THE last time that I saw the Imperial Palace of Pekin was on a morning
in the last of April. The air was fresh and limpid, and the vault of
heaven seemed to have lifted itself to a prodigious height. It was
not that somewhat misty atmosphere of spring in France, which seems
impregnated with damp and vegetable odours, and which bathes the
unstable outlines of objects; neither was it that tenuous light of
those mornings in the East that overspreads the distances, envelops
objects, and defines their planes. It was a very dry air, for five
months had passed since a drop of rain had fallen, with an almost
brutal clearness which seemed to bring the horizon nearer and which
harshly exhibited the forms of the buildings and the lines of the
landscape.
I went out very early, and the windings of my course took me to the
Imperial City, one of the three cities that compose the capital of the
Middle Kingdom. The streets differed in appearance from those of the
quarters I had just traversed, the shops became rarer, the roadways
wider, and the temples and palaces closer together. But at this early
hour there was still greater animation here, and a crowd of horsemen,
pedestrians, and carriages made passage difficult.
I was about to turn in order to return to the French Legation, when
a cart, peculiarly constructed upon two wheels placed almost at the
back, and escorted by two horsemen, made my horse stand aside; it was
a Tartar carriage from the court stables: a black mule harnessed with
yellow leather and led by a groom, also in yellow livery, drew it along
with great strides.
In front, visible between the open curtains, a young woman was seated
with her legs crossed beneath her. She was clothed in a large mantle of
salmon-pink silk bordered with blue and gold lace and ornamented down
the front and on the sleeves with clusters of flowers embroidered with
very delicate brilliancy and delicious harmony of colour. This vestment
almost entirely covered her gown of a pale and dead green that fell in
folds about her.
Her hair, gathered up on the top of her head, was divided in two thick
folds, crossed here and there by long pins of gold, surmounted by
butterflies of silver filagree, and artificial flowers of the strangest
forms and hues. Also, as is customary among ladies of quality, her
face was entirely painted with ceruse; but the cheeks and the dimple
of the chin and the lips were coated with a thick layer of carmine,
while a line of antimony immoderately lengthened her eyes out towards
the temples, and two black _mouches_ stuck near the cheek-bone,
gave a peculiar appearance, a sort of air of morbid coquetry, to this
depressing face in which life seemed to have been extinguished.
[Illustration: THE SUMMER PALACE, CHINA.]
She held herself in a paralyzed immobility, with a hebetated fixity of
gaze and a doubtful glimmer of intelligence, oscillating like a waxen
puppet or an idol in a procession, at each jolt of the carriage. She
was, doubtless, judging from the livery of the driver and the escorting
horsemen, a young Tartar lady of the court, one of the Empress’s maids
of honour, or one of the imperial princesses shut up in the Palace.
I set out to follow her at a distance. Her chariot ascended the
inclined plane of a bridge, the flooring of which was of marble; the
balustrade, also of marble, supported some sculptured dragons.
Beneath the arches, the waters of a lake glittered. The light of the
sun, still near the horizon, barely touched the liquid surface but
spread its brilliancy everywhere else. In certain spots, lotus flowers
blossomed and made the lake look like a meadow floating upon the clear
and sleeping waters. It was the “Golden Lake,” a dependency of the
Imperial Palace, whose high walls and golden roofs could be seen in the
background.
Light buildings, such as kiosks and temples, reached to the shore. The
vast number of these roofs assumed rosy hues and the slightest details
of their complicated architecture stood out clearly, looking in the
liquid air that enveloped them, elegant, graceful and fresh amid the
apricot trees and blossoming mimosas that covered the banks.
North China was, in fact, just emerging from her long winter’s
mourning, and the impression given by that spring-tide picture of
earth’s new awakening was exquisite.
The Tartar chariot continued to advance with the rapid steps of its
mule: it was now passing at the foot of an artificial hill, planted
with green trees, at the summit of which rose a Buddhist obelisk that
stood out almost harshly against the blue of the sky.
But along the shore of the lake, the tints had already become deeper,
and the lines less sharp. The kiosks, the pavilions, and the temples
that rose upon the banks exhibited the original type of Chinese
buildings, a canvas tent with turned up corners. The extreme profusion
of ornamental details did not succeed in hiding the poverty of the
original conception: dragons, chimeras, phœnixes, and tortoises, an
entire fabulous and fantastic zoology of sculptured wood or terra
cotta, surcharged the ridge-poles; figurines and painted flowers of
clay weighed down the cornices, the larmiers, and the pediments; gaudy
colors made a motley mixture upon the capitals of the columns and the
architraves; but beneath this bristling and unrestrained decoration,
you always found the absolute and invariable type that China has
uniformly adopted at every epoch of her history and throughout her
entire empire.
However, I had by this time arrived at the fortified enclosure of the
palace. High above me a rampart reared itself, thirty feet high and
surrounded by a wide moat. At regular intervals, towers with turned-up
roofs jutted out over this line of stone which extended so far that it
seemed to shut in an entire city. A few trees had crossed the sloping
wall, and the shadows of their branches spread over the dark and
stagnant waters of the moat.
A large gateway, surmounted by an enormous square tower, gave access to
the interior of the palace, and three gigantic black letters engraved
upon a golden panel at the summit of the tower seemed a mysterious
inscription placed at the threshold of an unknown world.
And at the moment when the Tartar carriage became engulfed under the
arch and was lost in the Imperial enclosure, I experienced still more
powerfully the impression that I had received three years before in
Morocco in front of the palace of the Sultan Moulay-Hassan. There also,
in the old city of Islam shining in the sunlight, I had felt myself
transported into the midst of a new world, but I saw the barriers
broken down, I was able to pass through the great pointed doorways of
Dar-el-Mechouar, and the Court of the Scherifs was opened before me, as
a scene of fairy-land or dreamland unfolds in a dazzling brilliancy of
light and colour.
Here, on the contrary, everything remained closed and impenetrable.
However, the topography of the palace was not entirely unknown to me;
I had already studied the plan made by the Jesuit missionaries who
visited it in the Eighteenth Century, and, indeed, from the heights
of the ramparts of the Tartar village, I had been able to recognize
the general arrangement and distinguish the regular succession of its
rectangular courtyards and gardens containing forty-eight enormous
palaces and about the same number of pavilions, kiosks, arches and
gateways.
Only the tops of the principal buildings rose above the surrounding
wall and into the clumps of verdure. Very far away, in the south, near
the “Gate of Eternal Purity,” I perceived the temple of the ancestors
of the dynasty of Ta-Thsing now reigning, where the Emperor comes at
stated dates to accomplish the sacred rites of the official cult.
Then nearer, three buildings, taller than the rest, stood in a row, and
the sculptured dragons on the ridge-poles and the glazed tiles on the
roofs were resplendent in the sunlight: these were the three palaces
of the “Sovereign Concord, Medium Concord, and Protective Concord,”
where the Sovereign attends to the affairs of state and traces with
his vermilion-steeped pencil the characters that express his decisions
and that are laws venerated as the figured and material form of the
Imperial will. There, every morning at two o’clock, the Emperor
presides at the Grand Council of the Middle Kingdom; five ministers
only have access to it. There, no matter what their age or fatigue,
they must remain standing the whole time, or bow their foreheads to the
ground when, from his throne, a stage of gilded wood raised six feet
above the floor, the Son of Heaven addresses them. During the minority
of the sovereigns, as is the case with the present Emperor, the Empress
Regent is present also in the council, but she is not considered as
there, and a screen of yellow silk hides her from all eyes.
Then I saw a confused mass of houses of imperial princes, Manchus,
chamberlains, daughters of Emperors married to Mongol princes and
immured in the palace until their death, wives of the second degree and
concubines of the deceased sovereigns, ladies of honour, mistresses
of ceremonies, and eunuchs, an entire population, a wisely arranged
hierarchy amounting to more than eight thousand persons. Towards the
east, in the dazzling sunlight, appeared also the barracks of the three
banners of the guard, the treasury, the shops of porcelain, silver,
and silk, ornaments, garments, tea, religious objects destined for the
Son of Heaven, and manufactories where things are prepared for his
exclusive use; the armoury, the stables, the Imperial library where
the oldest annals of the world are kept, the “Pavilion of the Literary
Flowers,” whither the Emperor repairs in the second moon of the year
to interpret the sacred books; and the temple of the Tchouan-sin-tien
where the sacrifices to the memory of Confucius and the great
philosophers are performed.
Finally, very near me, behind the gardens that ran along the length
of the wall of the enclosure, I caught a glimpse of the “Palace of
the Superior Terrestrial Element,” which recalled the memory of that
unfortunate Empress Aluteh, who died in 1875 at the age of eighteen.
She was the daughter of a Manchu prince. When very young, barely
fifteen years, a decree proclaiming her for the Emperor tossed her
brusquely into the Court of Pekin from her province in Tartary, and
shut her up in the palace which she was to leave only with her life. On
November 16, 1872, at midnight, she entered in bridal toilette through
the “Gate of Celestial Purity”: she wore a robe of red silk embroidered
with dragon and phœnix, a large scarlet veil enveloped her from head to
foot. Three years later she went out dead through the “Flowered Gate
of the East”: she had killed herself on learning of the death of her
husband, the Emperor Tong-Tche: an unusual luxury was lavished upon
her funeral procession, and embroideries of pale blue silk upon white
satin embossed with gold covered her coffin.
However, the hour was advancing; the meeting of the Council was over;
the couriers of state were departing for the provinces; the great
mandarins came out of the palace, and after making interminable bows,
got into their chariots, and I returned to the French Legation.