LETTER XVIII
Peking, 4th December 1865.
The messenger who brought us in the welcome mail of the 26th September also told us that there was still a chance of catching a vessel at Taku, before the final freezing of the Gulf of Pechili—the river, of course, is long since closed—so here goes for the last account of us before we are shut up.
Sir Rutherford Alcock arrived here last Wednesday with his family. They had a terrible journey of it; three days from Tientsing in sedan chairs, sleeping in inns without fires, and only paper windows in different degrees of bad repair.
We are enjoying the beau idéal of winter weather. We have had one fall of snow, which has left its traces in the shade and on the north side of the house-roofs; everywhere else it has disappeared under a sun which at mid-day is always genial; the sharp frosts of the night and early morning keep the ground as hard as iron; the air is perfectly delicious, and for many days we have not been visited by our chief curse, the wind, which comes tearing down from Mongolia to choke and blind us with dust. This weather, fine as it is, comes very hard on the beggars, who go about stark naked, livid with cold. The filth of the furs which the poorer Chinese wear surpasses belief. It is a common sight to see the sunny side of a wall occupied by half a dozen of the natives who have deliberately stripped themselves and are eagerly hunting after the vermin with which they swarm. The principal streets are crowded with sellers of cast-off clothes, rags that would be rejected by a respectable paper factory. They toss these about, singing a sort of monotonous rhythmical chant all the time, after the manner of Chinese hucksters, and they do a thriving trade in filth.
We had an offer the other day of purchasing a plant that would make a man immortal if he ate it; as we had no desire any of us to undergo the fate of Tithonus at the price of 5000 taels, nearly £2000, we let it slip through our hands. It was brought to us by a drug merchant, who said that he had found it in the mountains of Manchuria, and he produced a Chinese botanical work in support of his statements. The plant was a small black toad-stool; he called it the “tree of life,” and said that it was only found once in a thousand years. We asked him why he did not sell his treasure to the Emperor; he replied that he would do so were it not for the way in which he would be bled by the palace officials. When, however, we asked where the last man who had eaten of the tree of life was to be heard of, he left in high disgust at our unbelief. The Chinese ideas of natural history are always very curious. Some days ago one of the wandering curio-sellers came to me with a beautiful little crystal snuff-bottle of what they call hair crystal, from the black veins like hair which run through it, and he thought it necessary to explain how the hair got into the crystal. “You see,” said he, “as your Excellency knows, we Chinese did not always shave our heads as we do now. In the time of the Ming dynasty our people used to wear their hair long, but when the Tartars usurped the throne our people were all forced to shave their heads. Accordingly they threw their hair which they had cut off into the sea. There the waves and the rays of the sun, combining their influences, acted upon this hair and produced the effect which your Excellency admires. But it was only in rare instances that the influences happened to coincide, and no man could of his own will, and by cutting off his hair, depend on its being turned into hair crystal.”
The Emperor’s journey to bury his father has been made the opportunity of rescinding all the decrees disgracing the Prince of Kung last spring. They are to be blotted out from the records of the Empire, so that future ages may know nothing about them.