The hills west of Peking are the Switzerland of Northern China. They are not very high nor extraordinarily beautiful, but there are some very pretty gorges and valleys, richly wooded, and at any rate the air is fresh and pure. Every gorge has a perfect nest of temples, built by the pious emperors of the Ming dynasty and the earlier Tartars, for which good deeds the Corps diplomatique at Peking cannot be too grateful. Properly speaking, according to the rules of their order, the Buddhist monks are forbidden to receive any money for the hospitality which they offer to strangers, so when the Chinese go to stay at a temple they restore or beautify some part of it as a return; but we prefer paying a few dollars, and in spite of their statutes the arrangement seems to suit the monks as well as it does us.
Our temple is called “Pi Yün Ssŭ,” “the temple of the azure clouds,” a romantic name, and certainly the place is worthy of it. It is built on terraces ascending the hill to a length of about half a mile, and on every terrace is a shrine, each more beautiful (if that is the proper word to apply to the grotesque buildings of this country) than the last; black and white marble statues and vases, bronze dragons, alto-relievos and basso-relievos representing kings and warriors, gods and goddesses, and fabulous monsters, all of rare workmanship,—inscriptions graven on marble and stone, and bronze or gilt upon wood, meet one at every step; and the whole is set in a nest of rock-work, fountains, woods, and gardens. At the top is a small temple more in the Indian than the Chinese style, and here there is a very curious idol with ten heads, three large ones at the bottom, from which three smaller ones spring, in their turn carrying three lesser ones surmounted by a single very small head. The hands are in proportion. This little place commands a panoramic view over the plain, with the walls and towers of Peking in the distance.
Our habitation consists of several little houses on one side of the temple; we dine in an open pavilion, surrounded by a pond and artificial rockery, with ferns and mosses in profusion; high trees shade it from the sun, and close by us a cold fountain pours out of the rock into the pond, in which we can ice our wine to perfection. The pond was dried up, and the fountain had been turned from its channel, when we arrived; but we got together a few coolies, and soon set that right. Fancy our feelings on coming here, when we were told that if there came no rain we could have no bath! This too in a climate where the hot nights make a morning wash doubly necessary. The priest had hardly said the word, when a tremendous thunderstorm broke over the mountain and set our minds at rest, and next morning we discovered that we could have the most delicious natural bath. Our life here is very simple and very, very dull. We are only two—Saurin and myself. We rise at any hour after daybreak, breakfast at eight, dine at three; after dinner we go for a ride, or a scramble over the mountain, and come home to tea at about eight or nine. We sit smoking our cheroots for perhaps an hour, talking always about home and watching the fire-flies, that, according to Chinese tradition, served as lamps to Confucius and his disciples. A visit from or to the Russian Legation, who have got a temple at about an hour and a half’s ride from here, is the only break to the monotony of our daily life. I have my teacher with me here, and work with him at the language from breakfast to dinner; that is my serious occupation, and about as hard a task as one could wish for. I carry about my lessons for the rest of the day written on paper fans—a capital dodge for keeping one’s work before one. We are rather bothered by mosquitoes, and a most venomous little insect called the sand-fly, yellow in colour, and smaller than a midge, which is lucky, for if he were of the size of a blue-bottle I should think his bite would be fatal. There are quantities of scorpions too; one of our men was stung the other day. We heard a great wailing and crying one night, for all the world like an Irish wake; next morning our servants told us that the cook’s assistant had been stung in the hand, and that he had died in an hour, but that he had come to rights again, and was getting well. This sounded something like being “kilt entirely.” The man’s presence at the temple illustrates a custom of the country; of course, as is the way of the East, no one can move without a large retinue. There must be a valet for each man, and a groom for each horse, and a man or two to do nothing, and two or three more to look on and see them do it. But besides this, like Thackeray’s description of Irishmen and their poor relations, no Chinaman is so poor or mean but what he can find a poorer and a meaner to do part of his work. A coolie earning three dollars a month will pay another one dollar a month to help him, and he in his turn will give a boy a few cash, that he may enjoy his ease and his opium. The man who was stung was the cook’s poor relation. Although his brother and the other men supposed him to be dying, and finally to have actually died, they never came and told us, nor did they get any assistance for him. We heard the noise, but one of our servants has a very pretty little talent for tickling a lute, and there was so little difference between the sounds of the wake and those of the concerts he gets up, that we thought the hullabaloo was only a melancholy variety of the latter, so we took no notice of it. As far as Chinese remedies are concerned, better be without them. It is almost impossible to believe the amount of ignorance which exists in China about medicine and surgery. Native doctors, who never dissect, are utterly ignorant for the most part of the position of the heart, the lungs, and the other principal organs. They are ignorant of the difference between arteries and veins, nor do they understand the circulation, looking upon the several pulses of the body as the effects of separate causes. All diseases are attributed by them to their favourite doctrine, “hot and cold influences.” They have a certain knowledge of the use of drugs, and of mercury in particular, but their remedy above all others is acupuncture. Some days ago my groom had an attack of diarrhœa, and his medical man pricked him underneath the tongue for it! Sir John Davis tells a story of a doctor who wanted to prick a man for hernia. If in these prickings they cut into an artery, and the man dies, why, so much the worse for him! it is fate. Astrology plays a great part in their medical art, certain planets being supposed to influence certain parts of the body. It is one among many instances in which one sees the analogy between the present condition of China and Europe in the Middle Ages.
LETTER VIII
Peking, 8th July 1865.
We have ridden in to spend three days, copying despatches and sighing for our “cool grot.” The town seemed too beastly as we came in. Peking, as Southey said of Exeter, “is ancient and stinks.” The “Beggar’s Bridge,” which we have to pass every time we go into the Chinese city, and nearly every time we go out, is the most loathsome and stinking exhibition that it ever was my fate to come across. Here every day a hundred or two of the most degraded specimens of humanity congregate and beg. By far the greater majority of them are clothed only in dirt, and all sorts of repulsive cutaneous complaints; some have a linen rag, but it is worn over the shoulders, and in no way serves as a decent covering. Lice, mange, scrofula, leprosy, and filth are allowed to remain undisturbed by water or drugs. They are a stock-in-trade, and as such rather encouraged than not. It is a sickening sight when these creatures come and perform the ko̔to̔u to us, prostrating themselves in the dust or mud, which is scarcely as dirty as themselves. I spare you a description of the food I have seen them eating. If ever I get back to Europe, I feel that the Beggar’s Bridge will be a nightmare to me for the rest of my life. All this strikes one with double force after spending a fortnight in the country among the healthy, sunburnt natives of the hills. I assure you that they look quite handsome after the yellow townsfolk. It would amuse our friends at home, if they could see us the centre of a group of thirty or forty of these brown villagers, in some out-of-the-way valley where Englishmen are about as often seen as Chinamen in Yorkshire. They ask us all the most absurd questions about ourselves, our clothes, and our dogs, who are quite as great objects of wonder as ourselves. They never will believe that Nou-nou is not some variety of sheep, and Saurin’s pointer, a very handsome young dog of French royal breed, comes in for much admiration. The women are all frightened at us, and keep well out of the way; we see them timidly peering out of their doors at the foreign barbarians who kill little children, and use their eyes for photography, but it is seldom that anything but a stout old matron of great courage will venture to come near us. The people are beginning to get rid of their prejudices against us, and to see that we mean them no injury; at any rate they are quite friendly, and seem to look upon us as harmless eccentric creatures, but very ugly. As for personal safety, no one ever dreams of carrying arms, either by day or by night, and nobody is ever insulted or attacked.
We hear bad news of mercantile prospects in the south. Notwithstanding their having been hit so hard last season, the merchants have been speculating again more rashly than ever, and vying with each other in buying up tea. The Chinese are quite up to this, and have leagued together to raise prices. The nearer our merchants have got to the tea-growing districts by means of the opening of new ports, the dearer tea has become. Tea was never so cheap as when Canton was the only outlet to the market. This seems a paradox, but it is easily explained. The merchants competing to buy on the spot have caused the Chinese growers to send up their prices to any height, and the foreigner cannot transport the tea south so cheaply as the native, so that both the original price paid to the farmers, and the cost of transport, have been raised, and the merchants are paying the penalty of their own hunger for new markets.
As a set-off against this bad news, we have good tidings with regard to the rebels, who were in Shantung; they appear to be dispersed, some south and some west, and the capital is safe. For once the Chinese can lay the praise to themselves, they having acted without foreign aid.
LETTER IX
Pi Yün Ssŭ, 21st July 1865.