PART I--THE WARNING_Indiscreet Letters From Peking Being the Notes of an Eye-Witness, Which Set Forth in Some Detail, from Day to Day, the Real Story of the Siege and Sack of a Distressed Capital in 1900—The Year of Great Tribulation

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INDISCREET LETTERS FROM PEKING

Being the Notes of an Eye-Witness,

Which Set Forth in Some Detail, from

Day to Day, the Real Story of the

Siege and Sack of a Distressed Capital

in 1900--the Year of Great Tribulation

Edited by

B.L. PUTNAM WEALE

Author of "Manchu and Muscovite,"

and "The Re-shaping of the Far East."

China Edition

1922

Shanghai

Kelly and Walsh, Limited

British Empire and Continental

by Putnam Weale from 1921

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

PART I--THE WARNING

I FRAGMENTS

II MUTTERINGS

III OVERCAST SKIES

IV OUR GUARDS ARRIVE

V THE PLOT THICKENS

VI THE LICKING FLAMES APPROACH

VII THE CITY OF PEKING AND ALL ITS GLORIES

VIII SOME INCIDENTS AND THE ONE MAN

IX THE COMING OF THE BOXERS

X BARRICADES AND RELIEFS

XI SOME MEN AND THINGS

XII HELL HOUNDS

XIII A FEW CRUMBS

XIV THE ULTIMATUM

XV THE DEBACLE BEGINS

PART II--THE SIEGE

I CHAOS

II THE RETREAT AND THE RETURN

III FIRES AND FOOD

IV THE BONDS TIGHTEN

V THE MYSTERIOUS BOARD OF TRUCE

VI SHELLS AND SORTIES

VII THE HOSPITAL AND THE GRAVEYARD

VIII THE FAILURE

IX AN INTERLUDE

X THE GUNS

XI SNIPING

XII THE GALLANT FRENCH

XIII THE BRITISH LEGATION BASE

XIV THE EVER-GROWING CASUALTY LIST

XV THE ARMISTICE

XVI THE RESUMPTION OF A SEMI-DIPLOMATIC LIFE

XVII DIPLOMACY CONTINUES

XVIII THE UNREST GROWS AND DIPLOMACY CONTINUES

XIX THE FIRST REAL NEWS

XX THE THIRD PHASE CONTINUES

XXI MORE DIPLOMACY

XXII THE WORLD BEYOND OUR BRICKS

XXIII TRIFLES

XXIV DIPLOMATIC CONFIDENCES

XXV THE PLOT AGAIN THICKENS

XXVI MORE MESSENGERS

XXVII THE ATTACKS RESUMED

XXVIII THE THIRTEENTH

XXIX THE NIGHT OF THE THIRTEENTH

XXX HOW I SAW THE RELIEF

PART III-THE SACK

I THE PALACE

II THE SACK

III THE SACK CONTINUES

IV CHAOS

V SETTLING DOWN

VI THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT

VII THE FEW REMAINS

VIII THE PALSY REMAINS

IX DRIFTING

X PICKING UP THREADS

XI THE IMPOSSIBLE

XII SUSPENSE

XIII STILL DRIFTING

XIV PUNITIVE EXPEDITIONS

XV THE CLIMAX

XVI THE END

FOREWORD

The publication of these letters, dealing with the startling events

which took place in Peking during the summer and autumn of 1900, at this

late date may be justified on a number of counts. In the first place,

there can be but little doubt that an exact narrative from the pen of an

eye-witness who saw everything, and knew exactly what was going on from

day to day, and even from hour to hour, in the diplomatic world of the

Chinese capital during the deplorable times when the dread Boxer

movement overcast everything so much that even in England the South

African War was temporarily forgotten, is of intense human interest,

showing most clearly as it does, perhaps for the first time in realistic

fashion, the extraordinary _bouleversement_ which overcame everyone; the

unpreparedness and the panic when there was really ample warning; the

rivalry of the warring Legations even when they were almost _in

extremis_, and the curious course of the whole seige itself owing to the

division of counsels among the Chinese--this last a state of affairs

which alone saved everyone from a shameful death. In the second place,

this account may dispel many false ideas which still obtain in Europe

and America regarding the position of various Powers in China--ideas

based on data which have long been declared of no value by those

competent to judge. In the third place, the vivid and terrible

description of the sack of Peking by the soldiery of Europe, showing the

demoralisation into which all troops fall as soon as the iron hand of

discipline is relaxed, may set finally at rest the mutual recriminations

which have since been levelled publicly and privately. Everybody was

tarred with the same brush. Those arm-chair critics who have been too

prone to state that brutalities no longer mark the course of war may

reconsider their words, and remember that sacking, with all the

accompanying excesses, is still regarded as the divine right of soldiery

unless the provost-marshal's gallows stand ready. In the fourth place,

those who still believe that the representatives assigned to Eastern

countries need only be second-rate men--reserving for Europe the

master-minds--may begin to ask themselves seriously whether the time has

not come when only the most capable and brilliant diplomatic

officials--men whose intelligence will help to shape events and not be

led by them, and who will act with iron firmness when the time for such

action comes--should be assigned to such a difficult post as Peking. In

the fifth place, the strange idea, which refuses to be eradicated, that

the Chinese showed themselves in this Peking seige once and for all

incompetent to carry to fruition any military plan, may be somewhat

corrected by the plain and convincing terms in which the eye-witness

describes the manner in which they stayed their hand whenever it could

have slain, and the silent struggle which the Moderates of Chinese

politics must have waged to avert the catastrophe by merely gaining time

and allowing the Desperates to dash themselves to pieces when the

inevitable swing of the pendulum took place. Finally, it will not escape

notice that many remarks borne out all through the narrative tend to

show that British diplomacy in the Far East was at one time at a low

ebb.

Of course the Peking seige has already been amply described in many

volumes and much magazine literature. Dr. Morrison, the famous Peking

correspondent of the _Times_, informs me that he has in his library no

less than forty-three accounts in English alone. The majority of

these, however, are not as complete or enlightening as they might be;

nor has the extraordinarily dramatic nature of the Warning, the Siege,

and the Sack been shown. Thus few people, outside of a small circle in

the Far East, have been able to understand from such accounts what

actually occurred in Peking, or to realise the nature of the fighting

which took place. The two best accounts, Dr. Morrison's own statement

and the French Minister's graphic report-to his government, were both

written rather to fix the principal events immediately after they had

occurred than to attempt to probe beneath the surface, or to deal with

the strictly personal or private side. Nor did they embrace that most

remarkable portion of the Boxer year, the entire sack of Peking and

the extraordinary scenes which marked this latter-day Vandalism. A

veil has been habitually drawn over these little-known events, but in

the narrative which follows it is boldly lifted for the first time.

The eye-witness whose account follows was careful to establish with as

much lucidity as possible each phase of existence during five months

of extraordinary interest. Much in these notes has had to be

suppressed for many reasons, and much that remains may create some

astonishment. Yet it is well to remember that "one eye-witness,

however dull and prejudiced, is worth a wilderness of sentimental

historians." The historians are already beginning to arise; these

pages may serve as a corrective to many erroneous ideas. Perhaps some

also will allow that this curious tragedy, swept into Peking and

playing madly round the entrenched European Legations, has intense

human interest still. The vague terror which oppressed everyone

before the storm actually burst; the manner in which the feeble chain

of fighting men were locked round the European lines, and suffered

grievously but were providentially saved from annihilation; the

curious way in which diplomacy made itself felt from time to time only

to disappear as the rude shock of events taking place near Tientsin

and the sea were reflected in Peking; the final coming of the strange

relief--all these points and many others are made in such a manner

that everyone should be able to understand and to believe. The

description of the last act of the upheaval--the complete sack of

Peking--shows clearly how the lust for loot gains all men, and hand in

hand invites such terrible things as wholesale rape and murder.

The eye-witness attempts to account for all that happened; to make

real and living the hoarse roll of musketry, the savage cries of

desperadoes stripped to the waist and glistening in their sweat; to

give echo to the blood-curdling notes of Chinese trumpets; to limn the

tall mountains of flames licking sky high. If there is failure in

these efforts, it is due to the editing.

The summer of 1900 in Peking will ever remain as famous in the annals

of the world's history as the Indian Mutiny; it was something unique

and unparalleled. With the curious movements now at work in the Far

East, it may not be unwise to study the story again. And after Port

Arthur these pages may show something about which little has been

written--the psychology of the seige. The seige is still the rudest

test in the world. It is well to know it.

B. L. PUTNAM WEALE.

CHINA, June, 1906.

INDISCREET LETTERS FROM PEKING

PART I--THE WARNING

FRAGMENTS

12th May, 1900.

* * * * *

The weather is becoming hot, even here in latitude 40 and in the month

of May. The Peking dust, distinguished among all the dusts of the

earth for its blackness, its disagreeable insistence in sticking to

one's clothes, one's hair, one's very eyebrows, until a grey-brown

coating its visible to every eye, is rising in heavier clouds than

ever. In the market-places, and near the great gates of the city,

where Peking carts and camels from beyond the passes--_k'ou wai_, to

use the correct vernacular--jostle one another, the dust has become

damnable beyond words, and there can be no health possibly in us. The

Peking dust rises, therefore, in clouds and obscures the very sun at

times; for the sun always shines here in our Northern China, except

during a brief summer rainy season, and a few other days you can count

on your fingers. The dust is without significance, you will say, since

it is always there more or less. It is in any case--healthy; it chokes

you, but is reputed also to choke germs; therefore it is good. All of

which is true, only this year there is more of it than ever, meaning

very dry weather indeed for this city, hanging near the gates of

Mongolian deserts--a dry weather spelling the devil for the Northern

farmer.

Meanwhile, is there anything special for me to chronicle? Not much,

although there is a cloud no bigger than your hand in Shantung not a

thousand miles from Weihaiwei, and the German Legation is consequently

somewhat irate. It was noticed at our club, for instance, which, by

the way, is a humble affair, that the German military attache, a

gentleman who wears bracelets, is somewhat effeminate, and plays vile

tennis and worse billiards, had a "hostile attitude" towards the

British Legation--that is, such of the British Legation as gather

together each day at the "ice-shed"--which happens to be the club's

peculiar Chinese name. The military attache is somewhat irate, because

the spectacle of the Weihaiwei regiment, six hundred yellow men under

twelve white Englishmen, chasing malcontents in Shantung, is

derogatory to Teutonic aspirations. Germany has earmarked Shantung,

and it is just like English bluntness to remind the would-be dominant

Power that there is a British sphere and a British colony in the

Chinese province, as well as a German sphere and a German colony. But

the German Minister, a _beau garcon_ with blue eyes and a handsome

moustache, says nothing, and is quite calm.

Meanwhile the cloud no bigger than your hand is quite unremarked by

the rank and file of Legation Street--that I will swear. Chinese

malcontents--"the Society of Harmonious Fists," particular habitat

Shantung province--are casually mentioned; but it is remembered that

the provincial governor of Shantung is a strong Chinaman, one Yuan

Shih-kai, who has some knowledge of military matters, and, better

still, ten thousand foreign-drilled troops. Shantung is all right,

never fear--such is the comment of the day.

But the political situation--the _situation politique_ as we call it

in our several conversations, which always have a diplomatic

turn--although not grave, is unhappy; everybody at least acknowledges

that. Peking has never been what it was before the Japanese war. In

the old days we were all something of a happy family. There were

merely the eleven Legations, the Inspectorate of Chinese Customs, with

the aged Sir R---- H---- at its head, and perhaps a few favoured

globe-trotters or nondescripts looking for rich concessions. Picnics

and dinners, races and excursions, were the order of the day, and

politics and political situations were not burning. Ministers

plenipotentiary and envoys extraordinary wore Terai hats, very old

clothes, and had an affable air--something like what Teheran must

still be. Then came the Japanese war, and the eternal political

situation. Russia started the ball rolling and the others kicked it

along. The Russo-Chinese Bank, appeared on the scenes led by the great

P----, a man with an ominous black portfolio continually under his

arm, as he hurried along Legation Street, and an intriguing expression

always on his dark face--a veritable master of men and moneys, they

say. This intriguing soon found Expression in the Cassini Convention,

denounced as untrue, and followed by a perfectly open and frank

Manchurian railway convention, a convention which, in spite of its

frankness, had future trouble written unmistakably on the face of it.

Besides these things there were always ominous reports of other

things--of great things being done secretly.

After the Russo-Chinese Bank and the Manchurian railway business,

there was the Kiaochow affair, then the Port Arthur affair, the

Weihaiwei and Kwangchowwan affairs, nothing but "affairs" all tending

in the same direction--the making of a very grave political situation.

The juniors to-day make fun of it, it is true, and greet each other

daily with the salutation, "_La situation politique est tres grave_,"

and laugh at the good words. But it is grave notwithstanding the

laughter. Once in 1899, after the Empress Dowager's _coup d'etat_ and

the virtual imprisonment of the Emperor, Legation Guards had to be

sent for, a few files for each of the Legations that possess squadrons

in the Far East, and, what is more, these guards had to stay for a

good many months. The guards are now no more, but it is curious that

the men they came mainly to protect us against--Tung Fu-hsiang's

Mohammedan braves from the savage back province of Kansu who love the

reactionary Empress Dowager--are still encamped near the Northern

capital.

The old Peking society has therefore vanished, and in its place are

highly suspicious and hostile Legations--Legations petty in their

conceptions of men and things--Legations bitterly disliking one

another--in fact, Legations richly deserving all they get, some of the

cynics say.

The Peking air, as I have already said, is highly electrical and

unpleasant in these hot spring days with the dust rising in heavy

clouds. Squabbling and cantankerous, rather absurd and petty, the

Legations are spinning their little threads, each one hedged in by

high walls in its own compound and by the debatable question of the

_situation politique_.

Outside and around us roars the noise of the Tartar city. At night the

noise ceases, for the inner and outer cities are closed to one another

by great gates; but at midnight the gates are opened by sleepy Manchu

guards for a brief ten minutes, so that gorgeous red and blue-trapped

carts, drawn by sleek mules, may speed into the Imperial City for the

Daybreak Audience with the Throne. These conveyances contain the high

officials of the Empire. It has been noticed by a Legation stroller on

the Wall--the Tartar Wall--that the number of carts passing in at

midnight is far greater than usual; that the guards of the city gates

now and again stop and question a driver. It is nothing.

Meanwhile the dust rises in clouds. It is very dry this year--that is

all.

MUTTERINGS

24th May, 1900.

* * * * *

We are beginning to call them Boxers--grudgingly and sometimes harking

back and giving them their full name, "Society of Harmonious Fists,"

or the "Righteous Harmony Fist Society"; but still a beginning has

been made, and they are becoming Boxers by the inevitable process of

shortening which distinguishes speech.

have been talking about them a good deal to-day, these Boxers,

since it has been the birthday of her most excellent Majesty Queen

Victoria, and the British Legation has been _en fete_. Her Majesty's

Minister, in fine, has been entertaining us in the vast and princely

gardens of the British Legation at his own expense. Weird Chinese

lanterns have been lighted in the evening and slung around the

grounds; champagne has been flowing with what effervescence it could

muster; the eleven Legations and the nondescripts have forgotten their

cares for a brief space and have been enjoying the evening air and the

music of Sir R---- H----'s Chinese band. Looking at lighted lanterns,

drinking champagne cup, listening to a Chinese band--where the devil

is the protocol and the political situation, you will say? Not quite

forgotten, since the French Minister attracted the attention of many

all the evening by his vehement manner. I pushed up once, too, and

with a polite bow listened to what he was saying. Ah, the old words,

the eternal words, the political situation, or the _situation

politique_, whichever way you like to use them. But still you listen a

bit, for it is droll to hear the yet unaccustomed word Boxers in

French. "_Les Boxeurs_," he says; and what the French Minister says is

always worth listening to, since he has the best Intelligence corps in

the world--the Catholic priests of China--at his disposal.

Curiously enough, he was speaking of the arch-priest of priests,

renowned above all others in this Peking world, Monseigneur F----,

Vicar Apostolic of the Manchu capital--almost Vicar of God to

countless thousands of dark-yellow converts. It is Monseigneur F----'s

letter of the 19th May, written but five days ago, and already locally

famous through leakage, which was the subject-matter of his impromptu

oration. Monseigneur F---- wrote and demanded a guard of marines for

his cathedral, his people and his chattels--_quarante ou cinquante

marins pour proteger nos personnes et nos biens_, were his exact

words, and his request has been cruelly refused by the Council of

Ministers on the ground that it is absurd. The Vicar Apostolic,

however, gave his grounds for making such a demand calmly and

logically--depicted the damage already done by an anti-foreign and

revolutionary movement in the districts not a thousand miles from

Peking, and solemnly forecasted what was soon to happen....

The French Minister was irate and raised his fat hands above his fat

person, took a discreet look around him, and then hinted that it was

this Legation, the British Legation, which stopped the marines from

coming.

The French Minister was quite irate, and after his discourse was ended

he slipped quietly away--possibly to send some more telegrams. The

crumbs of his conversation were soon gathered up and distributed and

the conviviality somewhat damped. As yet, however, the Boxers are only

laughed at and are not taken quite seriously. They have killed native

Christians, it is true, and it has been proved conclusively now that

it was they who murdered Brooks, the English missionary in Shantung.

But Englishmen are cheap, since there is a glut in the home market,

and their government merely gets angry with them when they get into

trouble and are killed. So many are always getting killed in China.

So the Boxers, with half the governments of Europe, led by England, as

we know by our telegrams, seeking to minimise their importance--in

fact, trying to stifle the movement by ignoring it or lavishing on it

their supreme contempt--have already moved from their particular

habitat, which is Shantung, into the metropolitan province of Chihli.

Already they are in some force at Chochou, only seventy miles to the

southeast of Peking--always massacring, always advancing, and driving

in bodies of native Christians before them on their march. Nobody

cares very much, however, except a vicar apostolic, who urgently

requests forty or fifty marines or sailors "to protect our persons and

our chattels." Foolish bishop he is, is he not, when Christians have

been expressly born to be massacred? Does he not know his history?

Lead on, blind ministers plenipotentiary and envoys extraordinary;

lead on, with your eternal political situations in embryo, your

eternal political situations that have not yet hatched out; while one

that is more pregnant than any you have ever conceived is already

born under your very noses and is being sniffed at by you. But no

matter what happens outside, Peking is safe, that is your dictum, and

the dictum of the day. So, yawning and somewhat tired of the evening's

convivialities, we go our several ways home, in our Peking carts and

our official chairs, and are soon lost in sleep--dreaming, perhaps,

that we have been too long in this dry Northern climate, and that it

is really affecting one's nerves.

III

OVERCAST SKIES

28th May, 1900.

* * * * *

It is only four days since we discussed the Vicar Apostolic's letter,

and laughed somewhat at French excitability; but in four days what a

change! The cloud no bigger than your hand is now bigger than your

whole body, bigger, indeed, than the combined bodies of all your

neighbours, supposing you could spread them fantastically in great

layers across the skies. What, then, has happened?

It is that the Boxers, christened by us, as you will remember, but two

or three short weeks ago, have blossomed forth with such fierce growth

that they have become the men of the hour to the exclusion of

everything else, and were one to believe one tithe of the talk

babbling all around, the whole earth is shaking with them. Yet it is a

very local affair--a thing concerning only a tiny portion of a

half-known corner of the world. But for us it is sufficiently grave.

The Peking-Paotingfu railway is being rapidly destroyed; Fentai

station, but six miles from Peking--think of it, only six miles from

this Manchu holy of holies--has gone up in flames; a great steel

bridge has succumbed to the destroying energy of dynamite. All the

European engineers have fled into Peking; and, worst of all, the Boxer

banners have been unfurled; and lo and behold, as they floated in the

breeze, the four dread characters, "_Pao Ch'ing Mien Yang_," have been

read on blood-red bunting--"Death and destruction to the foreigner and

all his works and loyal support to the great Ching dynasty."

Is that sufficiently enthralling, or should I add that the

invulnerability of the Boxer has been officially and indisputably

tested by the Manchus, according to the gossip of the day? Proceeding

to the Boxer camp at Chochou, duly authorised officers of the Crown

have seen recruits, who have performed all the dread rites, and are

initiated, stand fearlessly in front of a full-fledged Boxer; have

seen that Boxer load up his blunderbuss with powder, ramming down a

wad on top; have witnessed a handful of iron buckshot added, but with

no wad to hold the charge in place; have noticed that the master Boxer

gesticulated with his lethal weapon the better to impress his audience

before he fired, but have not noticed that the iron buckshot tripped

merrily out of the rusty barrel since no wad held it in place; and

finally, when the fire-piece belched forth flames and ear-breaking

noise at a distance of a man's body from the recruit's person, they

have seen, and with them thousands of others, that no harm came. It is

astounding, miraculous, but it is true; henceforth, the Boxer is

officially invulnerable and must remain so as long as the ground is

parched. That is what our Chinese reports say.

There are myriads of men already in camp and myriads more speeding on

their way to this Chochou camp of camps, while in village and hamlet

local committees of public safety against the accursed foreigner and

all his works are being quite naturally evolved, and red cloth--that

sign manual of revolt--is already at a premium. The whole-province of

Chihli is shaking; North China will soon be in flames; any one with

half a nose can smell rebellion in the air....

This is one side of the picture, the side which friendly Chinese are

painting for us. Yet when you glance at the eleven Legations, placidly

living their own little lives, you will see them cynically listening

to these old women's tales, while at heart they secretly wonder what

political capital each of them can separately make out of the whole

business, so that their governments may know that Peking has clever

diplomats. Clever diplomats! There have been no clever diplomats in

Peking since G---- of the French Legation took his departure, and that

purring Slav P---- went to Seoul.

Of course Peking is safe, that goes without saying; but merely because

there are foolish women and children, some nondescripts, and a good

many missionaries, we will order a few guards. This, at least, has

just been decided by the Council of Ministers--a rather foolish

council, without backbone, excepting one man. All the afternoon

everybody was occupied in telegraphing the orders and reports of the

day, and these actions are now beyond recall.

Guards have been ordered from the ships lying out at the Taku bar. The

guards will soon be here, and when they have come the movement will

cease. Thus have the eleven Legations spoken, each telegraphing a

different tale to its government, and each more than annoyed by this

joint action. Incidentally each one is secretly wondering what is

going to happen, and whether there is really any danger.

It has been directly telegraphed from London by Her Majesty's

Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Lord Salisbury, so gossip says, that as

quite enough has been heard of this Boxer business it must cease at

once. Is not the South African War still proceeding, and has England

not enough troubles without this additional one? It is almost

pathetic, this peremptory order from a vacillating Foreign Office that

never knows its own mind--this Canute-like bidding of the angry waves

of human men to stand still at once and be no more heard of. People in

Europe will never quite understand the East, for the East is ruled by

things which are impossible in a temperate climate.

Meanwhile, in the Palace, whose pink walls we see blinking at us in

the sun just beyond Legation Street, all is also topsy-turvy, the

Chinese reports say. The Empress Dowager, shrewdly listening to this

person and that, must feel in her own bones that it is a bad business,

and that it will not end well, for she understands dynastic disasters

uncommonly well. She has sent again and again for P'i Hsiao-li,

"Cobbler's-wax" Li, as he is called, the reputed false eunuch who is

master of her inner counsels, if Chinese small talk is to be believed.

The eunuch Li has been told earnestly to find out the truth and

nothing but the truth. A passionate old woman, this Empress Dowager of

China, a veritable Catherine of Russia in her younger days they say,

with her hot Manchu blood and her lust for ruling men. "Cobbler's-wax"

Li, son of a cobbler and falsely emasculated, they say, so that he

might become an eunuch of the Palace, from which lowly estate he has

blossomed into the real power behind the Throne, hastens off once more

to the palace of Prince Tuan, the father of the titular heir-apparent.

As Prince Tuan's discretion has long since been cast to the winds,

and Lao t'uan-yeh, or spiritual Boxer chiefs, now sit at the princely

banqueting tables discussing the terms on which they will rush the

Tartar city with their flags unfurled and their yelling forces behind

them, a foolish and irresolute government, made up of the most diverse

elements, and a rouge-smirched Empress Dowager, will then have to side

with them or be begulfed too. Anxiously listening, "Cobbler's-wax" Li

weights the odds, for no fool is this false eunuch, who through his

manly charms leads an Empress who in turn leads an empire. Half

suspicious and wholly unconvinced, he questions and demands the exact

number of invulnerables that can be placed in line; and is forthwith

assured, with braggart Chinese choruses, that they are as locusts,

that the whole earth swarms with them, that the movement is

unconquerable. Still unconvinced, the false eunuch takes his

departure, and then the Throne decrees and counter decrees in agonised

Edicts. It is noticed, too, that the distributors of the official

organ, the _Peking Gazette_, no longer staidly walk their rounds,

pausing to gossip with their friends, but run with their wooden-block

printed Edicts wet from the presses, and shout indiscreetly to the

passers-by, "Aside, our business is important." In all faith there is

something in this movement. It is also noticed that roughness and

rudeness are growing in the streets; little things that are always the

precursors of the coming storm in the East are freely indulged in, and

"foreign devil" is now almost a chorus. The atmosphere is obviously

unwholesome, but guards have been ordered and it will soon be well.

All these other things of which I speak are merely native reports....

Meanwhile each Legation does not forget its dignity, but walks

stolidly alone. Alone in front of the French Legation is there some

commotion almost hourly. It is, however, only the arrival and

departure of Catholic priests posting to and from the Pei-t'ang about

that little business of forty or fifty marines _pour proteger nos

personnes et nos biens_, that is all. A singularly importunate fellow

this Monseigneur F----, our most reverend Vicar Apostolic of the

Manchu capital.

OUR GUARDS ARRIVE

31st May, 1900.

* * * * *

We had been dining out, a number of us, this evening, with result that

the good wine and the good fare, for the Peking markets are admirable,

left us reasonably content and in quite a valorous spirit. The party I

was at was neither very large nor very small; we were eighteen, to be

exact, and the political situation was represented in all its gravity

by the presence of a Minister and his spouse. The former has always

been pessimistic, and so we had Boxers for soup, Boxers with the

_entrees_, and Boxers to the end. In fact, if the truth be told, the

Boxers surrounded us in a constant vapour of words so formidable that

one might well have reason to be alarmed. P----, the Minister, was,

indeed, very talkative and gesticulative; his wife was sad and sighed

constantly--_elle poussait des soupirs tristes_--at the lurid

spectacle her husband's words conjured up. According to him, anything

was possible. There might be sudden massacres in Peking itself--the

Chinese Government had gone mad. Rendered more and more talkative by

the wine and the good fare, he became alarming, menacing in the end.

But we became more and more valiant as we ate and drank. That is

always so.

It was all the guards' fault. Telegrams despatched in the morning from

Tientsin distinctly told us that the guards were entraining; later

news said the guards had actually started; and yet when we were almost

through dinner, and it was nearly ten o'clock, there was not a sign of

them. That was the distressing point, and in the end, as it thrust

itself more and more on people's attention, the first great valour

began to ooze. For although the Guardian of the Nine Gates--a species

of Manchu warden or grand constable of Peking--has been officially

warned that foreign guards, whose arrival has been duly authorised by

the Tsung-li Yamen, may be a little late and that consequently the

Ch'ien Men, or the Middle Gate, should be kept open a couple of hours

longer, the chief guardian may become nervous and irate and

incontinently shut the gates. This alone might provoke an outbreak.

This train of thought once started, we busily followed it up, and soon

all the wives were sighing in unison more heavily than ever. I shall

always remember what happened at that psychological moment. A strip of

red-lined native writing-paper was placed in somebody's hands with a

long list of the different detachments which had just passed in

through the Main Gate. At last the guards had arrived. Speedily we

became very valorous again. P---- afterwards said that he knew

something which he had not dared to tell any one--not even his

secretaries.

From this little list, it was soon clear that the British, French,

Russian, American, Italian, and Japanese detachments had arrived. The

Germans and the Austrians were missing, but we concluded that they

would arrive by another train within very few hours. The important

point was that men had been allowed to come through--that the Chinese

Government, in spite of its enormous capacity for mischief, could not

yet have made up its mind how to act. That consoled us.

After this, a faint-hearted attempt was made to continue our talk. But

it was no good. We soon discovered that each one of us had been

simulating a false interest in our never-ending discussion. We really

wished to see with our own eyes these Legation Guards who might still

save the situation.

Strolling out in the warm night, just as we were, we first came on

them in the French Legation. The French detachment were merely sailors

belonging to what they call their _Compagnies de debarquement_, and

they were all brushing each other down and cursing the _sacree

poussiere_. Such a leading _motif_ has this Peking dust become that

the very sailors notice it. Also we found two priests from Monseigneur

F----'s Cathedral, sitting in the garden and patiently waiting for the

Minister's return. I heard afterwards that they would not move until

P---- decided that twenty-five sailors should march the next day to

the Cathedral--in fact at daylight.

In all the Legations I found it was much the same thing--the men of

the various detachments were brushing each other down and exchanging

congratulations that they had been picked for Peking service. It was,

perhaps, only because they were so glad to be allotted shore-duty

after interminable service afloat off China's muddy coasts that they

congratulated one another; but it might be also because they had heard

tell throughout the fleets that the men who had come in '98, after the

_coup d'etat_, had had the finest time which could be imagined--all

loafing and no duties. They did not seem to understand or suspect....

I found later in the night that there had actually been a little

trouble at the Tientsin station. The British had tried to get through

a hundred marines instead of the maximum of seventy-five which had

been agreed on. The Chinese authorities had then refused to let the

train go, and although an English ship's captain had threatened to

hang the station-master, in the end the point was won by the Chinese.

By one or two in the morning everybody was very gay, walking about and

having drinks with one another, and saying that it was all right now.

Then it was that I remembered that it was already June--the historic

month which has seen more crises than any other--and I became a little

gloomy again. It was so terribly sultry and dry that it seemed as if

anything could happen. I felt convinced that the guards were too few.

THE PLOT THICKENS

4th June, 1900.

* * * * *

No matter in what light you look at it, you realise that somehow--in

some wonderful, inexplicable manner--normal conditions have ceased

long ago--in the month of May, I believe. The days, which a couple of

weeks ago had but twenty-four hours, have now at least forty-two. You

cannot exactly say why this strange state of affairs obtains, for as

yet there is nothing very definite to fix upon, and you have

absolutely no physical sensation of fear; but the mercury of both the

barometer and the thermometer has been somehow badly shaken, and the

mainsprings of all watches and clocks, although still much as the

mainsprings of clocks and watches in other parts of the

world--bringing your mind to bear on it you know they are exactly the

same--are merely mechanism, and allow the day to have at least

forty-two hours. It is strange, is it not, and you begin to understand

vaguely some of the quite impossible Indian metaphysics which tell you

gravely that what is, is not, and that what is not can still be.... In

the crushing heat you can understand that.

Perhaps it is all because the hours are now split into ten separate

and different parts by the fierce rumours which rage for a few minutes

and then, dissipating their strength through their very violence, die

away as suddenly as they came. The air is charged with electricity of

human passions until it throbs painfully, and then.... You are

merrily eating your _tiffin_ or your dinner, and quite calmly cursing

your "_boy_" because something is not properly iced. Your "_boy_," who

is a Bannerman or Manchu and of Roman Catholic family, as are all

servants of polite Peking society, does not move a muscle nor show any

passing indignation, as he would were the ordinary rules and

regulations of life still in existence. He, like everyone of the

hundreds of thousands of Peking and the millions of North China, is

waiting--waiting more patiently than impatient Westerners, but waiting

just as anxiously; waiting with ear wide open to every rumour; waiting

with an eye on every shadow--to know whether the storm is going to

break or blow away. There is something disconcerting, startling,

unseemly in being waited on by those who you know are in turn waiting

on battle, murder, and sudden death. You feel that something may come

suddenly at any moment, and though you do not dare to speak your

thoughts to your neighbour, these thoughts are talking busily to you

without a second's interruption. For if this storm truly comes, it

must sweep everything before it and blot us all out in a horrible way.

Our servants tell us so.

These servants of polite Peking society are favoured mortals, for they

one and all are of the Eight Banners, direct descendants of the Manchu

conquerors of China. And, strangely enough, although they are thus

directly tied to the Manchu dynasty, and that some of them may be even

Red Girdles or lineal descendants of collateral branches of the

Imperial house, they are still more tightly tied to the foreigner

because they are Roman Catholic dating from the early days of

Verbiest and Schall, when the Jesuits were all supreme. On Sundays and

feast days they all proceed to the Vicar Apostolic's own northern

cathedral, and witness the Elevation of the Host to the discordant and

strange sound of Chinese firecrackers, a curious accompaniment,

indeed, permitted only by Catholic complacency. This they love more

than the Throne.

Your Bannerman servant is now the medium of bringing in countless

rumours which he barefacedly alleges are facts, and in impressing on

you that everyone must certainly die unless we quickly act. The three

Roman Catholic Cathedrals of Peking, placed at three points of the

compass, are almost strategic centres surrounded by whole lanes and

districts of Catholics captured to the tenets of Christ, or that

portion deemed sufficient for yellow men, in ages gone by. Every

household of these people during the past few weeks has seen

fellow-religionists from the country places running in sorely

distressed in body and mind, and but ill-equipped in money and means

for this impromptu escape to the capital which everyone vainly hopes

generally is to be a sanctuary. The refugees, it is true, do not

receive all the sympathy they expect, for the Peking Catholic being

the oldest and most mature in the eighteen provinces of China, holds

his head very high, and "new people"--that is, those whose families

have only been baptized, let us say, during the nineteenth

century--are somewhat disdained. In a word, the Peking cathedrals and

their Manchu and other adherents are the Blacks; and not even in papal

Rome could this aristocracy in religion be excelled. But although the

newcomers are disdained, their news is not. Everything they say is

believed. The servants, therefore, browsing rumours wherever they go,

bring back a curious hotchpotch after each separate excursion.

Sometimes the balance swings this way, sometimes that; sometimes it is

ominously black, sometimes only cloudy. You never know what it will be

ten minutes hence, and you must content yourself as best you can. Your

body-servant being a Bannerman (my particular one is a Manchu), and

being reasonably young, is also a reservist of the Peking Field Force,

and consorts with other Bannermen who may be actually on guard at one

of the Palace gates. Who passes in and who passes out of the Palace

now spreads like wildfire round the whole city, for the success of the

Boxers will depend upon the support the Peking Government intends to

give them when the worst comes to the worst. And the Peking Government

is still fencing, because the Palace cannot make up its mind whether

the time has really come when it must act. This lack of decision is

fatal.

Late in the afternoon it transpired that the Empress Dowager was not

in the Imperial city at all, but out at the Summer Palace on the

Wan-shou-shan--the hills of ten thousand ages, as these are poetically

called. Tung Fu-hsiang, whose ruffianly Kansu braves were marched out

of the Chinese city--that is the outer ring of Peking--two nights

before the Legation Guards came in, is also with the Empress, for his

cavalry banners, made of black and blue velvet, with blood-red

characters splashed splendidly across them, have been seen planted at

the foot of the hills. Tung Fu-hsiang is an invincible one, who

stamped out the Kansu rebellion a few years ago with such fierceness

that his name strikes terror to-day into every Chinese heart. As for

P'i Hsiao-li--the false eunuch--he is everywhere, they say, sometimes

here, sometimes there, and quite defying search. The eunuch has a

mighty fortune at stake, and all natives believe that he will betray

himself. Half the pawnshops and banks of Peking belong to him, and he

will not sacrifice his thirty million taels until he is convinced that

his head is at stake. The Summer Palace lies but a dozen miles beyond

Peking's embattled walls, and from the top, straining your eyes to the

west, you can vaguely see the Empress's plaisaunce. A journey in and

out is nothing by cart, and this favoured eunuch has the best mules in

the Empire--black jennets fifteen hands high--and is using them night

and day. And so everyone is asking again and again whether the

Empress has arranged with Prince Tuan, since that is the burning

question; and did this eunuch of eunuchs have his fateful confidential

interview with the secret Boxer leaders, which was to decide finally

on extermination.

The families of other palace eunuchs say yes, and the wife of one

eunuch, living near the South Cathedral, is quite positive, my

servants inform me. Wife of a eunuch, did I say? You will think me

mad, but it is nevertheless true, for Chinese eunuchs have wives. Why

have they wives, you will ask, since they are only half men, and

cannot perform the duties of the male? Well, I can only answer as did

my teacher once when I asked him years ago. "Eunuchs are still men,"

he said, smiling doubtfully, "insomuch as they like homes of their own

beyond the Palace walls and desire children to play with. Since their

wives can bear no children they buy children from poor people, and

these duly become their own. Thus when the eunuch dies he has children

to worship at his grave." In this land of mystery even eunuchs can

correctly become ancestors. Yet this is a trivial detail which I

should not speak of.

So the eunuch's wife living near the South Cathedral, who gossips with

her Black Catholic neighbours, and whose gossip gives me news many

times a day, avers most positively that the chief eunuch has been in

town--that the whole matter has been decided--and that every foreigner

will die. And very late in the evening my Manchu servant rushed in on

me with his eyes sparkling strangely, and his voice so hoarse with

excitement that he did not speak, but shout. "Master," he cried, "I

have seen myself this time; three long carts full of swords and spears

have passed in from the outer city through the Ha-ta Gate. The city

guards stopped and questioned the drivers--then let them go. They had

a pass from the Governor of Peking, and the people all say it is now

coming." Now do you wonder about our clocks and our watches, and our

time? Nothing can ever be normal again until this terrible question is

solved.

THE LICKING FLAMES APPROACH

9th June 1900.

* * * * *

It is getting desperate, of that there is now no shadow of doubt. The

Tientsin trains that have been lately running more and more slowly and

irregularly, as if they, too, were waiting on the pleasure of the

coming storm, are going to run no more, and the odds are heavily

against to-day's train ever reaching its destination. It is true these

trains have long ceased running as far as we are personally concerned,

for the weariness of living forty-two hours during twenty-four dulls

one's perception of everything excepting one's immediate surroundings.

And even one's surroundings are somehow shrinking until they will soon

be but the four walls of a courtyard. But about the trains--why are

they stopping? Because the licking flames are approaching so near that

they will soon overwhelm all who are concerned with the running of

trains unless they disappear very nimbly. One of the Chinese railway

managers, an educated man in the Western sense who can quote

Shakespeare, has been all over Legation Street yesterday and to-day,

pointing out the hopelessness of the general position and almost

openly urging the Legations to call on Europe to take steps. General

Nieh, an intelligent general, with foreign-drilled troops, has indeed

been fitfully ordered by Imperial Edict to "protect the railway," and

to keep communication open, but this order has already come to

nothing, and the position is worse than it was before. His troops,

merely desirous of testing their brand-new Mausers, and as calmly

cruel as only Easterns can be, did open a heavy fire a day or two ago

on some Boxer marauders who had strayed into a station on the

Tientsin-Peking line, and proposed to crucify the native

station-master and beat all others, who were indirectly eating the

foreign devils' rice by working on the railway, into lumps of jelly.

General Nieh's men let their rifles crash off, not because their

sympathies were against the Boxers, but probably because every living

man armed with a rifle loves to fire at another living man when he can

do so without harm to himself. This is my brutal explanation. But in

any case these soldiers have now been marched off in semi-disgrace to

their camp at Lutai, a few miles to the north of Tientsin, and told

never to do such rash and indiscreet things again. That means the end

of any attempts to control. For the Boxer partisans in Peking allege

that the soldiers actually hit and killed a good many men, which is

quite without precedent, and is upsetting all plans. On such occasions

it is always understood that you fire a little in the air, warwhoop a

good deal, and then come back quietly to camp with captured flags and

banners as undeniable evidences of your victory. This has been the old

method of making domestic war in China--the only one.

But all this is many miles from the sacred capital. The cry is still

that we of Peking are safe, and that even if this is to be a true

rebellion we cannot be hurt. The cry, however, is not so lusty as it

was even three or four days ago, and, indeed, has only become an

official cry--that is, one you are permitted to contradict privately

when you meet your dear colleagues in the street and wonder aloud

what is really going to happen. In the despatches Peking is still

quite safe, although unwholesome. Yet our own private political

situations, of which we were so proud and talked so vauntingly, have

all now disappeared, miserable things, and are quite lost and

forgotten. No one cares to talk about them. People merely say that all

business is temporarily suspended; that we must wait and merely mark

time.

But we discovered something worth knowing at the last moment to-day

which is, without any doubt, true. The Empress Dowager returned to-day

from the Summer Palace, and is now actually in the Forbidden City. We

are at a loss to know exactly as yet what this means, and whether it

is an augury of good or of bad. The Winter Palace is so near us; it is

just to the west of us. The fact that the redoubtable Tung Fu-hsiang

rode behind his Imperial mistress with his banner-bearers flaunting

their colours and his trumpets blaring as loudly as possible is,

however, not very reassuring. It seemed like defiance and treachery.

But at first, in spite of the Empress's entry, there were not many

rumours accompanying her; in the late afternoon they came so thick and

fast that no one had time to write them down. But of rumours we have

had more than our bellyful. Let me tell some of the facts.

First and foremost. The racecourse grand-stand where less than a month

ago we were all watching the struggles for victory between our various

short-legged ponies, has gone up in flames and puff--just like

that--the social battle-ground is no more. The Boxers, for everybody

who does anything nowadays is a Boxer, tried to grill our official

caretakers on the red-hot bricks, but the neighbouring village came to

the rescue and shouted the marauders out of the place. That is the

nearest danger which has been heard of. Immediately after this some

Legation students, riding out on the sands under the Tartar Wall, were

openly attacked by spear-armed men, and only escaped by galloping

furiously and firing the revolvers which everyone now carries. Most

important of all, however, to us is that aged Sir R---- H---- is

hauling down his colours, and has been rapidly calling in all his

scattered staff who live near the premises of the Tsung-li

Yamen--China's Foreign Office. Here we are, the Legations of all

Europe, with five hundred sailors and marines cleaning their rifles

and marking out distances in the capital of a so-called friendly

Power; with our _pro forma_ despatches still being despatched while

our real messages are frightened; attempting to weather a storm which

the Chinese Government is powerless to arrest. The very passers-by are

becoming sheep-eyed and are looking at us askance.

Passers-by, did I say? But do not imagine from this that there are

many of these, for the Chinese have been for days avoiding the

Legation quarter as if it were plague-stricken, and sounds that were

so roaring a few weeks ago are now daily becoming more and more

scarce. A blight is settling on us, for we are accursed by the whole

population of North China, and who knows what will be the fate of

those seen lurking near the foreigner?

And now when we wander even in our own streets--that is, those

abutting immediately on our compounds of the Legation area--a new

nickname salutes our ears. No longer are we mere _yang kuei-tzu_,

foreign devils; we have risen to the proud estate of _ta mao-tzu_, or

long-haired ones of the first class. _Mao-tzu_ is a term of some

contemptuous strength, since _mao_ is the hair of animals, and our

barbarian heads are not even shaved. The _ta_--great or first

class--is also significant, because behind our own detested class

press two others deserving of almost equal contempt at the hands of

all believers in divine Boxerism. These are _ehr-mao-tzu_ and _san

mao-tzu_, second and third class coarse-haired ones. All good converts

belong to the second class, and death awaits them, our servants say;

while as to the third category, all having any sort of connection,

direct or indirect with the foreigner and his works are lumped

indiscriminately together in this one, and should be equally detested.

The small talk of the tea-shops now even says that officials having a

few sticks of European furniture in their houses are _san mao-tzu_. It

is very significant, too, this open talk in the tea-shops, because in

official Peking, the very centre of the enormous, loose-jointed

Empire, political gossip is severely disliked and the four characters,

"_mo t'an kuo shih_" (eschew political discussions), are skied in

every public room. People in the old days of last month heeded this

four-character warning, for a bambooing at the nearest police-station,

_ting erh_, was always a possibility. Now everyone can do as he

likes.

It is, therefore, becoming patent to the most blind that this is going

to be something startling, something eclipsing any other anti-foreign

movement ever heard of, because never before have the users of foreign

imports and the mere friends of foreigners been labelled in a class

just below that of the foreigners themselves. And then as it became

dark to-day, a fresh wave of excitement broke over the city and

produced almost a panic. The main body of Tung Fu-hsiang's savage

Kansu braves--that is, his whole army--re-entered the capital and

rapidly encamped on the open places in front of the Temples of Heaven

and Agriculture in the outer ring of Peking. This settled it, I am

glad to say. At last all the Legations shivered, and urgent telegrams

were sent to the British admiral for reinforcements to be rushed up at

all costs.

But too late--too late; the Manchu servants who have friends among the

guards at the Palace gates have said this all the evening. For the

Chinese Colossus, lumbering and lazy, sluggish and ill-equipped, has

raised himself on his elbow, and with sheep-like and calculating eyes

is looking down on us--a pigmy-like collection of foreigners and their

guards--and soon will risk a kick--perhaps even will trample us

quickly to pieces. How bitterly everyone is regretting our false

confidence, and how our chiefs are being cursed!

VII

THE CITY OF PEKING AND ALL ITS GLORIES

11th June, 1900.

* * * * *

You do not know this Capital of Capitals, perhaps--that is, you do not

know it as you should if the scenes which may presently move across

the stage, now in shouting crowds of sword-armed men, now in pitiable

incidents of small account, are to be properly understood, and their

dramatic setting, stirring blood-thrilling, incongruous as they must

be and can only be. I feel that something will come--I even know it. I

have been talking vaguely about this and about that; have begun

preparing colours, as it were, in the usual careless fashion without

explanations or digressions--until you possibly wonder what it is all

about. For you have not yet seen the barbaric frame which will hedge

in the whole--the barbaric frame in all truth, since it is gradually

closing in on us on every side until, like some mediaeval torture-room,

we may have the very life crushed out of us by a cruel pressure. But

enough of fine phrases; while there is time let me write something.

Peking is at least two thousand years old. Several hundred years

before Christ, they say a Chinese kingdom made the present site the

capital, and began building the outer walls; but the Chinese, the

gentler Chinese who had all military spirit crushed out of them five

thousand years before by having to tramp from Mesopotamia to where

they now are in the eighteen provinces, these Chinese, I say, never

had in Peking anything but a temporary trysting-place. For Peking

stands for a sort of blatant barbarianism, mounted on sturdy ponies,

pouring in from the far North; and the history of Peking can only be

said to begin when Mongol-Tartars, who have always been freebooters

and robbers, forced their way in and imposed their militarism on a

nation of shopkeepers and collectors of taxes.

Even before the Christian era, the Chinese chronicles tell of the

pressure of these fierce barbarians from the North being so much felt

and their raids so constant, that Chi Huang-ti, the ruler of the

powerful Chinese feudatory state which laid the foundations of the

present Empire of China, began to build the Great Wall of China and to

fortify old Peking as the only means of stopping these living waves.

The Great Wall took ages to build, for the Northern barbarians always

kept cunningly slipping round the uncompleted ends, and the Mings, the

last purely Chinese sovereigns to reign in Peking, actually added

three hundred miles to this colossal structure in the year 1547, or

nearly two thousand years after the first bricks had been cemented.

That shows you what people they were, and what the contest was.

For hundreds of years the war with the semi-nomadic hordes of the

North continued. Sometimes isolated bands of Tartars broke through the

Chinese defence and enslaved the people, but never for very long;

instinctively by the use of every stratagem the cleverer Chinese

compassed their destruction. While Attila and his Huns were ravaging

Europe in the fifth century, other _Hwingnoo_, or Huns, veritable

scourges of God, forced their way into China. In this fashion, while

China itself was passing through a dozen different forms of

government, and had a dozen capitals--sometimes owning allegiance to a

single Emperor such as those of the T'ang dynasty who added Canton and

the Cantonese to the Empire, sometimes split into petty kingdoms such

as the "Ten States"--this curious frontier war continued and was

handed down from father to son. Chinese industrialism and socialism,

content to accept whatever form of government Chinese strong men

succeeded in imposing, instinctively kept up an iron resistance to

these Northern invaders. Such was the fear inspired, that a proverb

coined thousands of years ago is still current. "Do not fear the cock

from the South, but the wolf from the North," it says. Everybody is

always quoting this saying. I have heard it twice to-day.

It was not until the tenth century that the Tartars finally broke

through and established themselves definitively on Chinese soil. The

Khitans, a Manchu-Tartar people, springing from Central Manchuria,

then captured Peking and made it their capital. The Khitans were a

cheerful people, with a peculiar sense of humour and a still greater

conviction of the inferiority of women. To show their contempt for

them, it is still recorded that they used to slit the back of their

wives and drink their blood to give them strength. For two and a half

centuries the Khitans, under the style of the Liao or Iron dynasty,

maintained their position by the use of the sword, and then succumbing

to the sapping influence of Chinese civilisation, they in turn were

unable to resist a second Manchu-Mongol horde, the Kins. The Kins,

under the style of the Silver dynasty, reigned in Northern China for a

term of years, but there was nothing of a permanent character in their

rule, since they were uncouth barbarians who soon drank themselves to

death and destruction.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century Genghis Khan, the great

Mongol, born in the bleak Hsing-an Mountains, gathered together all

the restless bands of Mongolia, and sweeping down on Peking drove out

the Kins and established the purely Mongol dynasty of the Yuan. Up

till then Peking had consisted of what is to-day the Chinese city, or

the older outer city. Kublai Khan, Genghis's grandson, fixed his

residence definitively in Peking in 1264, and began building the

_Ta-tu_, or Great Residence--the Tartar city of to-day. The Chinese

city is oblong; the Tartar city is squat and square and overlaps and

dominates the northern walls of the older city. Kublai Khan, by

building the Tartar city on the northern edge of the Chinese city and

fortifying it with immense strength, may be said to have fitted the

spear-head on to the Chinese shaft, and to have given the key-note to

the policy which exists to this day--the policy of the North of China

dominating the South of China.

In time the Yuan dynasty of Mongols passed away--their strength sapped

by confinement to walled cities because their power was only on the

tented field. Ser Marco Polo, that audacious traveller, never tires of

telling of the magnificence of the Mongol Khans and their resplendent

courts. It requires no Marco Polo to assure us that the thirteenth

century of the Far East was immeasurably in advance of the thirteenth

century of Europe. The vast and magnificent works which remain to this

day, weather-beaten though they be; the fierce reds, the wonderful

greens, the boldness and size of everything, speak to us of an age

which knew of mighty conquests of all Asia by invincible Mongol

horsemen....

The Mongols were succeeded by the Mings--a purely Chinese house; but

the Mings, in some terror of the rough North, since for over four

centuries Tartars or Manchu-Mongols had been the overlords of China,

discreetly established their capital on the Yangtsze and called it

Nanking, or the Southern capital. It was only the third Emperor of the

Mings who dared to remove the court to Peking. His choice was ill made

for his dynasty, since a century and a half had hardly passed before

fresh hordes--the modern Manchus--began to gather strength in the

mountains and valleys to the northeast of Moukden. Fighting

stubbornly, Nurhachu, the founder of this new enterprise, steadily

broke through Chinese resistance in the Liaotung, then a Chinese

province colonised from Chihli, and slowly but surely reached out

towards Peking, the goal which beckons to everyone. The Great Wall,

built eighteen hundred years before as a protection against other

barbarians of the same stock, stopped Nurhachu a hundred times, and

although he captured Moukden and made it a Manchu capital, he died

worn out by half a century of warfare. His son, Tai Tsung, or Tien

Tsung, nothing daunted, took up the struggle, and finding it

impossible to break through the fortifications of the East, near

Shan-hai-kwan, adopted Genghis Khan's route--the passes leading in

from the great grassy plains of Mongolia many hundreds of miles to the

West. Allying himself by marriage with Mongols, the Manchu monarch

began a series of grand raids through their territory in the direction

of Peking. Once he actually reached Peking and sat down in front of

its mighty walls to besiege it. But he found his strength unequal to

the task, and once more was forced to retire. Then this second Manchu

prince died, and was succeeded by a tiny grandson of five. The regent

appointed by the Manchu nobles owed his final success to the fact that

he was called in by the Chinese generals commanding the coveted

Shan-hai-kwan gates to rescue Peking from the hands of Chinese

insurgents, who had everywhere arisen; and in 1644, after seventy

years of warfare, the Manchus seated themselves on the Dragon Throne,

in defiance of the wishes of the people, but backed up by a vast

concourse of Manchus and Mongols, and half the fierce blades of

Eastern Asia.

The history of all these centuries of warfare is eloquently written on

all the buildings, the fortifications, the monuments, the palaces and

temples of Peking which surround us. Peking is the Delhi of China, and

the grave of warlike barbarians. Four separate times have Tartars

broken in and founded dynasties, and four separate times have Chinese

culture and civilisation sapped rugged strength, and made the rulers

the _de facto_ servants of the ceremonious inhabitants. In the Tartar

city there are Yellow Lama temples, with hundreds of bare-pated lama

priests, the results of Buddhist Concordats guaranteeing Thibetan

semi-independence in return for a tacit acknowledgment of Chinese

suzerainty. Near the Palace walls is a Mongolian Superintendency,

where the Mongol hordes still grazing their herds and their flocks on

the grassy plains of high Asia, as they have done for countless

centuries, are divided up into Banners, or military divisions, showing

the enormous strength in irregular cavalry they possessed two hundred

and fifty years ago. Round the Forbidden City are the Six Boards and

the Nine Ministries, the outward signs of those bonds of etiquette

and procedure which bind the Manchu Throne to the eighteen provinces.

The walls of the Tartar city heave up fifty feet in the air, and are

forty feet thick. The circumference of the outer ring of

fortifications is over twenty miles. Each gate is surmounted by a

square three-storied tower or pagoda, vast and imposing. Round the

city and through the city run century-old canals and moats with

water-gates shutting down with cruel iron prongs. In the Chinese city

the two Temples of Heaven and Agriculture raise their altars to the

skies, invoking the help of the deities for this decaying but proud

Chinese Empire. Think of the millions of dead hands that fashioned

such enormous strength and old-time magnificence! On the corner of the

Tartar Wall is the old Jesuit Observatory with beautiful

dragon-adorned instruments of bronze given by a Louis of France. There

are temples with yellow-gowned or grey-gowned priests in their

hundreds founded in the times of Kublai Khan. There are Mohammedan

mosques, with Chinese muezzins in blue turbans on feast days; Manchu

palaces with vermillion-red pillars and archways and green and gold

ceilings. There are unending lines of camels plodding slowly in from

the Western deserts laden with all manner of merchandise; there are

curious palanquins slung between two mules and escorted by sword-armed

men that have journeyed all the way from Shansi and Kansu, which are a

thousand miles away; a Mongol market with bare-pated and long-coated

Mongols hawking venison and other products of their chase; comely

Soochow harlots with reeking native scents rising from their hair;

water-carriers and barbers from sturdy Shantung; cooks from epicurean

Canton; bankers from Shansi--the whole Empire of China sending its

best to its old-world barbaric capital, which has now no strength.

And right in the centre of it all is the Forbidden City, enclosing

with its high pink walls the palaces which are full of warm-blooded

Manchu concubines, sleek eunuchs who speak in wheedling tones, and is

always hot with intrigue. At the gates of the Palace lounge bow and

jingal-armed Imperial guards. Inside is the Son of Heaven himself, the

Emperor imprisoned in his own Palace by the Empress Mother, who is as

masterful as any man who ever lived....

I beg you, do you begin to see something of Peking and to understand

the eleven miserable little Legations, each with its own particular

ideas and intrigues, but crouching all together under the Tarter Wall

and tremblingly awaiting with mock assurance the bursting of this

storm? If you are so good as to see this you will realise the

wonderful stage effects, the fierce Mediaevalism in senile decay, the

superb distances, the red dust from the Gobi that has choked up all

the drains and tarnished all the magnificence until it is no more

magnificence at all--this dust which is such a herald of the coming

storm--the new guns and pistols of Herr Krupp and the camels of the

deserts and all the other things all mixed up together....

Oh, I see that we are absurd and can only be made more ridiculous by

coming events. Of course the Boxers coming in openly through the gates

cannot be true, and yet--shades of Genghis Khan and all his Tartars,

what is that? When I had got as far as this from all sides came a

tremendous blaring of barbaric trumpets--those long brass trumpets

that can make one's blood curdle horribly, a blaring which has now

upset everything I was about to write and also my inkpot. I rushed

out to inquire; it was only a portion of the Manchu Peking Field Force

marching home, but the sounds have unsettled us all again, and in the

tumult of one's emotions one does not know what to believe and what to

fear. Everything seems a little impossible and absurd, especially what

I am now writing from hour to hour.

VIII

SOME INCIDENTS AND THE ONE MAN

12th June, 1900.

* * * * *

Even the British Legation--"the stoical, sceptical, ill-informed

British Legation," as S---- of the American Legation calls it--is

wringing its hands with annoyance, and were it Italian, and therefore

dramatically articulate, its curses and _maladette_ would ascend to

the very heavens in a menacing cloud like our Peking dust. For on

England we have all been waiting because of an ancient prestige; and

England, everyone says, is mainly responsible for our present plight.

Everybody is lowering at England and the British Legation along

Legation Street, because S---- was not sent for two weeks ago, and the

language of the minor missions, who could not possibly expect to

receive protecting guards unless they swam all the way from Europe, is

sulphurous. They ask with much reason why we do not lead events

instead of being lead by them; why are we so foolish, so confident.

What has happened to justify all this, you will ask? Well, permit me

to speak.

The day before yesterday several Englishmen rode down to the Machiapu

railway station, which is just outside the Chinese city, and is our

Peking station, to welcome, as they thought, Admiral S---- and his

reinforcements, so despairingly telegraphed for by the British

Legation just fourteen days later than should have been done. Their

passage to the station was unmarked by incidents, excepting that they

noted with apprehension the thickly clustering tents of Kansu soldiery

in the open spaces fronting the vast Temples of Heaven and

Agriculture. Once the station was reached a weary wait began, with

nothing to relieve the tedium, for the vast crowds which usually

surround the "fire-cart stopping-place," to translate the vernacular,

all had disappeared, and in place of the former noisiness there was

nothing but silence.

At last, somewhat downcast, our Englishmen were forced to return

without a word of news, passing into the Chinese city when it was

almost dusk. Alas! the Kansu soldiery, after the manner of all

Celestials, were taking the air in the twilight; and no sooner did

they spy the hated foreigner than hoots and curses rose louder and

louder. The horsemen quickened their pace, stones flew, and had it not

been for the presence of mind of one man they would have been torn to

pieces. They left the great main street of the outer city in a

tremendous uproar and seemed glad to be back among friends.

Yesterday, the 11th, it seemed absolutely certain S---- would arrive,

since he must have left Tientsin on the 10th, and it is only ninety

miles by rail. The Legations wished to despatch a messenger, but the

Kansu soldiery on those open spaces were not attractive, and nobody

was very anxious to brave them. Who was to go? No sooner was it

mentioned in the Japanese Legation than, of course, a Japanese was

found ready to go; in fact, several Japanese almost came to blows on

the subject. Sugiyama, the _chancelier_, somehow managed to prove that

he had the best right, and go he did, but never to return.

It was dark before his carter turned up in Legation Street, covered

with dust and bespattered with blood, while I happened to be there. It

was an ugly story he unfolded, and it is hardly good to tell it. On

the open spaces facing the supplicating altars of Heaven and

Agriculture this little Japanese, Sugiyama, met his death in a horrid

way. The Kansu soldiery were waiting for more cursed foreigners to

appear, and this time they had their arms with them and were

determined to have blood. So they killed the Japanese brutally while

he shielded himself with his small hands. They hacked off all his

limbs, barbarians that they are, decapitated him, then mutilated his

body. It now lies half-buried where it was smitten down. The carter

who drove him was eloquent as only Orientals can be when tragedy

flings their customary reserve aside: "May my tongue be torn out if I

scatter falsehoods," he said again and again, using the customary

phrase, as he showed how it all happened. And late into the night he

was still reciting his story to fresh crowds of listeners, who gaped

with terror and astonishment. Squatting in a great Peking courtyard on

his hams and calling on the unseen powers to tear out his tongue if he

lied, he was a figure of some moment, this Peking carter, for those

that thought; for everybody realises that we are now caught and cannot

be driven out....

This was the 11th. On the 12th, the day was still more startling, for

somehow the shadow which has been lurking so near us seems to have

been thrown more forward and become more intense. The hero of the

affair is the one really brave man among our chiefs, of course--the

Baron von K----, the Kaiser's Minister to the Court of Peking.

The Baron is no stranger in Peking, although he has been here but a

twelvemonth in his new capacity as Minister. Fifteen years ago his

handsome face charmed more than one fair lady in the old pre-political

situation days, when there was plenty of time for picnics and

love-making. Then he was only an irresponsible attache; now he is here

as a very full-blooded plenipotentiary, with the burden of a special

German political mission in China, bequeathed him by his pompous and

mannerless predecessor, Baron von H----, to support. But a man is the

present German Minister if there was ever one, and it was in the newly

macadamised Legation Street that the incident I am about to relate

occurred.

Walking out in the morning, the German Minister saw one of the

ordinary hooded Peking carts trotting carelessly along, with the mule

all ears, because the carter was urging him along with many digs near

the tail. But it was not the cart, nor the carter, nor yet the mule,

which attracted His Excellency's immediate attention, but the

passenger seated on the customary place of the off-shaft. For a moment

Baron von K---- could not believe his eyes. It was nothing less than a

full-fledged Boxer with his hair tied up in red cloth, red ribbons

round his wrists and ankles, and a flaming red girdle tightening his

loose white tunic; and, to cap all, the man was audaciously and calmly

sharpening a big carver knife on his boots! It was sublime insolence,

riding down Legation Street like this in the full glare of day, with a

knife and regalia proclaiming the dawn of Boxerism in the Capital of

Capitals, and withal, was a very ugly sign. What did K---- do--go home

and invite some one to write a despatch for him to his government

deprecating the growth of the Boxer movement, and the impossibility

of carrying out conciliatory instructions, as some of his colleagues,

including my own chief, would have done? Not a bit of it! He tilted

full at the man with his walking stick, and before he could escape had

beaten a regular roll of kettledrums on his hide. Then the Boxer,

after a short struggle, abandoned his knife, and ran with some

fleetness of foot into a neighbouring lane. The gallant German

Minister raised the hue and cry, and then discovered yet another Boxer

inside the cart, whom he duly secured by falling on top of him; and

this last one was handed over to his own Legation Guards. The fugitive

was followed into Prince Su's grounds, which run right through the

Legation area, and there cornered in a house. The mysterious Dr. M----

then suddenly appeared on the scenes and insisted upon searching the

Manchu Prince's entire grounds and most private apartments. But time

was wasted in _pourparlers_, and in spite of a minute inspection,

which extended even to the concubine apartments, the Boxer vanished in

some mysterious way like a breath, and is even now untraced. This

shows us conclusively that there are accomplices right in our midst.

No sooner had this incident occurred and been bandied round with

sundry exaggerations, than the life of the Legations and the

nondescripts who have been coming in from the country became more

abnormal than ever. For in spite of our extraordinary position, even

up to to-day we were attempting to work--that is, writing three lines

of a despatch, and then rushing madly out to hear the latest news. Now

not so much as one word is written, and our eleven Legations are

openly terribly perturbed in body and mind and conscious of their

intense impotence, although we have all the so-called resources of

diplomacy still at our command, and we are officially still on the

friendliest terms with the Chinese Government.

This morning, the 12th, there was another commotion--this time in

Customs Street, as it is called. Three more Boxers, armed with swords

and followed by a crowd of loafers, fearful but curious, ran rapidly

past the Post Office, which faces the Customs Inspectorate, and got

into a small temple a few hundred feet away, where they began their

incantations. It was decided to attack them only with riding-whips, so

as to avoid drawing first blood. But when a party of us arrived, we

could not get into their retreat, as they had barricaded themselves

in. So marines and sailors were requisitioned with axes; after a lot

of exhausting work it was discovered that the birds had flown. This

was another proof that there is treachery among friendly natives, for

without help these Boxers could never have escaped.

And now imagine our excitement and general perturbation. Since the 8th

or 9th, I really forget which date, we have been acting on a more or

less preconcerted plan--that is, as far as our defences are concerned,

as we have been quite cut off from the outer world. The commanders of

the British, American, German, French, Italian, Russian, Austrian and

Japanese detachments have met and conferred--each carefully instructed

by his own Minister just how far he is to acquiesce in his colleagues'

proposals, which is, roughly speaking, not at all. We can have no

effective council of war thus, because there is no commander-in-chief,

and everybody is a claimant to the post. There is first an Austrian

captain of a man-of-war lying off the Taku bar, who was merely up in

Peking on a pleasure trip when he was caught by the storm, but this

has not hindered him taking over command of the Austrian sailors from

the lieutenant who brought them up; and everybody knows that a captain

in the navy ranks with a colonel in the army. There are no military

men in Peking excepting three captains of British marines, one

Japanese lieutenant-colonel and his aide-de-camp, and some unimportant

military attaches, who are very junior. So on paper the command should

lie between two men--the Austrian naval captain and the Japanese

lieutenant-colonel. But, then, the Japanese have instructions to

follow the British lead, and the senior British marine captain has

orders to follow, his own ideas, and his own ideas do not fancy the

unattached Austrian captain of a man-of-war. So the concerted plan of

defence has only been evolved very suddenly, a plan which has resolved

itself naturally into each detachment-commander holding his own

Legation as long as he could, and being vaguely linked to his

neighbour by picquets of two or three men. But about this you will

understand more later on. The point I wish you now to realise is that

the counsels of the allied countries of Europe in the persons of their

Legation Guards' commanders are as effective as those of very juvenile

kindergartens. Everybody is intensely jealous of everybody else and

determined not to give way on the question of the supreme command. Of

course, if the storm comes suddenly, without any warning, we are

doomed, because you cannot hold an area a mile square with a lot of

men who are fighting among themselves, and who have fallen too quickly

into our miserably petty Peking scheme of things.

THE COMING OF THE BOXERS

14th June, 1900.

* * * * *

I had risen yesterday some what late in the day with the oddness and

uncomfortableness--I do not mean discomfort--which comes from too much

boots, too much disturbance of one's ordinary routine, too much

listening to people airing their opinions and recounting rumours, and,

last of all, very wearied by the uncustomary task of transporting a

terrible battery of hand artillery (for we are at last all heavily

armed); and consequent of these varied things, I, like everybody else,

was a good deal out of temper and rather sick of it all. I began to

ask myself this question: Were we really playing an immense comedy, or

was there a great and terrible peril menacing us? I could never get

beyond asking the question. I could not think sanely long enough for

the answer.

The day passed slowly, and very late in the afternoon, when some of us

had completed a tour of the Legations, and looked at their various

picquets, I finished up at the Austrian Legation and the Customs

Street. Men were everywhere sitting about, idly watching the dusty and

deserted streets, half hoping that something was going to happen

shortly, when suddenly there was a shout and a fierce running of feet.

Something had happened.

We all jumped up as if we had been shot, for we had been sitting very

democratically on the sidewalk, and round the corner, running with

the speed of the scared, came a youthful English postal carrier. That

was all at first.

But behind him were Chinese, and ponies and carts ridden or driven

with recklessness that was amazing. The English youth had started

gasping exclamations as he ran in, and tried to fetch his breath, when

from the back of the Austrian Legation came a rapid roll of musketry.

Austrian marines, who were spread-eagled along the roofs of their

Legation residences, and on the top of the high surrounding wall, had

evidently caught sight of the edge of an advancing storm, and were

firing fiercely. We seized our rifles--everybody has been armed

_cap-a-pie_ for days--and in a disorderly crowd we ran down to the end

of the great wall surrounding the Austrian compounds to view the broad

street which runs towards the city gates. The firing ceased as

suddenly as it had begun, and in its place arose a perfect storm of

distant roaring and shouting. Soon we could see flames shooting up not

more than half a mile from where we stood; but the intervening houses

and trees, the din and the excitement, coupled with the stern order of

an Austrian officer, shouted from the top of an outhouse, not to move

as their machine-gun was coming into action over our heads, made it

impossible for us to understand or move forward. What was it?

Presently somebody trotted up from behind us on a pony, and, waiting

his opportunity, rode into the open, and with considerable skill

seized a fleeing Chinaman by the neck. This prisoner was dragged in

more dead than alive with fear, and he told us that all he knew was

that as he had passed into the Tartar city through the Ha-ta Gate a

quarter of an hour before, myriads of Boxers--those were his

words--armed with swords and spears, and with their red sashes and

insignia openly worn, had rushed into the Tartar city from the Chinese

city, slashing and stabbing at everyone indiscriminately. The

foreigners' guns had caught them, he said, and dusted them badly, and

they were now running towards the north, setting fire to chapels and

churches, and any evidences of the European they could find. He knew

nothing more. We let our prisoner go, and no sooner had he disappeared

than fresh waves of fugitives appeared sobbing and weeping with

excitement. The Boxers, deflected from the Legation quarter, were

spreading rapidly down the Ha-ta Great Street which runs due north,

and everybody was fleeing west past our quarter. Never have I seen

such fast galloping and driving in the Peking streets; never would I

have believed that small-footed women, of whom there are a goodly

number even in the large-footed Manchu city, could get so nimbly over

the ground. Everybody was panic-stricken and distraught, and we could

do nothing but look on. They went on running, running, running. Then

the waves of men, women and animals disappeared as suddenly as they

had come, and the roads became once again silent and deserted. Far

away the din of the Boxers could still be heard, and flames shooting

up to the skies now marked their track; but of the dreaded men

themselves we had not seen a single one.

We had now time to breathe, and to run round making inquiries. We

found the Italian picquet at the Ha-ta end of Legation Street nearly

mad with excitement; the men were crimson and shouting at one another.

But there was nothing new to learn. Bands of Boxers had passed the

Italian line only eighty or a hundred yards off, and a number of dark

spots on the ground testified to some slaughter by small-bore Mausers.

They had been given a taste of our guns, that was all; and, fearing

the worst, every able-bodied man in the Legations fell in at the

prearranged posts and waited for fresh developments.

At eight o'clock, while we were hurriedly eating some food, word was

passed that fires to the north and east were recommencing with renewed

vigour. The Boxers, having passed two miles of neutral territory, had

reached the belt of abandoned foreign houses and grounds belonging to

the foreign Customs, to missionaries, and to some other people.

Pillaging and burning and unopposed, they were spreading everywhere.

Flames were now leaping up from a dozen different quarters, ever

higher and higher. The night was inky black, and these points of fire,

gathering strength as their progress was unchecked, soon met and

formed a vast line of flame half a mile long. There is nothing which

can make such a splendid but fearful spectacle as fire at night. The

wind, which had been blowing gently from the north, veered to the

east, as if the god's wished us to realise our plight; and on the

breeze leading towards the Legations, some sound of the vast tumult

and excitement was wafted to us. The whole city seemed now to be alive

with hoarse noises, which spoke of the force of disorder unloosed.

Orders for every man to stand by and for reinforcements to be massed

near the Austrian quarter were issued, and impatient, yet impotent, we

waited the upshot of it all. Chinese officialdom gave no sign; not a

single word did or could the Chinese Government dare to send us. We

were abandoned to our own resources, as was inevitable.

Suddenly a tremor passed over all who were watching the brilliant

scene. The flames, which till then had been confined to a broad belt

at least three thousand yards from our eastern picquets, began leaping

up a mile nearer. The Boxers, having destroyed all the foreign houses

in the Tsung-li Yamen quarter, were advancing up rapidly on the Tung

T'ang--the Roman Catholic Eastern Cathedral, which was but fifteen

minutes' walk from our lines. We knew that hundreds of native

Christians lived around the cathedral, and that as soon as their lives

were threatened they would at once seek refuge in their church, and we

knew, also, what that would mean.

Indiscreet Letters From Peking Being the Notes of an Eye-Witness, Which Set Forth in Some Detail, from Day to Day, the Real Story of the Siege and Sack of a Distressed Capital in 1900—The Year of Great Tribulation · 第 1 / 7 章