{076}
_A good republican--The restricted Empire of the Manchus--Condign
punishment--Babylon--An Adventurous Chinaman--The entrance to the
Forbidden City--The courtyards of Babylon--A discordant and jarring
note--Choirs of priests--A living Buddha--“The Swanee River”--The last
note in bathos--Palace eunuchs--Out of hand--Afternoon tea--The funeral
procession--The imperial bier--Quaint and strange and Eastern._
|The Dowager-Empress of China, the unloved wife and widow of the late
Emperor, died, so they gave out to the world, on the 22nd February,
1913, the day I arrived in China. As Empress, just one of the women
of the Court chosen to please the ruler and to bear him children, his
consort in China never seems to have had any particular standing. This
Empress was overshadowed by her aunt, the great Dowager-Empress whom all
the world knew, but once the Emperor was dead, as one of the guardians
of the baby Emperor she came into a certain amount of power, for the
position of Dowager-Empress seems to be an official one as, since her
death, another woman who has never been wife to an Emperor has been
appointed to the post.
The power has gone from the Manchus, but China is wedded to her past,
nothing passes, so even the Chinese Republic, the men who barely a year
before {077}had ousted the Empress from her high estate, united in doing
her honour at her obsequies.
“She was the best republican of us all,” said a Chinese gentleman,
learned in the lore and civilisation of the West, “for she freely gave
up her position that China might be free.”
It was a pretty way of putting it, but to me it seems doubtful whether
anyone in over-civilised China trammelled with many conventions,
is free, and it is hardly likely that a woman bred to think she had
attained the most important position in the world that can fall to a
woman's lot, would give it up freely for the good of a people she
knew absolutely nothing about. All the Manchus rule over now are
the courtyards and palaces of the Forbidden City, and there they are
supreme. It is whispered that only a week before the day of which I
write, a man was there beaten to death for having stolen something
belonging to the dead Empress. So much for the love of the Manchus
for freedom and enlightenment. It carries one back to the Middle
Ages--further, to Babylon.
“They slew there mercilessly, and they also feasted--so did the
representatives of the dead Empress hold high festival in her honour.
“The King made a feast unto all the people that were present in Shushan
the palace, both unto great and small, seven days, in the Court in the
garden of the King's palace.
“Where were white, green, and blue hangings fastened with cords of fine
linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble, the beds were of
gold and silver, upon a pavement of red, and blue, and white, and black
marble.
{078}“And they gave them drink in vessels of gold... and royal wine in
abundance, according to the state of the King.”
So Ahasuerus the King entertained his people of Babylon, when Vashti the
Queen fell, and of Babylon only could I think when, first I entered the
Forbidden City.
[Illustration: 0129]
Standing on the walls of Peking, a city of the plain, you look down upon
twelve square miles of grey-tiled roofs, the roofs of one-storied houses
hidden in the summertime by a forest of trees, but in the heart of
the city are high buildings that stand out not only by reason of their
height but because the roofs of golden-brown tiles, imperial yellow,
gleam and glow in the sunlight. This is the Forbidden City where has
dwelt for hundreds of years the Emperor of China, often he must have
been the only man in it, and always it was closed to all save the
immediate following of the Son of Heaven.
I never realised till I came to Peking that this forbidden ground was
just as much an object of curiosity to the Chinese as it would have been
to any European nation.
“I went in once,” said a Chinese gentleman to me, “when I was a young
man.” He was only forty then.
“Were you invited?”
“No, no. I went secretly. I wanted to see what it was like.”
“But how?”
“I got the dress of a eunuch and I slipped in early one morning, and
then, when I got in, I hardly dared move or breathe for fear someone
should find me out. Then when no one took any notice of me I {079}walked
about and saw everything I could, but the last hour was the worst, I was
terrified at the thought that I might not be able to get out.”
“And if you had been caught?”
He looked grave even then at the remembrance of that bygone desperate
adventure.
“Oh death, certainly.”
“Death?”
“Yes, a long and lingering death,” and the thought of what he had
escaped twenty years ago, was on his face.
I looked at him with interest, a tall stout Chinaman with his hair cut
short in the modern fashion, a long grey robe of silk reaching to his
feet, and a little short black sleeveless jacket over it. He did not
look, pleasant as he was, as if he would ever have dared anything, but
then I have never thought of any Chinaman as likely to risk his life
without hope of gain, and to risk it for mere curiosity as a man of my
own people might have done! It was throwing a new light on the Chinese.
I rather admired him and then I found he was Eastern after all.
We talked of Yuan Shih K'ai, and he, being of the opposition party,
expressed his opinion freely, and, considering all things, very boldly
about him.
“He has eighteen wives,” said he shaking his head as if this was the
unpardonable sin in a man who desired to imitate the manners and customs
of the West.
I repeated this to a friend, and he burst out laughing. “Why the old
sinner,” said he, “what's he throwing stones for? He's got seventeen and
a half himself!” {080}So it seems it will be some time before forbidden
cities on a small scale will be out of fashion in China.
And still, in these days of the Republic, the Forbidden City of the
Manchus dominates Peking.
It was thrown open for three days to all who could produce a black paper
chrysanthemum with five leaves, red, yellow, blue, black, and white,
fastened to a tab of white paper with a mourning edge and an inscription
in Chinese characters. The foreigners had theirs from their Legations,
and the Chinese from their guilds. And those Chinese--there are many
of them--who are so unlucky as to belong to no guild, Chinese of the
humbler sort, were shut out, and for them there was erected on the great
marble bridge in front of the southern entrance, a pavilion of gorgeous
orange silk enclosing an altar with offerings that stood before a
picture of the dead Empress, so that all might pay their respects.
I pinned my badge to the front of my fur coat, for it was keen and cold
in spite of the brilliant sunshine, and went off to the wrong entrance,
the eastern gate, where only princes and notables were admitted.
I thought it strange there should be no sign of a foreigner, but
foreigners in Peking can be but as one in a hundred or less, so
undismayed, I walked straight up to the gate, and immediately a row of
palace servants clad in their white robes of mourning, clustered before
the sacred place. They talked and explained vehemently, and with perfect
courtesy, but they were very agitated, and though I could not understand
one word they said, one thing was certain, admitted I could not be
there. So I turned to the southern gate and there it seemed all Peking
was streaming. {081}It was like China that we might not go in the direct
way.
There is a great paved way through the Imperial City alongside a canal
that runs between marble-lined banks, but on the principal bridge that
crosses it was erected the orange silk pavilion for the poorer classes,
and we, the wearers of the black chrysanthemum, hundreds and thousands
and ten thousands of us, had to turn off to the right and go along by
the tall, pinkish red walls till we came to the great archways in the
walls, five great archways filled in with doors studded with great
brazen knobs. Usually they were fast shut, but they were open to-day,
guarded by soldiers in full-marching order, soldiers of the New Republic
in modern khaki looking out of the picture, and there streamed into the
tunnellike entrance as curious a crowd as ever I set eyes upon. All
must walk, old and young, great and lowly, representatives of the mighty
nations of the world and tottering Chinese ladies swaying like “lilies
in the wind” upon their maimed feet, only one man, a Mongol Prince, an
Incarnation of a Buddha, a living Buddha, was borne in in a sedan chair.
But every other mortal had to walk. The tunnels must always be gloomy,
and, even on that cold day, they struck chill after the brilliant
sunlight, and they are long, for the walls, just here, are about
ninety feet through, so might the entrances have been in the palace
of Ahasuerus the King. The courtyard we first entered had a causeway
running right across it of great hewn stones, hewn and laid by slave
labour, when all men bowed before the Son of Heaven, hundreds of years
ago. They are worn in many places now, worn by the passing of many
{082}feet, and still more worn are the grey Chinese bricks that pave
the courtyard on either side. It is a great courtyard of splendid
proportions. In front of us frowned more high walls of pinkish red,
topped by the buildings that can be seen all over Peking, temples or
halls of audience with golden-brown tiled roofs that gleamed in
the sunlight, and on either side were low buildings with fronts of
lattice-work rather fallen into disrepair. They might have been used as
guard-houses or, more probably, were the quarters of the six thousand or
so of eunuchs that the dignity of the ruler required to attend upon him.
There were a few trees, leafless then in March, but there was nothing
to spoil the dignity and repose of every line. A great mind surely
conceived this entrance, and great must have been the minds that kept it
so severely simple. If it be the heart of a nation then do I understand.
The people who streamed along the causeway, who roamed over the worn
brick pavement, had, as a rule, delicate, finely formed hands though
they were but humble craftsmen. If the hands of the poorest be so fine,
is it any wonder that the picked men of such a people, their very heart,
conceived such a mighty pile? There were more, longer and gloomier
tunnels, admitting to a still greater courtyard, a courtyard that must
be at least a quarter of a mile across, with the same causeway of worn
stones that cry out the tale of the sufferings of the forgotten slaves,
who hewed them and dragged them into place, the same grey pavement of
bricks, the same tall smooth red walls, crowned over the gateway with
temples, rising one story after another till the tiled roof cuts the
sky. And through a third set of tunnels we came into a third courtyard,
{083}the courtyard where the obsequies were being held. The third
courtyard was spacious as Trafalgar Square, and round three sides was a
wide raised platform of stone reached by broad and easy ramps, and
all across it ran a canal held in by marble banks, crossed by graceful
bridges, and every one of the uprights, made of white marble, was
crowned by a figure that I took for the representation of a flame; but
those, who know, tell me it is meant to represent a cloud, and is part
of the dragon symbolism. When marble is the medium by which so light a
thing as a cloud is represented it must be very finely done indeed, when
one outside the national thought, such as I, sees in that representation
a flame. Two colossal bronze monsters with grinning countenances and
curly manes, conventional lions, mounted on dragon-carved pedestals,
stand before the entrance to the fourth temple or hall of audience, and
here was what the crowd had come to see, the lighthearted, cheerful,
merry crowd, that were making high holiday, here was the altar to the
dead.
Overhead were the tiled roofs, and of all the colours of the rainbow
surely none could have been chosen better than the golden brown of those
tiles to harmonise with the clear blue of the glorious sky above it, no
line to cut it could have been so appropriate as the gentle sweep of the
curve of a Chinese roof. There was a little grass growing on the roofs,
sere and withered, but a faint breeze just stirred its tops, and it
toned with the prevailing golden brown in one glorious beauty. Where
else in the world could one get such an effect? Only in Australia have I
seen such a sky, and there it was never wedded to such a glow of colour
as that it looks down {084}upon in Peking. The men who built this palace
in a bygone age, built broadly, truly, for all time.
[Illustration: 0137]
And then, it was surely as if some envious spirit had entered in and
marred all this loveliness--no, that would be impossible, but struck a
discordant and jarring note that should perhaps emphasise in our minds
the beauty that is eternal--for all the front of that temple, which as
far as I could see was pinkish red, with under the eaves that beautiful
dark blue, light blue, and green, that the Chinese know so well how to
mingle, was covered with the most garish, commonplace decorations, made
for the most part of paper, red, violent Reckitt's blue, yellow, and
white. From every point of vantage ran strings of flags, cheap common
little flags of all nations, bits of string were tied to the marble
clouds, and they fluttered from them, and the great wonderful bronze
lions contrived to look coy in frills that would not have disgraced a
Yorkshire ham. The altar on the northern platform was hidden behind a
trellis-work of gaily coloured paper, and there were offerings upon it
of fruit and cakes in great profusion, all set out before a portrait of
the late Empress. On either side were two choirs of priests, Buddhists
and Taoists in gorgeous robes of red and orange. What faith the dead
Empress held I do not know, but the average Chinese, while he is the
prince of materialists, believing nothing he cannot see and explain,
has also a keen eye to the main chance, and on his death-bed is apt to
summon priests of all faiths so as to let no chance of a comfortable
future slip; but possibly it was more from motives of policy than from
any idea of aiding the dead woman that these representatives of the
two great faiths of China were {085}summoned. On the rights behind a
trellis-work of bright paper, one choir sat in a circle, beat gongs,
struck their bells and intoned; and on the left, behind a like
trellis-work, the other choir knelt before low desks and also solemnly
intoned. Their Mongolian faces were very impassive, they looked neither
to the right nor the left, but kept time to the ceaseless beat of their
leader's stick upon a globe of wood split across the middle like a
gaping mouth emblematical of a fish and called mu yii--or wooden fish.
What were they repeating? Prayers for the dead? Eulogies on her who had
passed? Or comfort for the living? Not one of these things. Probably
they were intoning Scriptures in Tibetan, an unknown tongue to them
very likely, but come down to them through the ages and sanctified by
thousands of ceaseless repetitions.
And the people came, passed up the steps, bowed by the direction of the
usher--in European clothes--three times to the dead Empress's portrait,
and the altar, were thanked by General Chang, the Military Commandant,
and passed on by the brightly clad intoning priests down into the crowd
in the great courtyard again. It was weird to find myself taking part in
such a ceremony. Stranger still to watch the people who went up and down
those steps. In all the world surely never was such an extraordinary
funeral gathering. I am very sure that never shall I attend such
another. There was such a mingling of the ancient and the blatantly
modern. To the sound of weird, archaic, Eastern music the living Buddha,
clad all in yellow, in his yellow sedan chair, borne by four bearers in
dark blue with Tartar caps on their heads, made his reverence, and was
followed {086}by a band of Chinese children from some American mission
school, who, with misguided zeal sang fervently at the top of their
shrill childish voices “Down by the Swanee River” and “Auld Lang
Syne,” and then soldiers in modern uniform of khaki or bright blue were
followed by police officers in black and gold. The wrong note was struck
by the “Swanee River,” the high officials dwelt upon it, for the
Chinese does not look to advantage in these garbs, he looks what he is
makeshift, a bad imitation, and the jarring was only relieved when the
Manchu princes came in white mourning sheepskins and black Tartar caps.
They may be dissolute and decadent, have all the vices that new China
accuses them of, but at least they looked polished and dignified
gentlemen, at their ease and in their place. It does not matter,
possibly. The President once said that to petition for a monarchy was an
act of fanaticism worthy of being punished by imprisonment, and so the
old order must in a measure pass; even in China, the unchanging, there
must come, it is a law of nature, some little change, and when I looked
at the bows and arrows of the Manchu guard leaning against the wall
I realised that it would be impossible to keep things as they were,
however picturesque. Still khaki uniforms, if utilitarian, are ugly,
and American folk-songs, under such conditions, struck the last note in
bathos, or pathos. It depends on the point of view.
On the white paper tabs, attached to our black chrysanthemums, was
written something about the New Republic, but it might have been the
spirit of the Empress at home, so cheerful and bent on enjoyment was
the crowd which thronged the {087}courtyard. The bands played, sometimes
Eastern music, strange and haunting, sometimes airs from the European
operas, there were various tents erected with seats and tables, and
refreshments were served, oranges, and ginger, and tea, and cakes of all
kinds, both in the tents and at little altar-like stands dotted about
the courtyard even at the very foot of the pedestals of the great
conventional lions. And the people walked round looking at everything,
peeping through every crevice in the hopes of seeing some part of the
palace that was not open to them, chatting, laughing, greeting each
other as they would have done at a garden-party in Europe. There were
all sorts of people, dressed in all sorts of fashions. New China looked
at best common-plage and ordinary in European clothes; old China was
dignified in a queue, silken jacket and brocaded petticoat, generally
of a lighter colour; Manchu ladies wore high head-dresses and brilliant
silken coats, blue or pink, lavender or grey, and Chinese ladies
tottered along on tiny, bound feet that reminded me of the hoofs of a
deer, and the most fashionable, unmarried girls wore short coats with
high collars covering their chins, and tight-fitting trousers, often of
gaily coloured silk, while the older women added skirts, and the poorer
classes just wore a long coat of cotton, generally blue, with trousers
tightly girt in at the ankles, and their maimed feet in tiny little
embroidered shoes. European dress the Chinese woman very seldom affects
yet, and their jet black hair, plastered together with some sort of
substance that makes it smooth and shiny, is never covered, but flowers
and jewelled pins are stuck in it. Occasionally--I {088}did on this
day--you will see a woman with a black embroidered band round the
front of her head, but this, I think, denotes that she is of the Roman
Catholic faith, for the Roman Catholics have been in China far longer
than any other Christian sect, and they invented this head-dress for the
Chinese woman who for ages has been accustomed to wear none, because of
the Pauline injunction, that it was a shame for a woman to appear in
a church with her head uncovered. Old China did not approve of a woman
going about much at all, and here at this funeral I heard many old China
hands remarking how strange it was to see so many women mingling with
the throng. It marked the change; but such a very short time back, such
a thing would have been impossible.
There were numbers of palace eunuchs too--keepers of the women who,
apparently, may now show their faces to all men, and they were clad all
in the mourning white, with here and there one, for some reason or other
I cannot fathom, in black. The demand for eunuchs was great when the
Emperor dwelt, the one man, in the Forbidden City surrounded by his
women, and they say that very often the number employed rose to ten
thousand. Constantly, as some in the ranks grew old, fell sick, or died,
they had to be replaced, and, so conservative is China, the recruits
were generally drawn from certain villages whose business it was to
supply the palace eunuchs. Often, of course, the operation was performed
in their infancy, but often, very often, a man was allowed to grow up,
marry, and have children, before he was made ready for the palace.
“Impossible,” I said, “he would not consent {089}then. Never.” And
my informant laughed pitifully. “Ah,” said she, “you don't know the
struggle in China. Anything for a livelihood.”
Some of the eunuchs wanted their photographs taken, and I was willing
enough if they would only give me room. I wanted one in white, but they
desired one in black, either because he was the most important or the
least important, I know not which, and they sat him on a stone that had
been a seat perhaps when Kublai Khan built the palace; and the keeper
of the women, the representative of the old cruel past, that pressed
men and women alike into the service of the great, looked in my camera
sheepish as a schoolboy kissed in public by his maiden aunt.
There were coolies, too, in the ordinary blue cotton busy about the
work that the entertaining of such a multitude necessarily entails, and
everyone looked cheerful and happy, as, after all, why should they not,
for death is the common lot, and must come to all of us, and they had
seen and heard of the dead Empress about as much as the dweller in
Chicago had. They were merely taking what she, or her representatives,
gave with frank goodwill, and enjoying themselves accordingly.
Against the walls they kept putting up long scrolls covered with Chinese
characters, sentences in praise of the virtues of the Empress, and sent,
as we would send funeral wreaths, to honour the dead, and presently a
wind arose and tore at them and they fluttered out from the walls
like long streamers, and as the wind grew wilder, some were tom down
altogether. But that was on the afternoon of the second day, when worse
things happened. {090}I went down to the Forbidden City after tiffin, and
behold, outside the great gates, looking up longingly and murmuring
a little, was a great crowd that grew momentarily greater. The doors,
studded with brazen nails, were fast closed, and little parties of
soldiers with their knapsacks upon their backs were evidently telling
the crowd to keep back, and very probably, since it was China, the
reason why they should keep back. The reason was, of course, lost upon
me, I only knew that, before I realised what was happening, I was in the
centre of a crushing crowd that was gradually growing more unmanageable.
A Chinese crowd is wonderfully good-natured, far better-tempered than a
European crowd of a like size would be, but when a crowd grows great,
it is hardly responsible for its actions. Besides, a Chinese crowd has
certain little unpleasant habits. The men picked up the little children,
for the tiniest tots came to this great festival, and held them on their
shoulders, but they coughed, and hawked, and spit, and wiped their noses
in the primitive way Adam probably did before he thought of using a
fig-leaf as a pocket handkerchief, and at last I felt that the only
thing to be done was to edge my way to the fringe of the press, because,
even if the doors were opened, it would have seemed like taking my life
in my hands to go into one of those tunnels with their uneven pavements
in such a crush. Once down it would be hopeless to think of getting up
again.
{091}After a time, however, they did open the doors, and the people surged
in. When all was clear I followed, and once inside heard how the people
in the great courtyard, in spite of police and soldiers, had swarmed up
and threatened by their rush, the good-natured, purposeless rush of a
crowd, to carry away offerings, altar, choirs and decorations, and,
very naturally, those in authority had closed the doors against all
new-comers until the people had been got well in hand again. It had
taken some time. Before the altar was a regular scrimmage, and after the
crowd had passed it left behind it, shoes, and caps, and portions of its
clothing which were thrown back into the courtyard to be gathered up
by those who could recognise their own property. By the time I arrived
things were settling down. We had to wait in the second courtyard, and
the women, Chinese ladies with their little aching feet, and Manchus in
their high head-dresses sat themselves down on the edge of the causeway,
because standing on pavement is wearisome, and there waited patiently
till the doors were opened, and inside everything was soon going again
as gaily as at an ordinary garden-party in Somerset.
[Illustration: 0145]
“Do you like Chinese tea?” asked a Chinese lady of me in slow and
stilted English. I said I did.
“Come,” said she, taking my hand in her cold little one, and hand in
hand we walked, or rather I walked and she tottered, across to one of
the great pavilions that had been erected, and there she sat me down and
a cup of the excellent tea was brought me, and every one of the Chinese
ladies present, out of the kindly hospitality of her heart towards the
lonely foreigner, gave me, with her own fair and shapely little hands,
a cake from the dish that was set before us by a white-clad servant.
Frankly, I wished they wouldn't be so hospitable. I wanted to say I
was quite capable of choosing my own cake, {092}and that I had a rooted
objection to other people pawing the food I intended to eat, but it
seemed it might be rude, and I did not wish to nip kindly feelings in
the bud. And then, as the evening shadows drew long, I went back to
my hotel, sorry to leave the Forbidden City, glad to have had this one
little glimpse of the strange and wonderful that is bound to pass away.
The Empress died in February, in March they held this, can we call it
lying-in-state, but it was not till the 3rd of April that her funeral
cortège moved from the Forbidden City, and the streets of Peking were
thronged with those who came to pay her respect. Did they mourn? Well, I
don't know. Hardly, I think, was it mourning in the technical sense.
The man in the street in England is far enough away from the king on the
throne, but in China it seems as if he might inhabit a different sphere.
The sky was a cloudless blue, and the bright golden sunshine poured down
hot as a July day in England, or a March day in Australia, there was
not a wisp of cloud in the sky; in all the five weeks that I had been in
China there had never been the faintest indication that such a thing was
ever expected, ever known, but at first the brilliancy had been cold,
now it was warm, the winter was past, and from the great Tartar wall,
looking over the Tartar City--the city that the Mings conquered and the
Manchus made their own--the forest of trees that hid the furthest houses
was all tinged with the faintest, daintiest green; and soon to the glory
of blue and gold, the blue of the sky and the gold of the sunshine,
would be added the vivid green that {093}tells of the new-born life. And
one woman who had held high place here, one sad woman, who had missed
most that was good in fife, if rumours be true, was to be carried to her
long home that day.
The funeral procession started from the Eastern Gate of the Forbidden
City, came slowly down the broad street known now as Morrison Street,
turned into the way that passes the Legations and runs along by the
glacis whereon the conquering Western nations have declared that, for
their safety, no Chinese shall build a house, the Europeans call it
the Viale d'ltalia, because it passes by the Italian Legation, and the
Chinese by the more euphonious name of Chang an Cheeh--the street of
Eternal Repose--a curious commentary on the fighting that went on there
in 1900, into the Chien Men Street, that is the street of the main gate
through which it must go to the railway station.
It seemed to me strange this ruler of an ancient people, buried with
weird and barbaric rites, was to be taken to her last resting-place by
the modern railway, that only a very few years ago her people, at
the height of their anti-foreign feeling, had wished to oust from the
country--root and branch. But since the funeral procession was going to
the railway station it must pass through the Chien Men, and the curtain
wall that ran round the great gate offered an excellent point of vantage
from which I, with the rest of the European population, might see all
there was to be seen. And for this great occasion, the gate in the
south of the curtain wall, the gate that is always shut because only the
highest in the land may pass through, was open, {094}for the highest in
the land, the last of the Manchu rulers, was dead.
I looked down into the walled-in space between the four gateway arches,
as into an arena, and the whole pageant passed below me. First of all
marching with deliberate slowness, that contrives to be dignified
if they are only carrying coals, came about twenty camels draped in
imperial yellow with tails of sable, also an imperial badge hanging from
their necks. The Manchus were a hunting people, and though they have
been dwellers in towns for the last two hundred and fifty years the fact
was not forgotten now that their last ruler had died. She was going on
a journey, a long, long journey; she might want to rest by the way,
therefore her camels bore tent-poles and tents of the imperial colour.
They held their heads high and went noiselessly along, pad, pad, pad,
as their like have gone to and fro from Peking for thousands of years.
Mongol, or Manchu, or son of Han, it is all the same to the camel. He
ministers to man's needs because he must, but he himself is unchanging
as the ages, fixed in his way as the sky above, whether he bears grain
from the north, or coal from the Western Hills, or tents and drapery for
an imperial funeral. Then there were about fifty white ponies, without
saddle or trapping of any kind, each led by a mafoo clad in blue like an
ordinary coolie. The Peking carts that followed with wheels and tilts
of yellow were of a past age, but, after all, does not the King of Great
Britain and Ireland on State occasions ride in a most old-world coach.
And then I noticed things came in threes. {095}Three carts, three yellow
palankeens full of artificial flowers, three sedan chairs also yellow
covered, and all around these groups were attendants clad in shimmering
rainbow muslin and thick felt hats, from the pointed crown of which
projected long yellow feathers. Slowly, slowly, the procession moved on,
broken now and again by bands of soldiers in full marching order. There
was a troop of cavalry of the Imperial Guard they told me, but how could
it be imperial when their five-coloured lance pennons fluttering gaily
in the air, clearly denoted the New Republic? There was a detachment of
mounted police in black and yellow--the most modern of uniforms--there
were more attendants in gaily coloured robes carrying wooden halberds,
embroidered fans, banners, and umbrellas, and the yellow palankeens with
the artificial flowers were escorted by Buddhist lamas in yellow robes
crossed with crimson sashes, each with a stick of smouldering incense
in his hand. In those palankeens were the dead woman's seals, her power,
the power that she must now give up. I could see the smoke, and the
scent of the incense rose to our nostrils as we stood on the wall forty
feet above. Between the various groups, between the yellow lamas who
dated from the days of the Buddha long before the Christ, between the
khaki-clad troops and the yellow and black police, things of yesterday,
came palace attendants tossing into the air white paper discs. The dead
Empress would want money for her journey, and here it was, distributed
with a lavish hand. It was only white paper, blank and soiled by the
dust of the road, when I picked it up a little later on, but for her it
would serve all purposes.
[Illustration: 0151]
The approach of the bier itself was heralded by the striking together
of two slabs of wood by a {096}couple of attendants, and before it came,
clad all in the white of mourning, the palace eunuchs who had guarded
her privacy when in life; a few Court attendants in black, and then
between lines of khaki-uniformed modern infantry in marching order, the
bier covered with yellow satin, vivid, brilliant, embroidered with red
phoenixes that marked her high rank--the dragon for the Emperor, the
phoenix for his consort. The two pieces of wood clacked together harshly
and the enormous bier moved on. It was mounted on immense yellow poles
and borne by eighty men dressed in brilliant robes of variegated muslin,
red being the predominating colour. They wore hats with yellow feathers
coming out of the crown, and they staggered under their burden, as might
the slaves in Nineveh or Babylon have faltered and groaned beneath their
burdens, two thousand years ago.
Out of the northern archway came the camels and the horses, the
soldiers, the lamas, the eunuchs, out came all the quaint gay
paraphernalia--umbrellas, and fans, palankeens, and sedan chairs, and
banners--and slowly crossed the great courtyard, the arena; a stop,
a long pause, then on again, and the southern gate swallowed them up,
again the clack of the strips of wood, and the mighty bier, borne on the
shoulders of the Babylonish slaves. Slowly, slowly, then it stood still,
and we felt as if it must stay there for ever, as if the eighty men who
upheld it must be suffering unspeakable things. Once more the clack of
the strips of wood, and the southern archway in due course swallowed
it up, too, with the few halberdiers and the detachment of soldiery who
completed the procession. {097}Outside the Chien Men was the railway
station, the crowded people--crowded like Chinese flies in summer, and
that is saying a great deal--were cleared away by the soldiers, the bier
was lifted on to a car, the bands struck up a weird funeral march, the
soldiers presented arms, the lama priests fell on their knees, and then
very, very slowly the train steamed out of the station, and the last of
the Manchu Empresses was borne to her long home.
Was it impressive I asked myself as I went down the ramp? And the answer
was a little difficult to find. Quaint and strange and Eastern, for the
thing that has struck me so markedly in China was here marked as ever.
It was like the paper money that was thrown with such lavish generosity
into the air. Amongst all the magnificence was the bizarre note--that
discordant touch of tawdriness. Beneath the gorgeous robes of the
attendants, plainly to be seen, were tatters and uncleanliness, the
soldiers in their ill-fitting uniforms looked makeshift, and the police
wanted dusting. And yet--and again I must say and yet, for want of
better words--behind it all was some reality, something that gripped
like the haunting sound of the dirge, or the stately march of the camels
that have defied all change.