LETTER VII
Pi Yün Ssŭ, 7th July 1865.
You will see by the date of this that we have beaten a retreat from the dust, heat, and filth of the city, and that our “villegiatura” has begun. Indeed, Peking was becoming insupportable. The thermometer when we left was standing at 108° in the shade, the highest degree which it has reached for these three years, and I was heartily glad to turn my back upon the Legation gates.
The plain between these hills and the town is very beautiful. It is thickly studded with farmsteads, knolls of trees, and tombs, which are always the prettiest spots in China, for as a balance against the dirt and squalor in which they pass their lives, the Chinese choose the most romantic and delightful places for their final habitations. The soil is wonderfully fertile, and yields two crops in the year, so that usually the plain bears every appearance of prosperity; but this year, owing to the excessive heat and drought, the first crop has failed, and the fields are parched and burnt up. In vain the Emperor prays for rain; it only comes in rare and scanty showers, and the fierce sun bakes the ground harder than ever. The country folk are in great distress, and food is at famine prices. Yet they seem happy and contented, and when we asked one of the priests here whether there was no danger of a famine riot, he answered, “Oh, no! the people about here are too great fools to get up a disturbance.” Those that are hardest up will sell their daughters into bondage, and there will be an end of the matter.
The hills west of Peking are the Switzerland of Northern China. They are not very high nor extraordinarily beautiful, but there are some very pretty gorges and valleys, richly wooded, and at any rate the air is fresh and pure. Every gorge has a perfect nest of temples, built by the pious emperors of the Ming dynasty and the earlier Tartars, for which good deeds the Corps diplomatique at Peking cannot be too grateful. Properly speaking, according to the rules of their order, the Buddhist monks are forbidden to receive any money for the hospitality which they offer to strangers, so when the Chinese go to stay at a temple they restore or beautify some part of it as a return; but we prefer paying a few dollars, and in spite of their statutes the arrangement seems to suit the monks as well as it does us.
Our temple is called “Pi Yün Ssŭ,” “the temple of the azure clouds,” a romantic name, and certainly the place is worthy of it. It is built on terraces ascending the hill to a length of about half a mile, and on every terrace is a shrine, each more beautiful (if that is the proper word to apply to the grotesque buildings of this country) than the last; black and white marble statues and vases, bronze dragons, alto-relievos and basso-relievos representing kings and warriors, gods and goddesses, and fabulous monsters, all of rare workmanship,—inscriptions graven on marble and stone, and bronze or gilt upon wood, meet one at every step; and the whole is set in a nest of rock-work, fountains, woods, and gardens. At the top is a small temple more in the Indian than the Chinese style, and here there is a very curious idol with ten heads, three large ones at the bottom, from which three smaller ones spring, in their turn carrying three lesser ones surmounted by a single very small head. The hands are in proportion. This little place commands a panoramic view over the plain, with the walls and towers of Peking in the distance.
Our habitation consists of several little houses on one side of the temple; we dine in an open pavilion, surrounded by a pond and artificial rockery, with ferns and mosses in profusion; high trees shade it from the sun, and close by us a cold fountain pours out of the rock into the pond, in which we can ice our wine to perfection. The pond was dried up, and the fountain had been turned from its channel, when we arrived; but we got together a few coolies, and soon set that right. Fancy our feelings on coming here, when we were told that if there came no rain we could have no bath! This too in a climate where the hot nights make a morning wash doubly necessary. The priest had hardly said the word, when a tremendous thunderstorm broke over the mountain and set our minds at rest, and next morning we discovered that we could have the most delicious natural bath. Our life here is very simple and very, very dull. We are only two—Saurin and myself. We rise at any hour after daybreak, breakfast at eight, dine at three; after dinner we go for a ride, or a scramble over the mountain, and come home to tea at about eight or nine. We sit smoking our cheroots for perhaps an hour, talking always about home and watching the fire-flies, that, according to Chinese tradition, served as lamps to Confucius and his disciples. A visit from or to the Russian Legation, who have got a temple at about an hour and a half’s ride from here, is the only break to the monotony of our daily life. I have my teacher with me here, and work with him at the language from breakfast to dinner; that is my serious occupation, and about as hard a task as one could wish for. I carry about my lessons for the rest of the day written on paper fans—a capital dodge for keeping one’s work before one. We are rather bothered by mosquitoes, and a most venomous little insect called the sand-fly, yellow in colour, and smaller than a midge, which is lucky, for if he were of the size of a blue-bottle I should think his bite would be fatal. There are quantities of scorpions too; one of our men was stung the other day. We heard a great wailing and crying one night, for all the world like an Irish wake; next morning our servants told us that the cook’s assistant had been stung in the hand, and that he had died in an hour, but that he had come to rights again, and was getting well. This sounded something like being “kilt entirely.” The man’s presence at the temple illustrates a custom of the country; of course, as is the way of the East, no one can move without a large retinue. There must be a valet for each man, and a groom for each horse, and a man or two to do nothing, and two or three more to look on and see them do it. But besides this, like Thackeray’s description of Irishmen and their poor relations, no Chinaman is so poor or mean but what he can find a poorer and a meaner to do part of his work. A coolie earning three dollars a month will pay another one dollar a month to help him, and he in his turn will give a boy a few cash, that he may enjoy his ease and his opium. The man who was stung was the cook’s poor relation. Although his brother and the other men supposed him to be dying, and finally to have actually died, they never came and told us, nor did they get any assistance for him. We heard the noise, but one of our servants has a very pretty little talent for tickling a lute, and there was so little difference between the sounds of the wake and those of the concerts he gets up, that we thought the hullabaloo was only a melancholy variety of the latter, so we took no notice of it. As far as Chinese remedies are concerned, better be without them. It is almost impossible to believe the amount of ignorance which exists in China about medicine and surgery. Native doctors, who never dissect, are utterly ignorant for the most part of the position of the heart, the lungs, and the other principal organs. They are ignorant of the difference between arteries and veins, nor do they understand the circulation, looking upon the several pulses of the body as the effects of separate causes. All diseases are attributed by them to their favourite doctrine, “hot and cold influences.” They have a certain knowledge of the use of drugs, and of mercury in particular, but their remedy above all others is acupuncture. Some days ago my groom had an attack of diarrhœa, and his medical man pricked him underneath the tongue for it! Sir John Davis tells a story of a doctor who wanted to prick a man for hernia. If in these prickings they cut into an artery, and the man dies, why, so much the worse for him! it is fate. Astrology plays a great part in their medical art, certain planets being supposed to influence certain parts of the body. It is one among many instances in which one sees the analogy between the present condition of China and Europe in the Middle Ages.