On the 16th of August we had a delightful addition to our family party in the shape of my old friend Dick Conolly, who has come out as second secretary—the cheeriest of companions.[17]
Next day he and I rode over to see a very famous temple, Hei Lung Tan, a shrine dedicated to the Black Dragon, which was built in the Ming dynasty and repaired in Ka̔ng Hsi’s reign. It is an imposing edifice built in three tiers with roofs of the imperial yellow tiles. Here the Black Dragon Prince rests in great dignity. He is surrounded by six satellites—a monster who presides over the thunder, a woman who rules the lightning, a clerk with pen and book who writes down orders for the rainfall, and three others whose functions are not so clear. Of human attendants there was visible but one priest, very dirty and saturated with garlic. The Black Dragon being, like all dragons in this country, a water deity or spirit, there is of course a pond in which he may disport himself. If his priest would only do the same!
The country people are really very civil and kind. The other day we were wandering through a village nestled away among the hills, when several of the peasants came out and brought us delicious pears. One old gentleman, a personage evidently, was just preparing a great sacrifice outside his house to ward off the devil. He had erected an altar on which were placed various fruits and grapes, and in front of it was a great paper boat with dolls in it. This was to be burnt, and with the letting off of many crackers would complete the sacrifice. This, it appears, being the 15th day of the 7th moon, is the feast of departed spirits—a sort of All Souls’ Day. It is the anniversary on which the pious Chinaman worships and burns incense at the tombs of his ancestors—the custom over which the Dominicans and Franciscans on the one side, and the Jesuits on the other, started their great feud in the days of the Emperor Ka̔ng Hsi.[18] There are also on this day great ceremonies in honour of the tutelary saints of towns, some deceased minister or warrior appointed by the Emperor as guardian over each town or part of a town. Great honour is paid to one of these patron saints, and men will flock to his shrine to dedicate themselves to his service, so that a man, for instance, who is a groom in this life, will go and offer himself to be the saint’s groom in the next world. The effigy of this “Lord of the Walls,” as he is called, is paraded through the town where he is supposed to search out evil-doers. There is also a Prince of departed spirits whose shrine is largely attended on this day. A stage is raised and priests are engaged to read prayers and distribute food for the spirits, that those who have died a violent death may be released from Purgatory. At midnight huge paper images, placed in a boat in order that the spirits may pass the river Nai-ho, a sort of Styx, are solemnly burnt, and the feast is over. The feast is called Yu Lang Hai, “The assembly of the Bowl and Flower.” My teacher explains this, saying that on board the boat there is a Buddhist god called Ti Tsang Wang, who gives the ghosts of the departed a bowl and flower as a token of release from their sins, so that they may cross the river which is a gulf between them and Paradise.
LETTER XXIX
Peking, 7th September 1866.
Some time ago I was invited to go to the play by the great curio merchant here—Han Chang-kwei-ti. As the Pekingese theatres have a great celebrity, I ought to give you some account of them.
There are a great many theatres in the Chinese city, their situation being marked by a few masks, lay figures, images of tortoises or dragons, or other queer beasts; though indeed no sign is necessary to indicate their whereabouts, for the infernal din which comes from them the whole day long would guide any one to them. The theatres are the property of restaurateurs, who engage a company of actors to come and play for so many days, so that the troupes are constantly changing quarters. You go in by a long passage, which leads into a lofty and spacious hall, lighted from the top, and surrounded by a gallery. In the pit, or body of the hall, are tables at which the people sit drinking tea, eating sweetmeats, or with papers of fried melon and gourd seeds before them. This is the place of the poorer people; the rank and fashion go to the gallery, part of which is divided into private boxes. At one end of the hall is a raised platform, without scenes or appliances of any kind, open at the sides, and separated from the dressing-room by two doors with curtains; at the back of the stage sit the orchestra, five or six performers, all of whom play upon several instruments, which they take up in turn, according to the character of the music. The chief instruments are fiddles, lutes, clarionets, flutes, a sort of mouth organ, and any number of variety of gongs, drums, and cymbals. I talk of fiddles, etc., for simplicity’s sake, but you know a Chinese fiddle is no more like a European fiddle than a Chinaman with his pig-tail is like a European in a chimney-pot hat.
Nothing could be more rude or primitive than the state of the drama. The tragedies are all strutting and mouthing; roaring in a bass voice that seems to come out of the actor’s boots, or squeaking in a falsetto shrill enough to set your teeth on edge. The whole of the words are declaimed in a sort of recitative, which is more than half drowned by the drums and gongs. The language of tragedies is the old literary style and very obscure, and as if to make it still more difficult to the Pekingese, the actors all affect the Soochow dialect as the mother-tongue of the stage. The consequence of this is that even a well-educated Chinaman will make a very poor guess at the plot unless he has read the tragedy beforehand. Not understanding what is going on does not, however, seem to affect the enjoyment of the audience, nine-tenths of whom could no more tell you what the play is all about than I could.
As there is no scenery or stage appliances a great deal must be supplied by the imagination. A lady coming in with an attendant in the plain clothes of a Pekingese coolie, holding horizontally on each side of her two flags on which are painted wheels and clouds, is a fairy entering in her chariot of clouds. A warrior brandishes a whip to show that he is on horseback; to dismount, he makes a pirouette on one leg and throws down his whip; to remount, he makes a pirouette on the other leg and picks it up again. But let me tell you the plot of the tragedy I saw, as Han Chang-kwei-ti explained it to me.
A warrior in white has an everlasting feud with a rebel in red, who always gets the better of him, and performs the most astounding pas seuls, making quite appalling faces (heightened by streaks of red, blue, and white paint) to the terror of the whole empire, as represented by five old men and two little boys in white. The warrior in white, after a series of stage combats with the rebel in red, which it would break the heart of our best pantomimists to imitate, sits down in an arm-chair and tucks up one leg under him, by which the audience are to understand that he has gone to sleep in a lonely forest. He then dreams that the ghost of his father appears to him to teach him a trick and give him a sword, by the aid of which he may circumvent the rebel in red. The dream is represented by his getting up from his chair and acting through the scene with his father’s ghost, after which he sits down in the same posture as before. During one of his dead father’s speeches, which may have struck him, as they did me, as rather tedious, the actor felt a little thirsty, so he called for a cup of tea, which a coolie brought to him, and he drank it with his face to the audience, gargling his throat and spitting out the last mouthful without the smallest regard for the situation. Well, the father having stalked out, the warrior tucked up his leg again and then awoke. A final combat of many rounds then terminates in the victory of the warrior, obtained by the grace of his father’s sword. The rebel is slain and walks out, and the victorious army, consisting of four wheezy old men, make a triumphal entry into the gates of the capital, which are signified by two coolies holding up two poles with a blue cotton curtain in which a hole has been cut.