The Last Days of Pekin

by Pierre Loti

IV

The country slopes gently toward the range of Mongolian mountains, which, though still some distance ahead of us, is now growing rapidly in height. Trees are more and more frequent, grass grows naturally here and there, and we have left the dreary ashy soil.

Near by there are a few pointed-topped hills, queerly shaped, with occasionally an old tower perched on the summit,—the ten or twelve storied kind, which at once give the landscape a Chinese look, with superimposed roofs, curved up like dogs' ears, at the corners, with an Æolian harp at each end.

The air is growing purer; the cloud of dust is left behind as we approach the unquestionably privileged region which has been selected for the repose of the celestial emperors and empresses.

We stop at a village, after about a dozen kilometres, to take breakfast with a great prince of much higher rank than the one who rides with us. He is a direct uncle of the Emperor, in disgrace with the Empress, whose favorite he has been, and now entrusted with the guardianship of the tombs. As he is in deep mourning, he is dressed in cotton like the poor, and yet does not resemble them. He makes excuses for receiving us in a dilapidated old house, his own Yamen having been burned by the Germans, and offers us a very Chinese breakfast, where reappear the sharks' wings and hinds' nerves. The flat-faced peasants of the neighborhood peer at us in the meantime through the numerous holes in the rice-paper window-panes.

We remount at once, after the last cup of tea, to visit the tombs toward which we have been journeying for three days, and which are now very near. My confrère of the Pekin Academy, with his big, round spectacles and his little bird-like body completely lost in his beautiful silken robes, has rejoined us, and slowly follows along upon a mule.

A more and more solitary country. No more villages, no more fields! The road winds along among the hills,—which are covered with grass and flowers,—surprising and enchanting our unaccustomed eyes. It seems like a glimpse of Eden after the dusty-gray China we have come through, where the only green thing was the wheat. The perpetual dust of Petchili has been left behind; but on the plain below we still perceive it, like a fog from which we have escaped.

We continue to mount, and soon arrive at the first spurs of the Mongolian range. Here behind a wall of earth we find an immense Tartar camp, at least two thousand men, armed with lances, bows, and arrows, guard of honor of the defunct rulers.

Once more we see a clear horizon, the very memory of which had faded. It seems as though these Mongolian mountains suddenly huddled together as though they had all pressed forward; very rocky they are, with strange outlines, peaks like turrets or pagoda-towers rising above us,—all of a beautiful purple iris effect.

Ahead of us we begin to see on all sides wooded valleys and forests of cedar. True, they are artificial forests, although very old,—planted centuries ago for this funeral park, covering an area twenty miles in circumference, where four Tartar emperors sleep.

We enter this silent, shadowy place, astonished to find that, contrary to Chinese custom, it is surrounded by no wall. No doubt it was felt that this isolated spot would be sufficiently protected by the terror inspired by the shades of the emperors, as well as by a general edict of death promulgated in advance against any one who dared to cultivate a bit of the ground or even sow a seed.

It is the sacred wood par excellence, with all its retirement and its mystery. What marvellous poets of the dead the Chinese are, to be able to prepare them such dwelling-places!

Here in the shadows one is tempted to speak low, as under the roof of a temple; one feels it a profanity for the horses to trample down the turf,—a carpet of fine grass and blossoms, venerated for ages past, and apparently never disturbed. The great cedars and the hundred-year-old thuyas, scattered over the hills and in the valleys, are separated by open spaces where brushwood grows; and under the colonnade formed by their massive trunks there is nothing but short grass, exquisite tiny flowers, and moss and lichens.

The dust that obscures the sky on the plains apparently never reaches this chosen spot, for the magnificent green of the trees is nowhere dimmed. In this superb solitude, which men have created here and dedicated to the shades of their masters, the distance disclosed to us as our road takes us past some clearing or up some height is of an absolute limpidity. A light as from Paradise falls upon us from a heaven profoundly blue, streaked with tiny clouds, rose-gray like turtle-doves. At such moments one gets a glimpse of splendid distant golden-yellow roofs rising amongst sombre branches, like the palace of the Sleeping Beauty.

Not a soul in all this shaded road. The silence of the desert! Only occasionally the croaking of a raven,—too funereal a bird, it seems, for the calm enchantment of this place, where Death is compelled, before entering, to lay aside its horror and to become simply the magician of unending rest.

In some places the trees form avenues which are finally lost to sight in the green dusk. Elsewhere they have been planted without design, and seem to have grown of their own accord and to form a natural forest. All the details recall the fact that the place is magnificent, imperial, sacred; the smallest bridge, thrown over a stream which crosses the road, is of white marble of rare design, covered with beautiful carvings; an heraldic beast, crouching in the shadow, menaces us with a ferocious smile as we pass by, or a marble obelisk surrounded by five-clawed dragons rises unexpectedly in its snowy whiteness, outlined against the dark background of the cedars.

In this wood, twenty miles in circumference, lie the bodies of but four emperors; that of the Empress Regent, whose tomb was long since begun, will be added as well as her son's, the young Emperor, who has had his chosen place marked with a stele of gray marble.[4] And that is all. Other sovereigns, past or to be, sleep, or will sleep, elsewhere, in other Edens, as vast and as wonderfully arranged. Immense space is required for the body of a Son of Heaven, and immense solitary silence must reign round about it.

The arrangement of these tombs is regulated by unchangeable plans, which date back to old extinguished dynasties. They are all alike, recalling those of the Ming emperors, which antedate them by several centuries, and whose ruins have been for a long time the object of one of the excursions permitted to European travellers.

One invariably approaches by a cut in the sombre forest, half a mile in length, which has been so planned by the artists of the past that it opens, like the doors of a magnificent stage-setting, upon some incomparable background such as a particularly high mountain, abrupt and bold, or a mass of rock presenting one of those anomalies of form and color that the Chinese everywhere seek.

Invariably, also, the avenue begins with great triumphal arches of white marble, which are, needless to say, surmounted by monsters bristling with horns and claws.

In the case of the ancestor of the present Emperor, who receives to-day our first visit, these entrance arches appear unexpectedly in the heart of the forest, their bases entangled with wild bindweed. They seem to have shot up, at the rubbing of an enchanter's magic ring, out of what appears to be virgin soil, so covered is it with moss and with the rare delicate little plants which nothing disturbs, and which grow only in places that have long been quiet and respected by man.

Next come some marble bridges with semicircular arches; there are three bridges exactly alike, for each time an emperor passes, dead or alive, the middle bridge is reserved for him alone. The architects of the tombs were careful to have the avenue crossed several times by artificial streams, in order to have an occasion for spanning them with these charming curves of everlasting white. On each rail of the bridge there is an intertwining of imperial fancies. The sloping pavement is white and slippery, and completely framed in grass, which pushes through and flourishes in all its joinings.

The crossing is dangerously slippery for our horses, whose steps resound mournfully on the marble; the sudden noise we make in the stillness is almost a source of embarrassment to us, making us feel as though our coming had disturbed in an unseemly manner the composure of the necropolis. With the exception of ourselves and a few ravens in the trees, nothing moves and nothing lives in all the immensity of this memorial park.

Beyond the three arched bridges the avenue leads to the first temple, with a yellow enamelled roof, which seems to bar our way. At the four corners of the open space it occupies, rise four rostral columns made of marble, white as ivory,—admirable monoliths, with a crouching animal at the top of each one, similar to those enthroned on the obelisks in front of the palace at Pekin,—a sort of slender jackal, with long, erect ears, upturned eyes, and a mouth open as if howling to heaven. This first temple contains nothing but three giant stele, resting on marble turtles as large as leviathans. They recount the glory of a defunct emperor; the first is inscribed in the Tartar language, the second in Chinese, the third in Manchou.

Beyond this temple of stele the avenue is prolonged in the same direction for an indefinite length, very majestic with its two walls of black-green cedars, and its carpet of grass, flowers, and moss, which looks as though it were never trampled upon. All the avenues in these woods are always thus deserted, always silent, for the Chinese come here only at rare intervals, in solemn, respectful processions to perform their funeral rites. And it is the air of desertion in the midst of splendor which is the great charm of this place, unique in all the world.

When the Allies have left China, this park of tombs, open to us for a single moment, will be once more impenetrable for how long we do not know; perhaps until another invasion, which may cause the venerable yellow Colossus to crumble away,—unless, indeed, it awakes from its slumber of a thousand years; for the Colossus is still capable of spreading terror, and of arming itself for a revenge of which one dares not think—Mon Dieu! the day when China, in the place of its small regiments of mercenaries and bandits, shall arm in mass for a supreme revolt its millions of young peasants such as I have recently seen, sober, cruel, spare, muscular, accustomed to every sort of physical exercise, and defiant of death, what a terrifying army it will have, if modern instruments of destruction are placed in their hands! On reflection, it seems as though certain of the Allies have been rather rash to have sown here so many seeds of hatred, and to have created so much desire for vengeance.

Now, at the end of the dark deserted green avenue the final temple shows its shining roof. The mountain above, the strange, crenellated mountain, which has been chosen as a sort of background for all this sad creation, rises to-day all violet and rose against a bit of rare blue sky,—the blue of a turquoise turning to green. The light continues to be modified, exquisite; the sun is veiled by the same clouds that in color remind one of turtle-doves, and we no longer hear our horses' steps, so thick is the carpet of grass and moss.

Now one catches sight of the great triple doors of the sanctuary; they are blood-red with hinges of gold. Then comes the whiteness of three marble bridges with slippery pavements, in crossing which my little army makes an exaggerated noise, as though the rows of cedars ranged like a wall on either side of us had the sonority of a church. From here on, as if to guard the ever more sacred approach, tall marble statues are lined up on each side of the avenue. We pass between motionless elephants, horses, lions, and mute white warriors, three times the height of man.

As we approach the white terraces of the temple we begin to perceive the ravages of war. The German soldiers, who were here before ours, tore out in places, with the points of their swords, the beautiful gilded bronze decorations of the red doors, taking them to be gold.

In the first court of one of the lateral edifices, whose roofs are as sumptuously enamelled as those of the big sanctuary, are the kitchens,—where are prepared at certain times repasts for the Shadow of Death,—extensive enough to provide for a legion of ogres or vampires. Enormous ovens, enormous bronze troughs in which whole oxen are cooked, are still intact; but the pavement is littered with broken porcelains, with fragments which are the result of a blow with the butt end of a gun or a bayonet.

On a high terrace, after passing two or three courts paved with marble, after two or three enclosures entered by triple doors of cedar, the central temple opens before us, empty and devastated. It is magnificent in its proportions, with tall columns of red and gold lacquer, but it has been despoiled of its sacred riches. Heavy silk hangings, idols, silver drinking-vessels, flat silver dishes for the feasts of the Shades had almost entirely disappeared when the French arrived, and what remained of the treasures has been collected in a safe place by our officers. Two of them have just been decorated by the Emperor of China for this preservation of property, and it is one of the most curious episodes of this abnormal war, the sovereign of the invaded country spontaneously decorating the officers of the invading army out of gratitude. Behind the last temple is the colossal tomb.

For the interment of an emperor the Chinese cut a piece out of a hill as one would cut out a portion from a Titanic cake; then they isolate it by enormous excavations and surround it with crenellated ramparts. It thus becomes a massive citadel. Then in the bowels of the earth they dig a sepulchral passageway known only to the initiated, and at its end they place the emperor, not mummified, but in a thick coffin made of cedar lacquered in gold, which must prevent rapid disintegration. Then they seal forever the subterranean door by a kind of screen of faience, invariably yellow and green, with relief representing the lotus, dragons, or clouds. Each sovereign in his turn is buried and sealed up in the same manner,—in the midst of a forest region equally vast and equally solitary.

At last we arrive at the end of this section of a hill and of this rampart, stopped in our course by a melancholy screen of yellow and green faience, which seems to be the end of our forty-league journey. It is a square screen, twenty feet each way, brilliant with color and varnish, and in striking contrast to the gray brick wall and gray earth.

The ravens are massed here as though they divined the sinister thing concealed from them in the heart of the mountain, and receive us with a chorus of cries.

Opposite the faience screen is an altar of rough-hewn marble, whose brutal simplicity is in striking contrast to the splendors of the temple and the avenue. It supports a sort of incense burner of unknown and tragic significance, and two or three symbolic articles intentionally rude in workmanship. One is confounded by the strange forms, the almost primitive barbarity of these last and supreme objects at the threshold of the tomb; their aspect is intended to create a sort of indefinable terror. I remember once, in the holy mountain at Nikko, where sleep the emperors of old Japan, that after the fairy-like magnificence of gold-lacquered temples, outside the little bronze door which forms the entrance to each sepulture, I stumbled against just such an altar, supporting two or three worn emblems, as disturbing as these in their artificial barbaric naïveté.

It seems that in these subterranean passages of the Son of Heaven there are heaps of treasures, precious stones, and metals. Those who are authorities in Chinese matters assured our generals that enough would be found about the body of a single emperor to pay the war indemnity demanded by Europe, and that the mere threat of violating one of these ancestral tombs would suffice to bring the Regent and her son to Pekin submissive and yielding, ready to make all concessions.

Happily for our Occidental honor, no one of the Allies would consent to this means, so the yellow and green faience screens have not been broken; every dragon, every lotus, no matter how delicate in relief, has remained intact. All have paused here. The old emperors, behind their everlasting walls, may have heard the approach of the trumpets of the barbarian army and the beating of their drums, but each one of them could fall asleep again, tranquil as before, surrounded by the empty glory of his fabulous wealth.