LETTER XXII
Peking, 8th February 1866.
I expect this will reach England with the bag that was despatched last Saturday; at any rate it will give you a few days later news; I have but little to say.
The student interpreters gave a second theatrical representation on Monday. The pieces were “Our Wife” and “To Paris and back for £5.” To my mind the most amusing part of the entertainment was to watch the faces of the Chinese servants at the back, who, not understanding a word, were deeply interested in the performance, and said that it was very beautiful, especially the first piece, in which the makeshifts for Louis XIII. dresses charmed them much. The ladies stood on an average 5 feet 10 inches in their stockings, and had blue marks where whiskers and beards had been shaved off in the morning; but in spite of all drawbacks, everybody agreed that there never had been and never could be such a success—which has always been said of every private performance I ever witnessed.
No one could believe that we are ice-bound here. Yesterday the thermometer at 2 P.M. stood at 84° in our courtyard; at eight in the morning it had been down to 22°, a difference of 62°! The Chinese complain bitterly of the heat. The Emperor was to go again to pray for snow to-day, and the Peking Gazette publishes an article from one of the Imperial advisers, stating that the want of snow must be ascribed to the anger of heaven on two accounts: 1st, undue severity on the part of minor officials in the Board of Punishments; 2nd, the number of bodies killed in the rebellion and still lying unburied.
What thieves these mandarins are! Some, time ago when the Ti̔en Wang (Prince of Heaven), the chief of the Ta̔i Pi̔ng rebellion, poisoned himself, his son fled carrying with him his father’s great seal, which, on his capture, was carried to the Emperor at Peking. The seal was a huge affair of massive gold with two dragons on the top. Its value was about £600. When the Emperor had seen it, it was handed over to the Prince of Kung and the Grand Council, and by them deposited under lock and key in the council office, the watching of which by night is confided to certain high officials. When the turn of night duty fell to one Sa, a man of good family and a mandarin of the fourth button, the seal was missing. There was a great hue and cry, and all the wretched servants in the office were carried off to the Board of Punishments, where they were tortured secundum artem, the real thief Sa being quite above suspicion. Meanwhile he carried off the seal to a goldsmith’s shop in the Chinese city, telling him that he had received orders from the palace to have it melted down. The man undertook the job and put the seal into the melting-pot; but the two dragons, being harder than the rest of the metal, would not melt, so they were put on one side to wait till a hotter fire could be prepared. As luck would have it a friend of the goldsmith, who had heard of the loss of the seal, came in, and seeing the two dragons, smelt a rat, and laid an information. Sa was tried, found guilty, and strangled in the vegetable market. He was a well-to-do man, and his family were rich people, so the money was not needed. But a little peculation, however small, is dear to a mandarin’s heart.
Sa was not a master of his craft; he had not sufficiently considered the eleventh commandment,—most important to a Chinese official.