LETTER XXV
Peking, 22nd April 1866.
Since I last wrote I have done nothing and seen nothing that I have not told you about over and over again. However, to-morrow morning I am off for a three weeks’ trip into Mongolia with Dr. Pogojeff of the Russian Legation. We shall go out of China by the Nan Ko̔u Pass, and come in by my former route of Ku-Pei-Ko̔u. I am looking forward with immense interest to seeing a little of Mongol life for the first time. It will be a new experience. I am afraid that one mail must pass without taking you any news of me; but when I return I hope to make amends. We had a great field-day at the Tsung-Li Yamên last week. Railroads, telegraphs, violation of treaties, etc., all the old stories that have been trotted out a hundred times. The Prince of Kung was very nervous and fidgety. He twisted, doubled, and dodged like a hare. At last when Sir Rutherford had him, as he thought, fairly in a corner, I saw a gleam of hope and joy come over the Prince’s face. He had caught a sight of his old friend and refuge in trouble, my eyeglass. In a moment he had pounced upon it, and there was an end of all business. The whole pack of babies were playing with it, and our Chief, who was furious, saw his sermons scattered to the wind. It does not signify, though, for these tricksters will promise anything. It is the performance which is lacking. By the bye, when the Prince of Kung calls at a Legation he leaves a card in the shape of a slip of red paper with his name and title upon it—Kung Chi̔n Wang.[13] But he never signs his name to documents; he subscribes them, Wu ssŭ hsin—“No private heart,” i.e. “disinterested.”
A Cantonese named Ma, whom I know and who has come up to Peking on business, was anxious to buy a little Pekingese slave-girl, and I was present at the negotiations. The child, a bright little creature eight years of age, was brought by her parents to Ma’s lodging, and as she gave satisfaction, the question resolved itself into one of price, and here the fun began, for the little thing was so keen to go that she eagerly took part with the purchaser in beating down the vendors; and, finally, a bargain was struck at 28 dollars. At that price she was handed over to her new owner, together with a bill of sale, of which here is a translation:—
“This is a deed of sale. Wan Chêng, of the village of Wan Ping, has a child the offspring of his body, being his second daughter and his seventh child, aged eight years. Because his house is poor, cold, and hungry, relying on what has passed between a third person and his wife, he has determined to sell his daughter to one named Ma. He sells her for twenty-eight dollars, every dollar to be worth seven tiaos and a half. The money has been paid over in full under the pen” (i.e. at this time of writing). “The girl is to obey her master and to depend upon him for her maintenance. In the event of any difficulties or doubts arising on the part of the girl’s family, the seller alone is responsible, it does not regard the buyer. It is to be apprehended that calamities may occur to the child, but that is according as Heaven shall decree; her master is not responsible. None henceforward may cross the door to meddle in her affairs. This agreement has been made openly face to face. In case of any inquiries being made this document is to serve as proof.” (Here follow the signatures or rather marks of the vendor, the middleman, and a third person as witness, and the date.) “The child’s birthday is the 11th day of the 6th month, she was born between the seventh and eighth hours.”
Ma declares that as soon as the girl is grown up he shall let her marry. He says, “My no wanchee do that black heart pidgin.” I believe he will keep his word—it is a matter of business, and in business the southern Chinese trader is scrupulously honest.
As for the child, she was simply in a fever of delight at leaving her parents. I dare say her poor little life had been none too rosy; for what says the proverb? “Better one son, though deformed, than eighteen daughters as wise as the apostles of Buddha.”
I wonder whether any European ever witnessed such a transaction before.
I have been spending the last few days chiefly in Paternoster Row, the Liu Li Chang, sitting at the feet of a very learned little Chinese Gamaliel, who tells me wonderful stories about the arts and the old craftsmen of China. He is a bookseller by trade, but being a great connoisseur, he always has a few rare specimens of cloisonné enamel, jade, rock crystal, cornelian, or porcelain in his shop. He is never weary of telling how the Emperor Ching Ta̔i (A.D. 1450) used to work at cloisonné enamel (like Louis XVI. at locks, and Peter the Great at boat-building); how some even say that he even invented the art, to which the Chinese still give his name, calling it Ching Ta̔i Lan, Ching Ta̔i’s blue; how the great family of potters, the Langs, died out in the beginning of the seventeenth century, carrying their secrets with them to the grave, and how ever since that time the Chinese have been trying to discover their methods—but all in vain—only producing, instead of a wonderful sang de bœuf of so soft a paste that it looks as if you might scoop it out with a spoon, the, as he calls them, inferior imitations, to which the French gave the name of Céladon Jaspé, and which the great metal workers, such as Caffieri, used to delight in mounting. Cloisonné enamel, by the bye, went out of fashion at the end of the last century, and the Chinese ceased to make it; but when, after the sacking of the Summer Palace, the specimens looted there and sent home fetched such wonderful prices in London and Paris, they routed out the drawers in which their forbears had carefully locked their recipes—for a Chinaman never destroys anything—and soon the market will be flooded with new work. The first specimen was brought to me at the Legation the other day, and very good it was.
The rose-backed plates and cups dear to the keen-eyed loungers at Christie’s can never have been the fashion at Peking, where men chiefly love the brave colours and bold designs of the artists of the Ming dynasty, and where purses are opened wide for ever so small a piece of the thickly glazed ware of the days of the Yuan and the Sung. From Ka̔ng Hsi’s reign to the end of Chien Lung’s, A.D. 1796, one seems to feel the Jesuit, or European, influence in the substitution of arabesques for the old barbaric designs. The great age for art in China and Japan, as in Europe, was the cinque cento; the meanest, the dawn of the nineteenth century.