The New Year’s festivities last for a fortnight or so; it is an endless succession of feasting and fireworks until the Feast of Lanterns, twelve days after New Year’s Day. The latter is quite a bright scene with all the lanterns and transparencies, but it sounds much more than it is.
I must tell you something about the Chinese travellers who are going to Europe, and whom you will see or hear about. Mr. Hart, the Inspector-General of Customs, is going home on leave, and the Chinese Government have ordered his Chinese secretary, with his son and three young Chinamen, students of European languages, to accompany him. Pin Chun, the gentleman in question, has been raised to the Clear Blue Button, third grade, and made an honorary chief clerk in the Foreign Office on the occasion. His son has been made a clerk in the Foreign Office. It is a great pity that the Chinese did not choose a more intelligent and younger man than Pin Chun, who is sixty-four years old, and a shocking twaddle. He and his son are, from what I have seen and heard of them, quite incapable of forming just appreciations of what they will see. Then, for their first mission to Europe, although it has no official character, they should have chosen a mandarin of more importance than Pin, whose reports will have but little weight with the lettered class of Chinese; indeed, these are jealous of his promotion, and consider that his distinction is too cheaply earned. The reason of Pin’s having been chosen is that he is a connection by marriage with one of the ministers of the Chinese Foreign Office. He is said to be very popular in Pekingese society, so at any rate, when he comes back, what he has seen will be talked about in the “highest circles”; and he is personally acquainted with the Prince of Kung, who proposed the mission to him at a wedding breakfast. Pin has no official character as envoy. He is told to travel and write down all about the “hills and streams” of the countries he visits, and he will be trotted about to every object of interest. I only hope that he will not be too much lionised. It would be misinterpreted here, where people would say at once, “See what great people we are; when a private traveller among us goes to your country he is received with the respect which you know is due to a superior intelligence, but your barbarian ministers even are not received here,—of course our Emperor is great and powerful, and you are only here on sufferance.”
I must leave off. I am just starting to Tientsing to see Saurin off, alas! and when I come back it will be to almost entire solitude.
Perhaps I have spoken rather too slightingly of Pin Chun’s mission. It is a small thing in itself, but we all look upon it as the first step towards permanent missions in Europe and better relations here.
LETTER XXIV
Peking, 12th April 1866.
I am going to tell you about an entertainment at the house of a Chinese mandarin. You will have gathered from my former letters to you that we see nothing of the Chinese in their own houses; their life and habits are a sealed book to us. We only see the mandarins in full dress and with the mask they wear in conference. It was a great pleasure to me, therefore, to make the acquaintance of a Chinese gentleman of good position, who is so far enlightened above his fellows as to like and even seek the society of Europeans, and learn what he can from them. Yang Lao Yeh is a mandarin wearing a blue button of the third grade; he is nominally on the staff of the officials of the Board of War, but his private fortune of some ten or twelve thousand pounds a year makes him independent of his office, except in so far as his social rank is concerned (for, as you know, in China, to hold office is to be a gentleman). I became acquainted with him through the Russian Legation, with which he has had intercourse for some three years or more, and he invited a party of us to his house at the time of the Feast of Lanterns. He occupies a large house in the Chinese city. We went to him at about eleven o’clock in the morning. As he had not expected us quite so early we spent half an hour in going over the premises. I had never before seen the interior of a Chinese gentleman’s home; I imagined, however, that Yang’s would be a very favourable specimen of a rich man’s house. It is very pretty, with innumerable courtyards round which the dwelling-houses are built. The principal court surrounds a small artificial pond, in the centre of which is a sort of glass summer-house approached by two little miniature bridges with tiny white lions of white marble guarding them at intervals. Rockeries, which are a very favourite garden ornament, caves, grottoes, and turrets with battlements, all on a Liliputian scale, are crammed wherever there is room, in a most picturesque defiance of order and architecture. The only attempts at flowers and shrubs are a few of the famous dwarfed trees, trained so as to represent with their branches characters of good omen, such as Happiness, Longevity, etc. A broad terrace walk surmounts the whole. But besides having the most perfect luxury à la Chinoise, Yang is a great amateur of all European inventions. He has a room fitted up after our fashion, and his whole house is full of guns, telescopes, clocks, barometers, thermometers, and other foreign importations. He has even gone so far as to fit up a photographic studio, and takes lessons in the art, which he practises with considerable success. He gave us really capital portraits of himself of his own execution. When we had wandered all over the house Yang led us into the private apartments where breakfast had been prepared for us. Here he presented to us his son, a very small boy of sixteen, but a white-buttoned mandarin, nevertheless (of course the rank had been purchased; in China both civil and military rank can be bought). The ladies of the family, resplendent in silks and satins of many colours, and painted so that not a particle of themselves was visible, were separated from us by a curtain through which they kept continually peeping, anxious to see, and not unwilling to be seen. We were joined by two mandarins, one from the Board of Punishments, the other from the Board of Revenue, both very cheery and talkative. The breakfast was by far the highest effort of Chinese culinary art that I have yet seen; a certain marinade of venison, especially, was beyond praise. Being asked to eat with chop-sticks always rather reminds me of the fable of the fox who invited the stork to dinner, and makes me appreciate the feelings of the stork on that occasion; but Yang had provided forks, so we were able to eat on equal terms with our entertainer, who, apropos of chopsticks, told us a story of a courtier who was so expert with that utensil that when a grain of rice once fell from the Imperial lips he caught it between his sticks as it fell, for which feat he was on the spot promoted to high office and emoluments.
The only fault of the breakfast was that there was too much of it, and as we were perpetually being pledged by our host and his friends in warm wine of the headiest nature (no heeltaps), matters were beginning to look serious, when happily the dishes were cleared away and tea was brought. I thought the eating was all over, but not a bit of it: it was only a pause in our labours; for in came a huge and delicious tureen of bird’s-nest soup and pigeons’ eggs with cream of rice in bowls to drink—excellent, but stodgy,—and so a Chinese feast goes on all day without a halt. We witnessed an instance of the duty which a Chinese son shows to his father; for not only did Yang’s son not sit down to dinner with us, but he waited at table like a sort of upper servant, handing his father’s pipe, and anticipating all our wants. Amongst other things which he forced upon us was a bottle of Curaçoa, which much delighted the Chinese guests. I ought to have mentioned that before breakfast began, a company of acrobats made their appearance to perform in the yard. The contortionists were two women and four little girls. The band, which hardly stopped clashing during upwards of three hours, consisted of a gong, two pair of cymbals, and a single kettledrum, beaten by men. The performance was chiefly rope-dancing and tumbling; the tricks were not in themselves as good as what we see daily in the streets of European cities, but the difficulty of them was enhanced by the performers all being small-footed. The elder woman was amazingly strong. Lying on her back she balanced tables, chairs, and other heavy objects on her feet as if they had been feathers, and wound up by taking a large wine jar into which a little girl had been put, like the forty thieves in the Arabian Nights, and tossing it about on her tiny goat’s hoofs in the most alarming manner. Whenever a trick was reaching its climax, the band, indefatigable and painfully conscientious, beat away vigorously, making the morning hideous with their charivari. To rest the women, who then took their places at the musical instruments, the men began to show off some juggling tricks. It was a mean performance, however, the tricks being all of the commonest and most transparent—such as the production of bowls of fishes, flower-pots, etc. The best trick was the waving of a sort of whip of paper twelve yards long and four inches wide, attached to a short stick. This the performer brandished and flourished in all directions, making the paper assume all manner of graceful shapes: now it was a snake crawling in huge coils along the ground, now a spiral column like Donato the one-legged dancer’s scarf, now a series of hoops through which the juggler skipped backwards and forwards. This was a very exhausting exercise. During the performances a rather amusing dialogue was carried on between the old man of the party and a small boy who acted the part of Mr. Merryman, steadily refusing to believe in the possibility of the tricks announced. The acrobats were not paid their fee all at once, but instead of giving applause for any particularly successful exertion, Yang would send them out money, and as we, according to Chinese custom, did the same, they received a plentiful largesse. One point of contrast between rope-dancing in China and in Europe is its decency. The women all wore their heavy winter trousers and loose jackets fastened at the waist by a sash—a costume which shows no outline of the form.
We stayed with Yang until three in the afternoon. I believe he had expected us to spend the night in his house; but the entertainment was becoming wearisome; besides, the Chinese do not understand our ideas of comfort—paper windows, thorough draughts, stone floors, and hard benches explain why they wrap themselves up in wadding and furs, and wear boots an inch thick in the soles. They are far behind the Turks in these respects. I, for one, thought a night in the Chinese city rather too much of a good thing, and was glad to make my bow. Our host, his son, and his Chinese guests, who, by the bye, had at an early hour gone off to a back room to enjoy a pipe of opium, came to the outer gate to see us off, and we parted with many expressions of goodwill on both sides.
I have had a deal of talk with Yang; he is certainly by far the most advanced Chinaman I have met yet. Railways and telegraphs, which are the bugbears of the Chinese ministers, are to him necessities which it is foolish to stave off; indeed, he spoke to me about constructing a tramway and telegraph over his property in Shantung for the convenience of communicating with his tenants and agents. Any new European invention which he hears of, instead of shaking his head and saying, “Ai ya! it is very wonderful!” he sends for and tries to introduce into the country. Indeed, more than this, if he is not called to high office next year, he proposes visiting Europe, Russia, France, and England; perhaps he will go home with me.