them and, armed to the teeth, hold, against the Chinese, the Legation
Quarter and a mile of their own wall.
Over fifty feet high are these Tartar walls, at their base they are
sixty feet through, at their top they are between forty and fifty feet
across, more than a hundred if you measure their breadth at the great
buttresses, and they are paved with the grey Chinese bricks that face
their sides. As in most Chinese cities, the top of the wall is the only
place where a comfortable promenade can be had, and the mile-long
strip between the Chien Men, the main gate, and the Ha Ta Men, the
south-eastern gate--the strip held by the Legations--is well kept; that
is to say, a broad pathway, along which people can walk, is kept smooth
and neat and free from the vegetation that flourishes on most of the
wall top. This vegetation adds greatly to its charm. The mud of the
walls is the rich alluvial deposit of the great plain on which Peking
stands, and when it has been well watered by the summer rains, a
{042}luxuriant green growth, a regular jungle, forces its way up through
the brick pavement. The top of the wall upon a cool autumn day, before
the finger of decay has touched this growth, is a truly delightful
garden.
[Illustration: 0078]
It was my great pleasure to walk there, for there were all manner of
flowering green shrubs and tall grasses, bound together by blooming
morning glory, its cup-shaped flowers blue, and pink, and white, and
white streaked with pink; there were even small trees, white poplar
and the ailanthus, or tree of heaven, throwing out shady branches
that afforded shelter from the rays of the brilliant sun. They are not
adequate shelter, though, in a rainstorm. Indeed it is very awkward
to be caught in a rainstorm upon the walls out of the range of the
rickshaws, as I was more than once, for in the hot weather I could never
resist the walls, the only place in Peking where a breath of fresh air
is to be found, and, since it is generally hottest before the rain, on
several occasions I was caught, returning drenched and dripping. It did
not matter as a rule, but once when I was there with a companion a more
than ordinary storm caught us. We sheltered under an ailanthus tree, and
as the wind was strong, umbrellas were useless. My companion began to
get agitated.
“If this goes on,” said he, “I shan't be able to go out to-morrow. I
have only one coat.” He had come up from Tientsin for a couple of days.
But for me the case was much more serious. I had on a thin white muslin
that began to cling round my figure, and I thought anxiously that if it
went on much longer I should not be able to go into the {043}hotel that
day! However, the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, the sun came
out in all his fierceness, and before we reached the hotel I was most
unbecomingly rough dried.
Things are ordered on the Legation wall, the pathway between the
greenery runs straight as a die, but beyond, on the thirteen miles
of wall under Chinese care, the greenery runs riot, and only a narrow
pathway meanders between the shrubs and grass, just as a man may walk
carelessly from station to station; and sometimes hidden among the
greenery, sometimes standing out against it, are here and there
great upright slabs of stone, always in pairs, relics of the old
fortifications, for surely these are all that remain of the catapults
with which of old the Chinese and Tartars defended their mighty city.
The walls stand square, north and south, and east and west, only at the
north-west corner does the line slant out of the square a little, for
every Chinese knows that is the only sure way to keep devils out of a
city, and certainly the capital must be so guarded. Whatever I saw and
wondered at, I always came back to the walls, the most wonderful sight
of a most wonderful city, and I always found something new to entrance
me. The watch-towers, the ramps, the gates, the suggestion of old-world
story that met me at every turn. In days not so very long ago these
walls were kept by the Manchu bannermen, whose special duty it was to
guard them, and no other person was allowed upon them, under pain of
death, for exactly the same reason that all the houses in the city are
of one story: it was not seemly that any mere commoner should {044}be
able to look down upon the Emperor, and no women, even the women of the
bannermen, were allowed to set foot there, for it appeared that the God
of War, who naturally took an interest in these defences, objected to
women.
Now little companies of soldiers take the place of those old-world
bannermen. They look out at the life of the city, at their fellows
drilling on the great plain beyond, at the muddy canal, that is like
a river, making its way across the khaki-coloured plain, that in the
summer is one vast crop of kaoliang--one vivid note of green. Wonderful
fertility you may see from the walls of the Chinese capital. Looking one
feels that the rush of the nations to finance the country is more than
justified. Surely here is the truest of wealth. But the soldiers on the
walls are children. China does not think much of her soldiers, and the
language is full of proverbs about them the reverse of complimentary.
“Good iron is not used for nails,” is one of them, “and good men do
not become soldiers.” How true that may be I do not know, but these men
seemed good enough, only just the babies a fellow-countryman talking of
them to me once called them. They know little of their own country, less
than nothing of any other. I feel they should not be dressed in shabby
khaki like travesties of the men of Western armies, tunics and sandals
and bows and arrows would be so much more in keeping with their
surroundings. And yet so small are they, like ants at the foot of an
oak, that their garb scarcely matters, they but emphasise the vastness
of the walls on which they stand; walls builded probably by men
differing but little from these soldiers of New China. {045}I
photographed a little company one bright day in the early spring--it is
hardly necessary to say it was bright, because all days at that season,
and indeed at most seasons, are brilliantly, translucently bright.
My little company dwelt in a low building made up apparently of
lattice-work and paper close to the observatory, and evidently word went
round that the wonderful thing had been done, and, for all the charm of
the walls, it was not a thing that was often done. I suppose the average
tourist does not care to waste his plates on commonplace little soldiers
in badly made khaki. When next I appeared with the finished picture all
along my route soldiers came and asked courteously, and plainly, for all
I knew not one word of their tongue, what the result had been. I showed
them, of course, and my following grew as I passed on. They knew those
who had been taken, which was lucky, for I certainly could not tell
t'other from which' and, when I arrived at their little house, smiling
claimants stretched out eager hands. I knew the number I had taken and I
had a copy apiece. And very glad I was, too, when they all ranged up and
solemnly saluted me, and then they brought me tea in their handleless
cups, and I, unwashed though I felt those cups were, drank to our
good-fellowship in the excellent Chinese tea that needs neither sugar
nor milk to make it palatable.
[Illustration: 0084]
There were other people, too, on the walls in the early springtime,
coolies clearing away the dead growth that had remained over from the
past summer. It was so light it seemed hardly worth gathering, and those
gleaners first taught me to realise something of the poverty of China,
the desperate poverty that {046}dare not waste so much as a handful of
dead grass. They gathered the refuse into heaps, tied it to each end of
their bamboos, and, slinging it over their shoulders, trudged with
it down one of the ramps into the city. Ever and again in my
peregrinations, I would come across one of them sitting in the sun,
going over his padded coat in the odd moments he could spare from his
toil. For the lower-class Chinese understands not the desirability of
water, as applied either to himself or his clothes, and, as he certainly
never changes those clothes while one shred will hold to another, the
moment must arrive, sooner or later, when his discomfort is desperate,
and something must be done. He is like the _wonks_, the great yellow
scavenger dogs that haunt the streets of Peking and all Chinese cities,
he sits down and scratches himself, and goes through his clothes. At
least that was my opinion. A friend of mine who had served for some
years in the interior with the great company, the British and American
Tobacco Company, that, with the missionaries, shares the honour of
doing pioneer work in China, says I am wrong, Chinamen don't mind such a
little thing as that.
“Those carters,” said he, “in the interior as it gets colder just
pile one garment on over another, and never take anything off, and by
February--phew! If you want to smell a tall smell”--I said I didn't,
the smells of Peking were quite recondite enough for me--but he paid no
attention--“you just go and stand over the k'ang in a room where five or
six of them are crowded together.”
And the carters, it seems, are highly respectable, sometimes well-to-do
men. I felt I had a lot to {047}learn about the Chinese, these men whose
ancestors had built the walls.
Of course there are gates in the walls, nine gates in all in the Tartar
City, great archways with iron-studded doors and watch-towers above.
I count it one of the assets of my life, that I have stood under those
archways, where for centuries has ebbed and flowed the traffic of a
Babylonish city, old world still in this twentieth century. They are
lighted with electric light now, instead of with pitch-pine torches, but
no matter, the grey stones are there.
The gate of a city like Peking is a great affair. Over every archway is
a watch-tower, with tiled roofs rising tier above tier, and portholes
filled with the painted muzzles of guns. Painted guns in the year of our
Lord 1914! So is the past bound up with the present in China! And these
are not entirely relics of the past like the catapult stones. In the
year 1900, when the Boxers looted the Chinese City, and the Europeans
in the Legations north of the Tartar wall trembled for their lives, the
looters burned the watch-tower on the Chien Men, all that was burnable
of it, and, when peace was restored, the Chinese set to work and built
their many-tiered watch-tower, built it in all the glory of red, and
green, and blue, and gold, and in the portholes they put the same
painted cannon that had been there in past ages, not only to strike
terror into the enemy, but also to impress the God of War with an idea
of their preparedness. And yet there was hardly any need of sham, for
these gateways must have been formidable things to negotiate before the
days of heavy artillery, for each is protected by a curtain wall as high
and as thick as the main wall, and in {048}them are archways, sometimes
one, sometimes two, sometimes three ways out, but always there is a
great square walled off in front of the gate so that the traffic must
pause, and may be stopped before it passes under the main archway into
the city. And these archways look down upon a traffic differing but
little from that which has passed down through all the ages.
Here come the camels from Mongolia, ragged and dusty, laden with grain,
and wool, and fruit, and the camels from the Western Hills, laden with
those “black stones” that Marco Polo noted seven hundred years ago, and
told his fellow-countrymen they burned for heating purposes in Cambulac.
You may see them down by the Ha Ta Men preparing to start out on their
long journey, you may see them in the Imperial City, bringing in their
wares, but outside the south-western gate, by the watch-tower that
guards the corner of the wall, they are to be seen at their best. Here,
where the dust is heaped high under the clear blue sky of Northern
China, come slowly, in stately fashion, the camels, as they have come
for thousands of years. The man who leads them is ragged in the blue
of the peasant, his little eyes are keen, and patient, and cunning, and
there is a certain stolidity in his demeanour; life can hold but few
pleasures for him, one would think, and yet he is human, he cannot go on
superior, regardless of outside things, as does his string of beasts of
burden. The crenellated walls rise up behind them, the watch-tower
with its painted guns frowns down upon them, and the camels, the cord
fastened to the tail of the one in front, passing through the nostrils
of the one {049}behind, go steadily on. They are like the walls, they
are older than the walls, possibly they may outlive the walls; silently,
surely, in the soft, heaped-up dust they move; so they came a thousand
years ago, two thousand years ago, before the very dawn of history.
These Babylonish gates have for me a never-ending attraction. I look and
look at the traffic, and always find something new. One sunny morning
I went and sat in the Chien Men, just to watch the never-ending throng
that made their way backwards and forwards between the Chinese and the
Tartar Cities. I took up my position in the centre of the great square,
large as Waterloo Place, enclosed by the curtain wall, and the American
Guard looked down upon me and wondered, for they watch the traffic
day in and day out, and so long as it is peaceful, they see nothing to
remark upon in it. There are three gates in the curtain wall, the one
to the south is never opened except for the highest in the land to pass
through, but from the east gate the traffic goes from the Tartar to the
Chinese City, through the west it comes back again, meeting and passing
under the great archway that leads to the Tartar City. And all day long
that square is thronged. East and west of the main archway are little
temples with the golden-brown roofs of all imperial temples, the Goddess
of Mercy is enshrined here, and there are bronze vases and flowering
plants, and green trees in artistic pots, all going to make a quiet
little resting-place where a man may turn aside for a moment from the
rush and roar of the city, burn aromatic incense sticks, and invoke good
fortune for the enterprise on which he is {050}engaged. Do the people
believe in the Goddess of Mercy, I wonder? About as much as I do,
I suspect. The Chinaman, said a Chinese to me once, is the most
materialistic of heathens, believing in little that he cannot see, and
handle, and explain; but all of us, Eastern or Western, are human, and
have the ordinary man's desire for the pitiful, kindly care of some
unseen Power. It is only natural. I, too, Westerner as I am, daughter
of the newest of nations, burned incense sticks at the shrine of the
Goddess of Mercy, and put up a little prayer that the work upon which
I was engaged should be successful. Men have prayed here through the
centuries. The prayer of so great a multitude must surely reach the Most
High, and what matter by what name He is known.
[Illustration: 0090]
Besides the temples there are little guard-houses for the soldiers in
the square; guard-houses with delicate, dainty lattice-work windows,
and there are signboards with theatre notices in Chinese on gay red
and yellow paper. There are black and yellow uniformed military police,
there are grey-coated little soldiers with just a dash of red about
their shabby, ill-fitting uniforms, and there are the people passing to
and fro intent on their business, the earning of a cash, or of thousands
of dollars. The earning of a cash, one would think mostly, looking at
many a thing of shreds and patches that passes by. To Western eyes the
traffic is archaic, no great motors rush about carrying crowds at once,
it consists of rickshaws with one or, at most, a couple of fares, of
Peking carts with blue tilts and a sturdy pony or a handsome mule in
the shafts, and the driver seated cross-legged in fronts of longer
carts {051}with wheels studded, as the Peking carts are, and loaded with
timber, with lime, and all manner of merchandise, and drawn sometimes by
three or four underfed little horses, but mostly by a horse or mule in
the shafts and a mule or a donkey so far in front one wonders he can
exert any influence on the traction at all. The rickshaw coolies clang
their bells, men on bicycles toot their horns, every donkey, and most
horses and mules, have rings of bells round their necks, and everyone
shouts at the top of his voice, while forty feet up on the wall,
a foreign soldier, one of the Americans who hold the Chien Men, is
practising all his bugle calls.
“Turn out, turn out Mess, mess,” proclaims the bugle shrilly above.
“Clang, clang, clang,” ring the rickshaw bells. A postman in shabby
blue, with bands of dirty white, passes on his bicycle and blows his
horn, herald of the ways of the West. A brougham comes along with sides
all of glass, such as the Chinaman loves. In it is a man in a modern
tall hat, a little out-of-date; on the box, are two men in grey silk,
orthodox Chinese costume, queue and all, but alas for picturesqueness
they have crowned their heads with hideous tourist caps, the mafoo
behind on the step, hanging on to the roof by a strap, has on a very
ordinary wideawake, his business it is to jump down and lead the horses
round a corner--no self-respecting Chinese horse can negotiate a corner
without assistance--and the finishing touch is put by the coachman, also
in a tourist cap, who clangs a bell with as much fervour as a rickshaw
coolie. Before this carriage trot outriders. “Lend light, lend light,”
they cry, which is the Eastern way of saying “By your leave, by your
{052}leave. My master a great man comes.” After the coach come more
riders. It may be a modern carriage in which lie rides, but the
important man in China can no more move without his outriders and his
following, than could one of the kings or nobles of Nineveh or Babylon.
More laden carts come in from the west, and the policeman, in dusty
black and yellow, directs them, though they really need no directing.
The average Chinese mind is essentially orderly, and never dreams of
questioning rules. Is there not a stone exactly in the middle of the
road under the great archway, and does not every man know that those
going east must go one way, and those going west the other? What need
for direction? An old-fashioned fat Chinese with shaven head and pigtail
and sleeveless black satin waistcoat over his long blue coat comes
along. He half-smothers a small donkey with a ring of jingling bells
round its neck, a coolie follows him in rags, but that does not matter,
spring is in the land, and he is nearly hidden by the lilac bloom he
carries, another comes along with a basket strapped on his back and a
scoop in his hand, he is collecting the droppings of the animals, either
for manure or to make argol for fuel, a stream of rickshaws swerve out
of the way of a blind man, ragged, bent, old, who with lute in one hand
and staff in the other taps his way along.
“Hsien Sheng, before born,” he is addressed by the coolies directing
him, for his affliction brings him outward respect from these courteous
people.
In the rickshaws are all manner of people: Manchu women with high
head-dresses in the form of a cross, highly painted faces and the gayest
of {053}long silk coats, shy Chinese women, who from their earliest
childhood have been taught that a woman must efface herself. Their hair
is decked with flowers, and dressed low on the nape of their necks,
their coats are of soberer colours, and their feet are pitifully maimed.
“For every small foot,” says a Chinese proverb, “there is a jar full
of tears.” The years of agony every one of those women must have lived
through, but their faces are impassive, smiling with a surface smile
that gives no indication of the feelings behind.
The Chien Men, because it opens only from the Tartar to the Chinese
City, is not closed, but eight o'clock sees all the gates in the
twenty-three miles of outer wall closed for the night, and very
awkward it sometimes is for the foreigner, who is not used to these
restrictions, for neither threats nor bribes will open those gates once
they are shut.
I remember on one occasion a young fellow, who had lingered too long
among the delights of the city, found himself, one pleasant warm summer
evening, just outside the Shun Chih Men as the gates of the Chinese City
were closing. He wanted to get back to his cottage at the race-course
but the guardians of the gate were obdurate. “It was an order and the
gates were closed till daylight next morning.” He could not climb the
walls, and even if he could, the two ponies he had with him could not.
He probably used up all the bad language at his command, if I know
anything about him, and he grew more furious when he recollected he had
guests coming to dinner. Then he began to think, and remembered that
the railway came through the wall. Inspection showed him that there
{054}were gates across it, also fast closed, and here he got his second
wind, and quite a fresh assortment of bad language, which was checked by
the whistle of an approaching train. Then a bright idea occurred to him.
Where a train could go, a pony could go, and he stood close to the line
in the darkness, instructed his mafoo to keep close beside him, and the
moment the train passed, got on to the line and followed in its wake,
regardless of the protests of raging gatekeepers. He got through the
gate triumphantly, but then, alas, his troubles began, for the railway
line had not been built with a view to taking ponies through the wall.
There were rocks and barbed wire, there were fences, and there were mud
holes, and his guests are wont to relate how as they were sitting down
to table under the hospitable guidance of his No. 1 boy, there arrived
{054}on the scene a man, mud to the eyes--it was summertime when there
is plenty of mud in the country round Peking--and silent, because no
profanity of which he was capable could possibly have done justice to
his feelings. Such are some of the joys of living in a Babylonish city.
[Illustration: 0096]
{055}When I had sat an hour in the gate I rose to go, and the rickshaw coolie
and I disagreed as to the fare. A rickshaw coolie and I never did
agree as to the fare. Gladly would I pay double to avoid a row, but the
coolie, taken from the Legation Quarter of Peking where the tourists
spoil him, would complain and try to extort more if you offered him a
dollar for a ten-cent ride, therefore the thing was not to be avoided.
I did not see my way to getting clear, and a crowd began to gather. Then
there came along a Chinese, a well-dressed young man.
His long petticoats of silk were slit at the sides, he had on a silken
jacket and a little round cap. He wore no queue, because few of the men
of his generation, and of his rank wear a queue, and he spoke English as
good as my own.
“What is the matter?” I told him. “How much did you pay him?”
“Forty cents.”
“It is too much,” said he, and he called a policeman, and that coolie
was driven off with contumely. But it marked a wonderful stride in
Chinese feeling that a Chinese should come to the assistance of a
foreigner in distress. Not very long ago he would have passed on the
other side, scorning the woman of the outer barbarians, glad in his
heart that she should be “done” even by one so low in the social scale
as a rickshaw coolie, a serf of the great city these ancient walls
enclose.