As for the child, she was simply in a fever of delight at leaving her parents. I dare say her poor little life had been none too rosy; for what says the proverb? “Better one son, though deformed, than eighteen daughters as wise as the apostles of Buddha.”
I wonder whether any European ever witnessed such a transaction before.
I have been spending the last few days chiefly in Paternoster Row, the Liu Li Chang, sitting at the feet of a very learned little Chinese Gamaliel, who tells me wonderful stories about the arts and the old craftsmen of China. He is a bookseller by trade, but being a great connoisseur, he always has a few rare specimens of cloisonné enamel, jade, rock crystal, cornelian, or porcelain in his shop. He is never weary of telling how the Emperor Ching Ta̔i (A.D. 1450) used to work at cloisonné enamel (like Louis XVI. at locks, and Peter the Great at boat-building); how some even say that he even invented the art, to which the Chinese still give his name, calling it Ching Ta̔i Lan, Ching Ta̔i’s blue; how the great family of potters, the Langs, died out in the beginning of the seventeenth century, carrying their secrets with them to the grave, and how ever since that time the Chinese have been trying to discover their methods—but all in vain—only producing, instead of a wonderful sang de bœuf of so soft a paste that it looks as if you might scoop it out with a spoon, the, as he calls them, inferior imitations, to which the French gave the name of Céladon Jaspé, and which the great metal workers, such as Caffieri, used to delight in mounting. Cloisonné enamel, by the bye, went out of fashion at the end of the last century, and the Chinese ceased to make it; but when, after the sacking of the Summer Palace, the specimens looted there and sent home fetched such wonderful prices in London and Paris, they routed out the drawers in which their forbears had carefully locked their recipes—for a Chinaman never destroys anything—and soon the market will be flooded with new work. The first specimen was brought to me at the Legation the other day, and very good it was.
The rose-backed plates and cups dear to the keen-eyed loungers at Christie’s can never have been the fashion at Peking, where men chiefly love the brave colours and bold designs of the artists of the Ming dynasty, and where purses are opened wide for ever so small a piece of the thickly glazed ware of the days of the Yuan and the Sung. From Ka̔ng Hsi’s reign to the end of Chien Lung’s, A.D. 1796, one seems to feel the Jesuit, or European, influence in the substitution of arabesques for the old barbaric designs. The great age for art in China and Japan, as in Europe, was the cinque cento; the meanest, the dawn of the nineteenth century.
LETTER XXVI
Peking, 23rd May 1866.
I returned from my Mongolian expedition last Friday, the 18th, half-starved and burnt to a cinder, but very jolly. I copy my journal for you.
We left Peking, the doctor and I, on the 23rd April. We took with us my servant Chang Hsi, groom, and fat cook. We of course rode our own horses, while five mules carried the servants and baggage. The doctor’s dog Drujok, a half-bred Russian setter, and my Prince, a heavy shambling puppy whom I call a Newfoundland, but whose seize quartiers it would be difficult to prove, made up the party. Our cavalcade made a great sensation in the streets of Peking. “Here’s a game,” shouted the street—arabs, piggish in many respects besides their tails; “look at the devils and the devil dogs!” We went out at the Tê Shêng Mên (Victory Gate). So soon as we had passed the dusty streets and suburbs obstructed by carts and camels, whose bells and dull tramp irritate one’s ears, while the dust they shuffle up blinds and chokes one, the ride became delightful. The fresh green of the budding trees and young spring crops and the tints of the distant hills were new life to eyes tired with the monotonous grays of a Peking winter. It was a lovely day too, bright, sunny, and cooled by a fresh breeze from the mountains.
Former experience of carts had decided me to take mules; but it was out of the frying-pan into the fire. Carts are slow, mules are slower. If one takes carts the servants are sure to stow away one ragamuffin at least to help them with their work and add to the expense. If one takes mules the muleteer is sure to add a number of mules carrying wares for trade at the different towns, which creates endless delays. Besides, the pack-mules cannot keep up with the horses, and it is no joke to arrive at an inn, tired and hungry, with the choice of ordering a bad Chinese dinner, or waiting three hours for the cook to come up and prepare a better one. Being in advance, we always had to find our own way from place to place; easy enough if one could even get a direct answer, but you might as well expect that from a Reading Quaker.
Englishman—“I borrow a light from your intelligence.”