CHAPTER XII

JOGGING ABOUT PEKING

There are various ways of getting about Peking, even though it lacks the

principal one of most large cities in other lands; but of them all I

like best riding “Hwei-Hwei.” He is the robust, shaggy-red little

Chinese pony I brought back from one of my trips into the interior, and

if he has not yet learned to look with equanimity upon a scrap of paper

or a wheedling beggar that suddenly springs up at him, at least he can

pass an automobile now without filling the timid hearts of all Chinese

within gunshot with speechless panic. “Hwei-Hwei” and I have jogged

together all over Peking and its surroundings, nosing our way through

the _hutungs_ and prancing down the broad streets of the Chinese as well

as the Tartar City, exploring every sunken road and meandering path

within reasonable distance outside the walls. I am under the impression

that this is improper. Though the élite among the foreign residents play

polo on the French drill-field and scamper over the broken landscape

about the capital on Sunday afternoon paper-chases, even canter solemnly

up and down the new cinder track at the edge of the Legation Quarter,

each followed at a respectful distance by the _mafu_ who will presently

walk the blanketed and almost shaven native imitations of thoroughbreds

slowly up and down before some improvised stable, I gather from the

glances that are thrown sharply upon us that mere sight-seeing on

horseback is not in accordance with the Peking social code. I am

heartbroken, naturally, at the thought of infringing that vital

document; but the opportunity of indulging in a luxury I have never

before dared even to consider has outweighed even that consideration.

The truth of the matter is that keeping a riding-horse is a luxury even

in Peking. “Hwei-Hwei’s” complete care and nourishment cost just twice

what one human servant does; yet the reflection that this is, after all,

only “Mex” and only relative has so far been sufficient to stifle the

grumblings of a troublesome conscience. I suppose, too, there is a

certain subconscious complacency in looking down, even from

“Hwei-Hwei’s” height, upon the throngs with which we mingle in places

where perhaps no other foreigner, and surely no Chinese, has ever before

intruded on horseback. Certainly I must confess that I find pleasure in

watching the continuous succession of acrobatic feats with which

Pekingese of all ages and degrees remove themselves from the immediate

vicinity the instant it is borne in upon them that they are mingling

with an animal that I can guarantee not to hurt an infant thrown under

his very hoofs.

Outdoor fairs, seasonal markets, temples without number, corners unknown

even to our Chinese teacher, have “Hwei-Hwei” and I explored together.

But there is a line beyond which his advantages over Peking’s more

common means of transportation cease. Even if it is possible to park him

outside those ugly buildings in which China’s Parliament flings

ink-wells at itself and refuses to draft a constitution even after it

has voted itself a daily bonus for attending the sessions, he can

scarcely expect admittance to the Forbidden City, or ask an evening

hostess to find accommodations for him. When “Hwei-Hwei” must remain at

home there are various substitutes, but only one of them is really

feasible. Sedan-chairs, in these modern days, are only for brides and

mourners, or the emperor himself; there are jolting Peking-carts which

it would be infantile yet exactly descriptive to dub “peek-out” carts;

mule-litters like gaily decorated cupboards on shafts come in at least

from the northeast; on the moats outside the walls there are boats in

summer and sleds in winter—except when the men laying up ice in mat- and

mud-covered mounds along them deprive their fellow-coolies of this

simple source of income; bicycles are not unknown; curious little

one-horse carriages with shutters, and an outrunner who clings on behind

whenever a corner or a crowd does not bring him running ahead to lead

the horse or to shout the road clear, are still the favorite equipage of

old-fashioned families of means. But none of these things ply the

streets for hire; if they did they would be beneath the dignity of

foreigners, and probably of many Chinese unconsciously under their

influence. Ordinary mortals cannot call an automobile every time they

wish to go around the corner, even if their nerves are proof against the

madness of Chinese chauffeurs. Promoted only yesterday from the abject

position of coolies, these conceive that they always have the right of

way over anything they could best in a collision—an impression in which

they are abetted by the police who, with outstretched hand, gaze only at

the machine, like men fascinated, as it dashes drunkenly past through

the maelstrom of pedestrians and other helpless forms of traffic—and,

evidently gaining “face” thereby, they delight to make life a constant

misery to the passenger by the incessant use of those atrocious horns

that seem especially to be exported to China. So it boils down to the

omnipresent rickshaw.

We often wondered how many rickshaws there are in Peking, until at

length the metropolitan police reported that they had registered 41,553

such vehicles, of which 4,788 are private. Even if this really includes

all those within the gates, there are thousands more in the dozen

villages clustered close outside them, whence men run to places many

miles distant. We still wonder how Peking got about in the imperial days

before an American missionary in Japan, wishing to give his invalid wife

a daily airing, invented the rickshaw. As late as the beginning of the

present century, old residents tell us, this vehicle was unknown in the

capital. To-day it is the most numerous, or at least the most

conspicuous, thing in Peking.

Who but a man gone mad on the matter of speed would not prefer the

rickshaw to the automobile after all? Silent on its pneumatic tires and

the soft-shod feet of the runner, it is the most nearly like sitting at

home in an arm-chair of any form of transportation. There is no

formality about it; even the man who does not keep one for his exclusive

use scarcely needs to call one, for it is a strange corner of Peking

where a rickshaw is not already waiting whenever he steps out. Once in a

rickshaw one can leave it to the runner to arrive at the right place,

and turn the mind to the streets and their doings. It is not merely

“Ha-li” who is so fond of “widin’ man,” though he is the only one of us

who shouts aloud at each donkey and big stone “pup dog” we pass,

especially at the camels as they stride noiselessly by along the wall or

through a city gate, whenever we ride hither and yon about busy yet

good-natured Peking.

The police go on to say that from sixty to seventy thousand rickshaw

coolies earn an average of a hundred coppers a day, of which about

seventy are for themselves and their families after deducting the rent

of the vehicle. That means a daily income of nearly twenty cents in real

money, which is high in Peking. An official inquiry, by the way,

reported during the winter that the minimum on which a Chinese adult

could support life in the capital is $1.87 “Mex” a month! One

particularly cold winter, foreigners, especially women, almost ceased to

patronize rickshaws, not so much for their own sake as for that of the

poor fellows who sat outside waiting for them, and sometimes froze to

death. It devolved upon the police to call their attention to the fact

that death by starvation is even more painful, and is likely to include

the dependents also. I suppose that same omniscient body could say how

many persons starve to death in Peking each winter; at any rate they

once announced how many hundreds of free coffins they had been called

upon to provide since cold weather set in.

Perhaps the constant sight of starvation more or less close upon their

heels is the reason that Peking rickshaw-men are such excellent runners.

They never slow down to a walk, as the much better paid ones of Japan,

for instance, do on the slightest provocation. If the trot from our

corner to Hsi-Chi-men station, diagonally across the Tartar City, is too

much for one of them he turns his fare over to an unoccupied colleague

when he is exhausted rather than disgrace himself by walking. Yet I have

almost never seen a well built rickshaw-man in Peking. Their ribs show

plainly through their leathery skins, and they are conspicuously

flat-chested, in contrast to the men all about China who carry burdens

over their shoulders. The belief that rickshaw-runners die young and

often is wide-spread, especially in lands that have never seen one. The

only personal testimony I can offer on the subject is that during this

year in the Orient I have never seen, or heard of, a man dying in the

shafts, and that there are many jobs in China that I would quickly

refuse in favor of drawing a rickshaw. Certainly many runners, not to

mention the vehicles themselves, reach a ripe old age in Peking; and

there is evidence that they do not take up the profession late in life.

Some one once wrote asking us to send a copy of the child labor laws of

China. When we had recovered from the resultant hysterics I went out to

photograph some of the smallest specimens of rickshaw-runners along

Great Hata-men Street for the benefit of the inquirer. Unfortunately a

good example and photographic conditions never have coincided. I do not

wish to be charged with exaggeration, and hence I will not assert that I

have seen two boys of six or a single one of eight trotting about town

with a big fat sample of the Chinese race lolling at his ease behind

them; but I have no hesitancy in reporting that male children of eight

and ten respectively may often be seen thus engaged. Perhaps these are

house-servants or their offspring, or even members of the family itself,

forced into service; more than once I have been sure of a facial

resemblance between the perspiring youngsters and the unsoaped old lady

who was urging them on. Often a small boy runs behind, pushing, who is

hardly as tall as the hub of the wheel, but perhaps that is a form of

apprenticeship. Recently there has been some agitation against employing

rickshaw pullers under eighteen, though apparently only among

foreigners. The Chinese of the rank and file bargain for their rides as

they stump along, pretending they will walk rather than pay more than

they are offering, and naturally they wish to be surrounded by as many

clamoring competitors as possible. If the lowest bidder chances to be a

child just heavy enough to keep the passenger from toppling over

backward, or an old man who looks as if he had been unwisely rescued

from the potter’s field, _bu yao gin_—it does not matter, for the

average Chinese hardly distinguishes between real speed and a steady

jogging up and down almost in the same spot.

In contrast to these sorry dregs of the profession are the haughty men

in the prime of life who run on a monthly wage for foreigners, or for

Chinese of wealth and official position, some of them in livery and with

clanging bells and blazing lamps that attest their importance. The tall

youth who runs with a physically light-weight young lady of our

acquaintance always calls a rickshaw when he wishes to go out on a

personal errand. Well fed and not overworked, these private human

trotters are often marvels of speed and endurance. I would like nothing

better than to enter our wrinkled old _la-che-ti_ in an Olympic

marathon—though foreigners who have tried that sort of test find that

the men cannot run without their vehicle, which is so balanced as to

help lift them off the ground. Like the runners, the rickshaws of Peking

range all the way from filthy half-wrecks to rickshaw-limousines. The

former are due both to the Chinese blindness to uncleanliness and to the

fact that, human fares lacking, they are ready to accept any form of

freight, be it even the bleeding carcass of a hog. The vehicle looking

tolerable, however, most of us pick our rickshaw-men exactly as we would

a horse, except that age is fairly apparent without examining the teeth.

Slavery is a dreadful institution, but if millions of the human

draft-animals of China were slaves they would at least be sure of a

place to sleep and something fit to eat. Yet they are a cheerful,

good-hearted, likable lot of fellows, these swarming rickshaw-runners of

Peking, amusing in their primitive ways. However much they may arouse

sympathy, for instance, there is no surer means of being involved in a

noisy dispute than by overpaying them. Find out the legal fare and pay

it, and the chances are that your runner will accept it without a word

and rate you a person of experience and understanding, for all your

strange race. The louder and longer you wish him to dance and shout

about you, the more you should overpay him. A soft-hearted old lady

arriving in Peking almost directly from America and wishing to be just

toward the man who drew her from Ch’ien-men Station to the principal

hotel handed him a silver dollar. It took three men from the hotel to

rescue her from the frenzied runner and kick him dollarless outside the

grounds.

The fact is that rickshaws are too numerous in Peking and their fares

too low. Even foreign residents grow flabby from so habitually jumping

into one rather than walking a block or two, though I confess it is

easier to do so than to endure the endless gauntlet of persistent

shouting, and even subtle ridicule in the case of “foreign devils”

supposedly ignorant of the language, which every well dressed pedestrian

must run. Hard-hearted men assert that the oversupply is due to the

laziness of the runners also, that coolies would rather wander about

with a rickshaw than work all day at some steady labor. What will become

of them when the street-cars arrive, for which the French were long ago

granted a much-opposed franchise, is a question which men of higher

intelligence than the runners themselves cannot answer. Yet they are

coming; cement poles are already creeping into the Tartar City from the

northwest, and rails are being piled up before the Forbidden City;

unless Mukden outstrips her, Peking will be the first to follow

foreign-influenced Tientsin and Shanghai by desecrating her streets with

the ugliness and clamor of electric tramways. We are glad to have known

the inimitable Chinese capital before they came.

The slowness of her man-drawn carriages and the dead flatness of Peking

give an exaggerated impression of its size; everything seems farther

away than it really is. In my school-days we used to hear wild tales

about this being the largest city in the world. Perhaps it has a million

inhabitants, though eight hundred and fifty thousand seems nearer the

mark. There is no “squeeze” to be had out of a census, however, and

guesses will probably continue to be the only available information on

that point for years to come. A one-story city with the courtyard habit,

to say nothing of enormous palaces and monuments that scarcely shelter a

human being each, and of big vacant spaces even inside its principal

wall, can hardly vie with New York and London, however like rats many of

its people may live. In what we foreigners call the Chinese City there

is a maze of shops and dwellings outside the three south gates of the

capital proper, human warrens here and there, swarming sidewalk markets

by night as well as crowded rows of booths by day; but vast graveyards,

cultivated fields, even great unoccupied areas take up much of this

secondary enclosure, not to mention the huge domains of the Temples of

Heaven and of Agriculture, playgrounds now of those with the price of

admission, with tea and soda-water and pumpkin seeds served almost on

the very spot where the Son of Heaven so long held his annual vigil.

Distressing are many of the noble monuments that make Peking justly

famed the world over, not merely because of the ruins they are becoming

under an anarchistic republican régime, but by reason of the rabble that

is permitted to overrun and defile so many of them. Ragged beggars

masquerading as caretakers beset the visitor in almost all of them;

foreigners, or Chinese with money but without influence, may still be

required to pay their way into Pei-Hai and the Summer Palace, but once

inside they find themselves jostled and gaped upon by loafing soldiers

and ill-mannered roustabouts whom the gate-keepers have not the power or

the moral courage to exclude. How long before imperial Peking will be

but another Baalbek or Nineveh, for all the busy streets that surround

it, is another subject for guessing.

We found few soldiers in Peking, however, compared with such places as

Mukden, and those are still curbed in a way that would bring gasps of

astonishment from their fellows in the provinces. Before the Boxer days

Peking had no police force in the Western sense; to-day the little

stations are as numerous as in Japan, while the white-legginged

gendarmes under a Norwegian general stroll the principal streets in

pairs, with drawn bayonets and an eye especially to the protection of

foreigners. We have tried in vain to impress upon our friends at home

that Peking is safer than any city we know of in our own land. A lone

woman not even speaking the language, and bespangled with jewels if you

like, can go anywhere in Peking, whether on foot or with a rickshaw

coolie picked up at random, at any hour of the day or night, without the

ghost of a chance of being molested, to say nothing of running any real

danger. They are a curious people, the Chinese. They will often starve

with riches within easy grasp rather than screw up their courage to an

act of violence, as they will display the cheerfulness of contentment

far beyond the point where Westerners would have even a transparent mask

of it left. There is something uncanny, if we ever paused to think of

it, in being so well protected by a police force whose meager wages are

many months in arrears; and the petty graft they inflict upon foreign

residents may almost be justified. Their task is greatly lightened, of

course, by the pacifist temperament of the Chinese; but criminal, even

violent, characters cannot be lacking even in Peking. Punishments are

still drastic, after the Chinese custom. Out toward Tungchow and over

beside the outer wall of the Temple of Heaven groups of men are

frequently shot, and they are by no means all assassins. When the

invasion from beyond the Great Wall was being repelled last spring and

bullets were singing across our corner of the city, the police were

instructed to punish with summary execution anything suggestive of

looting. A Chinese of some standing, friendly with several foreigners of

our acquaintance, went up broad Hata-men Street to borrow a few dollars

from an exchange-shop that had often favored him with small loans. The

proprietor happened to be out, and the youth in charge did not know the

client. “Oh, that’s all right,” the borrower assured him; “your master

always lets me have small sums when I need them, and I am in a hurry.”

He picked up a few dollars, jotted the amount down on a slip of paper,

and started away. The youth shouted, the police came running up, and

although the proprietor appeared at that moment and identified the

prisoner as an old friend who had acted in no way improperly, a headless

corpse was left lying in the dust before the shop.

There are incredible contrasts, too, among the scenes past which the

pony and I jog on our afternoon jaunts. Legation guards of half a dozen

nationalities play their boyish games almost across the street from

rag-pickers who are scarcely distinguishable from the garbage-heaps out

of which they somehow claw a livelihood. Along “Piccadilly,” as

foreigners call what is “Square Handkerchief Alley” to the Chinese, we

can easily imagine ourselves in the days of Kublai Khan; and around the

corner from it the Wai-chiao-pu is a more modern foreign office,

outwardly at least, than London, Washington, or Paris can muster.

Beneath the “Four P’ai-lous” motor-cars speed north and south while

barbaric funeral processions crawl under them from the west between two

long rows of squealing pigs, resenting the cords that bind their four

legs together and the discourtesy with which they are tumbled about by

sellers and purchasers. City gates like mammoth office buildings tower

above long vistas of lowly human dwellings; lotuses bloom on the lake of

the Winter Palace, and the visitor thither is pursued by all but naked

mendicants—_yao-fan-ti_ (want-rice-ers) the Chinese call them in their

kinder language. Sumptuous private cars stand before most modern

buildings, and Peking street-sprinklers, consisting of two men and a

bucket, with a long-handled wooden dipper, attempt to lay the dust about

them. We remember these sprinklers only too well, “Hwei-Hwei” and I, for

during the winter the sprinkling turned to ice almost as it fell, and

our progress was a kind of equestrian fox-trot. But for them, and the

water-carriers whose screeching wheelbarrows drip so incessantly, Peking

streets would be easy going the year round, for the whole winter’s snow

has been but a napkin or two that faded away almost as it fell. Nor have

I ever known a genuine Peking dust-storm, though I have seen the air and

the heavens, the inmost recesses of my garments and my food, even the

contents of locked trunks, filled with those flying particles of her own

filth and her surrounding semi-desert which the capital of Kublai Khan

has always charged against the distant Gobi. Old residents tell us that

this season’s dust-storms have been unusually rare, but my family was

vouchsafed one of the first magnitude during my absence. A welcome wind

blew all one hot spring night, and only in the morning was it discovered

that it had carried volumes of dust with it, so that the sleepers looked

as if they had been traveling across Nevada for a week without so much

as a wet cloth available, and everything from hair to mattress-covers

had to be washed at once, which was particularly difficult with the

blowing dust obscuring the sun for several days to come.

Often our way through a city gate or along a narrow street is made

disagreeable by passing wheelbarrows filled to over-slopping with the

night-soil of the city—sewers being as great a luxury as running water

in most Peking households. This is dried along the outside of the city

walls and distributed among the vegetable-gardens which, protected from

the north by rows of tall reed wind-breaks, take up much of the land

immediately outside the city. It goes without saying that the use of

chloride of lime is as fixed a habit in the kitchens of foreign

residents as boiling our drinking-water. The Chinese cannot understand

why Westerners persist in wasting the richest substitute for potash,

spending money to have it destroyed instead of gaining money by selling

it. Sometimes the foreigners are converted to the Chinese point of view;

I know at least one American mission school which supports two of its

girls on what it contributes to the fertility of the neighboring fields.

But it is not difficult to forget all such drawbacks when one looks down

upon Peking from her mammoth wall or the lonely eminence called Coal

Hill. Obviously “Hwei-Hwei” cannot climb Mei-shan; it is bad enough to

have outside barbarians of the human kind looking down upon the

golden-yellow roofs of the Forbidden City. This is not especially

forbidden now, with more than half of it open to the ticket-buyer, and

the rest hardly free from intruding politicians and their protégés. But

there still hovers an atmosphere of mystery, of something mildly akin to

the Arabian Nights or the Middle Ages, about the northern end of the

enclosure, within the moat in which coolies gather submerged hay and set

up fish-traps, and above which tourists shriek their delights from

Peking’s lone hill, even from airplanes. For, sadly shrunken as it is,

the imperial Manchu dynasty still holds forth within.

China is, I believe, the only republic on earth with an emperor. It was

stipulated in the agreement of 1912 between the imperial court and the

republican party that the emperor should keep his title, his imperial

abode, and certain other privileges, should receive a large annual

allowance from the Government for the upkeep of his court and household,

and should “always be treated by the Republican Government with the

courtesy and respect which would be accorded to a _foreign_ sovereign on

Chinese soil.” Thus the young man who, as a child, abdicated the dragon

throne can still go and sit on it any afternoon that it pleases his

fancy to do so. Perhaps no such caprices come into his head, for if we

are to believe his English tutor he is wise, as well as regally

polished, beyond his years, and does not really consider himself

emperor. He has lived in the imperial palace of the Forbidden City ever

since he was actually Manchu sovereign of China, however, and is still

accorded imperial honors there. Any one who rises early enough may meet

Manchu courtiers in ceremonial dress, a trifle shabby, their

red-tassel-covered hats still not entirely out of place in modern

Peking, jogging homeward on their lean ponies from an imperial audience

at the unearthly hour at which these have been held in China for

centuries.

Most Chinese have several different names, and emperors are no exception

to this rule. There is a “milk name” during infancy, a _hao_, or

familiar name by which one is afterward known to one’s intimates, a

school name, a business name, finally, but not lastly, in the case of an

emperor, a throne name or dynastic title. But though the present

occupant of the Forbidden City has such a name, to wit: Hsuan T’ung,

even this cannot be freely used; you cannot call a man to the

billiard-table by his dynastic title. The names by which we know former

emperors of China are really their “reign titles” and not personal

patronymics. This left the present head of the Ch’ing dynasty

handicapped, for, not being a real sovereign in spite of his legally

imperial title, and unable to have a reign title at least until he is

dead, there was no name by which he could be properly and generally

called, whether to dinner or to an audience. Being a sensible young man,

of modern rather than reactionary tendencies and by no means hostile to

foreign influence, noting moreover that not only do foreigners who

remain long in China have a Chinese name but that Western sovereigns

have personal appellations, he decided to take a foreign name. The fact

that his foreign tutor is an Englishman may or may not account for the

fact that he has chosen to be called “Henry.”

Those who have seen him describe “Emperor Henry” as a tall, slender

young man who is still growing, with the Chinese calligraphy of an

artist and some of the poetic gifts of his imperial ancestor known as

Ch’ien Lung. Not merely does he wield a wicked brush in both the classic

and the modern colloquial Chinese, now and then having a poem published

under an assumed name in a Peking paper, but he writes a very legible

English with pen or pencil. His English speech is described as slow but

correct, with a strong British accent. He reads newspapers voraciously

and is said to be unusually well abreast of the times, both at home and

abroad, for his years. His greatest single blow to date against

tyrannical conservatism, however, and the mightiest example of his

progressive tendencies occurred last spring at one fell swoop—he had his

cue cut off. The three imperial dowagers and his two distinguished old

Chinese or Manchu tutors tore what was left of their own hair in vain.

“Henry” was determined to be up-to-date even if he is confined in one

end of the once Forbidden City. The result is that for the first time in

nearly three hundred years there is hardly a pigtail left within the

Purple Wall, though the two old tutors, as a silent protest against what

they consider an act of disloyalty to the traditions of “his Majesty’s”

house, still wear their cues.

During last winter “Henry” turned sixteen, and it was high time he took

unto himself a wife—two of them, in fact. He is reputed not to have

wanted two—possibly he is not so ultra-modern as we have been led to

suppose—but his retinue insisted. Number one wife would have too many

duties to be able to perform them all alone; besides, what would the

neighbors say? So they chose him two pretty Manchu girls several months

his junior and set the date for the wedding. But “Henry” has a mind of

his own, and if he could not go out and pick a bride on his own

initiative he could at least exercise the sovereign rights of any

citizen of a republic and choose between the two candidates allowed him.

Thus it came about that the girl named by the high Manchu officials to

be “empress” became merely the first concubine, and vice versa. Some

time during the seven weeks of ceremonies between the betrothal rites

and the actual marriage “Henry” conferred upon the lady of his choice

the name of “Elizabeth.”

The wedding itself took place between the end of November and the dawn

of December, according to our Western calendar. By republican permission

the streets between the lady’s home, out near the Anting-men, and the

East Gate of the Forbidden City were covered from curb to curb with

“golden sands”—which in Peking means merely the earth we use in a

child’s sand-box. At three in the morning the principal bride set out

along this in a chair covered with imperial yellow brocade and carried

by sixteen bearers, with a body-guard of eunuchs from the palace. The

procession was no longer and hardly more elaborate than those that may

be seen along Peking streets on any day auspicious for weddings; some of

the impoverished Manchu and Mongol nobles, members of the imperial clan,

and former officials of the old empire looked, in fact, a trifle more

shabby under the specially erected bright lights along the route than do

the wedding guests of a wealthy Chinese merchant. But there were some

unusual features. The sedan-chair had a golden roof, on each corner of

which was a phenix, a design that predominated in all the flags,

banners, and mammoth “umbrellas” carried by the hired attendants.

Instead of the familiar Chinese wedding “music” produced by long,

harsh-voiced trumpets, there were two foreign-style bands, one of them

lent by the President of the republic. These played over and over, not

in concord one with the other, “Marching through Georgia,” “Suwanee

River,” and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” It was a memorable night

for Peking.

The chief escorts sent by the emperor to receive his favorite bride rode

horses and wore mandarin costume, including the official cap with a

peacock plume and buttons of every former rank. Promptly at four in the

morning the Phenix Chair, followed by a series of yellow-covered litters

containing the ceremonial robes of its occupant, passed through the Gate

of Propitious Destiny into the central and most sacred portion of the

imperial precincts. Foreign as well as Chinese guests had been admitted

as far as the large open space before this, which is used as a

parade-ground for the imperial guard and as a place of reception for the

camel caravans which still, even in these republican days, bring

“tribute” from beyond the Great Wall to the Manchu emperor. With the

moon just dropping out of sight in the west the scene was of a pageantry

which has almost disappeared from our modern commonplace world.

What took place beyond the gate that swallowed up the “empress” ordinary

people know only by hearsay. This has it that the bride, having been

carried over fire—pans filled with glowing coals—as old Chinese custom

decrees, was set down at the foot of the throne and greeted by the

emperor and his first concubine, after which he and all those of the

male gender except the eunuchs immediately retired. The concubine had

merely walked in without ceremony twenty-four hours before, one of her

first duties being to welcome the real bride at her arrival. Gossip has

it that she did not make the requisite number of kowtows to her more

fortunate rival and that “Elizabeth” took this so to heart that she shut

herself up from the emperor for some time. No sane person will vouch for

the truth of Peking rumors, however, imperial or otherwise. The fact

remains that “Henry” and “Elizabeth” were duly married, the clinching

rite being the ceremonial drinking together of the nuptial cup, and the

latest report is that they are all three living moderately happily, at

least, this long afterward.

An American girl is tutoring the “empress” in English and Western ways,

as she did before her marriage, and the emperor continues to grow,

mentally if not physically, under his cued and uncued tutelage. Even the

first concubine is said to be fond of learning, and the two no doubt

comment on their similarity of tastes with “our” husband. There is

probably less friction between the two young ladies than their Western

sisters may fancy, now that relative grades are inevitably fixed—with

reservations depending on the birth of a son; the most powerful woman in

Chinese history, the dowager who long ruled the country under the

puppets Tung Chih and Kuang Hsii, was, it is well for the two young

ladies to remember, only a concubine. Court etiquette prevents conflicts

in their demands upon the husband. By a rule said to be centuries old

the emperor is entitled to the company of his empress six times a month,

of the first concubine ten, and of the second concubine fifteen, in

reverse ratio, of course, to the social demands upon them. “Henry”

should by the rules of the game have chosen his second concubine before

this, but like all those to whom the Chinese owe money he has not been

paid his allowance for years, and there may be excellent reason for

putting off this addition to his cozy little household. It is what

school-girls call “thrilling” to think of him toasting his toes

alternately with his two brides, perhaps of dissimilar temperaments as

well as mental and physical charms, and still having every other evening

left free for the pursuit of his studies.

Misfortune, of course, does not spare even throneless sovereigns. Fire

has just destroyed much of that portion of the Forbidden City which the

head of the abdicated Manchu dynasty had left him, and has given a hint

of life within those mysterious precincts. Though the conflagration

broke out before midnight nothing worth while was done to curb it until

two in the morning. Most of the courtiers have always lived within the

Purple Wall and had never seen a disaster of such magnitude, so that

when they saw the palace buildings in flames the whole court, including

“Henry” and “Elizabeth,” some stories have it, were seized with nothing

more effective than frenzied excitement. Partly for fear of looting,

partly because no orders were given by their superior officers to break

an ancient rule, the guards refused to open the gates to the two Chinese

and one foreign fire brigades that offered their assistance. After a

lengthy conference these were admitted, but by this time the fire was so

far advanced that only by cutting down many old trees and leveling some

of the smaller buildings was it finally brought under control at seven

in the morning. Even the Chinese admit that almost all the effective

work was done by the foreigners; whatever their excellencies the

Celestials do not shine during emergencies.

Many priceless treasures, and the portraits of many former emperors,

were destroyed. The official report had it first that the fire was

caused by the bursting of a boiler in the palace electric-light plant,

but the more probable truth has since leaked out. The latest assertion

is that it was deliberately set by palace eunuchs, disgruntled over the

failure to receive their allowances, or to cover up their thefts of

imperial treasures. The time was close drawing near for the annual

inspection of these when the conflagration occurred. Looking about the

next day “Henry” found many precious things gone even from places which

the fire did not reach, and incidentally, the story runs, he discovered

a plot against his own life. Cynics wonder that the new régime has not

hired some one to do away with him long before this. Various eunuchs

were handed over to the police, some with bits of loot upon them, but

“unfortunately,” to quote one Chinese paper, “the emperor no longer has

the power to order their heads off.” When he demanded the arrest of some

of the chief eunuchs, however, he found they were under the protection

of two old imperial concubines—of Hsien Feng, consort of the famous

dowager, and of Tung Chih, her son, respectively, who have been dead

sixty-three and forty-eight years! So “Henry” and his two brides ran

away to his father, who has a “palace” outside the west wall of the

city, and refused to come back until all the eunuchs were discharged.

This may have alarmed the old concubines, as the newspapers put it;

certainly it frightened the republicans, with no president in office and

the country threshing about for want of a head; pressure came from

somewhere, the eunuchs went, and “Henry” came back.

[Illustration:

Preparing for a devil-dance at the lama temple in Peking

]

[Illustration:

The devil-dancers are usually Chinese street-urchins hired for the

occasion by the languid Mongol lamas of Peking

]

[Illustration:

The street-sprinklers of Peking work in pairs, with a bucket and a

wooden dipper. This is the principal street of the Chinese City

“outside Ch’ien-men”

]

[Illustration:

The Forbidden City is for the most part no longer that, but open in

more than half its extent to the ticket-buying public

]

The palace eunuch system has always been pernicious and one of the main

causes of the fall of the many imperial houses that have ruled China.

These have been served by eunuchs ever since the Chou dynasty, more than

three thousand years ago. The dynasty might change, but the eunuchs, who

were the palace servants and often the confidants of the other inmates,

mainly women, stayed on and carried all the vices of the old court over

into the new. Each new dynasty began with a hardy, outdoor ruler, but as

his successors, thanks to the silly “Son of Heaven” idea, were

practically imprisoned for life within the palace among women and

eunuchs, they were bound to become weeds in the enervating atmosphere.

Thus almost all dynasties petered out within two or three centuries, and

in the closing years the eunuchs often became masters; it is well known

that Tzu Hsi, the notorious old “Empress” Dowager, who governed China

for forty years, was herself ruled by a favorite eunuch, who started

life as a shoemaker’s apprentice—though some doubt has always been

expressed about his real eunuchhood. He is believed to be more

responsible than any other single person for the Boxer uprising, but the

only punishment meted out to him was that his wealth, in gold bars said

to be worth several millions, was discovered by the French troops upon

the occupation of Peking and—no one has ever heard of it since.

Avarice is the chief weakness of the eunuch tribe; and the official who

could afford to get a powerful palace servant on his side was sure of

preferment, and in time this system made China officially rotten to the

core. Masters of intrigue and selfishness, they had to be “greased” from

the outer gate to the throne-room even by those who wished to give the

emperor himself a “present.” Each palace occupant was allowed the number

of eunuchs which suited his rank, the total number being three thousand.

They came mainly from Hokienfu, a small city about two hundred miles due

south of Peking, where it was the custom for parents to make eunuchs of

many of their boys, just as they bound the feet of their girls, for they

could place them to still better advantage than a mere girl and thereby

improve their own incomes. When “Henry” made this new break with

antiquity, however, it was found that there were but 1430 palace eunuchs

left, all, it is said, over thirty years old. Orders were also issued to

all Mongol and Manchu nobles and princes forbidding the employment of

eunuchs, and it is hoped that hereafter no native of Hokienfu will get

himself mutilated for the sake of a palace job. Unlike bound feet, the

system was, of course, by no means confined to China. The papal choir

was made up of eunuchs, long since driven by public opinion from the

Italian stage, at least as late as the beginning of the present century,

and they are still employed as the keepers of harems in Mohammedan

countries, being part and parcel of polygamy. Transportation to their

homes, temporary lodgings, and a bit of money was allowed those whom

this lad of sixteen at last cleared out of the Forbidden City, and it

was a picturesque sight to see them leaving the palace with their tawdry

belongings, quarreling to the last with the men sent to pay them off.

Perhaps that is the end of them in China; but it is the land of

compromise, and already the old and crippled eunuchs have been taken

back into the palace until they die.

There are people who believe that “Henry” may again be a real emperor of

China, that he has proved himself so strong by some of his recent

actions as to suggest that had he been born twenty years earlier China

would not now be trying to pose as a republic. Even as modern a young

man as our Chinese teacher thinks that a constitutional monarchy is the

only feasible relief from the present anarchistic chaos of theoretical

republicanism. He puts at ten years, others at from a generation to a

century, the time required under such a restraining form of government

to prepare for a real republic. Who knows? Perhaps even if the monarchy

returns it will not be “Henry” who will head it; soothsayers have been

making strange prophecies recently about an entirely new emperor to come

out of the provinces. Besides, “Henry” is a Manchu, and China has

reverted after nearly three centuries to the misrule of her own people.

But he is already on the spot, sitting on the vacant throne as it were,

and that is seldom a disadvantage.

One of the first obligations of the foreigner coming to China for any

length of time is to get a Chinese name. In other countries the people

do the best they can, vocally and stelographically, to reproduce the

names we already possess; even Japan, by using one of her modern

scripts, can write all the but the more L-ish Western patronymics so

that they read noticeably like the original. But the Chinese have always

insisted that the outside barbarian adapt himself to Chinese ways,

rather than the topsyturvy reverse. Besides, Chinese is a monosyllabic

language, and naturally any stranger who comes to the country must be

translated into words of one syllable. Unfortunately, even syllables are

limited among the ideographs available to the Celestial brush-wielder,

and names which to our notion are obviously of one become polysyllabic,

to say the least, before the Chinese translator gets through with them.

The result is that they seldom bear even a family resemblance to the

original, and the foreigner who can recognize his own Chinese name,

whether written or spoken, is already in a fair way to become an

accomplished Oriental philologist.

Let me take my own name as an example. Except that it may be racially

misleading, I have always considered it quite a tolerable name, not

particularly difficult to pronounce, or to remember, by those who choose

to do so, and unquestionably monosyllabic. Yet the Chinese scholar to

whom it was submitted divided it at once into three syllables, like an

expert taking apart an instrument one had always believed to be of one

piece and returned it as “Feh Lan-kuh.” The first character stands for

“extravagance,” but all the sting is taken out of that false and unjust

start by the other two, which mean “orchid” and “self-control”

respectively. Only three names are allowed in Chinese; therefore my

given names in my own language were crowded into the discard. To the

Chinese I am “Feh _Hsien-sheng_”—Mr. Extravagance; if they wish to go

further and find out what particular form my wastefulness takes they

respectfully inquire my honorable _ming-tze_, and are informed that my

unworthy personal names are “Lan-kuh,” the Orchid with Self-control. The

trouble is that almost any foreigner whose name begins with an F, or

even with a Ph, is also Mr. Feh. There are a dozen of them within

gunshot of us, surely a thousand in China, most of whose English names

are not in the least like our own.

A few lucky mortals have names that can be put into Chinese just as they

stand, not only leaving them audibly recognizable to their compatriots

but saving their given names from the scrap-heap. There is Mr. Fay, of

course, Mr. Howe and Mr. May, and obviously Mr. Lee is orally at home

anywhere in China, whether the scholarly see him as a “pear” or “clear

dawn.” On the other hand there are names that cannot possibly be put

into Chinese even faintly resembling themselves,—Messrs. Smith and

Jones, for instance. It is quite as necessary to know the Chinese name

of the friend you wish to find in China as to be able to speak Chinese;

more so, in fact, for while the Celestials are the antithesis of their

island neighbors in the rapidity with which they grasp an idea from

signs and motions, it is difficult, unless some outstanding personal

characteristic is involved, to express a proper name by a gesture. You

may go up and down a Chinese city in which he has lived for twenty years

shouting for your dear old schoolmate Kelly, shepherding a flock of

Chinese in the general direction of heaven now, and never find a trace

of him unless chance puts you on the track of his new appellation.

Luckily there are but a hundred or so family names in all China, and as

many characters fit to be used as such, so that one may soon become

fairly expert at guessing.

One must have a Chinese name, not only because one would otherwise be

unmentionable, on respectful occasions, even to one’s own servants, but

because a plentiful supply of visiting-cards is absolutely

indispensable. Fortunately these can be had in China at a fraction of

what they cost at home; because not only are cards exchanged on the

slightest provocation, but one of those hastily printed scraps of paper

is just as important and just as final anywhere within the once

Celestial Empire as in South America. Without a card a millionaire in

evening-dress is a mere coolie; with one the most disreputable foreign

tramp who ever seeped back into the interior from the treaty-ports is a

gentleman fit to dine with a Tuchun.

In the olden days of not so long ago Chinese name-cards were red, the

color for happiness. To have a white card meant that one’s father or

mother had died within the past three years; those mourning the recent

loss of a grandparent had yellow or blue ones. The size of the card

determined the importance of the one whose name it bore, or vice versa,

so that the card of a viceroy or a generalissimo was of the size of a

sheet of foolscap, a blood-red splash that could be seen half a mile

away. Colors and size both cost money, however; moreover China has

become, in name at least, a republic. White cards are now in quite

general use, therefore, and though they still vary in size, I have never

been handed one larger than a coat-pocket. Some remain red on one side

and white on the other, especially among the formal and the wealthy; the

ultra-modern have their English name on one side and Chinese on the

other, like foreign residents. The custom of using both sides seems to

be an old one. Often the formal or “business” name appears on the front,

sometimes with the rank or calling, while on the back, in much smaller

characters, are the _hao_ and the _yuan-ch’i_, the name used only by

intimates, and the ancestral birthplace—which even the father of the man

represented may never have seen. Not a few Chinese use two different

cards. One of them bears the characters meaning, “This is only a

friendly exchange-card”; in other words, it has no import in serious or

business matters. If a Tuchun graciously gives you his “exchange-card”

that does not mean that you can use it to give orders to his soldiers or

borrow money in his name at a bank, though his official card may still

have almost the potency of the signet-ring of a king in the days of

ruffles and feathers.

A play modeled more or less on Chinese lines which went the round of the

English-speaking world some years ago has familiarized us with some of

the peculiarities of the Chinese theater—or, from their point of view,

with those of our own. At least those of us who had the pleasure of

attending that performance know that on the Chinese stage a banner held

aloft by two coolies at opposite ends of it stands for a city gate, and

that when a man has been histrionically killed he gets up, wipes his

nose, and saunters off the stage, quite as invisible to the audience as

are the property-men incessantly wandering about among the actors with

the ultra-bored expression of men more completely surfeited with things

theatrical than all the first-nighters and dramatic critics of

Christendom rolled into one. But the Chinese stage has other points

which were not included in that delightful effigy of it, partly because

to make it too Chinese would have been the surest way to drive away any

Western audience, partly because invention advances day by day. I enjoy

the casual, lackadaisical, “invisible” property-men of the Chinese

theater, but I find the man with the thermos bottle still more

beguiling. For “props,” dressed not in black, as the imported version of

Celestial theatrical life would have us believe, but in the hit-or-miss

costume of the Chinese laboring-class, with blue denims very much the

favorite, is after all at home in the theater and soon becomes even to

the foreign eye as natural a part of the decorations as does the

omnipresent coolie in or out of doors. I wonder if their property-men

are not really invisible to the Chinese, for do they not always have

servants and attendants flocking incessantly about them anywhere,

everywhere, on the most solemn as well as the most trivial occasions?

But I have never quite gotten used to the thermos-bottle man and able to

look upon him with complete equanimity. He is no theater employee, but

the personal servant of this or that important actor, which actor often

does not remain more than an hour or two at a time in one theater;

hence, at least in Peking in the winter season, the man who brings his

master his indispensable tea at the climax of every histrionic flight

wears overcoat, fur or knitted cap, and all the rest of the midwinter

equipment, so that, bursting suddenly but casually in upon a court

ceremony or a battle scene set in the color-splashed days to which

Chinese dramas hark back, he suggests an experienced and unexcitable

arctic explorer come to succor with the latest contrivance a group of

Martians enjoying an equatorial holiday.

The thermos bottle was, of course, unknown to those actors of some

generations or centuries back who refused to be deprived even for the

length of a scene of the national beverage, and at the same time wished

to impress upon the audience, itself engaged in satisfying the inner man

quite as freely as if seated at home, that they, for all the low rank of

players, were just as important, thereby establishing a custom that is

all but universal on the Chinese stage. Old-fashioned actors, or those

less generously subsidized by the box-office, also have their tea at the

end of every crisis; but it is brought, not in the latest triumph of

science and by a personal retainer, but by one of the omnipresent

“props,” by a disengaged “super,” or by one of the beggarly loafers that

seem always to be hanging about behind the scenes—if they can be called

such—of a Chinese theater. They, too, sip the uninebriating cup held up

to them while half turning their backs or holding an edge of their

always voluminous costumes over a corner of the mouth, a conventional

pretense which is supposed to make the act invisible to the audience,

and which so far as outward appearances go seems actually to do so.

Besides, why should an act as general and almost as continuous among the

Chinese as breathing attract the attention of a generation that has

probably associated it with every dramatic climax since the oldest man

among them first paid an admission fee? If so slight a thing as this

brought inattention to the play, what would not the orchestra accomplish

in the way of distracting from the plaudits due the actors, scattered as

it is about the stage itself, maltreating its strange instruments or

refraining therefrom in the most casual manner, to light a cigarette, to

scratch itself, to ply a toothpick, or strolling individually on or off,

in any garb at any moment of the afternoon or evening that happens to

suit the individual fancy.

There is a theater in the heart of the Tartar City completely

Westernized in architecture and general arrangements, yet where

perfectly Chinese plays are given; but the foreigner who wishes to get

the complete atmosphere must go “outside Ch’ien-men” into the Chinese

City. For after all it is the audience and what takes place in front of

the stage as much as what goes forward upon it that repays the Westerner

for visiting a Chinese theater. In this busiest part of Peking, among

the blocks where the singsong-girls ply their popular trade, are

scattered many genuinely native playhouses, and farther on there are

numerous makeshift ones hastily thrown together of boards, mats, and

sheet-iron, stretching beyond the _T’ien-ch’iao_, the “Heavenly Bridge”

with its swarming outdoor markets, across which emperors were carried

for centuries to the near-by Temple of Heaven. Out there one may hear

much of the play and more of the “music” than he cares to, while merely

riding past in the afternoon—for genuine Peking theaters are in full

swing from about noon until long after midnight.

Perhaps on the whole the visitor will get the most for his money at any

of those playhouses lost in the maze of narrow streets not far outside

Ch’ien-men, without earning the ill will of his rickshaw-man by driving

him ’way out to the Heavenly Bridge. Here he will find himself, though

perhaps not without Chinese help, entering what looks much like a

warehouse or a wholesale establishment, a roofed court overcrowded with

crude, narrow, painfully upright benches black with time and the food

and drinks that have been spilled upon them for generations from the

little shelves protruding along the back of each for the use of the row

behind. The foreigner is so far out of the orbit of his kind in one of

these establishments that, though the Legation Quarter is barely a hop,

skip, and jump away, just beyond the mammoth Tartar wall, and those two

of the Peking railway stations out of which emerge almost all foreign

visitors to the capital are still nearer, he will probably not be seated

before what looks like a coolie comes to ask his name, preferably to get

his card, explaining, if there is any common denominator of words in

which to do so, that every _wai-guo-ren_ who enters the place must be

reported at once, so that a policeman may be sent to protect him. Yet it

is years since a foreigner has needed individual police protection

anywhere within the Chinese City half as much as the unpaid gendarme who

will keep an eye upon him throughout the performance needs the tip which

he will not refuse if it is properly forced upon him.

Strictly speaking the foreign visitor does not find himself a seat, any

more than he discovers the theater without help. He is, _ipso facto_, a

“possessor of money,” and nowhere that he stirs in China, least of all

in a theater, are there lacking men eager to take as much of that

commodity away as can be bluffed or wheedled out of him. Hence the

conspicuous new-comer is beset from the very entrance by a flock of men

in the all too familiar garb of unwashed coolies, each eager to lead him

to some different section of the house. If he is easily led he will find

himself installed before he knows it in a rickety chair in one of the

little pretenses of boxes around the narrow balcony, the only part of

the house where women spectators may sit. The prices are higher up

there, and the inevitable rake-off of his guide correspondingly larger.

If he is wise he will insist upon remaining in the pit, not too near the

uproarious orchestra and not so close to the back as to interfere with

the throwing arms of the towel-men. When at last he has settled down as

the protégé of a man who seems suddenly to grow superciliously

patronizing toward him the moment he is sure of keeping him in his own

section, and has apparently made lifelong enemies of all the others who

tried to seat him elsewhere, he becomes at once the prey of the

innumerable hawkers of this and that who wallow and shout their way

through the audience quite irrespective of a possible interest in the

stage. Perhaps it occurs to him that he bought no ticket, and was asked

for none at the door. No one does as he enters the purely Chinese

theater. By the time each auditor has adjusted himself as well as his

bodily bulk will permit to the impossible seats behind the tippy

shelves, a man comes to sell him a ticket and to take it up with one and

the same motion. Prices are not high, sixty to eighty coppers at most,

including the percentage that is almost sure to be added out of respect

for his alien condition; even in the Westernized theater within the

Tartar City a seat anywhere in the pit or parquet rarely reaches the

height of a “Mex” dollar. Then a man who thinks he chose his seat for

him must also have his “squeeze,” but this by no means amounts to the

sum subtracted by the old ladies who pose as ushers in the theaters of

Paris. Long before these formalities are concluded, simultaneously with

his sitting down, in fact, the countless dispensers of food and drink

are taking his patronage for granted. A tea-cup sadly in need of an

hour’s scouring with sand is placed top down on the unwashed seat-back

before him, soon to be followed by a tea-pot the spout of which, if he

is observant, he has probably seen some unsoaped neighbor sucking a

moment before, now refilled with boiling water. Little dishes of

shriveled native peanuts, of pumpkin-seeds, of half a dozen similar

delicacies which he has often seen along the outdoor markets and in the

baskets of street-hawkers without ever having felt a desire to make a

closer acquaintance with them, probably also a joint of sugar-cane, will

likewise be set in front of him before he can say his Chinese name,

unless he waves all these things aside with a very imperative gesture.

None of the hawkers catch the meaning of this at once, at least

outwardly, and when they finally do their resentment often reaches the

point of what sounds unpleasantly like more or less subtle vituperation.

Whoever heard of going to a theater without sipping tea and cracking

pumpkin-seeds? Why does this wealthy barbarian come and occupy a seat if

he is going to cheat the men who supply that part of the house out of

their rightful and time-honored selling privileges?

By and by one may be able to turn one’s attention to the stage, though

one has certainly not been unconscious of it, auricularly at least,

since entering the door. The stage is nothing but a raised platform with

a low railing on all four sides, such as might have been the

auction-place in the days when the building was perhaps the warehouse it

looks as if it must have been. Whatever serve as dressing-rooms at the

rear, which according to the space there cannot be much, are separated

from the stage by an alleyway across which the exiting and entering

players hop. The antics on the stage are in no noticeable way different

from those at the Westernized Peking theaters regularly patronized by

foreigners. The masks and wigs and terrifying costumes are probably

cruder, less splendid, and worse adjusted; the lean and bathless coolies

who come on at frequent intervals in orderless groups undisguised as

soldiers, courtiers, and who-knows-what are if anything a trifle more

abject and bovine; there may not appear a single thermos bottle during

the whole evening, though there will be as incessant a consumption of

what passes for tea among the great mass of the Chinese. Certainly there

will be no scenery in the Western sense, though there may be a few

curtains half shutting off the inadequate dressing-room space, and some

pretenses of city gates, thrones, and the like improvised on the spur of

the moment by the bored property-men out of strips of cloth and

half-broken chairs. The conventionalized things which take the place of

scenery, the strange whips carried by those who are supposed to be

mounted, and the something which tells the audience that the bearer is

riding in a boat are somewhat the worse for wear, while the cushions

which “Props” disdainfully throws out in front of the stars when it is

time for them to kneel are almost slippery with the grease of

generations. But the tumbling and the juggling which imply that one of

the frequent battles is going on will be quite the same, except that it

will not be so well done, as inside the main city, and the uproar will

be just as constant and if anything a trifle more deafening.

One theater outside Ch’ien-men has only female players; but they appear

in the same rôles, in exactly the same time-honored plays, as the

all-men casts in other theaters, and act as nearly as possible in the

same way, equally dreadful even in the atrocious falsetto which is the

Chinese actor’s specialty, as noises from the pit of the stomach are of

those of Japan. There may be many a guttural “Hao!” from the men in the

audience for the juggling feats of the stars, winning their battles thus

after the time-honored manner of stage generals or emperors; perhaps

even greater signs of approval for some fine point skilfully rounded in

the old familiar themes, which escapes the foreigner entirely; but there

is never a suggestion of the thought of sex, not a hint, except in their

general appearance, that the players are women and not men. Some of the

unwashed girls who fill out the cast, looking like nothing so much as

kitchen wenches in odds and ends of old finery, are quite as clever

acrobats, in battle-scene tumbling at least, as the men at other places,

though they get less a month than a Broadway chorus-girl spends on

chewinggum in a week.

It will be an imperturbable foreign visitor, however, who can keep his

attention fixed on the stage long enough to note all this at once. The

goings-on in the audience will probably prove more comprehensible,

certainly more amusing. Without going into endless detail it may suffice

to say that the climax of all those things which a Chinese audience does

and a Western one does not is the demand for hot towels during the

performance. One or two towel-men stand over a steaming tub in a far

corner; as many as a dozen others are scattered about the hall, though

their presence may not be suspected by the inexperienced until the

bombardment of towels begins, about the end of the first round of

pumpkin-seeds. All at once the air overhead is crisscrossed with flying

white objects, which on closer attention prove to be bundles of hot, wet

towels tightly rolled together. A man near the tub is throwing them to a

colleague somewhere out in the house, who relays them on to others

dispersed about, these doling them out along the rows of spectators,

collecting them again after they have been used—not to give the ears a

respite from the ceaseless uproar but to deceive the face and hands with

the ghost of a washing—bundling them together once more to start them

hurtling back high over head to the point of origin. The most expert

venders of double-jointed Philadelphia peanuts at our national games

cannot equal Chinese towel-men in the number of throws and the narrow

margins of safety without injury to a spectator. Evidently the

towel-service is included in the price of admission, unless the hawkers

and the section guards band together to supply their clients this

apparent necessity. Therefore the foreigner who gracefully declines this

gracious attention, after noting that the returned towels are merely

immersed and wrung out again as a bundle and once more sent the rounds,

does not win the ill will that would accrue to him if there were a

copper or two of _cumshaw_ involved, and does no other damage than to

block the wheels of progress long enough for information concerning his

strange conduct to be relayed back to the tub-men and commented upon at

least throughout the section he makes conspicuous by his presence.

The bombardment of towels goes on periodically from early afternoon

until early morning, like all the rest of the performance. Where one

play ends another begins with barely the interval of a sip of tea, and

though some spectators are constantly coming and going, like the casual

members of the orchestra and the undisguised “supers,” the endurance of

the mass of them is phenomenal. Some time between five and seven o’clock

many spectators vary their incessant munching and sipping by ordering a

full meal from the runners of the adjoining tea-house, and the click of

chop-sticks may now and then be heard above the louder clamor. But the

spectacle, both on and off the stage, goes unconcernedly on.

It would require much more Chinese than I can so far understand to catch

any of the dialogue—if that is the word for it—of a typical Chinese

play. The inexperienced Westerner will seldom have the faintest idea

what it is all about, or even who the characters stand for, so

unintelligible to him are the signs and symbols by which the native

spectator recognizes them and their doings. For that matter the average

Chinese would not understand much unless he had imbibed all these old

stories almost with his mother’s milk. The old, poetic, and often

obsolete words in which the Chinese actor speaks—or rather “sings,” to

use the misleading Chinese term—would be obscure enough in a sane and

ordinary tone of voice; in his successful imitation of ungreased

machinery his actual speech is probably of little more import to the

hearers than are the words of an Italian opera to a Chicago audience.

Like the Japanese the Chinese prefer to hear the same old historical

themes and see the same old pageants over and over again, however, or at

most to have new variations upon them, generation after century. Hence

even the illiterate can often follow a play word by word without

understanding a line of it. We have discovered that by having our

teacher tell us the story beforehand we can guess the meaning of a

considerable part of the action, thereby finding the Chinese theater

much less of a bore than most foreigners report it. To every people its

own ways; certainly the attempt to ape Western theatricals which was put

on during the winter by a club of native élite, with traveled young

Chinese of both sexes prancing about the stage in frock-coats and scanty

gowns, not to mention bobbed hair, was more terrible than anything

genuine Chinese actors ever perpetrate. Personally I have even become

reconciled to Chinese “music”—in the olden days plays were given

outdoors, hence the deafening quality of this—and in certain moods even

to enjoy it, briefly, as one sometimes enjoys a crush in the subway or a

rough-and-tumble mingling with the Broadway throng; and we have both

grown very fond of seeing, if not of listening to, Mei Lan-fang.

Mr. Mei—whose family character means “peach blossom” and who is related

to us to the extent of including an orchid in his given name—is China’s

most famous and most popular actor. Like his father and grandfather

before him he plays only female rôles, and while even his falsettos may

grate on a Western ear, many is the foreigner who pursues him from

theater to theater merely to watch his graceful movements, his

inimitable dancing or simply the manipulation of his beautiful hands.

Scrawl the three characters by which he is known on the bill-board or

the newspaper space of any theater, inside Ch’ien-men or out, anywhere

in China for that matter, though he has no need to tour the provinces,

and the man in the box-office has only to order any suggestion of vacant

space filled with chairs and lean back in perfect contentment. Mei

Lan-fang carries his own troupe, like a Spanish _matador_ his

_cuadrilla_, even his own orchestra, and the arrangement of Chinese

performances is such that he can play in several theaters on the same

night, from eleven to midnight inside the Tartar City perhaps, where the

doors close ridiculously early, the rest of the night among the better

establishments outside the main wall. Seldom does he deign to appear

earlier than that, unless at some special matinée in the Forbidden City

or at the presidential palace, and he is under no necessity of appearing

every night merely to keep the wolf from his door. By Chinese standards

his income rivals that of any opera singer.

The Chinese are fond of complications of character in their plays, and

some of Mr. Mei’s greatest successes are as a man playing a girl who in

turn disguises herself as a man; but there is never a moment in which

the basic femininity of the part does not stand clearly forth in the

hands of this consummate artist. I had the pleasure of spending an

afternoon with him once. His house out in the heart of the Chinese City

is outwardly commonplace; but the touch of the genuinely artistic

temperament is nowhere missing inside the door. The delicate, almost

white-faced man still in his twenties, sometimes looking as if he had

barely reached them, proved to be one of the most gracious and at the

same time most unobtrusive hosts I have ever met. His manner had not a

suggestion of the financially successful, the popular idol, as it would

manifest itself in the West. He was as simple, as unassuming, as wholly

untheatrical as are the objects of Chinese art on which he spends his

surplus wealth and time inconspicuous with real distinction. Among his

treasures were many thin-paper volumes of classics, of old plays, some

of them several centuries old, with annotations in the margins by bygone

but not forgotten actors indicating tones, gestures, movements down to

the crooking of a little finger. Mr. Mei makes much use of these, though

not for slavish imitation. His entourage includes a scholar of standing

whose task it is to weave new stories about the old themes, and from

them the actor evolves new dances—which is not the word, but let it

stand—and new ways of entertaining his crowded audiences without losing

touch with the distant centuries to which they prefer to be transported

within the theater. Mei Lan-fang does not drink tea on the stage. It is

an arrogance of the profession to which his famous family never

descended. Nor, one notes, do property-men trip unnecessarily about

under his feet when he is performing. I have Mr. Mei’s word for it that

the throat does not suffer from the constant unnatural tasks put upon it

by his profession; but only from a man of such self-evident truthfulness

could I believe it. Certainly there was nothing in his soft home-side

speech to belie that surprising statement, as there was nothing in his

modest manner to suggest that wherever he plays the streets are filled

as far at least as the eye can see by night with waiting rickshaws.

Russians have occupied the extreme northeast corner of the Tartar City

for centuries. Away back in the reign of K’ang Hsi, to whom all those of

the white race were indeed outside barbarians, an army of the czar was

defeated in what is now Siberia, and the captives brought to Peking were

made into a defense corps after the style of the Manchu-“bannermen.”

Gradually the Manchu warriors disappeared from the enclosure that once

housed them only, as they grew weak and flabby and penniless under

imperial corruption and sold out family by family to the Chinese, until

to-day the Tartar City is that merely in name and in memory. But the

Russians remain just where the victorious emperor assigned them. Two

garish Greek Orthodox structures thrust their domes and spires aloft

from within the large walled area which makes that corner of the city

somewhat less of an open space given over to garbage-heaps, rag-pickers,

and prowling dogs than are the other three. The Son of Heaven was

graciously moved to permit his Russian bannermen to have their own

religious teachers, and the Orthodox priests sent from Russia became not

only missionaries to the surrounding “heathen” but the unofficial

diplomatic agents of the czar. In time, when the powers saw fit to

disabuse the occupant of the dragon throne of the impression that all

the rest of the earth was tributary to him, the Russians also

established their official minister in the Legation Quarter, with

pompous buildings and another Orthodox church within a big compound.

To-day, by consent of the Chinese, representatives of the old czarist

régime still informally occupy this, while the unrecognized envoy of the

Soviet finds his own accommodations, like any other tourist. But the

establishment in the further corner of the city survives, boasting not

merely a bishop but an archbishop, and numbering by the hundred the

Chinese converts clustered in that section.

A Russian church service with a mainly Chinese congregation is worth

going some distance to see. Nowadays the converts hardly outnumber their

fellow-worshipers, so many are the destitute Russian refugees who have

drifted to that distant northeast corner of Peking. They live thick as

prisoners in the stone-walled cells of the old monastery where once only

Orthodox monks recited their prayers,—frail women and underfed children

as well as men bearing a whole library of strange stories on their gaunt

faces. Groups of refugees who came too late or have not influence enough

to find room in the cells live packed together in stone cellars, some

still wearing the remnants of czarist uniforms, or of the various

“White” armies that have gone to pieces before the advancing “Reds,”

some still unrecovered from war-time wounds and sundry hardships.

The orchestra which enlivens the nights of the more fortunate foreigners

in the frock-coat section of the city huddle together here on improvised

beds that would hardly be recognized as such; in these ill smelling

dungeons there are men who have not garments enough, even if they had

the spirit left, to go forth and look for some possible way out of their

present sad dilemma.

But one’s sympathy for the dispossessed Russians in China always soon

comes to a frayed edge. Their scorn of manual labor even as an

alternative to starvation, the unregenerate selfishness of their exiled

fellow-countrymen in more fortunate circumstances, their lack of

practicality, of plain common sense from the Western point of view, in a

word their Orientalism, so out of keeping with their Caucasian exterior,

tend to turn compassion to mere condolences which in time fade out to

indifference. Perhaps any of us suddenly come down as a nation, like a

proud sky-scraper unexpectedly collapsing into a chaotic heap of débris,

would find ourselves bewildered out of ordinary human intelligence; but

it is hard to avoid the impression that these individual weaknesses were

there before the debacle, and that they are incurable, at least in the

existing generation. A few such enterprises as printing, binding, and

leather tanning have been started in the former monastery, but it was

noticeable that almost all the actual work was being done by Chinese.

Sturdy, even though possibly hungry, young men loafed about their cells

and cellars complaining that they could not hire some one to rebuild

their simple brick bathing-vat and cooking-stove. Chinese officials,

especially of the petty grade, have not been over-kind to the groups of

refugees that have fallen into their hands; but they rank at least on a

par with the Russian archbishop of Peking, who considers the northeast

corner of the city his personal property and demands the abject

servility of the Middle Ages toward his exalted person from those of his

fellow-countrymen whom he graciously admits to floor-space there in the

shadow of his own spacious episcopal residence.

These ostentatious forms of Christianity seem much more in keeping with

the Chinese temperament than the austere Protestantism of innumerable

sects, which has dotted Peking, as it has all China, with its schools,

churches, hospitals, and missions pure and simple. It is not at all hard

to find resemblances between the services of the Russians and those in

the lama temple a little west of them, in any joss-burning Chinese place

of worship, or for that matter between these and high mass at Pei-t’ang

to the northwest of the Forbidden City. The Catholics, too, go back for

centuries in the life of Peking, to Verbiest and his fellow-Jesuits who

served the Sons of Heaven in secular, as well as their subjects in

religious, ways.

In the Boxer days Pei-t’ang was scarcely second to the British legation

as a place of refuge against the bloodthirsty besiegers; on Easter

Sunday, at least, it rivals even in mere picturesqueness any temple in

the capital. Red silk interspersed with Maltese crosses in imperial

yellow wrapped the pillars; artificial flowers—where real ones are so

cheap and so plentiful—added to the Oriental garishness of the interior;

the mingled scent of incense and crowded Chinese made the scene

impressive not merely to the sight. Mats on the floor held more

worshipers than did the benches. The women sat on one side, the flaring

white head-dresses of the nuns forming a broad front border to the sea

of smooth, oily Chinese coiffures. Near the center hundreds of “orphan”

boys in khaki made a great yellow patch. In front, at the foot of the

choir-stalls backed by the gorgeous altar, the assemblage was gay with

French and Belgian officers in full bemedaled uniform, with a scattering

of European women—there are other Catholic churches in Peking that are

not so far away for most foreigners—their prie-dieus conspicuous in rich

silk covers. Even the raised place at one side, theoretically reserved

for Caucasians, was crowded with Chinese, hardly a dozen more of whom

could have been driven into the church with knouts or bayonets. Yellow

faces, high above any casual glance, peered from behind the pipes of the

big organ. Chinese acolytes in red wandered to and fro, swinging

censers; the music, while not unendurable, was screechy enough to prove

the unseen choir of the same race, boys echoing men, with the organ

filling in the interstices. Children ran wild among the rather orderless

throng; some of the congregation stood throughout the service; large

numbers of Chinese men kept their caps on. But a thousand Chinese

fervently crossing themselves at the requisite signals from the altar,

where two Chinese priests in colorful robes worthy at least a bishop

functioned on either side of the white-haired European in archiepiscopal

regalia, had about it something no less striking than anything Buddhism

has to offer. On week-days old Chinese women, just such bent, shrouded

figures as may be seen in any cathedral of Europe, come from the maze of

_hutungs_ about Pei-t’ang to bow their heads in silent prayer in its

perpetual twilight, with gaudy saints and images of here and there a

somewhat Chinese cast of countenance looking down upon them.

Preparations for the Chinese New Year began on the twenty-third of the

twelfth moon with the burning of the kitchen god still to be found in

nearly every home. Some of our neighbors, especially those whom lack of

a courtyard drove out into the _hutung_ for this ceremony, did it half

furtively, as if they were pretending, at least when foreigners looked

on, that this was only an ordinary wad of waste-paper. But we knew that

before he was torn down incense had been burned before the flimsy,

smoke-dulled god, with a little straw or _kaoliang_ for the horse that

is shown waiting for him, and even our neighbors admitted that they

stuck a bit of something sweet on his lips before sending him to heaven,

by the fire route, to report on the actions of the family during the

year. A little opium serves this purpose still better, or best of all is

to dip the whole half-penny lithograph in native wine just before the

burning, that the god may be too drowsy or too drunk to tell the truth

when he reaches headquarters.

[Illustration:

Mei Lan-fang, most famous of Chinese actors, who, like his father and

grandfather before him, plays only female parts

]

[Illustration:

In the vast compound of the Altar of Heaven

]

[Illustration:

Over the wall from our house, boats plied on the moat separating us

from the Chinese City

]

[Illustration:

Just outside the Tartar Wall of Peking the night-soil of the city,

brought in wheelbarrows, is dried for use as fertilizer

]

It is a seven-day journey to the Chinese heaven and back, so that people

have a little respite from the irksome surveillance of the god of the

kitchen. During that week there was a furor of house-cleaning, as the

Chinese misunderstand the term; the well-to-do renewed their paper

windows; those who could afford it went so far as to have the wooden

parts freshly painted. Especially on the last day of the year much

shaving, washing, and bathing went on; the baths outside the southern

gates of the Tartar City were crowded as they never are at ordinary

times, when a two-to-ten copper bath once a month is considered ample.

All that last day, too, the _chop-a-chop_ of food, especially of meat

dumplings, being prepared for the many guests of the following days,

when such work would be taboo, sounded from every house that was not a

poor man’s home indeed. Faded old scraps of paper came down everywhere

and bright new ones went up, particularly those long upright red slips

opposite each door, bearing the four familiar characters for _K’ai men

chien hsi_—“Open door see happiness.” Some of these were put up by the

householders themselves, some by poor neighbors who hoped for a slight

remembrance from the inmates. One saw them all over China for months

afterward. The most miserable little hovels far outside the walls put up

new paper gods that made brilliant splashes on doors and mud façades.

Perhaps the saddest thing about the Chinese New Year is that all debts

are expected to be paid before it breaks, which was particularly hard on

what is still recognized abroad as the Chinese Government, months in

arrears with every one except its Tuchuns and high employees of special

influence. Two men at least I saw next day wandering about with a

lantern, a pretense that it is still night and dunning still

permissible.

New Year’s day is everybody’s birthday in China; so there is a double

reason for new clothes appearing everywhere. Even beggars and

rag-pickers seemed to have them, or at least well washed and mended

ones, and the populace presented such a sight of approximate cleanliness

as it will not until another year rolls by and compels it to change

again. A new kitchen god, gaudy on its thin paper, is put up during the

first hours of the new year, with a little shrine, and firecrackers and

incense welcome him. Firecrackers, indeed, were the most conspicuous

part of the celebration. They boomed all night, close under our back

walls and all over the city; even “Ha-li” was restless with the

incessant uproar. This was partly in honor of the kitchen gods, but

largely to frighten off the evil spirits lurking about to contaminate

the new year at the start. Among the Chinese there was no attempt to

sleep that night; even our _ama_ asked permission to go home, and said

that she would sit up all night, eating meat dumplings from about two in

the morning until daybreak—yet she is a woman of unusual common sense

for China, with the utmost scorn for those who still bind their feet.

For the first five days of the new year women are supposed not to leave

home or to enter that of another, though in Peking many disobey at least

the first half of this ancient rule. The men, on the other hand, go out

early and often, not only on the first but on the succeeding days, to

call upon all their friends, particularly on the mother-in-law who

reigns over each household, to give greetings, and incidentally to fill

themselves beyond nature’s intention with meat dumplings. Our teacher

was still weary from this ordeal when he again reported for duty.

Rachel, however, was strictly enjoined by the _ama_ not to call on a

neighbor at whose house she had attended a wedding during the winter; it

would be even worse form than not to have a mother-in-law present to

receive those who called upon us. As in France, New Year’s is the time

for giving presents; no sooner had we distributed a dozen silver dollars

in red envelopes among the servants than they despatched the _ama_ to

get us presents,—food dainties for us adults, toys for “Ha-li.” Of all

the celebration, however, perhaps the detail that looked strangest was

to see the shops closed, long row after row of them blank-faced with

board shutters where we had never seen them before. Drums and

firecrackers sounded inside—some say that gambling goes on apace—whether

to scare off devils or merely for the joy of making a noise; probably

both motives existed, depending on the individual temperament.

Foreigners sometimes accuse the Chinese of laziness because they take as

much as a week’s rest at New Year’s, as if this were anything compared

with our fifty-two and more holidays a year. Besides, even the shops are

in few cases really closed; trust any Chinese merchant not to miss a

possible stroke of business. There is almost always a peep-hole, if you

know where to look for it, and one man inside who will make a special

exception in favor of any one who finds it. Merchants can send their

goods to the fairs, anyway; these spring up everywhere, especially in

temple grounds, in and outside the city, where every one comes to burn

joss-sticks by the bundle, until many a huge urn before the gods runs

over with ashes. These are the gayest of markets, with peep-shows,

acrobats, coolies, posing for the day as sword-swallowers,

story-tellers, and musicians, with amateur and professional theatrical

performances indoors and out, with every conceivable gambling device,

men, women, and children crowded around them, with all manner of

playthings for sale,—singing “diavolo” tops reaching almost the size of

drums, pink bottles of _chianti_-shape which reward the blower with a

peculiar noise, clusters of toy windmills on one handle that spin in

chorus as the holder rides homeward in his rickshaw or his Peking cart,

kites of every description, some fully man-size, of bird, beetle,

airplane shape. There are no age-limits among the Chinese in the use of

New Year’s toys; even solemn old men fly kites all over the city at this

season, among the swirls of pigeons following their whistle-bearing

leader about the cloudless heavens.

All this went on for a week or more, though with diminishing ardor; for

some soon tire of so long a holiday, and many would starve if they

celebrated it all, so that gradually men went back to work, though not a

few stuck it out. We hardly noticed a lack of rickshaws even on the

first day, and the calls of street-hawkers never completely died out. If

our servants went out more than usual we missed none of their usual

services, and certainly the cook must have found the markets open. The

real New Year’s duty of every Chinese, of course, is to go home, though

it be across ten provinces, to put paper “cash,” such as flutter along

the route of every funeral, on the graves of his ancestors, and to

prepare them special food, preferably duck or chicken, of which they can

eat only the “flavor,” leaving three guesses as to what becomes of the

rest. Many do go home, but in modern days it is surprising how many find

this imperative journey quite impossible. At length the celebration

petered out, though crowded carts of people in their best garments could

be seen plodding toward the temples outside our East Wall up to the

last, and Peking settled down to its industrious seven days a week

again.

With the republic, China officially adopted the Western calendar, as

Japan did long ago; but the masses cling to the old one, with its animal

names for the twelve years that are constantly recurring. Like

Christianity, the new calendar is considered something foreign, which is

quite enough, even leaving the tenacity of old custom aside, to condemn

it among many Chinese; and even in official circles the lunar New Year

is celebrated more thoroughly than the other. The result is that no

government employee has to come to office on the foreign New Year, and

no one does on the old one, when even cabinet members go to their

ancestral homes or on a spree to Tientsin or Shanghai. Nor is the cult

of cyclical animals by any means dead among the Chinese. Almost over our

head on the East Wall stand the famous astronomical instruments, some of

them made by Verbiest himself, which the Germans carried off in 1900 and

very recently returned in accordance with a clause in the Treaty of

Versailles; and just beyond them is an old temple, the occupants of

which include among their duties the annual task of compiling the

popular almanac. One may see original or reprinted copies of this

everywhere in China, for it is indispensable to the fortuneteller, the

geomancer, and all their innumerable ilk, if not to the mass of the

people themselves. Here are set forth the lucky and unlucky days for

marriages or funerals, for washing the hair, for beginning a new

building, for every act of importance in the Chinese daily life. Without

it how could match-makers know whether or not the birth-years of

possible brides and grooms conflict? Obviously if one was born in the

year of the rabbit and the other in that of the dog, or in the years of

the tiger and the sheep respectively, the result of an alliance would be

a sorry household.

This year the almanac concocted by our priestly neighbors has a pig as

“running title” from cover to cover, as well as the frequent recurrence

of this motif throughout its pages. For this is the Year of the Pig,

which began on our own February 16, and for twelve moons—this year there

does not happen to be an intercalary thirteenth—the millions of

Mohammedan Chinese must express themselves on that subject by using some

such subterfuge as “Black Sheep.” Moreover, it is the end of a cycle of

Cathay, the pig being the last of the twelve cyclical animals which pass

five times to make such a cycle. This, it seems, presages the worst year

of the whole sixty, and the soothsayers enlivened this New Year’s with

the most pessimistic predictions. According to the street-side

necromancers, who make their livelihood, such as it is, by telling the

fortunes of individuals or of nations, much calamity is due China before

this Year of the Pig is done. Millions, perhaps, will die of war,

pestilence, or famine, or a combination of these—one fellow went so far

as to assure his listeners that three fourths of the population of

Peking will be wiped out. Great disasters are promised all over the

country, particularly in the province of Shensi, which must suffer

especially for the privilege of being the birthplace of the next

emperor, whom the necromancers assert is already approaching man’s

estate there. It is hopeless, therefore, runs the gossip, to expect a

settlement of China’s crying difficulties during the twelvemonth of the

Pig—some of us wonder if the foreign legations have been imbued with the

same spirit. That is the evil of superstitions particularly in a land

where the majority is still influenced by them; the mere fact that large

numbers of people believe all this market-stall nonsense causes at least

a psychological depression, and probably increases the likelihood of the

beliefs being realized.

However, these popular oracles go on, after this year conditions will

rapidly improve, and it is almost certain that with the new cycle will

come a return to order and prosperity. Every friend of China sincerely

hopes so, for she certainly needs just that very badly, whether she

deserves it or not. No doubt the next cycle of sixty years will bring

something of the sort, even though it is difficult to think of China’s

calamities abruptly ceasing with this inauspicious porcine year.

There are good as well as unkind things to be said of the Chinese lunar

calendar. It is easy, for instance, to tell the time of their month

merely by glancing at the sky on any unclouded evening, and no one need

ask what day the moon will be full. By the old system of reckoning the

Chinese have a whole list of dates fixing changes of weather, and if one

year’s experience is a fair test these are more accurate than the

prophecies of our highest salaried weather men. Some weeks after the

lunar New Year comes the “Stirring of the Insects”; the “Corn Rain” is

set for one of the first days of the third moon—that is, late in our

April; there are the fixed days of “Sprouting Seeds,” the “Small Heat”

and the “Great Heat,” the “Hoar Frost,” the “Cold Dew,” the “Slight

Snow” and the “Great Snow”—though the last rarely reaches Peking—and so

on around the eternal cycle again. But “Pure Brightness,” otherwise

known as Arbor day now, on which the president himself came to plant

trees almost next door to us, has come and gone; _pengs_ are springing

up everywhere, shading the courtyards, forming whole new roofs and

fronts over the better shops, and implying that it is time we were

moving on, for the “Great Heat” is no misnomer in Peking.