world, that is to say, the three or four diplomatists who compose
our world, had very wisely taken itself off to the country. So early
as last February I had secured this “Temple of Great Repose,” and I
lost no time in coming out here. It is too far from Peking to be very
convenient; but it is well worth the extra ride, and the advantage
of being fifteen miles from the other temples inhabited by Europeans
is incalculable; one is not subject to perpetual interruptions by
people who, being bored themselves, come in and inflict their boredom
upon others. It is a great undertaking moving out to the hills. We
are obliged to take absolutely our whole _ménage_, and almost all our
furniture with us. I think you would have laughed at my procession;
there were fourteen carts full of every kind of movable—our whole
poultry-yard clucking and cackling out of coops and baskets, and a cow
with her calf. This must seem strange to you, who would certainly not
dream of taking your hens, ducks, and cows with you from town to the
country: it is only another instance of the universal topsy-turviness
of things in China, again demonstrated by the fact that the farther one
gets from town the dearer everything becomes, there being no market and
no competition, so that the owner of a leg of mutton can just charge
what he pleases for it, knowing that you must either buy at his price
or go without it altogether. It is a beautiful ride out here, past
Hai Tien, a little village with a smart inn at which the Pekingese
may be seen by scores, naked to the waist, and enjoying an outing,
after their fashion, with chopsticks and rice, tea and infinitesimal
pipes, past Yuen Ming Yuen and Wan Shao Shan, or rather its ruins,
past flourishing cornfields and picturesque hamlets, past temples and
shrines innumerable, along stony roads which the rains have turned into
canals so deep that the carters are obliged to cast lots for which
shall strip his very dirty body and go in to see whether the carts can
pass or not. It was quite dark before I reached the temple, after eight
hours’ ride under the hottest sun I ever remember to have felt. Indeed
I had a sad proof of its strength the next day, for my brown pony,
Hop-o’-my-thumb, who had carried me so well over so many hundred miles,
died of sunstroke after a few hours’ illness. Poor little beast! He was
a great pet, and as fond of me as a dog. When I went down to his stable
shortly before he died he put his head on my shoulder and looked so
piteously in my face. The Chinese veterinary surgeon (they are rather
clever at that) declares that he was struck by the sun the day before
while he was being led. He was the strongest, stoutest little beast you
ever saw, never sick nor sorry, and used to trot into Peking after a
700-mile journey as if he had just been out for a morning’s exercise.
He is the third horse that I have lost from one cause or another since
last September. Bad luck, is it not?
This is certainly the prettiest temple and the most charming summer
residence that I have seen near Peking. The temple stands in a nest
of trees—cedars, pines, firs, and poplars—a perpetual fountain runs
through all its courts, and there seems always to be a cool breeze
blowing. While our friends are complaining of being roasted and baked
in their temples, we here are revelling in fresh air. Here is a
translation of an account of Ta Chio Ssŭ by a Chinese gentleman:—
“Seventy li (23 miles) from the walls of Peking there stood in the
time of the Liao a temple called Ling Chuan Ssŭ, ‘The temple of the
Spiritual Fountain.’ In the reign of the Emperor Hsuan Tê of the Ming
dynasty it was restored, and the name changed to Ta Chio Ssŭ, ‘The
temple of Great Repose.’ There are four shrines: the first is to the
Prince of heaven; the second to Ju Lai Fo, the Buddha who reigns in the
western heaven; the third to the Yo Shih Fo, the Buddha who presides
over medicine; and the fourth and last shrine has an upper story, and
in it is the Pu-sa (god of the second class) of Great Compassion.
Behind the shrines is a pond with a fountain. In this is a dragon’s
head carved in stone, out of the mouth of which the spring issues. In
front of the pond is a pagoda, on the left and right hands of which
are old fir-trees, one on each side, about which an old tradition
says that they never can overtop the pagoda, hence the spot is called
‘Sung ta chi,’ or ‘The firs and pagoda level.’ Besides this, outside
the shrine of the Prince of heaven, on either side there is a stone
called the dragon stone and the tiger stone, from their resemblance
to those animals. In front of these there is a stone bridge with a
pond of water on each side, and in the ponds there are a fountain and
lotus flowers and gold fish. By the side of the ponds is a dragon’s
claw tree, in the shape of lions playing, whence it is called the Lion
Tree. The temple is built on the west, facing the east; on its south
side is an imperial residence called Ssŭ Yi Tang, ‘The Hall of the Four
Proprieties.’ In the hall stands an imperial throne. In the garden are
four trees—peonies and two Yu Lan Hwa trees, magnolias. Behind this
hall is the ‘Pavilion of the Reposing Clouds,’ ‘Chi Yün Hsuan,’ in
front of which are bright bamboos and dark green firs interlaced like
a forest, a capital refuge from the heat in midsummer, with plenty to
see.”
My friend Liu, who wrote the description which I have translated
above, has left out one of the greatest charms of the place. Just
behind the “Pavilion of the Reposing Clouds,” in which we live, is a
most beautiful rock work, all covered with tufts of feathery grass,
mosses, and ferns, and lycopods: down this and into an artificial
basin, which is screened from the sun by a network of fir branches,
comes tumbling a deliciously cool fountain scented with pine needles,
which gives us a famous shower-bath twice a day—a real luxury. Close
by my fountain is a little summer-house, in which the Emperor Chien
Lung was transacting business one day with his ministers, and feeling
inspired by the influence of the place got through his work greatly to
his satisfaction, so he called the summer-house “The Pavilion of the
Understanding of Important Matters.” I wonder whether I have given you
an idea of what a very pretty place this is? It is almost enough to
tempt a man to turn Buddhist priest, and abstracting himself from the
unrealities of this life, pass his hour on earth in reflecting upon the
beauties of the hopelessly unattainable Nirvana (I don’t suppose you
know what that is—so much the better. It will be like that “blessed
word Mesopotamia” to the old woman at church). The only pity is that
mosquitoes and sand-flies sound such a lively recall to the reality of
the disagreeable.
The monastery is richly endowed with lands, so much so as to be
independent of the assistance from Government, to which, as an imperial
temple, it would be entitled. The place looks richer than most of the
temples about here. There is no magnificence, but it has a comfortable,
well-to-do appearance, the grounds and buildings being properly kept
up. All over the gardens there are notices to “relations and friends”
who may visit the temple to abstain from damaging buildings and trees,
plucking flowers or cutting down the bamboos, a notice the spirit of
which, as it says, “all respectable persons will observe of their own
accord, and those who do not will be fined.” First and last, monks and
laymen, there are some fifty persons employed about the temple. The
abbot himself finds it dull, so he remains at Peking enjoying himself.
His second in command is a charming monk, very clean in his person
and especially natty about his boots. He is very intelligent, too,
and comes and sits with me by the hour talking Buddhism. This is an
extremely religious temple—prayers, liturgies, drum and gong beating,
seem to be going on very constantly. But except on the 1st and 15th of
every moon and other holidays the novices are put on active service,
the monks enjoying an unbroken idleness; they are apparently cursed
with an unquenchable thirst, but as a fountain of perennial tea flows
for them they are not to be pitied. I suppose you would ask the name
of my friend with the neat boots; this would be an arch mistake and
violation of good-breeding on your part. When a man shaves his tail
and turns monk he cuts himself off from the whole world, including his
family, whose name even he no longer bears. To remind him of this would
be quite ill-bred, but as it is inconvenient that a monk—who, however
much he may renounce the vanities of this life, must occasionally be
brought in contact with that extremely unreal idea, the world—should
have no designation at all, he adopts two words or characters as his
appellation, which on no account must you call his name. You ask him
what is his “honourable above and below”; this refers to the two
characters, one of which is written above the other. My friend’s
“honourable above and below” is Fo Kwo. As a Buddhist monk must not be
asked his name, so a Taoist monk must not be asked his age, although it
is one of the complimentary routine questions in China.
The neighbourhood round about here is as charming as the place itself.
The fields are richly cultivated; there is plenty of hedge-row timber,
and the villages are very picturesque and well shaded. The hills are
beautifully shaped, and take fine colours of an evening. The one
thing wanting is water, which is missing all over this part of China.
Nothing can be prettier than the cottages of the villagers with their
long, low eaves; each has its little garden hedged in by a fence of
tall millet, over which are trained gourds and other creepers. There
is generally, too, a millet-straw shed with a vine creeping about it,
and under this the labourers sit of an evening and drink their tea,
a picture of contentment. The temples, both Taoist and Buddhist, are
numerous. Yesterday I scrambled up to a very pretty one on the top of
a great eminence so steep that it is called by the Chinese the “Wall
Mountain.” I found a most charming little monastery built in tiers, I
should have said terraces had it not been so tiny, which reminded me
of the tiers of the Rhenish vineyards. Their reverences the monks had
all gone off to Peking on a lark, but I was hospitably entertained with
tea by two lay attendants, for whose benefit I in return emptied my
cigar-case. What a queer existence these people lead perched up on the
top of a high hill! They are so stay-at-home that they hardly seem to
care even to go down on to the plain. And as to going to Peking, none
but the better-to-do monks dream of such dissipation. You may imagine
what a state of crass ignorance they live in. For faces expressing
brutal stupidity there is nothing to equal the Chinese monks, except
the Thibetan llamas, between whom and drivelling idiotcy there is no
missing link. My friend here, Fo Kwo, is a brilliant exception. Monks
and laymen alike—all our neighbours—vie with one another in civility
to us. They all stop one to have a chat, and as for tea, I might drown
myself in a butt of it if I had a mind. The women, however—and in one
village there are some very pretty ones—are as _farouches_ as wild
deer. As I ride in at one end of a village I see them scuttling off
into their houses, with their babies on their backs, as fast as their
poor deformed feet will let them. If by chance I overtake them, they
scowl at me as if I really were the devil they call me. During the
whole time I have been in China, I do not think that I have three times
been addressed by Chinese women; the rare exceptions have always been
wrinkled old hags—of course I do not count beggars. _Ces dames_ don’t
love us. They are always the first to get up the cry of “Kwei tzŭ”
(devils) against us, and I almost think that they verily believe that
there is something uncanny about us, or at any rate that there is no
villainy of which we are not capable. However, I think that last year I
told you some of their beliefs with respect to us.
Farquhar joined me on the 20th July, bringing with him Dr. Pogojeff
from the Russian summer quarters at Pa Ta Chu—a group of temples nearer
Peking, where most of the Legations spend the hot season. They are
delighted with the beauty of this place. Farquhar, who is a very clever
artist, has made some lovely sketches. July the 25th was the fifteenth
day of the Chinese moon, a high day with our Buddhist friends. On
ordinary days the novices do the drum and gong beating, and intone the
prayers (which indeed never seem to cease), but on the 1st and 15th of
each moon the higher priests—whose everyday duties seem to be confined
to smoking infinite and infinitesimal pipes of tobacco, and sipping cup
after cup of amber tea—buckle to the work themselves, leaving their
ease and dignity to don their black and yellow robes, and perform
service with the rest.
One day out walking we were accosted by a man who told us that he was
out for a holiday, and insisted on taking us with him to a village
where there was “Jo nao” (fun) going on. We could not resist, so we
went with him, and in a by-lane of the said village, on one of the
threshing-floors, we found a small raised stage. After we had waited
some time, during which the whole village had time to turn out for a
good stare at us, a man made his appearance with a very small drum,
three pairs of castanets, and three gongs. He was followed by three
ladies—one old and two young, and all hideous—and then the performance
began with an instrumental overture by the whole strength of the
company, a rattling and jangling which lasted five minutes, and sent us
off with our fingers in our ears. We gave the poor people a dollar and
were glad to escape; but the villagers were highly delighted, for were
not these real actors come all the way from Peking, and, therefore, of
course eminent? Mario and Grisi, starring in the provinces, never gave
more pleasure to a country audience.
Frightfully hot weather. Do you remember the old quatrain written with
a diamond on a pane of glass in the old Foreign Office in Downing
Street:—
Je suis copiste,
Affreux métier,
Joyeux ou triste,
Toujours copier!
Copying despatches with the thermometer at 100° in the shade, with
a basin of water and a towel at one’s side for very necessary
hand-wiping, and a pad of blotting-paper over the blank part of one’s
paper, is indeed an _affreux métier_.
I find that Englishmen who can’t speak the language are a little
capricious as to exchanging courtesies which the Chinese press upon
them. Sometimes it amuses them immensely to stop and talk twaddle with
the natives through an interpreter, while at others, especially if
there is just a touch of headache in the case, the Chinamen get short
answers. To-day as we were walking we passed a group of peasants, one
of whom as usual called out civilly, “Hsie yi hsie pa?” (Won’t you sit
down a bit?)
_F._—“What the devil’s he saying?”
_Chinaman_ (thinking to be intelligible by being still louder)—“Hsie yi
hsie pa!”
_F._—“Don’t make that damned noise!”
_I._—“He’s only asking you to sit down.”
_F._ (savagely)—“Well, he needn’t make such a confounded row about it!”
_Chinaman_ (to his friends)—“The gentleman is not very quiet,” as if he
were speaking of a restive horse.
_Friends_ (assenting)—“Ah! these foreigners! they are indeed terrible
people. Unsurpassable! unsurpassable!”
The poor villagers would have been too civil to utter their opinion if
they had thought they were understood, but I had held my tongue to hear
what they would say.
On the 16th of August we had a delightful addition to our family party
in the shape of my old friend Dick Conolly, who has come out as second
secretary—the cheeriest of companions.[17]
Next day he and I rode over to see a very famous temple, Hei Lung Tan,
a shrine dedicated to the Black Dragon, which was built in the Ming
dynasty and repaired in Ka̔ng Hsi’s reign. It is an imposing edifice
built in three tiers with roofs of the imperial yellow tiles. Here the
Black Dragon Prince rests in great dignity. He is surrounded by six
satellites—a monster who presides over the thunder, a woman who rules
the lightning, a clerk with pen and book who writes down orders for the
rainfall, and three others whose functions are not so clear. Of human
attendants there was visible but one priest, very dirty and saturated
with garlic. The Black Dragon being, like all dragons in this country,
a water deity or spirit, there is of course a pond in which he may
disport himself. If his priest would only do the same!
The country people are really very civil and kind. The other day we
were wandering through a village nestled away among the hills, when
several of the peasants came out and brought us delicious pears. One
old gentleman, a personage evidently, was just preparing a great
sacrifice outside his house to ward off the devil. He had erected an
altar on which were placed various fruits and grapes, and in front of
it was a great paper boat with dolls in it. This was to be burnt, and
with the letting off of many crackers would complete the sacrifice.
This, it appears, being the 15th day of the 7th moon, is the feast of
departed spirits—a sort of All Souls’ Day. It is the anniversary on
which the pious Chinaman worships and burns incense at the tombs of his
ancestors—the custom over which the Dominicans and Franciscans on the
one side, and the Jesuits on the other, started their great feud in the
days of the Emperor Ka̔ng Hsi.[18] There are also on this day great
ceremonies in honour of the tutelary saints of towns, some deceased
minister or warrior appointed by the Emperor as guardian over each
town or part of a town. Great honour is paid to one of these patron
saints, and men will flock to his shrine to dedicate themselves to his
service, so that a man, for instance, who is a groom in this life,
will go and offer himself to be the saint’s groom in the next world.
The effigy of this “Lord of the Walls,” as he is called, is paraded
through the town where he is supposed to search out evil-doers. There
is also a Prince of departed spirits whose shrine is largely attended
on this day. A stage is raised and priests are engaged to read prayers
and distribute food for the spirits, that those who have died a violent
death may be released from Purgatory. At midnight huge paper images,
placed in a boat in order that the spirits may pass the river Nai-ho, a
sort of Styx, are solemnly burnt, and the feast is over. The feast is
called Yu Lang Hai, “The assembly of the Bowl and Flower.” My teacher
explains this, saying that on board the boat there is a Buddhist god
called Ti Tsang Wang, who gives the ghosts of the departed a bowl and
flower as a token of release from their sins, so that they may cross
the river which is a gulf between them and Paradise.
LETTER XXIX
PEKING, _7th September 1866_.
Some time ago I was invited to go to the play by the great curio
merchant here—Han Chang-kwei-ti. As the Pekingese theatres have a great
celebrity, I ought to give you some account of them.
There are a great many theatres in the Chinese city, their situation
being marked by a few masks, lay figures, images of tortoises or
dragons, or other queer beasts; though indeed no sign is necessary to
indicate their whereabouts, for the infernal din which comes from them
the whole day long would guide any one to them. The theatres are the
property of restaurateurs, who engage a company of actors to come and
play for so many days, so that the troupes are constantly changing
quarters. You go in by a long passage, which leads into a lofty and
spacious hall, lighted from the top, and surrounded by a gallery.
In the pit, or body of the hall, are tables at which the people sit
drinking tea, eating sweetmeats, or with papers of fried melon and
gourd seeds before them. This is the place of the poorer people; the
rank and fashion go to the gallery, part of which is divided into
private boxes. At one end of the hall is a raised platform, without
scenes or appliances of any kind, open at the sides, and separated
from the dressing-room by two doors with curtains; at the back of the
stage sit the orchestra, five or six performers, all of whom play
upon several instruments, which they take up in turn, according to
the character of the music. The chief instruments are fiddles, lutes,
clarionets, flutes, a sort of mouth organ, and any number of variety of
gongs, drums, and cymbals. I talk of fiddles, etc., for simplicity’s
sake, but you know a Chinese fiddle is no more like a European fiddle
than a Chinaman with his pig-tail is like a European in a chimney-pot
hat.
Nothing could be more rude or primitive than the state of the drama.
The tragedies are all strutting and mouthing; roaring in a bass
voice that seems to come out of the actor’s boots, or squeaking in
a falsetto shrill enough to set your teeth on edge. The whole of the
words are declaimed in a sort of recitative, which is more than half
drowned by the drums and gongs. The language of tragedies is the old
literary style and very obscure, and as if to make it still more
difficult to the Pekingese, the actors all affect the Soochow dialect
as the mother-tongue of the stage. The consequence of this is that even
a well-educated Chinaman will make a very poor guess at the plot unless
he has read the tragedy beforehand. Not understanding what is going
on does not, however, seem to affect the enjoyment of the audience,
nine-tenths of whom could no more tell you what the play is all about
than I could.
As there is no scenery or stage appliances a great deal must be
supplied by the imagination. A lady coming in with an attendant in the
plain clothes of a Pekingese coolie, holding horizontally on each side
of her two flags on which are painted wheels and clouds, is a fairy
entering in her chariot of clouds. A warrior brandishes a whip to show
that he is on horseback; to dismount, he makes a pirouette on one leg
and throws down his whip; to remount, he makes a pirouette on the other
leg and picks it up again. But let me tell you the plot of the tragedy
I saw, as Han Chang-kwei-ti explained it to me.
A warrior in white has an everlasting feud with a rebel in red, who
always gets the better of him, and performs the most astounding
_pas seuls_, making quite appalling faces (heightened by streaks of
red, blue, and white paint) to the terror of the whole empire, as
represented by five old men and two little boys in white. The warrior
in white, after a series of stage combats with the rebel in red, which
it would break the heart of our best pantomimists to imitate, sits down
in an arm-chair and tucks up one leg under him, by which the audience
are to understand that he has gone to sleep in a lonely forest. He
then dreams that the ghost of his father appears to him to teach him
a trick and give him a sword, by the aid of which he may circumvent
the rebel in red. The dream is represented by his getting up from his
chair and acting through the scene with his father’s ghost, after
which he sits down in the same posture as before. During one of his
dead father’s speeches, which may have struck him, as they did me,
as rather tedious, the actor felt a little thirsty, so he called for
a cup of tea, which a coolie brought to him, and he drank it with his
face to the audience, gargling his throat and spitting out the last
mouthful without the smallest regard for the situation. Well, the
father having stalked out, the warrior tucked up his leg again and then
awoke. A final combat of many rounds then terminates in the victory of
the warrior, obtained by the grace of his father’s sword. The rebel is
slain and walks out, and the victorious army, consisting of four wheezy
old men, make a triumphal entry into the gates of the capital, which
are signified by two coolies holding up two poles with a blue cotton
curtain in which a hole has been cut.
The dresses of the tragedians are magnificent. They are stiff with gold
and embroidery, and immensely valuable. The masks and painting of the
faces are to the last degree grotesque and hideous. The beards and wigs
are coarse and clumsily contrived.