LETTER VIII
Peking, 8th July 1865.
We have ridden in to spend three days, copying despatches and sighing for our “cool grot.” The town seemed too beastly as we came in. Peking, as Southey said of Exeter, “is ancient and stinks.” The “Beggar’s Bridge,” which we have to pass every time we go into the Chinese city, and nearly every time we go out, is the most loathsome and stinking exhibition that it ever was my fate to come across. Here every day a hundred or two of the most degraded specimens of humanity congregate and beg. By far the greater majority of them are clothed only in dirt, and all sorts of repulsive cutaneous complaints; some have a linen rag, but it is worn over the shoulders, and in no way serves as a decent covering. Lice, mange, scrofula, leprosy, and filth are allowed to remain undisturbed by water or drugs. They are a stock-in-trade, and as such rather encouraged than not. It is a sickening sight when these creatures come and perform the ko̔to̔u to us, prostrating themselves in the dust or mud, which is scarcely as dirty as themselves. I spare you a description of the food I have seen them eating. If ever I get back to Europe, I feel that the Beggar’s Bridge will be a nightmare to me for the rest of my life. All this strikes one with double force after spending a fortnight in the country among the healthy, sunburnt natives of the hills. I assure you that they look quite handsome after the yellow townsfolk. It would amuse our friends at home, if they could see us the centre of a group of thirty or forty of these brown villagers, in some out-of-the-way valley where Englishmen are about as often seen as Chinamen in Yorkshire. They ask us all the most absurd questions about ourselves, our clothes, and our dogs, who are quite as great objects of wonder as ourselves. They never will believe that Nou-nou is not some variety of sheep, and Saurin’s pointer, a very handsome young dog of French royal breed, comes in for much admiration. The women are all frightened at us, and keep well out of the way; we see them timidly peering out of their doors at the foreign barbarians who kill little children, and use their eyes for photography, but it is seldom that anything but a stout old matron of great courage will venture to come near us. The people are beginning to get rid of their prejudices against us, and to see that we mean them no injury; at any rate they are quite friendly, and seem to look upon us as harmless eccentric creatures, but very ugly. As for personal safety, no one ever dreams of carrying arms, either by day or by night, and nobody is ever insulted or attacked.
We hear bad news of mercantile prospects in the south. Notwithstanding their having been hit so hard last season, the merchants have been speculating again more rashly than ever, and vying with each other in buying up tea. The Chinese are quite up to this, and have leagued together to raise prices. The nearer our merchants have got to the tea-growing districts by means of the opening of new ports, the dearer tea has become. Tea was never so cheap as when Canton was the only outlet to the market. This seems a paradox, but it is easily explained. The merchants competing to buy on the spot have caused the Chinese growers to send up their prices to any height, and the foreigner cannot transport the tea south so cheaply as the native, so that both the original price paid to the farmers, and the cost of transport, have been raised, and the merchants are paying the penalty of their own hunger for new markets.
As a set-off against this bad news, we have good tidings with regard to the rebels, who were in Shantung; they appear to be dispersed, some south and some west, and the capital is safe. For once the Chinese can lay the praise to themselves, they having acted without foreign aid.