CHINA THE LONG- -LIVED EMPIRE ERSCIDMORE LIBRARY THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA PRESENTED BY MRS. ERIC SCHMIDT China The Long-Lived Empire THE EMPRESS DOWAGER SHOWIN(; COSTUME BEKOKE TWENTY-FIVE YEAKS OK ACK From a iwintiiig on eilk by Li 8bih C'liuan. China The Long-Lived Empire By Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore Author of "Jinrikisha Days in Japan," and "Java: The Garden of the East" New York The Century Co. 1900 Copyright, 1899, 1900, by The Century Co. The DeVinne Press. TO MY MOTHER MY MOST PATIENT READER THIS BOOK IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED PEEFACE In adding to the long list of books about China, one .can only hope to give another individual expe- rience and point of view, to add new testimony to that so abundantly offered. No one can cover the whole field, give the only key, or utter the last word ; and during seven visits to China in the last fifteen years, the mystery of its people and the enigma of its future have only increased. It is such an impos- sible, incomprehensible country that one labors vainly to show it clearly to others. To the hypercritical residents of treaty ports, aU writers have gone astray among the plainest Chinese facts ; but as these same critics often controvert one another, the outsider can claim a certain privilege, while at the same time beg- ging their indulgence for his views. Every effort has been made to attain accuracy, but in the face of so much conflicting testimony, of so many contradictory statements, no one can expect general indorsement. The chaos of all things Chinese is well illustrated in the spelling or transliteration of the characters for place-names. One finds Chifu and Chefoo used with equal authority ; Chili, Chihli, or Dshy-ly; Taku or Dagu; Kau-lung or Kowloou. X PREFACE Each European spells according to the genius of his own language, and in several instances general Eng- lish usage does not agree with the form or forms given by Consul Playfair in his '' Geographical Dic- tionary." The majority of sinologues are agreed that the English spelling or trunshteration of place-names used by the Imperial Maritime Customs on letter-heads and postal canceling-stamps should be accepted by foreigners in China. There is no society among Chi- nese literati for the Romanization or uniform trans- literation of Chinese characters ; and Chinese delegates to international Oriental congresses in Europe are usually silent, wliile German, Enghsh, and French sinologues argue ferventl}' for or against te or teh, or other fundamental syllables. The Twelfth Oriental Congress at Rome, in 1899, left this transliteration still an unfinished question, although, as one of the secretaries of Section IV, it was my privilege to make record of two long sessions of excited debate. I have a great indebtedness to acknowledge to the many authors whose works are quoted and referred to in this volume, and to many residents in treat}' ports whose courtesies and hospitalities relieved the depres- sion which Chinese environment and the discouraging state of China, the nation, too often cause. E. R. S. WAsni\(iT()\, D. C, March 31, 1000. CONTENTS PAGE I. The Degenerate Empire 1 II. The Edge of Chihli ..... 13 III. Tientsin 20 IV. Shanhaikwan 30 V, As Marco Polo Went 50 VI. Pei-ching, the Northern Capital . . 61 VII. The Tatar City of Kublai Khan . . .85 VIII. Imperial, Purple Peking .... 102 IX. The Decadence OF the Manchus . . .117 X. TszE Hsi An the Great 127 XI. The Strangers' Quarter 143 XII. Christian Missions 158 XIII. Tatar Fus and Fairs 1G6 XIV. Chinese Peking 188 XV. Without the Walls 201 XVI. The Environs of Peking .... 215 XVII. The Great Wall of China 227 XVIII. The Valley of the Ming Tombs . . . 250 XIX. Suburban Temples 266 XX. To Shanghai 275 XXI. The Great Bore of Hangchow .... 294 xii CONTENTS PAGE XXII. In a Provincial Yamun 319 XXIII. The Lower Yangtsze 333 XXIV. The Eiver of Fragrant Tea-fields . . 353 XXV. A Thousand Miles up the Yangtsze . . 377 XXVI. A KwATszE ON the Yangtsze . . 406 XXVII. The City of Canton 430 XXVm. The Chinese New Year 444 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The Empress Dowager— Showing Costume before Twenty-five Years of Age . . . Frontispiece From a painting on silk by Li Shili Ch'uan. PAGE Hunting-eagles Bound for Manchuria . . . .33 The Sea-shore End of the Great "Wall ... 41 Debris of the Great Wall of China . . . .45 A Manchurian Samovar 49 Native Boats on the Pei-ho River 53 "Walls of Peking, with Continuous Stream of Camels 63 "Walls of Peking, and Moat in "Winter ... 63 Map of Peking 67 Pailow at the "West End of Legation Street . . 71 The Manchu Head-dress 75 A Peking Cart 79 Porcelain Pailow before the Hall of Classics . . 89 British Tourist in Disguise 95 Sun-dial at the Hall of Classics 99 The "V^iceroy Li Hung Chang 113 A Manchu Hair-pin, Back View 129 Kang Yu "Wei '. ... 137 From " Harper's Weekly" Fruit-stall in Front of the French Legation . , 147 At the Old Fu 169 xiii xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Trained Birds 177 Feather-dusters for Sale— Entrance-gate of Lung- FU-SSU 181 Honeyed Crab-apples 184 Pigeon Whistles ........ 187 Chrysanthemum Gardener 211 Chrysanthemum Garden— Winter Quarters . 211 Coal Mining and Transportation 217 A Caravan Outside the Walls of Peking . . . 229 In the Nankou Pass 235 The Pa-ta-ling Gate 241 The Great Wall . . .245 Catching Singing Insects 257 Chinese Inn near Peking 263 A Suburban Canal 283 In Old Shanghai 289 A Marble Bridge 296 Map of Hangchow Bay to Tsien-tang River, with Waterways from Shanghai to Haininvj, Hang- chow . . 301 The Great Bore 305 Junks Riding in on the After-rush . . .311 On the Bank 323 TjITtle Orphan Island, in the Yangtsze below Lake PoYANG 343 In the <1k?:en-tea Country AROUND Lake PovANG . 349 The Native Bind, Hankow, at Low Water . . .361 Approach and Masonry Front ok Cavi; Temple near Ichang 381 The Foreign Settlkment of Ichang and Tiir; Graveyard Golf-links 387 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xv PAGE Stepping the Mast at Ichang 391 Otter-fishing at Ichang 395 Valley behind Ichang; Flooded Rice-fields; Ichang Pagoda on the River-bank in the Distance . 399 Sails in the Gorge of Ichang, with a Red Life-boat in the Foreground 403 Trackers on the Upper Yangtsze 409 Descending Ta Dung Rapids 413 Old Wrinkles, the Fo'c's'le Cook 418 Entrance of Ichang Gorge, Upper End .... 427 In the Temple of the Five Hundred Genii . . . 435 The Execution-ground at Canton .... 439 Five-storied Pagoda on City Wall, Canton . . . 443 A Canton Street 445 The Crooked Bamboo, Fa-Ti Gardens, Canton . . 449 The Creek between Shameen and the Native City, Canton , 453 CHINA THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE CHINA THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE THE DEGENERATE EMPIRE JHINA has been an old country for forty centuries. It has been dying of old age and senile decay for all of this century ; its vitality running low, heart-stilling and soul-benumbing, slowly ossifying for this hundred years. During this wonderful cen- tury of Western progress it has swung slowly to a standstill, to a state of arrested existence, then ret- rograded, and the world watches now for the last symptoms and extinction. But it lives, nevertheless, the ancestor kingdom of all the world, the long-lived, undying empire. Since time prehistoric, its vitality has often ebbed low in recurring cycles, its history has often been re- peated in these ages since it gave civilization, arts, letters, languages to the Far East, saw ephemeral Persia and Macedon, Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, and Rome rise and fall, watched them built up and broken up, while it endured. 1 1 2 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE This present " break-up of China," a catch-phrase wiiich has lately roused Occidental interest and anx- iety, is an old story, very often repeated in this oldest surviviii«^ empire of the world, an old-new subject fittingly dismissed in Colonel Yide's small foot-note thirty years ago : " It has broken up before." Such a crisis, a mere break-up or change of dy- nasty, is nothing new to Confucius's people, and China will continue to break up at intervals for thousands of more years to come ; the Chinese remaining the one same, homogeneous, unchanging, incomprehensi- ble people— the Chinese, only the Chinese, forever tlie Chinese, no matter under what alien flag they toil, by what outer people they are conquered, or be- nevolently protected in inalienable spheres of influ- ence. The physical endurance and vitality of the people as a race are no more remarkable than the endurance of the nation, of the body politic known as China, the survival of the decayed, crumbling, honey- combed old empire long after it should have logically ceased to hold together or exist. Defying age and time and progress and the harsh impact of Western civilization, China continues, and will continue, to be China— whether "for the Chi- nese " only some centuries can tell. That same shib- l)oleth of tlie handful of reformers to-day, ''China for tlie Chinese," is thousands of j'ears old, too, heard each time the em])ire was exploited by northern Ta- tars, each time a native dynasty arose. It is raised now, as time-honored custom ordains, when yet an- other Tatar coiKpu'i-or advances from the north, and vital tlinists are Ix-iiii:- dealt from the south, the east. THE DEGENERATE EMPIRE 3 and the west. There was a worse state prevailing when Confucius wandered from state to state, trying to rouse the rulers and people, and time may have only swung round again for another great moral teacher to rise up, scourge and lead this certainly chosen people. The Occident is fortunate in assisting at one of the many great downfalls, but it need not assume that this is at all the end, the absolute and final ruin, the last wreck and crash of the old empire, of its curious, four-thousand-year-old civilization, all because the present parvenu Manchu dynasty happens to fall. " It has broken up before." One may see now the same ancient, original China, the same conditions as in the middle ages; and he may have every theory upset, every sense and senti- ment offended, by an old civilization in rank decay. This spectacle awaits one everywhere in the eighteen provinces, and will continue to, through the years, as historical plays continue for days in a Chinese the- ater. The spectator need not hasten to his seat be- cause the curtain has risen. The present ''break-up" will be more than a long- running trilogy on the world's stage, and the audiences will go in and out many times before the curtain falls on even this Manchu interlude in the empire drama. The world, our crude, young, boisterous Western side of it, has only begun to discover Asia. Since there are no more new worlds to conquer, it must grapple with the oldest one. The Oriental is the problem of the century to come, as man was the ques- tion of the eighteenth century, and woman the mys- 4 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE tery of the one just closed. Our Western world only discovered actual China in the year 1894, after the battle of the Yalu River and the other sweeping victo- ries of the Japanese war. Before that war, an imagi- nary, fantastic, picturesque, spectacular, and bizarre sort of a bogy China had haunted European minds —that indefinable, romantic specter, the Yellow Peril, that no lessons of previous military campaigns, nor repeated exposures, could lay. The world wanted to be humbugged about China. It hugged its delusions to the last moment of absurdity, read fairy and Mun- chausen tales, and was deaf to what Gordon and Yule and Wilson distinctly said. " One cannot but wonder, " said Abbe Hue, " how people in Europe could ever take it into their heads that China was a kind of vast academy peopled with sages and philosophers. . . . The Celestial Empire has much more resemblance to an immense fair, where, amid a perpetual flux and reflux of buyers and sellers, of brokers, loungers, and thieves, you see in all quarters stages and mountebanks, jokers and comedians, lal^oring uninterruptedly to amuse the public." "W^ien Oriental met Oriental in 1894, the bubble of China burst, its measure was taken, and the huge Humpty-Dumpty of the Far East, General Wilson's " boneless giant," fell, and relegated the Yellow Peril of militant Europe's nightmares to the consideration of comic journals only. No Occidental ever saw within or understood the working of tlie yellow brain, which starts from and arrives at a different point by reverse and inverse THE DEGENERATE EMPIRE 5 processes we can neither follow nor comprehend. No one knows or ever will really know the Chinese— the heart and soul and springs of thought of the most incomprehensible, unfathomable, inscrutable, contra- dictory, logical, and illogical people on earth. Of all Orientals, no race is so alien. Not a memory nor a custom, not a tradition nor an idea, not a root-word nor a symbol of any kind associates our past with their past. There is little sympathy, no kinship nor common feeling, and never affection possible between the Anglo-Saxon and the Chinese. Nothing in Chinese character or traits appeals warmly to our hearts or imagination, nothing touches; and of all the people of earth they most entirely lack " soul," charm, mag- netism, attractiveness. We may yield them an intel- lectual admiration on some grounds, but no warmer pulse beats for them. There are chiefly points of con- tradiction between them and ourselves. Their very numbers and sameness appal one, the frightful likeness of any one individual to all the other three hundred odd millions of his own people. Everywhere, from end to end of the vast empire, one finds them cast in the same unvaiying physical and mental mold— the same yellow skin, hard features, and harsh, mechanical voice ; the same houses, graves, and clothes ; the same prejudices, superstitions, and customs ; the same selfish conservatism, blind worship of precedent and antiquity ; a monotony, unanim- ity, and repetition of life, character, and incident, that offend one almost to resentment. Everywhere on their tenth of the globe, from the edge of Siberia to the end of Cochin China, the same ignoble queue 6 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE and the senseless cotton shoe are worn ; everywhere this fifth of the human race is sunk in dirt and dis- order, decadent, degenerate, indifferent to a fallen estate, consumed with conceit, selfish, vain, cowardly, and superstitious, without imagination, sentiment, chivalry, or sense of humor, combating with most zeal anything that would alter conditions even for the better, indifferent as to who rules or usurps the throne. There is no word or written character for patriotism in the language, hardly good ground in their minds and hearts for planting the seed of that sentiment, but there are one hundred and fifty ways of writing the cliaracters for good luck and long life. And yet in no country have political martyrs ever died more nobly and unselfishly than those reformers executed at Peking in 1898. Although Mongol, Ming, and Manchu won the empire by arms, the soldier is despised, as much the butt of dramatists as the priest. There is no respect or consideration for woman, who is a despised, inferior, and soulless creature, a chat- tel ; yet three times in these last forty years the dragon throne has been seized and the country hur- ried on to ruin by the same high-tempered, strong- willed, vindictive old Manchu dowager odalisk. It is a land of contradictions, puzzles, mysteries, enigmas. Chinese character is only the more com- plex, intricate, baffling, ijiscrntable, and exasperating eacli time and the longer it confronts one. Whatever decision one arrives at, he is soon given reason to retreat from it. I gave up the conundrum of this people, abjured " that oilskin mystery, tlie Cliinaman," more devoutly THE DEGENERATE EMPIRE 7 each day of six visits to China, and on the seventh visit the questions were that many times the more baffling. One can both agree and disagree with the four-day tourist, who sums up the Chinese convin- cingly, with brutal, practical, skeptical common sense, and can echo his irreverent and wholesale condemna- tion and contempt when he has once seen the land and the revolting conditions in which the people live. One agrees and disagrees, too, with the sinologues, who are usually sinophiles, that the Chinese are the one great race and fine flower of all Asia, a superior people, the world's greatest and earliest teachers, its future leaders and rulers, the chosen people; China a vast reserve reservoir of humanity to repeople and revive decadent, dying Europe ; the Chinese destined tounderlive, override, and outdo all the pale races ; the whole hope of humanity bound up in this yellow people. Everything seems dead, dying, ruined, or going to decay in this greatest empire of one race and people. There seems no living spring nor beating heart in the inert mass. Religion, morality, literature, the arts and finer industries are all at least comatose. Their three great religions are dead ; two systems of ignoble superstitions live. Literature is a fossil thing, all hol- low form and artifice, the empty shell of dead con- ventions. The arts have died, the genius of the race has fled. They have lost the powers they once com- manded, and have acquired no new ones. Tliere is little joy, light-heartedness, or laughter in the race, and their greatest virtue, filial piety, is demoralized, degraded by the soulless, craven cult of ancestor- worship. China in its present stage, with the desper- 8 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE ate problems it presents, is a melancholy and depressing place, intensely interesting, full of "questions," but not enjoyable in enjoyment's literal sense. While India and Japan, on either side of it, overflow with tourists the year round, and railways, hotels, couriers, guides, and guide-books minister to this an- nual army, China, although open to foreign trade many years before the adjacent islands, lacks all this life and industry. Neither Murray nor Baedeker has penetrated the empire,— they have no need to; none calls them,— and Cook has only touched the edge of it at Canton. No pleasure-travelers make a tour of China, and the round-the-world tourist, the commonly and contemptuously termed ''globe-trotter" of the Far East, usually sees Shanghai during the few hours his steamer anchors at Wusung ; "■ does " Canton as an excursion from imperial, model, British Hong- kong, and vies with his fellow-tourists in extravagant descriptions of its general offensiveness, and the haste with which he leaves it. In the spring and autumn there are a few tourists in Peking, but they are not a twentieth, not a fiftieth, of the travelers who pass the coasts of China on the grand round of the globe. No inducements are offered, no jn'ovision is made, for the tourist in China ; nothing ministers to, no one caters to, his wants and needs. The foreign residents in treaty ports look coldly and listen ])atiently to those who wish to ti'avel in the interior, and a tourist's zeal oozes away in their presence. Every dejiarture from railway or steam- ship routes is like a journey of ex])l<)ration ; })nt without the excitement, surprises, and rewards of real THE DEGENERATE EMPIRE 9 discovery, one's energy soon lags in the opening of personal routes, and one longs to be on a beaten track, to have a coupon ticket, to be personally conducted in flocks. The hostility of the people, combined with a certain fraternity and equality ; the close shoulder- ing and elbowing of the filthy crowds whose solid, stolid, bovine stare, continued for hours, unpleasantly mesmerizes one ; the inevitable wrangling, haggling, and bribing before one can get in or out of any show- place, and the awful Chinese voice— in fact, the whole scheme and plan of the world Chinese — wear upon one, '' get upon one's nerves," in a way and to a degree difficult to explain. Then nothing Chinese seems worth seeing ; one has only a frantic, irrational desire to get away from it, to escape it, to return to civili- zation, decency, cleanliness, quiet, and order. The mere tourist, the traveler without an errand or an ob- ject beyond entertainment, finds that inner China does not entertain, amuse, please, or soothe him enough to balance the discomforts. He soon feels that he must go, and China's edge is paved with broken intentions, travelers' plans and itineraries abandoned with zeal. He may be surprised by many things, deeply interested, but admiration is a reserve senti- ment, not often called upon in the course of any tour. '' Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay " understates too eloquently. The bibliography of China is so extensive that it should be the best-known country of the East. Since "Marco Polo, Friar Odoric, Ibn Batuta, and Rashuddin, a legion of travelers have written ; but Marco Polo and these others without Colonel Yule would be less 10 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE known to the Western world than Omar without Fitzgerald, and Colonel Yule's commentaries upon the Venetian and the other early visitors furnish a small encyclopedia of things Chinese. The '^ Lettres Edifiantes " of the Jesuit priests and their memoirs are a storehouse of contemporary history. With the opening of China, a little group of scholarly mis- sionaries began their literary labors, and there have resulted the standard dictionaries and grammars and inniimerable translations of the Chinese classics. Those two solid volumes, " The Middle Kingdom, " by the American scholar and missionary. Dr. Wells Williams, hold all of China, and are the treasury for everything— histor}-, topography, literature, customs, philosophy, religion, and arts. Archdeacon Gray has described the social life and customs of the Cantonese, and Dr. Doolittle those of the Fu-kien people. No- thing can ever displace Dr. Arthur Smith's " Chinese Characteristics," the keenest and most appreciative study of the Chinese human being yet made ; and his "Chinese Village" is a worthy sequel. Other Protestant teachers who made notable contributions are Edkins, Macgowan, Parker, Hart, Milne, Moule, Morrison, ]Martin, Williamson, Holconibe, and Reid. Abbe Hue remains first of all travelers in this cen- tury, his narrative being as vivid and true, as piquant, to-day as a half-(;entury ago. After the abbe, the best books of pure travel, the most interesting nar- ratives, liave been written by women — jNIiss Gordon- Cumniiiig and ]Mrs. Bisliop. The Britisli consular service in China is a long roll of literarv honor, the line of scholars and WTiters THE DEGENERATE EMPIRE 11 beginning with that most eminent pioneer, Sir Thomas Wade, by whose method the sinologues of this gener- ation acquired the Chinese language. Sir Harry Parkes, Sir Chaloner Alabaster, Sir Robert Hart, Messrs. Hosie, Baber, Parker, Watters, Margary, Grosvenor, Bourne, Douglass, Legge, Giles, and Bush- ell have worthily continued the literary traditions of that eminent service. The direct, practical, clear-headed, straightforward account of China given by the American soldier, General James H. Wilson, is the most interesting book for the general reader, and the best contribu- tion by any military man, while Sir Charles Beres- ford's broadly compiled yellow book puts commercial and military China in the clearest light. Political writers— Lord Curzon, Henry Norman, Messrs. Boul- ger, Chirol, Colquhoun, Gorst, Gundry, Krausse, and Morrison— have presented every phase of each Chi- nese question as it rose, while the reviews and cur- rent literature teem with discussions of the '^ open door" and the envied spheres. Chinese art has been epitomized in M. Paleologue's admirable handbook, ''L'Art Cliinois." M. Grandi- dieiT's ".La Ceraniique Chinois," Mr. Hippisley's ''Cata- logue of Chinese Porcelains" (written for the United States National Museum), Dr. Bushell's superb " Ori- ental Porcelain" (the catalogue of the collection of Mr, W. T. Walters of Baltimore, and a unique ex- ample of the art of book-making), Mr. Golland's ''Chinese Porcelains," and Mr. Heber Bishop's ex- haustive work on jade, leave little to be said in the field of art. 12 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE French, German, and Russian writers in lesser numbers have been as zealous in exploiting the long lived empire, and each political crisis brings a trib- ute of books in all languages. As the West is only now awakening to China, discovering that unknown quantity, nothing need be discouraged that helps on acquaintance with any of its features or phases. Each book of the moment is an aid to comprehending the incomprehensible, deciphering the undecipheral)le, and working at the puzzle which other centuries may solve. II THE EDGE OF CHIHLI [S one steams in from the Yellow Sea westward across the Gulf of Pechili,the muddy waters of the Tientsin or Pei-ho River come far out to meet one, tinging the ocean to the same dingy, yellow- brown hue as the shores of the Great Plain of China. Twelve miles offshore, out of sight of the low-lying land's edge, the mud-bars arrest navigation, and at low tide are covered by only from three to five feet of water. Even at high tide, large ships must lighten their cargoes at the outer bar, and often then push their way and slide over the upper inches of a soft, sticky ooze that boils from the propeller-blades like bubbling mud-springs on a volcano's side. Ships finally enter the river's narrow mouth be- tween the two Taku forts, solid embankments of mud and millet-stalks, now containing superior modern batteries. It was off the mud-flats of the south fort that the British fleet and troops were fired on in June, 1859, the act which moved the neutral spectator, the American commodore Tatnall, to say, " Blood is 13 14 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE thicker than water," to lower his boat and rescue those so perilously placed, and, with his flag flying, continue to tow boat-loads of British marines into action. Deep ditches encircle these strongholds at the rear, " to keep the soldiers from straying away," a great viceroy explained. The Tientsin River, as it is called for sixty miles from the sea to the city of Tientsin, is a tortuous stream that calls for a short ship and a skilful pilot to round its bends and elbows. Before the railway, one had to endure the tedium of that serpentine sixty miles' voyage to the city, only twenty-five miles dis- tant in air-line. All the devices known to the navi- gators of our Upper Missouri were employed, and there were exciting times when the ship's bow nosed the bank and scraped the friable soil away. Often anchors were set in fields and bow or stern pulled round or pulled off, the anchor tearing up the earth and giving Chihli fields their first touch of subsoil- plowing. From high ships' decks one could easily survey intimate village and farm-house life in drear mud hovels, where women with crippled feet, and ape-like children with bare brown bodies and flying queues, seem far away from and below any equality with other humanity. The Tientsin River has its floods, when the soft embankments crumble away and the water pours back upon the low country, forming shallow lakes miles in extent, wrecking homes, destroying crops, and ishinding vilhiges of starving peasants in the midst of their flooded fields. Then wretched people wade out and grub in the flood and wreck, or pole THE EDGE OF CHIHLI 15 boats about among the stalks of kao-liang, or giant millet, seeking to rescue any ear of grain or single grain, even any bit of leaf or stalk that may feed and warm them through the dread winter. Starvation awaits a certain number of these people in years of flood, and they accept it patiently as the thing always expected, the lot of some body of toilers somewhere in China each year. The river-bed shallows to two and three feet when the banks have been breached and the flood-waters have turned fields to lakes, and then for months the city of Tientsin is without steamer communication ; even tugs and lighters pass with difficulty, and men-of- war are securely impounded at Tientsin's river-front. The mandarins have still the most childish ideas of engineering works, and the money devoted to Chinese reclamation and repair of embankments is frittered away and stolen. Under such conditions a railway from the sea-coast was more than a blessing; but its first section was built by subterfuge, strategy, and deceit, in the face of the determined opposition of the Chinese officials. A little seven-mile tramway connecting the Kaiping coal-mines with the canal at the head of the Pehtang River, above the Taku forts, was gradually converted into a real railway ; the British engineer at Kaiping built his first locomotive by stealth ; and, before the obstructing officials knew it, there was a narrow-gage line, fifty miles in length, in actual operation. Diplo- macy was required to keep the viceroy in the path of progress after he had unwittingly arrived there ; but the point was won, and the railway was regularly IC CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE built from the mines to Tongku, on the river-bank, and thence to Tientsin, and on to Peking. Bribes and authority easily secured the right of way over graves and through fields, filial piety pocketing its solace or timidly holding its tongue when the rail- way passed over ancestral graves, and fung-sJud Seeing before the persuasive dollar. Stupid, careless, and deaf people were always being knocked down and run over, —they even lay down on the nice, dry track to rest or nap,— and the railway people, fearing mobs and opposition, paid for those lives, but not at interna- tional indemnity rates. With such a means at hand of acquiring a fortune for their surviving families, the track was the resort of speculative suicides, until the railway managers stopped paying for lives lost,— for not even a coal-mine could meet that steady financial drain,— and the suicidal mania ceased as suddenly. In all travel one meets nothing like the railway- station at Tongku, where one lands from the steamer, a microcosm of the dirtiest, noisiest, and most hopelessly ill-governed empire on earth. We have mushroom towns in America, hasty and noisome growths at the end of track and along the line of new railroads, but nothing can match the Chinese '' mushroom " of new Tongku, slummiest of slums, more Augean than any- thing of Augoa's could have been, the last and worst alfront to the eyes, ears, and nose, Chihli's sufficient revenge for having i)rogress put upon it. The allies, in 18G0, exhausted two languages in attempting to suggest the filth of old Tongku, and time and progress have but intensified the situation. The words, " Imperial Chinese Railway," have an iiii- THE EDGE OF CHIIILI 17 posing sound, and one is ferried ashore from anchored ships with vague expectation of Oriental splendor— perhaps of yellow-bodied coaches and dragon-mouthed smoke-stacks on gaudy engines. One expects a Chi- nese railway to be different from anything else he has seen. And it is. The landing at Tongku is an ex- perience from which even the oldest resident in China quails, and after which the newcomer wishes himself home again. China is not to be transformed by a little thing like a railway, nor thrown from the groove of ages by the shriek of an iron horse. The iron horse has been transformed instead, translated, transliter- ated, Chinese- ed, so quickly and entirely that one has to admit certain indomitable qualities in the race that can put its mark so indelibly on the most alien thing from beyond its world. China is China to the last word, triumphant over all agents of progress and regeneration. The locomotive may pant and shriek on a side-track, but its noise can be drowned by the ordinary altercation of Tongku coolies when boat- loads of intending train-passengers approach the shore. Custom orders that one set of coolies shall take the luggage from the boats to the bank, and another set of coolies transport it to the station, where all lug- gage is weighed and charged for, and, without label or check, thrown in an open box-car, at the mercy of the weather and the hordes who crowd into those same open boxes as the only accommodation provided for third-class travel. Tongku station platform was as free as any street or highway of the empire. The whole mushroom vil- lage swarmed there at train-time, even criminals in 18 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE cangues strolling up and down and staring one out of countenance, while hucksters bawled on every side, and coolies quarreled with one another and elbowed Europeans with that freedom and equality that is greater among the greasy and ragged millions of this unsavory empire than in farthest western America. A dirty waiting-room received us when we had picked a way through the slums and sewery runs supposed to be streets, and itinerant cooks settled close by the door with their sizzling kettles and nameless things. The long cars, like the common day-coaches of American railways, are fitted with wooden seats, and at each end closed compartments, or coupes, seclude Chinese women and great folks at an extra charge. There are seemingly no springs under the body of the coach, and the first-class passenger finds himself thumped about like a load of freight. Without car- pet or cushion or curtain, carving, gilding, or surplus splendors, one is jolted along at the rate of twenty miles an hour. There were curtains and cushions in the first- class cars at the inauguration of railway travel, but the Chinese passengers took away every loose thing when they left the cars, even to the brass catches, snaps, and springs of window-fastenings. The vice- roy's private car was looted in the same way when it first went out, the great man's servants and guests vying with cacli other in the sack of public property. Tientsin station is Tongku station ten times con- founded, and an entire stranger might fear for his life in the first mad onslaught of the baggage-coolies with their carrying-poles. One stands aside and TfitJ EDGE OF CHIHLi Id watches one's iron-nerved boy deal with the shrieking madmen, extricate the small traps from the grasp of unauthorized dozens, retrieve the trunks from the box-car switched to a far side-track, and finally in some way get one ferried across the narrow river and borne to the hotel in a clumsy jinrikisha. The im- pedimenta follow slung from poles between men's shoulders, a rapid transfer in which the heaviest trunks are handled like eggs, and nothing is wrecked or turned topsy-turvy— an unexpected mercy and gentleness after the riot and pandemonium that precede it. Ill TIENTSIN jIENTSIN has now become but a way- station to the tourist, the place where he gets his passport and a native trav- eling servant, and makes ready to visit the Great Wall and Peking. The foreign settlement, within the crenelated mud wall which Sankolinsin built as defense against the allies in 1800, lies beside the most populous and turbulent city of the north, and is always protected by one or two foreign men-of-war. The French and Japanese keep gunboats there at all seasons, and the British and American admirals detail a ship in alternating win- ters ; this detail for a season at Tientsin being always pleasing to naval men. Shut out from the rest of the world when the river freezes in November, all com- mercial nctivity at an end until the ice breaks in spring, the mails coming by slow couriers overland from Shanghai and Cliefoo, the community gives it- self over to gaieties of every kind, with the diplo- matic colony at Peking leading the dance further on. There is skating on the river, but no sleighing on that 20 TIENTSIN 21 wind-swept plain, whose climate is as dry and ex- hilarating as that of Dakota for nine months of the year, followed by intense heat and a short rainy sea- son of tropical downpours and saturating dampness in midsummer. An ice-breaker at the mouth of the Pei-ho might keep the river open, or steamers could regularly run to some of the small railroad towns on the coast near the Great Wall; but others than the Chinese grow conservative when they live long in the land of the queue. The old walled city of Tientsin, at the northern terminus of the Grand Canal, holds with its suburbs more than a million people, and stretches along the river in compact mass for six miles. It is built of gray bricks, has dingy-tiled roofs, and, without space, splendor, greenery, or cleanliness anywhere about it, is but a huge warren in whose narrow stone runs un- ceasing processions of people stream and scream and scold their way from dawn to dark. A few streets have been widened or made passable for jinrikishas, but blockades are frequent and to be remembered. No stranger doubts the fighting qualities of the Chinese after he has been a few times blockaded in old Tientsin's streets. The two great events of Tientsin's history were the war and the winter of the allies' camps (1860-Gl), and the massacre of 1870. The severe lesson taught the Chinese in the allies' war had not lasted them ten years when popidar anti-foreign frenzy turned upon the orphanage of the French Sisters of Charit}', and the mob massacred twenty foreigners, including the French consul, all the sisters, and two Russians, and 22 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIEE burned the cathedral and convent. They were mov- ing upon the settlement to put all foreigners to death, when— rain dispersed them ! " I can hear the gongs and the shouts yet," said one Tientsin resident, who as a child saw the flames of the burning cathedral, and the bodies of the murdered nuns floating down the river past the ship on which the residents took refuge for a week. A summary punishment, another occupation of Peking, some actual humiliation, and a visible lesson of the consequences of such an outrage would have saved thirty years of lost time in China, but France was in the agony of its great war. There were no troops to spare, and home questions were of such import that things could not be managed with a free hand in China. The so-called degradation of a few officials, the execution of twenty alleged ring- leaders of the riot, the payment of an indemnity, and the despatch of an embassy of apology to Paris, were the only results. Since that unhappy summer, Tien- tsin has never been left without its foreign gunboats, and Li Hung Chang, who was made viceroy of Chihli after the massacre, took up his residence in the di- lapidated-looking yamun by tlie river-bank, and for twenty years was the real ruler of China as regards its foreign policy. The war with Japan brought his downfall, and the unique power he had exercised no longer appertains to the Chihli viceroyalty. There was a court in miniature there then, with all its cliques, cabals, and factions, and intrigues were rife about the viceroy's shabby yamun. In 1887 Tien- tsin swarmed with concessionaries of all nations, seeking to build railways, to establish banks and tele- TIENTSIN 23 phones, to wake up China and start her in the ways of progress. British, French, Belgian, German, and American agents vied with one another for the vice- roy's favor. The clever Frenchmen laid a miniature track and ran a miniature engine and cars in the palace grounds at Peking for the amusement of the Empress Dowager and the boy Emperor ; and others sent gilded steam-launches as playthings for the pal- ace folk. Every night was gay with great dinners at the foreign hotel on the river-bank at Tientsin, and mandarin minions from the viceroy's yamun rode to and fro in sedan-chairs, and made the garden and river-bank gay with the lanterns of their rank. The great concession went to an American syndicate that year, and then all the disappointed ones and the British press in China united in one long howl and a chorus of abuse of Li Hung Chang, whom they called a traitor and another khedive about to ruin his coun- try and hand it over to a foreign despotism. They prophesied the dissolution of China if the railways were built and banks established with the surplus silver capital then weighing down America. The American press unexpectedly and unpatriotic ally took up the refrain and turned upon the American conces- sionaries. Instead of rejoicing in the victory over the rivals of all nations, the yellow journals berated all the Americans concerned, until Chinese suspicions were aroused and progress was held back another ten years. Ten years later the concession-seekers were as many, but the bubble of China's reputation had been pricked by the war with Japan, and Li Hung Chang, 24 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE disgraced and deposed from power, was wandering about Europe at the behest of the great Manehus, who would not tolerate him at Peking. These greedy- officials, furious at the profits that foreign intercourse and concession-seeking had unexpectedly and unsus- pectedly poured into the Tientsin yamun, had vested the consideration of railway measures and all conces- sions in an omnivorous board at Peking, and con- cession-seeking was a more expensive, a more cautious, concealed, and strategic game than before ; and over all was the dread shadow of Russia. With the cus- toms revenues pledged for decades to come to pay the war indemnity loans, one certain source of income was gone, and the imperial hand fell so heavily on provincial officials that no money was left to spend on government railway extension. Chinese capital would not respond to Chinese government a])peals to subscribe, and it became apparent that only foreign capital would ever build railways in China. One progressive Chinese official even said in his despair: " Oh, why did not the English keep the country when they were at Peking in 18G0? Then we should have had progress in an honest and rational way. Now we have been delivered over, sold to the Rus- sians, and all Europe will devour us piecemeal. Our end has come." Tientsin's siglits and sho})s are few and small com- j)ared with Peking's, and its specialties are not many. Its position at the head of the Grand Canal made it for centuries the great market and exchange where the Mongol horse-breeders and the camel-trains from the north brought their i)i-oducts to barter for those TIENTSIN 25 of the soutli. All the tribute rice from the southern provinces once passed in endless lines of red junks up the canal and the river to the imperial granaries beside the walls of Peking ; but that tribute has been nearly all compounded now, and with the silting up of the Grand Canal and its invasion by the floods of the Yellow River the great traffic from the south has been diverted to coasting steamships. It carries one back and away from the modern world to meet the caravans that still come to Tientsin, bringing wool, hides, grease, and furs from Mongolia, the soft-footed, shaggy camels of Central Asia treading and swaying in single file beside the telegraph and the railway- track. The great tea-caravans start from the river- bank, each camel loaded with baskets of brick-tea, and his slow tread rivals the pace of the coolies of the cargo-boats, who haul brick-tea up the river to Tung- chow, where the baskets are loaded on camels for their slow transit to the heart of the vast continent. The great shag of the camePs wool is shed and clipped in the scorching summers, and many weavers supply the so-called Tientsin rugs for all China and the Far East. Until recent years they wove a close, firm, hard carpet, with a long, thick nap, using the wool in the natural brown color, with two blues and a black in good old Chinese geometric and conventional designs. The corrupting touch of foreign trade has given tlie weavers the cabbage-rose and the picture pattern, lent them solferino and all the aniline colors, and led them to produce coarse, thin, loosely woven carpets that wear flat in a few months and may be punctured at the first beating. The carael's-hair rug retains for 26 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE months the awful caravan odor, overpowering in damp weather, but a good airing in sun or frosty air will dissipate it. From eighteen cents a square foot for a good, thick, closely woven rug of the old order, the price trebled in ten years ; yet buyers are ten times as many as they were before, and one dreads to think what the Tientsin rug may become in another decade. The '' Tientsin date," the fruit of the jujube-tree pre- served in honey, is another specialty, but of Mongol origin or adaptation. The Tientsin figurines are as pleasing in their way as those of Tanagra, and as faithfully represent the people as they are to-day and have been, together with the cliief figures of history and legend. The humble modelers in clay are found deep in the burrows of the walled city, and their shelves show all the types and costumes, all the classes, callings, and occupations of the empire. One cannot buy modern portraits yet, and the wizened old artist of the inspired thumb looked blank when I insisted upon having him make me Li Hung Chang, bullet- mark, peacock feather, yellow jacket, and all. The figures are so cleverly done, so expressive, often so humorous, that one buys recklessly at a few cents apiece— to bestow them all upon tlie '' boy" in the end, since these solid lumps of dried mud are heavy and easily broken, stream with moisture, and even resolve themseh es into shapeless clay again in exceptionally damp seasons. There are many grimy temples and a Mohamme- dan mosque in the cnty ; streets of silk- and fur- and sweetirieat-shops, and a few curio-sliops, wliere tlie overflow and the suspicious pieces from Peking shops TIENTSIN 27 are vended. Peking palace and yamun thieves make Tientsin their "fence," and strangers about to leave by the first steamer sometimes find fate flying in their faces with the offer of treasures that resident collec- tors seek in vain. A specialty of the place, known best to the Ameri- can navy, is the blood-curdling tale of the " Tientsin ghost." Every ward-room has heard it, until officers know it by heart; cadets learn it at the Annapolis Academy, and when, as ofl&cers, they come to Tien- tsin on a first Eastern cruise, immediately want to see the house where it happened. The very oldest foreign inhabitants of the place told me they had never heard of any such spook, and the new American consul had been told it once, — somewhere, awhile ago, — but did not really remember. Naval officers of literary bent have put it in print in American news- papers, each giving it a new turn or detail, and each promptly taken to task for not telling it "as I first heard it on the Tennessee,'" the Oneida, or the Ashuelot, men-of-war of ancient and shipwrecked memory. In its simplest form the story of the Tientsin ghost records that one autumn a newly arrived American consul found that the only house for rent in the settlement was a haunted one, which had been untenanted for some seasons. The younger officers of the American gunboat wintering at Tientsin promised to lay the ghost for him at once and for all. A supper was served late that night in the dining-room, and at mid- night the toast-master rose, lifted his revolver over- head, and holding his glass in the other hand, said : " Here 's to the ghost ! " At the instant, shriek after 28 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIEE shriek, the scuffle of feet up above and continuing down the stairway to the very door, paralyzed the armed company. As the first man sprang into the hall, the wind from an open garden door extinguished the candles on the supper-table, and groping forward, he fell over a prostrate body, and his fingers slipped in warm blood. Lights were struck, and at the foot of the stair lay the body of a brother officer, who, listening to all the ward -room bravado and talk, had concealed himself in the upper part of the house beforehand to surprise them. He had been surprised himself by a gang of Chinese thieves that used the house for a hid- ing-place, and was hacked to pieces by them as he fled down the staircase. And the most elderly resident had heart not only to deny the whole time-honored, standard, ward-room and academy classic, but to go into details f>f expo- sition and rational arguments, to suggest examining consular-court records, naval log-books, and archives, and to support with Scotch firmness his own imme- diate verdict of " Bosh ! " Tientsin's gay social life is by no means limited to the winter season, while the river is closed and the two or three gunboats add their quota to pleasure-loving circles. It has the si)ring and autumn races, when tlie Mongolian ponies win cups, and pools sold after the most elaborate European racing fashions make and break investors. It lias its public park, where whole dinner-companies repair on summer evenings, their coffee following, while they listen to concerts by the viceroy's band, which, first instituted by Li Hung Chang under a Manila band-master, has attained cred- TIENTSIN 29 itable proficiency. That great viceroy is also remem- bered by the community as the donor of a dozen or more pairs of enormous embroidered curtains for the Gordon Hall, where the gay community dances its winters away, holds banquets, meetings, and theatri- cals—the same enormous, bordered curtains, with maxims or symbolic figures embroidered on red grounds, which Chinese princes and great ones hang in their halls on festivals and holidays. An excellent public library is housed in the same fine town hall, and the books on the shelves attest the tastes and culture of the community. IV SHANHAIKWAN ^T is only eiglit hours by train from Tien- tsin down to and along the shore of the sea to Shanhaikwan, the most pictur- esque of the many walled towns on the Chihli coast, and where the Great Wall of China dips down to the sea. After leaving the Taku mud-flats and those salt-marshes where the alUes fought and floundered in 1860, one follows a narrow, fertile plain between the mountains and the sea, wliich, in mid-September stacked over with millet, only needed ripening pumpkins to complete an American autumn picture. Harvest groups were at work in every field, and clumsy little wooden-wheeled carts were being drawn by ponies toward villages with whitewashed walls. Tall and short millet, buckwheat, dwarf cotton, and sweet-potato patches were yielding their abundance all the way to the edge of ^lanchuria, a land of plenty, in strong contrast to the drowned and muddy fields, the flooded villages, and the starving people back by the Tientsin's banks. The kao-liang, or giant millet, is nearly our sorghum, and it j'ields 'M SHANHAIKWAN 31 a rich syrup, a coarse sugar, and a distilled drink. The stalks are fodder and fuel and building-material, and the grain is the chief food of the people. At each station, venders of grapes, apples, white pears, and chestnuts besieged the train. The fruits lack in flavor, but the big, round red grapes are peculiar to Chihli, and are kept by skilful farmers in stone jars through the winter, as well as the long white "finger- grapes," which are pictures of beauty. My "boy" Chung, aged about forty, and engaged because of a strong Sioux countenance and a harsh voice, with which he could outbellow the others of Bashan, ate of all these fruits continuously, and of melon-seeds, peanuts, dumplings, dough-balls, and varnished lumps besides. But when ten cooked pears may be bought for six cash, the head of a family may eat heartily even on wages of seventy-five Mexican cents a day, and have blue brocade coats and mulberry satin trousers for common wear. The women, children, and maid-servants of some provincial grandees were hurried into the little boxes of coupes in the first-class car, and the doors quickly shut upon their rainbow garments, gorgeously dressed heads, and painted faces. The masters and their upper underlings sprawled at ease on the seats in the main body of the car, doubled their bodies in remarkable fashion, and let their feet climb the window-frames. Pipes bubbled and smoked all day long, and the harsh throat-tones of these northern people grated steadily on the ear above the roar of the trucks. Servants with second-class tickets rode with us and chummed with mandarins, and half of the passengers hung their 32 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE uncovered heads out of the windows, indifferent to the hot sun, the smoke, or cinders. A Russian mis- sionary priest distributed tracts in Chinese, and told me the people were much more tolerant, chastened, and subdued since the war, and that in time the or- thodox faith would do much with them. A telegraph operator, a young Chinese graduated from Victoria College at Hongkong, who spoke perfect English, was on his way to a new station on the Manchurian line, and he viewed his prospects as a young New- Yorker would have viewed a sojourn in the buffalo country in the far West before the Pacific railways were built. In the open box-car ahead of us, cattle, sheep, and pigs, men, women, and children, and finally a dozen hooded hunting-eagles, all traveled comfortably to- gether. The eagles were broad-winged, powerful birds, fastened by their feet to the ends of carrying- poles, and were borne, flapping their pinions nobly, as if in triumphal procession, by the hunters, who were taking them into Manchuria for hare and pheasant. When the magnificent birds of i)rey were once in the box-car and released, they settled down in baskets like brooding hens. At Tongshan and Kaiping between three and four thousand people are employed in the coal-mines and the railway works, directed by a half-dozen European engineers, virtually ruling a model, whitewashed, sanitary town. Distant blue mountains show there; the hills begin, and, running parallel with the sea, never more than five miles from it, soon rise and merge into the steep, bni'e, sharply cut mountain- SHANHAIKWAN 35 range, with exactly the crags and peaks of ideal Chinese landscapes. White walls of temples and monasteries shine on every steep slope, the groves surrounding them the only signs of forests in all the region. Two or three towns of this sea-shore plain are most picturesquely walled, long lines of battle- ments broken by gabled gate-towers and pavilions, with pagodas placed so as to invoke a good f ung-shui, the favorable influences of earth and air. At Peitaho, the foreign residents of Peking and Tientsin have summer homes, the fresh, clear air and the sea-bathing attracting an increasing colony each year. There the plain narrows between the mountain and the sea, and several lines of battle- mented walls show on the spurs and summits of the range. Soon one really sees that world's greatest wonder, the Great Wall of China, curving over, across, and down a steep mountain-slope, and squarely bar- ring one's advance. Shanhaikwan lies half-way between the mountains and the sea, and so close by the Great Wall that its own city walls are built in with and joined to the greater line of masonry that extends from the shores of the sea for more than a thousand miles to the great desert and the Kan-su Mountains. The wall succeeded prehistoric stockades, and defended China proper from the wild Mongolia and Manchuria, from which its conquerors and rulers have many times come. It is so picturesque, with its many bastions and tow- ers, so imposing, so massive, so seemingly endless as it crosses the plain and winds up, as if for picturesque- ness' sake only, to the crest of the mountain-range, 36 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE that it needs not imagination nor lifelong acquain- tance with it as a fact to have it exercise a strong fascination at sight — the most stupendous work that the hand of man has ever builded, an existing, still serviceable structure that can maintain its pretensions in part with the ruins of Egypt and Assyria. And it looks exactly like its pictures in school geog- raphies ! One had half expected that it would not, coidd not, be so irrationally, impractically picturesque, so uselessly solid and stupendous ; but Shi-Hwang-Ti, first Emperor of united China, builded better than he knew, and all this modern world must thank him for that enduring monument. One does not really care whether it is two thousand and one hundred and some years old or not; whether it is twelve hundred or fifteen hundred miles long, from twenty-five to sixty feet high, and twenty- five feet thick, with a broad terre-plein between parapets, along which one can walk from the Gulf of Pechili to the desert beyond Kan-su, from the Yellow Sea to the Sea of Sand ; or if millions of men toiled for ten years to complete it, and a lialf-million builders died ; or if government contractors and engineers "scamped" in 211 B.C., as they do now, and left great gaps in backwoods places where earthworks did as well as solid wall. Wan-li Chang Ching, the '' Ten Thousand Li Wall," or Chang Tang, the '' Great Wall," is too supremely satisfactory and eye-delighting as an artistic feature of the land- scape, as it winds and rambles in its useless way over the hilltops and far away, for one to split dates and details and to become precisely archaeological. It is one of the few great sights of the world that is not SHANHAIKWAN 37 disappointing. It grows npon one hour by hour, and from the incredible it becomes credible. Its solidity and deserted uselessness uplift it, put it forever liors concoitrs, and give it an atmosphere, a unique dignity, like only to the Pyramids. One turns to those loop- ing lines of bastioned wall with increasing sentiment as long as one remains within sight of it, and it arouses feeling and evokes ideas as only the great objects of nature can do. The engine stopped at the station outside of Shan- haikwan, the official "rail-head" or end of track at that time, and a half-mile beyond the Great Wall barred the way, save for one narrow gap through which the shining steel rails stretched away into Manchuria. It was almost sunset, the old pile glowing in golden light, and, like a lodestone, it drew us straight toward it, following the hunters who shouldered their eagles and walked up the track toward Manchuria. Con- tinued floods made the breach in the wall centuries before the railway was dreamed of, or locomotives might never have passed from Chihli into Shing-king. When fortifications were hastily thrown up at the sea- front at the time of the Japanese war, no attempt was made to repair this flood-gap. The topsy-turvy of Chinese military logic argued that the Japanese would only land on the beach in front of the forts, of course. On the Manchurian side, the Great Wall presents a bold face of gray brick and stone, with towers and projecting bastions, a formidable defense against the hordes of wild horsemen in the days of crossbow warfare. On the inner, Chinese side, the wall is a sloping earth embankment, stone and bi-ick facings 38 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE and cross-walls cropping out here and there. It has evidently been a builders' quarry for all the Shanhai- kwan plain, and there are still bricks to spare by millions, from ^remnants of walls that run here and there in aimless way on the inner side. WaU-build- ing must have been a habit or mania with these peo- ple in those early days, and they built walls when there was nothing else to do, to pass the time, to keep the people out of mischief. Weeds and brambles conceal the flagging of the terre-plein, parapets are gone, and many watch-towers have fallen, but a few towers are occupied by poor tillers of the soil and their swarming families. One may look far into Manchuria, the land of nomad Tatars, but he sees no flocks nor herds nor conical tents on grassy plains— only the same cultivated fields of millet, lines of trees, and villages of white houses in Shing-king province as in Chihli. The mandarin director of railways, who proved his fitness for that practical post by passing an exami- nation in classic literature, and who had never seen a railway until he became arbiter of this end of China's first line, occupied a large new yamun beside the sta- tion. In a far corner of the \amim, two courts of guest-rooms, with kitchens and servants' quarters, were reserved for European ti"avelers' use at a nominal charge, the (hd-h)nu/J(l of India repeated. The rooms were clean but bare, a wirc-mattressed bed, chairs, tables, and a washstand being all that were supplied, since the traveler in North China always carries his bedding and full cani])-('hest as necessary eipiipnuMit. From the yamun we could see Chang Tang posing SHANHAIKWAN 39 ghostly on the mountain-side in the flood of the full moon's light, and at sunrise watch the rose-tinted, curving, battlemented line cast intense blue shadows over the rugged mountain front— exquisite pictui*es of ineffaceable distinctness in memory yet. At Shanhaikwan the real mule-cart of North China jolts one over real Chinese roads, the huge, nail- studded wheels, on axles the size of kegs, thumping on unseen stones in the deep ruts worn by all preced- ing carts— the carter and his walking partner, the mule, alike tenacious of custom, plodding in others' ruts and footsteps, and never once turning to new ground. It is a breath-taking, liver-accelerating ride of two miles over a tree-shaded road to the sea-shore, past fields dotted with picturesque ancestral graves, turtle-borne stone tablets, stone altars and benches. There are three fine old temples facing the sea just within the great barrier wall, and that to Kwanyin, Goddess of Mercy or Queen of Heaven, nearest the town, is in the best condition, its courtyards, pavilions, and guest- rooms spotlessly clean, the images brightly shining, and the altar ornaments in order. ''Who is this?" I asked my hard-featured, mixed- Manchu servant, who had been often to Shanhai- kwan, and claimed to know all about everything in North China. " China woman," he answered, gazing stupidly at the gilded Queen of Heaven, Buddhist Goddess of the Sea. '' Why is she here in a temple ? " "China woman, China woman. But dis China woman no eat meat," he added triumphantly. 40 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE The cart-tracks wind aimlessly over the pine bar- rens and sandy flats by the sea's edge for a half-mile to another temple inclosure, where walls and gates are crumbling and broken, bell-towers dropping to decay, and altars deserted. The few poverty-stricken priests, drying their grain, their onions and red pep- pers on temple terraces and platforms, have parted with every portable treasure, and only the largest images remain to them. A half-mile farther up the beach a third temple is in still more ruinous condition, the wreck of its once splendid buildings a sad reminder of those older times when Buddhism was a living religion, and China had not been arrested in its civ- ilization, nor begun to retrograde. All the smaller images and belongings have been sold by stealth to the tourists whom the railway has brought to Shan- haikwan, and the gods of these sea-shore shrines now sit and smile serenely in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the few priests till salty fields behind the temple and lead lives of enforced absti- nence, wliether with or witliout prayer. The Wall of Ten Thousand Li once dipped down to the very edge of the sea and ended in a great wave- defying bastion tower, founded on the reef that here makes out from shore. The storms of two thou- sand years breached and battered away the seaward tower, and only crumbling fragments of the wall now touch the water. Just before the Japanese war the old forts on the high bank were hastily rel)uilt and mud walls of new forts set up. The line of the ori- ginal masonry is almost lost in these recent fortifica- tions, but there are enough ancient outcroppiugs on SHANHAIKWAN 43 the beach to supply tourists with the ponderous Great Wall bricks for years to come. " The foreigners have taken all the images from the temples, and now they are trying to carry away all the bricks in the Chang Tang," one native told another. " That is not Great Wall," said my blockhead boy, looking up from the beach to the mud fort stuck like a hornet's or a mud-swallow's nest to the side of the ancient pile. " That is mandarin's house for shooting Kapanese." " Where is the Great Wall, then ? " " Back there on that mountain. This used to be Great Wall, but now it is general's yamun for shooting the Kapanese." " How many Japanese did they shoot ? " " Oh, when Kapanese find out, they lun away ; never come this side." General Grant came from Tientsin in a man-of- war which anchored off the wall, and, landing him, gave the great soldier opportunity to examine and to follow this greatest defensive work in the world— greatly impressed by the senseless sacrifice of human toil on such a feat of military engineering. Japanese surveyors in disguise swarmed this region long before the war, and when hostilities broke out, the military authorities at Tokio had detailed maps of every foot of the Great Wall, and of everj^ dike and path in the fields, every village street and walled inclosure for the two hundred miles between Shanhaikwan and Peking. Twenty thousand soldiers were already on transports at Port Arthur, ready to land here, seize the railway, attack the Taku forts from the rear, while the fleet 44 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE bombarded at long range, and march victorious on to Peking; but the pleadings of the cowardly court at Peking were heard, and the war ended. The military mandarin, wlio so hastily built these sea-shore forts, completed them in thorough manner after the war, mounted larger and better guns, and connected them by carriage-roads equal to those of any foreign concession in China, thus proving that roads can be built by the Chinese in rural China, Once at the limits of the military reservation, how- ever, one's cart-wheels drop into the old Chinese ruts that pass for roads, and one is jolted and pounded as usual. While we rode over these smooth fort roads, a frowzy old farmer in patched clothes came across the fields, leading a donkey by a halter, and astride of the donkey there was a most wonderfully painted and powdered little girl, in a red petticoat and purple jacket, with ahead-load of tinsel and artificial flowers. My zeal to see and to snap a photograph of the strange trio was checked by the boy, who, in half-frightened tones, implored : " No, no, no ! That is leading home new wife. S'pose that man see you look wife, he make great bobbery"; and the lonely, joyless wedding-pro- cession plodded on across the field. The old farmer had gone to market and bought himself a wife, and was leading her home by a halter, quite as much as if she had been a calf or a dog. Shanhaikwan has picturesque gate-towers and pa- vilions, and where its walls join in with spurs and pro- jections of the Great "Wall the watery quadrangles and walled corners would enrapture and oceup}' an SHANHAIKWAN 47 Occidental sketch-class for many weeks. There are quaint old brass cannon of the Ming period on the towers, and the tourist has attempted even to buy and carry them away. In the tea-shops and restaurants there were curious brass samovars wrought in grace- ful Persian shapes, with the fire-box in the body of the vessel, opening by a butterfly door on the out- side. Wood chips, charcoal, and coal were used in- differently in these huge kettles, but all my efforts to buy one of these decorative Manchurian samovars were vain. The tea-drinkers lounged on hard stone or clumsy wood benches, before stone or wooden tables of the most durable kind, pouring tea from dingy, battered old tea-pots of coarse green pottery, and dipping up greasy shreds and bits of pottage from bowls decorated in elaborate patterns with menders' rivets. In this land of cheap porcelain and pottery one is continually surprised to see how com- mon household pieces are mended and mended as long as there is room for another rivet, and one rarely sees a large piece in table use in foreign houses without its meander lines of copper rivets— the carelessness of Chinese servants matched by their economy. There is a mile of picturesque, open campagna be- tween the city wall and the hills, with ruined walls and heaps of gray bricks everywhere. These walls are modern affairs of the Ming period, and their thin, small bricks, although more convenient and attrac- tive as tourists' souvenirs, are not the genuine two- thousand-year-old ones by thirteen centuries. These half-baked, modern Ming bricks are barely an inch thick, while the hoary ones of Shi-Hwang-Ti's time are 48 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE over three inches thick, and to be valued more highly if particles of the hard cement of their day adhere, as this ancient white mortar is sovereign cure for all diseases of the eye, and a balm for flesh-cuts. At a Manchu village among the millet-fields, women with large feet and huge cross-bar hair-pins ran out to gaze at us, while their men-folk scampered in from the fields, got carrying-chairs and ponies, and began the deafening joy of bargaining to carry us in chairs up the steep zigzags to the mountain temple. The priests there were amiable and clean, their labyrinthine precincts spotless, and from terraced courts in mid-air one looked out upon one of the finest views in China —the green and golden plain of the famous battle- field sloping to the sea, the town in its midst, and the Great "Wall at the left plunging steeply down and running its great air-line across the level. The great battle fought on this sloping plain of Shanhaikwan at the middle of the seventeenth century was the last contest in the series of victories which placed the young Manchu prince Shunchih on the throne of the Mings. The army, which had marched through the gates of the Great Wall from Manchuria, marched on to Peking, and the burned and looted palaces re- ceived the Mukden ruler, whose race has now run to ignoble end. While the old priest watches that gap in the wall beyond Shanhaikwan, he may yet see the railway carrying the Manchu's successors on to Pe- king, and note the bloodless conquest of the rolling ruble that is circling to the winning prize-pocket on the great game-board of Asia. A farm-house a quarter of a mile beyond the rail- SHANHAIKWAN 49 road-track burst into flames that night, illuminating all space, and the din and uproar from the scene of action were borne to us at the yamun so appallingly that one wondered what the pandemonium' would have been, had the " Kapanese " landed at Shanhaikwan. The next morning a general and his staff, with official chair, ponies, and bannermen, a veritable cir- cus chorus in peaked hats, and ragamuffins of all descriptions, boarded the train to go to a near town where a lunatic had run amuck the night before and killed eighteen people. The Celestial general was a wrinkled, grandmotherly old creature in petticoats and short gown, with beads around his neck and feathered turban tied with cap-strings under his chin. Nothing more absurdly unwarlike could be imagined, unless it were the group of grandmothers in satin dressing-gowns that received the miscellaneous com- pany of men and ponies when they left the train— a heelless, collarless, pocketless lot of soft-shod warriors. A MA^'CHUKIAN SAMOVAR. AS MARCO POLO WENT NTIL 1897, when the locomotive shrieked within three miles of the ancient gray walls, one traveled from tide-water to Peking as Marco Polo traveled; sail- ing, poling, and tracking up the Pei-ho River from Tientsin in native boats during the sea- son of open navigation, or following the frightful land road on ponies, in mule-carts or mule-litters— ignominy, tedium, and discomfort pushed to the ex- treme in every mode of progress. There were no changes in tourist customs or accommodations in six centuries. While Shangliai merchants on pleasure bent had been going up and down the rivers and creeks and canals of their neighborhood in luxurious house-boats of foreign construction for thirty years, and every great mercantile house there had its spa- cious "glass boat" as a matter of course, diplomats, grandees, noble and princely visitors traveled to Pe- king meekly in native boats hired for eacli occasion. None of the legations su])ported boats of splendid trappings, sacred to ])ersonal, sui)erior European use only, such as move upon tlie Bosporus. AS MARCO POLO WENT 51 It was amusing, to be sure, to make the trip once by house-boat, to travel as Marco Polo traveled, and journey in the fashion of the middle ages, but truth compels one to state that after a half-day, the Pei-ho palled. Every mile of mud-bank was very like the other eighty miles of mud-bank; each serpentine bend and set of S's and W's in the river's path was a little more tiresome than the last. After a day, one could no longer be surprised and entertained by the many and elaborate dishes served from the tiny, four- foot-long kitchen, with the aid of the camp-chest of table utensils hired for the trip, together with bed- ding, from the hotel at Tientsin. Such miracles are too many and too cheap in China. The house-boat was carved and varnished and mod- erately gilded about the window-frames on the out- side, and a tall mast held the single square mainsail which was to help against the current. There was a small deck forward, under which the crew kept all sorts of things, and the cabin opened on it by an elaborate^ carved doorway that was closed at night by sliding boards. There were latticed doors and window-frames, and much gilding, while carved and lacquered panels, and bursting pomegranates and con- ventionally riotous gourd-vines trailed all over the artistic little salon. In the adjoining compartment, a raised platform formed the bed, and trunks were stowed beneath it. There was a tiny kitchen and boys' quarters amidships, and the crew lived and fed at the very stern. All tliis, with a crew of trackers to tow by a rope made fast to the tip of the mast, was to be enjoyed for ten Mexican dollars for the trip, and 52 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE with a good boy and cook, and in company witli an- other and hirger boat, we journeyed along in very pleasant fashion. Each boat had books and maga- zines galore; we dined and tiffined back and forth, walked the banks in lonely places, and cut across bends on foot, often having to wander far from the high dikes of paths because of some back-water flood. Once we went through a village w^here the misery, filth, hardship, and horrors of poor country life in China were so borne in upon one that it seemed as if the sum of all suffering were centered there. From that miserable place some fifty noisy and cheerful youngsters, with and without clothes, trailed us out and along on the high dike paths for a mile, a queer procession of silhouettes to those remaining in the boats' cabins. At seven o'clock, that first night out of Tientsin, the boats stopped, the crews fed and turned in to sleep until one in the morning, when they were to resume travel. Then at candle-light all eyes were on the alert to see if the servants had obeyed threats and orders, had emptied the boats entirely, and scalded them with boiling chemicals to dislodge the roaches, inch-long JiaJckerlacs of horror, that inhabit these gilded boxes. The new boy Liu, who had replaced the bellowing Chung, was worthy of his boasts, and not a moving antenna or object rewarded our look- out, for Tientsin residents can cause the hair to stand on end with veracious tales of house-boats that were more nearly entomological museums. The face of Liu was more than ever that of a well-fed, ecstatic, worldly buddha, as he served the soup, the ■v-*^ NATIVE BOATS ON THK PEl-HO 1(1 VEK. AS MARCO POLO WENT 55 crab croquettes, the chops and pease, the snipe and salad, a frothing souffle, and then hot chestnuts and fruit, with the clear black, admirable coffee. Each dish was perfectly cooked, garnished with green sprigs, and served with the decorum and precision of the most formal dinner on shore. And all this was conjured from a four-foot-square kitchen, two tiny- charcoal stoves, and the few pots and pans carried in a camp-chest but a little larger than a dress-suit case ! Truly Abbe Hue was right when he called the Chinese a nation of cooks. It was three o'clock in the morning before Liu's voice of rage and command, aided by the majordomo of the other boat, got the fleet in motion. At six there was a dense damp mist upon all the world, but we looked out to see the piers of the railway-bridge at Yang-tsun, just risen from their caisson works. " This railroad very curious," said the oracle. " All these things [the piers] they have built with a wind- machine [compressed air]. Will missis have tea stout or thin ? " and through the magic trap-door came a model tea-tray. The second day repeated the first in scenery and incidents. We walked the banks and cut across fields, many of them levels of caked mud, seamed with cracks as they dried in the hot sun after the floods. Once we found a woman and four children crouching in a little shelter built of millet- stalks, refugees from the flooded districts below, with no other hope of comfort than this lean-to of canes for the bitter winter to follow. Tlie landmark of the day was Hsu-si-wo, site of the allies' camps in 1860, when the capture of Mr. Parkes and the other com- 56 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE missioners hastened the march to Peking. A row of open mud booths and shops fronted the river-bank, where boatmen bought pork and cabbage and offen- sive things, with boiled and salted peanuts, persim- mons, and all the fruits of the autumn. In one place, a blindfolded donkey trod a dreary round, grinding corn spread on a round stone table, and on the kang^ or high mud platform of a bed, beside it a soldier of the empire lay fast asleep, mouth open, and body bent at such angles that we accepted it as the ocular proof of what Dr. Arthur Smith has said in his delightful ''Chinese Characteristics," that "best book" of hundreds written about China, and with which one only finds fault because there are not six more and larger volumes : " It would be easy to raise in China an army of a million men — nay, of ten millions— tested by competitive examination as to their capacity to go to sleep across three wheelbar- rows, with head downward like a spider, their mouths wide open, and a fly inside." The third day's journey began at two in the morn- ing, and we dragged slowly upward in a gray world of dampness all day. Tliere was the ugly mud vil- lage of Ma-tau, with its line of broken-down hovels on the river-bank, where stale things and fried things were ranged in the shop-fronts, and the village shoe- maker mended ragged cloth shoes with pulp and paper soles, the most absurd, senseless, perishable, impracticable foot-gear tlie whole world can offer. The white man's scorn and contempt for this flimsy " cloth-shoe civilization " of the Chinese are surely jus- tified, for, with a history running back beyond the AS MARCO POLO WENT 57 ages, these people have never devised a serviceable nor even a waterproof shoe. A mere bedi'oom slipper of cloth, with a felt or pith or paper sole, is the regu- lation foot-covering of the people, and even a general's campaign boots are but millinery affairs of black satin. Wherefore a rain-storm can put an armj^ out of action, check a mob, and, as one can see any showery day in the settlements, send every Chinese running madly for shelter— all save the barefooted toilers and the very few who possess oiled-paper boots, that barely resist a light sprinkle. The Russian will at least bring with him his thick, common-sense shoes, and a raw-hide and hobnail civilization may do much for this paper-soled race. By a merciful dispensation, the summer floods, which drown the crops, turn the fields into fish-ponds where men and boys catch the small shiners by hand or with dip-nets, and we saw wretched creatures everywhere eagerly catching their daily or their win- ter store of food. Wheelbarrows drawn by donkeys, tandem leaders to men in harness between the han- dles who steered as well, passed in absurd processions along the banks. At sundown, the ancient pagoda and the new American flour-mill of Tungchow were in sight, and the next morning we lay by the river-front of the town, in line with the hundreds of house- and cargo- boats that there discharge their freight for Peking and Mongolia. There is a canal which leads to the walls of the capital, but there are five levels, and as the Chinese brain, in all its thousands of years of fumbling with canal problems, never devised a canal- 58 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE lock, one has to change to a new boat with all his belongings at each section, and then has a three-mile cart- or chair-ride into the city from the Eastern Expediency Wicket, or gate in the outer wall. Other- wise one may take a donkey or a pony, or a sedan- chair, or the springless Peking cart for the thirteen- mUe ride. It was beginning to rain from a thick gray sky. A dozen tourists and four diplomats, amv- ing the day before, had taken all the available closed chairs from Tuugchow, and there was no choice but to pad the best-looking carts with mattresses and crawl into those small torture-chambers for what proved to be an all-day jolt. The mud was deep and noi- some in the narrow streets of the walled city of Tung- chow, and we waited long while the head cart of a funeral procession stuck fast and a balky mule re- fused to pull it out. There were embroidered um- brellas and banners, and mock treasures paraded in state, a string of small priests howling, five carts full of women wailing, and the great coffin with its embroidered pall was followed and surrounded by a group of grieving male relatives attired like pastry- cooks, in white garments and white paper caps. Outside of Tungchow we crossed the splendid carved marble bridge where the Chinese army made its last stand in 18G0— Pa-H-kao, the "Eight Li Bridge," which won for General Montauban the title of Count Palikao. Then all day there succeeded such ruts and gullies and muddy ditches, such jolting, thumping, and bumping, as decided one that Peking was dearly seen at the price of one such ride in a lifetime. The actual or recognized, the traditional, conventional AS MAECO POLO WENT 69 road, a mere cut or ditch worn deep in the clay of the plain, was a floundering, bottomless mud trough all the way, and we drove around it, never in it, zig- zagging at right angles all over the Peking plain. In every field and millet-patch some man lay in wait to ostentatiously throw a spoonful of dirt in the rut or the ditch he had himself made, and then extend his hand for coin. All the way to Peking our path was lined with extended, greedy palms, and when, in the weariness of monotony, we ordered a recess in alms- giving, a shrieking hag, hobbling on dwarfed feet, pursued us across the field, raining such curses and threats at the trespasser on the millet-field that we threw cash by the handful to stop the clamor. In every rainy season for uncounted years the same tricks have been resorted to on the Peking plain, the people digging holes to break donkeys' legs, and tossing hand- fuls of dirt in as a cart approaches. A good mac- adamized road would rob the countrj'- people of their chief income and would be promptly cross-guUied for their benefit. Family graveyards, with temple roofs curving above dense tree-tops, were oases in the plain, and occurred more and more frequently until a turn around a mud- bank showed near at hand the endless lines of the city's gray walls and the great soaring gateways of the north- ern capital. But— having walked half of the way from Tungchow, and, for the rest of the time, balanced on the cart-shaft at the very heels of the mule, indiffer- ent to sprinkles of rain and splashings of mud if only one might escape the awful thumping of the axletree —there was no enthusiasm to expend upon the scene, 60 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE no possibility of being thrilled, no impulse toward apostrophizing, Avhen that greatest city wall and the most massive city gates of the world came in view. There are nobler, far more beautiful walls and gates in India, but for mere brute size, overpowering mass, oppressive solidity, and cubic quantity only the Great Wall of China can rank with these gigantic walls of Peking, that shut in the most picturesque and inter- esting city of China, the most unique of all the world's capitals, a living, working exhibit of the Eastern world of the sixteenth and even earlier centuries— an ancient civilization brought to a standstill, arrested, petrified, and beginning to turn backward when that of the Western world only received its greatest impetus and began to advance by leaps and bounds. VI PEI-CHING, THE NORTHERN CAPITAL 'EKING is the most incredible, impossi- ble, anomalous, and surprising place in the world ; the most splendid, spectacu- lar, picturesque, and interesting city in China ; a Central Asian city of the far past; a fortified capital of the thirteenth century handed down intact. It is the greatest contradiction of our times that Peking is Peking, that such a place can exist at the end of this century ; but Peking is as it always was, and will be as it is as long as the queue and the cotton shoe are worn within its walls— the one place that can hold its own ancient flavor and local color, and upon which the demon of progress has not brought down the dread monotony of the universal commonplace. Peking is the capital of all China, yet what interests and piques one most, gives Peking its own individual character, and distinguishes it from the other cities of the empire, are the things that are not Chinese, the contrasts and the contradictions. Peking is by first intention a permanent Tatar encampment, a fortified Gl 62 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIEE garrison of nomad bannermen surrounding Pei-ching, the northern palace of the conquering khan of khans. The Tatar ruler of nearly four hundred millions of sub- ject Chinese is closely surrounded by his faithful Man- chu clansmen from beyond the Great Wall, who scorn and hate and secretly fear the masses of Chinese more than any outer enemy ; who have thrown themselves into the arms of Russia through fear of the Chinese ; who have bargained that Russia shall send soldiers to their aid when needed ; who have held back and turned back the wheels of progress, with a certain prescience that the new order would relegate them to poverty and extinction. Every Manchu is borne on the rolls as a bannerman, and receives his stipend, even if he never bends a bow or hurls a stone in mili- tary drill. But the Manchu bannermen are no longer the fierce warriors their ancestors were, nor their khan even a hardy" huntsman like the early Manchu em- perors. Like Kublai Khan's Mongols long before them, these nomad horsemen and hardy shepherds of the plains, enervated by long peace and idle plenty, corrupted by the luxuries and vices of Chinese civili- zation, have degenerated to a type their marauding forefathers would scorn and scourge, and their capital is an index of the decadence of the ruling race, whose end draws tragically near. There had been three cities there before Kublai Khan made the splendid capital Marco Polo first de- scribed for us. The city's plan, the palaces, the walls, all date from Mongol times, the thirteenth century. The same quaint military customs of the middle ages are observed. The soldiers are drilled in archery and PEI-CHINa, THE NORTHERN CAPITAL 65 quoits, and the nine city gates are clanged to at sun- set, shutting Chinese subjects out in a separate city by themselves, as if their conquest were just accom- plished. Yunglo, the Ming Emperor, extended the walls and beautified the city at the beginning of the fifteenth century, but since then, barring some repairs by the Emperor Kienlung, more than one hundred years ago, no one has emulated that early Haussmann. At the time of the Japanese war, a few parapets were patched, some crumbling buttresses rebuilt; but otherwise, Chinese indifference and inertia, slipshod neglect and shiftlessness, along with a blind worship of '' old cus- tom," have preserved this unique capital of the north- ern tribes almost unchanged. The walls and the gates are the greatest features of Peking. Although one travels toward it across the great level plain that extends from Peking's suburban hills for seven hundred miles southward, the city walls are not distinguished until one is near them. Then they loom above and stretch in such long, end- less perspective that one loses measure of their vast- ■ ness, and the eye accepts them quite as much as it does a range of hills or any natural feature of the landscape. Two cities, the Chinese and the Tatar Cit}', the outer and the inner city, lie side by side, each entirely surrounded by a great defensive wall, and the Man- chus' citadel even more strongly walled and defended from the Chinese City than from the outer plain. The Tatar, or the inner city, as it is called, holds in its center the Yellow or Imperial City, and within that 66 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE again is the Purple Forbidden City, the actual palace inclosure, the home of the Son of Heaven. One enters first the Chinese City through a deep arch in the solid walls, and after two miles comes to the more impressive walls and gate-towers of the Tatar City, each gate with a semicircular enceinte around it. A great waste space extends along the outer side of the Tatar City walls, where carts stray in lines of ruts, donkeys wander, and camels move in files like auto- matic silhouettes, all enveloped in clouds of dust. If one enters the Tatar City through the deep arch of the Hata-men, he comes almost immediately upon the Chiao-min Hsiang, or Legation Street, which runs parallel with the city wall for a mile, before debouch- ing on the great square in front of the palace gate. All the foreign compounds are on or near that street, but it is a straggling, unpaved slum of a thorough- fare, along which one occasionally sees a European picking his way between the ruts and puddles with the donkeys and camels; envoys, plenipotentiaries, and scions of la carriere diplomatique liaving lived along this broad gutter for nearly forty years, and had just the effect upon imperial Peking that many barbarians had upon imperial Rome. But for the matchless climate of this northern, treeless plain, the same dry, clear, sparkling, exhilarating air of our Minnesota or Dakota, the surface drainage, or rather the undrained, stagnant, surface sewage, would have killed all Europeans by zymotic diseases long ago. There is no water-supply for this city of a half-million people, although the Mongol and Ming dynasties con- structed and maintained a splendid system, and, save ^ 4- ^ ^ ^ i^ t MAI' OF PEKING. PEI-CHING, THE NORTHERN CAPITAL 69 for cisterns of rain-water, householders must depend upon wells, the water of which, impregnated with ail the salts of the Chihli plain, is as hard and harsh as that of the Nile at Cairo. The gift of a tin of rain- water by a diplomatic friend in Peking is more to be appreciated by the newly arrived tourist than a bouquet of orchids in Paris. With a tropic summer heat and deluge rains in that same season, with zero winters almost without snow, the streets either ankle-deep in dust or more profound sloughs of noisome mud, Peking offers more variety and incident in physical discomfort and the generally offensive than any other world's capital ; yet it has a fascination and interests different from them all. One can best see Peking and fix the idea in his mind by ascending the walls and taking a bird's-eye view of the two great cities of low, black-tiled houses that lie side by side. Forty feet above the streets and smells one has a splendid, satisfying, inspiring view, and after one such prospect the ground-plan and the four distinct walled cities are kept in mind. There is a quiet, shady, forgotten lane running along the inner, Tatar side of the stupendous masonry pile, and a gate- keeper with a greedy palm opens a small wicket in a blocked-up gate, and lets one ascend a sloping terrace walk to the terre-plein between the parapets. Up aloft there, one may walk in peace on a broad, flagged way more tlian thirty feet wide between the vast projecting buttresses, and which extends unbroken for fourteen miles around the Tatar City, and for sixteen miles around the Chinese City. Great towers like temples, with curving gable-roofs shining with green tiles, rise 70 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE over each of the nine city gates ; the towers empty, and squads of ragamuffin soldiers herding in small stone huts beside the parapets. All that upper walk is overgrown with weeds and brambles, a narrow beaten path running between these banks of under- brush. No Chinese civilians, and never Chinese wo- men, are allowed to mount or to walk on the walls, but the privilege was extended to legation families by courteous old Prince Kung, in the complaisant long- ago after the allies' war. This one refuge and breath- ing-place, where one is free from the madding, infragrant crowd, was closed to foreigners for a time, when one tourist had spurred his horse past a dazed gate-keeper and galloped half around the city before he descended and stilled the clamor and tom-toming at every guard-house in his rear. Yet another tourist is charged with scorching around the wall on his bicycle and spoiling the f ung-shui, or favorable geomantic in- fluences, by the circle of his infernal machine. The populace do not relish seeing foreigners on the wall, and once, while leaning on the parapet directly over the Hata-men arch, the smoking soldier-in-ohief came, spoke and gesticulated earnestly, and our servant translated : " He say must come back liere. People see you now, and get very mad. Maybe he lose his job." From this Hata-men, or Chuug-wen-men (the " Gate of Sublime Learning "), one looks northward for three miles across tiled roofs and tree-tops to the towers over the north gates of the Tatar City. Temple roofs and yamun roofs soar among the trees in the Tatar City, and one can trace the long walls and great red PET-CHING, THE NORTHERN CAPITAL 73 gates of the Yellow or Imperial City, within which again the yellow-tiled walls of the Purple Forbidden City are traced for two miles from the great south gates to the tree-covered knolls of the Meishan, at the far end of the palace grounds. The magnets for the eye in all this view are the great, glistening, yellow- tiled palace roofs that rise in the heart of the bowery citadel, overlapping as they stretch in long perspec- tive ; but, after the satisfaction of looking upon these palace walls and gables, I suffered an acute disap- pointment in those famous yellow tiles. They do not flash and glitter with a clear, golden glory, as on the dragon palace of one's dreams, and the imperial yellow of these tiles is a coarse, opaque, dingy tint, not the pure yellow of mustard-flowers, but the gritty, pasty, powdery, surface yellow of mustard-paste. No tall towers or great pagodas, no flags or banners, show from the forbidden precincts, and the shimmer of these great roofs is all that one sees of truly imperial Peking. Southward the rectangle of the Chinese City is a monotony of tiled roofs or waste tracts, the domed roof of the Temple of Heaven, in its great park, the only dominating feature. One may walk the mile from the Hata-men to the Chien-men, the main, meridional, or front gate of the Tatar City, which faces the great square, or pT'C^ce d'armes, before the palace gate, and there find himself at the very heart of Peking, or at least over its main artery. The great streams of trade and travel be- tween the inner and outer cities go through the tunnel of that gate and the two lateral gates in its semicir- cular enceinte, carts, donkeys, camels, chairs, wheel- 74 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIKE barrows, and foot-passengers streaming through from sunrise to sunset. The main south gates of the palace are closed and lifeless, no guards, or flags, or minions going in and out, to give the red doors and yellow roofs any more value than blank walls. In winter, picturesque Mongols in long yellow gowns and quaint fur hats hold a daily horse-market in that open square, and always a legion of fakers and ped- dlers are encamped there and about the two little, yel- low-roofed temples within the enceinte. Arcades of rich shops surround this palace square, and streets stretch away under jjailoivs, or skeleton gates of honor erected by imperial permission to the memory of deceased ones of great virtues and exemplary lives. Through them streams of busy life converge to this focal point, until the hum, the shouts, the movement and clouds of dust give one an idea of the busy, living Peking of to-day. The middle gate in the Chien- men's encircling enceinte is opened only for the Em- peror's use, and gives dire(;tly upon a marble bridge crossing the moat, whence a splendid broad street continues, at first under rows of monumental pailows, due south for two miles to the parks surrounding the Temple of Heaven and the Temple of Agriculture, where the Emperor worships in state twice each year. Nowhere in China is the street life so busy, bright, and picturesque as in Peking, with such unceasing variety of type and costume, incident and spectacular display. Tlie most noticeable and striking feature, the peculiarity wliich gives most brilliancy and in- terest to all street scenes and outdoor life, is the presence of women — tall, splendid Mauchu women. PEI-CHING, THE NORTHERN CAPITAL 77 who walk with sturdy tread freely on their full- grown, natural feet, and balance their magnificent head-dresses with conscious pride. The Manchu women's coiffure is the most picturesque, and their long Manchu robe the most dignified of any costume in Asia. In my first breathless delight in each of these striking figures, these far-northeastern living pictures, I berated all my traveled acquaintances, who, harping on the dirt and the dilapidation, the offensive smells and sights, of Peking, had never told me of these Manchu women, with their broad gold pins, wings of blue-black hair, and great bouquets and coronals of flowers, the bewitching pictures in every thoroughfare. Nor any more had they given me an idea of the bewildering interest and richness of the street life, something of which at every moment catches and dazzles the eye and fixes one's attention —the real sights of Peking, not the walls and temples and monuments set down in the abbreviated and scholarly local guide-book, but the throngs of all classes of two races, who give continuous perform* ances all over the twin cities. At the Chien-men all activity centers, and the open- air dramas are most diverting. The Emperor's sacred middle south gate opens upon a broad marble bridge, carved to the fineness of lace and once snow-white, but now grimed, greased, battered, worn, and stained with the dirt of ages, its graceful balustrades half hidden by the frightful company of beggars and lepers assembled there. Where life centered there was death also, and I never went to this main gate of the Chinese City 78 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE without encountering a funeral. Often my cart was blocked on the broad meridian street by some grievous and elaborate parade. And what a motley grief wears at this capital ! One hears the funeral from afar as the clang of cymbals and gongs and wind-instruments, the howls of the hired mourners are borne to one, and all the air is filled with the mighty hoo-Jioo, hoo-hoo-hoo-Jioos wheezed from a long horn that looks, and is worked, like a gigantic garden syringe. The boo-hoos of the mourners were feeble and in minor keys compared with this sobbing pump, and the mourners often stopped dry-eyed, in the midst of a wail, to gape at us as we thrust our heads from cart-fronts the better to see them and the "Palstaflfian parade. Abbe Hue long ago remarked that the Chinese possess "the most astonishing talent for going distracted in cold blood " ; and these funeral parades all prove it. For a first-class funeral, the manager of such pomps and vanities gathers up street boys and beggars, tricks them out in uniform coats and peaked hats, and as- signs them embroidered umbrellas, red-and-gold- lettered standards and boards, which they hang over their shoulders at all angles as they straggle along. Other ragamuffins carry imitations of the dead man's treasures, which are burned at the grave in order that he may have them in the world beyond— card houses and carts, paper men, women, horses, jewels, clocks, vases, and curios of every kind, heaps of paper coin and paper money, myriad sheets of false gold and silver foil, and .vj/rc^s, or shoe-shaped ingots— all these consumed in magnificent, extravagant show of wealth and belief in a material future life. ii 9J' --^ - ? '»«%*<-. ^': ii-> PEI-CHING, THE NORTHERN CAPITAL 81 Lucky days must have been many during the au- tumn month I spent at Peking, for the gorgeous red wedding-chair conveying a bride to her home was another frequent sight. Not a glimpse could one get of the jeweled treasure within, and one had to speculate on the unseen, like the bridegroom himself. More splendid than the red box of the bride was the red. bodied cart of rank, carrying a palace beauty about the Imperial City, which I often met near the palace gates. The first such vision — a young Manchu beauty in full ceremonial dress, with her hair piled high with gorgeous flower-bunches, and loops, chains, and tassels of pearls pendent from the great gold bar balanced across her blue-black hair— quite took my breath away. '' Emperor's relatives," said my awe-struck servant, as he balanced himself on the cart-shaft ; and the glimpse of that radiant, motionless heathen goddess, clearly visible in full face and then in profile through the gauze curtains of her shrine, lifted the Peking cart for- ever from the realms of the commonplace. At every red-bodied cart in range I fixed all attention, most usually rewarded by the tableau of some fat, spec- tacled mandarin sitting cross-legged in unctuous ease ; but one vision of a statuesque court beauty repaid one for many disappointments. The Peking cart has been dwelt upon with vituper- ation, ridicule, and abuse by all who have endured its jolts and poundings, but the half cannot be told. The lines of the one conventional cart model in com- mon use have not been changed since Marco Polo's time, and this primitive, archaic vehicle has solid axles with hubs like kegs, and nail-studded wheels 82 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE heavier than those of any Roman chariot. A good road would be ruined in a week by such cart-wheels, and the cart must go if ever Peking streets are paved or macadamized. Each mule steps in the last mule's tracks, each wheel cuts deeper the rut already made in the dirt road, and as the square platform or body rests directly on the axle, the occupant gets the full ben- efit of every jolt and obstacle. The gait of the mule affects one, too, and if it steps briskly, even on smooth ground, one begs the carter to say " Wu-wu-wu" to the mule and slow down its gait. One enters the cart head first, stepping up on a little stool, putting the knee on the shaft, crawling in on the padded floor on all fours, turning, and tucking his heels under him as he faces front. Anything less graceful or less digni- fied cannot be imagined, and for mighty mandarins and ministers, princes, potentates, and foreign envoys to crawl into a vehicle on all fours, and sit flat on its floor until the time comes to dismount feet foremost, dropping one foot on the tiny stool so dangerously near to the mule's heels, passes all belief. The Chi- nese have an inimitable way of leaving a cart, shoot- ing out as it stops, like a jack-in-the-box, unfolding their legs in air, and alighting evenly on their soft, thick soles ; but even these experts must mount or enter in tlie same ignoble manner on all fours. There is a tradition tliat one can learn to enter and leave a Peking cart gracefully, if he gives as mucli time to it as to learning the language ; but I did not hear of nor see any sinologue whose cart exercises could be studied as models of grace. There are variations in carts which modifv the de- PEI-CHING, THE NORTHERN CAPITAL 83 gree of misery, the official cart being very long in the body, with the axle placed so far back that one has a little of the spring of a buckboard, raid a surcease from the pounding, that is almost equal to the pleasure of sitting sidewise on one shaft and dangling one's heels close beside the mule's heels in clouds of dust or spatters of mud. The official cart has more black trimmings on its barrel-top canopy, which is of cloth instead of cotton stuff, and the carts of highest rank have a broad strip of red cloth around the base. The official cart has always windows at the sides, so that the occupant is not restricted to one tunnel-like view ahead. The windows are cov- ered with black silk gauze, and it is good form always to drop the front curtain of gauze, and ride in visible retirement safe from the clouds of nauseous dust. In winter, thick curtains shut out the cold, and the cart is a nest of furs, with Mongol braziers besides, that are not nnlike the Kashmiri fire-basket. In rainy weather, the cart is enveloped in oiled paper, and in summer an extension canopy or curtain is stretched out to protect the carter and his mule from the blaze of a desert sun. Foreigners have modified the cart of the country by cutting an entrance-door at one side and a hole in the bottom, below which a box or well for the feet permits one to sit with bent knees. By making fast an upholstered drawing-room chair with extra-strong springs in the seat, and using many pillows, one may be carted about Peking witli some comfort ; and, moreover, if he stays long enough to forget the barbarian world and to lose the keen sense of comparison, he will even be sensible of points of 84 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE style in the two-wheeled mule-cart, with its mounted outrider in turban hat, that would be side-splitting features in any circus procession at home. Good riding-ponies are to be had in Peking, selected from droves which the Mongol herdsmen drive down from the plains every autumn, and from the saddle one has sight over the carts and crowds of people in the highways. There are donkeys, too, for hire, but they are looked on with scorn in Peking, only the common- est people using the despised animals. Sedan-chairs are restricted to official use at extravagant charges, and the bearers are slow, slipshod joggers to any one who has known the perfection of motion behind the steady, swinging tread of Hongkong bearers. There are camels, to be sure, and the strings of slow, silently mov- ing creatures bringing coal and wool into the city are the most frequent and characteristic sights of Peking, the swinging, automatic, silent tread of the shaggy beasts being fascinating and hypnotic, and forever associated in background with the vista of the end- less city wall. These two-humped, woolly Bactrian camels, that cross Siberia in great caravans over the winter snows, and can only travel during the cool night hours in summer, are not like the swift drome- dary of Egypt and Arabia in gait, and are not trained to the saddle. VII THE TATAR CITY OF KUBLAI KHAN 'EKING is sadly lacking in guide-book sights, in buildings, monuments, public works of art, or historic spots that can appeal to one to whom Chinese dynas- ties and rulers are but empty names, shibboleths, ciphers, and symbols of the ceramic craze only. All that is best worth seeing in the way of temples is barred and forbidden ; each year some other attractive or interesting place is closed to visi- tors, and the difficulties and annoyances of entrance to any of the show-places make the scant sight-seeing that is possible in Peking a trial and a test of endur- ance. One must bargain and pay to enter anywhere, and when one has satisfied the greedy gate-keepers, a swarm of neighborhood idlers and children troop in without price, crowd around and elbow one, trip his feet, and make the air hideous with jeers, catcalls, and mimickings of foreign speech. One may have murder in his heart, but he does not do it, does not dare to notice or lay stick upon a single baboon tor- mentor ; for a Chinese crowd is an uncertain, uncon- 85 86 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE trollable quantity, with no fear of mandarin, emperor, or foreign powers. The great sights are the Observatory on the walls, the Examination Hall, the Confucian Temple, the Lama Temple, the Clock-tower, the Drum-tower, the palace gates, the Temple of Heaven, and the Temple of Agriculture. The last two objects are sequestered in vast parks at the extreme south end of the Chinese City, and one sees them by the aid of opera-glasses from the nearest point of view on the south wall. The Observatory possesses quaint old bronze instruments, mounted on elaborate arrangements of writhing dragons and clouds— the finest works of ancient art to be seen at the capital. The old buildings be- low and the platform on the wall are successors of the tall tower of the Persian astronomers and astrol- ogers who came with Kublai Khan. Until the Emperor Yunglo's time that tower marked the south- east angle of the Tatar City wall, but that builder of the present great walls and towers moved the city line south in order to give room for nobler approaches to his palace gates. Jesuit astronomers came out from France, and Louis XIV sent with them a large bronze azimuth and celestial globe to the Emperor Kanghsi. In 1G74 Father Verbeist, the official astronomer and president of the Board of Works, was commanded to make a full set of instruments, and from his designs Chinese artists modeled and cast the splendid grouj) of dragon-wreathed bronze instruments that one ad- mires tliere now. A water-clock, or clepsydra, is in one of the buildings in the ground court, but, since the vandalism of a tourist years ago, the guardiaTis rarely THE TATAR CITY OF KUBLAI KHAN 87 let one look in at the series of copper cisterns. The Chinese were apt pupils of both Arab and Jesuit ^ teachers, and the Board of Astronomers is one of the most important of the government departments to- day. They compute eclipses and calculate solar and lunar incidents with precision for the official calendar or almanac ; but when the moment of the eclipse ar- rives, the members of the honorable board assemble in the courtyard in state robes, and frantically beat tom-toms to scare away the dragon which is about to swallow the sun or the moon. The Examination Hall nearly adjoins the Ob- servatory, a great inclosure filled with tiled sheds, suggesting cattle-pens. There learning abides and honors emanate, and civil service, by competitive examination, is carried to burlesque every third year, wlien three thousand diplomaed students from all the provinces are penned up while they write essays on Confucian philosophy to prove their fitness to act as civil and judicial officials and squeeze the last pos- sible cash from the common people. One enters through tottering yellow pailows and dilapidated gates to the literary stock-yards, with the rows of l)rick alcove cells where the candidates are kept in solitary confinement for three days and two nights. A central bell-tower overlooks it all, and at the end are the pavilion and halls where the judges first select three hundred and sixty papers from the three thou- sand, from them choose the best eighteen essays, and then the tln-ee superior ones whose authors are to rank with the immortals. These three are given the high- est degree of doctor of literature by the Emperor 88 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE himself, and their names are cut on tablets at the Con- fucian Temple. Knowing the abject worship of learn- ( ing, the profound reverence for the written word, and the senseless exaltation of the literati which prevail in China, one may have believed that these examinations had remained uncorrupted in this land of universal corruption, that these triennials were fair and thorough tests of learning, that the judges were honest and up- right, and that the wholesale moral and material decay of China had spared this one feature of the national life. One learns that the examination-papers and the necessary essays may be bought beforehand ; that the judges may be bribed to recognize certain marks ; that needy scholars, without influence to push them after they have won a degree, will personate the dunces of great families, for whom offices, honors, and emoluments are waiting as soon as they receive the stamp of the literary examiners ; that not only fraud and corruption and collusion are rampant in these classic halls, but that intimidation is also re- sorted to, and the judges are threatened, hounded, stoned, beaten, and " hustled " by mobs of fellow- provincials and family followers waiting upon the success of individual candidates. Peking is filled with disappointed scholars who have failed at the ex- aminations and have a scorn of trade or honest work, and there are from thirty to eighty thousand waiting graduates in the empire, successful candidates who have passed the ordeal, but lack the money or influence necessary to secure a government office. All these idle, useless, worthless literati are the bane and terror of the government. They are not yet enlightened THE TATAR CITY OF KUBLAI KHAN 91 enough to become political agitators, reformers, or bomb-throwers, but they constitute a force to be reckoned with when progress really makes a start, when China awakens. One thumps and jolts his way northward a mile and more, either by shady streets of old Manehu residences, or along the main street running from the Hata-men's arch, the latter a broad, busy thor- oughfare, lined with shops with gaudy fronts and gables, and double-lined with booths, mat- and canvas- covered stalls. Carts traverse a raised causeway,— a dike between two awful ditches of open sewers or cesspools,— and the traf&c is so great, and blockades are so frequent, that one is in constant terror of be- ing backed into these foul ditches and pools of horror by a locked wheel, a balking mule, or a crumbling bank's edge. Where a broad, lateral street crosses at right angles each approach is spanned by a grand pailow, these commemorative wooden arches in Pe- king being strangely shabby and rickety compared with the splendid carved granite and marble pailow of the Grand Canal and South China. At this cross- roads of commerce— the Four Pailows— the great banks, the tea-, silk-, medicine-, and confectionery- shops of the Tatar City are gathered, and there is always a blockade of carts, chairs, wheelbarrows, camels, mules, and donkeys, and an incredible stream of people— Mongols from the plains, Mancliu notables and common folk, priests, spectacled Chinese, and al- ways the Manehu women in their gorgeous coiffures as brilliant features in this fashionable shopping quarter. The Four Pailow tea-shop has a front so 92 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE carved and ^Ided that one can hardly credit its con- secration to commerce and trade; but he buys there the same perfumed oolong, redolent of jasmine-buds or Olea fragrant, that is served one at the superior silk- and curio-shops, until he learns to like it and forever associate it with certain stone-floored interiors, the dazzle of splendid fabrics, and crowded displays of rich art objects. The Four Fallow drug-store is carved and gilded out of all reason, and the confec- tioner's shop is as alluring without ail the sugared and honeyed sweets on the counters. At the Four Fallow silk-shop one is ushered in, according to his purse and rank, to farther and farther courts, the tribute of sig- nal esteem being isolation in a far-back, lonely, stony sepulcher or little trade temple, with two reserve al- cove rooms, where braziers and hot tea are needed to thaw and cheer one between the waits for more and more baskets and armfuls of silks, satins, brocades, velvets, crapes, gauze, linen, and furs from their sep- arate storehouses. Tailors and embroiderers ply the needle and the goose in long side-buildings, and there is a room of remnants that would set Occidental shop- pers wild, while in the mirrored salesroom near the street Mancliu matrons, in their flowered and gold- barred coiffures, deliberate over the stuffs for their future finery. ; At the far north end of this busy main street one passes the first pailowed entrance and open court of the Lama Temple, which was for years the great sight and show-place of Feking, but is now closed past the most extravagant bribes, no fees sufficing for the gate-keeper and the horde of vicious, raven- THE TATAR CITY OF KUBLAI KHAN 93 ing Mongol Buddhist priests. Visitors used to pay roundly to enter and penetrate the five courts, to hear the yellow-robed lamas at service, and see the colossal gilded Buddha, the remarkable bronze and enamel altar-vases, the books and pictures. ] Then they paid as extravagantly at each gate of departure from the dangerous demesne, and such an experience as Mr Henry Norman relates in " The Peoples and Politics of. the Far East" is sufficient warning to tourists for all time. The place was first the palace of that seventeenth son of Kanghsi's who succeeded him as the Emperor Yung Cheng, and who upon his accession made it over for religious uses, together with an endowment sufficient to support three thousand lamas. Their number diminished to one thousand as the great re- ligion lost life and vogue in China, and there are now only about five hundred tonsured, yellow-robed scoun- drels there, a band of sacerdotal villains, whose coun- tenances suggest that they, like other priests in China, may be fugitives from justice, criminals of the deepest dye, who adopt the religious life as a cloak and seek the monastery as a refuge from the law. The Lama serai has the same yellow-tiled roof as the palace, and the lamas were permitted to speak to the Emperor face to face. Tlie living buddha who rules the place, subject to the dalai-lama of Tibet, was for some years accessible to visitors, who used to converse freely with this holy one, but no foreigner has talked with this Gagen in recent years. This temple is the place where occultism and mystic things were taught, where yogis and mahatmas and V 94 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE saints with astral bodies practised and imparted their secret powers ; but occult China is all impenetrable now, and disappointed investigators denounce the mystic Buddhism as naught but rankest astrology, Shamanism, and demonology, its priests in Peking sunk as low as among the farther northern tribes. All the cutthroat-looking Mongolian and Tibetan lamas who come to Peking put up at this temple, and there are often pilgrims and fakirs like that Tibetan who wore an iron spike through both cheeks as a sign of and aid to holiness, and with an eye to worldly gains posed to all the amateur photographers of Peking for a consideration. ( The gate of the Confucian Temple is always slammed shut at sight of foreign visitors, who treat through weU-worn cracks in the panels for the privi- lege of entering, poking silver dollars and Peking tiaos, or bank-notes, through until Cerberus is satis- fied. Meanwhile the rabble gathers, and when the gates swing open all the tag-rags, Arabs, beggars, and neighbors stream in without price, and fairly prevent one from seeing the first court with their maddening chatter, jeers, and horse-play. Venerable cedar-trees shade the first flagged court, where the deeply bayed gate-house, or antetemple, is raised on a terrace; and this splendid entrance-porch, with its stone tablets and two-thousand-five-hundred-year-old stone drums, is all for the Emperor's use at liis annual visit. The commoner passes by a humble wicket to a long, flagged quadrangle, whore ancient cedar-trees shade yellow-tiled pavilions and stone tablets of honor. Broad marble steps, with a sloping panel between, BRniSH ToriMST IN DISGUISE. THE TATAE CITY OF KUBLAI KHAN 97 carved in high relief with noble dragons, lead to the grand terrace or platform on which the great red temple, or memorial building, stands. The crowd lags, holds back at the terrace steps, and when the guardian unlocks and swings open the double-latticed doors, one treads the vast, columned hall in silence- something of dignity, splendor, and impressiveness to be enjoyed in Peking at last, without filth, insistent squalor, and insulting epithets offending one's every sense. Massive teak columns tower to the shadowy, paneled ceiling, thick coir mattings cover the stone floor, and behind the altar-table is the red wooden shrine containing the tiny, sacred tablet of Confucius. The tablets of Mencius and the lesser sages are ranged on each side, and votive tablets from the worshiping emperors, who have paid homage to China's greatest teacher, are hung around the dark-red walls. There is such space, simplicity, quiet, and solemnity within this memorial hall that one recognizes it as the very sacred spot where even the gabbling gate-keepers are subdued and reverent, where the rabble cannot pursue, where the hideous Chinese voice is stilled.- Yet, they let me place my camera on the altar-table and photograph the sacred tablet, the soul of Con- fucius, the host of the high altar in the cathedral of the one living faith of the empire ! ; On one visit to the Confucian Temple we found a great crowd jeering around a tourist in the gateway whom the gate-keeper would not admit at any price. This elderly Englishman, with an unwonted consider- ation for .the sensibilities of an alien people, had thought to don Chinese dress that he might go about 98 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE unobserved. Top-boots, a flowing blue silk gown, and a deer-stalker's cap, with a long raven-black queue at- tached with a safety-pin, made a combination to which his rosy English face and stubby white hair added a last contradictory touch. The guardians evidently took him for a lunatic, and the people could not be blamed for their roars of laughter. When he showed himself in his " disguise " at the Lama Temple a crowd of holy men fell upon him, took his money, despoiled him of the gown and the queue, and left him to walk home bareheaded. We were baited for a Chinese holiday, however, when we went out, and by a narrow lane reached the back gate of the adjoining Hall of Classics. Again we bargained and passed bank-notes through cracks in the gate, and a mob of a hundred vicious young ragamuffins pushed in with us, somersaulting over the grass and the marble rails. They shrieked and cat- called in the cloisters as they leaped on and over the tall stone tablets on which all the nine books of the most ancient classics are cut in permanent, unalter- able, everlasting text, a stone library founded by the great Emperor Kienlung. Within the south gate of imperial entrance there is first a broad green lawn, witli tiny pavilions or temples at each side, and fa- cing it a noble brick-and-stone pailow of three arches, half covered with glazed green and yellow tiles and ornamental panels— the most splendid and glittering monument that learning could wish for. Its arches frame a charming picture of the central pavilion within a marl>le-bridged pond, the audience-hall where the Emperor sits in state on a red throne similar to the SUX-DIAL AT THE HALL OF CLASSICS. THE TATAR CITY OF KUBLAI KHAN 101 greater throne and dais of his palace when he comes in state to confer the great literary degrees. There is an interesting old sun-dial on the terrace at the back of the quadrangle, which, like all Chinese dials, has its summsr face to tell one the standard time until the 22d of September, and the nether winter face to mark the hours until the 22d of March. The Drum-tower and the Bell-tower in that north- ern quarter are two splendid Mongol keeps rebuilt by Kienlung, one sheltering the monster bell of Yunglo that used to strike the curfew, and the other holding a great barrel drum that bangs the hours in good Mongol fashion. They are in a deserted neighbor- hood—deserted until a foreigner climbs down from a cart. Then a dense population springs up from the ground and the encircling mud-puddles, and to pro- duce a camera doubles the mob as suddenly as if that second mass of spectators had fallen from the clouds. There is positively no admittance to these interesting old towers, and one is easily consoled by believing that the drum, the clepsydra, and the burning sandal sticks that measure the hours are not worth the effort of seeing. One becomes cautious and judicial in Peking, weighs the sight, and considers whether the lion is worth looking at before he worries and haggles and pays and draws an unfeeling crowd around him. VIII IMPERIAL, PURPLE PEKING I HE great south gate in the continuous wall surrounding the Imperial or Yel- low City is the main gate of the palace, a state entrance used only by the Em- peror on ceremonial occasions. One passes from the Tatar to the Imperial City by gates in the east, west, and north walls, each a towering red Mongol keep, whose curving gables break the nine- mile circuit of the Imperial City's yellow-tiled walls. Each gateway is a busy center of city life, where beggars wail, grandees strut, and mandarins, generals, eunuchs, and bannermen, on foot and horse, in carts and chairs and litters, are continually passing to and fro. One is nearest the actual palace demesne at the north or " back gate," where^ at the barracks of Man- chu bannermen and the headquarters of the governor of Peking, the Ti-tu, or "■ ^Mandarin of the Nine Gates," all municipal and civic authority centers. In that intimate Imperial City there are streets of pal- aces, public offices and buildings, temples and resi- dences with imposing gateways and roofs of colored 102 IMPERIAL, PURPLE PEKING 103 tiles. There are even shops here in this imperial ward, although the Manchu is distinctly forbidden to engage in trade, and is gathered for defense closely around the yellow clay and yellow-tiled walls of the Sacred Purple Forbidden City of the Son of Heaven, the citadel in its midst. From the broad avenue leading between the ban- nermen's barracks one looks directly upon the green hills and summer-houses of the Emperor's Pei-ta, or Northern Garden, One may drive beside the low garden wall for a mile, admiring the green Meishan, the Prospect or Coal Hill, which Marco Polo and Friar Odoric both described. This garden was laid out by Kublai Khan, and the Mongol emperors stored up supplies of coal against a possible siege and turfed them over into landscape ornaments. The Meishan is between one hundred and fifty and one hundred and sixty feet in height, and, overtopping the palace roof, sufBces to ward off all evil influences from the north. The Ming emperors built, or more probably rebuilt, the fanciful round^ square, and hex- agonal red pavilions on the hills, and near one of these temples or kiosks the last of the Mings hanged ^ himself from an acacia-tree when the victorious Man- chu general had captured the city and seized the throne. With proper respect for a sovereign ruler, the Manchu usurper loaded the offending tree with chains, as punishment for its part in an imperial crime. One hilltop pa^dlion holds a life-size statue of Kanghsi, and another is reserved for the l^nng in state of imperial corpses. In the days when the religion of the lotus was law, 104 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE this beautiful park and the adjoining Western Garden with its great lake were adorned by temples, pagodas, and dagobas. One temple still holds a colossal golden image of Buddha, and another shelters ten thousand bronze images of the All-Knowing and his attendant bodhisattv^as. There is a bronze pagoda covered with myriad images and reliefs, and a tall white dagoba, that one sees above the tree-tops, holds the ashes of a living buddha who died at Peking. There are monasteries in the palace gardens where legions of sleek lamas used to minister to imperial souls, and another of Yunglo's colossal bells swings unrung, voiceless, in its noble tower. The gi'eat religion is as dead within the palace walls as elsewhere, the temples and shrines are only relics and garden ornaments, and the imperial folk have few spiritual needs that the great Fo can meet. The Northern Garden is separately walled, and is divided from the actual palace inclosure by a broad highway, continued as a causewaj' or long bridge across its lake. Until quite recently this road and bridge were freely used as a direct route from one side of the Imperial City to the other. For more than twenty years foreign residents greatly delighted in this one green and beautiful prospect, this one breath of fresh, imperial, purple air, and drove frequently over the marble bridge of nine arches and picnicked in the deserted pleasure-grounds around the lake. Suddenly the gates were slammed in their faces, and no foreigners were permitted to pass through. At the sight of a foreigner looking from a passing cart now, the guardians run to shut the gates, and to BIPERIAL, PURPLE PEKING 105 emphasize their spite hold boards against the cracks long after the alien has gone his way. Maps, plans, and detailed descriptions of each huildiDg in the palace inclosure may be bought at any Chinese book-store, and Dr. Edkins has condensed the facts in his chapters in Dr. Williamson's " Jour- nej'^s in North China." The Jesuit fathers, who lived beside and overlooked the palace gardens, and had freest range of the forbidden purple precincts in Kanghsi's and Kienlung's time, wrote full accounts of the city, the suburban and the hunting palaces, and of the life that went on within them. They painted albums of landscape views and of palace occupants in their gorgeous costumes, and copies are easily bought to-day. From the city wall one can trace and identify the yellow-tiled roof of each of the pavilions of high- sounding titles, as they stretch away from the great south front gate for two miles back to the fairy pavilions on the green Meishan. Friar Odoric de- scribed the palace interiors, even to Kublai Khan's great, dragon-carved jade punch-bowl, which, stand- ing "two paces high" and hooped with gold, was always filled with drink, with golden goblets standing round. The storehouses, magazines of silk, furs, tea, clothing, jewels, and the treasury of gold and silver ingots are on the west side of the main avenue from the south gate, with lesser storehouses of reserve clothing, drugs, and perfumes on the east side. On the east side shines the green-tiled roof of the Impe- rial Library, the chief treasure of all China. This precious and now unique collection of books was 106 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE brought together by that august patron of letters, the- Emperor Kienlung, and duplicate libraries were deposited at the Summer Palace outside the city, at the hunting palace of Jehol in Mongolia, and at the old ancestral palace of the Manchus at Mukden. The library at the Summer Palace was burned by the allies in 1860, the Jehol palace has not been used for forty years, and Mukden's library is farther beyond imperial ken. Earlier imperial libraries treasured at Hang- chow and on Golden Island, below Nanking, were destroyed during the Taiping rebellion. Driving along the west wall of the palace, one may see the upper portion of the red palace which the Emperor Kienlung built for his Mohammedan "vvife, a Turkestan princess, whose religion he regarded to the extent of adding this unusual second story to a dwelling, in order that she might look upon the Mo- hammedan mosque across the way. Her face was turned to Mecca and to Turkestan at the same time— "the home-looking building," the Chinese called it. Near this little Turkish seraglio rise the gables of the one-story "Palace of Earth's Repose," which the Ming emperors built for the use of dowager em- presses, and where Tsze Hsi An, the despotic ruler for forty years, is supposed to have passed her time. The immediate dwelling, the intimate living-rooms of the Emperor, are in this northwest corner of the palace inclosure, nearest the women's quarter, and a high- walled passage leads from this private quarter to the Si Yuen, or Western Garden, a pleasure-ground disused as long as the tower of the Jesuit church overlooked it. Tlie residence palace of the first IMPERIAL, PURPLE PEKING 107 Mongol emperors stood in this western pleasure- ground, but earthquake, fire, and the ravages of the first Manehu conqueror left few of the Mongol buildings standing. The Empress visits the Western Garden in state once a year to perform the ceremony of feeding the silkworms at the so-called Silk Temple, and a few lamas tend their temples and maintain schools in the garden. The famous Pavilion of Purple Light is in this outer garden also— a build- ing where Korean, Mongol, and Looehoo envoys used to be entertained with feasts and games when they had offered their annual tribute, quite as the Great Father at Washington used to receive delega- tions of noble red men, give them presents of blankets and tobacco, and pretend to whiff at the pipe of peace. Ignominious audience was granted there to other outer barbarians and savages— the ministers and envoys of the great powers of Europe — when they clamored for audiences in 1874 and in 1891. No sovereign lives in such seclusion and mystery as the Emperor of China, and the least is known in the general foreign circle at Peking of what goes on within the palace, of what affects the lives of the eight thousand people who live and move within the four-mile circuit of those yellow, dragon-tiled walls. Everything connected with this Tranquil Palace of Heaven, the actual imperial dwelling, has a tan- talizing fascination for the outsider in Peking, indif- ferently and scornfully as some may regard it all. Half of the grotesque, absurd accounts of palace life are manifestly untrue, but the most truthful ones are often the most absurd, as witness the edicts and me- 108 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE 1 morials daily published in the official Peking Gazette, oldest newspaper in the world. Nothing in comic opera, in the maddest burlesque or extravaganza, equals the bombast and grandiloquence of some of the petitions and memorials it prints, the maudlin raptures and ex- hortations in the name of filial piety, nor yet the puerile edicts signed by the "Vermilion Pencil," i. e., the Em- peror, whose long-drawn bathos ends with a dra- matic " Respect this." There have even been edicts commanding grasshoppers to retire from stricken provinces, and the annual inundation of the Yellow River produces a crop of imperial inanities. Where there is so much mystery, imagination at once supplies material, and almost everything one hears in Peking about the most exalted Pekingese circle is immediately contradicted or disproved. Except for the envoys and their suites on ceremonial occasions. Prince Henry of Prussia, the Russian princes, and the ladies of the diplomatic corps, the only foreigners be- lieved to have penetrated the forbidden realm during the nineteenth century were one or two physicians, an electrical engineer, and some musicians, and these last were carried in and out in closed chairs, past blank walls, with everytliing screened from view save what pertained to their immediate errand. It is known that the palace awakens at twilight and is busiest when graveyards yawn, and that imperial owls have long chosen to bestir themselves only while their toiling millions slept. The liglit of thousands \ of vegetable-wax caudles, sent as tribute from certain provinces, has given way to the blaze of incandescent bulbs, and steam-heat is said to have been introduced IMPERIAL, PURPLE PEKING 109 in the Empress Dowager's quarters. During the years of the Emperor Kwangsu's minority he seldom passed the city walls, but after he ascended the throne and the Empress Dowager retired to her suburban palace, the Emperor often made visits out through the northwest gate to her E-ho Park retreat, and a part of the ruined Summer Palace was rebuilt for his imperial pleasurings. Much of his time was taken up with state worship, and whenever he was about to perform annual services at any place it was duly an- nounced in the Peking Gazette, and special notice was sent to each legation, in order that no foreigners should venture near the imperial procession. The route was always curtained and lined with soldiers for its whole length, every house-window closed, each door guarded, the street paved, smoothed, and strewn with fresh sand. Yet every foreigner in Peking who cared to had seen an imperial procession and enjoyed a good look at Kwangsu, the Son of Heaven, borne along in an open chair, or rather canopied platform, by eighteen or twenty bearers. There were always bannermen and house-owners to be bribed, and once the Chien-men tower guards were surprised and bought up by an energetic Englishman bent on see- ing the Emperor and his train proceeding by torch- light to the New Year ceremonies at the Temple of Heaven. All described the dragon countenance of Kwangsu as a pale and sickly one, the glance timid rather than terrifying, and the lonely figure in its simple dark robes extinguished by the blaze of color, the sheen of tinsel and gold, in the uniforms of his suite. Even his chair-bearers wore bright-red and 110 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE yellow satin tunics close-belted at the waist, and strings of attendants in long yellow satin gowns with rainbow borders in wave patterns dazzled the peeping eye. One tourist, looking through a curtain-slit at the imperial cortege, reported that the gorgeous robes of the Emperoi^'s train were as shabby and greasy, as dirty and threadbare, as the worst that the peddlers ever offer for sale. Tribute elephants from Cochin China were part of every imperial train until fifteen years ago, when the supply diminished as more of the elephant country was lopped off for French colo- nies, and the ill temper of the few old animals remain- ing in the imperial stables made them a danger to all who came near. One mad elephant broke away from the procession, seized a woman and threw her over the roof of a house, and then threw a mule and cart into a doorway. When the city gates are closed at sunset they can only be opened by direct imperial command, save the great Chien-men, between the Chinese and the Tatar City, which is opened for a half-hour every midnight to admit the official carts and chairs and mounted mandarins bound for the palace. The Emperor Kwangsu was supposed to rise for his day at two o'clock in the morning, and, after the rites and cere- monies, to hold councils and audiences, receive me- morials and reports, and work busily until after sunrise. He turned to relaxation when plebeian day- light came, and went wearily to bed about five o'clock in the afternoon. Audiences were set for the grisly hour just before dawn, and the assembled ministers usually waited sleepily on the imperial pleasure. IMPERIAL, PURPLE PEKING 111 Even the foreign envoys were bidden to their audi- ence in the ignoble Pavilion of Purple Light at six o'clock in the morning, as to a French military court martial. The Ti-tu, or military governor of Peking, the Man- chu Guardian of the Nine Gates, does not open the Chien-men gate nor the Imperial City gate gratui- tously, nor permit any one to traverse the palace approaches freely. All who enter the imperial, purple precincts must pay roundly for the privilege. Rennie relates that in the early days of Canton trade the hoppo of that port was expected to pay the Guardian of the Nine Gates at the rate of ten thousand taels for each year of office-holding. One hoppo paid thirty- six thousand taels after three and a half years of profitable intendancy in the south, and two ver- milion checks for ten thousand taels each were after- ward sent out from the palace to be cashed at a bank. The hoppo's salary had been twenty-four hundred taels a year. Out of that stipend he spent eight thousand taels on the necessary running expenses of the Canton yamun. Leaving Canton with three hundred thou- sand taels as his savings, half of that amount went to Peking officials before the hoppo prostrated him- self before the Emperor, since the eunuchs had also to be remembered. In recent times, Li Hung Chang is said to have disbursed over thirty thousand taels in connection with the one imperial interview accorded him in eight years— the audience which preceded his departure for the Czar's coronation. At such audiences, the highest official was forced to prostrate himself and 112 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE remain on hands and knees, forehead repeatedly touching the floor, in the kotow of worship, without daring once to turn an eye directly on the dragon countenance. When Li Hung Chang had knelt in that attitude on a cold stone floor for an hour, he was unable to rise. Eunuchs lifted him up and assisted him to an outer room, where a physician restored him sufiiciently to permit him to totter to his chair in a far- away court. Another Pekingese tale tells that, on his return from his grand tour of the globe, the Empress Dowager summoned the grand secretary Li to her E-ho palace in the suburbs, and, as a final mark of favor, he was shown the improvements and restorations she had been making. The eunuchs, who hate him as only Manchus can hate a Chinese, speciously led him to a quiet arbor to rest, and plied him with tea and pipes- all in a sacred, set-apart pavilion where only the dowager dragon herself was ever expected to sit Then the eunuchs denounced him for trespass and lese-majesty, and had him arrested— virtually for walking on the gi-ass— and turned over to the Board of Punishment, which has absolute power of life or death to all committed to it. The board was a unit against the grand secretar}', whom kings and emperors had courted and presidents of republics had run after, and they gladly stripped him of his yellow riding-jacket, of his button aud peacock feather, and the worst might have followed but for the iutercession of the Empress Dowager. Li Hung Chang had just been named a member of the Board of the Tsuug-li Yamuu, aud the judges decreed that THE VICEROY 1,1 HUNG CHANCi. IMPERIAL, PURPLE PEKING 115 he should be fined the half of a year's salary as final punishment. As the services of this great man were rated as worth ninety taels a year to the state, he was mulcted of forty-five taels, or about thirty dollars in United States gold. The Russian envoy at Peking had expressly indi- cated the young Manchu princes whom it was desir- able to have attend the Czar's coronation ceremony and be impressed for all time with definite proofs of Russia's power and riches. But the princes refused to go, to appear as vassals or tributaries of the Czar, as their suspicious minds viewed that assembling of princes in Moscow. The Russians then chose Li Hung Chang, who had served them well before, and deserved a reward and an incentive for the future. The Man- chu enemies of the grand secretary, who hated him for the disasters attending the war he had protested against their inviting, hailed the idea of his going abroad. During his absence they expected to under- mine him thoroughly, never dreaming of the honors and distinction to be accorded the ^' Grand Old Man of China," the absurdities of adulation which all Europe and America were to heap upon a deposed and discredited provincial governor, a Chinese poli- tician out of a job. They were dumfounded and chagrined when reports of Li's triumphal progress reached China, and the cry was raised that the great tourist was assuming honors due a sovereign, that he was representing himself as the empire— that La Chine, c'est moi, was his attitude. The United States, not first among Chinophile countries certainly, and whose regularly accredited ministers at Peking have l^ / 116 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE received but the scantiest hospitality and very little courtesy from the individuals directing the Chinese government, spent thirty thousand dollars in United States gold entertaining this passed politician and ex- office-holder, and fairly outdid Europe in its abject attitude before this great hypnotizer. IX THE DECADENCE OF THE MANCHUS [HEN the allied armies approached Peking the Emperor Hienfung and his court hastily fled from the Summer Palace as the French advance-guard reached it, to Jehol, the hunting palace in Mongolia, more than one hundi-ed miles northeast of Peking. It was the custom of the Manchu emperors to repair to Jehol each year for a season of hunting and vigor- ous outdoor life, for relaxation from the awful tram- mels of Peking palace etiquette. With the decadence of that once sturdy race, the outing to Jehol had then been omitted for more than forty years, nor has the court revisited Jehol since that involuntary outing of 1860. Hienfung remained in hiding after the igno- minious peace was concluded by his brother Prince Kung, and died at Jehol within the year, when his body was brought to Peking and laid in state in the pavilion on the Meishan. The Empress, the one legal widow of Hienfung, had an only child, a daughter, but the little princess could not count in the succession. The son of one of Hien- 117 118 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE fung's inferior wives, the child of a concubine of the lowest rank, was declared heir to the throne in the Emperor's last edict. The mother of Hienfung was at Jehol at the time of the Emperor's death, but this Empress Dowager seemed to have had no part in the dramatic events, the fierce intrigues and cabals that went on in the mountain palace, and she returned quietly to Peking with her retinue and all the widows of lesser rank, and was never heard of by the outer circles. The guardianship of the baby Emperor Tungchih had been left to a board of princely regents and schemers at Jehol, and the widow of Hieu- fung and the mother of the little Tungchih fled in alarm to Prince Kung, as they saw the intrigues closing around them. An imperial decree raised the fortunate mother of Tungchih to the relative rank of empress, and another decree made this " Mother of the Sovereign," or Tsze Hsi An, the Western Empress, a co-regent with the " Mother of the State," the East- ern Empress, or legal widow of Hienfung, both acting with Prince Kung. The two empresses entered Pe- king together, little four-year-old Tungchih on the lap of his handsome and courageous mother. The conspir- ator princes were seized as they returned from Jehol and put to death, and the two empresses and Prince Kung ruled together amicably for the dozen years of tlie little Emperor's minority. In compliance with im- perial custom, Tungchih was married with great state and splendor in 1872, and at the age of seventeen this child, reared in the harem, with harem ideas only, save for the dry bones of the classics taught him in the deep palace seclusion, began to rule. One account made THE DECADENCE OF THE MANCHUS 119 him out a weakling and a debauchee who left every- thing in the hands of the eunuchs and degraded and banished Prince Kung when he remonstrated. Another described him as being possessed of some enlightened and progressive ideas, as having resented the routine of senseless ceremonials and rites, as roaming Peking in disguise and righting many of the small wrongs of his people, and it was said that he and his high-spirited young Empress Ahluta resented the constant domina- tion and overriding of their wishes by Prince Kung and the dowager empresses. There were wars and intrigues between the two factions at court, and soon the asser- tive, troublesome young Emperor died of smallpox (no one investigates such deaths), and his independent young Empress Ahluta quickly and mysteriously fol- lowed. " Fate is under government control in China," says Mr. Harold Gorst, significantly. Disregarding aU ordinary rules of succession, the astute empresses chose and named as the Emperor one Kwangsu, the four-year-old son of Prince Chun. This child, being a nephew of Hienfung and of the same generation as the last Emperor Tungchih, could not rightly suc- ceed him nor worship his tablets ; but the empresses disposed of that objection by proclaiming a posthu- mous adoption by the Emperor Hienfung, by which Hienfung's widows logically became the stepmothers of his adopted son, who was also their nephew. The Emperor Hienfung had died ten years before his adopted son Kwangsu was born, but this break in genealogy had no weight with the doughty empresses, who were tasting again the sweets of power. Etiquette and law being complied with, the two 120 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE stepmothers embarked upon another long regency, Li Hung Chang ingratiating himseK with the regents at a time when a palace intrigue to displace them was checkmated by his suddenly marching troops to the vicinity of Peking to support their authority— a lesson not lost upon the shrewd Western Empress. The Eastern Empress, the less assertive and forceful of the regents, died in 1881, and then Tsze Hsi An, only one in a palace full of concubines twenty years before, began her real reign, became sole and undis- puted ruler of more than three hundred millions of people, usurper of the oldest throne and autocrat of the largest empire of one people on earth, tyrant over one fifth of the human race and one tenth of the area of the world— a dizzy pinnacle for one of the sex de- spised by Buddha and Lao-tsze and Confucius, in the land where woman is held in least esteem. Dowager queens and empresses have been court problems and national difficulties in all time, but the end of the century has seen them become the special dilemmas of the greatest of Eastern and Western em- pires. A conference of young emperors, with the masterful one of Germany as chief adviser, might have spared Kwangsu his freedom. There have been empresses regent before in China, but no precedents avail for comparison with this masterful Manchu, Tsze Hsi An, the most remarkable woman sovereign and the most unbridled female despot the world has known. She rose from the harem's ranks, unedu- cated, ignorant of public affairs; but by sheer ability, by her own wits, will, and shrewdness, she attained the supreme power. Hers is the greatest of personal THE DECADENCE OF THE MANCHUS 121 triumphs, her strength of mind and force of char- acter and dominant personality having won every step ; centuries of precedent and all the shackles of Oriental etiquette overborne by her masterful strat- egy and remorseless will. Her enemies have fallen away, sickened and died, and scattered as chaff ; no one has opposed her will and survived ; no plot or intrigue has availed against her ; no conspirator has found her unarmed or off her guard ; and hers has been a charmed, relentless, terrible life. When Kwangsu had attained the age of sixteen, his stepmother and' aunt, the Empress Regent, threw herself with ardor into match-making or wife-choosing for a second time. The august Tsze Hsi An attended to the marrying of her nephew as zealously as she had married off her own son seventeen years before, the poor little bride and bridegroom being equally pawns and puppets in her hands. She summoned all the daughters of noble Manchu families, as before, but many evaded the summons. The examination and weeding out of candidates went on for nearly two years, narrowing down from three hundred original entries to thirty picked beauties, then to ten precious pearls, and last to the one Yehonala, queen rose in the Manchu garden of roses, and daughter of the Empress Regent's own brother ; whereby the invincible dowager showed her skill again, and kept imperial affairs in the family, despite Kwangsu's preference for another. The unsuccessful candidates at the first matrimo- nial examination, the hundreds of rejected aspirants for the throne, are always consoled by rolls of silk and splendid gifts ; and then the two inferior wives of 122 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE the first rank, the twenty-seven of the second order, and the eightj'^-one of the third class are chosen from these same expectant empresses. This Oriental in- stitution is as fixed and is regulated by as strict rule and ceremony as any other thing about the court. Friar Odoric found Kublai Khan sitting in state, with the first real wife or empress at his left, and two in- ferior wives a step lower down. All of these impe- rial favorites have their distinctive dress and marks of rank, their particular coronals of flowers, their symbolic plastrons embroidered on their coats. Fa- ther Ripa describes the Emperor Kanghsi moving about the grounds, studying and reading in the pavil- ions in the Summer Palace and in the Jehol gardens, always surrounded by groups of women. Herr von Brandt, who was German minister for so many years at Peking, has published a German transcript of the memoirs of one of these supernumerary wives or palace ladies, which gives some idea of the life and the gilded miseries of those women, widowed, but re- maining still secluded when the Emperor dies, cut off from their own families, and sedulously excluded from all part in the court life of the sovereign who succeeds. Only a Tsze Hsi An could lift herself from such an estate and escape the penalties of plural im- perial widowhood. The Emperor Kwangsu had no interest in his own wedding, and heeded little the teachings of the two women '' professors of matrimony " duly assigned him in preparation for the long-drawn-out, awesome cere- mony. The same order of formalities, the processions to and fro with gifts and tablets and golden name- THE DECADENCE OF THE MANCHUS 133 cards, and finally the torch-light procession escorting the bride to the palace in her gorgeous red wedding- chair, were followed as at the wedding of Tungchih in 1872. After the little Yehonala disappeared with her paraphernalia into the palace gates, little was heard of her. The Emperor was indifferent to the pliant and pretty niece whom the stepmother em- press aunt had chosen for him in place of the bride he wanted, only to fasten the hampering family chains and claims the more closely around him. It is said that there are three thousand eunuchs on the palace staff to watch and guard and wait on the empresses and the great company of lesser wives and widows in the palace— repulsive creatures in gorgeous garments, often to be met at the foreign shops in Legation Street and in the neighborhood of the east palace gate. Some of them have been slaves or pris- oners of war, or were bought from their parents for such palace service; some retire with old age, and often with fortunes, since they do all the palace pur- chasing. There is a special cemetery for the eunuchs in the northwest part of the city, where the graves are tended, incense burned, and the tablets worshiped by pious ones of the palace fraternity. The eunuchs have been in aud at the bottom of every palace in- trigue and crime for some nineteen centuries. Kanghsi and other sovereigns tried to suppress them, to restrict their numbers and authority, but in vain. One of the first acts of the empresses regent in 1861 was to punish and deport the eunuchs who had taken part in the intrigues at Jeliol, and eunuchs went to the block after the coup d'etat of 1898 ; but the cliief of 124 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE the eunuchs is still the power at court, the one behind the throne, to be placated and feared by all. No individual in the empire had less liberty of ac- tion than the lonely Kwangsu during the few years he went through the form of ruling. Tied down by the ponderous etiquette of his station, he could neither live nor move of his own volition. Every act from birth to death, at any hour of the day or night, in the life of a Chinese emperor is prescribed by custom and regulated by minute rules ; any deviation para- lyzes and alarms the retinue. Yet, except for the bur- den and forms of sovereignty, Kwangsu was a puppet and a minor even after he had married and had as- cended the dragon throne. The Empress Dowager, in the assumed retirement of E-ho Park, still did it all ; still terrorized and directed, and issued edicts which the hypnotized one of the Vermilion Pencil, protest- ing, signed, and sometimes never saw at all. By the specious pleas of filial devotion she lured him to re- peated visits to her beautiful retreat at a time when her influence had waned and the young Emperor was seeking a means of ridding himself of such petticoat tyranny. There were quarrels with Prince Kung, and the faithful old guardian was exiled from court for years, and all the advisers of progress were degraded or disposed of less happily. One great statesman, Liu Min Chan, dying, left a memorial to the throne which he would not have dared to present in life. The old general urged re- forms, railroads, and Western learning, and in a few paragraphs wrote a warning that sliould liave been kept always before the imperial eyes : THE DECADENCE OF THE MANCHUS 125 " We feel her [Russia's] grip on our throat and her i^ fist upon our back, and our contact with her is a source of perpetual uneasiness to our hearts and minds. But our long season of weakness and inaction disables us from making a show of strength, and our only alterna- tive, therefore, is to bear patiently insult and obloquy. When a quarrel occurs we have to yield to her de- mands and make a compromise regardless of money, in order to avert the dangers of war. . . . '' Now, Japan is an extremely small country — like a pill. Her rulers, however, have adopted Western mechanical arts; and relying on her possession of railways, she attempts now and again to be arrogant, like a mantis when it assumes an air of defiance, and to despise China, and gives us no small amount of trouble on the smallest pretext. " The reasons why Russia is overbearing and Japan underrates us are to be found in the fact that China has only one corner of her vast possessions protected, is afraid to face difficulties, and is incapable of rous- ing her energies because possessed of an inordinately pacific disposition." Others felt the same, but dared not speak. The young Emperor's interest in foreign people and ways was stilled and thwarted, and the most impossible ideas of foreigners were conveyed to him. The for- eign envoys, who had to wait through another long minority before having audience with the sovereign to whom they were accredited, had to insist strenu- ously before that small courtesy was granted. Tung- chih's famous audience of 1873, the first occasion 126 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE upon which any foreigner in this century had gazed upon the dragon countenance, was held in the Pavilion of Purple Light in the detached "Western Garden, with the deliberate intention of belittling the foreign rep- resentatives in Chinese eyes— a coarse sort of practical joke. The same insult was repeated to the supine envoys by Kvvangsu in 1891, when the ministers again waited in a cold tent at daylight, and when ushered into the Pavilion of Purple Light found the Emperor seated cross-legged like a Turk on a broad arm-chair, with a low table before him. They themselves were not allowed to lay their addresses on that table before the nodding automaton, but handed them to an officer who did it for them. After this second ceremony, the diplomats, weighing and appreciating the mean- ing of each incident, and being very wroth, vowed one and all never to put themselves in such position in such a hall of humiliation again. The Chinese and the Manchus alike have such a genius for hypno- tizing diplomatic folk unused to Asiatic character that such audiences might have continued to tickle the Chinese sense of the humorous for many years but for the surprises of the Japanese war. That war and its train of disasters dulled the sense of humor in court circles, suppressed the Empress Dowager for a season, and left her under a cloud of humiliation and unpopularity. TSZE HSI AN THE GREAT |0 break the tedium of her life without visible power, to keep herself in sight, and to please her insatiable vanity, the Empress Dowager jumped her age for- ward a few years, and began prepara- tions to celebrate worthily her sixtieth birthday, that age of especial honor in China, and in October, 1894, she expected to rival and surpass the celebration of the sixtieth birthday of the Emperor Kienlung's mother. Buildings were reconstructed in the suburban plea- sure-grounds she had chosen for her own, and a broad, level stone road, equal to the old highways, was built out from the new northwest gate of the Tatar City to her palace gates. Against the advice of Li Hung Chang and of every one who knew the strength of Japan and remembered what foreign armies have done in China, the Empress Dowager and her reac- tionary Manchus urged and provoked the war with Japan. She wanted the spoils and trophies of war for her birthday triumph, to have the Emperor of Japan and a few captives brought her in cages. It was 127 128 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE she who inspired the wording of the Chinese declara- tion of war, a piece of inflated verbiage, long drawn out, inane, coarse, and vulgar. Her birthday preparations were rudely intemipted, and in magniloquent phrases the dowager posed to the empire and discounted a greater jubilee celebra- tion after the war by assigning to military purposes some thousands of taels that had been high-handedly diverted for her contemplated holiday. As reverses came, and yellow riding- jackets and peacock feathers were lifted from viceroys and generals without stop- ping the advance of the Japanese, the Empress Dow- ager became frightened— the worst frightened one of all the imperial clan. Jehol was not a possible asylum, since the Japa- nese army was coming from the east ; and Mukden, the old home and citadel of the Manchus, where it was said they had been storing treasure for genera- tions against the day of their expulsion from China, had already fallen to the Japanese. The Empress Dowager grew frantic, remembering the flight to Jehol and all that had followed thirty-odd years before, and implored the recall of Prince Kung, the intervention of the European envoys, help from any one— anything for peace. The Emperor exposed the dowager's frame of mind in edict after edict, and peace was de- sired, he said, if only as a panacea to the elderly lady's nerves. The Empress Dowager and her con- servative, foreign-hating faction had entirely lost "face," and all stomach and heart for war. There was no overbearing pride left in them then. "When the danger was past, the humiliating peace TSZE HSI AN THE GKEAT 131 concluded, and the three Heaven-sent allies in Eu- rope had wrested back from Japan the Liao-tung peninsula, Chinese insolence and self-sufficiency rose again, and an audience was given the envoys in a small outer hall in the palace grounds. The old con- temptuous attitude was resumed outwardly, while provinces, ports, and concessions were wrung from them by the Christian powers, as Christian knights in the middle ages used to despoil the Jews. The great viceroy on the Yangtsze urged the removal of the capital to either Hankow or Nanking, since the old memorialist's warnings against Russia were more than coming true. But the chagrined Manchus, still smarting from their humiliation, and fearing the Chinese as much as any other outer enemy, fatuously suggested moving the capital to the heart of the mountainous province of Shansi, " where the foreign- ers could not follow," bound themselves faster in Russia's debt, yielded more and more to her de- mands. The war had taught intelligent and progressive Chi- nese that a change must come if their country was to survive, and the awakening sense of the long- sleeping people at last made itself heard in Peking. Although progressive ones in high places fell ill, died, or went into retirement, the young Emperor, once freed from his bigoted, foreign-hating tutor, con- tinued to read foreign books, and summoned to him the " Modern Sage," Kang Yu Wei, a Cantonese scholar of the highest degree, who, as a secretary of the Tsung-li Yamun, had had an opportunity of mak- ing himself known. Then the palace filled up with 132 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE progressive yoang reformers, unsuspected advocates of reform declared themselves, aud the Manchu con- servatives were in panic. Prince Henry of Prussia came with his terrible fleet, took formal possession of the German priuci- pality-on-leasehold of Kiao-chau, and with a refine- ment of satire paid his respects to the despoiled landowner at Peking. The Emperor stood up to re- ceive the visitor as an equal in the audience-hall of the Summer Palace, and returned the visit with due cour- tesy. The traditions of insolent conservatism were broken, and while innovations were in the air, and all sacred precedents and customs were being disre- garded, the Empress Dowager received Prince Henry face to face, instead of listening from behind a screen, as she had usually given audience to Chinese officials. The young Empress Yehonala was not heard of at either of these audiences, but Prince Henry suggested to the Empress Dowager that she should receive the ladies of the diplomatic corps, ignoring the reigning Empress in a way that could not be thought of in Berlin, nor hardly in St. Petersburg. All through that summer of 1898, succeeding Prince Henry's illuminating visit, reform edicts poured from the palace, calling for changes by wholesale, for progress post-haste, and for regeneration overnight ; for foreign studies to be made the tests in the great examinations; for foreign drill to be introduced in the army, foreign system in the departments of the government. A host of incompetents and useless hangers-on were swept out of office in brief edicts, and there was consternation at provincial capitals. It TSZE HSI AN THE GREAT 133 is said that an edict permitting or commanding the cutting of the queue and the adoption of foreign dress was written, but not given out. Schools of Western learning were authorized, and the many newspapers and magazines, that had been the first agents in the work of reform, were subsidized and encouraged, and others projected. The Emperor announced that he would end his life of seclusion, go by railway-train to Tientsin in September and review his army in per- son, and become a modern ruler. The Empress Dowager's feelings may easily be ima- gined ; but that shrewdest woman in Asia, " the only man in China," as she has been called, having pro- tested and interfered in vain, soon let it be known that she was the moving spirit behind the Emperor, that she was inspiring the new departure. She showed an ambition to be in the forefront of progress, to out-reform the reformers, to be more anxious than they were for railroads, steam-engines, and Western civilization. She would go to Tientsin by railway- train, too, and attend the review as European em- presses do. She would adopt European etiquette and dress for her own court, hold drawing-rooms, have foreign ladies presented, and entertain with fetes and garden-parties like the Empress of Japan. Peking was dazed ; the Far East was aghast ; but it was understood that the plans for the new etiquette were being formulated upon the past experience of the Japanese in changing from the old Eastern etiquette to European court customs. Only one Mancliu noble- woman of the court circle has been educated in a foreign country in foreign ways, and has permitted 134 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE her daughters to be taught on the same lines, and orders were given this Manchu family to devise and take charge of the changed ceremonies of the Empress Dowager's court. Before that family could reach Peking, the crash came; reaction reacted; the coup d'etat fell ; the reformers fled for their lives ; decapi- tations were made by wholesale, and the whole group of progressives, who had roused the Emperor to his country's needs and perils, were exterminated. All were seized save Kang Yu Wei, to whom the Em- peror sent a last message to fly for his life. The Emperor, in attempting to escape from the palace himself,— to seek refuge at the near-by British lega- tion, it is said,— was seized by the Empress Dowager's eunuchs and carried off to the island palace in her suburban park. The reformers had been too hasty and had counted without the Empress Dowager, whom they openly an- tagonized. Chang Liu, reformer, in one memorial to the Emperor, had dared to say : '^ The relation of the Empress Dowager to the late Emperor Tungchih was that of his own mother; but her relation to you is that of the widowed concubine of a former emperor." While they had written essays and memorials and inspired edicts, she had quietly mustered an army to the neighborhood; and the unsuspecting reformers confided in this Tatar general of hers, who imme- diately informed the dowager. It suited the Man- chu general and all his kind to keep to the old order. Moreover, all the reformers were Chinese of the middle and southern provinces, their leader a Can- tonese, the most hated of all Chinese by the Manchus TSZE HSI AN THE GREAT 135 since the war of the allies, when Cantonese coolies worked for the foreigners and saw the Manchus defeated and with lost " face." The Empress Dow- ager had shrewdly bided her time, and her wits re- seated her on the throne, with her obstreperous stepson in some indefinite sort of durance, dethroned maybe, or abdicated perhaps, but at any rate out of her way. The little episode of Kwangsu's play at ruling was over, and that two hundred and forty-sixth Son of Heaven was set aside as easily as a puppet in a box, all because he had lacked the courage and force first to set aside and crush the Empress Dowager. Then, "• by request," the Empress Dowager unselfishly took up " the burden of rule in her old age," all that the invalid Emperor might rest ! Not an allusion was made to the young Empress Yehonala, although two of Yehonala's brothers, nephews of the dowager, were among the proscribed and persecuted reformers. It was not known whether she remained in the Peking palace or shared the imperial prison at E-ho Park. As there were no imperial children, the Empress Ye- honala counted for nothing in the tragic drama playing on in those thick- walled palaces, and had no such leverage as the beautiful concubine Tsze Hsi An made use of forty years before. Eunuchs guarded her somewhere, as eunuchs guarded the Emperor at E-ho, and although eunuchs were ruthlessly decapi- tated with the reformers, Kang Yu Wei doubts if the government can ever be reformed until the palace is wholly rid of these pests, these Oriental survivals of primitive society, who are the arch-enemies of all prog- ress and reform, 136 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE When Kang Yu Wei had escaped to Shanghai, to Hongkong, to Japan, and to Europe, he was pursued everywhere by spies and emissaries told off for his capture or murder. Only the closest police surveil- lance protected him, and the price on his head was raised to two hundred thousand taels when he ven- tured as near as Singapore. As the last stroke, the vindictive dowager commanded that the tombs of Kang Yu Wei's ancestors should be desecrated and destroyed. Chinese hatred and malice, the greatest fury of revenge, could not devise direr punishment than such outrage of all that Chinese hold most sacred. The wives of the envoys and the ladies of the dip- lomatic corps had never been recognized during the thirty-eight years that legations had been established at Peking, and after the dowager's ready assent to Prince Henry's suggestion it took months of pressure and insistence, and long discussions as to the form and order, before the audience took place. The Empress Dowager protested against receiving any but the en- voys' wives, because of the great number it would in- clude, and it could not be explained to her that not all the envoys, nor half the secretaries, were married. The Chinese brain could not comprehend such a condition, such unevenness, such iiregularity. It could compre- hend two, and two only. Proper consideration was finally accorded, and the wives of the British, German, Japanese, Russian, American, and French ministers, comprising the little group of legation chatelaines, were properly met by yellow chairs at the first palace gate, and carried to the doors of the reception-hall. KAN'G YU WEI, The " Modem Sage " of Chiim TSZE HSI AN THE GREAT 139 Three reverences in advancing and retiring from the presence were made as in a European court, and Lady Macdonald, doyenne of the corps, read a short address. The soberly attired dowager made gracious remarks, and the guests were entertained at a feast in an adjoining hall. She did not sit with them, nor was anything seen or heard of the little Empress Yehonala in dethronement. Rolls of silk and pearl rings wei'e distributed before the visitors took leave, and none who took part in the affair seemed to show more interest or pleasure than her redoubtable Majesty Tsze Hsi An. When the diplomats came out of that trance they found that the audience of the for- eign ladies, so thrust upon the Empress Dowager, was construed as an official recognition of the usurper, a virtual acknowledgment that the real Empress was dethroned. These few who have looked upon the countenance of the dowager describe her as a tall, erect, fine- looking woman of distinguished and imperious bear- ing, with pronounced Tatar features, the eye of an eagle, and the voice of determined authority and absolute command. She has, of course, the natural, nndef ormed feet of Tatar women, and is credited with great activity, a fondness for archery and riding and for walking, and with a passion for games of chance and theatrical representations. With advancing* years, empresses and Manchu palace women assume more sober colors in their outer robe, which is always the long Manchu gown touching the floor, no matter how thick the soles of their ''stilt" or "flower-pot" shoes may be. There are curious little shoulder-cape 140 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE arrangements around the neck of their ceremonial gowns, which have the Manchus' symbolic "horse- shoe" cuifs falling over the hand, embroidered plas- trons of rank on back and breast, and the large offi- cial beads, whose use as insignia of high station came in fashion with* the Buddhist religion. After the age of twenty-five, empresses and princesses put away their great gold bar-coronets with the pendent showers of pearls and the large bouquets of flowers and butterflies, and wear instead a broad fluted-gold coronal set with stiff bunches of flowers, a magnificent head-dress very like a cocked hat set crosswise. One may buy water-color sketches on silk, copied from old albums of court costumes, that ohow one all the varie- ties and vagaries of court costume worn in the audience- hall and the women's quarters of the palace. One may play ''paper dolls" in this way with the imperial folk and their followers, but otherwise he only gets tanta- lizing glimpses now and then of the court beauties and the palace women in their carts, gilded, painted, jew- eled, finished like works of art and enshrined like idols in the archaic cart, but unknown. All the period since 1861 should be rightly re- corded as the reign of Tsze Hsi An, a more eventful period than all the two hundred and forty-four reigns that had preceded her three usurpations. It began after a conquering army had made terms of peace in her capital, and with the Taiping rebellion in full swing of success. The aid of foreign nations crushed that re- bellion, saved the throne, and propped up the INIanchu dynasty for a little longer. The break-up of China was imminent then, but Gordon averted it, as some TSZE HSI AN THE GREAT 141 other Heaven-sent one will continue to do at every crisis. There succeeded the Nienfei rebellion in Shan- tung, and the Mohammedan rebellion in Yun-nan ; the rebellions in Kan-su and Ili and Hu-nan, the difficulty with the Japanese in Formosa, and unexampled floods and famines. Annam and Tongking were lost to the French J tributary Burma passed under British rule, and China's prestige vanished for- ever in the disastrous war with Japan. The mere peninsula of Liao-tung, claimed by Japan, was saved by the intervention of Russia and her two confed- erate nations in Europe, in order that, later, the peninsula and the whole of Manchuria should be handed over to Russia as reward. Kiao-chau fell to Germany at the first pretext, and France took a Shan state as her price for intervention. Then England leased Wei-hai-wei, and acquired the Kow- loon peninsula opposite Hongkong. All China was marked off into spheres of influence, over which some double-headed eagle or vulture flew. Italy demanded a port; Denmark equipped an expedition. In the last moment an understanding with Japan set the totter- ing throne erect, warned predatory powers off, but roused Russia to fresh demands ; and then came the dramatic stroke when that new world-power, the United States, appeared as the great and good friend of Tsze Hsi An in securing written assurances that the harpy powers would maintain the " open door " in trade, and therefore the integrity of China. Where- upon Tsze Hsi An felt herself again saved from the break-up, and safe in announcing, in an edict signed by Kwangsu, January 24, 1900, the abdication of 142 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE Kwangsu, and the choice of Pu Chun as heir to the throne,— son of Prince Tuan, and grandson of the dowager's own deceased consort, the Emperor Hien- fung,— a boy of nine, whose father and tutors have been rabid anti-foreign conservatives of the most viru- lent, unenlightened kind, leaders of the secret societies opposed to foreigners and Western progress. Then a storm arose, and Tsze Hsi An quickly pro- duced the passive Kwangsu, and permitted him to as- sume the role of emperor during the brief New Year's audience with the foreign envoys. In all topsyturvy- dom surely nothing approaches this petticoat tyranny and bullying of poor Kwangsu— the one man in palaces full of women and eunuchs, yet unable to free or assert liimself ; a manikin majesty, who is put off and on the throne at short notice ; set up and lifted down like a marionette or a piece of furniture, without as much as a "By your leave"; a pitiful "paper tiger" of an emperor. Kang Yu Wei, at Singapore, surrounded by a body- guard of defenders and by colonial police, in a city full of spies and hired assassins, continued to ful- minate against " the False One," " the Usurper," " the Concubine Relict," and the infamous Li Luen-yen, her sham eunuch, to whom he ascribed all power and all evil. Kang Yu Wei even threatened to head a rebel army, which madness would probably precipitate the inevitable Russian garrisoning of Peking, and the certain Russo-Japanese war. XI THE STRANGERS' QUARTER [T the close of the war in 1860, the humil- iated government, accepting the pres- ence of foreign envoys at Peking as a necessary evil, offered the Summer Palace inclosure for a great diplomatic compound, and then a tract of land immediately out- side the west wall for a foreign concession. Sir Harry Parkes led in emphatically repudiating these offers, and the Liang-Kung-f u (palace of the Duke of Liang) was bought for a British legation, Duke Tsin's fu becoming the French legation. A fu always has green-tiled roofs, stone lions before the five-bayed entrance-gate, and four courts and pavilions beyond, and a fu is assigned to each imperial son outside of the succession. Imperial descendants move down one degree in rank with each generation, and when the third descendant has reached the level of the peo- ple again, the fu reverts to the crown. The occu- pants of fus may have eunuchs attached to their establishments, and to the remotest generation they may wear the yellow girdle of imperial descent. There 8 143 144 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE have been yellow-belted teachers, and even domestic servants in foreign employ, starvelings of imperial ancestry who took their few dollars with plebeian gratitude. All the legations are in that quarter of the Tatar City where Mongols, Tibetans, Koreans, and other tribute-bearing visitors were always lodged, and where the Mongols still have a street to themselves. The French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Italian legations, the club, the hotel, the bank, and the two foreign stores are grouped closely together, facing and touching one another half-way down Legation Street ; and, across a once splendid bridge, the Ameri- can and Russian legations face, and the British legation, adjoining, stretches along an infragrant canal, or open sewer, that drains away from lakes in the palace grounds. The British is the largest estab- lishment, the five-acre compound always sheltering from forty to fifty British souls, or " mouths" in the sordid Chinese expression. All these European lega- tions and the Japanese legation have their corps of student-interpreters, university graduates sent out for two years' study of the Chinese written and spoken language, the Pekingese or mandarin court dialect used by the official class throughout the empire. At the completion of their prescribed course under their minister's charge, they are drafted to consulates, are steadily promoted in line of seniority, and retire on pensions after twenty-five years' service. All these official European residences are maintained on a scale of considerable splendor, and the sudden transfers from the noisome streets to the beautiful THE STRANGERS' QUARTER 145 parks and garden compounds, the drawing-rooms and ball-rooms, with their brilliant companies living and amusing themselves exactly as in Europe, are among the greatest contrasts and surprises of Peking. The picked diplomats of all Europe are sent to Peking, lodged sumptuously, paid high salaries, and sustained by the certainty of promotions and rewards after a useful term at Peking— all but the American minis- ter, who is crowded in small rented premises, is paid about a fourth as much as the other envoys, and, com- ing untrained to his career, has the cheerful certainty of being put out of office as soon as he has learned his business and another President is elected, his stay in Peking on a meager salary a sufficient incident in itself, leading to nothing further officially. The United States does not maintain student-interpreters at Peking, and the legation has so far drafted its in- terpreters from the mission boards. Such interpre- ters, having usually given most attention to the local dialects of the people, must then acquire the elaborate and specialized idioms of the official class. Dr. Peter Parker and the great Wells Williams are the only sinologues, or Chinese scholars, who have lent luster to the roll of American diplomats serving in China. The diplomats in exile lead a narrow, busy life among themselves, occupied with their social amuse- ments and feuds, often well satisfied with Peking after their first months of disgust, resentment, and homesickness, and even becoming sensitive to any criticism or disparagement of the place. They have their club, the tennis-courts of which are flooded and roofed over as a skating-rink, their spring and autumn 146 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE races at a track beyond the walls, frequent garden- parties and picnic teas in the open seasons, and a busy round of state dinners and balls all winter. For the nearl}^ forty years that the fine flowers of Eu- ropean diplomacy have been transplanted to Peking, they have been content to wallow along this filthy Legation Street, breathing its dust, sickened with its mud and stenches, the highway before their doors a general sewer and dumping-ground for offensive refuse of every kind. The street is all gutter save where there are fragmentary attempts at a raised mud- bank footwalk beside the house walls, for use when the cartway between is too deep a mud-slough. " We are here on sufferance, under protest, you know," say the meek and lowly diplomats. ''We must not of- fend Chinese prejudices." Moreover, all the legations would not subscribe to an attempted improvement fund, nor all unite in demanding that the Chinese should clean, light, pave, and drain Legation Street— that jealousy of the great powers so ironically termed the "Concert of Europe" as much to blame for the sanitary situation in one corner of Peking as for affairs in Crete and Armenia. The whole stay of the envoys at Peking has been a long story of trial and fruitless effort, of rebuffs and covert insults. It was unfortunate that their resi- dence began without the refugee Emperor being forced to come down from Jehol and receive them with honors and due courtesy, and that the long re- gency of the two secluded empresses continued the evasion of personal audiences, since precedent and custom soon ervstallize in fixed laws to the Chinese. THE STEANGERS' QUAETER 149 In the first years of their disgrace and defeat, the offi- cials were civil and courteous, gracious and kindly in their intercourse with diplomats ; but in a few years they recovered their aplomb, found their lost " face," and became as insolent, arrogant, contemptuous, and overbearing as they had been before the war, and have continued to be, save in other brief moments of humiliation and defeat, ever since. The audience question was just reaching the hope- ful and enlightened stage when the coup d'etat un- settled things. There have been no social relations between the diplomatic corps and the court circle, no meeting or mingling save for the formal presentation of credentials, the dreary New Year's audiences in the palace inclosure, the ladies' audience of 1898, and the formal exchange of visits with the members of the Board of the Tsung-li Yamun, and, in general, none know less of Chinese character and life than those offi- cially acquainted with the Emperor of China. No Chi- nese official dares maintain intimate social relations with the legations, even those who have appreciated and keenly enjoyed the social life and official hospitalities of London, Paris, Tokio, and Washington relapsing into strange conservatism and churlishness, the usual con- temptuous attitude of the Manchu official, when they return to Peking. Even then they are denounced to the throne for " intimacy with foreigners," black- balled and cold-shouldered at their clubs, and perse- cuted into retirement by jealous ones, who consider association with foreigners a sure sign of disloyalty. Even the needy literati, who teach Chinese at the dif- ferent legations, would scorn to recognize their foreign 150 CHINA: THE LONa-LIVED EMPIRE pupils on the street or in the presence of any other Chinese, and the contempt of grandees and petty button-folk as they pass one on the streets of Peking is something to remember in one's hours of pride. During recent years, Peking has been such a hot- bed of intrigue, secret conventions, and concession- seeking, of high-handed and underhanded proceedings, that a diplomat's life has not been a happy one, nor his position a sinecure. With coup d'etats before breakfast, executions overnight, rioting soldiers at the railway-station, mobs stoning legation carts and chairs at will, and telegraphic communication broken whenever the soldiers could reach the wires, the lega- tions called for guards of their own marines in the autumn of 1898. Thirty or forty guards were sent to different European legations, but the Russian lega- tion required seventy men-at-arms and Cossacks to protect it. Last to arrive were nine marines to de- fend the modest premises rented to the great republic of the United States of North America, the want of actual roof-area to shelter more guards obliging the American minister to ask that the other marines should remain at Tientsin, eighty miles away. By renting a Chinese house, eighteen marines were finally quartered near the legation. This would have been farcical and laughable, humiliating to American pride only, if there had not been real danger and need for guards for the little community of foreign diplomats, shut like rats in a trap in a double-walled city of an estimated million three hundred thousand fanatic, foreign-hating Chinese, with a more hostile and lawless army of sixty thousand vicious Chinese THE STRANGERS' QUARTER 151 soldiers without the walls and scattered over the country toward Tientsin. All international affaii'S are dealt with by the Board of the Tsung-li Yamun, established as a temporary bureau of necessity after the war of 1860, and still rank- ing as an inferior board, not one of the six great boards or departments of the government. It has not even the honor of being housed within the Imperial City. Ministers have always a long, slow ride in state across to the shabby gateway of the forlorn old yamun, where now eleven aged, sleepy incompetents muddle with for- eign affairs. As these eleven elders have reached such posts by steady advances, they are always septuagena- rians worn out with the exacting, empty, routine rites and functions of such high office, and physically too exhausted by their midnight rides to and sunrise de- partures from the palace to begin fitly the day's tedium at the dilapidated Tsung-li Yamun. The appoint- ment for an interview with the non-committal, ir- responsible board must be made beforehand, the minister and his secretaries are always kept waiting, and the inner reception-room swarms with gaping attendants during an interview. Once the American minister made a vigorous protest, and refused to con- duct any negotiations while there were underlings in the room; and as it was business that the Chinese government wished conducted, the minions were summarily cast out— cast out to the other side of the many-hinged, latticed doors, where they scuffled au- dibly for first places at cracks and knot-holes. The other envoys would not sustain the American protest, and soon the farce of the empty room was played to 152 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE an end, and the servants came in with their pipes and fans, tea and cake and candies, as usual ; stood about, commented on, and fairly took part in the diplomatic conversations, as before. An unconscionable time is always consumed in offering and arranging the tea and sweets, and to any direct questions these Celestial statesmen always answer with praises of the melon- seeds or ginger-root— "lowering buckets into a bot- tomless well," was Sir Harry Parkes's comparison for an audience at this yamun. " I go to the yamun by appointment at a certain hour," said one diplomat, *' and while I am waiting my usual wait in those dirty, cold rooms, the ash- sifter comes in and wants to know if I think there will be war between this and that European power; because, mind you, some very peculiar telegrams have just arrived for those legations. Every legation tele- gram is read and discussed at the yamun, you know, before it is delivered to us, and the cipher codes give them rare ideas." Every servant in a foreign establishment in Peking is a spy and informer of some degree ; espionage is a regular business; and the table-talk, visiting-list, dinner-list, card-tray, and scrap-basket, with full ac- counts of all comings and goings, sayings and doings, of any envoy or foreigner in Peking, are regularly offered for purchase by recognized purveyors of such news. One often catches a glimpse of concentrated attention on the face of the turbaned servants stand- ing behind dining-room chairs, that convinces one of this feature of capital life. Diplomatic secrets are fairly impossible in such an atmosphere. Every secret THE STRANGERS' QUARTER 163 convention and concession is soon blazoned abroad. Every word the British minister uttered at the Tsung- li Yamun was reported to the Russian legation with almost electric promptness, until the envoy threatened to suspend negotiations and withdraw. Wily con- cessionaries know each night where their rivals are dining and what they have said ; whether any piece of written paper has passed, and what has gone on at each legation in Peking and each consulate at Tien- tsin. Every legation keyhole, crack, and chink has its eye and ear at critical times, and by a multiplica- tion in imagination one arrives at an idea of what the palace may be like. Decorations are freely bestowed upon the diplo- mats who coerce most severely, and the Chinese or- ders are very splendid ornaments to court uniforms. Before the Order of the Dragon was founded in 1863, to reward the foreign soldiers who took part in sup- pressing the Taiping rebellion, an emperor had hon- ored his subjects by bestowing buttons and feathers, yellow riding-jackets, colored reins, and acacia-bark scabbards, and by permitting eminent personages to ride or be carried into some still farther court of the palace before dismounting. It will be remembered that General Gordon returned the yellow riding- jacket as well as the purse and presents sent him ; and Li Hung Chang's yellow jacket, conferred at the same time, was thrice taken away from him and as often restored. The Order of the Double Dragon was instituted in 1881 ; double, because one set of decorations— buttons, feathers, and jackets-— is re- served for Chinese subjects, and the conventional 154 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE ribbons and decorations of European orders are be- stowed upon foreigners, jeweled and plain gold medals with plain and bordered yellow ribbon distin- guishing the five grades of merit. Many decorations of the Double Dragon were bestowed after the Japanese war, thank-offerings and ex-votos promised fervently, when the scare at Peking was greatest. Many of the favored ones discovered that the im- perial yellow satin box contained only clumsy brass insignia, with blue glass instead of sapphires in the dragon's eyes. A few, whom the gift followed to foreign countries, accepted the swindle without re- marks, but one diplomatic decore, happening to return to Peking, sent his brass bauble to headquarters with a polite note requesting an exchange for the real thing. Then it was known what a fine harvest some one had been reaping from imperial honors. The most remarkable man in China, the ablest dip- lomat in Peking, that benevolent despot " the I. G.," as he is known in English speech all over the Far East, or Sir Robert Hart, the inspector-general, the organizer, arbiter, and many-sided director of the Imperial Maritime Customs service, maintains greater state than any envoy in a verandahed villa in the midst of a high-walled park, which also contains the resi- dences of his immediate staff. His bureau or depart- ment is the one financial stay and prop, the one negotiable asset, the one honestly administered and creditable branch or hopeful feature in all the Clii- nese scheme or plan of government. The collection of the revenue from foreign customs dues was first put in the hands of foreigners by an arrangement THE STRANGEES' QUARTER 155 suggested by the foreign merchants to the Chinese authorities at Shanghai during the Taiping rebellion. The temporary expedient worked so well, yielding such an unexpectedly great revenue, and demonstrat- ing how much of this revenue had heretofore been estranged by Chinese officials, that the imperial authorities gladly extended the service, and put it definitely under foreign control. Every treaty and indemnity loan has since extracted fresh pledges that the customs service should remain under foreign management. Sir Robert Hart left the British con- sular service in 1861, and in his hands the '^ Chinese Customs " has become the most admirable civil service in the world. The officers of this honorable and well-paid service are university graduates appointed from each country in numbers proportioned to that country's share in the foreign trade of China. As England holds the largest share of that trade, Eng- lish university men of course predominate in the customs service, and accounts are kept and business transacted in Chinese and in English, the accepted trade language of the East. Each appointee, on coming out to China, spends two years at Peking studying the written and spoken language, and is obliged to continue his studies and pass examinations from time to time, since promotion greatly depends on proficiency in the Chinese language. Intelligent favoritism has always recognized special talents and abilities, and the men of parts and tact and diplo- matic ability have always been availed of and put forward where their qualities could count most for the service. The fall and demonetization of silver 156 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE in the West sadly reduced the liberal salaries of those silver-paid employees, who, instead of retiring pensions, have an increased percentage of pay each year. They are furnished with handsome residences, and the commissioner of each port maintains that state and ceremony which must accompany power in the East. The increase of foreign trade, the open- ing of more treaty ports, the addition of the light- house and postal service of the empire to this bureau, have necessitated a great increase in the number of foreign customs employees in this decade, and greatly complicated the work at headquarters in Peking, but the inspector-general still directs it all and has every detail in grasp. He has never offended Chinese conservatism and prejudices, while steadily inserting the thin edge of some wedge of progress and reform. In every dilemma, tlie imperial govern- ment turns to him, and he has planned coast defenses, conducted peace negotiations, arranged conventions, and reduced indemnity demands past counting. The Chinese appreciate him,— gi-ndgingly, it may be, ad- miring in him what their own officials lack,— and have heaped rewards and honors upon him without stint. Every government in Europe has decorated him, and when the Chinese had decreed all within their power they ennobled his ancestors for three generations back, conferring the button of the first rank upon his fatlier, grandfather, and great-grand- father. Chinese wishes for his long life are sincere, for after him may come the deluge, the break-up, but not while he lives. This clever, delightful Irish gentleman is the pet TfiE STRANGERS' QUARTER 157 and arbiter of Peking society, which he assembles each week to dance on his lawn and roam his garden alleys in summer, and to dance in his great ball-room in winter. Under his direction, a Manila master has trained a Chinese band, whose brass and reed instru- ments send the strains of the " Washington Post " and " Old Town " gaily about that quarter of Peking. The Chinese of&cials enjoy the band concerts and also the brilliant illumination furnished by Sir Robert's gas- plant, one great gas-burner in a conventional city ' street-lamp having flared as a beacon of progress from his compound wall beside the dark Koulan-hu-tung alley for a quarter of a century— a blessing to way- farers, but an object-lesson utterly wasted on the Peking municipality. XII CHRISTIAN MISSIONS |HEN a first papal embassy came to China in the seventh century, the Nestorian Christians had then been zealously proselytizing there for a hundred years. Friar Odoric, who visited Kublai Khan on his way to the realm of Prester John, found the Mongol Empress a convert ; and when the first Jesuit, Father Ricci, came up from Macao, the Ming Emperor Wanli showed him special favor. Father Schaal, wlio reformed the Chinese calendar, was tutor of the Manchu Emperor Kanghsi, and Father Verbeist became his chief astronomer and president of the Board of Works. Kanghsi honored these Jesuits in every way, accorded them rank and consideration at court, and built them dwellings and a church beside the palace. Through the great Colbert, the Frencli Academy of Sciences became in- terested in China, and six Jesuit priests of scientific training were sent to Peking, where tlie Emperor re- ceived them with the greatest favor. Tliey ranked as nobles and literati, and Kanghsi kept them in con- stant attendance. They designed and decorated the 158 CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 159 rococo pavilions and the Italian villas in the Summer Palace grounds, directed the artists in the palace ateliers, produced new colors and decorative motifs for the potters at King-te-chen, and at their own glass-works by the Pei-tang, or northern cathedral, produced many works of art. They surveyed and mapped the empire, and Father Ripa, who engraved the plates of the great map, has left a most interesting account of the daily palace life. The priests cured Kanghsi of ague by doses of cinchona, or " Jesuits' bark," then new in Europe, and their influence was supreme. The Emperor's mother, wife, son, and half the court were baptized as Christians, and Kanghsi only hesitated himself because of his worshipful ances- tors. Those early Jesuits were broad, tolerant, sen- sible, and far-seeing, and if they had been let alone or sustained by an intelligent pope during the enlight- ened reign of Kanghsi there might be a very different China to-day. They urged the Pope to canonize the imperial ancestors, and thus do away with the one ob- stacle to the Emperor's conversion ; but meddling and envious Dominicans and Franciscans came to Peking, and reported to Rome that the Jesuits were tolerating and sanctioning heathen customs and leading lives of worldly pomp and splendor. The Pope sent legates to make inquiries and, naturally, trouble with the Jesuits, and Kanghsi, resenting this interference, and wearied with the bickerings of the new priests, would have nothing more to do with the religion or its teachers after Clement XI had launched his bull sup- porting the Dominican contentions and denouncing ancestor-worship as a heathen practice. 160 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE His son and successor, Yung Cheng, was an ardent Buddhist, and Father Ripa tells how he further abridged the pri^'ileges of the priests, deprived them of all honor and rank at court, and tolerated them only as directors of works and art industries. The Em- peror Kienlung was more gracious ; he sat to Attiret for liis portrait, he entered into correspondence with Voltaire through Father Amiot, and he showed mi- nute interest in the painters who were further embel- lishing his suburban home. Toleration ended with his reign, and under disfavor and neglect and finally open persecution the Jesuits decreased until, at the begin- ning of this century, the one Jesuit priest at Peking sold the church property and left. In 1860 the French insisted upon the restoration of this church to the Jesuits, and slipped into their treaty a clause, not in- cluded in the Chinese copy of this treaty, which secured full rights and immunities for Roman missions and their converts. France, at that time the armed de- fender of the Pope's temporal power in Rome, became the recognized official protector of the faith in the East. Under the favored-nation clause, all sects then claimed the right to reside, own property, and con- duct mission work in the interior. Strict moralists may decide whether this introduction of Christian missions by, diplomatic fraud and deceit, backed up by gunboats, gave the religion any prestige with the government. The Jesuits rebuilt their Pei-tang witli a tall tower overlooking the ])rivate gardens of the palace, spoil- ing the fung-sliui of the neighborhood, and so enraging the regents that in 1885 the Chinese insisted on only CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 161 one clause in the French treaty of peace — that the Jesuits should again sell the property to the crown and build on land given them elsewhere. The new Pei- tang is a splendid building, having a school, hospital, orphanage, printing-office, library, and museum con- nected with it, all presided over by Bishop Favier, an astute and scholarly Jesuit, an eminent art connois- seur, and author of the monumental illustrated work " Peking," last issued from the Pei-tang press. With- out diplomatic aid, he negotiated a convention in 1899 which secures to bishops and priests of the Church of Rome equal official rank with viceroys and provincial magistrates; which enables them to ex- change visits, demand interviews, and adjust local difficulties without appealing to French consuls or the French minister. It discounted the possible aban- donment of the mission protectorate by anti-clerical France ; prevented any assumption of a protectorate of Christian missions by Germany ; cheered the Pope as an indirect recognition of his temporal power; and by exalting all Catholic missionaries in provin- cial Chinese eyes has greatly incensed all Protestant missionaries, and, some believe, has imperiled them. The Catholic Fathers, who direct the Pei-tang, have in their charge the Dung-tang, or eastern church, the Hsi-tang, or western church, and the old Nan- tang, the southern or Portuguese cathedral, and also the chapel in the French legation compound. From this long establishment of French Jesuits at Pe- king there has grown a colony of French-speaking Christian Chinese, who by hereditary custom almost monopolize certain occupations. The painters in 9 162 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE water-color, engravers on copper, watch- and instru- raent-niakers, and snuff-dealers are nearly always hereditary Christians, while the greater number of domestic servants seeking foreigners' employ speak French. The Sisters of St. Vincent and St. Paul have an orphanage beside the old Portuguese cemetery outside the west gate, where Fathers Ricci, Schaal, and Ver- beist, and those earlier scholars and propagandists who so nearly won imperial adherence to Christianity and its establishment as the state religion, lie in con- secrated soil first given by the Emperor Wanli, who erected an imperial tablet to Father Ricci. The Em- peror Kanghsi testified in Latin and in Chinese on other turtle-borne stone tablets to the virtues of Fathers Verbeist and Schaal. Dr. Edkins has pre- served, in his account of Peking, the description of the funeral of Father Verbeist, in which Chinese and Christian rites were combined ; and near his grave is a great stone crucifix, with stone altar-tables below it, adorned with the conventional vases, candlesticks, and incense-burner of Buddhist altars, provided at all great tombs for the annual homage or worship — significant emblems of the tolerance of those early evangelists and the compromises in the faith's mere ritual and externals which they conceded for conver- sion's sake. The Mohammedans were most numerous in Kublai Khan's time, and their converts many. Kienlung built the marble mosque in the Tatar City to please his Turkestan wife, widow of a Turkish prince of Kashgar ; and every Friday, noAV, the descendants of CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 163 her Turkestan followers and other of the faithful gather there, but they do not welcome the visitors who ferret them out as one of the sights of Peking.^ The twenty thousand Mohammedans in Peking are accused of great laxity in their religion, with sadly mixing Islamism with Confucianism, Taoism, and fuug-shui. Mohammedan merchants display the cres- cent on their signs, but the pilgrimage to Mecca and the green turban do not seem objects of their ambition. A Russian mission was established in Peking in 1727 to care for the souls of the orthodox prisoners from beyond the Amur River. The archimandrite gave up his compound for legation use in 1861, and moved to the Pei-kwan, in the far northeast corner of the Tatar City. Active proselytism has never been a part of the Russian priests' work at Peking, but of recent years they have enlarged their college build- ings, where more and more students are enrolled, and the magnetic and astronomic observatory and other departments of science directed by them have a de- servedly high standing. Because they have no active missions in China, Russian ministers have always had a freer and a higher hand in dealing with the Tsung-li Yamun than those envoys who themselves grow so weary of their repeated visits on account of mission- ary outrages and indemnities. Protestant missionaries, availing themselves of the surreptitious clause in the French treaty of 18C0, were soon established at Peking and throughout the em- pire. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions has a large compound in the Tatar 164 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE City, with schools, chapels, and free dispensaries in other quarters ; and the Methodist Mission includes a university for the higher education of Chinese youth in Western sciences, which itself is an object-lesson of Western progi-ess, and has set more novelties before Chinese eyes and given native Peking more to talk and wonder about than all the legations. The London Mission has a large hospital with outside dispensaries, and nothing has so opened the way and advanced the work of these different missions as this free medical aid. The medical missionary is the most influential worker in the cause of enlightenment, and his ministrations do most to allay prejudices, to prove the unselfishness and sincerity of the mission- aries' lives, and at least to prepare the rising genera- tion to receive other truths. I have often heard discouraged evangelical workers envy the ground gained, the advances made, and the tangible results that reward the medical missionaries' work, and lament that for themselves there seems to be so little hope of reward with this generation. "It is only with the children of our first converts, with the second and the third generation of Christians, that we get great encouragement, that we see the result of our labors, something accomplished, something fixed fast in their hearts and minds past all chances of backsliding," say preachers, teachers, and Bible-readers. There is a chapel of the Church of England in the British legation compound ; and, besides the mission schools and university, the Tung-wen College, main- tained by the Chinese government for the instruction of young literati in Western languages, law, history. CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 165 and sciences, necessary qualifications for the diplo- matic service, has had a certain influence for Chris- tianity through its president and the instructors, taken from the staff of different missions. Rev. Gilbert Reid, in his independent mission to the higher classes, attempting to reach them socially, has embarked on a most interesting experiment ; and but for the coup d'etat of 1898, it was hoped that through his efforts Christian teachers might again enjoy the power and regard at court that they had at the end of the seven- teenth century. From the sixth to the twentieth century Christian missionaries have been actively at work in China with varying fortunes, and any summing up of visible results gives one many problems to consider. XIII TATAR FUS AND FAIRS jNE may prowl the high- walled lanes of the Tatar City for weeks and eontin- fJI ually discover strangely neglected fus and temples, but there is the greatest difficulty to learn their history after one has found a clue. Across the canal from the British legation is the interesting old wreck of a once magnificent palace, the Shu-wang-fu, its last oc- cupant that prince who conspired against the regency of the empresses in 1861. He was arrested on his re- turn from Jehol and condemned to death by slicing ; but the compassionate dowagers commuted this to decapitation on the common execution-ground. His family was swept away, and the fu returned to the crown. The fu was available for and should have become the American legation, but was not taken, and a few years' neglect transformed the once splen- did palace into a wrecked and ruinous estate, its di- lapidated buildings sheltering families of the very common people, and its outer court an open thor- oughfare. Near it is anotlier great inclosure, about 166 TATAE FUS AND FAIRS 167 which I long cross-questioned in vain those who lived nearest its yellow-tiled walls. After a few years' residence in Peking the foreigner grows apathetic over Chinese sights, but a missionary, living farther away from it, was able to tell me that it was the " ghost's temple." The beautiful gabled roof, with imperial yellow tiles glimmering among lofty tree- branches, shut fast in an inclosure whose gates seemed forever sealed, "was reared to the spirit of a court favorite unjustly beheaded by a hot-tempered emperor, who learned the truth after it was too late. The headless Manchu haunted the palace, and threatened to parade his gory trunk there for all time unless the Emperor should erect a temple to his memory and worship there every New Year before kneeling to the imperial tablets. To this latest day, the erring Emperor's successors have paid state visits to this memorial hall, prayed and burned incense be- fore the tablet, and replaced the old rolls of silk with new offerings. When my best benefactress in Peking said that she would take me to see an old Tatar noblewoman with an irrepressible curiosity concerning foreign people, ways, and things, I was delighted when we drove across the neglected common of the outer court of a dilapidated old fu I had been inquiring about. The fu had been last allotted to Kienlung's favorite brother. The family, descending in rank and riches, were out of favor at court, but had held on to their old home and maintained their proud exclusiveness and state within the labyrinth of courts. We left our carts at one side of the five-bayed entrance pavilion. 168 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE walked around it to an inner court, up steep stone stairs to a third gate, across another court, and up to a fourth red-walled pavilion with columned front, where imperial tablets hung. Inside the lofty hall were more imperial tablets and shrouded lanterns on each side of the great carved throne-chair or divan where Kienlung often sat and smoked, and sipped his tea, and possibly indited some one of his thirty-three thousand poems, or even read over his letter to Vol- taire before he sent it. Certainly he must often have quoted there his own immortal ''Praise of Tea,"— which in exquisite characters decorates half the old cups and plates and fans of his period that one finds in curio-shops,— one of the best known of later poems : " Graceful are the leaves of mei-Jioa, sweetly scented and clear are the leaves of fo-cheou,^^ says Kienlung. " But place upon a gentle fire the tripod whose color and form tell of a far antiquity, and fill it with water of molten snow. Let it seethe till it would be hot enough to whiten fish or to redden a crab. Then pour it into a cup made from the earth of yue, upon the tender leaves of a selected tea-tree. Let it rest till the mists which freely rise have formed themselves into thicker clouds, and until these have gradually ceased to weigh upon the surface, and at last float away in vapor, then sip deliberately the delicious liquor. It will drive away all the five causes of disquietude which come to trouble us. You may taste, and you may feel; but never can you express in words or song that sweet tranquillity we draw from the essence thus prepared." The wife of one of the younger sons and a flock of AT TllK OLD KU TATAR FUS AND FAIRS 171 little children, all rouged, beflowered, and gorgeously dressed, welcomed us in this imperial pavilion, and led us on to the fifth great flagged court, where lattice- windowed dwelling-rooms lined each side, and the noble ancestral hall or main pavilion on a terrace filled the end. This great building, with green-tiled roof, green tiles facing the walls to a height of six feet, and massive red-lacquered columns supporting the roof, was all but a ruin, but it sunned itself against the brilliant October sky with a splendid and commanding dignity. In that gray old stone court there was gathered such a dazzling group of women as made me doubt my eyes and forget everything in looking. The gracious old Tai-tai (madame), in long plum-and- purple robes, had a strong, kindly face and the deep, rich voice of undoubted command. Her eye and smile led to friendship, and her cordial greetings had all of Celestial imagery and intensity. Her dark gown and sober-tinted hair-bouquets were in contrast to those of her daughters-in-law and grandchildren, who rivaled the rainbow, all the gay colors intensified by the dazzling sunshine. Each pale-yellow, aristocratic face was rouged and tinted to a work of art; each lower lip had a prim, piquant stain of deep carmine. Each beautiful figure bent in a stately Manchu cour- tesy, sinking low with clasped hands resting on the left knee, and each then gave us a few cold, thin fingers for a Western barbarian hand-shake. Each of these blue- blooded Tatars, Manchns of the purest lineage, was more brilliantly picturesque than the other ; each lifted up on stilt or flower-pot shoes, whose three-inch soles 172 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE were hidden by their long gowns. Their robes were of brocade, embroidered satin, or plain silk quilted in finest lines and herring-bone rays, and bordered around with those conventional and arbitrary ribbon bands in which lies all the style and changing fashion of a Chinese woman's dress. Short, sleeveless Manchu jackets gave contrasting touches to some of the gowns, and each head was a monumental affair of blue-black hair with zigzag partings, and with a flower-garden bal- anced beside either end of the broad gold hair-pin. One Manchu matron caught the sunshine with a glistening, golden-green, finely quilted gown and a gold-thread bolero jacket ; another's dull, rich mulberry-red satin was wrought over with sprigs and circles of flowers ; and a third wore a black satin robe with clouds of the most brilliant butterflies winging their way across it. It was a clothes-show beyond compare, and the daz- zling group in that sun-flooded old court made one wonder what the imperial palace groups could be, since this was but one yellow- girdled, green-tiled family of dilapidated fortunes. After we had explored the deserted hall, admired the pots of ragged chrysanthemums and the white- aiid-brown Pekingese pugs, and photographed away all the film in my camera, we were shown the living- rooms. The cabinet or library of the absent master was severely simple in its furnishings — scroll-pictures and texts on the wall, a few pieces of old porcelain on a console, and books stacked on the shelves above the long divan, or kang, whicli extended across the win- dowed end of the room. This stone-and-mud plat- form of the kang, three feet in height, is heated in TATAR FUS AND FAIRS 173 winter by brush fires built from an opening on the outside, the smoke and heated air following intricate flues which thoroughly warm the kang. It is a Mon- gol or Central Asian contrivance used everywhere in -^ North China and Korea, and with thick felts and soft rugs makes a luxurious sleeping- and lounging-place in winter, while with cool mattings it is equally luxu- rious in another way in the scorching summers. We were shown rooms with great carved wardrobes, where the heaps of fur and silk and summer garments are stored in turn ; and on that day the ladies brought out their winter hats for the season's wear, Tatar turbans with saucer brims, and long ribbon ends that fall below the waist at the back. The gi-eat gold hair-pin cannot be worn with this winter hat, and with a dexterous twist of the red cords a maid lifted oif the whole great structure on the Tai-tai's head, fastened the hat in its place, and tucked two small bouquets just above the ears. All classes in China ^'^ dress by imperial command, and when the Peking Gazette announces that the Emperor has put on his winter hat on a day prescribed by centuries' un- varying astronomical custom, all China does likewise and turns over the chair cushions, exposing their ''winter side." When we were seated, with strict regard for prece- dence, at a square table, the Tai-tai served us with her own silver and ivory chop-sticks to the half- dozen kinds of cakes and fruits grouped on com- potiers around a centerpiece of gorgeously colored persimmons. A crowd of maid-servants brought tea, and in turn served us with a delicate cream or sweet 174 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE pur^e of almonds, some steamed dumplings with minced chicken inclosed, thin sesame wafers, honeyed fruits, candied nuts, white pears, and big round grapes worthy of Fontainebleau's vines. The cups of per- fumed tea were filled and refilled, hot cloths were passed in lieu of finger-bowls, and then, with shadows slanting far across the great court, we began our leave- taking, and repeated it to a diminishing company at each gateway, until only the little children were left near the outer court gate to drop us the last stately Manchu courtesies. " Three eunuchs came and talked to me," said my awe-struck servant, brought almost to humility by this nearness to greatness and my entree to good society. " They must still be high people here at the fu, even if the master has lost his job at the palace." I spent yet another afternoon tea-drinking with the kindly old Tai-tai and her daughters-in-law, pho- tographing certain interested friends asked in for the afternoon to look at us, the Tai-tai's latest curios. These were haughty and hot-tempered Tatar ladies, who made little secret of their opinion of us and our civilization, and led us to appreciate more how rare a character was our kindly, gracious hostess. They had opinions, too, these visiting Manchu ladies, and we had an inkling of the fierce antipathies at heart when one said of a Chinese diplomatic family : " Oh, yes ; but he is a Chinese from the south provinces. You could n't expect his wife have any nice manners." When a return visit was arranged, the Tai-tai's carts drew up at the gate at the stroke of the hour, the mules were unharnessed and led away, and with the TATAE FUS AND FAIRS 175 cart-shafts dropped, the ladies stepped out with dig- nity and safety. Notliing could exceed their amia- bility, their gracious inquiries and compliments, their interest in all the arrangements of a foreign house? from which, by the way, all men-servants were ban- ished for the time. Their own maid-servants accom- panied them, one bearing a silver spittoon. Amused as they were with each implement and oddity at table, they carried themselves with the perfect ease of the well bred and the people of assured position in any country. They were so many exquisitely mannered children, with a naive, unconcealed interest in every- thing, yet the perfect dignity of Manchu grand dames never forsook them. The sugar made from the ma- ple-tree, the chocolate cake built in many-striped stories, and the rich black fruit-cake were so many new sensations, verifications of tales told them. Through one of her progressive sons, who read for- eign books, had a camera and dangerously advanced ideas, the old Tai-tai had heard of many queer things in the Western world. Although old customs and superstitions were strong, and she would take Chinese potions, philters, and charm-powders, she yet had a great respect for foreign doctors, for the earnest, un- selfish women who conduct mission hospitals and dis- pensaries in Peking. Her doctor told me of the' difficulties of attending these women of the aristo- cratic class, who never walk or take exercise, but sit in cold, sunless rooms, weighted down with heavy clothing, consuming quantities of sweets, and smok- ing opium as steadily as their means allow. "What in the world can such uneducated, secluded 176 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE women find to talk about all the year round ? " I asked the little doctor. " Much," she answered. '^ The last time I went there they were discussing the X-rays." " What ! " I exclaimed, " have the Rontgen rays pen- etrated even the five courts and walls of the old f u f " " Oh, certainly. Her son had been telling the Tai- tai of the cathode miracles, and she asked me if it was true that foreigners had another light to see by at night, that was so much stronger than Sir Robert Hart's gas-jets or the ' lightning light ' at the palace that we could look through the human body and see all the bones ; and— here was the point— did I believe that Li Hung Chang had gone to a foreign doctor, who had turned this light on him and actually seen that bullet that Li Hung Chang said a Japanese had fired into himf" One day the doctor brought to the fu the chate- laine of a legation who had lived in Peking for thir- teen years without ever visiting or receiving a visit from a Manchu or a Chinese lady. Her entree to this one social circle of the capital that should have openly welcomed her arrival so long before was informal and unofficial, but the Tai-tai gave a cordial greeting, and all went pleasantly. '' How many children have you, and grandchildren ? " both asked each other, but when the foreign tai-tai explained that one grand- son was her son's child and the other her daughter's cliild, the Manchu matron said : " No, no ; that can- not be. That is not your grandchild. Your son's child is your grandchild, yes ; your daughter's child, no. That child beh)iigs to her husband's parents and TKAINEU BIKDS. TATAE FUS AND FAIRS 179 the other family. It is their grandchild, uot yours. Of course Li Hung Chang and Chang Yen Hoon told you the same thing." The point was argued for a while, and then the hostess, yielding graciously to her obligations, said : '* Oh, yes ; if you wish, you can, of course, claim it as a grandchild. An outside grandchild, we should call it. But if you call them all your grandchildren, how about inheriting property? Do you want any of it to go to some strange family, and your sons get very little f How would you like that ? " assuming that equal consideration for sons and daughters could only be an accidental instance of great affection, and not American law and custom. "We are friends forever," said the dear old Tai- tai when I went to bid her good-by. " I spend my heart upon you. My heart speaks your language, but not my poor tongue. Come back to me some- time again. Do not forget the old Tai-tai and the poor, miserable fu you have honored to enter." I had, indeed, looked forward to revisiting the same old, green-tiled fu, and seeing there again groups of gorgeously dressed, gracious Manchu women ; but word came at the time of the coup d'etat that the fu had been claimed as site for a college of foreign studies by the Emperor's reform favorites, and that Kienlung's great-great-grandnephew had sought less splendid quarters out by the Anting Gate. The old fu was laid low, and nothing has risen in its place. When one is a little hardened to it, he may dare to enter one of the local temple fairs, which are always 180 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE occurring somewhere about the city, since each tem- ple has its anniversary fete-days, and at least once a month bursts forth with more red papers, lanterns, and incense-sticks, peddlers and crowds. The best known of these popular fairs is that at the Lung-fu- ssu Temple, near the Confucian Temple. On the ninth and tenth, nineteenth and twentieth, twenty- ninth and thirtieth days of each month, the street leading to the temple was taken possession of by holi- day crowds, peddlers, fakers, and touts, and there were kaleidoscopic pictures of all Pekingese life. Bird-sellers offered one every kind of feathered pet that could swing in a cage or perch on a twig, and one of the attractive features of Peking streets is in the numbers of men and boys whom one sees carrying pet birds about. It is a Chinese custom, at which many Manchus affect to sneer, but it argues for gentle, poetic traits of character that one would otherwise surely deny these hard-featured, unattractive people. Old poetry and old pictures show men of the lower provinces carrying their nightingales off for an airing to some hill temple or classic vale ; but in Peking grimy and tattered old men, little boys, and even gay official messengers, go about the streets with tiny birds on twigs. The grace and fearlessness, the pretty flights to shoulder and hand of these uncaged pets are most engaging, and tell of kindly treatment. "Why don't you get a little bird and carry it around with you ?" I asked the huge, blunt, bluff Liu, my manly boy, with the port and mien of pros- perous rascality, the meditative face and somnolent features of the Buddha in art. TATAR FUS AND FAIRS 183 "Because I am not loafer. I am not Manchu," came the answer, in measured bass tones of scorn. On the street approaching Lung-fu-ssu one en- counters the first of the fair, and there may buy pet crickets, black little skeletons of things, which are trained, and fight as gamely as Manila cocks. One maj^ buy, too, airy bamboo boxes to keep them in in summer, and thicker boxes which cricket-fanciers carry in the folds of their garments to keep the tiny creatures warm in winter. For some unaccountable reason, the feather-duster is an important and conspicuous article of trade in Peking. One sees it hawked at every fair and in every street, a presence nearly as surprising as if one met soap in monumental heaps everywhere in this city of dreadful dirt. There is dire need of it, since all the year round, save for the few weeks of mud, one moves in and breathes a cloud of dust, pulverized particles of the richly composite street soil. Occasionally there are legitimate dust-storms, when certain winds lift the surface dirt from the Desert of Gobi, fill the heavens with a dense fog-cloud, and dim the sun ; and in Peking there is sound of the gnashing of teeth. These storms from the desert partly account for the begrimed, dilapi- dated look of all outdoor Peking, for not even the Paris municipal council could keep that exquisite city clean if the Desert of Gobi, or Shamo, lay to wind- ward. One has to step quickly in this street before Lung- fu-ssu, compreliending all in swift glances, buying as well as reading as he runs ; for if one loiters, the crowd closes in around him, packed ten and twenty 10 184 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE rows deep, in a gaping, jabbering circle. Several times I went into and, by main force only, got out of a florist's garden, where dwarf trees, ragged chrysan- themums grafted on artemisia stalks, and some cocks- combs were shown. Nothing in Peking was more disappointing and disillusioning than the vain autumnal search I made for chrysanthemums worthy to rank with those of Japan or those of the foreign settlement of Shanghai. Things old and new, for use and ornament, were spread over the flagged courts and the terrace walks and on booths. Fortune- tellers, money-changers, letter- writers, professional menders, cobblers, barbers, and dentists were there. Quack doctors spread out their magic pills and bottles of eye-water, while the legitimate old school of Chinese medicine was represented by apothecaries, who made tempt- ing spread o^tlie time-honored roots and herbs, musk, dried rats, lizards, frogs, and toads, clots of so-called dragon's blood, and lumps of nameless things warranted to cure, although powdered tliickly wath the microbes, germs, bacteria, and what not, that constitute Peking dust. The liot-chestnut man spiced the air with his nuts roasted in shallow pans full of black sand set HONKYEI) CRAB-APPLES. TATAE FUS AND FAIKS 185 over a mud-oven fireplace— the same institution of all Central Asia, and which the tourist meets again in the bazaars of Peshawar. The hot-peanut man was there too ; and in Peking the American learns that salted almonds and peanuts are Chinese inventions almost as old as gunpowder. The cold-slaw man presided over great bowls of tasseled strips of cabbage, that he sheared off with fascinating skill with a huge cleaver. There were mounds of the famous white Peking pears, of the fine large grapes, that they know how to keep for • a year by an ancient cold-storage system of pottery jars buried in the ground, and heaps of gorgeous red- orange persimmons, that made color-studies of de- light. The persimmon grown most commonly for the Peking market is a huge sphere, very much flattened at the poles, with the most curious fold or seam at the equator line, as if it had been cut and had grown to- gether again. The rich, dried fruit of the jujube-tree, with its narrow, pointed seed like a date, and com- monly known as the Tientsin date, was offered us in boxes or beaten into smooth, rich jujube paste. Then there was the crab-apple man, with a great broom on his shoulder, that proved to have every straw strung with crab-apples preserved in honey— a favorite sweet with the Mongolians beyond the Great Wall, who knew how to preserve their tart fruits in honey long before the peasants around Bar-le-Duc began to immerse their currants in honey. There was the candyman, with slabs of peanut candy and sesame ^brittle, the latter the same sesame-seeds, cooked in a rich sorghum syrup and cooled in thin cakes, that furnish tliat wafer of delight known as giij in tlie 186 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE Pan jab, and that one buys in the cold weather all over northern India. The Mongols and the Moguls took with them in their conquests the love of sweets which the Turks, the Persians, and all the people of Central Asia still manifest, and by their sweets one may trace the path of the conquering khans. Besides sesame brittle, one may buy delicate sesame wafers, the sesame flour beaten in water with either salt or sugar, and baked in a thin wafer that might well be introduced at fastidious tables on the other side of the globe. One sees macaroni, made of millet or buckwheat flour, in process of manufacture everywhere about Peking streets, hanks and skeins of the doughy filaments swinging by doorways in the sun and wind, and acquiring a fine bloom of the richly composite dust of the streets. To the Lung-fu-ssu fairs I went again and again, bewitched by the life and movement that went on in the courts of the dingy -red, roofless temple of deserted altars. I went to watch the Manchu women in their holiday dress, to look for the fabled sleeve dogs, or buy chrysanthemums and pigeon whistles, the latter the most unique and ingenious playthings in Peking. The pigeon whistle is made of thinnest bamboo and of little gourds scraped to paper thinness, and when fastened beneath the tail-feathers of a pigeon the tiny organ-pipes emit a weird, elfin, ^Eolian melody as the bird flies. Every morning and afternoon the vault of the Peking sky is swept with the sweet, sad notes of scores of pigeon whistles, as the carrier-birds wing their way across the walls with bankers messages and quotations of silver sales— a stock report and ticker TATAE FUS AND FAIKS 187 service older than the telegraph and automatic tape, ^' a system of market reports as old as time. These swirls and sweeps of melody were strangely sad and thrilling, and the whistling flight of these musical pigeons, the " mid-sk}^ houris " of the hoary East, was something that I waited and listened for each day. There are some twenty kinds of pigeon whistles, ranging from the simple, single bamboo tube of one stop to those with elaborate sets of pipes which a musical-instrument maker might admire. Each bam- boo pipe or gourd whistle is as light as thistle-down, and if one even holds it in his hand and sweeps the air, it responds with mellow wind-notes of weird charm. The pigeon whistle is the most delicate and exquisitely constructed toy imaginable, a thing one might expect to find in Tokio or Paris, but never in half-barbaric Peking, the city of dreadful dirt, of the clumsy cart and the rocking camel, the dilapidated capital of Kublai Khan, the racked and ruined relic of the splendid city of the Ming emperors. I'lGEOK WHISTLES. XIV CHINESE PEKING jHE contrasts that present themselves when one passes through the gates from the Tatar to the Chinese City are not the least in the sum of dazzling impres- sions Peking makes npon one, Lord Curzon's " phantasmagoria of excruciating incident." Once through the Chien-men's vast, barrel vaults, across the dirt and beggar-incrusted marble bridge, a great, broad avenue passes under elaborate pailows, and continues for two miles southward to the Temple of Heaven — a noble, flagged w^ay fit for imperial pomps and processions. But there is not another broad or paved thoroughfare in all the Cliinese City. Narrow lanes, with banks of refuse against the house Avails, where cart-wheels have cut deep mud-troughs, intersect the crowded city, and there are gates to each city ward, as in Chinese cities to southward. Few women are seen, and they hobble on painful stumps of feet, and glue their hair into absurd and inartistic imitations of the magpie's or '' joy-l)ird\s" tail, wretched contrasts to the splendid, free-stepping 188 CHINESE PEKING 189 Manchu women with their picturesque bar pins and big bouquets. The custom of foot-binding is as uni- versal here at the gates of the capital as if the Em- press, the palace, and the Tatar City full of Manchu women did not take comfort and pride in possessing natural, useful feet ; as if imperial edicts had not for- bidden foot-binding centuries ago. It was easy for the Manchu conquerors to impose the queue as a mark of subjugation upon all the millions of Chinese men, and make that appendage almost a matter of religion with them. To change the Chinese woman's mind as to the fashion of her foot was another task. That covered, curving, semicircular bazaar that follows the line of the Chien-men's great outer wall is a most Oriental feature, a real Central and Western Asian bazaar. One may buy there caps and cap-but- tons, mandarins' belt-buckles of gold, brass, enamel, and jade, their beads and belts and plastrons of rank ; also the womanish pipe-, fan-, tobacco-, watch-, spec- tacle-, and money-pouches of embroidered satin that the petticoated grandees hang in dazzling bunches from their girdles in lieu of practical, masculine pock- ets. One may also buy pipes and snuff-bottles, hair- pins and ornaments, the toys of the writing-desk, jade bracelets and ear-rings and charms ; and even in this day of careful gleaning by professional buyers, the amateur sometimes finds a treasure. Misery over- flows from the marble bridge, and beggars, lepers, and loathsome wretches cling to the sunny curve of the outer wall like hideous flies. One sees enough in that one spot to prove that China is the greatest field for active philanthropy tlic world holds, and the sum of 190 CHINA: THE LONG-LI\^D EMPIRE suffering, the accumulation of misery there presented, makes one's heart sick with the hopelessness of it all, the utter impossibility of relief. Wrecks of men, emaciated or bloated, in the last stages of starvation's diseases, crawl to one's very cart-wheels, or lie help- less with glazed eyes. In the keen, sparkling October days they huddle together in the sun to keep warm, many of them with only a bit of straw matting for bodily covering, and after each piercing night dead beggars are carted away as a matter of course. Pe- king claims eighty thousand beggars among its popu- lation, and it is said that this gild has its officers and its regulations quite as much as the recognized gild of beggars in Canton. The so-called King of the Beggars has his headquarters on the marble bridge, and there are always several truculent ruffians there who have more the air of power than of pleading. One must enjoy the story as the delightful old father tells it, and not seek to find or know any more about the famous feather-bed lodging-house of the Peking beggars tliat Abbe Hue describes. As the beggars stole the coverings at their lodging-house, some keen one devised a single great felt coverlet the size of the floor, with holes for the sleepers' heads. It Avas raised and lowered by tackle, a tom-tom sounding an alarm each morning to warn the lodgers to get their heads in under the coverlet. Beneath this great communal bedspread the area was covered thickly with loose feathers. Only a missionary could expect credence for such a tale on its first telling, and I found no one who knew more than the charming old abbe relates. The east side of the great Meridian Street, running CHINESE PEKING 191 through the Chinese City, is lined for the first half- mile beyond the bridge with the stalls of the fish, game, meat, and vegetable market of Peking ; and the next street running parallel with it holds the nut and dried-fruit market, where the hot-chestnut man and the hot-peanut man are triumphant. Beans of infi- nite variety offer intellectual diet to people to whom rice is a luxury, and, with the unvaried pork and cab- bage, constitute their staple food. Still farther east of Chien-men's broad street are Bamboo Chair Street and other sewery side lanes, where* dealers in furs, old embroideries, and second- hand clothing abide. The old-clothes market, held on an open common every morning from daylight until nine o'clock, is one of the sights of Peking that bears many repetitions. There is a permanent old-clothes bazaar surrounding the open market space, and the rows of alcove shops are so many silk- and satin-lined grottoes, all speciously dazzling with color and tin- sel. In the early morning the whole common is cov- ered with piles of silk and furred and gorgeous garments, that have often been stolen before they were pawned to these shrewd " uncles." The coup d'ceil is brilliant and striking, the sheen and shimmer of rich fabrics in tlie Peking sunshine is bewitching; but, prowl as he may, the tourist finds no decorative treasures at the fair, since the professional buyers have gleaned before him, ready to hawk any desirable objects around the legations, and flaunt them at the grand gathering of all such purveyors in the hotel garden court at noon. Tlie show of furs is a rich one, but, tempting as the greatcoats and grand- 192 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE motherly cloaks of tlie mandarins may seem, with their linings of sable and mink, ermine and squirrel, white fox and Tibetan goat, second-hand Chinese fur admits of too many possibilities for foreigners to be tempted to buy. The old-clothes merchants are usually fold- ing up their goods when foreigners arrive on the scene, but some uncle will beckon one away through side slums and garbaged lanes to his own particular labyrinth of stone passages and courts, and show one his store-room filled with official costumes, great curtains, palace and yamun hangings, and plun- der. Tribute sables, ermines, and finest skins in bunches as they came from imperial storehouses, even the yellow satin uniforms of the Emperor's attendants, the cloth-of-gold robes of the Empress, cov- ered with seed-pearl dragons, and the plienix door- curtains of her private apartments, have been offered for sale with no questions asked. Remembering the gi'isly tales of what befell certain other dealers in im- perial effects and palace loot, one buys and flies, and locks the treasures out of Chinese sight. The neigh- borhood is crowded with the hidden homes of such pawnbrokers and the infragrant homes of fur-dealers, who cure and dress their fine sheepskins and Tibetan goatskins at their doors, reserving no secrets in the processes, from the stretching, washing, and scraping to the final dressing with coarse chalk, which, beaten out after a few days' bleaching, fills the air with clouds of poisonous dust. Although furs are comparatively cheap and are almost a necessity in this climate, not all the people can afford them. Each INIanchu bannerman has a CHINESE PEKING 193 sheepskin coat provided him, but the masses of Chi- nese wear only wadded cotton, rarely any woolen garments, and with advancing winter weigh them- selves down with more and more clumsy wadding, with " cotton overcoats," as they call them. Silk rugs and silky rugs of the inner wool of the Tibetan goat come from Tibet and the Ordos coun- try—temple carpets or Tibetan rugs, as the dealers call them, exquisite velvety products of Central Asian looms, real works of art. The Mongolian sheep's wool and camel's wool come to this quarter also, and there are weavers of carpets in Peking who are slowly com- ing down to the Tientsin level, exchanging the old con- ventional key patterns, the seal characters, the bats and butterflies of longevity for leaves, flowers, and scrolls and pointer-dogs woven in aniline colors. Silk rugs of long, loose nap are woven also for one dollar and a half the square foot, and even more for those of close, firm texture ; but the modern silk rugs flaunt the aniline dyes at their brightest, and have fewer stitches to the inch each season. There is another outdoor clothes-fair in the Chinese City, but it is held by torch-light in the earliest morn- ing hours, closes at daylight before the city gates open, and is appropriately known as the " thieves' market." As at its Moscow namesake, everything of luxury, value, and utility may be bought in its third estate. Beyond the beggars' bridge there is a half-mile of outdoor shops and booths extending down the west side of the Meridian Street. Snuff-bottles of every kind, small objects in jade, crystal, and semi-precious stones, entrap one's attention, and but for the offen- 194 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE sive, infragrant, gapiug, jeering crowd that presses around one, he could loiter with delight for hours. Great tea-, silk-, fur-, porcelain-, hardware-, harness-, furniture-, and curio-shops stretcli along this avenue and fill the streets opening from it. Street signs and street calls are of endless variety and puzzling inter- est in Peking, and a German anthropologist has made exhaustive study of them. The streets hang full of ^'beckoning boards," gold-lettered on black or ver- milion grounds, and the carved and gilded fronts of medicine-, tea-, and sweetmeat-shops are often so elaborate that one wants to put them under glass, •since all around he sees the wreck of them, loaded with the grime of countless searing dust-storms. The em- blems of the trades and the images of the wares within are decorative to a degree. The gigantic gilded coin of the money-changer, the wooden official hats and strings of official beads, the feather-duster signs of brush-shops, the fleur-de-lis of tobacconists, the brass bowls of barbers, and a host of obscure em- blems continually occupy one. The fleur-de-lis brand of snuff, first brought by French Jesuits, has enjoyed exclusive favor for three centuries, and its use is so universal that one sees these Bourbon lilies as fre- quently before Peking shops as one sees tlie Prince of "Wales feathers in London. The Mohammedan crescent is another Western emblem seen with sur- prise in Peking streets, the sign of bath-houses and butcher-shops, those public purveyors being exclusively Mohammedans. Picture and Lantern and Jadestone streets are dis- appointing, and one easily accepts the assurance that CHINESE PEKING 195 they have fallen off in recent years. It is a curious process, however, by which they steam, scrape, stretch, and bend a common horn until it is a great, trans- parent bubble like a bladder, a huge horn lantern a foot in diameter, which, when decorated with vermil- ion characters and hung with tassels and glittering trinkets, makes the most admired decoration for a house-front or garden court. There are endless curi- ous kinds of "candle-cages" and "candle-baskets" used in this city of nightly blackness, nothing prettier in effect, perhaps, than the huge, red-lettered, ribbed, and flattened spheres of official lanterns, looking most like gigantic tomatoes, which are held close to the ground in legation compounds as a light to the feet. While great sums are appropriated for lighting Peking streets, one sees only a few faint lamps at long inter- vals, and any one abroad after dark must light his own way through the pitfalls, death-traps, and noi- some niud-holes. The lantern is not a mere decorative adjunct of Chinese life, but a first necessity, as much as a fan or a pipe. Even the soldier has his lantern, and that army that attacked the English at Ningpo in 1842 all stole upon the enemy lanterns in hand. The Chinese soldier most resents the foreign drill-masters and officers because they will not let him fan himself on dress-parade and deny the lone sentry his lantern. The Liu-li-chang, the booksellers' street, used to be the Peking deliglit and treasure-house. There schol- ars and dilettanti still prowl to buy the immortal classics in ten thousand volumes, rubbings of old in- scriptions, scroll pictures, painted books, and the con- ventional ornaments and necessaries for the writing- 190 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE table ; but the eurio-shops, where jade and porcelain, lacquer and bronze, used to embarrass the visitor's choice, have suffered a serious falling off, and thus robbed Peking of its greatest delights and tempta- tions. Each war, with its vicissitudes among the great families, flooded the market with treasures galore ; but between such crises one searches long, and he needs to be on the alert for the imitations that abound. All the dragons there now have five claws, all the hawthorns have the double ring of Kanghsi or the seal of Chenghua. There are treasures yet cherished in Peking, so great was the activity of artists and artisans in the centu- ries just gone, when ten thousands of pieces of porce- lain were sent annually to the Peking palace for gifts ; but the owners of such art objects can afford to keep them until some great political convulsion, the fall of the dynasty, a foreign war with another sack of tlie palaces, brings them into the market. Every amateur is eagerly waiting for some such crash, and dozens avow themselves ready to take flight to Peking from the ends of the earth. One is shown the boarded-up front of a once famous curio-shop, whose owner kept the fence for some palace servants who tunneled up under one of the imperial storehouses and took away cart-loads of treasures. Suspicions were at last roused by the number of unusually fine pieces of por- celain this particular dealer and a confrere at Tien- tsin had for sale. Wlien the lialf-em})tied storehouse with the underground passage was opened, the of- fenders were soon found and beheaded, all the mem- bers of their families put to deatli, and the front of the big sliop l)oarded u{) as a warning. One looks at CHINESE PEKING 197 it fearfully, and sees why the great treasures are now to be seen and bought in New York, London, and Paris rather than along the Liu-li-chang. Yet col- lecting has its fascination in face of the law and the lictors, and such curio-stealing for the market will go on as long as there are servants in Chinese yamuns and storehouses worth looting. The recent coups d'etat did send some famous Chinese connoisseurs to the block and to exile, but their treasures vanished be- fore the families could turn a key. One never gets to the end of the strange and as- tonishing histories of ancient works of Chinese art, and I was shown the famous album of water-color sketches of eighty pieces of Ming porcelains once owned by the wicked Prince of I. It was this prince who violated the flag of truce in 1860 and im- prisoned the peace commissioners, which act brought about the attack on Peking and the destruction of the Summer Palace. He was graciously permitted to strangle himself in prison when the coup d'etat of 1861 had seated the empresses in the regents' chairs, and all of I's great collections of treasures were scat- tered. This exquisitely colored album was offered to one foreign euvoy, who retained it for consideration, had an artist secretly copy the paintings, and then returned the album to the dealer with word that he did not care to buy. Another thrifty plenipotentiary did the same thing when it was offered to him. The third customer to whom it went a-begging, being more British than diplomatic, honestly bought the original album, which he supposed was unique, al- lowed a friend to have a copy made, and then took it 198 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE to London, where the original book was burned. Then the envoys produced their surreptitious copies and boasted of their smartness. It is a standing Pekingese parable, too, how the slender little dappled peach- blow vase, for which American collectors contended so extravagantly at the Morgan sale, was hawked about every legation and finally sold for a virtual trifle to a visiting professional buyer. Not all of these whom fortune tempted that once are agreed to berate themselves for short-sightedness, nor yet do all deny the superior charms of the peach-cheeked trea- sure which became the sensation and then the mys- tery of its ceramic season. Out of Peking came, a few years ago, a most won- derful collection of jade, acquired at a stroke by an American collector and connoisseur who enjoys the possession of the greatest and rarest collection of jade in the Western world. He spent but a compara- tively short time in Peking, and when one finds that there is less good jade to be seen for sale in Peking than in New York, and that none is now carved there, that feat of collecting piques curiosity. He learns, though, that the season of the American collector's great find was a few months before the Empress Dowager's birthday, and the eunuchs, in search of worthy offerings, had commanded the great dealer or father of all jade in the Liu-li-chang, and his Tatar City rival by the Dung-tang, to assemble some "ten-times-number-one" o])jects for their inspection. The American collector had "such a good heart" that one dealer let him just look in upon the splendors laid out for eunuch inspection. The American, after CHINESE PEKING 199 brief survey, made an offer for the whole lot, with instant delivery. And it was paid for, cotton- wooled, and boxed out of the premises so speedily that the dazed dealer was literally so ^'heavily sick" with prosperity that he was indifferent to the scorn of the eunuchs when they looked upon the few trumpery pieces hastily shuffled into the place of the heavenly green joys the American had borne off. Eunuchs are keen bargainers and poor pay, anyhow. The other dealer, who had assembled a roomful of jade rarities for eunuch inspection, was also taken by storm, bought out at sight, and paid within the hour in good dollars instead of in long-running palace promises. Two such transactions could not go on in the same market without some one telling or turning traitor, and a chain of suspicion was fastening upon the boxes that heaped up so rapidly in the tourists' quar- ters. Only the fact that his boy sat on those boxes night and day, and that the collector had diplomatic company on his speedy trip down to Tientsin, averted some kind of an unpleasantness. Sight might have been proof of stolen property, but as anything worth having has usually been stolen for the curio-market, a buyer's sensibilities lose their finer edge when he has honestly paid for his purchases to some one in the long chain of rascals. In the long-ago there was a porcelain-factory in the Liu-li-chang, whei-e Chihli's clays were shaped to things of beauty and decorated after the designs of the best court painters, but it has long been closed. Tliere is still a crowded fair in the Liu-li-chang at New Year's time, when the long street is beset by 200 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE scholars and collectors who are there by day and by night to buy the treasures that the season of debt- paying brings to light, and to watch their own trea- sure-seeking purchasers in the hands of middlemen. A famous sweetmeat-shop in the Liu-li-chang main- tains its standard and prestige undiminished, and the honeyed things in glazed pottery jars are each more tempting than another. While one sips jasmine tea in some inner curio sanctum, one can send for and make trial of these Mongol sweets, taking them in Russian fashion between sips, or dropped into the tea. There is a factory of cloisonne enamels near the Liu-li- chang, which produces large pieces after the best old designs ; and as Chinese taste and artistic invention seem alike dead in this decade, it is best that they tread the conventional Avay. They cannot repeat the softest colors of the old Ming enamels, but the Japanese deceive Peking connoisseurs as easily with their artistic forgeries of old enamels as with their counterfeits of old porcelains, and of both such im- portations the Liu-li-chang holds full supply. " Be- ware of the Japanese," say Chinese coniioisseui-s, who seem easily victimized. If one would study and enjoy Chinese art, one should go where the great collections and the great dealers in ''Oriental" are— to Paris, to London, to New York or Baltimore, to Di'osden, Berlin, Weimar, or St. Petersburg, but not to Peking. XV WITHOUT THE WALLS ^N the Chinese City there is little of in- terest beyond the shops and streets, as the great inclosures of the Temple of Heaven and the Temple of Agri- culture are fast shut, and one sees what he may through an opera-glass as he walks the city wall. No foreigner has ever assisted at the ser- vices at the Temple of Heaven, and few have entered its inclosures. For some years after 1860, entry to the lovely park by the south wall was easily gained, but after certain vandal acts the entry of visitors was pro- hibited. Every foreigner became possessed then to gain entry, and bribery ,trickery, and every other device were resorted to to penetrate the forbidden realm. Full illustrations and full explanations of all the tem- ple precincts and ceremonies are given in the standard works on China, which sufficiently gratify a normal curiosity or any legitimate interest, and the majority of these zealous investigators schemed to enter the park of the Temple of Heaven to gratify a love of adventure and that last ambition of small minds, " to 201 202 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE say they have been there." Persistent visitors were assisted up the walls and dropped down on the inner side. When discovered and chased by the guards, they ran for the wall, where their servants stood with ropes to haul them up, and mounting, rode away before the guards could reach the outer gates to stop or identify them. From the wall one can see the circular white altar rising in terraces, and, with the full descriptions given, can picture the scene of the midnight sacri- fices and the worship of the Supreme Deity by the Emperor and his great retinue at the time of the win- ter and the spring solstice. This religion, this wor- ship of the Supreme Ruler with burnt-offerings and on an open altar, is the most ancient cult now ob- served anywhere in the world, far antedating Confu- cian and Taoist and Buddhist doctrines, and is the survival of those primitive beliefs that had force in Asia before the gods were personified, their images enshrined in temples, and creeds and ceremonies elaborated. The temples and buildings in the great park were rebuilt in splendor by Yunglo, the mag- nificent builder, the Grand Monarque of the Mings ; and the new Temple of Heaven of tliis decade, roofed with shimmering azure tiles and with window-screens of fine blue glass rods, repeats the temple of his day, which was destroyed by heavenly fire soon after the war of the allies. The Temple of Agriculture occupies another great park adjacent to the south wall of the Chinese City, which the Emperor and his officers visit in state an- nually, the Emperor plowing a piece of ground each WITHOUT THE WALLS 203 spring in reverence for the spirits of earth and his great ancestors, who first made the earth bring forth its fruits. The altar or Temple of the Earth outside the north wall of the Tatar Cit}', the altar of the Sun in the east suburb, and the altar of the Moon beyond the west wall, where the tablets of the stars are placed, are other sanctuaries of annual imperial wor- ship, as jealously guarded as those within the city wall, although the allied troops camped in the park of the altar of the Earth in 1860.) vThe Po-yun-Kwan, the mother temple and head- i/' quarters of the Taoist sect in North China, which was a venerated place when Kublai Khan came, lies just outside the northwest gate of the Chinese City— ■ the Hsi-pien-men, or Western Wicket of Expediency. This religion of the indefinite and the impalpable, this baffling cult of the vague and the opaque, which has now gone off into mere magic, hocus-pocus, charms, exorcisms, and wizardry of the cheapest kind, seems there to have some reality, some dignity, some form. The great ceremony of the fire test is performed at Po-yun-Kwan on the third day of the third moon each year, but quite by chance we hap- pened upon a great conference and convocation of Taoist priests on the last day of our Christian Oc- tober. More than two hundred priests were gathered at the temple, and a great service or mass had just begun as we arrived. The priests had taken their places inside the temple and in the great stone-flagged court, all attired in loose, dark-blue robes, wearing Taoist caps with open crowns showing a topknot of hair held by a single pin, like the Korean and Loo- 204 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE chooan coiffure of to-day and the universal Chinese fashion in the Ming times. It was solemn and im- pressive as those blue-robed priests stood in twelve lines of twelve men each, facing the altar of the inner temple, each priest grasping a jui, or Taoist scepter, the symbol of good luck and long life in common usage. Seven higher priests in brilliant red stoles stood at intervals down the central path or aisle of the court, where the great bronze incense- burner gave out curls of fragrant smoke. The voice of the high priest far within the temple was lifted in a chant, the priests on the steps responded, a bell vibrated in the sanctuary, and all the priests knelt in unison and struck their foreheads upon the stones. Three times they made this obeisance and this pros- tration in concert ; the great sweep forward of all those robed figures at once was like the bending and bowing to Mecca in a crowded mosque. At times they knelt upon one knee, then rose in unison, and the deep Gregorian chant went on. There were inner and further altars of the indefinite, impalpable religion of nothingness in courts beyond, where the gilded images of the Guardians of the Four Quar- ters smiled, imperial tablets stood, and rolls of silk were laid as offerings, and more splendid incense- burners sent up fine blue clouds of worshipful fra- grance. Every part of the temple in closure, all its labyrinth of courts and fantastic gardens of artificial rockwork, was exquisitel}' clean, and a great glass pavilion was being made ready for the feast which was to close the annual convocation of priests. ; But foreign Peking takes little interest in Taoism, WITHOUT THE WALLS 205 its masses and ceremonies, its fire-walking or its fire- eating,' and we were carried on to an elaborate tea in the high-terraced guest-room of the Tien-ling-ssu, whose noble old thirteen-story pagoda of the sixth century holds a colossal Buddha of a commonplace, gilded plaster countenance. The priests bid one throw a cash at a metal plate hanging directly over the All- Knowing one's gilded hand, for good luck and the good of the temple exchequer. The Peking race-course is just beyond these two temples, and the meets give all the Cambaluc world of Western fashion days of enjoyment out in the fresh, clear, sparkling air of the open plain, fresh air blown straight from the hills and boundless Mongo- lia beyond. On midwinter days, when the sun shines with desert fierceness from a dry, blue, cloudless sky, the electric, exhilarating air makes human and equine blood and muscles tingle, and there are many scratch races called on the spur of the moment to give spirits vent and relief from the rush of routine, intramural and indoor social amusements. The Mongol horse-traders bring droves of ponies down from their grassy plains from beyond the Great AVall each season " when the river has frozen and the tourists are gone," and the racing man has the plea- sure of choosing the most promising of these prairie- bred ones, and training the Asiatic bronco for a cup-winner. These tough, strong-jawed, and shock- headed little horses of the plains often develop aston- ishingly, and surprises are the regular order of the meets. Gentlemen jockeys ride their own ponies, which they themselves have trained morning after 206 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIEE morning at sunrise outside the walls, or light-weight friends ride for them. Irreverent strangers who see the lean yellow Chinese jockey in conventional cap and boots and gaudy satin jacket for the first time are sure there was never funnier sight before, and the crowded race-course is a most diverting spectacle. A few Chinese officials, who have learned the delightful excitements of racing in European capitals, enliven the grand stand with their brilliant satins and sables, and on an autumn day that I best remember, Chang Yen Hoon, his faithful Liang, and some confreres gave the brilliant touch of local color and splendor to the gathering. It was cup-day, and all Peking was there, arriving by horse and chair, mule-cart or mule-litter, and making strangest pictures ever a grand stand saw as they descended or extricated themselves from such medieval conveyances. A year later the coup d'etat had fallen, and Sir Chang, barely saved from the block, was on his way to life-exile in Kashgaria. A great concourse of the people, thousands of Chi- nese, had flocked to the race-course, and stretches be- side the grand stand and stables and in the field were solidly blue with their monotonous garments. They were kept back and in bounds by Chinese grooms and jockeys who spared not the lash on man or beast, and all the legation servants and outriders assisted to preserve the inviolability of the lawn and yard. A Russian secretary ordered his booted and belted Cossack orderly to bring something from the stables at once, and as the clumsy creature touched his cap, wound his rawhide whip around his hand, and started WITHOUT THE WALLS 207 down the steps and across the lawn on a run, the whole mass of Chinese took to their heels before him, precipitating themselves headlong into ditches, tumbling over one another, picking themselves up without looking back, and running entirely across the field before they brought up exhausted. Even the Cossack stopped for a second and looked bewildered around him to see what had started this silent, frantic flight of this Tatar tribe— scene typical of the rela- tions and attitudes of those two races, a picture in miniature of so-called railroad extension in Man- churia. The Chinese know the Russian. They have found their master and have felt the whip, and they stand not upon the order of their going. After the great race tiffin, with speeches and toasts and cheers, when the winners in their gay satin jackets had come up to receive the prizes presented in graceful little speeches by different ladies, there came the mad breakneck, steeplechase, free-to-all, great race of the day, through fields, over ruts and ditches, across lots, anyhow — the foreigners' race home from the races before the city gates should close. Those who were in the saddle could of course wait for the last race of the program, long before which the grand stand was emptied. Chair-bearers could rely upon making great spurts across lots, but carts had to follow the fixed lines of ruts into the Chinese City, and then plod through the waste of sand along the walls of the Tatar City to its gates before the fatal stroke. There mules were beaten, carts bumped, and carters chir- ruped and repeated their ivu-ivu-wu tvu-u-u and the pr-pr-pr-rup like Norwegian skydguts, while one 208 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE bounded about in the upholstered chair and wedged more pillows beside one. Clouds of dust surrounded each cart, through which one saw dimly only the barrel glimpse ahead, nothing but the darkening waste and the endless, endless walls. With some energetic whackings, mules were made to go faster, and just when every joint seemed racked loose, mules turned in the great arch, with other carts, carters, donkeys, and camels streaming through the tunnel as the bells' slower clang and the pipes' shrill whistle proclaimed the last moments of grace. Then mules and muleteers and dust-laden passengers stopped to breathe, and car- acoling knights called into cart interiors their thanks- givings at such a fortunate escape, for a survey assured us that all were safely within the walls before the gates went to with a sound not to be forgotten. Picturesque medieval customs are better read about than encountered. Chi, the anger principle, naturally possesses an out- sider at that most amazing and humiliating spectacle of the Peking year. It is the regular spectacle, how- ever, on all autumn and winter race-days, and the Chinese must have a secret delight in seeing all the hated barbarians, titled representatives and honored officials, the great diplomats of the greatest powers, running home like school-boys when the curfew tolls, dignity, self-respect, and that domineering spirit of treaty-making times all gone. Not a protest, not an appeal, not a request is made that even one gate should be left open for the diplomats' use that night ; and still less does the Ti-tu, or city governor, ever dream of offering such a courtesy. Yet these abject WITHOUT THE WALLS 209 ones are the very same envoys of the same great powers who snatch provinces and ports and islands at will, and who wrest the spoils of war from a con- quering nation, slip whole clauses into their own transcript of a treaty, and hold the Chinese by threat of war to its literal fulfilment ; who push the privilege of their coupe-ligne cards everywhere in European capitals, who insist that their dogs shall go without muzzles as a diplomatic privilege, in the face of laws crowned heads must obey in their own empires ; yet they do not, dare not, ask to have one gate left open for them on one night of the year ! Truly the ways of diplomacy are tortuous and past finding out. La carriere is a path in the dark, and the Chinese are not the only ones who think backward and upside down. With all this there has never been a Jameson raid in China ! With their genius for taming and hypnotizing the diplomat, the Chinese ought logically to rule the world. For a flowery kingdom, one sees the fewest flowers in its capital city. No sight nor hint of flower-gar- dens, nor any purposely blooming and beautifying thing, may be seen in the streets, and the rich tangle of wild roses and tough morning-glory vines all over the terre-plein of the city walls is not growing there by any intention of enjoyment on the part of the neg- lectful guardians. At Lung-fu-ssu fair and at the morning market by the west gate, a few plants and common flowers are offered for sale, but there are too few to prove that any love of flowers exists with the masses, and their price is prohibitive to the common people. In each legation compound one sees hun- 210 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE dreds of flower-pots ranged along the paths, but the baked-clay soil of the Peking plain does not admit of luxuriant flower-gardens, although that plain is cov- ered with wild flowers in spring, and fragrant, long- stemmed violets bloom there until late autumn. As the chrysanthemum came from China originally, one would naturally look for its richest development at the capital where wealth and luxury center ; but Peking makes poor show in any floral line, and the chrysanthe- mum is seen at its best in the foreign flower-shows at the Shanghai race-course, and at a garden in the native city of Shanghai. Ningpo claims to have gardeners who can produce more astonishing pompons and great incurved and recurved descendants of the " Chusan daisy" than those of their gild elsewhere, but few foreigners have chance to judge of this. All the chrysanthemums in legation courts, even those at the old fu, were of the commonest varieties, and nearly all grafted on the shaggy, woody stem of artemisia, the neglected, untidy, untrained foliage detracting greatly from the beauty of the flowers. After persistent questioning on all sides, a literatus told of a certain chrysanthemum and plum-tree gar- den where flowers were grown for the eunuchs who decorate the palace living-rooms. It was a long drive to the garden, first through the endless Chinese City, past the public execution-ground— a piece of the public highway which is blocked while the decapita- tion or brutal strangling by hand goes on, and where curious children were then gazing at a robber's head that had lain for a week in the lattice-box or cage. Then we went on past slums and suburban tracts, the lit- ^ ?: WITHOUT THE WALLS 213 eral rus in urbe, past desolate graveyards whose broken walls showed reeling and fallen Buddhist monu- ments ; and at last, through the deep-vaulted tunnel of the outer southwest gate, the cart reached dusty wastes and the group of gardeners' huts and plant- houses where the palace flowers bloom. The disillu- sionment was complete when, in that baked-clay garden, the tattered and greasy-coated gardener or imperial purveyor and florist pointed to some shaggy artemisia stems abloom with white and yellow chry- santhemums that were to go to the palace the next morning. The imperial eyes had to be delighted with the commonest flowers or with none at all, since this favorite of the eunuchs declared them his choicest blossoms. His winter plant-houses were being made ready to store and force the palace palms, oleanders, dwarf plums, almonds, Jcwei-hwa, or fragrant olive- trees, and the moutans, or tree-peonies. These houses of wattle and dab, with mud walls on three sides and mud roofs laid on a frame of poles and matting, were being chinked up and mended. Thick white paper was already pasted over some of the skeleton poles of the south walls. These thick, dry, warm shelters, with sunlight glowing hot on the paper fronts, keep the plants at a safe and even temperature through the bright but bitter winters of that northern plain. Other mud storehouses with glass south walls have underground kangs and flues that force the plants appropriate to the New Year to bloom on time. If the symbolic festal flowers lag in the last week of grace, caldrons of boiling water furnish clouds of gentle steam-heat that open the most obstinate peonies, and 214 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE then, swathed in paper mantles, they are transported in closed carts warmed with hand-furnaces or Mongol braziers. The rarest vases are put to use at the New Year season, and, with true Chinese shiftlessness, withered flowers are left in vases for weeks until the water freezes and cracks the precious porcelain. In this way have resulted great cracks entirely around the rarest palace pieces, vases which when broken are reported as such and ruthlessly thrown away— and very carefully gathered up and mended, and sent to the curio-dealer, who may have indicated to some needy eunuch or eunuch's servant what kind of a vase it would be most profitable to have suffer a frost- crack. Such was the fate of one splendid sang-de- bceuf vase in the palace some years ago, which was sold to an American, whose collection was soon after dispersed in a New York auction-room, the glorious red beaker reserved for sale, however, with the trea- sures of quite another collector, in order to maintain the mystery and fraud, and save a suspected Pekingese head. XVI THE ENVIRONS OF PEKING ^ERE there good roads aud more tol- erable inns, were traveling by land in China anything but the reverse of comfortable, safe, or pleasant, one could spend weeks of the matchless spring and autumn weather in trips to the interesting places in the Peking neighborhood. When it is neces- sary to go by cart or litter, or at least to carry one's bedding and full camp equipment in such slow, archaic conveyances, one loses interest in places that are one or many nights away from Peking. All-day excur- sions usually suffice one. The railway, as it approaches Peking, skirts the wall of the Nan-hai-tzu, or '' Southern Hunting Park," an abandoned and unused demesne, where for years the unique '' David or tail deer," with its huge antlers, roamed in herds, and other game increased in peace. The extension of the line beyond Peking brings to modern light and makes accessible that wonderful old Liu-ko-chiao bridge, which spans the Hun-lio Eiver by great stone arches, its carved parapet guarded by 215 216 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE stone lions, so bewildering in number in other cen- turies that none could keep count of them. Marco Polo crossed and praised it in the thirteenth century, and it remains an enduring monument of greater days, one of the famous bridges in this empire of wonderful bridges. The legations and nearly all the customs families remove in summer to the temples in the western hills, which rise from the level Peking plain ten miles from the city, as suddenly as the Alban Hills beyond Rome. Eight temples are nielied in ravines and built on spurs of the steep hills, the ascending chain of tem- ples connected by an ancient flagged roadway. These beautiful, clean temple compounds comfortably ac- commodate the diplomatic colony each summer, when the desert sun scorches Peking for so many hours of the long northern day, and the city is enveloped in dense clouds of the finely pulverized, poisonous dust, or else, with the deluging rains, the streets become so many rivers in flood, and mules in cart-harness are drowned at legation gates. The British government has bought land and built summer quarters for that legation at the hills, but the other envoys continue to rent their favorite temples, and enjoy a picturesque sort of intimate country and camp life in these quaint old Buddhist precincts. These western hills and fai'ther hills to the south- west hold valuable coal-deposits. Although the great geologists Pumpelly and Richtofen examined and reported upon their richness thirty years ago, conces- sions for foreign engineers to work the mines with machinery and Western appliances have but lately COAL MIXIXa AXI) TRASSI'OKTATID.V. (COAI.-I.UADKI) CAMEL.) (SI.AVK DKAWINC BABKKT UK COAL.) THE ENVIRONS OF PEKING 219 been wrested from the government, Chinese jealousy, suspicion, and conservatism being exerted to the ut- most still to prevent the course of progress and the working of these concessions. The coal, both bitu- minous and anthracite, is still picked out with primi- tive tools, and is dragged to the surface in basket sleds fastened to the necks of wretched workmen, who creep on all fours along the narrow little run- ways picked along the lines of the veins. It is trans- ported to Peking in baskets by camel-train, and delivered at the consumer's door for less than three gold dollars a ton. The road out from the west gate to the hills passes through the walled town of Pa-li-chuan, which has as its landmark a splendid old thirteen-story pagoda, the largest in the Peking neighborhood. Within twenty years the pagoda has gone to ruin, and the gold image of Kwanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, piously enshrined there by one of the Ming empresses, is no longer on the altar. As worshipers decreased, and with them the income, the priests grew angry, sold all the attainable timbers and carved woodwork for fuel, and all the altar ornaments, and decamped, leaving the pagoda to the elements and passers-by to wreck at will. North of it, on the palace road, stand the ruins of the outer temples of Wu-ta-ssu, built by Yunglo to shelter five golden images and a model of the immortal diamond throne under the sacred bo-tree of Buddh Gaya, which a priest had brought from Iiulia to the devout Emperor Chenghua. In one great hall the roof was alloAved to fall in and crush 220 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE the altar images and the company of lohans, frag- ments and lumps of which only now remain. The square marble building of the inner sanctuary re- mains, its outer wall covered with row above row of recessed images of Buddha, and the five pagodas on its flat terrace top are covered with more and more images of Fo. There are no priests, no keepers to be seen, but a legion of country folk approach and beg at sight of a stranger. This road from the northwest city gate continues on past Wu-ta-ssu to the bannermen's village of Hai- tien, at the gates of the Summer Palace and of the E-ho Park, the residence of the Empress Dowager and the prison palace of the Emperor Kwangsu. The road is paved with large, flat slabs of stone, and was built in 1894 as part of the preparation for celebrating the Empress Dowager's sixtieth birthday, which the Japa- nese war so rudely interrupted. There were grum- blings and loud-mouthed criticisms in Peking that the palace folk should build such a model road for their pleasurings, while all Peking's communication with its markets and the outer world was crippled by the wrecked condition of the Tungchow road. For the years that the road was all but impassable for im- perial wheels, the Celestial, dragon family went to and fro in barges drawn by men along the canal leading to the cit}' gates. Steam and electric launches were next employed, and had the coup d'etat been averted and progress allowed to progress at the pace it was acquiring, tlie Emperor would doubtless soon have been guiding his own automobile over this splendid park I'oad. THE ENVIEONS OF PEKING 221 When the French army reached the Summer Palace in 1860, the imperial family had but barely fled through a side gate, and the French officers found the fan, the hat, the pipe, and the papers that the Emperor had been using in his private apartments. The suburban palace had been made a general storehouse and place of safe- deposit for the treasures of the court nobles and princes, in addition to the incredible riches the emperors had long accumulated there. The French held the palace for several days before the English troops came up —looting strictly prohibited, General Montauban averred, although the camp of his men at the gates overflowed with satin garments and hangings, and certain French soldiers had watches and jewels to sell to any who wished to buy. In room after room, the walls were built over with divided shelves like cabinets, and crowded with such pieces of porcelain, jade, crystal, and jeweled objects as even the officers had never seen before. "When it was decided to burn and destroy the buildings, as a direct and personal punishment put upon the erring ruler, rather than to punish his long-suffering, misgoverned peo- ple, and as a retribution on the very spot where the foreign captives had been tortured to death, the place was thrown open to the soldiers' pillage. The em- perors of two dynasties had lavished all the taste, talent, and treasures of the empire on this favorite residence. Mogul, Persian, Chinese, Indian, Arab, Frencli, and Italian architects planned and decorated the innumerable i)alaces and pavilions scattered through these parks, and from Kanghsi's times until the middle of the century the most gifted artists and 222 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE artisans were assembled at ateliers there, where paint- lug, illuminating, carving, enameling, jade-, gem-, and glass-cutting, lacquering, and every branch of art and art industry Avere pursued under imperial supervision. Miracles of beauty and marvels of cunning work- manship emanated from these imperial ateliers, to be retained by the Emperor or distributed as gifts, and the Summer Palace held the greatest and richest col- lection of any art museum in the world when the sol- diers were turned loose in it. Every writer— Chaplain McGee, General Wolseley, Oliphant, Rennie, and Sir Harry Parkes— speaks with sorrow of the senseless, brutal, ignorant destruction of the incalculable trea- sures the place contained. Not one tenth of the trea- sures were rescued; five tenths of the precious fragilities were smashed by the butts of muskets or hurled about by skylarking soldiers, and the rest were consumed and shivered in the final fire and explo- sions. Besides what the men could pocket or carry with them, three hundred carts were forcibly im- pressed, loaded with booty, and driven out of tlie park — booty which has since enriched museums and private collections in Europe and America. The English soldiers and officers, who had a poor show and second culling in the treasure-houses, were made to turn all their loot into a common store, which was auctioned off and the money divided among the sol- diers. The English officers, having waived their share in the prizes, had then to buy any souvenirs they wished to take home from China. What the French had they ke])t, and one understands why the boule- vard hailed General Montauban as " Due de Pillage " THE ENVIRONS OF PEKING 223 as often as Couut Palikao, and why French palaces, museums, chateaux, and the homes of the families of the French officers taking part in the allies' war are so rich in gems of Chinese art. Even within a few years, an exquisite piece of jade, carved to the fine- ness of lace, was sold by a retired French officer to a collector, with the promise that he should never show it nor speak of it in Europe. His superior officer had wanted it, had taxed him with having it, and tried to make him give it up, but the sous-officier got it safely away, and for thirty years knew that they were still watching to see if he sold it. There were palace and temple ceilings whose panels were plates of pure gold, heavy images of solid gold on many altars, stores of jewels and bullion treasure, and such supplies of silk garments that sepoys and zouaves masqueraded in imperial robes and palace uniforms, and lined their tents and mud barracks with palace fineries. Father Ripa has described the palace as it was in Kanghsi's time, when he and his fellow-Jesuits were laboring to beautify it. Those artists and architects and others in Kienlung's time, fresh from the splen- dors of Italy and Versailles, designed baroque and rococo and Renaissance structures, as bizarre and out- landish to Chinese eyes as Chinese pavilions and pagodas are to European eyes. The Italian artists set Chinese carvers to work upon the lace-like orna- ment of marble pavilions, loggias, and horseshoe stair- ways, and the rainbow tiles of the Chinese potters were wrought into fantasies of architecture never equaled elsewhere. Even the officers who had to set 224 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE the torch and touch the fuses to all these pillaged palaces felt the pity of it. The burning palaces lighted the sky for two nights and sent black clouds of smoke drifting toward frightened Peking for days, while the work of destruction was pushed to the farthest little imperial Trianon in the folds of the hills. The one hilltop temple of Wan-shou-shau, and here and there a rainbow pagoda or a bronze shrine, were sjiared by a regi'etful British officer, but years of neglect soon gave the general air of ruin to the whole scene. The Summer Palace grounds, Yuan-ming-yuan (" Round and Splendid Garden "), were wholly aban- doned for the first dozen years of the regency. All diplomatic Peking used to ride and ramble and picnic there, and extract souvenirs from the debris-heaps; but when the young Emperor Tungchih came into power the work of reclamation and rebuilding began, and has been carried on intermittently since, so that the mile-square park, with its eigliteen gates and "forty beauties," afforded a favorite residence for Kwangsu up to the time of the coup d'etat. The suburban palace has again become a treasure-house of Chinese art, and there have been assembled there miniature railways and vessels, European carriages of all kinds, jinrikishas, bicycles, clocks, mechanical toys, and articles de Paris and Vienna galore, all sent and brought by returning Cliinese envoys from abroad and by concessionaries anxious to build rail- ways, work mines, and regenerate Cliina. The palaces were so well mapped and described in tlie past, so tlioroughly photogi-aphed in the years of neglect, tliat one has a tolerable acquaintance with them in that THE ENVIEONS OF PEKING 225 way, and from the western hills he can identify the buildings in the great parks. The E-ho Park, or Wan-shou-shan {" Hill of Ten Thousand Ages ")> which the Empress Dowager chose and restored for her residence with moneys diverted from naval and railway appropriations, has more im- portance in this decade than the Yuan-ming-yuan. Its chief feature is the great hill crowned with a Bud- dhist temple of rainbow tiles, which was spared in the general demolition of the buildings that crowded both sides of the steep, knife-edged ridge. All the build- ings on this hill are Buddhist and date back many centuries. From the marble-railed lotus lake, steep terraces and a lofty stone embankment with diverg- ing staircases make an imposing architectural show, and the yellow lamas' silent temple at the top com- mands the noblest view over the imperial parks and the plain to the city walls and towers. At the foot of the hill, a lotus lake is spread out on one side, and on the other side a larger ornamental water is crossed by a beautiful marble bridge, with a pretty kiosk floating over its central arches and a marble junk moored beside it. An exquisite marble bridge, whose seventeen oval arches are doubled in the still water, leads to an island where a temple, once dedicated to the God of Rain, was the place of detention of Kwangsu after the coup d'etat of 1898, and where he remained under the close watch of eunuchs for all the weary time after progress was strangled by the masterful dowager. There is yet another hill of temples in this wonder- ful park, but all its structures are Taoist. At its 226 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE foot bubbles up the Jade Fountain spring, whose clear waters feed the palace lakes and the Peking palace lakes, whence there trickles away a feeble stream past the British legation, out to the moats and ultimately to the Grand Canal, which used to communicate with Hangchow. Kublai Khan saw in his sleep the plan of tShangdu, the hunting palace inlnner Mongolia, beyond the wall and beyond Jehol. Many of those realized fan- tasies of dreamland were repeated in the series of parks and palaces, imperial demesnes, and princely villas that extended from Hai-tien's protecting camp into the far hills, and other monarchs devised unique features to add to the pleasure-grounds. Nothing more unique, perhaps, has ever existed than the Summer Palace and the adjoining parks when the allies came in 1860, and all of art, architecture, and even landscape-gardening's triumphs were obliterated in a trice. It was a blow and a humiliation from which the Emperor never recovered, which the court nobles have never forgotten nor forgiven, which rankles in cultivated Western capitals where appreciation of Oriental art has come as the latest gift and delight of this century, and which accomplished not nearly as much all around as if the wonderful buildings, the pi-iceless and then unappreciated treasures, had been spared, and instead the cowardly Emperor liad been followed to Jeliol, and brought back to Peking as a prisoner. XVII THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA ^N midsummer, when the northern sky dark- ens for only a few hours, an early start on a country journey is made at two or three o'clock in the morning, in or- der to get beyond the walls before the stamping donkeys and strings of camels can fill the Peking streets with suffocating clouds of dust. In the golden October, one always meets strings of beady-eyed Mongols in snug fur caps, and wonder- fully ragged Chinese trailing their camel-trains in from north and west the moment those gates open at sunrise. Around the Anting or main north Gate of Peace and Tranquillity, which the allied troops held in 1860, and on whose parapets they mounted their sentries and artillery, the crowd is thickest, and streams of vehicles, pack-animals, and people file through the deep barrel vaults unceasingly. Processions of cam- els and wheelbarrows come in from the plain, loaded with huge, black, wicker-cased flagons or jars of grease from Mongolia, which, brought by such slow 227 228 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE transit all that distance, can yet be sent profitably to France, and — infragrant idea — is said to be used there in the manufacture of soaps and perfumes. One grazes scores of scavengers' wheelbarrows loaded with the city's refuse, which, bought and carried out each morning, is sold at wholesale suburban depots to enrich the poor, alkaline clay soil, an ambulant sewer system that never disturbs Chinese senses. A sandy common outside the Anting Gate is the parade-ground of the Peking garrison and field force. One may see the flower of the Manchu banners put through their antic drills there any day, their feats of archery, stone-lifting, stone-throwing, jousting, and monkey-posturings — puerilities the more absurd when indulged in in sight of An ting's towers, where modern weapons and artillery defeated them forty years ago. Like the doomed Bourbons, the Manchus have forgotten nothing and learned nothing, and, like all other survivors of outlived ideas, must go. Every Manchu is primarily a soldier, a personal defender of the Emperor. They are the " Old Guard." The Man- chus are forbidden to trade and to intermarry with Chinese, and, whether actively in the force or not, each one is given his rice,— literally fed from the pub- lic crib, — his three taels a month, and a sheepskin coat each year. His name must be on the roll of one of the banners, whether he ever wears uniform or throws a stone, and even the stalwart head-boy or steward at the foreign hotel was one of the loyal force, going regu- larly to headquarters on pay-day, although usually the stipend of such absentees is swallowed up or squeezed to a fraction by superior officers. Half the servants THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA 231 in each legation are baunermen, making no disguise of the fact, and not for that reason necessarily spies any more than the other servants. Because of these special privileges and perquisites, the Chinese hate the Manchus of the rank and file, the fatted, heredi- tary pensioners, the " old soldiers," far more bitterly than the ex-Confederate in America hates the Northern soldier, pensioned at the nation's expense for crush- ing the Southern Confederacy. The Manchus, blind to the signs, go on with their medieval drills, stub- bornly turning out jingals and archaic weapons from their modern arsenals, and hastening their end. No- thing contributed so much, nothing in the fevered pro- gi'am of progress so precipitated Kwangsu's downfall and constituted the last straw on the Manchu's back, as the plan to put the army in foreign clothes and wholly under foreign drill. One watches the bannermen's antics with mixed emotions— amusement, contempt, impatience, and the excitement of a theater audience when the denouement of a tragedy drags, when just retribution is deferred too long. Our little procession of mule-litters, donkeys, and carts wound northwestward from this parade-ground, in the lines of ruts that straggled everywhere on the unfenced plain. Strings of camels swung and rocked their way past us with clanging bells ; and, as the harvest was just on, every field was dotted with groups of l)lue-clad workers. Rich bunches of millet were stacked ])y every mud farm-house, and blindfolded donkeys dragged stone cylinders around and around the hard clay thresliing-floors, painfully wearing the millet kernels out of tlieir husks. We plodded 232 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE through villages where the one street was a deep trough or ditch between, the houses, half full of mud and stagnant water. " An old road becomes a river as surely as an old wife becomes a mother-in-law," says the Chinese proverb; and one wonders if the great system of canals in China was not self-made instead of by man's intention— the people taking to boats from necessity when all the roads became and remained small sluggish rivers. There were ancient and established mud-sloughs on the way, where the mules floundered knee-deep, and the carters and muleteers, helpless in their silly cotton shoes, leaped along stepping-stones, purposely put beside these long-established mud-sinks. Women were at work in the fields and bearing burdens along the road, hobbling smartly on poor dwarfed feet, each one with her hair dressed in an elaborate '^ magpie tail " and decorated with flowers, even to the woman who, yoked in company with a blindfolded donkey, was grinding meal on a stone table in a farm-house yard. The cook and the boy had been sent on ahead, and when we had crossed a wrecked stone bridge and gone half-way up Sha-ho's deep ditch street, a turn into the yard of an inn found tiffin ready to serve in the bare room of honor at the upper end of the court. The yard was filled with the outfit required to take four people and two servants on a four days' journey, the mattresses, bedding, food, cooking-uten- sils, and tableware all having to be brouglit with us from Peking. Our animals fed in full view as we fed, and hideous black swine wallowed and rooted in THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA 233 the same central court, which was securely shut off from the street by ponderous barred gates. Sha-ho, the Sandy River, flows by another branch in a shallow bed on the other side of the village, and was once spanned by a splendid stone bridge whose middle sections still stand. Floods have swept around and washed away either approach, leaving a bridge without ends standing in midstream, islanded by the little mud-flood called a river. The mythical marble beasts that once guarded the sloping cause- ways of approach lie broken with other blocks and rubbish ; even imperial tablets are half embedded in the clay banks, and but few carved parapets and panels remain. The thick stone slabs of this road- way, which the least care would have preserved for all time, are now thrown at every angle, and over their protruding ends and edges the animals pick their way, and only the iron-bound Peking cart could survive such wrecks of roads. The passenger crawls into a mule-litter while it rests on the ground, it is lifted up, and the shafts at each end are fastened to the mules' collars. To en- ter or leave the litter afterward seems a problem, but the driver bends his knee, and one steps up on it and crawls in head first, on all fours, as ignominiously as into the Peking cart. The mule-litter has points of comfort, and affords a crude sort of luxury after the harsh bells have been removed from the fore and aft mule. With mattresses, pillows, and fur wraps, one may recline at ease or sit erect, watching every- thing ahead and on either side througli the sliding glass windows. With the steady, even steps of well- 234 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE trained mules, one can read comfortably, or more comfortably be soothed asleep by the gentle, easy motion of the deliberate right-foot, left-foot, right- foot, left-foot of the long-eared motive power. As we neared the hills, flocks of sheep and herds of ponies passed us in clouds of golden dust, driven by sliaggy Mongols, and endless files of camels, loaded with furs, wool, salt, and coal, came down from Mon- golia, the Mang-i-Mang of their bells beating slowly in the air. Then camels, and camels, and more camels went up with their loads of brick-tea, the easy-going, slow-footed, swaying beasts moving in such automatic regularity that, watching them in the meUow autumn afternoon sun, one dozed away, hyp- notized by the steady metronome stroke of the cara- van's tread. At sunset, when the hills were at hand, and had turned sapphire and intensest violet, with a sharp chill in their long shadows, we came to Nankou, and stopped at an inn near the massive city gate. The ruined watch-towers on the hills above and the crum- bled towers of tlie town wall are but first of the chain of forts, walls, and defenses which the Ming em- perors built in the pass to keep back the Mongol Ta- tars, wliose dynasty they had overthrown. From earliest times, the ravaging and conquering horsemen from the plains have poured down through this nar- row Nankou Pass to the Great Plain of China, as Greeks, l\n-sians, Mongols, and Afghans have come down tlirougli the Khyber Pass to India. Nankou's defenses made it the Jamrud of tliis pass, and in the heart of tlif df'filc Wwn^ is n, great fort, (•()iT('sponding to THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA 237 Ali Musjid in the Khyber. This narrow Nankou, which leads through the hills for fifteen miles to the vast grass plains of Mongolia, is a lesser affair in every way than the Khyber, but in some of its wilder parts it quite reminds one of that wild gateway to India. It is a gloomy, desolate little canon for the greater part, but travel through it is safe, brigandage is un- known, and there are no soldiers in evidence along the line. One goes up the pass on any day without escort or arms, and the caravans jog their way uncon- cernedly, not hastening to the shelter of fortified se- rais before sunset from necessity. No one on the road glares at the foreigner with such hatred and ferocity as the Afridis and Afghans do on the two days of the week that the Khyber is open and guarded, sentineled every hundred yards, and each vis- itor provided with an armed sowar. Beyond Nankou, also, lies Russia ; the northwestern gateway to China an exact matchpiece for the one to India ; the path- way of Kublai Khan and all the conquering Tatars into this rich empire of the East far easier than the pathway of Alexander and the Great Mogul into India. As the hills overhanging Nankou gi'ew blue-black, a huge, pinkish-white moon rose above the horizon haze on the eastern plain. The white moonlight and the long northern afterglow gave us the chance to explore the dilapidated old town. Under the great vaulted arch of the city gate the shadows and darkness were intense, and one had to feel his steps carefully over broad flagstones, worn smoother than glass by the spongy bare feet of camels, as oily and 238 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE slippery as if woru by human feet. A shaggy knee touched me in the depths of the black vault, a great head swayed over my head, and, without any noise or warn- ing, we found ourselves slipping about in darkness, mixed up with a line of camels. They came on and on irresistibly, with that fixed automatic gait, push- ing against their leaders, rubbing their packs, groan- ing, and showing their yellow teeth and frothing lips as tlieir drivers tried to check and straighten them in line again. We cared no more for local color, nor for provincial life ; for seeing if any foreign goods were for sale, or if any foreign ideas had penetrated those medieval gates. The inn-yard was filled with our carts and litters, and, in the stream of light playing out from the cook- house, carters and muleteers sat on their heels and watched the gifted Liu (" Ever-bubbling Fountain ") evolve the same elaborate dinner of civilization we should have had in Peking. Our apartments of honor at the upper end of the court had each a stone plat- form-bed, or kang, on which our mattresses were laid. Our inn was tolerably clean, because it, with all the inns on the way to Siberia, had just been officially visited and scraped, cleaned, scrubbed, and put in so- called order for Count Cassini, l)earing to St. Peters- burg that famous convention by which China signed away all Manchuria in the guise of a railway conces- sion, in return for nothing at all— the reward for the Shimonoseki protest. The cobwebs and rubbish-heaps were gone from the rooms of honor in every inn on this end of the overland road to Europe ; fresh ])aper had been ])asted on window-frames and lattices, and THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA 239 doors had been mended after a fashion. Country- travel in China is ahnost tolerable when one can have a dreaded and triumphant envoy as avant-eourier, and at dinner we formally wished health and long life to the victor of the bloodless campaign, the uncon- scious rejuvenator of a long chain of Chinese inns. Before daylight, the nosing of a donkey roused one of our party, who found that during the night the de- crepit door had sagged open, and little four-foot had also enjoyed the bedchamber put in order for the great envoy. A candle-light breakfast and a sunrise start took us through Nankou's suburbs early and started us on up the rugged defile that leads to the Pa-ta-ling Gate in the Great Wall. Recent chronicles of travel had told of the awful condition of the flood-wrecked road through this pass, but a progressive mandarin coming to this Nankou district began road-making in a serious way, and a toll of a few cash on each passing animal soon paid for a new road, which was as smooth, well gi'aded, and well drained as roads were four centuries ago. The steep and bare hills rose higher as the defile narrowed ; walls and towers began to show, curving over, up, and down the hills— battlemented walls that came from nowhere and ran there too— purposeless, disconnected, picturesque old walls that reached down and encircled a village, ran up and bristled with watch- towers, and disported their ponderous lines in ex- travagant loopings and leapings in precipitous places where only goat-men could have built. Tliere were views suggesting Italian hilltop fortresses around 13 240 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE Chu-yuug-kuan, the midway fort, a half-deserted place with double walls and strong towers. One gate- way of the fourteenth century, elaborately sculptured on its outer arches, is lined with carved tablets, where Buddhist inscriptions are repeated in the strange let- terings of six languages— Sanskrit, Chinese, Mongol, Tibetan, Uigur, and Niuchih— for the benefit of those people passing through. Originally, this decorated arch was only the foundation of a noble pagoda built by the Mings, but obligingly pulled down when the Mongols refused to pass under this triumphal spire, which, standing on the head of the dragon of Chihli, secured a good fung-shui for the whole province. Wayfarers drank tea at stone tables outside the inns, and shaggy Mongols, afoot, munched at the rosaries of crab-apples strung around their necks, or pared and cut away at huge persimmons as they walked, strew- ing the path with great flakes of the red-gold peel. In serais along the way, camels were resting for a day behind breastworks of brick-tea, and Mongols lounged in the traditional black felt tents as if on the great, grass plain. The pass grew wilder and more lonely beyond that once great garrison town ; all signs of cultivation disappeared, and save for some rock-hewn, pinnacle- perched temples and holy inscriptions carved deep in the solid rock by the Ming builders and rebuilders of the maze of defensive walls, there were no signs of hab- itation for miles. As the defile grew narrower, the road became a mere cut or torrent-bed between precipitous walls of gloomy and savage aspect. Tlien, ahead and beyond, massive walls began to appear, true Chinese THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA 243 walls, Chang Tangs, Great Walls. Loops, sections, and running spurs of battlemented walls appeared here, there, and everywhere, and then disappeared entirely — disconnected, aimless, unexpected pieces of masonry, that gave picturesque sky-lines to each bar- rier range and hill profile. At the Cha-tao or Pa-ta-ling Gate, at the top of Nankou Pass, where the Great "Wall actually barred out and held the nomad hordes at bay for ages, there is a little level plateau, or amphitheater, encircled by bastions and defended by massive towers. The wall crosses the pass squarely, a vast gateway giving one a view out and down to the green hills and valleys of farthest Chihli and Inner Mongolia. The bare arch remains, but its iron-studded gates are gone, and there is no garrison, not a sentry, nor a sign of life. The parapets and towers are crumbling a little ; weeds and bushes grow everywhere, and the silence of the high pass, the deserted road, and the empty towers make this upland of the enchanted castles more impressive than even that far-away sea end of the wall at Shanhaikwan. The ^vall sweeps up sharply from either side of the gate, making easy tangents and angles from tower to tower as it climbs the hills, and with all its colossal size and huge impressiveness it is most graceful, winding in long, slow sweeps and curves over the hills and far-away heights. The deserted towers are melancholy reminders of past defenders, who bugled and battled with the Ta- tar hordes for ages ; and European imagination, by tremendous effort, can repeople these battlements and the valleys beyond with the opposing forces. No 244 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE one can fail to be impressed with the Great Wall at Cha-tao. The civilian feels the charm of its tremen- dous sweeps and curves, the picturesqueness and the poetry of the ancient place, while military men and engineers are possessed and spellbound by this grand monument of defensive warfare. General Wil- son declared that, though "laid out in total defi- ance of the rules of military engineering, yet the walls are so solid and inaccessible, and the gates so well arranged and defended, that it would puzzle a modern army with a first-class siege-train to get through it, if any effort whatever were made for its defense." It was plain to him that, in the old days of the wild horsemen, even men armed with stones could have held it, only treachery or gross neglect ever leaving it possible for the tribesmen to possess or pass it. This magnificent wall, that bars the great trade route, is not the old original wall of the Emperor Shi-Hwang-Ti (215 B.C.), but merely the inner Great Wall, a modern seventh-century affair, splendidly rebuilt by the Mings in the fifteenth century, a loop to provide a second and most effectual barrier against the Mongol Tatars, who for centuries had crossed the wall and poured in through that gateway to the Great Plain of China. That very earliest, original wall, built by Alexander the Great's contemporai-y, is met at Kalgan, a two days' journey beyond the village of Cha-tao, but is so ruined, so nearly a rubbish-heap and earth embankment, that it is a very poor sight after this stately wall of Yunglo. A railway line will surelv be built alon56 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE ** No sabe other tomb. No sabe why. Why for missis wanchee know so much thing ? " And then I let the dead Ming sovereigns go their splendid way, satisfied myself to go the cut-and-dried route to this one splendid and satisfying sepuleher of that enlightened one who rebuilt and beautified Peking. He must himself have been pleased with this series of red-walled, yellow-tiled, marble-broidered halls, with the magnificent avenue of approach which we were yet to see, having taken the sight in reverse order, in true Chinese rule of inversion. The other twelve sepulchers are said to be each a companion-piece or copy of the other, and none as splendid as the Yunglo temples. Some of the Ming tombs have been despoiled to beautify the tombs of the Mancliu dynasty, seventy miles away from Peking in another direction. The admirable Kienlung is accused of this sacrilege, but the Mancliu sepulchers are so thoroughly guarded that no one knows how splendid they may be. Thirteen was an ominous number for the Mings, for when thirteen of their line had been interred in this valley of tombs, the dynasty fell, the last of the Mings hanged himself to a tree, and there was none to build him a tomb in this valley. The two Ming emperors who ruled at Nan- king are buried there, and those tombs were models for these northern sepulchers. Every one of these golden, tip-tilted, imperial yel- low roofs around the valley is sagging to decay j grass, weeds, and small bushes are breaking tlie tiles apart, and tliey fall like golden leaves. Each ^-ear the ex(iuisitcly carved white marble balustrades lean CATCHING SIXGIXG INSECTS. THE VALLEY OP THE MING TOMBS 259 away, topple to a fall, and it was surely a compassion- ate American who wanted to buy and take away the dragon-crusted rail and posts from one of the Yuuglo terraces. A few years more of Manehu neglect and these Ming temples will be as the Taipings left those at Nanking, and it is a place to ponder on the little- ness of greatness and the brevity of all things, even in the long-lived empire. The still, mellow autumn noon, with the wind sighing softly in the old, old cedars, could dispose one to more reveries if the Ming emperors were nearer to us, if any one of them had been a living reality to even medieval European minds, if a legend or historical incident from one's school-books in any way identified them or provoked associations. The detachment is too extreme, and the mental effort required is too great, to give any one of these Sons of Heaven form and individuality. Only by their porcelains, their blue and white, their egg-shell, their soft paste, their "five-color," and their bronzes does the Western world know them or recall the names that ran contemporary with Henry VIII and Elizabeth, with Columbus, Ferdinand, and Isabella, the dynasty ending soon after the Pilgrims had landed at Plymouth Rock. While we lounged in the sunshine, the muleteers crept cautiously over the grass, hunting each cricket or insect musician that set up its little pipe, and by the time we left, each cricket-catcher had a dozen or more russet and brown-black little fiddlers tied fast along twigs, and was gleeful at the prospective profits in the Peking cricket-market. When our procession had gone a little way from the 260 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE gates, two keepers emerged from the gi'ove and handed from their sleeves all the yellow tiles I had wanted. " Twenty cents one piecee," said the boy, with such a gleam of triumph in his eye that there must then have been a considerable profit in the transaction. The day had grown more still and golden, the whole earth and air " sang " in the mellow sunshine, and even the poor ragged hind at his plow stopped to wipe his brow and gaze upon the great plain that spread away — white hazes, the lakes of mirage in farthest distance, and Peking's towers glittering and flashing heliograph signals in the midst. The stone road ended in grass-grown ruts, and twice we wound about to cross dry gullies where stone bridges stood detached in the ehasra, footwalks and parapets ending in air. We went under a three- arched pailow and down that strange avenue of ani- mals, where six colossal warriors in ornamental dress stand on each side, and gigantic horses, kilins, ele- phants, camels, unicorns, and lions face in double pairs for a half-mile along this triumphant way. A pavilion with an imperial tablet resting on the back of a gigantic tortoise, more bridges in ruin, and then rose the solid tower of the Red Gateway, where the inner park wall used to stand, and where the imperial trains rested in great barracks long gone to ruin. At a farther distance, the great five-arched pailow stretcliod its marble skeleton of honor across the sky, the larg<'st and noblest arch or gate of its kind in China. Tliis quintuple gate stands at the edge of a first bench or tei-race of tlie higli plain, and when one ap- proaches the Ming tombs properly from the front, THE VALLEY OF THE MING TOMBS 261 instead of backward as the Chinese guides prefer to lead one, it is traced like a gigantic seal character against the heavens. It marks the edge of the impe- rial demesne and is the official entrance to the valley of tombs. One of Kienlung's many poems is cut on its central tablet, in praise of the dynasty his own ancestors cast out, although the pailow was erected two centuries before the imperial poet thus associated himself with the Mings. We crept at a tortoise pace to the tall gray walls of Chang-ping-chou, the '^Jumping Joe" of the globe- trotter, and wound in through its deep gateway and across the town to the south gate— a quiet, old pro- vincial town, with deep roadways, high sidewalks, and blank walls to the street, but with green shade-trees giving it some character. It seemed just the retired old place in which to grow poets and great scholars, and where philosophers might live in peace, all the town's activity and excitement centering that day at a chestnut and persimmon market outside the gates. We returned to the same inn at Sha-ho with quite a home-coming sense ; and. after chestnuts and tea, and a walk to the ruin of the beautiful carved bridge be- yond the town, watched there the sunset across the open plain, that was worthy pageant to close such an autumn day. The full moon rose rapidly, and, in its silver light and against the lingering red band above the horizon, there moved the silent, fascinating cara- vans of dreams. Gaunt silhouettes of camels filed on and on, each one tlie twin image of the one gone be- fore, each treading the same measured pace, each footfall as silent, each scornful lip the same. Ragged 14 262 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIEE paper cylinders of lanterns showed a feeble orange glow here and there as they dangled inefficiently from the packs, and a rude bell clanged from the shaggy neck of one beast in fifty. All stepped and kept automatic time to it. Shoi'e-shuff, shove-shuff, went their soft, padded feet, as they walked beside us. More and more caravans came by as it grew darker and cooler— mysterious automata from shadow-land, surely, that soon disappeared into the rim of frost haze around the plain, the Ming-Mang of their harsh bells softening musically in distance. While we dined at the top of the court, with the door wide open to the moon-lighted yard, we could look over into the restaurant office, where the lights flamed on the dark bodies and yellow faces of mule- teers and common travelers. We could just discern shadowy camel-trains passing in the street beyond, a slow, methodical progress of dark shapes for hours, with rarely the clang of a bell. Through pillow and mattress and kang came the strangest sound-sensa- tions all night, the beat of those soft, padded feet sending sound-waves through solid earth, stone, and cement that the air would not carry. ThumbJe, th unible, thnmhle, fJinmble, went the continuous, rhythmical beat of their footfalls, unearthly sounds that rang in one's ears, beat on one's head in time with the pulses— a sound felt rather than heard, for if one sat up and strained tlie ears to listen there was only a far clang- ing bell to be heard. This wireless, underground telephone communication was so distinct and so in- sistent that it forced itself on one's attention, excited and kept one awake more than loud noises could have THE VALLEY OP THE MING TOMBS 265 done. Our donkeys lifted up their voices one by one until some one hit them. Then they sobbed them- selves in diminuendo into silence ; but the mysterious tJmmble, thunible of the camels' muffled tread came up through the kang all night — a sound of witchery and mystery. One felt as if all the camels of Asia were counterfiliug on the Peking plain ; as if all Mongolia were afoot; as if the whole Russian army had come down on that moon-lighted night— and all China none the wiser. XIX SUBURBAN TEMPLES ^E followed bypaths and cut across fields the next morning, the same animated groups in the harvest-fields, by thresh- ing-floors, and in the village markets, declaring the season's abundant crops, until China seemed a veritable land of plenty, over- flowing with grain and fruits ; yet thousands were then facing starvation by the flooded Tientsin and Yellow rivers. A glittering object at the back of a cart crawling northward caught the eye for an hour, and days afterward we identified it as the woven-wire mattress of an American tourist, who, having seen one kang in Peking, hitched his wagon to the patent bed of his own country and rested luxuriously every night in Chinese inns. In the fourth inner court of Ta-chung-ssu, the Temple of the Great Bell, a fine, red-eaved, hexagonal building holds that world's wonder, the greatest feat of artistic bronze-casting to be seen even in China. Ta- Chung, or Ta-Toong, the Great Bell, swings down to one's level, its great lip is pointed and recurved like a 266 SUBURBAN TEMPLES 267 flower-petal, and the whole surface, inside and outside, is covered with gracefully modeled characters. Each square, strongly drawn seal character is a half-inch long ; each one of the eighty-four thousand characters is as true and clear-cut, as sharply outlined, as if dashed by a master hand with a brush on paper. The whole of a Buddhist book of sutras is graven there in a beautiful raised text that a blind scholar might lovingly read. This gigantic campanula's cup in bronze is one of Yunglo's master castings of the year 1400, and differ- ent writers give different measurements — fourteen, fifteen, seventeen, and eighteen feet in height, but all agreeing that it is twelve feet in diameter and nine inches thick at the rim. One record says that all of Yunglo's great bells weigh one hundred and twenty thousand pounds each, and another record gives this bell a weight of eighty-seven thousand pounds. There is a companion bell in the palace garden at Peking, another in the big city Bell-tower, and a twenty -two- ton monster which Yunglo left behind when he moved from Nanking to the northern capital. This big bell outside Peking is said to be the largest hanging bell in the world. The big bell in the Kremlin at Moscow is greater in circumference and thicker at the rim, but that plain, graceless, dumpy lump of bell-metal with a broken edge is not to be compared with this beautiful inverted chalice, which from lip to loop is a mass of finest relief-work, and bell-making and bronze-casting have never gone, cannot go, be- yond this masterpiece. The big bell at Mandalay is twelve feet high, sixteen feet in diameter, and from 268 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE six to twelve inclies thick, and the big bell of the Chioin temple in Kioto, best known of big bells in the Far East, is but ten feet high, nine feet in diameter, and nine and a half inches thick. Chioin's sweet- sounding monster is only a plain bronze cylinder com- pared with this fretted flower-cup, but one longs to hear Yunglo's bell speak before he dethrones Chioin's enchanter. The bell is rung only at the annual festi- val or when the Emperor commands his representative to pray for rain, to call upon Buddha and all the bo- dhisattvas for aid, and then its voice is said to be heard all over the city and the Peking plain. Eight men were killed at the casting, and their spirits, still im- prisoned in the metal, may be heard in the last vibra- tions. A small hole at the top of the bell prevents the sound-waves from bursting the cup when the bell is struck too hard or the strokes are too near together, and hawk-eyed priests showed us how to throw cash through that needle's eye and secure good luck and good crops for the year — and when a shot missed the bell's eye it went equally to the good of the temple treasury. All the smaller ornaments and images, the desira- ble temple properties, had gone to the curio-market, and only the life-size deities, the gilded thrones and clumsy fragments of the sacred mise en scene, re- mained. A semicircle of wolfish priests stared stonily at us as we tiffined in the outer court, and wolfish dogs did as their masters. The dogs slunk after and leaped in a snapping, yelping circle around one stran- ger who ventured to the next court alone, and the priests only turned apathetic looks that way, indiffer- SUBURBAN TEMPLES 269 ent whether the dogs ate the foreigner or not. It was all in a day with them — other foreigners had been there before, other foreigners would come again. We went across stubble, sweet-potato and peanut fields to the set of cart-tracks converging toward the Anting Gate, and reached the Yellow Temple. A lama sentry had given the alarm, and at the end of a long stone passage there was wrangling and snarling through the crevice of a gate until we paid the dear admission fee and went in, tagged by a crowd of filthy loafers whom the lamas would not, dared not, exclude. We saw but a small corner of this vast establishment, which has been a headquarters of Buddhism since its foundation in Kanghsi's time, the haven of visiting lamas, and place of pious pilgrimage for Mongols and Tibetans coming to Peking. In the first shaded court stands the beau- tiful marble dagoba erected to the memory of the Tibetan tesho-lama, uncle of the dalai-lama and sec- ond only to him in that hierarchy, who came to visit the Emperor Kienlung in 1780, and died of smallpox after a few weeks' stay. After Kanghsi, Kienlung, '^ the Magnificent, Great Ruler of Asia," has perhaps more of personal identity to us than other occupants of the dragon throne. The Jesuits have written fulh'^ of him and his court at Jehol, where Lord Macartney also visited him, and George Staunton described the embassy's reception. Kien- lung sent an expedition to Tibet and across the Himalayas into India to punish the Goorkhas for in- vading Tibet, and the barriers he then established for the lama's land have preserved it as a forbidden 270 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE country. Devout Buddhist as he was, gossip said that Kienhuig wearied and rebelled against prostrat- ing his imperial person and worshiping this " Gem of Learning," and deliberately poisoned his superior guest. Turnei*'s " Embassy to Tibet " tells of this banian bogdo and his fortress of a lamasery at De- garchi, and of the erection of this memorial dagoba by his pious host. The lama's body was sent to Lhasa in a golden coffin, and his infected garments were incased in another precious casket and depos- ited under the dagoba at the Yellow Temple. The pinnacled monument of white marble, with its four attendant pagodas and the fretted white pailow, are raised on a stone-and-marble terrace, and from its wave-patterned base to the gilded tee thirty feet in air, it is as fair and perfect as when finished, chis- eled all over with reliefs as fine and white as frost traceries. There are bands of symbols, diaper-work, and inscriptions, eight panel scenes from the life of the great lama, and besides the Buddhist trinity in the high medallion, Kwanyin and the company of bo- dhisattvas in the cloud-laud of Nirvana are seated on its successive stories. Each tiny figure is as exqui- sitely finished as an ivory carving, and the lines of floral symbols, the bands of svastikas and ])henixes, medallions and geometrical designs, make it a very text-book and grammar of Chinese and liiuddhist ornament. Its perfect whole shows what we know by the fragments rescued from Amrawati and Gand- liara ; and the fine carvings, the snowy r('lief of white on white, recall Mogul tombs and palaces at Agra and Delhi. It is an object so exquisite and so per- SUBUEBAN TEMPLES 271 feet that one feels concern at its being left in the open air, that it is not kept under roof or treasured under glass in some great Western museum. It jars on one, too, to see this matchless example of pure Buddhist art tagged over with scraps of cloth and paper, to find a clumsy, modern bronze incense-burner before it, and a grimy glass box of artificial flow- ers set as an offering before this superb reliquary; and the jeers and jabber, the insolent elbowing of the greasy lamas and their apish neighbors, grate on one just a little more. We were shown into one great hall where the three conventional images of Chinese Buddhist altars smile and brood serene, with their attendant lohans or ar- hats at either side— the Buddhist trinity of Fo, Fa, and Seng, or Buddha, the Law, and the Priests ; the Past, the Present, and Maitreya, the Future Buddha, or '' Buddha and his wives," as this temple trinity was once described by an English officer who wrote a book about his life in China. The clustering roofs and the two tall flagstaffs of honor at the distant south gate tell how vast the yellow establishment is ; but we saw nothing more of its halls of worship or temple treasures, and reasonable offers could not get us a sight of the " traveler's palace," whose richly decorated rooms were the headquarters of Sir Hope Grant in 1860. Nor would they show the bronze- foundry where bells, images, temple vessels, and orna- ments are made for the Buddhists of Mongolia and Tibet. Only a few years since, the Yellow Temple foundry cast and shipped away an image of Buddha over twenty feet high, for which a temple had been 272 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE erected on the Lhasa road— the faith still real and living in Mongolia and Tibet, however apathetic and unbelieving degenerate China may have become. The copper forms which are the base of the brilliant cloi- sonne and painted enamels made in Peking are fur- nished from this same foundiy, and they follow good old conventional forms. The best of the old enamels date from the early Ming period, the golden age of Yunglo ; but there was a revival in Kienlung's time, and his Jesuit artists furnished medallion and other designs for painted enamels without cloisons, which resemble the old Limoges work. As in the porce- lain decorations which they also inspired, the Jesuit or " missionary colors " distinctly mark the enamels of this period; and certain intense pinks and the paler rose du Barry, the rose-of-gold hues that are so unmistakable, mark the exquisite little pieces of this later period. All over the Peking plain are temples and monas- teries whose revenues have failed, whose worshipers have fallen away, and in whose solitude a few infirm, degenerate priests manage to exist. There is the Wo- fu-ssu, the Temple of the Sleeping Buddha, where a recumbent image fifty feet in length dreams in Nir- vana, as in the shrines and cave temples of Ceylon ; and all along the line of the hills are sacred groves whose temples are lialf forgotten. Any other govern- ment and people would proudly preserve these monu- ments of their nobler past, but the Cliinese reverence for antiquity is just as false and artificial as some others of their great virtues when reduced to the prac- tical test. An architectural treasure of the great cen- SUBURBAN TEMPLES 273 turies of Buddhism is the Pi-yun-ssu, or Azure Cloud Monastery, a religious foundation of Kienlung's time, whose marble pailows, dagobas, pagodas, and temples are in perfect condition, splendid specimens of Bud- dhist architecture and ornament. There the great Kienlung himself sits among the arhats, or expectant bodhisattvas, in the Hall of Five Hundred Genii, as he sits with those other gilded companies of saints by brevet at Hangchow and Canton. Other halls with their thousands of gilded images gave the Azure Cloud unique attractions until, with the decay of all things, material and spiritual, this great treasury of religious art began to respond to the market demand for ob- jects of vertu, until the gods of the Azure Cloud have crossed the seas and gone everywhere in the Western world. Once, in going out of the city to the western suburbs, there was unusual stir and motion in the city streets near the gates, but nothing could induce boy or carter to inquire if an imperial procession was to pass that way. " S'pose I speakee him what time Emperor go walkee, my catchee big bobbery. Soldier say, 'Hai ! what for you wanchee knowf You come yamun side.' And then he lock me in; bamboo me ; maybe kill " ; and the coward grew so pale and ill at ease that I gave up insisting and went on outside for a day of suburban temples. Outside the walls we met red-satin-clad bearers bringing in empty yellow chairs shrouded in yellow cloths, and carts as carefully covered followed. Late in the afternoon we found the roadside from Wu-ta-ssu into the north- west gate gay with holiday crowds, Manchu women 27-i CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE and children in carts and litters and on foot, all arrayed in their most brilliant clothes. Outside the walls they could view- the imperial train from a respect- ful distance, and it had been a regular Manchu holi- day for crowds that watched the modest retinue of the then retired Empress Dowager returning to E-ho Park after a two days' visit to the city palace. This was the only occasion on which we saw anything like idle pleasuring, or families off for a country jaunt. There were never pilgrims nor holiday companies encoun- tered at the temples in the suburbs, and the charms of country life do not seem to be envied by the mil- lion and a third dwellers in the two great walled cities. The love of nature and landscape charms which the Buddhist religion fostered and encouraged, and which is so pronounced in the ancient classic poetry, seems to have died out with the great faith itself, one more evidence of present decadence. XX TO SHANGHAI ^HEN one has endured much of prim- itive travel in China, the railway seems surely to be inventive genius's greatest gift to man. Having delayed too long in Peking, winter came in one Novem- ber night, succeeding a dull, hazy sunset that her- alded a dust-storm. It was a baby blizzard in a way, with dust instead of dry snow to smother and blind one, and how our chair-bearers got to Tung- chow through that featureless, brown world we never knew, for we could not see. Gusts of icy wind made the sedans sway and the bearers stagger, and dust penetrated curtains and wraps and veils until all were of one color, when the procession filed out on the broad river-bank at Tungchow, deserted of its crowds and caravans, while the icy wind from the desert shrieked across it and whirled its surface in air. With every crevice and knot-hole of the boats pasted up, the dust had insinuated itself everywhere, and although the servants had spent the day clear- ing awa}" the accumulations, all food was as Dead Sea apples. 275 276 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE Boats were tied fast ten and twenty rows deep, and all activity was suspended on account of the weather. At sunset, when the wind went down and dust-clouds circled slowly, the envoy's ensign was hoisted on the scattered boats of the fleet, and by the most ingenious poling and WTiggling they were extricated from the jam and strung out in line in the open river. For the next cold, bleak day we hurried down-stream with current and sail, and at the second sunrise the vice- roy's steam-launch found us, hoisted the foreign flag, and sped shrieking to Tientsin with the fleet in tow— a certain triumphant convention in the envoy's keep- ing,- a last victory of his nation in China, and cause for this courtesy. Cargo-boats cleared away promptly without any hails or back talk from their skippers or trackers ; for some half -submerged boats loaded with brick-tea, run down by the yamun launch the night before, pointed the usual moral against boatmen dis- puting right of way with the viceroy's august fire-boat. One gets idea of the volume of foreign trade in China as he watches ocean-going steamers clear away by twos and threes daily from Tientsin for Shanghai, and vice versa; and with the opening of the Pei-ho River in spring, twenty ships have left Shanghai in one day, bound for the northern port. With winter coming on, Cliefoo, the one seaside summer resort of all China before Peitaho was known, was a deserted, wind-swept settlement, coolies on the foreshore, and the wind-gages and signal-flags on the top of the hill where the consuls live, the only moving things in sight. The summer hotels on the farther bathing- beach were closed, and a few men-of-war lay at the TO SHANGHAI 277 far naval anchorage. Despite the opening of Kiao- ehau, on the east coast of the province, Chefoo has not lost its trade, and straw braid and bean-cake, raw silks and pongees, continue to pour in from the back country. Bales of straw braid the size of haystacks, done up loosely in matting, threatened to fall apart as they were hoisted on board. " All the braid has to be repacked in Shanghai," said one depressed shipper of such cargo. " In all these years we have not been able to induce them to deliver us anything but these huge^ untidy bundles." When he was asked why the ship coaled at Chefoo instead of at Tongku, the port of the Chihli coal-mines, he wearily replied : "We get the Japanese coal here cheaper than the Kaiping or Tongshan coal at their own docks at Tongku. They always cheat in the weight and quality of Chinese coal." The sight of the port, the sign-board and label of Chinese official intelligence, a handwriting on the wall that is the last brand of imbecility, is " the great wall of Chefoo"— a twelve-foot construction franti- cally built from sea-beach to hilltops east of the city to keep out the Japanese in 1894. With a harbor full of neutral men-of-war coming and going, with an army-corps landed, great guns thundering at Wei-hai-wei, forty miles down the coast, and Port Arthur, a hundred miles across the gulf, already fallen, mandarin minds could just rise to this prehis- toric mode of defense— a trifling bit of masonry that troops could surmount at parade in unbroken com- panies, and naval guns in the harbor could breach by the furlong. This Chefoo wall of a.d. 1894 does not 278 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE argue much for Chinese intelligence. Fifteen years ago, Chefoo was renowned for its fruits, among them being apricots that could have won first prizes at CaUfornia fairs. These resulted from the efforts of an American missionary who brought out seeds and cuttings and taught the farmers how to graft and improve the quality of their fruit. When that kind teacher left, the fruit-growers ceased their efforts, and things drifted back to their original condition. It was not '' old custom " to graft and fuss with the trees in that way. One gets a glimpse of ships and flags and forts as he passes the narrow entrance of the bay of Wei-hai- wei, where great deeds were done in the bitter winter of 1894-95, and the brave Admiral Ting, almost the one Chinese hero of the war, took his own life when all was lost. Under British lease, Wei-hai-wei has been rebuilt and improved, and in summer is head- quarters and rendezvous for the British Asiatic fleet, and general sanatorium for the fleet and the Hongkong garrison. One sees nothing of Kiao-chau after rounding that dread promontory of Shantung, where the German gunboat litis was so tragically lost, and until its new tenants have carried out their plan of making it a '' German Hongkong," it will be long before Kiao- chau comes within the ordinary traveler's ken. When it has passed this first discouraging, sickly stage of its beginning, when trade has come and railways are built inland, many of the interesting places in Shan- tung will ])e('ome accessible. The birthplace and the tomb of Conf ludus are in this province, and the res- TO SHANGHAI 279 idence of his seventy-sixth direct male descendant, ^ the ever-sacred Duke Kung, whom General Wilson and several foreign travelers have visited. /The great sacred White Mountain of pilgrimage offers a picturesque excursion, but the Shantung heart is so hardened to any and every foreigner that a generation must pass before there is even chill welcome. Only unrestricted foreign control of the province and the continued efforts of foreign engineers with great financial re- sources can ever restrain the unmanageable Yellow River, " China's Sorrow," which anniially overflows its banks and drives thousands of people from their homes, which has had two outlets to the Yellow Sea, another on the Gulf of Pechili, and for a time poured through the bed of the Pei-ho or Tientsin River. There are embankments of the last century that rise and reach like ranges of hills across Shantung, but Chinese destructiveness and stupidity have even worn and cut through them with cart-roads, and when the great floods come the gaps are feebly stopped with millet-stalks, and the weary old Li Hung Chang is the engineer sent to inspect them ! Any government, any other despotism, any usurpation would be better for China than the one from which it now suffers, and if German militarism can subdue, train, and regener- ate the people of Shantung, and German engineering curb and confine the Yellow River, German protection and absorption of this province will be for Shantung's and the world's advantage. Shanghai, while not a place of tourist attractions, is one of the greatest surprises to the newcomer in the East. At the Yangtsze's mouth, steamers move 16 280 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE across a glaring expanse of yellow-brown mud, the Wusung adds another turbid flood, and low-lying raud shores give poor promise of the laud beyond. Sixteen miles below Shanghai large and heavily laden mail-steamers anchor at the Wusung bar, lighter their cargoes, and send their passengers up by tender. This "■ Heaven-sent Barrier" was made more effectual during the French war of 1884 by driving piles and sinking junks across the narrow channel, while its protector, the Celestial gunboat, modestly named '' The Terror of Western Nations/' sailed away to farther, safer, inland reaches. During the Japanese war, England warned Japan away from Shanghai and stationed a fleet at the mouth of the Yangtsze. When the Japanese declared Shanghai outside the sphere of military intentions, the foreign community recognized this exemption by a total disregard of the laws of neutrality. Shanghai was recruiting-station and a base of supplies for the Chinese army, the neutral flag covering every munition and contraband article. Every foreign resident loudly prophesied the certain victory of the Chinese and complete anni- hilation of their opponents. They had lived in China and knew the people, they said. After exasperating the Japanese in countless ways, England as coolly left China to her fate at the close of the war, and from that period of vacillation and inaction and ap- parent unfriendliness to both nations date the seri- ous attacks upon England's supreme influence and prestige in the Far East. The first railway in China was built from Wusung to Shanghai in 187G, and was enthusiastically patro- TO SHANGHAI 281 nized by the Chinese. After an accident and riots, both instituted by the literati, it was bought by the Chinese, who tore up the rails and threw them in the river, and sent the locomotives to Formosa, where they rusted on the beach. The railway was rebuilt in 1898, many Chinese buying shares, and their peo- ple now crowd the cars ; but in the main, travelers prefer to remain with their belongings on the tender until they are landed in the heart of Shanghai. The river-banks, with their villages and fields of graves, grow busier as one ascends, the stream be- comes crowded with anchored ships, and shipyard hammering and the noises of industry fill the air. Factories, cotton-mills, and filatures line the shore, and the pervading hum and roar of progress and mod- ern industries oppress the ear until one can scarcely credit that this rushing, hustling, feverjshly busy place is in Asia at all. But the true flavor of China, that heavy, half -sickening smell of bean-oil, of incense- and opium-smoke, and of filthy human beings, per- vades the air and dispels any illusions. After the wharves there follows the fine Japanese consulate with its garden walls, and then the German consulate shows its flag from a splendid pile of build- ings on the river-front of the American Settlement. The British consulate is in a great park adjoining the Public Gardens in the British Settlement, and the American consulate occupies the upper floors of a business block in the side street of the British Settle- ment—ousted from the suitable compound it once occupied in the American Settlement, when the land- lord raised the rent. A rural Missouri congressman, as 282 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE well informed on Shanghai, or European life and con- ditions in the East, as a Shanghai comprador might be concerning Missouri facts, ran his pencil through the item in consular appropriations, and the Ameri- can flag was hauled down and raised over cheaper quarters outside the American Settlement. Shanghai, as the largest foreign settlement in the East, with a population of 2002 British, 357 Americans, and 2433 other Europeans, and a foreign import and export trade of forty million pounds sterling a year, has a fixed importance, a character and consequence, traditions and customs all its own. Half the foreign trade of China goes up and down the Wusung River, and the city's interests are all commercial, material, of the moment. Great fortunes are not made with the dazzling swiftness they were " before the cable " and " before Suez," but Shanghai is a home of Eastern luxury at least, and Shanghai society, taken too seri- ously by those who constitute it to be treated lightly in any by-chapter, is busy, brilliant, extravagant, and all-absorbing to its votaries, and is keyed to the pitch and tone and time of the social centers of the great- est velocity in the Western world. The tourist with- out entree to its hospitable circles finds few attractions or " sights " to entertain him in Shanghai, and the want of hotel accommodations speeds the pleasure- traveler on to Hongkong or Japan, so that Shanghai is, in a sense, almost off tlie tourist's grand route. There has been a city there since Chinese time was recorded, but there is nothing of scenery or land- scape ill all the neighborhood, the nearest hills, barely hillocks, lying tliirty miles away. One drives TO SHANGHAI 285 out the Bubbling Well Road, past miles of villas, and then past miles of dwarf cotton-fields dotted with an- cestral graves, to the American Episcopal College of St. John ; and one may drive to the Point, and to the French Jesuit College at Sicawei, and enjoy just the same rural prospects of depressing monotony, Shanghai is the '* model settlement," th« metropolis and emporium of the Far East. The original British and American concessions, lying side by side along the river-front, are now one international settlement, under the municipal control of a board of foreign consuls and residents. The original French conces- sion maintains its separate municipal government, and its three hundred and eighty-one French citizens are unwilling to sink themselves in the greater municipal- ity. In their quarter are qiiais and rues, and each street-comer has the blue-and- white signs of Paris ; but through its streets stream a motley crowd of Chi- nese, since it directly adjoins the native city. All three foreign concessions were originally intended for exclu- sive foreign residence ; but the Chinese, fleeing there for refuge by tens of thousands during the Taiping rebellion, discovered the advantages of foreign rule, and have since invaded every part of the settle- ments. They numbered two hundred and ninety- three thousand in 1895, all appreciating their immu- nity from mandarin extortions, amenable for their offenses to the Mixed Court, where consular officers sitting with a Chinese magistrate deal with Chi- nese delinquents. The space, liglit, and air, the clean- liness of those orderly streets, with their gas and electricity, water-supply and sewer system, do not so 286 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE greatly appeal to them, nor move them to better ways. They swarm and hive in the houses, overflow the doors and windows, and are Chinese to the last word. Shanghai settlement is the refuge and headquar- ters for all the Chinese progressives and reformers. There they print their audacious newspapers and magazines that tax the Empress Dowager, the Man- chus, and the literati with their malfeasances in plain terms, and in political vituperation out-yellow all the yellow journals of America. Rich and rascally Chinese from the farthest interior long to come and do come to Shanghai to enjoy their wealth in safety, or spend it in reckless dissipation, as the miners in Argonaut times went "down to the bay" and flung away their sudden fortunes at San Francisco. At the time of the Japanese war, there was an influx of rich and offi- cial Chinese to the settlement, anxious to safeguard their families and fortunes. Real estate rose enor- mously in value, thousands of houses have been built each year since the war without meeting the demand, and villas on Bubbling Well Road in which foreign families of three souls at most were crowded now shelter single Chinese families of eighteen or eighty " mouths." The settlement numbers scores of re- tired tao-tais and magistrates settled there with their families and ill-gotten gains in prosperous retirement. Where fashion drives, there " Chineses drive," and the Bubbling Well Road, once the resort of the high cart and the closed brougham of British good form and high life, now rattles with anything that can go on wheels and be crowded with gay and gilded TO SHANGHAI 287 ''young China," callow sinners and mature scoun- drels in splendid satins, all smoking large cigars, who have adopted and adapted all Western vices and modes of dissipation. They have their theaters and restaurants and gambling-houses, of course, and, in fine travesty of the foreign community, their " coun- try clubs" and tea-gardens, where young China en- joys cycloramas, spectacles, and distractions, varied with flower-shows very well worth seeing. This much of Western life they have approached to, but nothing so discourages one for the future of China and the chances of progress as this daily display of young China in its hours of ease. Combining all of domestic and imported depravity, these young Chi- nese of the merchant and comprador class, longest in contact with foreign ways, well entitle Shanghai to its repute in their world as the fastest and wickedest place in China. The Duke of Edinburgh and other experts and competent judges among foreign visitors long ago gave the model settlement the palm of the same unique distinction among foreign communities east of Suez. Shanghai is the headquarters station for nearly all the mission boards in China, and the local directory lists thirty-five separate establishments under the head of ''churches and missions," this bewildering number of roads to Christianity having drawn criti- cism from Dr. Henry Drummond and led others to wonder if missions could not accomplish more if each sect had one separate province or district to it- self, as mission work among American Indian tribes has been apportioned to the different denominations. 288 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE The Jesuit Mission at Sicawei has been in existence for more than a century, and confers benefits upon the foreign community in the observations and warn- ings issued from its meteorological observatory. The time-ball on the French bund, dropped by signal from Sicawei, regulates clocks, watches, and chronom- eters for the region, and under the direction of the learned Jesuits a complete system of observations is maintained along the China seas. It was the great astronomer, Padre Faura, of the Manila Obser- vatory, who first observed and deduced the laws of typhoons, and from his vantage-ground of Luzon, off which typhoons are bred and sent circling on their way, usually toward the Formosa Channel, telegraphed warnings to the China coast. The benefits to ship- ping were incalculable, and if the accuracy and time- liness of the Manila and Sicawei warnings had not been well enough established before, the memorable wreck of the P. & O. steamer Bokhara, which went to sea in the face of Sicawei warnings, taught mariners a lesson for all typhoon time. The stranger, of course, wishes to visit the old city of Shanghai, but he should repress his enthusiasm in the presence of the foreign resident, and never, under any circumstances, no matter what powerful let- ters he may present, what ties of kinship or bonds of old friendship he may claim, expect the foreign resi- dent to accompany him there. Nor any more shoidd he talk about tlie ex(?virsion in polite Shanghai circles afterward. In all boredom nothing so bores the resident as the globe-trotter's tales of his slum- ming in the native city. The resident has usually TO SHANGHAI 291 never been there, or he may apologetically explain that he did go once, years ago, when he first came, when he was a " griffin," otherwise a " tenderfoot," in the Far East. Old Shanghai is very little worth seeing com- pared with either Peking or Canton, and is valuable chiefly as an exhibit of contrasts, lying there inert, unchanged, uncleansed, with the model settlement beside it in glaring contrast for these forty years. One balances himself on a passenger-wheelbarrow and is trundled around the gray old walls, passing on the way a dead-house, where, in one cholera season that I passed by, some two thousand coffins were waiting for the favorable day and signs for burial. One enters the grimy vault of a gate and leaves the present century. There are a few temples with cramped and crowded and noisy courtyards to see, some peony and chrysanthemum gardens, a garden where fan-tailed goldfish of extraordinary varieties are reared in crocks of stagnant, filthy water, and a fantastic tea-garden or gild-house of a company of merchants. The narrow streets, the filth, the shout- ing crowds, and the close familiarity of the people are the same as in all tlie cities of China. There is a tea-house in the middle of a sewery pond, approached by zigzag bridges, which is 7iot the house of the wil- low-pattern plates, despite its claim. This pond is a center of city life, the one open glimpse of the sky within the walls, and besides the daily sales of jade and cheap jewelry, letter-writers, fortune-tellers, cob- blers, barbers, peripatetic cooks witli portable kitch- ens, menders, and peddlers hold the crowds there. 1/ 292 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE Once I happened upon an outdoor juggler show in which a woman with dwarfed feet lay upon a rickety table, and twirled and tossed huge earthen jars in air with her feet. She twirled and somersaulted a poor, pale slip of a child in the same way ; then balanced a ladder on lier feet, and the child crept up and down the rungs, backward, head first, posing as it clung or hung to the swaying ladder. It was sickening to watch, and we moved away, when yells of rage arose, ladder and child came down at a flash, and the woman juggler ran after us with the rest. The foreigners had contributed after seeing the first feat, but were leaving without paying again, and as no one else in the open-air audience had contributed a cash, they could not let us take any such informal leave. The curio-shops, cleared of everything of merit, hold only the merest junk, and one most eminent connois- seur said sadly : " I used to go there once a week, and always found something worthy to add to my collec- tion. Now I never go." Another sinologue given to prowling the old city told of a modern treasure he unearthed at a book-stall, in the way of a Chinese manual for house-servants in foreign employ. There were clear instructions how to pour sherry in the master's glass, and by sleight of hand continue with a bottle of inferior wine around the board ; even dia- grams of how to arrange cigars in a box to conceal the little larcenies, and so many other minute in- structions to the perfect servant that the sinologue studied it himself, and found that he had evidently stumbled upon the same manual in use in his own clockwork household. All villainy is systematized TO SHANGHAI 293 in China, protected by gilds even, and nothing is more \^ logical and reasonable to the Chinese mind than that the shroffs who examine all moneys in foreign mer- cantile establishments, in search for counterfeit coins, should first serve an apprenticeship to the different counterfeiters of their city or province. The Chinese theater is well worth visiting, and de- spite the absurd conventionalities and traditions, the want of scenery, the din of the orchestra, and the actors' high-pitched and falsetto voices, some excel- lent art is manifested there, and the costuming in the historic and legitimate drama is superb. All the topsyturvy of Chinese logic is intensified, and the insanest reversals of the credible are given rein in comedies, some of them so delightfully farcical that China is a mine for exhausted authors and adapters of the Western dramatic world to draw upon. Lost " face " is the supremely delicious situation, the hen- pecked husband is the favorite butt and victim, and the strong-minded woman is the dea ex macMna and pivot of action. In one favorite comedy, a burglar prayed to his joss, and when twice pulled back by a devil in black calico, cuffed the joss soundly, and then entered the rich man's house as the wife was about to hang herself. Pie cut the suicide down, and when the master rushed in to repel the burglar, he thanked him instead for his opportune arrival, and the joss was used as club to beat the discomfited devil. Gor- geous officials thanked the burglar, who tied his queue to the suicide's noose, and swung in air for three whole minutes— and the air was rent with the ecstatic shouts of the audience XXI THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW [HERE are only three wonders of the world in China— the Demons at Tung- chow, the Thunder at Lungehow, and the Great Tide at Hangchow, the last tlie greatest of all, and a living wonder to this day of " the open door," while its rivals are lost in myth and oblivion. On the eighteenth night of the second moon, and on the eighteenth night of the eighth and ninth moons of the Chinese year, the greatest flood-tides from the Pacific surge into the funnel mouth of Hangchow Bay to the bars and flats at the mouth of the swift-flowing Tsien-tang. The river current op- poses for a while, until the angry sea rises up and rides on, in a great, white, roaring, bubbling wave, ten, twelve, fifteen, and even twenty feet in height. The Great Bore, the White Thing, charges up the narrowing river at a speed of ten and thirteen miles an hour, with a roar that can be heard for an hour before it arrives, the most sensational, spectacular, fascinating tidal phenomenon— a real wonder of the whole world, worth going far and waiting long to see. 294 THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 295 Yet how very few go to see it, when it is visible at Hajning, only seventy miles distant by smooth water- ways from Shanghai, where luxurious house-boats and steam-launches may be had by telephone order ! Our two house-boats were lashed side by side as the launch puffed out up the Whangpu River, past the British and French settlements, and the rows upon rows of anchored junks off the gray walls of old Shanghai. We slowed up at the liMn, or customs station, above the city long enough for the pilot to flourish the passports against the glass windows of the launch. Every few hours that formality was re- peated, but only one gunboat on the Grand Canal detained us to read the documents. There was a superb sunset as we reached the upper end of the broad, lake-like Seven Mile Reach. A marvelous pale, pure, porcelain-blue sky shaded to greenish yellow and pure lemon near the horizon, and was dappled over with tiny white clouds, that took fire as the sun sank and tipped every ripple in the Reach with its reflected flame. As the sun's burning face fell, a round white cloud in tlie opposite east turned rosy pink, and in silvery lines and pearly masses showed all the continent outlines on the full face of the splendid ninth moon, that was to Avork the wonder for us. With shrieks and toots infernal, our launch passed under the great springing arch of a bridge, tlie laofas ("old ones," or captains) let slip the lashings, and the two house-boats trailed tandem into the Grand Canal. We threaded watery suburbs and rounded the moat of a walled city " half as old as time," where moon- 296 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE light and reflecting waters made witchery with crum- bling battlements and dragon-eaved towers. All night the screech of the launch waked echoes from city walls along the Grand Canal, towns that Taipiug rebels had besieged and Gordon captured, where A .M.Ma;I.i: BRIDGK. battle, massacre, and fire have left their marks- ruined bridges, towers, and walls eloquent and un- touched to this day. It was an ideal autumn morning as we trailed down the Grand Canal to Samen. The stone em- bankment, with its smooth granite curb, once ran continuous for tlie six hundred odd miles of the Grand Canal between Hangchow and Peking. It was a great highway, too, and dwelling touched dwelling all the way; but the Taipings' fury spent itself in this prov- ince, the last stamping-ground of that rebellion, and but one thirtieth of the population survived. " The THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 297 Sungs made the roads and bridges, the Tangs the towers, the Mings the pagodas," runs the Chinese saying, and all three dynasties lavished their work along this imperial highway and river. China is pre- eminently the land of bridges, and this end of the Grand Canal once assembled such a collection of bridges, such a range of types and models, as no other country of the world could offer. Bridge after bridge bowed over us, humpbacked, horseshoe, spectacle, camel's-back, and needle's-eye bridges, their ovals or arches often springing forty and fifty feet in air- carved parapets, piers, balustrades, guardian lions, dragon-mouthed water-spouts, and lettered tablets nearly perfect, the mellowing touch of time having worn all angles and edges smooth, and toned the marble to a rich, warm yellow. Fallows, those monu- mental carved gateways erected by imperial permis- sion as memorials to some dutiful son or faithful widow, are in such numbers now along the canal that they must once have stood along favored reaches like continuous rood-screens in a cathedral. They are now battered and neglected, sagging, tottering, top- pling into ruins, covered with moss and lichens, that kindly hide the ravages of their lace-work and filigree carvings. One longs to transport just one of these wonderful trophies to some city park in Europe or America, where such a unique piece of sculpture would be an ornament far beyond obelisks or cap- tured cannons. We were away from the rice and beyond the cot- ton-fields of the immediate Shanghai section of the Great Plain of Kiangsu, the '^ Garden of China," 298 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE where tlie iiiluibitants iiuinber eight hundred to the square mile. All along the luxuriant green shores blue-clad figures climbed and worked among the glowing, crimson tallow-trees, gathering the berries for primitive household candle-making. Mile after mile of short, stunted mulberries, pollarded like wil- lows, bespoke the chief industry of the region. The green leaves of ling-gardens covered long stretches of side-waters, squared off in subdivisions like fields on shore, and ling-farmers paddling about in tubs to tend their crops gave a holiday air to this culture of Trapa hicornis, the " buffalo-head " nut. There was interest along every mile of this splendid waterway, where the Sung emperors and the Grreat Khan trav- eled in gilded barges, where Marco Polo, Rashuddin, and Ibn Batuta exhausted Italian, Persian, and Arabic in describing the splendors of Cathay centuries before America was discovered. At Samen we turned from the broad, embanked canal and tlie imperial telegraph lines, and pursued water lanes, narrow gleams between green banks and hedge-rows, where there was barely room for boats to pass. Sa-jow, Sa-men-yu, Ko-ti, and towns of lesser import, huddled by the banks ; arching bridges, tea- shops with ov^erhanging wdndows, and market spaces all crowded with the same unattractive yellow people, who gaped and jeered or hai-yaied, as our launch went head on, whistling and screeching like mad, scattering sampans to right and left. The creeks and canals grew nai-rower, the arches of the bridges lower, until smoke-stack and kitchen stove])ipes had to hinge back on the dec^ks to let us squeeze under. THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 299 Here all the ways are waterways, and land transpor- tation extends only from creek to creek, across a field or two. Crops are carried, markets are supplied and attended, even peddlers and tinkers go by boats, and the people have learned to row with their feet as well as their hands. These ^' foot-boats " were the most comical, laughable things we saw— tiny shells of sam- pans, each with its crew of one, lounging astern, grasping the oar with his long, nimble, ape-like toes, and steering by a short paddle held close under one arm. There was a grotesque air of ease and leisure to these boatmen, who kicked their wriggling way over the water, leaning, and apparently loafing at ease, steering by the armpits, and openly despising those who toiled with their hands. We passed a gaily decked '' wedding-boat " hung with red cloth and red lanterns, the red-curtained chair set amidships, and the red boxes and trunks supposed to contain the trousseau, the corbeil, the regalia, the showy and borrowed properties, the too often mock treasures of a Chinese wedding proces- sion, piled at the stern. There was hubbub on the banks, boats were tethered in lines, and the cortege only waited for our shrieking train to pass before starting off to make the country-side ring with the fiddles and gongs of joy. This wedding of the keeper of the chief restaurant at the village of Three Bridges to the daughter of a rich up-canal farmer was as great an event to the sets and circles of these oozy reaches and back-waters of Chekiang as any nuptials by the Adriatic. Crowds pressed to the Three Bridges and hung out of village windows, taking us for y 300 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE a first part of the pageant ; but the whole community jeered when the mistaken musicians ceased to twang and thump in our honor on discovering that not a red lantern, nor a red rag, nor a sign of the joy color connected us with the great event. Language all consonants hurtled through the air to the crew of the launch, well known in the mulberry country by their frequent visits to buy cocoons for Shanghai filatures, and there and at two other villages they tried to cast us off, insisting that creeks were too narrow, too shal- low, and the bridges too low for the launch to go farther. Despite protestations and theatric frenzy, we pointed the way down the green canal ahead, and the launch laota, with lost " face," went on. At noon we shot under a bridge, and emerged in the broad moat at the northwest angle of the walls of Haining. There were the same gray brick, battle- mented walls as surround all these provincial towns, a green bank of grass and trees sloping along the north side of the moat, that was only a basin, and ended against a high stone embankment, where a noble pagoda overtopped the main city gate. The basin was crowded with cargo-boats loading and unloading. Coolies with grain-bags and fagots on their shoulders toiled up and disappeared by flagged paths among the trees, and coolies with heavy loads of straw paper and dried fish descended in monotonous strings like so many ants. The stone slabs were worn smooth and slippery by the bare feet of generations, until it was a feat to turn the angles at the city gates, escaping the lines of grunting coolies, and come out on the broad, high embankment between THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 301 the city wall and the Tsien-tang River. This great stone-faced sea-wall, with its high embankment of rammed earth and stone and piles, extends along this north bank of the Tsien-tang River for more MAP OF From U. S. Hydrographic Chart No. 1305, with inland waterways from French authorities. HANGCHOW BAY TO TSIEN-TANG KIVER, WITH WATERWAYS FROM SHANGHAI TO HAININQ, HANGCHOW. than one hundred and twenty miles, a monument of toil, repeated and repeated, rebuilt and repaired ceaselessly for more than twelve hundred years. The Tsien-tang, a muddy, uninteresting stream, is a 302 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE mile wide off Haining, and at that hour of high tide flowed within a few feet of the embankment's level. A string of clumsy, flat-bottomed Ningpo junks, gau- dily painted, and with protruding eyes at the bows, lay tethered to the bank, exchanging cargoes with the boats in the basin ; for, owing to the furious tides, there is no direct water connection between this end of the Grand Canal and the river. Coolies, idlers, and shipping circles gathered around us, gaping with that brainless, aimless, stupid, stolid, maddening stare of the Chinese millions, that is the last irritant to foreign nerves and antipathies. They tagged after us into the fine old Bhota pagoda, built a thousand years ago to secure a favorable fung-shui for Haining, and to ar- rest the ravages of the awful Avater-dragon. The pa- goda, although its lower story is used as a granary, with no altars visible, is in excellent condition, and from each of its six galleries, with the fantastic roofs and dangling wind-bells, there is a better view of the brown river and the low green shore opposite, with the vaporous blue outlines of the Ningpo mountains showing beyond Hangchow Bay, which opens two miles below. Farther down the embankment there is a clean, new temple to the water-god, where junkmen put up prayers and offer gifts, and the priests try to ap- pease e\ery high tide with fire-crackers, gongs, in- cense, and prayers. To all questioning they responded with a strong sense of their responsibility to carry on the business they were engaged in, but they hazarded nothing as to the efficacy of their ways of dealing and arguing with the bore. The ])riests THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 303 knew less than any one else about the one bronze cow that lies adrift in the grass by the city waU ; for all the bank-side knew that there had once been fifty of these cows on the broad terrace to watch the water-dragon and protect Haining, and that the others had all " walked away " when a more furious bore than usual washed over the embankment. Lightning had struck and dehorned this one remaining guardian, and strange abrasions of the surface suggested the shot and shell of Taiping times ; but it was '' No sabe " as to these strange gougings in the solid metal, and " No sabe " as to what the inscription on its shoulder meant. A small rabble tagged after us to our boats, and youngsters on the city wall maintained a plunging fire of stones and bits of brick and mortar. They howled and made faces at us, drew fingers across their necks in cutthroat sign, lay in ambush and " sniped " us as long as daylight lasted. Whenever they saw a hated foreign head they tried to hit it. We were ten thousand miles away, virtually in Eu- rope, in the warm, bright cabin of the house-boat, the silken boy of the velvet foot serving the convention- ally perfect dinner on a flower-decked table shining with silver and glass ; but when we came out on the bank at eleven o'clock, old, gray Haining was there in the moonlight, as still and dead and turned to stone as the castle of the Sleeping Beauty, and all around it lay that unmistakable, great graveyard— China. Before midnight, the rows of junks had disappeared bodily from the sea-wall, had dropped twenty feet with the tide to a broad stone shelf that made out 304 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIKE twenty feet toward the shrunken river. This junk platform, or shelter, bordered with double rows of piling and rough stones, extends along the sea-wall for a thousand yards, defended by two great curving buttresses, built out to deflect the bore's fury. The junks sat high and dry, squarely on their flat timbers, on this platform, seven feet above the low-running Tsien-tang, slipping swiftly with a hoarse, stealthy, treacherous rippling out to sea. Then distantly, far away, came a soft, long-rolling undertone, a muffled thumi)ety-thumpety-thumpety- thumpetyj that continued and continued, grew nearer and louder ; was now the tramp of a charging cavalry thundering past at a gi*and review, then the leaden pounding of surf upon a coral reef ; the unmistakable sound of falling water ; the booming, dashing rever- beration of breaking waves, of waves breaking with- out cessation or interval, beating slowly the mighty diapason of the sea. The moon was riding at the very zenith, and it dizzied us to look up to it. Each one stood evenly within the circle of his own clear-cut shadow on the ground, at that moment of the moon's transit, and the bore was due ; but it was a calm night, and it was three quarters of an hour after our unaccustomed ears had caught the first far-distant, muttering un- dertone before the White Thing was seen, a ghastly line advancing as evenly over the water, and as quickly, as the dark shadow of an eclipse sweeps over a landscape. Nearer and nearer it roared, growing greater and whiter, until we could see the whole cas- cading, bubbling, frothing front, with spray-drops THE GREAT TfOKE. THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 307 showering from the crest higher up in moonlight. With the roar of awful waters the dread thing came on, raising its white crest higher and higher as it licked the edges of the piles beyond which the junks lay. There were shouts and yells, and the usual boatmen's pandemonium let loose on the junks as the roaring wave approached. A rocket sizzed, some fire- crackers sputtered and gongs resounded, but all small sounds of earth's creatures were drowned as the fear- ful White Thing crashed past, and a frightful hissing, a seething, lashing, and swirling of still higher billows succeeded,— the most sinister sound of water ever heard,— all speeding, rushing, whirling madly, irre- sistibly on. As the ten-foot wall of foam reached the edge of the piling and the junk platform, it floated the junks loose at the instant. Each junk rode to the flood's fury bow on, and continued to rise, to lift itself bod- ily up, up, along the sea-wall before one's fascinated gaze. In the fierce after-rush the water went swifter and more swiftly by, until one had a dizzying sense of danger to come, but past fleeing from. Something held one fascinated to the spot, although in the fewest minutes, barely a quarter of an hour, two thirds of the whole body and mass of the flood-tide had flung itself against the wall, and, it seemed, might continue to rise with the same force for hours. A salt, fresh smell of the sea, the breath of the ocean's coolest, deepest under-world, came in with the awful tide. A gliastly mist succeeded. Shreds of vapor scudded over the triumphant moon, and tlie sea's curtain fell on one of the most sensational, spectacular perform- 308 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE ances the Pacific Ocean and the moon ever make together. The next midday, just at noon, our straining ears caught the first far-away, long-rolling thump, thump, thump, as steady as the beat of a dynamo, and we could see a white line at the farthest distance on the water. We watched it wdth glasses, and then with the eye, as it came over the broad level, and then won- dered why that one long, slow, white breaker should have been so frightful and awe-inspiring just by the witchery of midnight and moonlight. But at a dis- tance of a quarter, and then of an eighth mile, the wave seemed to gather impetus, to rise, to double, and to foam still higher, and swTpt past under our feet with the speed and fury of a whirlwind. It shook the earthy filling of the great buttress, beat the ear with a roar that was appalling, and my breathing and my knees were not normal any more than at midnight. The old Avi'iters say : " The surge thereof rises like a hill, and the wav^e like a house ; it roars like thunder, and as it comes on it appears to swallow the heavens and bathe the sun." The front wall of water, one long line stretched from shore to shore, was a confused, seething white mass of bubbles, spray, and foam over ten feet in height, curving four or five feet higher at mid-stream, while back of this whole front wall the water sloped up still higher in great billows and tossing spray. The abrupt white bank of foam did not seem to op- pose and stem the river current squarely, to turn it back, to roll it over upon itself, and back it up-stream, as one might picture it. The swift brown river ran THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 309 as rapidly as ever toward the sea as the bore advanced, and the great wave, moving twenty feet a second, seemed to overrun it, to hurl itself upon and break over the brown plane of the river as if it were a solid floor. The great wave is foreshortened and belittled when one looks down upon it from the twenty-five- foot sea-wall, and the lens reduces it contemptibly in photographs ; but while one hears or remembers that frightful, incredible, awful roar, he is not wanting in respect for this white terror of the sea. A long string of junks lay stranded on the platform below the sea-wall, their bows pointed down-stream, and bamboo cables made fast to trees on the embank- ment. At the first touch of the foaming wave's edge each junk was afloat, and leaping by inches up the face of the sea-wall in unearthly fashion. Each junk- man was screeching like mad as he fended his boat off from the stone wall and from his neighbors, but no sound could be heard until the roaring wave had gone by, and the evil hiss and seethe of the after-rush had subsided. The wave raced up the river, and wild waters rushed after, at the rate of thirteen miles an hour. A score of big brown junks, in full sail, hover- ing in the bay behind the bore, entered the river and came careering up-stream, riding tlie after-rush as lightly as cockle-shells. The huge lumbering arks dipped and danced, spun around in circles, and, help- less in the sweep and swirl of that flood-burst, made for every point of the compass, going bow first, stern first, broadside on, rocking and pirouetting with all sails flapping in the maddest fashion. It made one feel dizzy to watch these antics, and one might next 310 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE expect the pagoda to dance across the sea-wall. At the approach of these bewitched boats every junkman by the bank seized his boat-hook, and ki-yied at the top of his lungs. By some magic a few junks finally swept in lessening circles toward the shore, waltzed around and around as deliberately as so many dancers seeking good seats along a ball-room wall, made a last wheeling turn, let down sails with a clatter, and each dropped exactly in and stopped in a chosen berth by the sea-wall. There was collapse and reaction as this manoeuver and our nerve-tension ended, for never have I seen a more thrilling or neater nautical feat. "Wrinkles in Navigation" does not begin to inform the halyard world of what can be done with sheet and rudder with a big bore as auxil- iary. Cat-boat sailing in a squall, or ocean cup- racing in half a gale, are tame sports compared with this riding in on the great wild bore's back, and dropping away from its crest at the desired moment as precisely as the tiniest naphtha-launch could do it. A few of the waiting junks let go, struck out into the stream, and rode with the other junks on the back of the bore up the river toward Hangchow, the wave usually traveling that twenty- three miles up-stream in two hours. The bore decreases in height as it rolls on up-stream and up-hill, and if ten feet high when pass- ing Haining, is usually but five feet high when abreast of Hangchow, and dies away in the upper river, the last ripples of the highest bore being observed eigh- teen miles above the city. All navigation up the swift river is necessarily in the wake of the bore, and within JUNKS RIDING IN ON TUE AFTEK-KUSH. THE GEEAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 313 two hours after it passes Hangchow, junks must start down-stream or seek a shelter on the junk platforms. If a junk cannot reach a platform before the tide leaves the shelf dry, its fate is decided. No vessel could meet that irresistible wall of water and live, and for five hours before the bore comes no junks are seen off Haining. The transport Kite, during the opium war (1840), touched on a bank at the north of the river and was instantly overturned by the tide. A little later the PhlegetJion, reconnoitering the ap- proaches to Hangchow, broke her cables, and had an alarming drive with the tide. The literature ^ of the bore is brief, and for the most part technical and scientific. 1 "Journal of the North China Branch Royal Asiatic Society," January, 1853. A paper by Dr. Maegowan. "Journal of the North China Branch Royal Asiatic Society," Vol. XXIII, No. 3, 1888. " The Bore of the Tsien Tang Kiang," by Commodore W. Osborne Moore, R.N. "Report on the Bore of the Tsien Tang Kiang" (1889), " Further Report on the Bore of the Tsien Tang Kiang " (1893), by W. O. Moore, R.N. Publications of the Admiralty Office. ''Journal of the Institute of Civil Engineers," 1893. Paper by Commodore W. O. Moore, R.N. " Annalen Hydrogi-aphie," Berlin, 1896, pp. 466-475. "Die Sprungwelle in der Mundung der Tsien Tang Kiang." "Century Magazine," October, 1898. "Bores," by G. H. Darwin. Milne's "Life in China," p. 295. Moule's "New China and Old," pp. 44, 45, 279. Fortune's " Residence among tlie Chinese," pp. 309, 316. Wheeler's (W. H.) "Tidal Rivers," pp. 106-109. Darwin's (G. H.) "The Tides," pp. 59-75. Beresford's (Lord Charles) " Break-up of China," p. 344. 314 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIKE The city of Haining offered us little of interest, save the one clean and spacious temple to the local genii, whose courts and passages were reached through classic pailows, guarded by lackadaisical lions of Fo grotesquely coquetting with the sacred jewels. There are finely cut, stone-tracery windows, and quaint pa- vilions with carved shrines, and a tine phenix-pan- eled ceiling in the sanctuary which shelters the gilded images. The names of Haining's successful candi- dates at the great literary examinations are immortal- ized here, but the treasure of interest to the foreign- er's eye is a great stone chart, an imperishable map of the bay and river cut in stone and set in the wall. Some thousands of taels had recently been spent in the restoration of this temple, from which emerges the annual procession after the full of the second and eighth moons, as at the similar temple in Hangchow, when the officials and thousands of people assemble at the bank to appease the spirit of the bore by prayers, offerings of food, sham money, and treasures, accom- panied by tens of thousands of fire-crackers. More an- ciently the crossbowmen were called out and fired their arrows at the advancing flood to drive it back, for the Chinese know perfectly well what, or rather who, the bore is. It began, their most truthful records say, in the fifth century B.C., when Prince Tsze-sii, of the state or kingdom of Wu, offended the sovereign Fu-ch'a, who sent him a sword. Tsze-sii obediently com- mitted suicide, and liis body was thrown into the river, as requested. He had promised that at dawn and at dusk he would come on the tide to watch the THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 315 fall and ruin of Wu, and the classics relate how the great tides then came with " a wrathful sound, and the swift rush of thunder and lightning could be heard more than thirty li off." Tsze-sii's spirit is the god of the great tide, and in recurrent rage, in revenge and reprisal for the way he was abused in this world, he revisits the scene to wash away banks, flood the low country, and spread ruin around. " Then might be seen in the midst of the tide-head, Tsze-sii sitting in a funeral-car drawn by white horses. Whereupon they built a temple to appease him with sacrifice." ^ Temples have been built in every town, and between towns, along the river, to appease his wrath ; prayers and sacrifice have been offered for these two thousand odd years; every dynasty has conferred titles and posthumous honors upon him and his ancestors ; im- perial epistles have been read and thrown to him : but it is all too late. Tsze-sii is a good hater, and a iiw thousand years is a short time for a Chinese ghost to cherish a grudge. Tsze-sii's fearful wave has always been recognized as a great sight, and when Bayan, the conquering lieutenant of Genghis Khan, had captured Hangchow and received the jade seal of the Sungs, he was taken to the river-bank to see Tsze-sii go by, during the third moon (April) in our year 1276 a.d. Barring the damage and the restrictions to com- merce, and the annual expense for fire-crackers, silk, rice, and "joss-money," what a spectacular, sensa- tional, splendid old custom Tsze-sii maintains un- broken ! And if the Chinese had half the wit jthey 1 Translation by Bisliop Moule from the " Hsi-jui-ehi." 316 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE are credited with, how easily could the riverside recoup itself for all loss and expenditures ! Fancy excursion- trains to Haining; hired windows and balconies at Bore View Hotel ; chartered junks for wild rides up the river on the bore's back ; and midnight illumina- tions by red fire when the moon failed ! Alas that this money-coining, dividend-paying wonder could not have happened to a thrifty Swiss canton, instead of to the by-parts of Chekiang ! Surely in the next century it will be different, and the bore will be set to earning its own living, working machinery for electric power, and gradually making payments on the bill of damages running unpaid for two thousand years ; and the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce, rec- ognizing its obligations, the cause of Shanghai's trade importance, will erect some monument or tablet to Tsze-sii's spirit, who turned trade to the Wusung and away from the Tsien-tang. The embankments were built in the eighth and tenth centuries, the stone-faced sea-wall in the four- teenth century, and in the last century the Emperor Kienlung spent the equivalent of some ten million gold dollars on the embankments of the Tsien-tang, A thousand coolies are continually at work repairing, it is said. Even in these poor days of peculation and decay, the public-works expenditures of the district are tempting prizes to expectant tao-tais and magis- trates who have passed the literary examinations. The Tsien-tang ran low and still, sullenly, stealthily, in its dying ebb to the sea on the great eighteenth night. Thei-e was a thin mist on land and river, a half-liaze over the moon, and unearthly chill drafts THE GREAT BORE OF HANGCHOW 317 blew to us, as we sat straining our ears for a first sound of our third and final bout with the bore on its last great night of the year. We had heard it the first night at 12 : 10, and the wave passed us at 12 : 50 ; but this second midnight our better-educated ears caught the faint murmur, the swelling undertone of the sea, the thump, thump, thump of far-away overfalls at 12 : 25, at the moment it must have formed in de- fiant front against the swift river current off Chisan headland, twelve miles away. There was an hour of eager, fascinated listening as the great sea-prelude increased in volume and rose to crescendo in a mighty threnody. At 1 : 23 '^ the eager raised its horrid crest," and with the deafening roar of ten thousand pounding ore-stamps raged past in a great burst of foam. Then the hiss of ten thousand serpents, a swish and mighty ripples, and the tide had come in again, and with it the strange, damp smell of the under-sea. The bore was certainly greatest that night, and one million seven hundred and fifty thousand tons of water undoubtedly thundered past in each minute. We could see it in the strange moonlight arching higher toward the middle of the river, foaming whiter over the platform where the junks lay waiting, and its whole charge past with that unearthly roar was more sensational and awe-inspiring than before. The moon hung directly overhead as the crest of fury passed the pagoda; a rocket and some sputtering crackers told that the priests were doing their duty, and immediately a pall of mist shut down upon us, and ended the high water's great season night of that year off Haining. ni8 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE A friendly old junkman assured us again that these autumn bores were the best, the greatest of the year ; that the eighteenth nights of the eighth and ninth moons were the dates for sensational bores, better even than the eighteenth of the second moon, unless— unless an easterly wind or a long storm were raging outside. " Hai-ya ! " said the old fellow. '' The great- est sight was three years ago [1893], at big tide of the eighth moon. The wave came over this sea-wall, struck the pagoda, and poured sea-water into the basin. Many people were killed ; many junks broke away and were lost, many were broken agafnst the stone wall." *' That was the year before you went to war with the Japanese. It was a sign of bad luck." The junker grunted disgust. '' Now if another big wave conies and kills people and breaks junks, you may know there will be another war, and those Manchus will be driven out of Peking." " That would be good," said the man of Ningpo, and future visitors may learn whether that random suggestion has crystallized into a good, serviceable legend yet. XXII IN A PROVINCIAL YAMUN [^NCE in the course of time, there came a letter in exquisitely written characters from a blue-buttoned official of secretly- progressive and reform tendencies, in- viting us to visit him in the gray, old provincial city which he governed— a city which shall be nameless. That was passport to what I most wanted to see in China, but we had also double- page passports with the neatly pinked seal of the American consulate, and a smudge of red salve an- swering for the official vermilion stamp of the con- senting tao-tai of Shanghai, who besought for us safe transit in search of health and feathered game down the Grand Canal and vicinity, " in accordance with the provisions of the treaty of Tientsin." It was restful to move by sail and oar and tow- rope, rather than play crack-the-whip behind a shriek- ing, cinder-spitting fire-boat, and we floated away in the afternoon, and were soothed asleep by the slow thump of the big oars, the easy gurgle and swish of water, and strange rappings below as beds of heavy- 17 319 320 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE topped water-plants slipped under the keel. The sickly-sweet fumes of the opium-pipe arose, the oars beat more slowly, and we were silently drawn in and made fast to the bank while the faithless laota slept. We wakened to find ourselves, not by the battle- mented walls of the city, but still pursuing canals or ditches across the same green prairie of rice- and millet- and cotton-fields, of mulberry- and tallow-tree plantations, with the same beautiful and quaint old stone and marble bridges curving over the water- ways. Long slabs of hewn stone laid on stone posts, with a skeleton hand-rail to steady the wayfarers, led over the smaller streams, and country folk trooped over them, loops of little blue figures against the bluest sky. At one cross-roads, where three bridges arched across and pailow^s tottered, we landed to enjoy better the details of all this picturesqueness. We looked in one mud-walled, thatched farm-house where people and pigs lived together in one greasy, smoke-blackened room, with an earthen floor and the fewest miserable furnishings. The owner, incrusted with all the dirt of his lifetime, gave friendly greet- ing, and four women and six children tumbled out to look at us with the usual dumfounded, spellbound, bewildered, and voiceless attention and interest. One boy sat down on the grass to stare at his ease with just the stolid, bovine, ruminant gaze of a water-buf- falo, chewing the while a long stick of sorghum, which was probably his only breakfast. The farmer grubbed in his flooded bed of water-chestnuts and found us a few ripe nuts, and his gratitude when we gave a handful of casli in return was pathetic. A IN A PKOVINCIAL YAMUN 321 duck-farmer came poling his way to fresh pastures, surrounded by his docile flock, but at sight of the strange figures on the high slab bridge, the duck- farmer was spellbound, and the three hundred odd birds took fright, quacked frantically, flapped their wings, and fled up either bank in alarm. The shep- herd of birds launched out the long bamboo with which he was poling, and with the crook at the end hooked a few ducks back through the air to the water, gave some few exhortatory quacks himself, and the recreants waddled back sullenly with angry quackings to one another— the most diverting and irresistibly funny thing ever ducks did. Our sails, that staggered aloft on masts nearly as tall as Colnmhitt's or Defender's, came down at each bridge, the masts hinged back, and we just slipped under, and then moved on across the level plain, where other giant sails were moving in every direc- tion on invisible waters. We came to the venerable, gray, battlemented walls of our city, skirted all its tip-tilted pagoda-towers of defense, afforded a water pageant to its people, and were then hurried into chairs and borne away through the same narrow streets of all Chinese cities— the same signs, the same shops, the same commodities for sale, the same arti- sans and workmen pursuing their same occupations as anywhere else in the land of eternal monotony. Yamun servants had been sent to pilot our boats, yamun runners dropped to our decks from the first bridges to conduct the ceremonies of arrival, and our own red-tasseled servant ran ahead of our chairs with a yamun escort to present our red cards of 322 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE ceremony. We were all supposed to be illustrious ofl&cial doctors, since that was the only plausible ex- planation to be given to his people for such toleration of barbarians by an august, blue-buttoned, jeweled personage. As the smart-stepping chair-bearers swung in through the first great gate of the yamun, a long trap- door window fell and disclosed six pipers who began a furious tooting, and a retainer in a peaked hat fired three pistol-shots as salute of honor. Tlie bearers paced on through another gate to a second court, where the yamun runners or retainers were drawn in crooked lines of honor on either side, all arrayed in the peaked hats and baggy coats of our sawdust ring. The next gateway was closed, painted across with a sensational red, green, and blue, fire-spitting, ball- chasing dragon ; but the bearers walked on with the same swift, measured tread as if they would batter the gate open with the chair-poles or end our proces- sion in a heap. At the moment the first pole was about to touch the dragon panel, it parted, flew open like magic, and we were borne through a third court- yard lined up with retainers, through another magic dragon gate into a fourth court, where our host, in his best satins, and button, feather, and beads of oflB- cial ceremony, stood with his staff to receive us, shaking his own folded hands in the depths of his gorgeous sleeves as we each emerged from the cur- tained chrysalis of a sedan and returned his cordial " Chin-ohiii " of welcome. He led the way to tlie great hall, seated us at the blackwood tables ranged down each side, and refreshed us with tea and sweetmeats, IN A PROVINCIAL YAMUN 325 while he made the conventional inquiries as to our health and the voyage. Then the ladies were led to the last dragon gate, which parted magically and brought us facing a solid screen. We rounded it, and saw the pretty tableau of the Tai-tai of the yamun and her seven young sons ranged in a row before the bright-red curtain that concealed the doorway of her own boudoir or living- room. The Tai-tai stood on the tiniest of pointed slippers, and from their tips to her throat she was a mass of embroidered satins of brilliant, contrasting colors. Full trousers and skirts, each heavily em- broidered, and coat upon coat weighted the slender figure, and her blue-black hair was almost concealed with wing-like pieces, butterflies, pins, and clasps of pearls. A string of finely cut ivory beads and phenix plastrons on the back and front of her outer coat de- clared her official quality, and the fine, pale-yellow face was alight with an expression of pleasure that lent emphasis to the cordial, soft-voiced greetings. An attendant lifted the screen curtain, and she led us into her lofty, stone-floored room, furnished with deep, square, carved chairs and round center-table, and hung with the gold-lettered red scrolls of holiday ornament. Tea was brought, and the Tai-tai, swaying on her stumps of feet, served each one with her own ivory chop-sticks to fruits and cakes of many kinds. Then sweet champagne, that had, unsuspected, been warm- ing itself all morning in the sun on the fore-deck of our boats, was served, and conversation through an in- terpreter went on, a long dialogue of direct questions and answers. Her seven sons, ranging from the in- 326 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE fant in arms to charming boys fourteen and sixteen years of age, were introduced, these larger boys hav- ing free range of the women's reserved quarter, and not seeming out of place there in their long satin robes. A cloud of maid-servants hovered about, talked audibly, and seemed on a footing of perfect equality. We were shown the Tai-tai's bedroom, an adjoining stone-floored apartment, with the same hard, carved chairs and stiff tables along two walls, a mirror and dressing-table before the window, and facing it a monumental carved canopy or alcove-bed. The walls were hung with more vermilion scrolls, and the bed cornice, set with panels of "landscape marble," had also coin trophies and tinsel charms hung there to ward off evil spirits, framed pictures and j^oems to in- vite and detain the good spirits. The bed was a hard marble shelf with many thick blankets folded at the farther side. Not a soft chair nor a floor-covering, not a common comfort, as we consider such things, was provided for this gentle, delicate, high-bred woman, despite the considerable wealth of the family. We were prompted to urge the hostess to lay aside her outer official coat, easily fatiguing with its weight of splendid trimming. We were told to urge again, when it was put aside, and we continued to urge until five successive garments had been doffed, and the Tai-tai moved her slight shoulders and sighed with relief; more wonder that she had not fainted with their weight and warmth on that hot autumn day. We were shown the wardrobe, a room hung round with the common silk garments of every-day IN A PROVINCIAL YAMUN 327 wear, piled high with the red trunks of her great trousseau, and holding huge carved wardrobes where the winter wardrobe and furred garments were stored. Three maids had the care of these clothes; another brought out baskets where tray below tray held the Tai-tai's jewels ; and a fifth maid, the hair-dresser-in- chief, without warning or bidding, whipped all the pearl ornaments out of her mistress's hair, and showed us the effect of the different filigree, jade, kingfisher-feather, and other sets of ornaments in turn. The autumn edict from Peking had just turned all the chair-covers in the yamun to their red winter side, put different hats on master and retainers, and relegated the Tai- tai's jade ornaments to obscurity until the spring edict should allow summer jewelry to be worn again. There was one dazzling arrangement in hair-dressing where silver, tinsel, and artificial flowers were massed in coronals almost as becoming as the Manchu coif- fure, but it was not etiquette for that to remain, and the pearl wings and pins were replaced. The master came for a short call, a remote twinkle to be seen in his eye as he noted the commotion and clatter of the women servants at his daring intrusion when strange women were there. He had but just left the harem when shouts were heard beyond the gate, and from behind the great screen curtain we saw the feet of chair-bearers deposit sedans and de- part. A Chinese lady in ceremonial dress was as- sisted out, received just within the red curtain, and duly presented to us as the magistrate's wife. The whole harem conversation was repeated for her over again— ages, children, servants, diseases, clothes, the 328 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE eternal feminine, tea-party topics of all countries. Our strange garments and huge feet amused them, but we talked to them rather as one would talk to nice children ; for these aristocrats of the south were of far different mold from our old Manchu Tai-tai in Peking, she with the ready questions concerning the X-rays. "We had had two rounds of tea and sweets in wel- come at eleven o'clock, another round at twelve, a fourth when this visitor came, a light luncheon at one, and tea yet again at two o'clock. The two ladies fell away in a little chat of their own, and we looked at albums of paintings the master had sent in. The ladies were plainly discussing us, but otherwise, on other days, yesterday or last week, what did they have to talk about, these helpless, crippled women with their scores of maids, spending all their lives on the hard chairs, hard beds, and hard floors in these cheer- less rooms, looking on stone courts and blank walls ? Without exercise, incidents, books, occupation, or any social excitements save these stilted visits in closed sedans, it seemed a dreary prison life at best, and the oppressive idea made us long to escape from the harem's walls. We sent a note to the outer masculine world, and the raspberry-satin-clad son of the house came and whispered the English message given the little par- rot : " Foreign ladies please come my side " ; and we promptly fled down a side passage that encircled the outer edges of the court to the master's apartments. It was the men servants then who were flustered at such an unexpected irniption, at such an unknown, IN A PROVINCIAL YAMUN 329 irregular proceeding as women visitors penetrating to the master's inner sanctum. But we felt more at home there, and found much more to talk about than in the harem circle. Our host was visibly wasted and shrunken, relieved of six or eight coats of honor at his guests' insistence. Besides his own consider- able treasures, his friends had lent him their choice pieces for the day, and the black tables were covered with bronzes, porcelains, and some charming bits of Sung pottery. There was a terrestrial globe and enough foreign books and seditious scientific prints from the Shanghai Society for the Diffusion of Chris- tian and General Knowledge to have sent him to the block in Peking. We had some hope for China when we saw this official pursuing such studies under such apparent difficulties ; but less hope when we learned that these books belonged to the other guest of the day, a man educated abroad with the intention of serving his government afterward indefinitely, but recalled and virtually punished by being kept wait- ing in idleness, eating his heart out in that provin- cial town where everything was alien and unfriendly. Without hope of honors or employment, and always in danger of being persecuted or denounced to the yamun by malicious literati, it was a wonderful chance for him when he found the new governor sympathetic and interested in every new and for- eign idea. Political history and economics, Henry George's theory of land ownership and taxation, railroad-building and electrical engineering, had been the topics in the governor's study all morning. When that worthy welcomed us, he discoursed as 330 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE connoisseur upon the old bits of carved Soochow lacquer laid out, and mourned with us that the lovely Foochow lacquers were so sadly falling off in this decade, with this last generation descended from that artisan who learned the art of lacquer while a captive in Japan in Koxinga's time. The Raspberry Boy and his brother the Blue Boy took us for a turn in the fantastic garden of the ya- mun, all rockwork, bridges, and summer-houses with moon and fan windows, abutting on the battlemented city wall, and we returned to the women's quarters for the four-o'clock dinner, the feast to which all the little nibbles and sips of the day had been fore- runners. It began and ended with tea, and the little plates of hors d'oeuvres, watermelon-seeds, pickled almonds, salted peanuts, and mysteries, remained by us to the end. A preliminary bowl of shark-fin soup with egg-curd was followed by shreds of fried duck, and then came pigeon-egg stew, from whose depths my chop-sticks brought up thin bits of mountain mushrooms. There were bacon fritters, as far as hasty analysis could determine, another sort of stew with mushrooms, fried chicken, almond-cream cus- tard, a steamy sponge-cake, a stew of Japan shell- fish, fresh fish fried, bird's-nest stew, sweet olives, another soup, another fish combination stew, a deadly pastry, innumerable sweets and fruits and nuts, and the final cup of tea. The rice-bowls were kept full all the time as a running aecomj)animent to the successive courses, and warm champagne was poured in full bumpers. The Chinese visitor set the convivial example by lifting her glass, giving the IN A PROVINCIAL YAMUN 331 conventional toast in a " Chin-chin Tai-tai ! " and then clinked glasses round, the Chinese ladies evi- dently enjoying the warm, sickly-sweet stuff. Tow- els wrung out in hot water were passed at intervals in lieu of finger-bowls, and the chattering maids fanned us assiduously. When the Raspberry Boy announced that our chairs were waiting, we made long-drawn and profuse adieus, and bestowed largess on all the servants — strings of cash rolled in red paper; the same gifts were made to our small following, and a roll of silk wrapped in red paper was sent to the boats for each guest. The Tai-tai had slipped into her official coat and beads to bid us adieu, and stood again in tableau against the red curtain, smiling and shaking her own hands. In the next court we made formal speeches, and took leave of our host, a bulky figure again in all his layers of coats, shaking his own hands within his big sleeves, and thanking us in most correct phrases for the honor of the visit. As the sedans were carried out, the courts were again lined with retainers, the trap-door fell again, the Jack-in-the- box pipers piped, and the gunner fired three times. The landing-place was blue with people, a silent, motionless, stonily staring multitude. "We skirted the walls at the sunset hour, and were soon in the water mazes of the flat, green plain. Country folk trooped along the banks and over the bridges ; weary work-folk rested by their doors or ate in strangely lighted interiors. A din and thumping on shore called us from the dinner-table to see a festival pro- 332 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE cession filing alongshore and up over an invisible bridge, huge round glow-worms of lanterns moving against the stars and darkness above, and among the reflected stars in the water below. Poor, forlorn, dirty, decrepit old China seemed then a land all pictur- esqueness and charm— so much could darkness and a few lanterns do for this pathetic old wreck of an empire. The next night we dined and danced at a house in Slianghai suburbs, that might as well have been in London suburbs, save for the rustling, blue-silk servants. The company and the talk were cosmopoli- tan, the gowns Parisian, and the day in the yamun seemed a half-memory of something that had hap- pened years ago, the yamun itself more than ten thousand miles away instead of only a few leagues off in the cocoon country of Chekiang, XXIII THE LOWER YANGTSZE HE Yangtsze-kiang, the Great Muddy- River of China, which, by a faulty tra- cing of the Chinese characters represent- ing it, has enjoyed such poetic English equivalents as " Son of the Ocean " and " Child of the Sea," is one of the greatest rivers, and its valley the most densely populated and closely cul- tivated river basin of the globe. Rising in northern Tibet, on the Roof of the World, this " Girdle of China " crosses the whole empire in its three-thousand-mile course to the sea, touching nine of the richest provinces, draining and giving commu- nication through a region more than six hundred miles wide, a basin of six hundred thousand square miles, with a population estimated at one hundred and eighty millions. All of British diplomacy is alert to protect British trade in this her '' inalienable sphere of influence," to maintain the ancient trade route to India, Burma, and Tibet against French de- signs on Yun-nan— the Yangtsze valley a Far Eastern storm-center, with a future Fashoda somewhere in its length. 3:53 334 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE The Yangtsze has a different name in almost every province, and pours a flood of diluted mud through half its valley, tingciug the ocean for more than a hundred miles offshore into the really Yellow Sea. It has built up the plain of Hu-peh within historic times, and in five hundred years has made the thirty-mile-long Tsung-ming Island, opposite Wusung, whose fertile fields support an incredible population. The tide is felt three hundred miles above the Yang- tsze's mouth ; it is navigable for one thousand eight hundred and sixty miles, and is never closed by ice. It is called the '' River of Fragrant Tea-fields," since that plant, as well as the bamboo, grows from Yun- nan to the sea ; while poppy-fields cover great areas in Szechiian, the mulberry flourishes everywhere, and orange-groves in the gorges suj)ply the lower ports. When the snows melt in Tibet and the monsoon pours its annual flood on the watershed, the Yangtsze rises eighty and one hundred feet at Chungking, seventy and eighty feet at Ichang, and forty and fifty feet at Hankow, sweeping in a fierce flood from June to October, and then falling as rapidly as a foot a day. The British besieged and took some of the cities of the Lower Yangtsze in the opium war, and in the treat}'' of Tientsin (1861) the ports of the lower river were opened to foreign trade, the upper ports being opened by the Chefoo convention (187G) and the treaty of Shimonoseki (1895). A fleet of river and ocean steamers maintains communication between Shanghai and Hankow, six hundred miles from the sea, above which point smaller river steamers ply regularly to Ichang, a thousand miles from the sea. Although THE LOWER YANGTSZE 335 the right of steam-navigation over the fourteen hun- dred miles to Chungking was conceded at Shimono- seki, Chinese obstinacy and conservatism prevented its fulfilment until March, 1898, three months after which all the internal waterways were open to for- eign vessels. The large river steamers time their leaving Shang- hai so that they may pass the dangerous shoals and quicksands of Lang Shan Crossing, above Tsung- ming Island, by daylight and with a favorable tide. Leaving Shanghai after midnight, our steamer, the WganMng, was well into the broad river by break- fast-time ; but, with the Yangtsze there seventeen miles wide, it was long before shores or any landscape features appeared. Then a pagoda showed on a dis- tant islet, a line of green hills approached the river, and pagodas, forts, batteries, and long-running walls stood out against backgrounds of intense green, for- tifications mounted with ten- and twelve-inch Krupp guns at the time of the war with Japan. It was a mild, soft, gray November day, half rainy, half misty, the air sodden and saturated with the depressing dampness of eastern Asia, typical Yangtsze weather. The steamer whistled as it neared a cluster of build- ings at a creek's mouth, and large, flat-bottomed boats, with passengers and freight crowded indis- criminately together, came out and made fast to the steamer's guards. All this way-cargo, living and in- animate, tumbled or was tumbled in pell-mell, with uniform celerity and unconcern, joining a confused half-acre of the same damp, dirty, ill-favored, ill- smelling boxes, bags, mats, and people. There were 336 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE the same unpleasant type of countenances commonest at Shanghai, the same greasy blue cotton or glazed calico clothes seen everywhere in the unsavory em- pire, the same frightful monotony of life and charac- ter among this least attractive people of earth. The cargo and passengers destined for the creek-side land- ing were hurled into the flatboats with as little cere- mony, with the bells ringing and the boat in motion before the last pig-tailed parcel had been shoved off. The Nganking churned on through the long, damp, dreary afternoon, boat-loads of common cargo and common people tumbling off and on the steamer as it swung to in the stream before each town. The lower deck was packed with chattering crea tures, smoking, eating, sleeping, gambling among and over their heterogeneous belongings— eight hundred of these yellow beings herded in a space not sufficient for two hundred white emigrants on the other side of the globe, a most profitable live cargo, moved without handling or feeding or risks. The Xgan- li')ig\^ spacious, spotless upper deck and cabins fur- nished all the comforts, latest improvements, and gilded splendors one could wish to find on Hud- son or Mississippi River boats ; electric lights, lux- urious upholstery, a piano, potted palms, scattered books and magazines, and a well-served table secur- ing one's content. Eternal thrift, the total want of any fastidious taste or senses, a camaraderie and equality, a true democracy and fraternity, unseen elsewhere, often move even rich and official Chi- nese to herd with the commoners on the steerage- deck— or send their families there : for I once saw a THE LOWER YANGTSZE 337 Chinese admiral sprawling at his ease on the silken cabin sofas, while his wives and children went in the crowded promiscuity of the steerage. Unbounded disgust is felt by foreign captains, Chinese stewards, and menials when mandarins appear in the first cabin, with their water- and opium-pipes, tribes of servants, and mountains of small baggage. Rules of conduct in conspicuous Chinese text are unheeded, and nothing can prevent their bringing on their own greasy and malodorous foods, which they strew over rich carpets, curtains, and couches as unconcernedly as on a yamun's stone floor. Unfortunately, it was dark when we passed through the narrow channel by Silver Island and saw the lights of Chinkiang twinkling on a hillside and far along the river-bank ; for this is one of the picturesque parts of the river, with two landscape ornaments of sacred islands that have been favorite themdS for poets, painters, and gem-carvers for centuries. Silver Island (Tsiao Shan) and Golden Island (Kin Shan), which lie off Chinkiang, are both abrupt rock masses which Buddhism sanctified and beautified in the long- ago. Both islands were covered with temples, tow- ers, terraces, and carved gateways ; both were visited by Ming and Manchu emperors ; and the sounds of gong and bell and chanting priests were continuous. In Marco Polo's time there were two hundred priests on Silver Island, and Golden Island was the depository of an imperial library, the only similar book collec- tions being at Peking and Haugchow. Old pictures, precious jade, crystal and ivory carvings, show in miniature what the sacred islands were, for to-day 18 338 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE they are desolate and in ruins. British forces occu- pied Golden Island during the siege of Chinkiaiig in 1842, and it is to be regretted that one of the British officers did not carry out his intention of sending the library to the British Museum, since those books and the library at Hangchow were later destroyed by the Taiping rebels. The Taipings destroyed temples, shrines, and sacred groves, wreaking their wrath more especially upon Silver Island, because the priests had sheltered an imperial official there. After that the American consul secured the island's immunity by establishing his residence there, and the "■ flowery flag " or " gaudy banner," as Chinese call our in- tricate arrangement of colored stripes and pointed spots, flew from the sacred summit until ruined and desolate Chinkiang was freed from the rebels. Dur- ing the war with Japan, batteries were mounted again, and all sacredness would seem to have fled, A few priests maintain a tradition of Buddhism, but the grottoes and niches and groves no longer shelter saints and hermits attempting buddhahood, and even the cave temple of the river-god who checks floods and rains has lost vogue in this day of dilapidation and disillusionment. Chinkiang has always enjoyed commercial impor- tance from its position at the junction of the Grand Canal and the Yangtsze. Besieged and bombarded by the Britisii in 1842, captured by the Taiping rebels in 1853, and recaptured by the imperialists in 1857, the city was only a waste space of ruins wlien opened to foreign trade in 1858. As population gathered it was rebuilt, trade increased, and there was monoto- THE LOWER YANGTSZE 339 nous prosperity until one of those insensate anti- foreign riots occurred in 1889, the mob attacking, looting, and destroying all the foreign buildings save the Catholic mission, and driving the foreign resi- dents to some cargo-hulks, where they defended themselves until taken off by gunboats. By one of those fortunate accidents that just save our foreign service now and then, the United States consul at Chinkiang was a veteran in consular and Eastern service, whose courage and sturdy Americanism were a match for the wiles of the tao-tai, or local governor, who had short orders from Peking to settle for the damage wrought. Other consuls accepted minimum sums for their losses, and obliged their countrymen to do the same ; but General Jones stood for ample indemnity or none, and the meekness of the other consuls in accepting any trifle " for peace' sake," and " lest it embarrass trade relations," only added fuel to his ire. The tao-tai made several visits and specious pleas, without General Jones abating one cash of his first demand ; and meanwhile Peking inquired of the tao-tai : " Have you settled with those foreign devils yet? " " Why don't you pay those claims at once ? " etc. The ''river" was convulsed with accounts of General Jones's encounters with the mercenary tao- tai, and of that final scene where the bluff and belli- cose American, advancing with uplifted forefinger, thundered at the tao-tai: " You, sir, are the tao-tai of Chinkiang" (every word fraught with superb scorn and contempt), " while I, I, sir, am the Ameri- can Consul ! " This, delivered with a swelling breast, a magnificent. New- World, broad-continent gesture. 340 CHIJsA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE the mien and voice of Jove, made the trembling tao-tai turn pale green and cease his haggling. General Jones received his full indemnity, and from that time en- joyed more consideration and influence among the Chinese than any other foreigner on the river. A General Jones in every port, and a dozen of his dou- bles to represent the great but feeble powers at Pe- king, would have awakened China long ago, and possibly prevented the sad collapse, the cool dismem- berment of the moribund empire that we see to-day. As this kindly old Virginia gentleman, with a person- ality as lovable and truly Southern as that of the im- mortal Colonel Carter of Cartersville, was one of the oldest, ablest, most experienced and efficient American consuls in China or the East, he was the most promptly removed by the new administration in 1897 ; but before his successor could arrive and relieve him of office and honors, the rare old soul *' thanked the world " and went where spoilsmen, '' plums," and office-seekers could never rout him more. The many picturesque incidents of his life in Japan and China have passed into the fixed traditions of the East, where an unend- ing procession of American consuls have come and gone in quadrennial relays without the whole pass- ing company making the same impress on their times as did this one competent and intensely American consul. The Grand Canal, which leads southward from Chinkiang to the rich cities of Soochow and Hang- chow and the great silk districts of Cliina, continues noi'tlnvard from the opposite bank of the Yangtsze to the walls of Peking. The disastrous floods of the THE LOWER YANGTSZE 341 Yellow River have rendered parts of the canal use- less, and the tribute rice, the silks of the south, the tea, and the porcelain do not all go to Peking by that route now. Steamships convey those products to Tientsin, and the imperial red rice-boats maintain some show of their old importance as they creep up the Pei-ho to the imperial granaries of the capital. A German railway from Tientsin to Chinkiang may soon parallel the canal. Twelve miles within the Grand Canal's entrance, the great city of Yangchow, which Marco Polo governed, conceals its ancient walls and a population estimated at from three hun- dred thousand to seven hundred thousand. It is a greater city than Chinkiang, a city of great riches and pride, of fine temples and shops, the home of re- tired scholars and oificials and of the keenest and most critical bargainers in all China— an unspoiled paradise to the cui'io-hunter. The hills rise to mountains between Chinkiang and Nanking, where the river breaks through a geo- logic barrier, and besides the attractive scenery there is much game in the region. Wild-boar hunts over the harvested fields tempt Shanghai sportsmen every autumn, and the peasant proprietors even welcome foreigners who rid them of the formidable animals. Nanking, the southern capital of the Ming emper- ors, and, until Taiping times, a center of arts and luxury, literature and learning, stands back from the river-bank, and one sees only its encircling walls and the waste hillside it incloses within its protective bar- rier. A modern fort and barracks front the river-bank, but a carriage-road, where jinrikishas ply, leads five 342 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE miles back to the main city gate. The Taiping rebels, who started from Kuangsi in 1850, destroyed in turn all the cities of the Yangtsze, and held their infamous court at Nanking for ten years before yielding to the ''Ever-victorious Army," which, raised and drilled by the American adventurers Ward and Burgevine, was finally commanded by the English Major Gor- don. While Hung-siu-tsuen, the " Heavenly Prince," reigned at Nanking, liis troops were arrayed in the plundered silks of the rich cities near, and they reveled in loot and license. They destroyed the great white porcelain pagoda of Nanking, the most beautiful tower in China. The mad extravagance of the Taiping court, the ruthless destruction of myriad smaller works of art, make the tourist groan as he prowls among the rubbish and junk of its curio- shops, and hears of courtyards strewn with powder and fragments of porcelain, jade, and crystal, of pic- tures and hangings trodden in mire and deluged with the blood of the slaughtered. American missionaries maintain schools and a hos- pital, and a university for the higher education of Chinese j^outh; and the viceroy, who could never spare a cash for such innovations, maintains a naval school, batteries of Krupp guns, and a military estab- lishment where German instructors vainly tried to teach the Chinese how to shoot and march. The Prussian drill-sergeants were so freely and frequently mobbed, stoned, and driven from the parade-ground tliat a perpetual object-lesson in civil war reigned at the garrison, until the foreign officers resigned. Yet we read and we read of the Yellow Peril, of the inex- LITTLE OKPHAN ISLAND, IN THE YAXGTSZE BELOW LAKE I'OYANG. THE LOWER YANGTSZE 345 haustible recruiting-ground that China offers, of the millions, of the masses of raw material of armies that wait only for foreign leadership ! For another day of travel up-stream, the Yangtsze flowed between green hills, the river-bed bordered with giant reeds ripened to a rich dull yellow and harvested by blue-clad farmers, who poled Lilliputian boats in among stalks twelve, fifteen, and twenty feet high. Junks with dark-brown butterfly sails made pictures on the oily brown river that cut through the East and "West Pillar Hills, which form the Gates of the Yangtsze, abrupt heights carrying picturesque forts and walls. On the third morning we had reached the scenic stretch of the Lower Yangtsze, and a marvelously clear, soft, rain-washed atmosphere, flooded with early yel- low sunlight, made every contour and color-tint tell. Quaint farm-houses beneath spreading trees, ancestral tombs like small temples, black cattle browsing on green meadows or wandering beside gigantic reeds, made pleasing pictures of rural China. There were mountains on each side, and where the river came through a narrow gorge the pinnacle rock of the Lit- tle Orphan (Siau-ku-Shan) stood in the midst of the river, a fantastic two-story pagoda topping the cliff that rose sheer three hundred feet from the water. A great stretch of '' chow-chow water" about a rocky point drew flocks of birds to fish in the swift, white- capped stream, and a few gorged and sleepy cormo- rants blinked by their nests on the Little Orphan's sides. The steeper front of this islet facing up-stream is built over with temples and monastery walls, which 346 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE fit into the great rock mass as if a part of it, red bal- conies and roofs fiu-nishiug the one high note of color. The season's high- water mark is traced in a muddy- band at the base of this tiny Mount St. Michel, and one with difficulty picks out the lines of staircases and galleries cut in the rock, by which the lone friars mount to their aery. The shrines are neglected and dilapidated, the priests few and poor, and although once richly endowed by an emperor's mother, with souvenir poems cut in the everlasting limestone as record of illustrious and contributing visitors, reve- nues are now scant and votaries far between. Legends cling as thickly as the vines around this picturesque rock which Buddhism beautified in the early centuries. Tradition tells of a woman swept away in a flood and cast on this rock, who pei'force remained, fed by attendant cormorants, until pious river folk, regarding hers as a holy life, souglit the orphan's intercession with the gods. Another tells of a whole family drowned by a capsized boat, save two small children, whom a big frog put on his back and swam away with toward Lake Poyang. The little orphan, grieving and comfortless, threw himself from the frog's back and was drowned, afterward rising as this solid rock memorial in the river gorge. The other orphan, grieving at his second loss, leaped from the frog's back as he entered Lake Poyang, and the Big Orphan Island stands as his monument. More fanciful still is the legend of the lone fisherman, who, diving for a lost anchor, found a river-nymph asleep on its fluke. Stealing her tiny shoes, he rudely tripped the anchor and sailed away for Lake Poyang. The THE LOWER YANGTSZE 347 angry naiad pursued him, and he threw back one slipper, which turned to stone on the spot. The naiad still pursuing, he threw away the other shoe, which shows in mammoth outlines as the Shoe Rock of Ad- miralty charts. The provinces of Anhui and Kiangsi meet on the south shore of the Little Orphan Gorge, and twenty miles beyond one looks down a narrow water-corri- dor to Lake Poyang, the tapering mass of Big Or- phan Island finished with a fine needle of .a pagoda filling the middle distance. The city of Hu-kau, or *' Lake's Mouth," a picturesque, red-roofed and white- walled, almost Spanish-looking place, balances on the edge of steep cliffs, at the base of which flows the river of clear water from the lake. A fine old yamun and fort at the edge of the town, and a fortified monas- tery, with rows of ascending and overlapping gables and roofs and walls, held by a truculent, swash-buck- ling company of priests to whom all river folk give a wide berth and bad name, tempt a visit for the sake of the picturesque ; but not the customs commissioner at Kiukiang, nor any European there, had ever vis- ited Hu-kau or the militant monks, to tell me any more. Beyond the clear river. Lake Poyang stretched away in placid blue and pearly distance, a mirage of islands showing in remotest azure. " I spread my sail to enter on the mirror of the sky," sighed Li Tai Peh, and there are poets' groves and classic vales along the lake more celebrated in verse than any other in China. It is a sacred lake, too, with state worship paid its spirits, sacrifices and offerings made 348 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE when the Emperor's annual epistle to the genius of the lake is read and burned at the chief temple. The choicest tea districts of China slope from its shores and tributaries, and the great potteries of King-te-chen have their port and market at Jao- chau, on the east shore of Poyang. The potteries, forty-five miles up the river from Jao-chau, date from earliest times, the famous imperial factories estab- lished by the Ming emperors in the sixteenth century being but a small ward in the great industrial city of a half-million people that stretched for three miles along its river-bank. All the materials for porcelain- making, the kaolin and petuntze, exist in the hills about the city, which for centuries was one of the four great marts of China. Chinese records tell of and Jes- uit priests have written of King-te-chen in its days of greatness, when inspired workmen were producing the pieces which have been the delight and despair of the Western world for three centuries, Dresden, Sevres, and Delft factories being founded only to imitate them. With the rapid decay of all the arts, the utter and complete degeneration of the Chinese people in this century, the standards of King-te-chen had fallen low, when the destruction of the city and wholesale slaughter of the potters by the Taiping rebels gave the death-blow to the ceramic art in China. Although King-te-chen has been partly rebuilt and work re- sumed at some five hundred kilns, the wares are of the most common and vulgar sort, coarse travesties of the miracles of beauty and skill that used to come from its furnaces. The Jesuits visited the potteries freely for two THE LOWER YANGTSZE 351 centuries, often by imperial command, and many triumphs of the kiln — the wonderful "rose of gold" {famille rose) tints and the intense, clear ruby-red glaze of the later sang-de-bceuf, all known as " mis- sionary colors"— -were due to their advice. P^re d'EntrecoUes, in the " Lettres Edifiantes," described King-te-chen at the height of its greatness, with de- tails of the processes employed, for the benefit of the Sevres workmen. King-te-chen people are rough and unruly, vexing their mandarins out of all reason, striking and rioting at all seasons, and giving hostile reception to any stranger who may show his head. A few years ago a Boston and an Australian tourist went up to the pot- teries in winter and had an interesting visit without molestation; but when M. Scherzer, the late French consul at Hankow, attempted to visit King-te-chen, at the request of his government, in the interests of the national factory at Sevres, every obstruction was put in his way before and after starting. The pro- vincial officials warned him of the ugly and hostile spirit of the rough potters, of the assaults and indig- nities sure to befall him, and insisted that he should visit the factories in a closed chair at night. Even then he was stoned and roughly used before he got away, the whole demonstration arranged by the man- darins to discourage foreigners from visiting interior towns. During strikes of the potters in 1896, troops were called out to settle the differences between labor and capital, and there was great loss of life before the unruly ones could be made to return to their work. The great trade route to southern China ascends 352 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE the river at the head of the lake and crosses over the Mei-ling or Plum-blossom Pass, "the throat of the north and south of China," and seems as well used now as in earlier days before open ports and steam- navigation. This overland route to Canton offers a most attractive house-boat and walking tour to a traveler, but, save for Abbe Hue and the missionaries, few Europeans have attempted it. In the great days of the East India Company, and when Canton was the only port open to foreign trade, the black tea and the choicest green teas went that way from Anhui and Kiangsi. Until 1898 steam-navigation was pre- vented from resorting to Lake Poyang, and the offi- cials refused to allow steam-launches to tow junks or rafts on the sqiially and dangerous lake, lest cargoes reach their destination too quickly and ^' spoil busi- ness"— the governor at Nanchang keeping a steam- launch himself, however, to tow his own house-boats and his timber-rafts. The Detroit, U. S. N., made a tour of the lake during the high water of 1896, creat- ing the greatest sensation among simple rustics and irate officials. Free navigation of all internal water- ways was officially conceded in 1898, but the mandarins are passed masters in the art of delaying and blocking. XXIV THE RIVER OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS ^lUKIANG, in the shadow of the lion bulk of Lien-shan, is four hundred and forty- five miles from Shanghai, and presents a long gray crenelated wall to the river, along the bank of which continues the foreign settlement, with its broad bund, its rows of shade-trees, the imposing French mission buildings, consulates, important hongs or mercantile houses, and residences. It suffered sadly in Taiping times, but has recovered and become again the green-tea and porcelain mart of the river. From the floating hulk, from which one lands, the bund is lined to the city gates with peddlers crouched behind their baskets of cheap porcelain, hide ous things in form and color, unpleasant to sight and touch, the bargains, rejects, and refuse lots of King- te-chen kilns. Shops within the city show the same screaming atrocities in pigments and glaze, shameful travesties of the old designs, woeful debasements of uncomprehended European ideas. There are attempts at imitations of old wares that make one long for a 353 354 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE destroying hammer— liawtliorn pieces whose crude blue is that of the street-dyers' dirtiest indigo wash ; medallion bowls whose thick, painty yellow is far from the pure jonquil tints of even Tao Kwang's time; would-be coral reds that are dingy brick-dust hue, and smudgy reds that are far removed from the old pitted, clotted sang-de-bceufs or the later pure ruby-red Jesuit glaze, the glory of the eighteenth century at King-te- chen. Of new ideas there are snuff -bottles, small tea- pots, and pieces for the writing-table molded in relief, with a pale, poison-green glaze, a related yellow, and an unhappy blue that are color novelties due to European laboratories, cheap imported pigments having helped on the ceramic degradation of King-te-chen. There are a few careful counterfeiters of the old wares work- ing somewhere in King-te-chen, but the nearer one gets to their workrooms the less is known of this fraud- ulent art, as their output does not seek the local mar- ket, but goes to dealers in Shanghai, Peking, and Hong- kong, where in silk-lined teak-wood boxes it catches the European eye. The cleverest approaches to old King-te-chen's triumphs are those made in Japan, the souls of certain old Ming and early Manchu master potters reincarnated in those wizard ceramists at Ota and Kioto. To visit King-te-chen and see even the decay of its great art was the definite errand I had set myself in China that year; but the nearer I drew to King-te- chen, the vaguer the whole subject grew. The hideous china-shops in Kiukiang told little that one wanted to know, and Kiukiang shopkeepers seemed to know less. There were no serious amateurs of porcelain among THE KIVER OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 355 the foreign residents, but the resident physician, the one most interested in ancient art, who found his delight in bronzes, admitted having acquired a few plates by accident. I shall not soon forget the effect on that dreary day when I passed from his hallway, filled with interesting bronzes, and the opening of the drawing-room door was like a burst of sunshine— a drawing-room the wall-spaces of which glowed with great plates and plaques of imperial yellow, each disk a glory of the purest daffodil glaze, manufactured during this or the preceding Emperor's reign, and showing that the achievements of King-te-chen could be repeated when the Emperor wills. " Yes, you can go to King-te-chen, if you are help- lessly bent on it," said the kindly doctor. '' You must have a special passport and a military escort from the viceroy, and he will take weeks to grant it, and then send word ahead to have you scared off; and the escort will probably alarm you enough at sight. How- ever, you could get a junk here, and with a hulk-man from one of the hongs to be responsible for the crew, you would be safe enough to Jao-chau, where the French mission and convent would take you in. The priests can give you every information, get you a guide and small boat for the river trip ; but the potters are a very bad lot. There is little to see, and they won't let you see it — that is, see it peaceably and intelli- gently, as you might expect to see potteries in Japan. The game is not worth the candle. Take my advice and stay away. Come with me to the American mis- sion, and maybe the ladies there can arrange for you to visit the yamun of the official who has transmitted 356 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE the Peking orders to the potteries and passed upon all the imperial palace porcelains for these thirty years. His yamun is crammed with porcelains, and he could tell you more about King-te-chen than you could find out by going there." It was a long, chilly ride across town to the mis- sion, through a labyrinth of narrow streets where men in high boots with hobnailed soles clamped noisily over the flagstones, holding up their skirts with both hands, and wearing flannel hoods that fell in long capes over their shoulders. Waste places told where some temple or yamun had stood before the Taipings' sad havoc. When we reached the mission, the one who knew the porcelain mandarin's family best was absent, and in any event it would have been a matter of days to arrange to visit the wives of the family and talk ceramics to the master, who annually orders and critically inspects some forty thousand taels' worth of porcelains, made for the Peking palace. The wives of this ceramic grandee were not to be called upon without warning b}^ any casual stranger, nor in hap- hazard quarter-hours by any old friend, either. Time must be given to prepare tilings in the women'.s quar- ter; time to smoke and drink tea with the idea; time for the women to have their hair built up in elaborate designs and their best clothes donned— a dozen suc- cessive layers of best clothes, so that they may gra- ciously comply with a visitor's insistence that the hostess shall lay aside her top-coat of ceremony, and comply again and again until she is peeled of tlie dozen layers of silk, brocade, satin, and crape. Steamers and seasons may come and go, but Chinese etiquette THE RIVER OP FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 357 demands time, and more time ; and so I never saw the glories of that yamun, what models and duplicates of imperial porcelains were hoarded there, the rejected pieces with imperceptible flaws and imaginary defects, and all the private imperial marks. The foreign settlement of Kiukiang is one of the many " ovens of China," the thermometer often mark- ing 102° and 107°, and this heat continuing in a heavy, motionless, damp, and exhausting atmosphere for days at a time during the midsummer weeks, when commercial life is busiest. The tea season opens at the end of April, and the choicest teas of all China, growing in the hilly regions around Lake Poyang, are marketed at Kiukiang. Kiangsi, like Anhui, was formerly a great green-tea province, and much of its crop was carried over the Mei-ling Pass and sold to foreign traders at Canton. As more and more black tea was demanded with the increasing intelligence and taste of barbarian tea-drinkers, more and more black tea was made ; but it was not until Mr. Robert Fortune had made his personal visit to all the tea dis- tricts of China in 1845 that it was known that the black and green teas of commerce came from the same bushes, the difference lying in the different methods of curing the leaf. Kiukiang, which was at first the great green-tea port, shipped 230,367 piculs ^ of tea in 1896, of which only 38,793 piculs were green tea. In 1897 the tea shipments reached a total of 192,942 piculs, of which 38,734 piculs were green tea. The famous Moning, 1 A picul weighs one hundred and thirty-three pounds avoir- dupois. 19 358 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE Moyune, or Waning teas, the Ening, Kaisow, Ning- chow, and Keemuug teas, are grown within five days' journey, or one hundred miles, of Kiukiang, and na- tive buyers go to those chosen valleys and hillsides when the first leaves open, and buy the standing crops for the great British and Russian exporting firms at the river ports. One Russian firm, lately removed from Hankow, manufactures brick-tea for the Siberian market, and "tablet-tea" of the finest green leaves compressed into thin cakes grooved in divisions like chocolate, an article of luxury for fastidious travelers and campaigners in European Russia. The British concession holds the little foreign set- tlement of Europeans, and farther up the river-bank is a low mud-flat, inundated every year, which was conceded as an American settlement, but never used, as the American mission establishment is in the heart of the native city. The great barrier of Lien- shan, which shuts off the south wind in summer, is one reason for the excessive and sickening heat of Kiukiang ; and the American missionaries, who have been pioneers in such exploration and discovery of available health retreats near their field of work in both China and Japan, were first to utilize Lien-shan itself, and find high, cool plateaus and valleys where they could buy useless and neglected land cheaply, and put up summer homes. Their primitive camp has grown to a considerable resort, and Kuling, at an elevation of three thousand feet, is refuge and sana- torium for all the heated Yangtsze valley settlements. It is only ten miles up a steep mountain road to the THE RIVER OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 359 cool, wind-swept valleys of summer delight, while in winter, frost and light snow offer tonic and cure to malaria- and fever-worn systems. The one hundred and eighty-seven mile reach of river between Kiukiang and Hankow is justly lauded as one of the fine scenic stretches of the lower river, the Yangtsze there cutting through a range of lime- stone hills that divide it into many lake-like stretches, richly weathered cliffs rising from the water, and green hills running in overlapping ridges. The Yangtsze was fast subsiding in that last week of November, and navigation becoming safer and easier as the banks and landmarks emerged from the yellow flood, and the regular channels were defined. An Odessa tea- steamer bound down from Hankow had touched on the flats above Kiukiang a few days before, and with all efforts the cargo could not be lightered fast enough to offset the falling river, nor could the strongest ocean tugs dislodge her from the bed of soft, sticky mud. Coming down-stream six weeks later, we saw the ship standing high and dry an eighth of a mile back from the water, shored up as in a dry-dock, roofed over, and furnished with outer stairways, like pictures of ships in the Arctic. Stranger things yet happen along this river when all the landmarks and boundaries are submerged, and some of the riverine incidents match anything from the ''Peterkins" or a comic opera. One year a pas- senger-steamer found itself aground in a rice-field far from the river-bank, and the water fast subsiding. The rice-farmer raged violently, talked of trespass and ground-rent, forbade any injury to his property by 360 CHINA: THE L0NG-LI\T:D EMPIRE trench-digging, and finally forced the ship-owners to buy his field as a storage-place for the vessel until the next year's flood should release it. Then the river rose in a sudden and unparalleled after-flood, and floated away the impounded ship. Meanwhile, a war- junk which had been sent for to quell the riotous peo- ple ran aground in another field while seeking the besieged ship, and the mad country folk, cheated of their winter prey and profits, set upon the dread engine of war with pitchforks, drove off the braves and the commander of the battle-ship, looted the junk of every portable object, and made winter fuel of its timbers. Hankow, the great tea-market of China, and its com- panion cities of Hanyang and Wuchang, six hundred miles up-stream from Shanghai, together present one of the greatest assemblages of population in China. Abbe Hue, who passed this way in 1845 and wrote the most interesting and still useful travelers' book about China, estimated the combined population of the three gi'eat cities at eight million, and drew amazing pictures of the crowded river life of the Han and Yangtsze, a floating population depleted by thousands in the miles of burning junks when the Taiping rebels got their first taste of blood and plunder in the destruction of the three cities. For half the year the Yangtsze runs at the foot of a forty-foot stone embankment where broad flights of steps lead up to the park, or bund, of the British concession, a model foreign settlement ex- tending from the walls of the native city for three quarters of a mile along the river-bank. For the rest of the year the Yangtsze rises higher and higher, THE EIVER OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 363 until it often overflows the parapet and the great es- planade, the settlement streets and the race-course being navigable by small boats for weeks at a time. Since the opening of the port in 1861 this British con- cession, with its smooth, clean streets, shade-trees, and flower-beds, has been an object-lesson in municipal order, wholly thrown away on the Chinese wallowing in the filth of the native city. Only the magnificent, red-turbaned Sikh police have really impressed the natives, and with their splendid scorn and contempt of the yellow race, these men from the Panjab have maintained order, in fact the most serious decorum, in the settlement. The Chinese have conceded land along the river-bank adjoining the British concession for a Russian settlement, and beyond that tracts for French and German settlements, which, when em- banked and improved, will give the great foreign city of the future a continuous bund over three miles in length. Hankow, so long the chief source of supply of Brit- ish tea-drinkers, with fifteen or twenty tea-steamers in port at a time loading for London, has undergone a change in this decade. As Chinese teas deteriorated in quality and tea-farmers became more careless and dishonest, India and Ceylon teas began to win favor, and with the enormous increase of production in those two British dependencies, Chinese tea has lost its place in the British market, furnishing only one ninth of England's import in 1896. At that same time began the general awakening of Russia. At Hankow the Russian has come, and to stay, and the shadow of the Muscovite is over it all. The Russian is not only 364 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE established at the gates of China, but also at its very heart, the invasion and absorption being as remark- able in this British settlement at Hankow as anywhere in Korea or Manchuria. Hankow is fast becoming a Russian city or outpost, a foothold soon to be a strong- hold in the valley of the Yangtsze, which China has given her word shall never be alienated to any power but England. Some alarmists may even view the Si- berian merchants at Hankow as emissaries, like those armed Russian monks who first established them- selves in the Caucasus and Asia Minor in stronghold monasteries. Although the Russians have their own concession at Hankow, they do not care to build upon it and live there, amenable then to Russian laws and consular jurisdiction, to Russian restrictions and es- pionage ; and the consulate and a few warehovises were the only buildings on the Russian concession in 1896. The Russians prefer the laws and the order of the British concession, crowding in upon it at every opportunity, competing for any house that comes into the market, and building closely over former lawns and garden-spaces. They compete with and out- bid the few British tea-merchants who remain in these days of active Russian trade aggression. Only one tea-steamer took a cargo to London in 1896 ; two more British firms closed out and left Hankow that year ; and, still more significant, only one pon}^ showed the colors of the one British racing-stable at the autumn races. In the retail shops prices are quoted and bills made out as often in rubles as in taels or dollars, and the Russians have gradually assumed an air of ownership, of seigniorial rights, as complete as THE RIVER OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 365 if they held the lease or diplomatic deeds to the place for ninety-nine years. This great tea-market of foreign Hankow is a city of six weeks only, the heads of the great hongs, or their managers, occupying their residences from the first of May to the middle of June each year. Leaf- teas are fired and shipped until September and even later, and brick-tea is made until January, but the choice tea is all looked to in those few weeks. For that first quality the Russians buy only the first " flush," or crop of young leaves unfolding at the tips of the new twigs of the evergreen camellia-bush each April. These pekoe and souchong ^' leaves of the sec- ond moon " are carefully picked by hand, while the next crop of tougher leaves is cut with a knife, and at the third and fourth gleanings the knife takes whole twigs, woody stems as well as leaves. The first crop of pale, downy leaflets is cured, or put through the wilting, rolling, fermenting, and drying processes, at the tea-farm, the fermentation changing the color of the leaf to a reddish brown, and converting part of the tannic acid to sugar, in which regard black teas differ from green teas, the leaves of which are dried as they come from the bush. With all the machines invented and used on tea-plantations in India and Ceylon, a drier has only once been used in China. All attempts toward greater care and cleanliness in preparation have been as vain as attempts toward introducing machinery at the tea-farms themselves. Neither declining trade nor prices can stimulate the tea-growers to any change, and only when the whole country is open to foreign trade and residence will 366 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE each village or valley have its own tea-factory to cure and pack the tea for final shipment on the spot. The dried tea-leaves of the first crop are gathered up by middlemen and brought to Hankow, and on some day in the first week of May the Chinese bro- kers, in silk array, are borne in sedan-chairs from the native city and set down in the compounds of the great hongs to offer their first musters, or samples of tea. The high season begins at that moment, and for six weeks, in the first scorch and stew of its summer climate, Hankow runs at high pressure. The musters are tested by foreign experts, the skilled tea-tasters, whose acute and highly trained senses render their judgment and appraisal unerring. A few leaves are carefully weighed from the muster into a shallow cup, and boiling water poured over them. The tea-taster notes carefully how the leaves unfold in the water, how the liquor colors and deepens to a rich, clear coffee-brown, and inhales the fragrance of the essen- tial oil as it is borne off in vapor before he takes his judicial sip. He carefully analyzes its qualities for the second it rests on his tongue, and then ejects the liquid, never by any chance swallowing it. A price is agreed upon, and the tea is brought in chests and thick paper sacks and dumped into great bins at the factory, where it is refired, or toasted slowly in iron pans over charcoal fires, to dry it thoroughly, then sealed in air-tight lead cases within wooden chests, which are papered, varnished, covered with matting, and hurried aboard the waiting ships. The average price at Hiuikow for this first-quality black leaf-tea, which is all shipped to Odessa, is about forty Mexican THE RIVER OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 367 dollars for each ninety-pound chest. Twenty-five half- chests of this first crop's pekoe-leaves are sent to the Emperor of Russia for palace use. Several times it has happened that the whole crop of some particular farm or hillside has been bought up by the Russians and shipped before Chinese connoisseurs, who would drink no other tea, knew it. At once they cabled to Odessa, and had the tea bought on arrival and shipped back to China. Twice on the Yangtsze I used a rich and fragrant tea from the Keemung hills that had per- formed that journey to Odessa and return, because some mandarin knew what he wanted and was willing to pay for it. The tea-taster is king at Hankow for the six weeks of his exclusive reign, and whatever he may do dur- ing the remainder of the year, he is a most rigid total abstainer during the high season, when every faculty of his keenest senses is on the alert. Although he never swallows a sample sip, the tea-taster's nerves and digestion are impaired at the end of ten or twelve years, even the stimulating effect of the strong, vola- tile aroma in the tea-hongs sometimes giving retired tea-tasters attacks of that tea-tremens which the Chi- nese and Japanese recognize as a disease ; while tem- perance reformers, usually green-tea drinkers, seem ignorant of the fact that other stimulants than alco- hol may be abused. The professional tea-taster at Hankow is said to drink only soda or mineral waters during the scorching weeks of his exacting season, and when word goes round the settlement that such a one of the great experts was seen to take sherry and bitters at the club, it is a signal that the great tea 368 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE season is declining, that little choice tea is being brought in. Then the tension relaxes, and a certain section of Hankow gives itself over to a jubilation and indulgence that are the scandal and byword of the other ports. Although the tea firms are all Russians or Siberians now, the tea-tasters are Englishmen, and, for reasons not flattering to Russian character, it is said that the tea-tasters will always be English. No green or oolong teas, no perfumed or fancy teas, are included in these great summer shipments, those being specialties of the southern ports. Several times I was regaled on pu'erh-cha, the gi*eatly esteemed '' strength- ening tea " from Pu'erh Fu in Yun-nan. It had a mil- dew, tobacco, weedy flavor, a bitter draught which is warranted to strengthen the system, clear the brain, relieve the body of all humors and bile, and serves high-living mandarins as a course at Homburg does European bon-vivants. This plant gi'ows in the Shan States, and the leaves are brought to Pu'erh Fu to be steamed and pressed into large, flat cakes, which, being packed in paper only, soon mildew. The long viscous leaves are probably from some variety of the wild Assam tea-plant, and the taste of the dried leaves themselves is a little like the yerha huena of the Cali- fornia foot-hills. The Chinese consider the pu'erh-cha the better by age, and do not heed the mildew flavor. It promotes longevit}^ along with its therapeutic quali- ties, and is sent regularly to the Emperor at Peking. Despite the distinguished consideration implied, I should not care to have the costly herb offered me again, and, with all the craze for cures, I doubt if pu'erh-cha would ever find favor abroad. THE RIVEE OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 369 The Russians buy the best and the worst, the dear- est and the cheapest teas in Hankow's market, the chests of choice tea going to Odessa for European Russia, and the compressed brick- or tile-tea to Mon- golia and Siberia. By September the best leaf-teas are j&red, and some tea-steamers are back at Hankow for second cargoes, Odessa ships trying to make two round trips in each season. After that the tea-farmers send in the bags of coarse leaves, broken and refuse tea, the dust from their tables, bins, and floors ; the factories have binfuls of such leavings and sweepings too, and the manufacture of brick-tea begins, and con- tinues until January before all such accumulations are disposed of. Tokmakoff, Molotkoff & Co.'s brick- tea factory, which is managed by a Scotchman who invented and adapted several of the machines and processes employed, is the largest factory in Hankow, employing fourteen hundred workmen through the long season, and shipping nearly a million bricks a year, with an almost equal output from their factory at Kiukiang. All the way to their compound the set- tlement is fragrant with toasting tea-leaves, delight- ful whiffs coming from the rows of windows at that end of Hankow, where walls are higher and longer, and chimneys rise significantly. They showed us first the bins of fine dust, ground and sifted by wretched, sallow, greenish-hued coolies, whose nos- trils were filled with cotton-wool to prevent their breathing in the insidious dust. Two pounds of tea- dust are weighed into a cloth, which is laid on a per- forated plate over a caldron of boiling water and covered for a few minutes, when it is poured into a 370 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE clumsy wooden mold, and a half-pound of finer dust added as a surface. The mold is covered, put under a screw-press, and clamped shut. The noise around this press is deafening as the heavy molds are clanged about on iron tables and the stone floor, and with the half -clothed workmen moving in clouds of steam from the caldron and shouting their hideous dialect about the dark warehouse, a short inspection of the process satisfies. The bricks remain in the molds for six hours to cool, and are then removed, weighed, and stacked in endless rows in an upper story to dry and shrink, before being wrapped in paper, furnished with red labels in Russian, and packed in baskets holding seventy bricks each. All defective or under-weight bricks are broken and ground to dust again, and it takes heavy blows with an iron, or sharp raps against the stone floor, to break one of these inch-thick black tiles, which are nine inches wide and twelve inches long. A larger and a smaller size of green-tea bricks are also made at this factory, into which the coarse leaves and stems go entire, without grinding. One naturally wonders that machinery is not employed for all these simple processes, and that some Yankee does not start a factory where a stream of tea-dust would go in at one end and rows of bricks come out at the other; but human life is so over-abundant in China that hand-labor is cheaper than any steam-driven machinery, coolies' food worth less than engine coal. The black brick-tea for Mongolia and Siberia, and in fact almost the whole tea-su])ply of Russia, used, long ago, to go from Hankow by boat for three hundred miles up the Han River, was portaged across, and THE RIVER OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 371 taken a distance up the Yellow River, and then loaded on camels and carried across Shansi to Kiakhta, on the Siberian frontier. The caravan trade from Kiakhta and Kalgan to the Volga was the subject of negotia- tions by the embassy Peter the Great sent to the Em- peror Kanghsi, and ever since there have continued, winter and summer alike, the unending processions of camel-trains back and forth across Siberia. Nijni- Novgorod was then the tea-market of Russia, and the water and land transportation across Siberia was so cheap that tea could be delivered in Nijni-Novgorod by caravan more cheaply than by tea-steamers to European ports. The opening of the Suez Canal gradually moved the tea trade to Odessa; the tea brick is no longer a unit of exchange at Nijni, and the great fair on the Volga has lost its most picturesque feature with the vanishing of the camels and the great tea-caravans. When all the Chinese tea came by car- avan to Nijni, '' caravan tea" had a deserved repute in Europe. About the time that the Russian tea trade shifted to Odessa, the name of '' caravan tea " reached America, and dealers, not always informed them- selves, played with the catching word. One is offered ''Russian tea," and assured that "caravan tea" is better than other teas, because a sea voyage spoils the flavor of tea. One must not inquire how the tea crossed the Atlantic, evidently. If all leaf -teas were not sealed in air-tight lead cases, the sea air and ships'- hold odors could not taint them as unspeakably as the proximity of camel's wool, pack-saddle coverings, and the belongings of the filthy Mongol caravan-men on their three months' journey across Siberia. 372 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE Hankow's trade statistics deal in large figures for the export of tea. In 1896 there went out from that port 470,003 piculs, or something over sixty million pounds, of leaf-tea, and 434,107 piculs of brick-tea. In 1897 the total tea shipment was 410,01 9 piculs. These figures, as compared with the 895,031 piculs shipped in 1886, show how the tea trade has fallen off since the English are no longer the great consumers. Sixteen different religious establishments exist at Hankow, — Catholic, Protestant, Greek, and Quaker, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopal,— English, Canadians, Swedish, Norwegians, Spanish, Italians, Scotch, Americans, and Russians all striving in evan- gelical ways, and by their number confusing the native. A ride through the native city of eight hundred thousand inhabitants is an experience no one would willingly repeat. While Shanghai, Canton, and Amoy run rivahy, and imperial Peking has some sloughs and slums and smells unparalleled, Hankow may be safely entered against the field. The people of the Yangtsze banks are in general as unlovely a lot as can be found in China, but never have I seen such dull, heavy-featured, dirty, and unhealthy-looking faces as in the Hankow slums. It is interesting to review by boat the water-front of the native city, where some futile attempts have been made at stone embankments, and where brown boats crowd together and creep about like water- inseets, while a glimpse up the narrow river Han shows only a vista of masts, where junks are crowded ten rcnvs dee]) on each side of the water-street dividing THE RIVER OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 373 the cities of Hankow and Hanyang. The great water- population have their shops and marts afloat, each trading-junk displaying its trade emblem or a sample of its specialty at the masthead. A bundle of fire-wood dangled from one mast ; buckets, brushes, stools, bar- bers' bowls and plaited queues, hanks of thread, gar- ments, and candles advertised other floating shops. Every kind of craft that floats upon the Yangtsze water system may be seen at this great entrepot: Hu-nan rice-boats, as graceful and slender as Vene- tian gondola or Haida canoe ; clumsy Szechuan cargo- junks; ridiculous house-boats; and even the quaint fiddle-shaped boats from Lake Poyang, the sides of which, contracted at the middle like the body of a violin, perpetuate evasions of the ancient law that taxed boats according to their breadth of beam amid- ships. Could any opera bouffe ever burlesque China ? Bewitched by its crass absurdity, I asked to have a model of the fiddle-boat made ; but the oldest foreign resident on the river besought me not to begin on boat models, since his efforts in collecting them had been so over-rewarded that he had had to desist for want of storage-room. No models seem to have been put aside since the deluge— save the centiped, dragon, hawk's-beak, and four-wheeled junks, descriptions and pictures of which survive from a thousand years ago, when the Yangtsze was the dividing-line between two great empires and naval battles raged. The four- wheeled junk had two wheels at the bow and two at the stern— the common water-wheels of their irrigating ditches, turned by hand or treadmill gangs. After al- most anticipating Fulton's invention by ten centuries. 374 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE they stood still forever after. Chinese conceit claims half of Western inventions as mere imitations or re- vivals of long-forgotten Chinese things. Anything and everything— stern- and side-wheel steamers, tele- phones, telegraphs, phonographs, railroads, and elec- tric lights, almost the automobile— can be found de- scribed in some book of the immortal classics. Ages ago a Taoist teacher spoke into a box, put his voice in a box and sent it to a kindred soul. " Is not that plainly the foreigners' phonograph ? " ask the il- luminated literati. '* What could be clearer ? What more proof do you want when we find it in the books of the classics ? " Hanyang, the twin city of Hankow, is no more filthy and dilapidated than its neighbor,— it hardly could be, —but it boasts the arsenal and iron-works, those ex- pensive foreign toys of Chang Chi Tung, the great viceroy, reputed the one honest official in China, the one provincial officer of the empire who does not di- vert the revenues and riches of his satrapy into his own pocket. His iron ore is brought from a district seventy miles away, the coal is transported two hun- dred miles, and often Japanese coal is used, since the local and export taxes on Chinese coal make imported coal cheaper along this river of inexhaustible coal-fields. Rifles and smokeless powder are made at the Hanyang works, as well as the rails for the intended future great road from Peking to Canton— a scheme in agitation for thirty years, that has exercised all the intelligence, ambition, and rascality in China, brought armies of floaters, promoters, concessionaries, schemers, specu- lators, sharks, and sharps of all nations to China, set THE RIVER OF FRAGRANT TEA-FIELDS 375 the diplomatic corps at Peking by the ears many times, and almost embroiled rival European nations in war, and now, with concessions granted, is a project almost as far from realization as ever. The officials at Peking were slow to learn that concession-granting was profitable for them. Until it is proved that con- cession-working is also profitable, railroad-building will lag. Any amateur prophet can tell that when this railway is completed it will be to all intents a Russian railway, a feeder and branch of the trans- Siberian system, connecting the Russian tea port of Hankow with Irkutsk, the trade and railway center of Siberia. A Belgian syndicate holds the concession, but in China one paraphrases Napoleon's saying, and it is only necessary to scratch the Belgian to find the Muscovite Tatar. There is a picturesque tea-house in the grounds of an old temple by Hanyang's river-bank, which is the resort of literati and officials, and where the viceroy gave a great feast to the present Czar and to Prince George of Greece a dozen years ago. The " great dividing mountain" curves back from this riverside temple point, and is the lucky tortoise which offsets the dragon hill in opposite Wuchang, and by that combination secures favorable geomantic influences, good wind and water for the three cities. Hanyang's tortoise bears a temple on its back, while far across the river a needle of a pagoda marks the head of the Wucliang dragon. Some greasy priests inhabit the temple on the heights, and from their courts, three hundred feet above the river, one has a fine view of the twin cities stretching away, in a huddle of roofs 376 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE covering more than a million people, to the billows of greenery by the river-bank, marking the English con- cession. Wuchang, the " Queen of the Yangtsze," where offi- cials and literati live, where the viceroy has another foreign toy in the shape of a great electric-lighted cotton-mill, and a military establishment with German iustnictors, and where the American missionaries have their schools and hospital, is seen in full bird's-eye view from the temple terraces. One has small wish to cross the mile of swift, white-capped waters, where sampans struggle against or are swept away by the seven-mile current, to see the viceroy's seat, a great city once Taipinged to rubbish-heaps, and but shabbily patched up in places in the quarter of a century since that incident. It reeks with filth, and its people give scant welcome to the stranger in town, their stoning of the German minister on his way from a viceregal visit being a last straw and a golden incident in the summing up of events that led to the forcible lease of Kiao-chau. XXV A THOUSAND MILES UP THE YANGTSZE [BOVE Hankow the Yangtsze River tests all of a fresh- water navigator's skill and patience ; and changing to small, light- draft steamers, we were three days in accomplishing the four hundred miles to Ichang, sounding and feeling the way among sand- bars by day, and anchoring at night. "Bhe picturesque old walled town of Yo-chau, at the edge of Tung-ting Lake, was declared an open port in April, 1898 ; but its people have a bad name, and its future only a stormy promise. The Hu-nan brave is the most disorderly of all Chinese ; Hu-nan literati have sent out the shameful pamphlets and led the anti-foreign crusades for years ; and Hu-nan has so reeked with the blood of martyred priests for a cen- tury past that, had France been so disposed, she might have taken possession of the whole province, and, indeed, all the provinces of China, more Ger- manico, long ago. The opening of Yo-chau, with the free navigation of this inland sea of three hundred square miles, secures great prosperity for the region, 377 378 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE and some illumination for its bigoted and unreasona- ble people. An old trade route passes up the Siang River from the foot of this sacred lake, and by the Cheling Pass to the West River above Canton. The projected railway of the American syndicate from Wuchow to Canton wi\l pass near the east shore of the lake and cross by the Cheling to the southern province. On great Kin Shan, or Golden Island, in Tung- ting Lake, tea-culture has been made the finest art, and this tea, possessing, along with other virtues, the gift of longevity, is all reserved for the Emperor of China. The first crop of this choice tea of immor- tality would be worth eight Mexican dollars a pound, by commercial estimates, if it could be bought ; but the priests guard each sacred leaf -bud, and send it all to Peking, though, by common gossip in the Purple For- bidden City, the Emperor drinks something less rare. The argument in that imperial topsyturvydom is that, as the Emperor never visits any one or drinks any one else's tea, he cannot know the difference, and that if the Kin Shan tea was ever exhausted, heads would fall when a substitute was offered. Because of this imperial connection the Taiping rebels uprooted the bushes and devastated the island ; but it soon recov- ered, and the plantations throve again. Tea from the Ming-shan hills, by the lake, is also sent in satin- covered boxes fi'om Yo-chau to the Peking palace. Above the outlet of Tung-ting Lake, the Yangtsze is a broad, shallow, wandering stream, half the volume of the river being diverted through the lake by a canal at its western end. The lead was swung, the A THOUSAND MILES UP THE YANGTSZE 379 monotonous chant of the man at the line rang all after- noon, and the tiniest of steam-launches skimmed the surface ahead like a frantic water-insect, the pilot probing the mud with a bamboo pole and marking the six-foot channel by a line of staves. The next day there were the same monotonous mud- banks again, protective dikes that run for three hun- dred miles above Hankow. Country folk used the embankment as a highway, processions of men, women, and children, buffaloes, pack-horses, carts, and sledges, filing along in silhouette against the sky. Lone and ragged fishermen inhabited burrows in the bank, or from a platform over the water worked big, square dip-nets by levers ; and for fifty times that I watched the big, square cobweb drop beneath the waters, once a small silverfish was dipped up. Children with fly- ing pigtails, as near to young apes as their earliest ancestors could have been, shrieked at the fire-boat, and ran along to watch the foreigners on deck. " Look ! see ! Look ! see ! " they screamed joyfully ; and ^' Foreign devil ! oh, foreign devil ! " they bawled, with menacing gestures. "Oh, give me a bottle! Quick ! Give me a bottle, foreign devil ! " other fran- tic ones cried. Chinese passengers on the lower deck found amusement in holding out bottles to induce the poor, tired little apes to run for miles along the mud- banks, only to have the boat veer away to the baboon laughter of the inhuman teasers of the wretched little country children, to whom a glass bottle is a treasure. In revenge, the children have learned to fasten a mud ball on the end of a bamboo, and with a quick jerk shoot the pellet to the steamer-decks. The fusillade 380 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE is unpleasant, often dangerous; and as the young imps master the science of projectiles, there are bits of inshore navigation beset with uncharted perils. We came to larger towns with stone embankments, conspicuous temples, and yamuns where inverted fish- baskets on tall poles proclaimed the official residence. When we reached the Taiping Canal, which cuts away to Tung-ting Lake and drains the Yangtsze of half its flood, the lonely river was enlivened. Here two great trade routes, the land route from north to south and the river route from west to east, cross. Great Szechuan cargo-junks came down with the current, their chanting crews steering by a broad projecting sweep or oar at the bows, and great junks went up, sailing and tracking, with gangs of ragged creatures straining at their bricole thongs, like the beasts of burden they are. Brown sails and blue-and-white striped sails ornamented the water, and hills beyond hills rose in the west, with needle-spired pagodas pricking the sunset sky, and bold headlands coming to the river's bank. It was six o'clock and all blue- black darkness when we crept close to the twinkling lights of Shasi's bund and dropped the heaviest an- chors. The current races there at the rate of seven miles an hour, and passenger-boats that ventured out for prey came whirling at us broadside on, stern first, bow first, any way at all, and banged the steamer's hull alarmingly. A hundred boatmen squawked, screeched, and chattered madly, and if one of them failed to grapple the chains and lines along the free-board at the moment, the current swept him astern and far down-stream before he could recover headway with APPROACH AND MASONKY FKUNT OF CAVK TEMPLE NEAK ICHANG. A THOUSAND MILES UP THE YANGTSZE 383 the oars. The frantic ki-yi-ings of these disappointed ones, swept away into distant darkness, filled the night air along with the noises on shore. Shasi is an old city with a deservedly bad name. The opening of this port was secured by the Japa- nese in the treaty of Shimonoseki (1895), and as soon as a Japanese consulate could be built, the Shasi spirit broke out and the building was destroyed, the four ringleader assailants afterward executed, the consulate rebuilt at local expense, and further con- cessions granted in reparation. The customs offi- cers, occupying house-boats moored to the bund, barely escaped with their lives, and the floating British consulate was set adrift, and with difficulty rescued from burning. The town is behind the em- bankment, and one sees only a few roofs to tell of a city of seventy-three thousand inhabitants; but Shasi is, after all, only the port and place of junk transhipment for King-chau, the provincial capital, which lies back from the river a mile above the rowdy water-town. We had toiled three hundred miles up-stream to reach this great cross-roads of provincial trade, yet we could have returned to Hankow by a hundred- mile journey, either on foot or by boat, through a line of creeks and small canals. For a last day we had bright, mild December sunshine. Mud-banks gave way to clay- and gravel-banks, and conglome- rate, red sandstone, and limestone cropped out. Fields were green with winter wheat, tallow-trees glowed with rich-red autumnal foliage, and men in dull-blue garments, at work on those trees, added 384 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE another color-note to the picture. Pagodas spired the crests of near and distant hills. Temples, dago- bas, and shrines told of the great religion which came by this route from Ti])et and India. The Yangtsze is a broad, deep stream in this upper limestone re- gion ; the landscape is attractive ; and the Tiger- tooth Gorge, first in scenic attractions, is followed by a remarkable natural or fairy bridge spanning a ravine between two rocky hills. (Four miles below Ichang and a mile back from the river, a palisade wall rises a sheer thousand feet, extends for a mile or more, and the Chih Fu Shan monastery crowns a pinnacle rock that is joined to the palisade wall by a masonry bridge. This neglected old Buddhist fane is as remarkable as any of Thessaly's "'monasteries in the air," and one needs a clear head and steady nerves to walk, or be carried in an open hill-chair, up the narrow goat-path on the rock's face and along a knife-edged ridge, and across "the bridge in the sky " to the needle rock. ) There is a dizzier path still up rock-hewn staircases around to the mon- astery door. A few miserably poor and ignorant priests crouch on the summit of the rock. The altars are stripped and deserted, and imagination must supply any legends or splendors attaching to this aerial shrine. A clumsy pagoda on the river-bank is first land- mark for Ichang, and the gray city walls edge the water for a half-mile, inclosing an uninteresting city of thirty-five thousand inhabitants. Junks of all provinces crowd the water-front, and a tiny British gunboat, all shining white and brasswork, protects A THOUSAND MILES UP THE YANGTSZE 385 the handful of foreign residents, Chinese river- steamers, as gay as cockatoos, with blue bodies and yellow deck-houses, add to the gaiety of navigation ; and war-junks, with red standards and pennants, tilt about stream with beating tom-toms— hundreds of flags and gala rags fluttering from junk-masts, but never the official national flag of China. These pro- vincials have nothing to do with that. It belongs to 'Hhose Manchus at Peking," probably; it is not old custom to display it. At low water, one climbs the terraced steps of a seventy-foot embankment, and at high water is rowed in the garden gate and over the flower-beds to the steps of the custom-house. A great grave- yard extends from Ichang's city walls for a mile along the river-bank and a half-mile inland, and the foreign settlement is in the midst of this grue- some suburb. French, Scotch, Canadian, and Ameri- can mission establishments, the consulates, customs buildings, and a few hongs, all solid brick-and-stone buildings in high-walled compounds, constitute the settlement, which dates from 1887, although con- ceded as an open port in the Chefoo convention of 1876, which made reparation for the murder of Margary, the British explorer, travehng with Chinese consent across Yun-nan to Burma. Ichang settle- ment was once destroyed and twice threatened by rioters, and the residents find these acres of graves, this belt of ancestral tumuli surrounding them, an advantage and protection, these thousands of dead forefathers more desirable neighbors than their living descendants. They even manage to play golf in this 386 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE graveyard, a course of a tliousand bunkers and haz- ards, with fine drives insured from teeing-grounds fixed on certain superior mandarin mounds. Until 1897, when China joined the Postal Union, each port on the river had its own post-office and local stamps- sets of these local treaty-port stamps treasures to philatelists. The sale of Ichang stamps furnished funds to purchase the inevitable recreation-ground, first necessity of British exiles in the East. The neighborhood is rich in temples, hilltop and cave shrines, both Taoist and Buddhist, and in con- tinuation of its legend a colony of otter-fishers lives by the An-an temple across the river. The fisherman rows out and casts his huge circular net upon the water, and as it sinks, the otter slips down the central cord and brings up any imprisoned fish. Ichang, one thousand miles from the sea, and in the shadow of the great central mountain-range, which crosses China from Siam to the Amur, is the head of steam-navigation and port of transhipment for all the products arriving from the provinces beyond the range. The famous gorges and rapids of the Yangtsze begin there, the river running through the Mountains of the Seven Gates, as its flood has cut seven deep ca- nons through the uplifted rocks, and carved their walls to a scenic panorama for the four hundred miles be- tween Ichang and Chungking. Despite conventions and promises, Ichang remained the end of steam-navi- gation for twenty years after the privilege of such navigation was conceded on the Upper Yangtsze. Ob- structive mandarins resorted to every subterfuge and device to prevent the march of progress and the in- A THOUSAND MILES UP THE YANGTSZE 389 evitable end of their extortions, and even that arch- pretender to progress, Li Hung Chang, gravely assured negotiators that the monkeys on the banks would throw stones at the steamers in the gorges, and he could not let foreigners run such risks ! The privilege of steam -navigation on the upper river was again con- ceded in the treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, but clumsy junks and Jcwatsze continued to mount the rapids at the end of bamboo tow-ropes, with all navigation sus- pended in the weeks of flood, until, in March, 1898, Mr. Archibald Little, who had clung to the intention for twenty years, took a small steamer to Chungking. In June, 1898, the free navigation of all waterways was enjoyed through British diplomacy, and steam- whistles have echoed in all the great gorges. The prize in view on the Upper Yangtsze has been the trade of Szechuan, the richest, most fertile, and best-governed province of China, the seventy million inhabitants of which have been praised by every traveler from Marco Polo to the present day of Lord Charles Beresford's commercial mission. Szechuan's fertile plains and valleys have earned it the name of " the Granary of China," and proverbs relate that ^' Szechuan grows more grain in one year than it can consume in ten years," and the boast is made that " you never see an ill-dressed man from Szechuan." It is one of the great silk provinces, and the seat of opium-culture in China, patches of poppies flaunting in the gorges, and great plains and valleys above ablaze with the seductive flowers which furnish three fourths of China's opium-supply. Since Abbe Hue wrote his account of the province 390 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE and the people, Szechuan and all this far west of China have been the goal of travelers and scientists. Richtofen, PumpeUy, Von Kreitner, Hosie, Baber, Blakiston, Little, Gill, Hart, Parker, and Pratt, Mrs. Little and Mrs. Bishop, have published at length and seriously, and Dr. Morrison, the inimitable " Austra- lian in China," has diverted his readers with his ad- ventures on his happy-go-lucky trip up-country. With the assistance of all kindly and hospitable Ichang,— and they offered and brought, sent and lent and gave, every possible thing that could be thought of for our comfort,— our kwatsze, a lumbering Noah's ark of a house-boat, got away late in the afternoon of our first day ashore. On a flatboat fifty feet long a two-room cabin had been built amidships, leaving a space at the bows for the crew to work, cook, sleep, and eat, and a space behind the cabin where our boy and cook lived and worked, dodging the sweep of a giant tiller, which reached up above the roof of our cabin, where the master stood to command the craft. A projecting cabin at the stern, the most ridiculous flying-poop, was the captain's cabin, where he im- mured a rather pretty, flat-faced wife with small feet and a dirty blue coat, whose life seemed spent in sit- ting on a stool and smiling at space. This tipsy, top-heavy, crazy craft was ours for so much each day that we chose to keep it, and a crew of ten men were engaged to take us the thirty-nine miles to Kuei, through the three greatest scenic gorges and back, any farther travel a matter of fresh bargain, the whole expense of boat, crew, provisions, and gra- tuities for the week's trip being less than thirty dol- > g A THOUSAND MILES UP THE YANGTSZE 393 lars in silver. All books of Yangtsze travel are full of delayed starts and long waits by the way, because of the dilatory and missing cook, and we were com- placent at sight of our chef smilingly picking duck- feathers as we poled out into the stream, to cross and tie up far from city temptations, and enter the Ichang Gorge at sunrise. While we had tea the boatmen crept up and in among the maze of junks off the city front, and began to make fast for the night. Then we found that a cook in the boat was not everything. The captain was not on board— buying rice, the sub- stitute said, and plainly intending to put us through all that our predecessors had endured of missing crews and delayed starts. The captain's " cousin," a Szechuan soldier with the word " brave " sewed in gory red letters on the back of his coat, was playing captain overhead, and, at our discovery of the situa- tion, went leaping along from junk to anchored junk to find his relative. We held parley with our com- panion kwatsze, and to the amazement of the crew, they found themselves rowing across the river and tying up to the bank beyond the otter-fishers' village. We had a delightful dinner on board, as regularly ordered and perfectly served as if on shore ; and in our snug fore-cabin, with its carved and gilded par- titions and window-frames, our rug portieres and American oil-stove to offset the pitiless drafts of river-damp, we congratulated ourselves on a first naval victory. At daylight the lost captain himself roused the crew, the octogenarian fo'c's'le cook dealt them bowls of rice and green stuff, the braided bam- boo ropes were uncoiled, and the draft-creatures began 394 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE hauling us up-stream. The captain greeted us smil- ingly, without embarrassment or apologies, and no strained relations followed the incident of the night before ; but the Szechuan soldier with his red-lettered, decorative back was missing, still hunting for the lost captain on the other shore. The first or Ichang Gorge begins two miles above the city, the river, narrowed to less than three hun- dred yards, flowing for nine miles in a deep chasm five hundred and a thousand feet deep. Two great conglomerate cliffs form an entrance gateway, at one side of which a torrent has cut out the picturesque San Yu Tung Ravine, at the mouth of which Ichang residents maintain a summer club on a large house- boat moored in the cool drafts of the gorge. There is a cave temple of great antiquity in the side-wall of this ravine, and by following a path along rock-hewn shelves and through tunneled archways that fur- nished three gateways of defense in militant times, one comes to the broad balustraded space at the front of the shrine, a noble loge commanding a set scene of classic Chinese landscape, the very crags and clefts and stunted trees of ancient kakemono. The cave arches back in a great vault with a central column or supporting mass, and in the farther darkness there is a sanctuary full of gilded images, guarded by carved dragons, gnomes, and fantastic bird-creatures, that peer out from dark crevices. Poems and inscriptions are carved on the walls, and incense-burners. Urns, and bells tell of better days when Buddhism flour- ished from Tibet to the sea. The few poor priests boil their miserable messes of pottage, and live in irTEi;-FI.SllIV(i AT ICIIA.NC A THOUSAND MILES UP THE YANGTSZE 397 small chambers at one side of the vaulted hall— mere dens and caves, which, half lighted on that sunless side of the ravine, are comfortably cool in summer and as cold as Siberia in winter. The Ichang Gorge cuts straight westward for five or six miles, and then turns at a right angle north- ward, an arrowy reach between gray, purple, and yel- lowed limestone walls overhung with the richest vege- tation. Tiny orchards and orange-groves are niched between the buttresses of these storied strata walls, and cling to terraces ; quarries and lime-kilns show, and mud houses are left behind, stone huts and houses being cheaper beside the quarry than the wattle and dab of the plains. Brown junks floated in mid-stream, and junks with square and butterfly and striped sails were dwarfed at the foot of the cliffs. All day our trackers strained at the braided bamboo ropes, crawl- ing up and down and over rocks where bamboo hawsers have cut deep, polished grooves in the con- glomerate and limestone banks by the friction of cen- turies. Lookout men at the water's edge kept the line free from rocks, throwing it off from any projec- tions, and wading out to release it from hidden snags. Where foothold was wanting, the trackers scrambled on board and rowed around the obstacle or across stream to tracking-ground again. Their whole per- formance was the burlesque of navigation, the climax of stupidities, and nothing ingenious or practical seems to have resulted from the three thousand years of "swift-water" navigation on the Upper Yangtsze. The ridiculous, top-heavy, tilting kwatsze is wholly unsuited to such a flood-river, and the trackers tow 398 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE by a rope fastened to the top of the mast, as on the Pei-ho, the mast shivering, springing, and resounding all the while. They rowed us with poles, round sap- ling stems held to the gunwale by a string or straw loop, and it was a marvel that the kwatsze responded to these bladeless oars, even when all hands, including the cook, rowed madly, screaming and stamping in chorus, and the captain on the roof raging and shriek- ing, and threatening to drop through upon us. The kwatsze would reel and wabble, gain by inches, and round the ripple or point, and the ragamuffin crew would drop off with the tow-line and fasten to it by a flat metal button at the end of their bricole thongs. With a deft loop, that can be detached with the least slackening, the cotton thongs hold firmly to the slip- pery cable. In all these thousands of years they have never learned to '* line up," either by a capstan on board or a winch on shore, nor to invent other com- pelling swift- water fashions of the Nile, the St. Law- rence, the Snake, the Columbia, or the Stikine. Some years ago Admiral Ho was ordered to these river precincts, where lawlessness had been rife, and he, un- precedented in this century in China, took an interest in his work, and attempted to better things. He established a system of life-boat patrol in the gorges, and his little red rowboats waiting above and below rapids and eddies, and moving alongshore to render assistance, had a salutary effect on the wild river folk. Any traveler of distinction,— and all foreigners are that,— or ''explorer" in these bv-r)arts of Asia, can have a life-boat detailed to accOixipany his kwatsze through the gorges, adding to his prestige, compelling A THOUSAND MILES UP THE YANGTSZE 401 precedence, aud insuring safety at the river towns, where the scum of the Yangtsze rob and batter at every opportunity. Admiral Ho, moreover, compiled a " Traveler's Guide to the Upper Yangtsze," which pictures the river's surface from Ichang to Chung- king, with the profile of each bank as seen from the water, and gives pilots directions for every rock and eddy. We varied our time in the lower end of Ichang Gorge by many walks ashore, where familiar flowers and leaves grew among the strange plants, and bou- quets of bittersweet, wild chrysanthemums, asters, and maidenhair ferns went to our cabin tables. Where the water trickles through beds of spongy sandstone, the whole rock face is covered with a fine mantle of ferns, and this soft stone, cut off in slabs, makes a fairy fern wall or wainscoting in garden-spaces and conservatories at Ichang. The rocks are rich in fos- sils, often yielding that curious orthoceras, whose long, tapering shell, cut in transverse sections, is known as the Ichang pagoda-stone, and is cleverly imitated for the tourist trade. There is a local customs-station in the midst of the gorge, a great house-boat moored by the bank, where every passing craft must stop to show its pass or pay duty on its salt and cargo. In midsummer, when the river is in flood, and the accumulated rain and melted snows cannot race through the gorges fast enough, weeks pass without a craft showing off this Piii-shan-pa station, as deserted a river as the Fraser in its canons, although the Yangtsze above Ichang presents no greater difficulties than the Snake, the 402 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE Upper Columbia, the Stikine, and other swift-water rivers of the United States, and the sheik of the first cataract of the Nile and a Lachine pilot would scorn the small ripples in these Chinese gorges. The Ichang Gorge seems to end in a cul-de-sac, a ver- tical barrier- wall blocking the caiion squarely ; but we turned a sharp point, and saw a narrower and deeper gorge cutting straight to the face of another trans- verse barrier. This upper end of Ichang Gorge, flooded with the golden sunlight of an autumn after- noon, each bank lined with processions of striped and tilting sails, and the great walls rising sheer two or three thousand feet, was one of the most beautiful pictures that I can remember. The western wall was bold and precipitous, the eastern barrier broken by fantastic pinnacles, needles, spires, and arches, with natural bridges, cave temples, and great rock inscriptions on its face. The natural or fairy bridge, from which a pious hermit flew directly to the sky, once led to a great temple, which marked where the ancient four kingdoms met. The steep wall of rock at the end of the gorge was topped by a second ridge, and a further, higher pinnacle aspired to the very sky, capped with a white temple, the Diamond Shrine, that played hide-and-seek with us among the gorges for the next three days. As there was no foothold on the rock walls of the upper gorge, sail was spread, and the ridiculous oars went hit and splash to a frenzied chorus, every man stamping and shrieking, and the captain on the roof outdoing them all as we worked against the current. A puif of wind filled the sail, and the crew dropped SAILS IX TTIK GORGE OF ICUAXG, WITH A KKI) LIFK-BOAT IX TUE FOKEGROCXI). A THOUSAND MILES UP THE YANGTSZE 405 their pole-oars, and crouched on their heels to rest. Suddenly a mournful "Ki-yi," the wail of a Sioux brave, was given by the most leather-lunged raga- muffin of the lot; and all the rest let off ki-yis and war-whoops, together, singly, and at intervals, with- out moving from their " stand-at-ease " position. ''Why do they make that noise?" I asked our boy; and after much gabbling with the band of water- braves, he answered for them : " To make wind come. He talkee wind-joss." But the wind-joss was inat- tentive, and at every swirling stretch they had to row and stamp their way again. The Ichang Gorge has an even finer gateway en- trance at the upper end than where it opens to the Hu-peh plain; and as we passed through the stu- pendous gates, the great columnar '' Needle of Hea- ven" spired the north bank, and the last of sunset glory filled the valley ahead. Beyond Nanto village, where the smooth, oily river was olive and purple as it swirled around black boulders, we crossed the sheeny stretch, and made fast bow- and stern-lines to stakes driven in the sandy shore. The kwatsze was braced off from shore by the longest poles, to guard against a sudden fall of the river in the night grounding us on sharp rocks that would pierce the thin hull. We dined in quiet after the exciting day of landscapes and navigation, having covered twelve miles in twelve hours of frantic exertion. The trackers had a fifth round of rice and greens, rigged up a mat awning over the bows, produced some ragged quilts from the hold, and laid themselves in close mummy rows on the deck-planks for tlie night. XXVI A KWATSZE ON THE YANGTSZE ^N early starlight, a cock, which was part of our live provisions in the forecastle's depths beneath the sleeping crew, let off a resounding peean from its dark prison, and we could hear old Wrinkles, the ven- erable river-cook, snap the twigs, start his charcoal fire, and begin his day's routine of washing and boiling rice. In that deathly, breathless stillness every sound told, and we could follow his processes as well as if we saw them. We had left the limestone country behind, and in that open valley reached the granite and gneiss foundations, the core of the great mountain -range. Something in the polished black-and-red rocks of the river-level, the wastes of coarse yellow sand, suggested Upper Egypt and Assuan. Later we saw red life- boats and fishermen's boats hanging around the rocks in the stream, and a gray-and-white stork, posing on single leg, stretched itself and idly floated away; an- other and another stork launched itself off, until their line in the sky against the crags completed the ideal 400 A KWATSZE ON THE YANGTSZE 407 Chinese landscape picture. Trackers ran baying across these sands in full cry like packs of hounds, scrambled over boulders like four-footed animals, and sank back on their haunches almost with lolling tongues when the line caught on some sunken rock, and some wight stripped, swam out to and released the singing cord. Huge cargo- junks came by, veri- table ships or caravels of Columbian cut, with seventy and a hundred trackers straining in leash and yelping as they ran, their masters or drivers running beside them, beating the air and the sand, with feints at be- laboring them, and rivaling our captain in the flow of frenzied vituperations. Their tow-lines cleared our mast by a toss, or were dropped and drawn under our keel with a drubbing noise that was a novelty to nerves in navigation. There was swift water there among many rocks, and from the breakfast-table we watched the trackers straining at the lines, heads hang- ing forward and arms swinging uselessly from their brute bodies as they hung in harness. Surely, in all the scale of lower humanity, no creature can be sunk to such a mere brute life and occupation as a Yangtsze tracker. In this Egyptian valley of sand and boulders our dahabiyeh came early to the temple of the red dragon, Hwang Ling Miao, built high above the sand-levels, with an attendant village spread below it, where all the wants of junks and trackers may be supplied. Sand terraces held rows of houses, sheds, and booths on stilts, where bean-curd, dried fish, meat, fowls, eggs, rice, vegetables, and charcoal tempted one, while rope-weavers on high platforms like dove-cotes or 408 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE martin-boxes braided stiff bamboo strands into the shining yellow ropes that are so nearly indestructible. Bamboo ropes do not rot or fray like hemp or cotton, and water and dampness only improve their qualities. The strands for weaving and the coils of finished cable are kept buried in wet sand, and it is usually only the old, dry, and brittle bamboo rope that snaps under sudden strain. The country people carried their bur- dens in deep baskets on their backs like Koreans. An old priest took us in the temple's side-gate, and showed us the great columned hall, with its gilded i shrine guarded by carved dragons writhing in chase of jeweled balls. There was an inner sanctuary and court, with curious plants, a few fine vases, and in- cense-burners before the altar; but the living spark, the splendor and dignity of the great religion, had departed from Hwang Ling Miao. The autumn nights were chill and damp in the gorges, but the days were those of the most perfect Indian summer, a mild, warm, golden air filling all space, soft September hazes hanging in the distance ; and after the radiant, glowing yellow afternoons there were sunset pageants that lifted the Yangtszc gorges to higher scenic rank in one's mind than they perhaps deserve. Where the river turned almost at a right angle again, we came to the first rapids, the Siau Lu Chio and the Ta Lu Chio (the Little and Great Deer-horns), and swung into line behind other craft, and waited our turn to be dragged up a short mill-race that ran over and between great rocks. Red life-boats hovered near, peddlers' l)oats went to and fro with pots, pans, O /tU igf^' «<. o J?:V ^ i^fWlP A KWATSZE ON THE YANGTSZE 411 lanterns, bowls, and food for sale, and extra trackers squatted on the sands waiting to be hired. Extra lines were put out from bow and stern of each ark, men were stationed on rocks to wave signals, laopans began screaming in anticipation, and the ships' cooks by etiquette presided at the gong, whose taps signaled the trackers when to start, stop, puU away, or let go. A first junk, swinging away into the froth of waters with bedlam on board, hung motionless, held at bay by a current that has raced at eighteen miles an hour. The trackers strained and bent double, their driver ran mad, belaboring the sands, the laopan reached his fifth fury, and the junk, moving as slowly as the hour- hand of a watch, finally breasted the last curls of foam, and was hauled away to smooth waters. One or two junks hung irresolute, slipped back, and with new lines began all over again. Our turn came, and we swung out and crept up the foaming incline, and all afternoon we inched along up this reach of rapids, with moments of suspense and hairbreadth escapes ; and just as we rounded the dan- ger-point, with a last tug and yell from the trackers, the mast at our door-siU gave way, toppling shore- ward with the strain, and nearly carrying the cabin with it. Then bedlam was ten times let loose ; but somehow, in the general chaos of things, we were drawn slowly inshore and on into a snug little bight cut back into the high sand-bank. It was then sunset, the glowing west hidden by the purple precipice walls that rose three thousand feet to the splendid sky-lines overhead, the east all melting rose and blue, and the great gray Yosemite walls southward dim in shadows. 412 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE A dense fog shut us in until ten o'clock the next morning, when we poled out from our sand slip, ran along the bank a bit, and were at the foot of the Ta Dung, or Otter Cave, Rapids. As we grappled and were hauled up a chute between two rock masses, a figure came leaping along the boulders, made a des- perate slide down a rock shelf, and landed on our deck— our long-lost, red-lettered Szechuan soldier, who had followed by foot-paths and short cuts overland from Icliang, hunting the kwatsze with the flowery flag. Although he had been sprinting across country with a heavy belt of cash weighing him down, the Sze- chuan soldier lent a hand and both lungs, and out- yelled every man on board, although the stamping laopan on top was changing from red to purple with the fury of his efforts. We worked through another narrow mill-race among the rocks, swung across to another bit of compressed current, and, with thumps and bangs along every plank of the kwatsze's infirm old body, reached the foot of the real rapid, and lined up behind big junks hung over with coils of rope, crates of cabbages, and cackling fowls. A junk swung out, and had just begun to work up the white-capped incline when a big boat came speeding down-stream, sixty or eightj^ men chanting at the sweep. The resistless current spun it around like a toy, shot it this way and that way, and after three whirls in mid-stream, sent it, head on, in air-line toward the junk hanging in mid-rapids at its tow-ropes' ends. Just when we should have heard the crash, and both junks should have gone to splinters, when all the air rang with Chinese yells, the runaway A KWATSZE ON THE YANGTSZE 415 veered off at an acute angle, and was soon diminishing in far perspective. After a round of rice, new cables were laid, extra trackers harnessed, and we swung far out and faced the foaming incline. Ropes tautened, the mast creaked, every plank trembled, and the water boiled around us as we hung motionless in the seethe and roar of the rapids. As we began to move, a big junk, with all hands howling at the sweep, came in view beyond the rapids, and, like those gone before, spun around wildly and charged straight for us. As the drowning man reviews his past in a flash, I, who was about to drown, forecast my next last moments and foresuffered the smash, the crash, the splintering, the sudden engulfing and sweeping away of my remains and the kwatsze's; but at the seemingly last second the destroying junk shot away without grazing us, and there was collapse after that agony of tension, even the laopan silent on his perch above. Old Wrinkles was in command forward; the Sze- chuan soldier was on deck ; even our silk-clad boy lent a hand ; and during certain seconds, or seeming hours, of agonizing suspense, when our bow-line caught, and a tracker with a life-line around him swam out into the lashing waters to disentangle it, our cabin cook woke from his opium dream, clambered to the roof, and outyelled the captain on his own stamping-ground. Then a red life-boat rowed across our sunken line, which, suddenly tautened, gave the rescue corps a shock, of which they volubly informed the village, the valley, and the whole welkin space. The captain's pretty, moon-faced wife crept from the coop of a cabiu. 416 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIEE lifted up the deck-plauks, and sat ready to bail out with a wooden scoop clumsier than anything Fue- gians or prehistoric man ever used. We triumphantly breasted the stiff flume, all white- caps and billows for a hundred yards. Then the din ceased, and the trackers drew us in beside a sandy reach covered with patches of raw cotton salved from two wrecks, whose masts alone were visible. Other wrecks were laid up on the sands, with all hands mending ribs, calking seams, spreading piece-goods out to dry, and dip-netting tufts of cotton down from eddies and back-water pools. All the mellow, radiant afternoon, from rock to rock, we banged along among incipient rapids, the shaky old kwatsze miraculously holding together, the trackers in and out of water splashing stork-like in long, single files through shallows, or scrambling like a pack of beagles over sand and boulders. Once, when the cable caught on a sunken rock, a tracker waded out, rolled up his rag ends of trousers and waded deeper, felt for the line with one foot and then with the other. All on board and on shore were scream- ing to him wildly, but very deliberately he waded back to a rock, left all his precious clothes there, swam out, and with one dive freed the bamboo rope, that, tense with the strain, had been singing and humming down the mast Uke a telegraph-wire in the wind. We had had chapters of accidents, and the epic of incident was but well begun at the Ta Dung. With the slacking and tautening of our line, the hard bamboo cable had dealt .slapping blows to cook and crew, dipped into the soup-kettle, upset the rice-boiler, and lofted a cab- A KWATSZE ON THE YANGTSZE 417 bage overboard as neatly as a golfer's club. Then it caught on the pin at the bow of one junk, and slipped off with a jerk that careened us against a sampan, where a meditative fisherman crouched, '' reading" the water. The stunned fisherman leaped to his feet ; the taut rope struck his wash-bowl hat, flicked it off into the Yangtsze, rolling rapidly, and it bobbed away out of sight, while the beheaded one danced and cut capers to maintain his footing. Then billingsgate went back and forth and drowned the roar of waters, but not a laopan or roustabout could match our cabin-top screamer, nor the scowling crosspatch captain of the bow boat-hook, in frenzied vituperations. Once, in shoving off a boat that had as much business to be there as our kwatsze, the crosspatch splintered and dropped his boat-hook. The whole crew burst into execrations, and the laopan tore fury to tatters. Like a whipped cur he slunk overboard, swam like a dog for the sticks, and handed the fragments plain- tively to the cook. Old Wrinkles spliced them with bamboo splints and paper string, cut the string with a cleaver fit to sever an ox, and went on boiling rice, the most restful, delightful old creature in China. Whether he pottered with his never-ending cookery, twisted tobacco-leaves into a loose thumb-end cigar and smoked it from a pipe, or, crouching in his sunken cockpit kitchen, dozed in the soft autumn sun- shine, while the crew almost stamped on his ears and threatened to brain him with every oar-stroke, old Wrinkles was a constant study. We had demonstra- tions by old Wrinkh^s in practical navigation that Captain Lecky's invaluable handbook never mentions. 418 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE Passing junks threw their lines over our mast, or dropped them under the keel, or, crossing our lines, sawed them as rival kites can saw. Every such marine or riverine manceuver was accompanied by so much language and lung-power that we wondered if any OLD WRINKLES, THE FO'C'S'LE COOK. life in the world demanded so many different and high powers of endurance as boat life on the Upper Yangtsze. We tied up at the end of this exciting day below Lao Kwan Miao, an ancient temple on a terrace, where five white stone cube and pyramid pedestals used to A KWATSZE ON THE YANGTSZE 419 show fire-beacons to tell benighted travelers of an- other temple stage in the river journey, as at Hwang Ling Miao. They had bailed the boat every few hours that day. The captain had gone below with a candle, and stuffed rags and pitch into the yielding seams of the boat, and twice in the night he came to examine the hold. While we waited for the dense morning fog to clear, I took a look below, and found that the severe knocking about that the old kwatsze had endured, in the two days' straining up the valley of rapids, had loosened seams from stem to stern along one whole side, through which the water slowly seeped. A transverse partition had sagged away two or three inches from the side-frames when the mast wrenched loose, and only the special providence that keeps crazy Yangtsze craft afloat had saved us as we bumped and banged our way along the rocky shores. It was mad- ness to think of straining the kwatsze up any more rapids, and there was risk enough in rowing through the great Liu-kan Gorge to Tsin Tan village, where we could repair or secure a new kwatsze. It depressed all spirits and dulled all anticipation and realization of this finest of all the Yangtsze gorges to see it at such risk of life, and every eddy and jutting rock and swirl of current made hearts sink deeper as we tracked up toward the towering entrance cliffs. A turn, and we were within the deep cut ; dull-red and purplish cliffs towered perpendicularly one, two, and three thousand feet, and the muddy river swirled at their base. For two miles there is no ledge or shelf or tracker's foothold within that royal gorge, that 420 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE closely approaches that of the Arkansas above Caiion City. Fantastic cliffs and weatherings have given rise to local names, and the magnij&eent stretch of the Ma- f ei, or Horse-liver, Gorge is named for a gigantic rock excrescence hanging high on one wall. The men had rowed frantically into the deep canon, the body of the infirm kwatsze shivering and rocking as if about to fall apart ; but when the upward draft of a breeze caught our sail, we went silently upward against the flood through a caiion worthy to match with the Frasei-'s and the Arkansas's best. One might indulge in extravagant raptures over this magnificent gorge had not Lu Yu, the mandarin, out- done the possible in his " Diary of a Journey to Sze- chuan " (Hangehow, 1170 a.d.). When he came to this Lao Kwan Pass, the Liu-kan, Niu-kan, or Ma-fei Gorge of modern writers, he exclaimed : "In this pass the mountains rise in a thousand peaks and from ten thousand precipices. Here they struggle upward in confused masses, as though in mutual rivalry ; there they shoot aloft in solitary pinnacles. In one spot they obtrude in prostrate ledges, appearing about to fall and crush whatever is below ; in another they overhang in beetling cliffs, as though on the verge of falling from their supports. Some are split in trans- verse fissures ; others are riven asunder from crown to base. On this side they swell in convex shoulders ; on that they sink in cavernous depressions ; and here, again, are jagged and twisted in fantastic shapes for which no embodiment can be found in words. West- ward the piled-up mountains stand athwart the way like a barrier; but the river ruslies tlirougli them A KWATSZE ON THE YANGTSZE 421 and forms for itself what is known as the Dungeon Gorge." The great walls part for a space, and make room for a sloping hillside, which the village of Tsin Tan climbs in rock-piled terraces, stretching along for a half-mile's length. A temple and a few houses cling to the steeper opposite bank, and between, the Yang- tsze roars and dashes over a ledge of rocks, where a steep fall in the river-bed causes the Tsin Tan Rapids, the most dreaded of the river's obstructions. Above the echoing roar of the river the canon resounded with the beat of gongs and the wild chant of trackers on each shore, as junks hung quivering in the rapids. As we threaded the high village paths, bands of one hundred and more trackers came yelping by in leash, straining in harness until the veins stood out on their faces. Many were mere boys, wearing out their first splendid strength in this brute toil, matching their muscle against the ten-knot current for a few miser- able coppers and some coarse food each day ; and shale and pudding-stone were cut in grooves inches deep, where their bamboo hawsers have rubbed for centuries. We did not need to watch the straining trackers and the junks in the rapids, or to see two junks part cables and sweep back, for us to know that one long pull at our masthead in that current would scatter the kwatsze planks like jack-straws. As the crew had been definitely engaged to go as far as Kuei, two or three days farther in time, we dreaded mutiny, or at least " bobbery," when we announced that the kwatsze should go no fartlier, since the Chinese mind is always aflame with suspicions at any deviation from an 422 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE original plan or bargain— at anything that does not '' b'long custom." We were willing to pay a pacify- ing indemnity, even, for releasing them from the con- tract to track and row those additional miles to Kuei ; but knowing the lingual possibilities of the captain, it required courage to break the decision to that inflam- mable person. His looks were lowering, storm-signals flew from each eye, and the blue cotton Szechuan tur- ban had a contradictory twist and cant. He was told that we would not risk our lives any farther up-stream in his kwatsze ; that he could have a day to calk and pitch and mend, and must then return to Ichang; and the face was illumined, the master mariner more relieved than we. "The kwatsze stays here. We will take a light sampan with a sail, at the other end of the village, and push as far beyond Mitsang Gorge as we can in a day " ; and the captain leaped with joy, and the crew begged to man the sampan. Tsin Tan is most picturesquely placed, is almost Alpine or Norwegian in environment, with the Yang- tsze rolling at its feet as a greater Fraser in a greener setting. The magnificent profiles of the Mitsang walls and the lines of the Liu-kan gateway are both in view from the village, and when steam-navigation is es- tablished Tsin Tan's outlook will be far-famed. Rows of village women gaped and grinned at us, their chil- dren's red, green, and orange coats the only touches of color in town, save for the heaped oranges and pomeloes for sale by the river-bank. Swine roamed everywhere, and men staggered up and down steep paths with baskets of coal and country produce on their backs. A KWATSZE ON THE YANGTSZE 423 Once embarked on the river above the rapids in a sampan, that seemed to skim like a bird after the clumsy creep of the kwatsze, we could enjoy the wild scenery without distraction or panic. When well within the walls of the Mitsang (Rice-granary) Gorge, the breeze took the sail and floated our speck of a boat up the flooded crevice between stupendous cliffs. Folds of slate and shale and sandstone and gi'easy black veins of coal rose from the river as the limestone dipped under, and vines and bushes cling- ing to every crevice made gorgeous autumn pageant along the palisades. The Mitsang Gorge was scenic delight worth all the effort of reaching it, and too soon we came out from its gateway and to green hills rising softly from a crystal-clear stream by the town of Shansi. Beyond this next valley of rapids lay Kuei, our intended goal, and on beyond that busy boating-town are the Wushan, Wind-box, Fairy, and other gorges, which it is a matter of weeks to traverse, unloading and changing to a new kwatsze on the other side of the impassable New Rapids, formed by a landslide in 1896. The scenery of these upper gorges is of the same order, but continues in longer stretches than in the Liu-kan and Mitsang gorges. When we had shot down-stream in the late after- noon, and into the gulf of blue gloom within the Mitsang's steep walls, the wind, in regular Alaskan williwaws, played with our sampan alarmingly. Gusts struck spray from the water, made swirls, and bored eddies that sucked down our bow and sent us reeling down the canon. We met many such small mael- 424 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE stroms, rowed through chow-chow water in stretches, but finally reached Tsin Tan beach, and the protec- tion of the American flag in our kwatsze beyond. The relic had been patched and mended a bit, tacked and pasted together, and we promised presents all round if, starting at six in the morning, the crew could reach Ichang by six at night. When the early tea-tray was pushed in, the boy an- swered that the cook and crew were all on board. We counted ten men at the bows gobbling down their first rice, and the captain was told to shove off at once. Then our boy said with embarrassment, " One piece cook no have got." The piece of a cook had just gone up-town to get some money that a cousin owed him, he said. We waited a quarter of an hour, then ten minutes of the soft, still, warm, early day, smoke rising straight in air from each village, and every detail of canon walls and distant peaks exqui- sitely clear in that pure, pale light. No one was in sight on the shining shingle, and we told the captain to let go, he incredulous, and the crew grinning in foolish amaze at the idea of white travelers severed from a cook. Although bewildered, they bent to their poles, and, once in mid-stream, the boy recovered from stupefaction and admitted that the cook had gone ashore the night before, to return before day- break, and that the debtor-cousin story was a fiction and excuse of the moment. The cook was probably asleep in some opium den, as he had smoked and slept all the way up-stream, leaving the boy, with the aid of the captain's wife, to do nearly all the cooking; thus the miracle of our well-served dinners was all tlie A KWATSZE ON THE YANGTSZE 425 more amazing. While the boy and the captain's wife looked to coffee, toast, and bacon, one of the little mud stoves of the country was brought to the front, its lumps of charcoal glowing, and in that primitive chafing-dish eggs scrambled in boiling milk at last materialized. While I stirred the frothing mass, the whole crew watched agape, and the captain's head hung down from overhead to witness the amazing spectacle of a foreigner acting as cook. It was a cheerful ship's crew all day long as they urged and drove the kwatsze on toward their extra gratuities, and at the very mention of cook all burst into laughter, and old Wrinkles wiped tears away. There were such pale-blue mists and lilac lights in the Liu-kan Gorge that the splendid precipice walls were transfigured, the great canon far more impressive than when we had passed through before, dejected, in a sinking kwatsze. We raced down the valley of rapids, in contrast to our toilsome ascent, whizzing past rocks and through mill-races, plunging and spinning around as we had enviously watched other downward craft do when we were hanging inert at the ropes' ends. We made a headlong dash at a junk in Ta Dung Rapids, shot away one second before the collision was due, and went pirouetting down-stream. The crew worked a great sweep-oar rigged at the bow to keep the kwatsze's head on its course, the captain swung the clumsy tiller-beam without exhortations, and the current did the rest. By noon we reached the Needle of Heaven and the entrance of Ichang Gorge, Diamond Hill Temple shining like a white bird far in air, and the line of fantastic, gray. Troll- 426 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE tiuder-y peaks stretching along this water-floored Romsdal. Bj^ noon the upward wind was felt. Gusts swooped down from the heights, spun the kwatsze round, and bored whirlpools at our bows. We had retraced five days' journeys then, and while we drifted in aimless circles the crew fortified themselves with a vegetarian lunch, bowl after bowl of cabbage-soup and rice re- storing their brawn and tissue. Then they laid to their oars, or hop-poles, with a will, even a pale Sze- chuan scholar, who was working his passage down- stream, stamping with the rest. Once an oar snapped, and it took a miserable quarter of an hour to put about and manoeuver to recover it in that bottomless gorge where none dared swim. Old Wrinkles squared the splintered ends with his cleaver, spliced them firmly, and the crew resumed chant and stamp, vexing the Yangtsze with their broken strokes until the cur- rent caught us. It was the rarest of all our autumn days, and we basked in the sun, and feasted eyes again on tlie splendidly splintered and buttressed walls, the caves and high-hung temples, the bridges and rock inscriptions, and the procession of striped sails creeping at their feet. We dipped the ensign and flew past Pin-shan-pa customs-station, behind which the palisade of seamed and broken marble strata, overgrown with vines, so easily suggests a tropical temple ruin. We x)assed the gateway at full speed at sunset hour, and were fast at Ichang jetty at the appointed time, ready to kneel with flag in thanksgi\'ing, like Columbus in the picture. At ten o'clock tlie next night the boy came grinning A KWATSZE ON THE YANGTSZE 429 to US. " That cook want money ; just now come." And then it was related how the cook, strolling down to Tsin Tan's shore at his leisure, found the kwatsze gone hours before. Giving his coat as security for his passage-money, he embarked on a downward junk, sure of finding us tied up and waiting around some corner for the cook to prepare the tif&n. He had dealt with foreigners before, and knew their feints and helplessness. Another garment went to a second and swifter craft, until, changing from junk to junk, he had arrived shivering in his last thin garments, a full day behind us, but asking to be paid for that day and his down-stream traveling expenses. While it was swift and easy to descend the Yangtsze by kwatsze, our difficulties began with steam-naviga- tion. It was difficilis descensus Yangtsze then. After vexatious delays, we twice embarked, twice had the machinery break down, and twice were taken back to Ichang, arriving finally in Hankow on a third steamer, which lost one propeller on the tedious down trip. From palm-trees and orange-trees in the gorges of the far interior range, we traveled to snow-striped hills around Nanking, and to hard frost at Shanghai, 31° 15' N., a thousand miles nearer the sea-coast than Ichang, 30° 42' N. XXVII THE CITY OF CANTON jHE free city of Victoria, in the British island colony of Hongkong, is so splen- didly built, and so well placed on the steep slope of a mountain overlooking its broad harbor and opposite Kowloon, that it only needs the fashion to be set, for some one to begin raving, to select, cut and dry the epi- thets, for every visitor to voice extravagant praises of this city of real palaces, more nearly the Mag- nificent or the Superb than hillside Genoa. It is strikingly Mediterranean in many aspects, and from the higher terraces of streets one hears just that same roar of voices rising from the crowded Chinese quarter as ascends to San Martino from the busy streets of Naples. There is a second city, a hanging suburb in the clouds at the summit of the Peak, and only British dignity could survive being pulled up and dropped down from the clouds backward in those most primitive cable-cars. With Highlanders, Fusi- liers, and Sepoy regiments deploying through Queen's Road, and all the brown and yellow races of Asia 430 THE CITY OF CANTON 431 streaming through the arcades and the staircase streets, Hongkong is so spectacular, picturesque, dra- matic, and fascinating that one never tires of its moving panoramas. The wonderfully blue harbor is crowded with merchant steamers and junks, brown butterfly-sails wing here and there, and men-of-war of all nations make the mountains ring with their echoing salutes. Imperial, free, modern, and enlight- ened Hongkong gives the American citizen cause to consider when he finds himself landing and leaving without having encountered the custom-house. There is none, yet the colony prospers. River steamers built after American models, but finished and furnished with Spartan simplicity com- pared with those gilded originals, carry one at an ex- travagant charge up the eighty miles of the Pearl River to Canton. The lines of a projected railway have long been drawn on maps across the rice-fields of southern Kwangtung, but obstructing officials do not intend that one shall comfortably take train from Kowloon to Canton until their last device is exhausted. And what a medley one meets when the paddles cease churning, and the white river boat drifts in among acres of flimsy little brown boats and ties up at the Canton wharf ! All the eighty thousand boats of the water population seem fighting for first places at the steamer's guards, and the voices of the three million of the city's land-dwelling people come to one in a great undertone like the far-away roar of angry surf. One retreats from the howling coolies on the wharf to the half-acre of boat-women scream- 432 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE ing and scolding at the river gangway, and is dazed with the uproar and confusion of it all when depos- ited in a rocking cockle-shell, and sculled away by the historic " Susan," in her exquisitely clean sampan, that is at once family dwelling and hotel omnibus. One creaks along the vociferous riverside, and away to quieter waters in the back canal that separates Shameen Island from the city proper. The foreign concession of Shameen is an oval of reclaimed land bunded all around, bordered with shade-trees, and cut by grassy, banian-shaded avenues where beautiful villas are surrounded with flowers, and birds sing as if in Arcadia. The strange undertone of the far- away voices soon disillusions one as to the genuine- ness of this Arcadia, and a foreign gunboat is always at anchor off the bund, to defend and rescue in emer- gencies, and to direct the campaign against the pi- rates, whose activities on the West River have exactly offset the benefits secured by the concession of the free navigation of inland waterways. The exiles on Shameen have their public gardens and tennis-courts, their club and little theater, and two hotels. Their own police guard the gates of two iron bridges that span the canal, and Chinese soldiers lounge at guard- houses at each bridge, startling one day and night by trumpetings, tom-tomings, and pistol-shots that are intended to assure the community that all is well. Yet the mob assaulted Shameen fifteen years ago, and the blackened walls of the houses they looted and burned stood as reminders for some seasons. Fluent, parroty, English-speaking native guides besiege one at the steamer and take visitors in pro- THE CITY OF CANTON 433 cessions of sedan-chairs around and across the city to all the great sights and the shops — the guide always borne ahead in a tasseled chair of state by the best coolies, and his charges following in any sort of chairs picked up at the nearest stand. The great man goes first, his bearers shouting to clear the way, and for- eigners follow as underlings and retainers in an offi- cial's train, a reversal of proprieties and etiquette immensely pleasing to Chinese vanity and sense of humor. Street children jeer ; larger enemies make faces and the cutthroat sign, and hurl epithets and invectives after one — ''she-devil," "old granny," and " old hag " the only ones that bear translating. The foreigner is best hated in Canton of all Chinese cities, for foreign soldiers have not only held its walls, but turned their guns on the city with effect. After the courtesy of the Japanese guide or the cringing abase- ment of the Hindu traveling servant, the brusque, laconic responses and commands of the Cantonese guides ruffle one. "Yes," "No," blurts the mentor. " Get into your chair," " Jump into this shop," " Come this side," and other direct orders irritate some tempers amusingly. The guides often know better, but it tickles their sense of humor, it is a delicious Chinese joke, to order foreigners about in the exact tones and phrases they have heard Shameen residents use to their coolies. To the steady slap-slap of bare feet, one is borne swiftly through the narrow slits of streets, aisles in a great exposition of the products and industries, the riches and utilities of this capital of South China, greatest city of the empire and almost of the world 434 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE in the number of its inhabitants. There are the same open alcove shops, the same gold-lettered, black and vermilion '' beckoning-boards," and the streets of the Thousand Beatitudes, of the Ascending Dragon, and of Early Bestowed Blessings all swarm with the same blue-cotton- and black-glazed-calico-clad people one has seen in the other cities of the empire of the great unwashed. There is a little court of silk, sil- ver, porcelain, and teak-wood shops near Shameen, where one buys the same grass-cloth or ramie-fiber cloth, the crapes, silks, gauzes, embroideries, carved ivories, and lacquers that went from these same shops and firms in the East India Company's day — few changes in commercial fashions in a century. In Tai- sing-kai, or Jadestone Street, curio-shops abound — too nearly junk-shops, now that the country has for so many years responded to European demands for Chinese art objects. One is dizzied in trying to watch both sides of the street at once, to catch all the genre pictures and tableaux framed in each shadow-box shop, and is deafened with the shouts of the chair- coolies, the backbiting and vituperation of pedestri- ans hustled to the wall by the procession of hated foreigners. Gasping fish in tubs of water, bleeding fish, and joints are the attractions at restaurant doors, and the tinkle and twang of musical instruments beyond brass-plated stairways are other allurements. People haggle over repulsive meats and offal, and troop home with bits of cat-meat hanging from a finger by a loop of bamboo packthread. Dried ducks with bodies flat- tened and necks stretched to swan-like lengths, and THE CITY OP CANTON 437 dried rats with curly, grape-vine tendril tails, are sold at delicatessen- shops, the latter titbits warranted to quicken the hearing and to make the hair grow luxu- riantly. Rats, alive in cages, are often seen for sale in the streets, and everywhere one sees gorgeous heaps of red and yellow fruits — oranges, cumquats, pome- loes, limes, bananas, lychees, loquats, mangoes, caram- bolas, and persimmons in their different seasons. / ( The courtyard of the Temple of Horrors shows one realistic pictures of the debased Buddhist hell — the boiling in oil, flaying alive, pounding in mortars, sawing in two, broiling on gridirons, slicing and be- heading of sinners, and even the transmigration of an offending soul, its last body assuming horns and hoofs before one's eyes. This popular temple of the people is gathering-place for letter-writers, fortune- tellers, doctors, barbers, menders, and for dentists, who swing strings of their patients' teeth almost in one's face. There are loafers and loathsome beggars in plenty, but few worshipers, and one gladly obeys the command, " Go, jump in your chair," and visits the Temple of the Five Genii, who gave five food-grains to man. At Buddha's Footprint, dirty street urchins leap over and measure their feet against the sacred stones, but at the Flowery Forest Monastery, or the Temple of the Five Hundred Genii, the guardian bars them out, and one may offer incense in peace to the gilded, imperial image of Kienlung and to Marco Polo, grinning beneath a tarpaulin sailor-hat, an expectant bodhisattva. • The famous clepsydra, or water-clock, of Canton is housed in a temple on the city walls. "We went into a 438 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE sort of rubbish-room and sat down to wait until the expected bargaining should be concluded and we were free to enter some further hall, the supposed splendid Temple of Time. ''Lady, jump down. Lady sitting Canton ancient water-clock," said Ah Poll, our swag- gering parrot of a guide; for three big earthen jars on successive shelves beside us, a fourth and low- est one with a wooden cover, constituted the whole clepsydra, and we had unwittingly sat down upon a quarter-section of all time. The water descends by slow drops from one jar to the other, the brass scale on a float in the last crock telling the hours as it rises. Every afternoon at five o'clock since 1321 a.d. the lowest jar has been emptied, the upper one filled, and the clock thus wound up for another day. Boards with the number of the hour are displayed on the outside wall, that the city may know the time, and from the wall's edge one looks over acres of black- tiled roofs, with jars of water as fire-buckets, and drying orange-peel on every roof, only the square towers of pawn-shops rising from the level. We followed our leader in a foot-race down a narrow alley until it widened into what seemed a pot- ter's back yard, encumbered with jars and clay and other rubbish. " This is Execution-Ground," said the complacent one, and disillusionment scored another record at this blank, featureless, contracted place of such gruesome, great reputation. There was one skull in a wooden cage — head of a rebel who had been fastened to a cross and sliced to death a month before. This Ungchih, the lingering death, was decreed to Kang Yu Wei, if captured alive, while TUE EXECUTION-GKOUND AT CANTON THE CITY OF CANTON 441 plain beheading was allotted to all his family, uncles, aunts, and cousins. A legion of street Arabs somer- saulted over the potter's jars, wayfaring starers closed around us, and escaping, we poured more camphor and cologne on handkerchiefs, and went to the city prison, where only wooden bars and wooden doors restrained the prisoners. All of Chinese filth and dis- order were intensified there, and a score of prisoners in heavy chains lolled in the courtyard, smoking ciga- rettes given by preceding visitors. They yelled wildly and clanked toward us — horrible creatures, with eyes shining brightly from semi-starvation, who clamored for cumshaws, for money to buy them rice or release, or to gamble with their jailers. Other prisoners, feeble and hardly human in aspect, dragged withered old bodies out from dirt-floored lairs to beg, too. "We looked in at the women prisoners, a wild-eyed, clam- orous, fierce, and insistent band of beggars, like their brethren — all save one comical, ancient prisoner in owlish spectacles, who smiled, swung her dwarf stumps of feet from a stool, and went on mending rags. This ancient charmer had murdered her husband to run away with a younger man ; but the law was invoked, and the yamun runner said she would soon be tried and taken to the place where the potter's jars stand — lingchih, maybe; anyhow, he knew beforehand that she was sure to be executed. Justice and clemency are equally market commodities in China, and the spectacled lady, having no money, had naturally no friends nor chances. He could not explain why in a city of three million inhabitants only this handful of prisoners seemed to have broken the laws ; whether 442 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE the power of the family tribunals and the dreadful punishments in the yaraun deterred complainants and offenders, or whether only such penniless ones and outcasts ever reached the jails. Few can endure the scenes in a Chinese court of justice, the punishments and tortures in the judge's presence, and after seeing splendidly decorated gild- halls and the Examination Hall, a lesser copy of the one at Peking, the chairs wended along past the Mo- hammedan tower to the city gates and walls. CTwo mosques, with actively proselytizing priests, keep the five or six thousand of the faithful together in Can- ton, and some theorists say that the Chinese mind accepts Mohammedan tenets so easily that, if ever Christianized, it must be by first converting the Chi- nese to Islam, and from that to Christianity."\ The grass grows rankly and old cannons lie neg- lected on the city walls, from whose towers one has view over the great monotonous plain of tiled roofs of the city, and of the valleys of tombs and beehive graves outside the walls. After all one sees and smells in this unspeakable city of dreadful dirt, one can believe how epidemics of disease can rage. It is the wonder that any inhabitants survive under con- ditions that oppose every law of hygiene and theory of sanitation. When the black or bubonic plague began its ravaging of Asia by a first outbreak here in 1894, au estimate of the number of deaths could only be arrived at by the tally of coffins carried out through the city gates to this graveyard suburb. No quaran- tining, no isolating, cleansing, disinfecting, tearing down, or burning went on, the drains and the rats THE CITY OF CANTON 443 bred and spread the plague at will, under ideal con- ditions for bacilliculture. It ceased after a second season and has not recurred in epidemic form, while in India, where Rudyard Kipling says the Hindus are " sanitating saints " compared with the Chinese, the plague continues, increasing in virulence year after year at Bombay, where all of European medical science and skill and sanitary science are arrayed against it. nVE-STOKIKD PAGODA ON CITY WALL. CANTON. XXVIII THE CHINESE NEW YEAR lEW YEAR'S in Canton is the fete dear- est to the Chinese heart, and the season when Chinese cities are outwardly dull- est and least interesting to visitors. The first moon of the year shows itself in our February, toward the end of the soft, mild winter, when the weather is usually warm at noonday and barely chilly at night; but sometimes relentless northers blow, and Shameen's spacious houses, with their double pierced ceilings, sing like ^olian harps with drafts, and beggars die of exposure in the sun- less city streets, where the penetrating chill and damp- ness benumb one. There is feverish activity before the New Year, when everything is rushed for the grand accounting, the collecting and debt-paying of the year. Art treasures appear in curio-shops, are hawked about the streets and at night fairs. Lan- tern-shops overflow, and picture-shops are all-impor- tant. There are temporary shops hung round with modern daubs, "sales" of forged old masters, and sets of fine old pictures and albums come to light, 444 THE CHINESE NEW YEAR 447 unusual finds in this field, which the French, the very- grasshoppers of the Orient art world, long ago gleaned to the stubble. The annual house-cleaning occurs before the New Year, and one must be there and see to believe that even such a travesty is attempted. There is much swashing and swabbing with cold water at the front door ; red papers and tinsel charms are pasted on the lintels, the dirt is flicked farther into dark corners, pictures are hung up, flower-vases are filled, and all Canton sits down in its best silks to a fortnight's feast behind closed doors. Mile after mile of empty streets show only boarded shop-fronts, and if one gains en- trance or finds an open door, the proprietors are ab- sent, or sit yawning, absolutely indifferent to trade. After the midnight services at the Emperor's temple, when all the officials kotow,— a certain profession of allegiance,— the crowds vanish from the streets, and busy, commercial Canton is as if turned to stone, while the first moon of the year waxes. The stone houses and courts are fitted together like a puzzle ; there are no parks, open spaces, boulevards, or breathing-places within the city walls save temple courts, and for a holiday the Cantonese bar the doors and sit down to a feast. Otherwise they go to the great flotilla of flower-boats, gilded and mirror-lined restaurants, and cafes chantant, where poor little ''sing-song girls," in gorgeous clothes and coiffures, mince and pose on their tiny feet, sing and twang the lute. Besides visiting ancestral graves, pleasure- seekers may walk in slow procession the crowded paths of the Fa-Ti gardens, nurseries where the hun- 448 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE dreds of potted plants repeat the same feats of dwarfing, forcing, and training. Rows of evergreen dogs, lions, men and women, have artificial heads, hands, and feet cunningly introduced; stems are trained to form the characters for joy and long life, and even the stiff bamboo is bent at will and made to writhe in serpentine curves. Branches of white plum, double peach, almond, and quince, and pots of royal peonies, are the proper New Year decorations. Kwei-hua {Olea fragrans) and narcissus bulbs are everywhere — silver and gold kwei-hua, tall and short and " crab's-claw " narcissus, the latter a grotesque ball of recurved shoots and fragrant blossoms. This holiday life would be the death of Europeans or Anglo-Saxons, and such a holiday season a peniten- tial season to other races. Chinese spirits and emo- tions find vent in touching off strings and packs of fire-crackers all day and all night long; food and money and drink are thrown into the river to propi- tiate the dragon and the evil spirits for the year. Money is literally burned; the poorest deny them- selves to '' chin-chin joss " with false gold-leaf and fire- crackers, while the still poorer starve and die where the fusillades are fiercest and the " lie money " flutters thickest. The more spectacular and active Cantonese fete is in midsummer, on the fifth day of the fifth moon, when the water-dragon of the Pearl River must be bribed and intimidated. Pandemonium is then let loose upon the air, and the Cantonese have a heavenly feast of noise ; thousands of gongs, millions of fire-crackers, and hundreds of thousands of ear-splitting voices as- /<■ TUE CKOOKKD BAMBOO, FATI GARDENS, CANTON. THE CHINESE NEW YEAR 451 sailing the di'agon at once, begging him not to steal and devour boat-people, or consume the food-offerings thrown to the soul of the statesman founder of the festival. Crazy, jointed dragon boats sweep up and down the river-front, slam-banging with gongs and cymbals ; tons of boiled rice and gallons of rice brandy are consumed in offerings; the dragon boats scatter prayers, sham gold-leaf, bank-notes, and ingots ; the crews defy and race one another, they foul, collide, and end the day in glorious free fights. The shrewd- 'est and most intelligent merchants, bankers, compra- dors, and servants believe in a real, material water- dragon with fiery eyes, and abjectly fear his potamic majesty. One year it was believed that the dragon had sent its young to devour all the obnoxious for- eigners on Shameen. Servants were in panic, afraid to stir after dark, and late revelers saw "something" in the grass near the club; but when "it" coiled around the foot of the American consul, the young cobra was killed with a walking-stick, bottled, and sent to the Hongkong Museum, where it is still fear- fully regarded by the Chinese as the B,eal Thing, at least the elder son of the great water-dragon. In the hot weather, from April to October, Canton reeks with more solid smells than ever, opium fumes lie low, and even on Shameen the air is too thick to breathe ; one only strains it through the lungs. All China strips to the waist, and Canton is inhabited by living bronzes of incomparable tone and patina. One gladly takes to the river then, and sight-seeing is done in boats to the Ocean Banner Monastery, where y^ Buddhism is in lowest decay, beggars and lepers are 452 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE many, and worshipers few, and the wolfish priests are not far removed from the pampered swine they shelter as reincarnations of Imman souls.) One goes to the great ginger-factory, sees the root nine times handled in the many processes before it is put into jars — and never cares for ginger more ; and one goes to the Howqua house, if introduced, and sees the untidy splendor, the magnificent disorder, and the rich discomfort of the family mansion of the greatest of Cantonese merchants of East India Company days. A fat young Howqua entertained us one long, warm afternoon, social officer of the day, picket for the army or clan of Howqua, who to the number of four hundred mouths are said to inhabit the one compound. He showed us the ancestral hall, the European office and parlor, with its imported upholstery horrors, and then the sadly neglected gardens. Quite as a matter of fact he showed us, too, his new concubine and his little-foot daughter. *' Foolish fashion," said young Howqua, when we commented on the mites of slip- pers. "Then why do you do it?" we asked. "Oh, custom, custom ! Who can prevent custom ? " But the Anti-foot-binding League had not then been in- augurated with the approval of princes and viceroys, scholars and merchants ; Kang Yu Wei and his family were not then famous. Young Howqua's mind ran to money. He thought only in dollars and taels, and each dusty vase in his show apartments was paraded with its price— his " thousand-tael led lang yao," liis " hundred-tael Tapple-green," his " tliousand-tael Sung-time, egg-plant color." " How much you think I get New York that vase ? " was his eager question as THE CHINESE NEW YEAR 455 each piece of porcelain or bronze was admired. Keen, shrewd, intelligent, and in a measure well informed as this silken scion of the great house was, he was as abjectly superstitious as the lowliest boatman; be- lieved as much in dragons and spirits, and the efficacy of gongs and fire-crackers, as any of his people ; would doubtless prostrate himself before a little water- snake, as a great viceroy once did at a review of his foreign-drilled troops; and possessed not a trace of patriotism or public spirit in the Western sense. It is a mad world, this Chinese one, and we shall never arrive at the half of its madness. We shall never account for the Chinese, never fathom the infinite purpose, never know why the Chinese were ever created ; how the type was produced or evolved from the different, yellower clay than the Caucasian. We shall never explain the racial mystery. In despair at my own changing and deflected vision, I have asked a hundred residents, or ''old China hands," the same questions : " Who does know these people ? Who really understands them ? " And the direct answers have always been negative. No one has penetrated or uncovered or satisfactorily analyzed the Chinese brain, or whatever lies behind those blank, stolid, immovable yellow countenances ; no one has comprehended the temperament so op- posite, so unsympathetic, so antipathetic, nor un- raveled the threads of a character too complex and tangled, too contradictory and inconsistent, too baf- fling and evasive, too Asiatic for us ever to have insight there. There is no starting-point from which to ar- 456 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE rive at an understanding ; always the eternal, impas- sable gulf yawns between the minds and temperaments of Occident and Orient. "I have been twenty years trying to find out how they are governed, what the attitude of the governed is to their rulers, and what the ruling class think, mean, and have in aim," said one serious observer. " I thought I saw the answer in my first year, but not now. It is too late or too soon for conclusion. You will not find any one knowing less about China than the sinologues. They are all in the clouds, lost in the fogs and mists of the Chinese language and the poetry of 2000 B.C. Something queer comes over the best of men when they get very far in the Chinese language and its classical literature. They become abnormal, impersonal, detached, dissociated from the living world, from the white-skinned, red-blooded human races of the West. Something in the climate, some mental microbe, gets into all of us here in China. The longer we stay here the less we see, the less we are fitted to judge." Sinologues assured me that the treaty-port mer- chants did not know the people, since they come in contact with only one branch of the mercantile classes, since they never study the language, and in their social life never touch the Chinese. When I asked one long in government employ if his thirty years in their midst led him to believe that the Chinese could be regenerated, awakened, or gal- vanized to some semblance of modern life, he ex- claimed : " No, never ! It is not possible to regenerate China as China. It cannot be effected from within THE CHINESE NEW YEAR 457 by the Chinese. The motive power is not here. They do not want to be regenerated. They do not see that there is anything the matter. It would not disturb the Pekingese to have France seize all Kwang- tung, nor excite the Cantonese to have Russia seize all north of the Yangtsze. They are indifferent to it all. They do not realize that China, the nation, was whipped by Japan. It was only Li Hung Chang and those Manchus up north who lost '' face." Not until the foreign bayonet actually pricks them do they feel. As a province of Asiatic Russia, North China might improve. A strong government is good for them. See what the Dutch have done with them in Java. Until they cut their queues there is no hope of their awakening. They can never be men while they wear those petticoats and soft-soled shoes. A century of subjection, of good, hard European tyranny, of Russian domination or German militarism, might ^make a man of him.' After that, a century or two of enlight- ened struggle for liberty, then united China and the millennium." One talks in centuries easily in China. A taipan, the head of a great foreign firm, owned to weariness at his colleagues' eternal, conventional laudations of the high standard of Chinese commer- cial honesty, the cut-and-dried " never-knew-a-China- man-to-break-his-word " panegyrics. "They forget about the bank comprador who disappeared with a quarter of a million, the silk comprador who got away with sixty thousand and dozens of cases before this last affair of the bank shares, when the Chinese went squarely back on their written pledges and got a tao-tai's judgment to sustain them. There are hon- 458 CHINA: THE LONG-LIVED EMPIRE est and dishonest merchants in China, as everywhere, but the dishonest merchant seldom becomes the great merchant anywhere, and foreign trade is all in the hands of such old, reliable firms. The power of the gilds is enormous, and mutual protection obliges the gilds to cast out rank offenders. Chinese sense of re- sponsibility is strong, the saving virtue of the race, all that holds the rotten old empire together ; but all of commercial honor and morality is not centered here any more than in England or America— it only averages up. As there is no official honesty, no stan- dard there whatever, the merchant class shine by contrast. The Chinese are credited with the greatest intellectual capacity of any race, and what use do they make of it ? For two thousand years the Chinese have only learned by heart, committed to memory, poetry and metaphysical essays, the mechanical edu- cation of a parrot. Look at their rulers at Peking throughout the whole nineteenth century !— not a man among them. Look at the present Emperor ! Every coolie grins at the way his stepmother locks him up and bullies him. There is no dignity in his downfall. He is exactly the figure you see in every Chinese thea- ter, the henpecked man, the conventional butt, the laughing-stock in every farce and comedy. And the reformers are impractical theorists, dreamers ; even Kang Yu Wei is the greatest classical scholar of his day. All China is wrong and out of joint, but do not ask me how it is to be put right." " Can China be regenerated ? " repeated another old resident. " Only by immersion for forty days forty fathoms deep. The fresh start must be a clean start. THE CHINESE NEW YEAR 459 Soap and carbolic will do more than diplomacy or gunpowder. They are the first necessary factors in any regeneration of this country. If they burn the classics and behead the literati, they might make some start without soap and water." All replies to such questions were equally discour- aging, equally biased, vague, or flippant, and the Chinese in the present and the future remain prob- lems more baffling and unsatisfactory each time one attempts them. China is very old, very tired, sick. It craves rest and peace— anything for peace ; peace at any price. It does not want to be dragged out into the fierce white light and the contests of the new century. But how can it prevent it? Will it rouse itself from its long paralysis and benumbed opium sleep, or will it be rudely awakened, broken up this time on the wheel of progress? INDEX INDEX Abdication of Ewangsu, 134, 135, 141, 142. Agriculture, Temple of, 202. Amiot, Father, 160. Anting Gate, 227, 228. Astronomers, 87, 158. Attiret, 160. Audiences, imperial, 107, 111, 125, 126, 136, 146. Batuta, Ibn, 9. Beggars, 189, 190, 437. Bells, 101, 104, 266, 267. Beresford, Lord Charles, 313, 389. Birds, trained, 180, 345. Bishop, Mrs., 10, 390. Bokhara, wreck of the steamship, 288. Bore of Haugchow, 294, 304, 307, 309, 317. Brandt, Herr A. von, 122. Bricks, 47. Bridfies, 58, 74, 188, 189, 215, 216, 233, 297, 320. British legation, 143, 144. Buddha, living, 93, 105. Buddh Gaya, 219. Buddhism, 94, 104, 384, 394, 408, 451. Bushell, Dr., 11, 247. Cairo, 69. Camels, 24, 25, 84, 227, 234, 238, 261, 262. Canals, 21, 24, 57, 226, 295, 296, 297, 340, 380. Canton, 431-452. Carpet-weaving, 25, 193. Cart, the Peking, 3!), 81, 82, 83. Cassini, Count, 238. Cave temples, 394. Chang Chi Tung, the viceroy, 374. Chang-ping-cliou, 261. Chang Yen Hoon, Sir, 206. Cha-tao, 243. Chefoo, 276, 277. Chestnuts, 184. Chien-men Gate, 77, 110. Chihli, 14. Chinkiang, 337, 338. Chrysanthemums, 184, 210, 291. Chun, Prince, 119. Chu-yung-kuan, 240. Classics, Hall of, 98, 101. Clepsydra, 101, 437, 438. Coal, 32, 216, 219, 277, 374, 423. Concessions, 23, 375. Confucian Temple, 94-97. Confucius, 3, 97, 279. Cormorants, 345. Corruption, 88, 111. Cossacks, 150, 206. Counterfeiters, 200, 293, 354. Coup d'dtat, 134, 135. Crab-apples, 185. Crickets, 183, 259. Curio-markets, 26, 189, 196, 197, 292, 434. Curzon, Lord, 11, 188. Customs, Imperial Maritime, 154, 155, 156. Czar, the, 112, 115, 375. Dagoba, 269, 270. Decorations and orders, 153. Deer, the David or tail, 215. Detroit, United States steamship, 352. Dragon, festival of, 448, 451. Dragon, Order of, 153. Drum-tower, 101. Duck-farming, 321. Dust-storms, 183, 275. Eagles, 32, 37. Edicts, imperial, 108, 128. Edkins, Dr., 105. Egypt, 406, 407. E-ho Park, 124. Elephants, 110. Embroideries, 191, 192. Empress Ahluta, 119. Empress Dowager, 106, 109, 112, 118, 120, 127, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 139, 140, 220, 272. 463 464 INDEX Empreaa Yehonala, 121, 128, 132, 135, 139. Enamels, 200, 272. Eunuchs, 123, 143, 174, 210. Examinations, 87, 88, 442. Execution-grounds, 210, 438. Fairs, 179, 180, 191. Fa-Ti gardens, 447, 448. Faura, Padre, 288. Favier, Bishop, 161. Feather-dusters, 183. Fiddle boat, 373. Figurines, 26. flowers, 184, 209, 210, 213, 447, 448. Foot-binding, 189, 252, 452. Foot-boats, 2i)9. Fortune, Robert, 357. Four-wheeled junk, 373. Funeral, 58, 78. Furs, 192. Fus, 143, 166, 167. " Garden of China," 297. Gardens, 103, 104, 106, 447, 448. Genoa, 430. Ghost, temple of Manchu, 167. Ghost, Tientsin, 27. Gobi, Desert of, 183. Goddess of Mercy, Kwanyin, 39, 219, 270. Golden Island, 337. Golf-links, 385. Gordon, General, 153, 296, 342. Gorst, Mr. Harold, 119. Grants General U. S., 43. Grease, 227. Guides, 433. Haining, 300, 303, 310, 314. Han River, 370, 372. Hangchow, 310, 314. Hankow, 131, 360, 363, 364, 372. Hanyang, 374, 375. Hart, Sir Robert, 154, 156, 157. Harvestinjf, 231. Hata-men Gate, 66, 70. Head-dress, Manchu, 77, 172, 173, 327. Heaven, Temple of, 201, 202. Henry, Prince of Prussia, 108, 132, 136. llienfung, tlie Emperor, 117, 119. Hills, the western, 216. Ho, Admiral, 398, 401. Hongkonp, 430, 431. Honor, Cdiiimercial, 457, 458. Horrors, Temple of, 437. Horse-liver Gorjre, 420. Honse-l)oats, 50, 51, 295 319, 390. Howqua family, 452. Hue, Abb(5, 4, 10, 55, 78, 190, 352, 389. Hu kau, 347. Hunan, 377. Hunting Park, 216. I, Prince of, 197. Ichang, 384, 385, 386. Ichang Gorge, 394, 397, 401, 402, 406, 425, 426. Iron-works, 374. Jade, 198, 199, 223. Japanese war, 43, 65, 126, 127, 128, 181, 277, 280. Jehol, 106, 117, 118, 1:8, 144, 248. Jesuits, 10, 86, 158, 159, 288. Jones, General, 339, 340. Jugglers, 292. Kaiping, 16, 32, Kalgan, 244, 247. Kang, 172, 173, 250. Kanghsi, the Emperor, 86, 93, 103, 122, 158. ' • -^ Kang Yu Wei, 131, 134, 136, 438, 462, 455. Kao-liang, 30, 31. Khyber Pass, 237. Kiao-chau, 132, 141, 278, 376, Klenlung, the Emperor, 66, 98, 106, 167, 168, 269, 316, 437. King-te-chen, 159, 348, 351, 353, 354, 355. Kipling, Rudyard, 443. Kiukiaiig, 353, 354. Kowloon, 430, 431. Krnpp guns, 335, 342. Kublai Khan, 62, 86, 103, 105, 122, 168, 2-J6, 237, 248. Kuling, 358. Kung, Prince, 70, 117, 118, 119, 124, 128. Ku-peikou, 247. Kwangsu, the Emperor, 107, 109, 110, 120, 121, 122, 124, 126, 226. Kwanyin, 39, 219, 270. Kwatsze, 390. Lacquers, 330. Lamasery, 90, 93, 269, 270, Lanterns, 195, 444. Legations, 66, 143, 144, 145, 146. Liao-tung peninsula, 131, 141. Libraries, 98, 105, 106, 337. Life-boats, 398. Li Hung Cliang, 22, 23, 111, 112, 115, 120, 127, 153, 176, 179, 279, 389. Ling-gardens, 298. Litter, mule, 233. Little, Mr. Archibald, 389, 390. Liu-i