I found Tientsing in a great state of excitement. It was the last day of the races, and to my great joy I found my colleague Saurin staying at the Russian consulate. Of course we agreed to make the journey to Peking together, and the Russian consul, by way of making things pleasant, most kindly volunteered to put me up.

The races really showed some very good sport. Tientsing cannot boast of such a meeting as those of Hong-kong and Shanghai, where English thoroughbreds are run, and for which such horses as “Buckstone,” since dead, and “Sir William” are imported; the horses are but Mongol ponies, the bona fide hacks of their owners and riders, yet they accomplished the three-mile race in seven minutes and forty seconds. They are very plucky, strong little beasts, and run till they drop. The races were an additional stroke of luck for me, for I was able at the end of the day to buy a capital pony for fifty dollars. The Chinese crowd showed the greatest possible interest in all the proceedings, and the course had to be kept vi et flagellis, which latter were not spared by the native police. Perhaps they feared spoiling the Chinaman, who is proverbially a child.

19th May.

I must own that I was agreeably disappointed in Tientsing. So many travellers have abused it, and inveighed against its filth and its beggarly crowd, that I expected to be shocked in one or other of my senses at every step. It certainly is very dirty, but not much more so than other Chinese towns, or, for that matter, than many in Europe; and who that has travelled in the sunny South has not seen rags and tatters, vermin, foul diseases, and deformities paraded as stimulants to charity? There is one drawback to Tientsing which is really insufferable. All the wells are salt, and the inhabitants are obliged to drink the loathsome water of the river. In order to cleanse it, it is first placed in large jars that the impurities may settle at the bottom, and then filtered. But nothing can purge it so as to convince one that the disgusting matter, which forces itself upon one as one sails up the stream, has been entirely got rid of.

We went to see some of the curiosity shops. There was a great deal of porcelain to which the dealers and local connoisseurs assigned wonderful dates and fine titles, but nothing that would be cared for in England; and the prices were simply outrageous, for the merchants will pay any mad sum that is asked by the rascally dealers. There were some very fine specimens of cloisonné enamel, but if the sums demanded for the porcelain were high, the enamels were ten times dearer. I saw a quantity of Chinese picture-books; they were not fit to buy, although some had great merit for delicacy of drawing. They each represented a story, generally the “Harlot’s Progress,” from a Chinese point of view, very coarse, and without Hogarth’s grim retribution at the end. Of course, where such drawings are openly exposed for sale there is no great strictness of morals, and Tientsing is famous, or rather infamous, even in China, for every bestial and degrading vice.

The European settlement of Tientsing is about two miles distant from the Chinese city. There are some fairly good houses built by the side of a broad bund or quay, and they command fabulous rents. The same municipal system which obtains at Shanghai has been established here; and, on the whole, the community shows signs of prosperity, although the port has been a disappointment to those who expected that it would reach an importance such as to crush Shanghai and its other rivals, or, at all events, to divert a considerable portion of their trade. For the first year or two after its establishment the business done was very great, and large fortunes were made; one merchant, for example, is just retiring with a fortune of £5000 a year, accumulated since 1861. But the Chinese, cunning in trade, very soon found out that it answered their purpose better to charter steamers, and have consignments made to themselves directly, than to buy from the agents of the great houses; consequently, as the trade is entirely import, the Europeans are finding less and less to do. The Yuen-tse-Fee, although she hails from Glasgow, and is nominally owned by Messrs. Trautmann and Co., a German firm, is in reality chiefly, if not entirely, the property of a dirty little Chinese comprador, whom I saw, and to whom the whole of her cargo was consigned.

LETTER IV

Peking, 23rd May 1865.

We left Tientsing early on Friday morning the 19th, by which means we had the tide in our favour, and were able to get quicker clear of the hideous sights and smells of the river as it runs through the town. We each had a boat; Saurin’s was the drawing-room, mine the dining-room, and his servant occupied the third as kitchen. They were capital roomy boats, covered in with hoods of bamboo and rattan matting, and with a sort of dresser in each upon which we spread our beds. Each had a crew of three men, and in Saurin’s, which was the biggest, there was a boy besides. They were very cheery, hard-working fellows, and indeed they had no sinecure, for although the wind was ostensibly in our favour, still the river winds round such sharp twists and elbows that in every other reach it was dead against us, and we had to proceed laboriously by dint of towing and punting. But the harder they worked the better humoured the crew seemed to be, and the boy especially distinguished himself by zeal equalling that of an unpaid attaché. The shoals are innumerable, and we were constantly crossing the river backwards and forwards, along a course marked out by twigs stuck in the mud. There is no scenery to enjoy, nothing but interminable fields of millet, and here and there a little wood. There is not a hillock to be seen, and we were lucky in being as short a time as possible over what must be a very dull journey. We reached Tungchou at three o’clock on Sunday afternoon. Here we found our horses, with an escort which had been sent down with them to meet us.

Tungchou was very busy. A fleet of junks had come in with grain, and the quay was alive with crowds of coolies, many of them as naked as they were born, discharging cargo, sifting corn, and carrying it into granaries. Our appearance produced some astonishment, for “foreign devils” are hardly yet quite familiar objects so far north. Tungchou was the place where the unfortunate English prisoners were taken in 1860, and where Wade and Crealock, carrying a flag of truce and demanding to parley with the commander, were fired upon and narrowly escaped with their lives. It is fortified, as all the northern cities are, but its walls would only be a security against native warriors. The roads in this part of the world are miracles of badness, and it is not difficult to conceive the tortures that the English prisoners must have suffered when they were conveyed along them in native carts without springs, and having their hands and heels tied together behind them with cords tightened by water. Every inch of the road to Peking is famous from the events of that time. Some way outside Tungchou we rode over the bridge of Palikao,[5] where the Chinese crossed their spears with the French bayonets, and held their own for half an hour. From this bridge the Général de Montauban takes his title. Its kylins and stone flags still bear traces of shot and shell. Riding through dust over one’s pony’s hocks, and raising a cloud at every step, is very dry work, and I was glad when we struck off the main road, and, coming upon a tea-house in a shady nook, stopped to rest and refresh. The people received us with the utmost bonhomie and civility, and brought us delicious tea, without milk or sugar, in bowls, hard-boiled eggs, and a sort of roll-twist fried instead of baked. We soon had ten or twelve yellow gentlemen round us, eagerly asking all sorts of questions about ourselves, our ages, and belongings. Murray talks Chinese fluently, and Saurin has also some knowledge of it, so we got on capitally. Our ages always puzzle Chinamen. They neither wear beard nor moustache until they have reached the age of forty, so they think that all Europeans who wear such appendages must have passed that age. A single eye-glass is, however, the possession which commands the most astonishment. They are familiar with spectacles and double eye-glasses, for they themselves wear them of portentous size, and mounted in thick brass or tortoise-shell rims. But a single glass is indeed a marvel, and provokes much laughter. Though the peculiarities of foreigners amuse the Chinese as much as theirs do us, it is singular how their natural courtesy prevents their showing it in the offensive manner that every Englishman has experienced in some foreign countries. I had expected to find the country on this side of Peking flat, ugly, and barren. Flat it certainly is, but there are plenty of trees and rich fields, and it cannot be called ugly. The villages and graves argue an immense population. It is not till one is under the very walls of the town that one sees Peking. The walls are high, ruinous, battlemented, and picturesque, of a fine deep gray colour. They are capped at intervals by towers of fantastic Chinese architecture, and, with their lofty gates, make a strange and striking picture. As a means of defence against modern artillery the walls of Peking are probably absurd. However, before I tell you anything about Peking I had better know something myself. At present I only know that I was very hot, very tired, and as dusty as the oldest press in the Record office, when I rode into the court of Her Majesty’s Legation, where I received the warmest welcome from Wade, the chargé d’affaires.