Intimate China: The Chinese as I Have Seen Them

by Mrs. Archibald Little

Part I.—Getting to Peking.

House-boat on the Peiho.—Tientsin.—Chefoo.—A Peking Cart.—Camels.—British Embassy.—Walking on the Walls.—Beautiful Perspectives.

It was in 1888 we first arrived in Peking, and we felt at once convinced that, whatever wonders it might have to offer, nothing—no! nothing could surpass the wonder of the journey. And when it is considered that every high official throughout the empire had to travel this same way in order to be confirmed in each appointment, the wonder of it is enhanced. From Tientsin you could always ride to Peking, if you were strong enough. Sir Harry Parkes did it in the day, the year before he died. But if not equal to riding eighty miles at a stretch, or eighty miles relieved (?) by nights at Chinese inns, you had in 1888 to travel the way we did, taking boat up the Peiho as far as Tungchow.

We left Tientsin at two o'clock on Thursday, and reached Tungchow at 9 p.m. on Sunday, having been very lucky, as it appeared. We had a south-west wind all Friday, spinning us along certain reaches of the ever wriggling, rather than winding Peiho. Along the reverse reaches the men had to tow or pole us. On Saturday the wind was so high that we had to lie to in the middle of the day, the men being unable to make any way against it by towing. And we only made a very few miles that day. In the afternoon it rained, and was altogether cheerless. But on Sunday we had a fine westerly wind blowing us on. Although a river, the Peiho in this part of its course is decidedly more canal-like and uninteresting than the English canal down which I had had some thought of travelling the year before, till I decided it would be too tedious. But after all there is a charm about this exceedingly slow method of progression. The world does not really stand still with you, but you feel as if it did. You get interested in the boats you pass and meet; some coming down stream, laden with plants in pots—two dwarf orange-trees, with oranges on them, I saw once—or bringing down straw braid, or taking up brick tea—such quantities of brick tea, which had, I suppose, come all the way down the Yangtse from poor water-beleaguered Hankow of the willow avenues and ravening mosquitoes, and round farther by sea from Shanghai to Tientsin, and whose progress on strings and strings of dignified camels Siberiawards we subsequently saw. What brick tea costs in the original instance I do not know. But when I think of the labour expended on its transport I feel it ought to be precious indeed to the Siberians.

INTERIOR OF GOVERNOR'S OFFICIAL RESIDENCE AT HANGCHOW.

Every now and then we got out and walked along the banks, looking backwards at the long zigzagging procession of boats behind us, each with one large sail, or at times each with a bare mast, looking like a long line of telegraph-poles. And beside us was the line of real telegraph-poles, forerunners of the coming railway that has since been opened; and we knew that the foreigners who would approach Peking in the old historic manner were already numbered. For there will be nothing to tempt people to provide themselves with all the necessaries of life for a three or four days' trip, now that the railroad is open and you can book direct. There is nothing to be seen upon the road that cannot be seen as well elsewhere,—mudbanks, sandhills, millet- and sorghum-fields with poor crops, fairly nice trees, fences gay with convolvulus flowers, mud houses, mud roofs, and level mudbanks crowded with all the disreputable refuse of a poor Chinese village; then wood-cutters (one or two substantial coffins stood out prominently alongside of them; wood seems too precious for anything but coffins in those parts), a mule and a pony ploughing, or a donkey or an ox, never a pair of animals of the same kind. All these one looks at with a pleasant interest as one saunters or floats by. But you can see them elsewhere; or you can never see them, and yet be none the worse for the miss.

It is true that by the old method you could shut yourself into the boat cabin, and study colloquial Chinese according to Sir Thomas Wade, or write letters home to say how you were enjoying yourself, or drink tea, or smoke, just as your previous way of life disposed you to act, there being no restraining influence further than the size of the cabin. A native boat is not quite as luxurious as a Shanghai house-boat, though it is well enough, except in the matter of its being impossible to open the cabin door from the inside. So that when we were shut in, I always thought how, if the boat should heel over, we should be drowned inside like mice in a trap. Another exception must be made—not in favour of the cracks which grow portentously larger, as the boards shrink with the increasing dryness of the air, and which must let in an inordinate draught in winter, when the air is more cold than kindly. Even towards the end of September we found it hard enough to keep warm at night. We had two cabins, but one was pretty well all bedstead, being a raised ottoman sort of a place, under which boxes could be put, and on which mattresses were laid. We had to provide ourselves with everything we wanted, even to a cooking-stove. But then we paid only nine and a half dollars for our boat, including drink money. This at the then rate of exchange was under thirty shillings. The men fed themselves. So did we. It is tiresome that, travelling in China, nothing is to be bought by the way, beyond chickens and eggs, and sweet potatoes (delicious!) and cabbage (horrible!). It is tiresome, also, that the makers of tinned things do not put dates upon their tins; therefore in the outports—which Shanghai fine ladies always pronounce as if they were only peopled by "outcasts"—people have to put up with the tinned milk that somehow did not sell at Shanghai. It is a pity that the local representatives of the Army and Navy Stores do not see to this, and put dates on their tins. It would be well worth the "outcasts'" while to pay extra for recently tinned butter and milk, if they could rely upon the dates. As it was, our milk was very nearly butter, though it could not quite be used for that, and it certainly was not milk.

The Concession at Tientsin is either so far away from the Chinese town, or so satisfactory to its inhabitants, that they never stray away among the Chinese. On landing at the bridge of boats in the native city, while our servants made a few purchases, I found I excited as much interest as if there had not been a European colony within a thousand miles. It was, however, a particularly friendly crowd that accompanied me. A boy danced in front, clapping his hands, as if to bid the people in the street make way; another boy was very eager to point out all the sweet cakes he thought nicest; two old women and an old man went down on their knees to beg; an old man was washing very old shoes upon the bridge; another was selling odds and ends of old things, that looked as if they never had been new. There were sweet potatoes cooking; there were various other buyers and sellers, and crowds passing by, both on foot and in boats. Sometimes the bridge would be opened, sometimes closed to let the foot passengers go by. There was always a crowd; whichever way of progress was open, people were always progressing by it before it was ready for them. Nobody pushed, nobody was rude; every one appeared pleasant. But there, looking down the long straight reach of the river, was the tall tower of the ruined Roman Catholic Cathedral, recalling the massacre of 1870—a massacre that might so easily have embraced all the Europeans in the Concession, had not the rain mercifully come down in torrents and dispersed the mob. It did not seem possible, when we were there, to think of any danger of the kind threatening the exceptionally thriving-looking settlement.

I have not seen any Concession yet I liked the look of so well as that of Tientsin. There is a go-ahead look about the place, with all its goods stored in heaps on the Bund with only matting over them, instead of, as elsewhere, in warehouses; which makes it contrast especially with Chefoo, that sleeping beauty, whom no fairy prince has yet awakened. Perhaps, when he does, the merry wives of China, who used to resort there every summer, may find it hardly as charming as it was in its tranquillity and freedom from all restraint. But it was so tranquil, so absolutely uneventful, that our summer month there seemed only like a dream to look back upon. Its coast-line is beautiful; but it is a coast-line with nothing behind it, as it were—like the cat's smile in Alice in Wonderland, a grin and nothing more.

But it was at Tungchow in the old days that the tug of war in getting to Peking used to begin. You had bought all your stores, and furnished your boat, and spent days and nights in it; but all that was nothing to the great business of getting to Peking. There were thirteen miles yet to do, and the question was, How did you mean to try to get over them? My own firm conviction now is that the easiest way would have been to get up very early in the morning and walk. But as it was, I came into Peking in the traditional style, feet foremost in a springless cart, holding on hard to either side. We started at eleven in the morning from Tungchow, paused for an hour at a wayside inn to eat and rest, and did not reach Peking till six, only just before the gates were closed. At first starting I thought the accounts of the road had been exaggerated. It is true it was so dusty at intervals I was more reminded of a London fog than anything else. It is true I could not leave go with either hand without getting a tremendous bump on the head. But still I did not think the road was quite as bad as I had expected. Alas! the road was so bad we had not started by it at all, but were simply getting along by a way the carts had made for themselves. At Pa-li Chiao we came upon the real grand stone road, with the grand bridge made by the Ming Dynasty—when they moved their capital from Nanking to Peking, in order better to repel invading Tartar hordes—and never in the centuries since repaired by the Tartar horde of Manchus, who at once conquered them, when they thus obligingly put themselves within easy reach at the very extreme limit of their vast empire.

FARMER AND WATER BUFFALOES.
By Mrs. Archibald Little.

There was the road, with huge blocks of stone, some of them five feet long, and wide and thick in proportion, but sometimes worn away, sometimes clean gone. Now to hold on like grim death! How the smartly varnished little carts with their blue tops kept together at all I cannot imagine. But I know I immensely respected the mule that could pull us into and out of the holes and ruts, into which we dropped with a veritable concussion, not a jolt. Of course it was a new sensation—but a new sensation it can do no one any good to experience; and before I had had half an hour of it I had had enough, and asked for a donkey. However, the donkey brought was so tiny that, after a rest on its poor little thin back, I tried the cart again. The road did not seem quite so bad as before, until we got nearer the capital. Then—then I got out and walked. There was no help for it. And walking was decidedly less fatiguing. But an increasing crowd followed me. Every one spoke to me—I hope complimentarily. Men selling clothes waved them at me, and sang to invite purchase. It was hard work to avoid the carts, and donkeys, and mules, and camels, and men carrying things, and Manchu women with feet of the natural size, violently rouged faces, and hair made up into teapot handles, sticking out quite six inches behind their heads, or made into stiff wings, projecting about three inches on either side, and always with flowers stuck into their hair. It was hard work to avoid all these, and to keep up with the carts, and disagreeable to be choked and smothered in dust, and to feel oneself all the while appearing to every one as an escaped lunatic—ploughing through dust on one's own feet, instead of being driven along properly. But anything was better than jolting along that road till the great mock fortress came into view. We were about to enter the gates. The crowd there was too great to try to press through; so I climbed into the cart once more, and thus entered Peking comme il faut, in a springless cart.

PAPER-BURNING TEMPLES.
By Mrs. Archibald Little.

It is the custom to say the road to Peking from Tungchow is desperately uninteresting. It may be so. I feel I ought hardly to hazard an opinion, for I was afraid to leave my eyeglasses dangling, and thus only once or twice managed both to get them out and up to my eyes sufficiently steadily to see through them; but to my shortsighted gaze there appeared to be a constant series of interesting graves and gateways and monsters, which I longed to examine more closely. Then the long procession of camels carrying brick tea northwards, or coming south empty to fetch it, did not become monotonous, even after I had seen some thousands or more of them. The men riding upon them had handkerchiefs tied in a very simple way, which, however, I at once saw was the original of the old homely English sun-bonnet. The men walking by their sides had conical oil-paper hats, which were equally evidently the original of the Nice hats of my youth. They had even red linings to them, such as I had so often worn myself in Europe, and three little spots of black, whose nature I could not quite make out, but which on my hats used to be represented by three little stars of black velvet. I had always thought a Nice hat looked Chinese, and, since I came to China, that it would be the very thing to wear in summer; and now here I found these camel-drivers wearing the old original model, which probably the Jesuits carried over long ago to North Italy.

The camels placed their springy hoofs softly on the hard, stony road. Those that wore bells carried their arched necks high. Their grave eyes looked down kindly on the clouds of dust. Between their two humps rode a man, as in a natural saddle. Their yellow necks shone in the slanting rays of the sun, while the great tufts of hair at the tops of their legs stood out darkly. I thought I should grow tired of them, but I had not even by the time we had reached the gate of Peking, at the end of our long day's travel of thirteen miles.

"Is this inside the city or outside the city?" I asked at last of my stout carter, when we seemed to have been travelling an interminable distance through roads rather like Clapham Common, if there were no grass upon it, and two rows of booths cutting it into three divisions—two of booths and one of road—so wide and uncared for and wildernesslike was this last. "Inside the city," answered he haughtily. I felt as if I had been very rude to ask, and longed to apologise, if I had hurt his feelings. But the road was so unlike a city street. It was like a large caravanserai, or like the encampment of a savage tribe. The shops that skirted the road had gaily gilded fronts, and every now and then a shopkeeper sent out men to scoop up the liquid filth at either side, and sprinkle it upon the dust by way of somewhat keeping it down. The smell resulting left nothing to be desired. Long before we reached Peking I had decided that the Chinese were a docile, peaceable nation of traders, overrun by a northern horde so incurably barbarous, that not even centuries of contact with the Chinese had been able to civilise them, though it might have made them so effeminate that they would soon become effete. I now began to wonder how long Peking could go on accumulating filth within its walls without breeding a Black Death or other awful pestilence.

We drove on and on. At last we turned down a very disreputable, dilapidated sort of mews; and there was the French Embassy to the right, very smart in fresh paint; the Japanese Embassy, very perky, with a European gateway; the German Embassy, dignified and fresh painted. Round the corner stood the English Embassy, with a massive but somewhat jail-like portal.

In the Middle Ages it often seems as if it must have been very pleasant for the lords and ladies. And in Peking it is very pleasant to live in a ducal palace. From the moment the Embassy servant stepped forward with a fly-flap, and courteously flapped the dust off our boots, everything was charming. We never wished to go outside again to face that vile mews, with its holes, its dust, its smells. We forgot all about it, as we looked at the stately perspective of the inner entrance of the Palace,—its ceilings richest blue and brilliant green, relieved by golden pomegranates and dragons; its mortised beams projecting, all highly painted, green, red—green, red. Not a sound penetrated within its sheltered courtyards. The wood-carvings were beautiful, the galleries long enough to satisfy all desire for walking. The Chinese decorations satisfied our eyes. At last—at last we had come upon something Oriental in China, æsthetic, eye-satisfying. At the same time we were surrounded by every English comfort, enjoying delightful English society! Why ever go outside the Embassy compound? Could Peking possibly have anything to show worth encountering such horrors as those of its entry, a survival from those Middle Ages so agreeable to read about, so disagreeable to live in?

APPROACH TO MING EMPERORS' TOMBS, PEKING.
By Mr. Stratford Dugdale.

But one evening we took the one Peking walk, along the summit of the walls. There was something pathetic, as well as ludicrous, in thinking of European attachés and their wives, European diplomatists and their families, having for a pleasure-walk the walls of Peking. The horrors of the approach to them can only be realised by those who know what the entourage of the walls of a Chinese city is generally like. They cannot be described in a book, that may lie on an English drawing-room table. Arrived at the top, you find a wilderness of thorns and plants and trees, and there in and out amongst them a narrow way, along which a lady can barely manage to walk without tearing her dress. From the walls you see the yellow roofs of the Imperial Palace buildings within the inner wall, inside the Forbidden City. And you wonder what it must be like to be a Chinese Emperor, brought up under one of those yellow roofs, and never allowed outside that Forbidden City, except for a ceremonial visit to a temple, to pray for rain or fine weather. You see the green-tiled roofs of the princely ducal buildings, far more effective than the yellow by the evening light. On the one side you look at the "Outside City," the China town; on the other the "Inside City," the Tartar town, where the Embassies, etc., are. In the centre of this last, four-square, is placed the Forbidden Imperial City. Then you look out into the distance upon the western hills, beautiful in the sunset light. But it is fast growing dark. As we came out, the sun was still too hot to be pleasant. Now already it is too dark to discern distant objects. We turn back to that oasis in the wilderness of Peking, that fairy palace, the Ying-kuo Fu. We reach once more the beautiful perspective, that makes us long for the British Minister to stand in state with his following, holding a reception of Chinese mandarins, that we might see them all grouped according to their dignities against such a picturesque background. Then looking at the blue and green and golden dragon beams, at the sunshine and the stillness of the courtyards, we feel inclined, like Germans, to evolve the rest of Peking out of our own inner consciousness. Oh, rest ye, brother-mariners, we will not wander more!