Ruin and dilapidation within the walls, as I expected, not from any
fault of the Boxers or of the Allies, for the war did not come near
here, but as a result of decay, of the falling into dust of this old
China, our elder by more than thirty centuries.
The gong in front of me continues to sound lugubriously at fixed
intervals, and the heralds continue to announce me to the people by
prolonged cries, resounding through the little powdery streets under
the still burning evening sun. One sees unused land and cultivated
fields. Here and there granite monsters, defaced, shapeless, half
buried, worn by years, indicate what was formerly the entrance to a
palace.
Before a door which surmounts a tricolored pavilion the procession
stops, and I dismount. For seven or eight months our fifty soldiers of
the marine infantry have been quartered here, spending a whole long
winter at Laï-Chou-Chien, separated from the rest of the world by snow
and icy steppes, and leading a Crusoe-like existence in the midst of
the most perplexing surroundings.
It is a surprise and a joy to come among them, to see again their
honest home faces, after all the yellow ones we have met along the
road, darting sharp enigmatical glances at us. This French quarter is
like a bit of life, gaiety, and youth in the midst of mummified old
China.
It is plain that the winter has been good for our soldiers, for the
look of health is on their cheeks. They have organized themselves with
a comical and somewhat marvellous ingenuity, creating lavatories,
douche rooms, a schoolroom where they teach French to the little
Chinese, and even a theatre. Living in intimate comradeship with the
people of the town, who will before long be unwilling to see them go,
they cultivate vegetable gardens, raise chickens and sheep, and bring
up little ravens by hand like orphan babies.
It is arranged that I should sleep at the house of the mandarin after
having supped at the French post. So at nine o'clock they come for me
to conduct me to the "Yamen" with lanterns of state, decorated in a
very Chinese fashion and as big as barrels.
The Chinese Yamen is always of tremendous extent. In the cool night
air, picking my way by the light of lanterns, amongst huge stones and
between rows of servants, I pass through a series of courts two hundred
metres long, with I don't know how many ruined porticoes and peristyles
with shaky steps, before reaching the crumbling and dusty lodging
which the mandarin intends for me,--a separate building in the midst
of a sort of yard, and surrounded by old trees with shapeless trunks.
There, under the smoky rafters, I have a great room, with whitewashed
walls, containing in the centre a platform with seats like a throne,
also some heavy ebony arm-chairs; and as wall decorations some rolls of
silk spread out, on which poetry, in Manchou characters, is written. In
the wing on the left is a small bedroom for my two servants, and on the
right one for me with window-panes of rice paper. On a platform is a
very hard bed with covers of red silk, and, lastly, an incense burner,
in which little sticks of incense are burning. All this is rural,
naïve, and superannuated, antiquated even for China.
My timid host, in ceremonial costume, awaits me at the entrance, and
makes me take a seat with him on the central throne, where he offers me
the obligatory tea in porcelain a hundred years old. Then he had the
discretion to bring the audience to a close and to bid me good-night.
As he withdrew he told me not to be disturbed if I heard a good deal
of coming and going over my head, as the space above was frequented by
rats. Neither was I to be disturbed if I heard on the other side of
my paper window-panes people walking up and down in the yard playing
castanets; they would be the night watchmen, thus informing me that
they were not asleep, and were doing their duty.
"There are many brigands in this country," he added; "the city with
its high walls closes its gates at sunset, but the workmen going to
the fields before daybreak have made a hole in the ramparts,--this the
brigands have discovered, and do not hesitate to enter by it."
When this deep-bowing mandarin was gone, and I was alone in the
darkness of my dwelling, in the heart of an isolated city whose gates
were guarded by human heads in cages, I felt myself at an infinite
distance away, separated from my own world by immense space as well as
by time, by ages; it seemed to me that I was going to sleep amongst a
people at least a thousand years behind our era.
SATURDAY, April 27.
The crowing of cocks, the singing of little birds on my roof, awoke me
in my strange old room; and by the light that came in through my paper
panes I guessed that the warm sun was shining out of doors.
Osman and Renaud, who were up before me, came to tell me that they were
hurriedly making great preparations in the courtyard of the Yamen in
order to give me a fête, a morning fête, because we had to continue
our route to the imperial tombs soon after the mid-day meal.
It began about nine o'clock. I was given a seat in an arm-chair beside
the mandarin, who seemed weighed down beneath his silken gowns. In
front of me, in the dazzling sunshine, was the series of courts with
porticoes of irregular outline and old monsters on pedestals. A crowd
of Chinese--always the men alone, it is understood--have assembled in
their eternal blue rags. The yellow wind which had died down at night,
as usual, begins to blow again, and to whiten the heavens with dust.
The acacias and the monotonous willows, which are almost the only
trees scattered over this northern China, show here and there on their
slender old branches little pale-green leaves just barely out.
First comes the slow, the very slow, passing of a band with many gongs,
cymbals, and bells all muffled; the melody seems to be carried by a
sweet, melancholy, and persistent unison of flutes,--large flutes, with
a deep tone, some of which have several tubes, and resemble sheaves of
wheat. It is sweet and lulling, exquisite to hear.
Now the musicians seat themselves near us, in a circle, to open the
fête. All at once the rhythm changes, grows more rapid, and becomes a
dance. Then from afar, from the retirement of the courts and the old
porticoes, one sees above the heads of the crowd, through the dust
that grows thicker and thicker, a troop of dancing creatures two or
three times taller than men, swinging along, swinging in regular time
and playing citherns, fanning themselves, and comporting themselves
generally in an exaggerated, nervous epileptic manner.--Giants?
Jumping Jacks? What can they be? They are approaching rapidly with
long, leaping steps, and here they are in front of us. Ah, they are on
stilts, enormously high stilts. They are taller on their wooden legs
than the shepherds of the Landes, and they hop like big grasshoppers.
They are in costume and made up,--painted, rouged. They have wigs,
false beards; they represent gods, genii such as one sees on old
pagodas; they represent princesses also, with beautiful robes of
embroidered silk, with cheeks too pink and white, and with artificial
flowers in their chignons,--princesses all very tall, fanning
themselves in an exaggerated way, and swinging along like the rest of
the company, with the same regular, continuous movement, as persistent
as the pendulum of a clock.
All these stilt-walkers, it seems, are merely young men of a
neighboring village, who have formed themselves into a gymnastic
society, and who do this for amusement. In the smallest villages in
the interior of China, centuries, yes, thousands of years, before
the custom reached us, the men--fathers and sons--began to devote
themselves passionately to feats of strength and skill, founding rival
societies, some becoming acrobats, others balancers, or jugglers, and
organizing contests. It is especially during the long winters that they
exercise, when all is frozen, and when each little human group must
live alone in the midst of a desert of snow.
In fact, in spite of their white wigs and their centenarian beards, it
is obvious that all these people are young, very young, with childlike
smiles. They smile naïvely, these droll, pleasant princesses with
the over-long legs, whose fan motions are so excited and who dance
more and more disjointedly, bending, reversing, and shaking their
heads and their bodies in a frenzy. They smile naïvely, these old men
with children's faces; they play the cithern or the tambourine as
though they were possessed. The persistent unison of the flutes seems
to bewitch them, to put them into a special condition of madness,
expressed by more and more convulsive movements.
At a given signal each one stands on a single stilt, the other leg
raised, the second stilt thrown back over the shoulder; and by
prodigies of balancing they dance harder than ever, like marionettes
whose springs are out of order, whose mechanism is about to break down.
Then bars two metres high are brought in, and they jump over them,
every one taking part, including the princesses, the old men, and
the genii, all keeping up an incessant play of fans and a beating of
tambourines.
At last, when they can hold out no longer and go and lean against the
porticoes among the old acacias and willows, another company just
like the first comes forward and begins again, to the same tune, a
similar dance. They represent the same persons, the same genii, the
same long-bearded gods, the same beautiful mincing dames. In their
accoutrements, so unknown to us, and with their curiously wrinkled
faces, these dancers are the incarnation of ancient mythological dreams
dreamed long ago in the dark ages by human beings at an infinite
distance from us; and these customs are handed down from generation
to generation, and from one end of the country to the other in that
unchanging way in which rites, forms, and property in China are
invariably transmitted.
This fête, this dance, extremely novel as it is, retains its village,
its rustic character, and is as simple as any truly rural entertainment.
They finally cease jumping the bars, and now two terrible beasts come
forth, one red and one green. They are big, heraldic dragons at least
twenty metres long, with the raised heads, the yawning mouths, the
horns, and claws, and horrible squinting eyes that everybody knows.
They advance rapidly, throwing themselves onto the shoulders of the
crowd with the undulations of a reptile; they are light, however,
made of pasteboard, covered with some sort of stuff, and each beast
is supported in the air by means of sticks, by a dozen skilful young
men who have a subtle knack of giving to their movements a serpentine
effect. A sort of master of the ballet precedes them, holding in his
hand a ball which they never lose sight of, and which he uses as the
leader of an orchestra uses his baton, to guide the writhings of the
monsters.
The two great creatures content themselves with dancing before me, to
the sound of flutes and gongs, in the centre of the circle of Chinese,
which is extended in order to make room for them. At length the
struggle becomes quite terrible, while the gongs and cymbals rage. They
become entangled, they roll on top of one another, they drag their long
rings in the dust, and then, all at once, with a bound they get up,
as though in a passion, and stand shaking their enormous heads at one
another, trembling with rage. The ballet master, nervously moving his
director's ball, throws himself about and rolls his ferocious eyes.
The dust on the crowd grows thicker and thicker, and on the invisible
dragon-bearers; it rises in clouds, rendering this battle between the
red beast and the green beast almost fantastic. The sun burns as in a
tropical country, and yet the sad Chinese April, anæmic from such a
drought following the frozen winter, is barely heralded by the tender
color of the few tiny leaves on the old willows and acacias of the
court.
After breakfast some of the mandarins of the plain from the
neighboring villages arrive, preceded by music and bringing me
pastoral offerings,--baskets of preserved grapes, baskets of pears,
live chickens in cages, and a jar of rice-wine. They wear the official
winter head-dress, with a raven's quill, and have on gowns of dark silk
with squares of gold embroidery, in the centre of which is depicted,
surrounded by clouds, the invariable stork flying toward the moon.
They are nearly all dried-up old men with gray beards and drooping
gray moustaches. We have great _tchinchins_ with them, profound bows,
extravagant compliments, handshakings in which one feels the scratch of
over-long nails, the touch of thin old fingers.
At two o'clock I remount with my men and start off through the
dilapidated streets, preceded by the same procession as upon my
arrival. The gongs are muffled, the heralds sound their cries. Behind
me my host, the mandarin, follows in his palanquin, accompanied by the
troop on stilts and by the enormous dragons.
As we leave the village, and enter the deep tunnelled gateway where
the crowd is already assembled to see us, the whole procession is
engulfed with us,--the long, striding princesses, the gods who play the
cithern or the tambourine, the red beast, and the green beast. In the
semi-obscurity of the arched way, to the noise of all the citherns and
of all the gongs, in the clouds of black dust which blind us, there is
a compact _mêlée_, where our horses prance and jump, troubled by the
noise and terrified by the two frightful monsters undulating above our
heads.
After conducting us a quarter of a league beyond the walls, the
procession leaves us at last, and we find silence again on the burning
plain, where we have about twenty kilometres to go through the dust
and the "yellow wind" before reaching Y-Tchou, another old walled city
which is to be our halting-place for the night.
Not until to-morrow do we arrive at the tombs.