Our host gave the European ladies fans and silk handkerchiefs as souvenirs, showing us how to unfurl a fan to its full extent with a movement of the wrist, and then escorted us to the house to visit his wife, who met us at the entrance. She was a pleasant-faced lady, with well-oiled hair brushed back from her forehead, and was dressed in a black silk coat and tightly-fitting trousers. As she clambered with difficulty over the extremely high door-step, and tottered towards us on the tiniest of feet, I was unkind enough to reflect that my Russian friends with their narrow skirts and heels of abnormal height did not progress much better.
CHINESE SOLDIERS AT THE KASHGAR YAMEN.
Page 74.
We were invited to drink tea in a room adorned with a couple of charming Chinese pictures, together with a mass of European photographs and knick-knacks in bad taste, and afterwards passed into two large bedrooms, where we were received by the daughter-in-law, and inspected huge bedsteads hung round with curtains and furnished with long silk-covered bolsters and neatly-folded piles of silken quilts. My entire ignorance of the language prevented me from enjoying this glimpse of a Chinese home in the way I might otherwise have done, and my thoughts centred on the neat little “hoofs” shod in black satin that served our hostesses for feet. I had heard Mrs. Archibald Little lecture on this fashion, and her account of the tortures inflicted on so many thousands of tiny girls to bring about the repulsive mutilation which the Chinese euphemistically call “golden lilies” had filled me with an abiding indignation. And yet a recent traveller in China says that these crippled feet possess for him a “quite extraordinary exotic charm,” and he exhausts himself in conjecture as to which mistress of an Emperor’s heart introduced a custom that “entailed a new charm on her sex.” I have no theory to offer as to the origin of the custom, but from the position of women in China it seemed to me that some man must have been responsible for a plan that would firmly tether his womankind to their homes, just as the veiling of Mohamedan women was a masculine device.
During our visit to his house the Governor, who could talk Russian, kept the ball rolling with Princess Mestchersky while we sipped our tea. He had met her some years before in China and afterwards she quoted to me one of his remarks, of which she had not entirely approved. He had said, “When we were in China we were young, but now in Kashgar we are old!” I thought the Governor distinctly lacking in tact, but how easily can one jump to wrong conclusions through ignorance. Later on I heard that there is such reverence for age in the Celestial Empire that it is a high compliment to impute many years; an aged man, even if poor and blind, being regarded as a fortunate being. To this veneration for age is united an intense respect for parents, especially for the head of a house. No son would retire to rest before his father, nor would he sleep upon the roof if his parent occupied a room below.
The death of a father is one of the greatest calamities that can befall a man, and Sir Aurel Stein illustrated this by an incident that occurred when he was returning to Kashgar from one of his long desert expeditions. It became known that his Chinese interpreter’s father had passed away, and all along the road there was a friendly conspiracy to keep all letters from Jongsi until his journey was at an end and he could indulge his grief at home.
When we said good-bye to our host we drove off, as we had arrived, to the accompaniment of three loud detonations, and this time the crackers were exploded so close to us that I marvelled that our horse did not smash the carriage and its occupants in its terror.
JAFAR BAI DISPLAYING THE VISITING CARD.