MONDAY, October 22.
Chinese workmen,--amongst whom we are warned that there are spies and
Boxers,--who look after the fires in the two furnaces in our palace,
have kept us almost too warm all night. When we get up there is, as
there was yesterday, another illusion of summer on our light verandah
with the green columns painted with pink lotus flowers. An almost
burning sun is rising and shining upon the ghostly pilgrimage which
I am about to make on horseback, toward the west, outside the Tartar
City, and through the ashy, silent, ruined suburbs.
In this direction there were, scattered through the dusty country,
Christian cemeteries which even in 1860 had never been violated by
the yellow race. But this time they furiously attacked the dead, and
left chaos and abomination behind them. The oldest remains, those of
missionaries who had been sleeping there for three centuries, were
disinterred, crushed, piled up and set on fire in order to destroy,
according to Chinese beliefs, whatever might still be left of their
souls. One must be somewhat acquainted with the ideas of the country
in order to understand the enormity of this supreme insult to all our
Occidental races.
The cemetery of the Jesuit Fathers was singularly splendid. They were
formerly very powerful with the Celestial Emperors, and borrowed for
their own tombs the funereal emblems of the princes of China. The
ground is literally strewn now with big marble dragons and tortoises,
and with tall stele with chimæras coiled about them; all these carvings
have been thrown down and smashed; the heavy stones of the vaults have
been broken also, and the ground thoroughly overturned.
A more modest enclosure, not far away, has for a long time been the
burial-place for the European legations. It has undergone the same
treatment as the beautiful cemetery of the Jesuits. The Chinese have
ransacked the graves, destroyed the bodies, and even violated the
coffins of little children. Some few human bones are still lying on
the ground, while the crosses that marked the graves are placed upside
down. It is one of the most poignantly affecting sights that ever met
my eyes.
Some good Sisters who lived near by kept a school for Chinese children;
of their houses nothing is left but a pile of bricks and ashes, even
the trees have been uprooted and stuck back in the ground head foremost.