CHINESE STREET SCENE DURING RAINY SEASON.
Such hints as these will be sufficient to suggest to the least imaginative that peculiar unattractiveness of the Peking streets which has been a determining factor in the habits of the foreign residents. Life would be intolerable to Western folks if it were not removed from the sights, noises, and odours of the streets; and fortunately the ruling local principle of spaciousness lends itself to the solution without running counter to any native practice or prejudice. The Legations, the customs, and the missionaries are in their various degrees established in "compounds" large enough to accommodate the members of their staffs in separate buildings with ample elbow-room, as in an Indian cantonment, interspaced with trees and sometimes gardens, the whole surrounded by a high wall and capable of defence. These seductive oases in a wilderness of garbage, in a city of great distances, naturally conduce to stay-at-home habits and to segregation, which it requires some energy to overcome.
Nor is Peking life wanting in more mundane compensations. The city itself contains many "objects of interest," which in the earlier years of foreign intercourse were open to the curious. The well-known "Lama temple," reputed to contain 2000 inmates, which has for many years been dangerous to enter, was in those days a much-frequented resort, where the stranger was welcome to go over the establishment and listen to the Buddhist litanies: a certain bass voice, or perhaps a succession of bass voices, in the choir, indeed, attained celebrity among foreigners. In the refectory of that monastery one was obliged, out of respect, to eat, or feign to eat, the unmitigated fat of the sheep's tail, fished from out the broth, not with a hook, as was the custom in the Jewish Church, but by the deft fingers of the chief lama. Now, on the contrary, the foreigner who enters the gate is hustled, robbed, and stoned. This great change in the attitude of the lamas has never been satisfactorily explained, but it is presumed that the manners and customs of some of the visitors to the temple may have had something to do with it. There have been visitors who, with the keen acquisitiveness of the world-tourist, have slipped small "josses" into their pockets out of what, perhaps, appeared to them the superfluous number of molten images ranged round the shelves of the great Buddha's sanctuary.
The Temple of Heaven, too, that grand altar to the Living God, standing in an immense park enclosed by a lofty wall, was then, and for many years remained, open to all comers. This was perhaps due less to any intentional liberality of the authorities than to the negligence of the gatekeepers and the Board of Works. For a long time access was gained over a broken part of the outer wall left unrepaired. At one period English residents played cricket within the vast enclosure; at another Billingsgate and brickbats were the ordinary salutations which greeted the would-be visitor—the change being probably due to the slow awakening of the officials. So with many other places within and without the city, for in some cases where direct request was made for extension of the accommodation, the effect of drawing official attention to the subject was to restrict the privileges which had actually been enjoyed.
Notwithstanding the occasional rudeness of which Dr Rennie has given us so faithful a picture, the most unartistic of men could hardly fail to take pleasure in the daily traffic of the streets, provided only his nerves, visual and olfactory, were not too delicate. The true lord of the roads is apt from his commonplaceness to be overlooked by those who owe him most—that universal conveyancer, the sagacious, tireless mule. He does not belong to the "five great families"—the fox, weasel, hedgehog, snake, and rat—which the Chinese hold in mystic awe because they have learned the secret of immortality; but if utility to man were a criterion of merit, they would surely fall down and worship this indispensable hybrid. Hot or cold, wet or dry, the mule never fails to respond to the severest call upon his strength and courage.
With the approach of winter an antediluvian rival is introduced upon the scene, in the shape of the well-known two-humped camel, which is then shaggy, dignified, and in really grand form. Intolerant of heat, but impervious to cold, the camels, after passing the summer on the grass-lands of the Mongolian plateau, are brought down in droves to the great fair held on a large open space outside the Northern Wall. The coming of the camels with their bronzed and heavily booted riders is like a whiff of the free air of the desert. The Pekingese use this patient but surly beast of burden chiefly for carrying coal from the mines in the Western Hills to the city; but immense numbers are employed in transporting tea from the navigable limit of the Peiho to Siberia and Russia, not entering Peking city at all.
A roomy encampment between the British and Russian Legations is allotted to the Mongols, and serves as a market-place where the products of the desert are exchanged for the utensils and gewgaws of civilisation. The staple of the Mongol trade is frozen meat—mutton, venison, furred and feathered game; and without refrigerator or other appliance the carcasses remain fresh in their skins till the end of the three winter months. These simple-minded herdsmen, chaffering with shrewd Chinese hucksters, or sitting, where they seem to have been born, between the high humps of their slow-moving beasts, form picturesque groups in the imperial city, the more interesting that their appearance is pathetically suggestive of an order which is passing away. The Grand Khan, dispensing favours to his loyal tributaries, has come ominously near to being a mere tradition. These very sheepskin-coated camel-drivers are the only buffer remaining between the receding empire and the advancing tide of foreign encroachment from the north.
Other evidences of that imperial grandeur which lent some justification to the title "Middle Kingdom" were still occasionally to be met with. Though Siam, and even Burma, had fallen indefinitely into arrears, dust-begrimed embassies from Korea or Nepaul, with their trains of pack-mules bearing tribute and merchandise (duty free for the benefit of the officials), might still be seen defiling through the massive gates of the city, preserving to our day a living picture of the Asiatic mission of the antique type. For what were they but interesting survivals, shadows of departed greatness?