My friend Liu, who wrote the description which I have translated above, has left out one of the greatest charms of the place. Just behind the “Pavilion of the Reposing Clouds,” in which we live, is a most beautiful rock work, all covered with tufts of feathery grass, mosses, and ferns, and lycopods: down this and into an artificial basin, which is screened from the sun by a network of fir branches, comes tumbling a deliciously cool fountain scented with pine needles, which gives us a famous shower-bath twice a day—a real luxury. Close by my fountain is a little summer-house, in which the Emperor Chien Lung was transacting business one day with his ministers, and feeling inspired by the influence of the place got through his work greatly to his satisfaction, so he called the summer-house “The Pavilion of the Understanding of Important Matters.” I wonder whether I have given you an idea of what a very pretty place this is? It is almost enough to tempt a man to turn Buddhist priest, and abstracting himself from the unrealities of this life, pass his hour on earth in reflecting upon the beauties of the hopelessly unattainable Nirvana (I don’t suppose you know what that is—so much the better. It will be like that “blessed word Mesopotamia” to the old woman at church). The only pity is that mosquitoes and sand-flies sound such a lively recall to the reality of the disagreeable.
The monastery is richly endowed with lands, so much so as to be independent of the assistance from Government, to which, as an imperial temple, it would be entitled. The place looks richer than most of the temples about here. There is no magnificence, but it has a comfortable, well-to-do appearance, the grounds and buildings being properly kept up. All over the gardens there are notices to “relations and friends” who may visit the temple to abstain from damaging buildings and trees, plucking flowers or cutting down the bamboos, a notice the spirit of which, as it says, “all respectable persons will observe of their own accord, and those who do not will be fined.” First and last, monks and laymen, there are some fifty persons employed about the temple. The abbot himself finds it dull, so he remains at Peking enjoying himself. His second in command is a charming monk, very clean in his person and especially natty about his boots. He is very intelligent, too, and comes and sits with me by the hour talking Buddhism. This is an extremely religious temple—prayers, liturgies, drum and gong beating, seem to be going on very constantly. But except on the 1st and 15th of every moon and other holidays the novices are put on active service, the monks enjoying an unbroken idleness; they are apparently cursed with an unquenchable thirst, but as a fountain of perennial tea flows for them they are not to be pitied. I suppose you would ask the name of my friend with the neat boots; this would be an arch mistake and violation of good-breeding on your part. When a man shaves his tail and turns monk he cuts himself off from the whole world, including his family, whose name even he no longer bears. To remind him of this would be quite ill-bred, but as it is inconvenient that a monk—who, however much he may renounce the vanities of this life, must occasionally be brought in contact with that extremely unreal idea, the world—should have no designation at all, he adopts two words or characters as his appellation, which on no account must you call his name. You ask him what is his “honourable above and below”; this refers to the two characters, one of which is written above the other. My friend’s “honourable above and below” is Fo Kwo. As a Buddhist monk must not be asked his name, so a Taoist monk must not be asked his age, although it is one of the complimentary routine questions in China.
The neighbourhood round about here is as charming as the place itself. The fields are richly cultivated; there is plenty of hedge-row timber, and the villages are very picturesque and well shaded. The hills are beautifully shaped, and take fine colours of an evening. The one thing wanting is water, which is missing all over this part of China. Nothing can be prettier than the cottages of the villagers with their long, low eaves; each has its little garden hedged in by a fence of tall millet, over which are trained gourds and other creepers. There is generally, too, a millet-straw shed with a vine creeping about it, and under this the labourers sit of an evening and drink their tea, a picture of contentment. The temples, both Taoist and Buddhist, are numerous. Yesterday I scrambled up to a very pretty one on the top of a great eminence so steep that it is called by the Chinese the “Wall Mountain.” I found a most charming little monastery built in tiers, I should have said terraces had it not been so tiny, which reminded me of the tiers of the Rhenish vineyards. Their reverences the monks had all gone off to Peking on a lark, but I was hospitably entertained with tea by two lay attendants, for whose benefit I in return emptied my cigar-case. What a queer existence these people lead perched up on the top of a high hill! They are so stay-at-home that they hardly seem to care even to go down on to the plain. And as to going to Peking, none but the better-to-do monks dream of such dissipation. You may imagine what a state of crass ignorance they live in. For faces expressing brutal stupidity there is nothing to equal the Chinese monks, except the Thibetan llamas, between whom and drivelling idiotcy there is no missing link. My friend here, Fo Kwo, is a brilliant exception. Monks and laymen alike—all our neighbours—vie with one another in civility to us. They all stop one to have a chat, and as for tea, I might drown myself in a butt of it if I had a mind. The women, however—and in one village there are some very pretty ones—are as farouches as wild deer. As I ride in at one end of a village I see them scuttling off into their houses, with their babies on their backs, as fast as their poor deformed feet will let them. If by chance I overtake them, they scowl at me as if I really were the devil they call me. During the whole time I have been in China, I do not think that I have three times been addressed by Chinese women; the rare exceptions have always been wrinkled old hags—of course I do not count beggars. Ces dames don’t love us. They are always the first to get up the cry of “Kwei tzŭ” (devils) against us, and I almost think that they verily believe that there is something uncanny about us, or at any rate that there is no villainy of which we are not capable. However, I think that last year I told you some of their beliefs with respect to us.
Farquhar joined me on the 20th July, bringing with him Dr. Pogojeff from the Russian summer quarters at Pa Ta Chu—a group of temples nearer Peking, where most of the Legations spend the hot season. They are delighted with the beauty of this place. Farquhar, who is a very clever artist, has made some lovely sketches. July the 25th was the fifteenth day of the Chinese moon, a high day with our Buddhist friends. On ordinary days the novices do the drum and gong beating, and intone the prayers (which indeed never seem to cease), but on the 1st and 15th of each moon the higher priests—whose everyday duties seem to be confined to smoking infinite and infinitesimal pipes of tobacco, and sipping cup after cup of amber tea—buckle to the work themselves, leaving their ease and dignity to don their black and yellow robes, and perform service with the rest.
One day out walking we were accosted by a man who told us that he was out for a holiday, and insisted on taking us with him to a village where there was “Jo nao” (fun) going on. We could not resist, so we went with him, and in a by-lane of the said village, on one of the threshing-floors, we found a small raised stage. After we had waited some time, during which the whole village had time to turn out for a good stare at us, a man made his appearance with a very small drum, three pairs of castanets, and three gongs. He was followed by three ladies—one old and two young, and all hideous—and then the performance began with an instrumental overture by the whole strength of the company, a rattling and jangling which lasted five minutes, and sent us off with our fingers in our ears. We gave the poor people a dollar and were glad to escape; but the villagers were highly delighted, for were not these real actors come all the way from Peking, and, therefore, of course eminent? Mario and Grisi, starring in the provinces, never gave more pleasure to a country audience.
Frightfully hot weather. Do you remember the old quatrain written with a diamond on a pane of glass in the old Foreign Office in Downing Street:—
Je suis copiste,
Affreux métier,
Joyeux ou triste,
Toujours copier!