From Pekin to Calais by Land

by Harry De Windt

Most of our waste time in Pekin (and we had plenty) was spent in the numerous porcelain shops with which the city abounds. It was curious to walk out of the squalid, filthy streets, knee-deep in dust and reeking with sewage, into the cool, luxurious rooms with their tesselated pavements, fountains, and flowers, and hundreds of pounds’ worth of beautiful wares laid out invitingly before one in cloisonné, jade, and porcelain. We found it hopeless as a rule, to think of getting anything at a reasonable price. Japan itself can produce nothing so beautiful and graceful as true Pekin work, though, like everything else, it is imitated, and there has been, of late years, a quantity of worthless trash in the market. Like most eastern nations, the dealers “see a European coming” and raise their prices accordingly. Unfortunately also, unlike other eastern nations, they steadily refuse to lower them, bargain he never so wisely. It made one’s mouth water to look round the shelves of one of these shops, groaning with thousands of pounds’ worth of treasure in porcelain and jade, and to think of the looting of the Summer Palace in 1860.

I had always imagined the latter to be a building of Chinese architecture, a great rambling place all domes, towers, and pagodas, but found it more like a very perfect imitation, in miniature, of the Tuileries. The morning of our visit one might have been standing on the banks of the Seine and looking on the charred and blackened ruins of Napoleon’s beautiful palace after the fatal September, 1870, had not the red and yellow temples dotted at intervals round the sunlit plains, and Chinese character of the landscape recalled us to a sense of the situation, and reminded us of the distance we were from Fair France! Anything less Chinese than the architecture of the Summer Palace I never saw. It is in pure French style and was designed by Jesuits at a time when they were more popular in China than at present. Standing in the midst of such picturesque scenery, surrounded by such beautiful gardens, park, woodland, and lakes, it seems a sin to have ever destroyed a building which, with its characteristic indolence, the Imperial Government has never attempted to restore. There it stands just as the allies left it in 1860, even to the very names scrawled by Tommy Atkins and the French “Piou-Pious” on its smoke-blackened walls and terraces, and embellished here and there with verses, the work of some French or English canteen poet, containing language more forcible than polite as to the ways and customs of John Chinaman. To say nothing of the enormous value of the objets-d’art and furniture, over 32,000l. in solid ingots of gold were found at the looting of the Palace, and a quantity of valuable china and porcelain cloisonné wantonly destroyed and left on the spot by the troops. The Emperor in those days was a liberal and merry monarch. The Summer Palace was before the war more like a miniature Compiègne than anything else, with its theatricals, hunting-parties, concerts, and revelry of other and less sober kinds, in which the Emperor himself used freely to join; a very different existence to that led by his harassed and melancholy descendant of the present day.

The now reigning sovereign, “Kwang-Su,” is eighteen years of age, and by the time these pages are in print will have taken unto himself a wife, or rather one will have been taken for him by his aunt the Queen Regent who, though her nephew has come to years of discretion, has even now a good deal more to do with the management of affairs than the Emperor. She is an arbitrary, ambitious woman, and, rumour has it, knows considerably more about the death of the late Emperor than she cares to own. “Kwang-Su,” cannot, like the Pope, be said to lead a happy life. As a matter of fact, it is literally not his own. Everything must be done by rule and under supervision of the court officials, even to eating and sleeping. The poor boy gets little of the latter luxury, as frequent cabinet councils are held at four in the morning, the Chinese ministers averring that the head is clearer at that hour of the day than at any other. I hardly think this plan would always succeed in Europe.

One can scarcely wonder that “Kwang-Su” is ill-tempered, morose, and subject to fits of passion, during which he defies his aunt, destroys everything within his reach, and declares he will not be Emperor, but will escape and go and work in the fields, anything rather than be shut up like a dog in the Forbidden City. And truly it must be a wretched existence. Every day is planned out beforehand. Not a detail is omitted, even to the very clothes he wears. It must be more than annoying to be given, say a mutton chop, when one particularly wants a beefsteak, champagne when you know it disagrees with you, and you much prefer claret, or a thin suit of clothes when you feel cold and require a thick one. The Emperor’s studies take up about nine hours of the day. His great joke when we were at Pekin, was to beg his tutors, the constant relays of whom annoyed him to desperation, to let him look at their watches. No sooner were they handed to him, than they were violently dashed on the ground and stamped upon. By this means, Kwang-Su argued, they would not know what time to come another day. Since his Majesty’s new “game,” however, most of the professors sent to Shanghai for Waterbury watches. Gold and silver ones became expensive.

Riding or walking, hunting in the green fields and shady forests, or fishing in the blue willow-fringed lakes of the Forbidden City, although as far removed from the turmoil and foul smells of Pekin as the desert of Gobi itself, the Emperor is never alone. There is always a retinue following him to tell him what to do and when to do it: to remind him, for instance, when at four o’clock he is enjoying his favourite pastime of fishing, and has forgotten for a brief period the caring cares of monarchy, that at 4.15 he must abandon the pursuit for a deer-hunt, or a walk (always accompanied by a suite), in a specified part of the grounds of the city. The latter must be a curious place, for the eye of the white barbarian is never allowed to look within its walls, save when, at very rare intervals, the European ministers are admitted to audience in a particular part of the palace.

It was in 1873 that the Great Audience question was finally settled to the satisfaction of all the European powers, and their representatives presented to the Emperor “Tung Che” in the European manner. It had been argued ever since the mission of Lord Amherst in 1814, and unsuccessfully. On that occasion the envoy returned without seeing the Emperor, the latter insisting that he could only do so on condition that he prostrated himself, but this, as the king of England’s representative, Lord Amherst declined to do, and returned to England.

Even at the present time audiences are extremely rare, and only occur, if at all, on the most important occasions. Even the Duke of Edinburgh, when he visited Pekin in 1869, was refused one. The Chinese ministers themselves are not allowed to approach the imperial presence nearer than a distance of about sixty or seventy yards. The Emperor sits at the end of a long, narrow, funnel-like passage, while his ministers prostrate themselves in a small apartment at the end of it. The Empress Regent is still more unapproachable, for when she holds a reception, it is from behind a large screen. On one occasion she became so excited during an argument, that her head appeared over the top, and the ministers were able to gaze (if for an instant only) on the sacred features. The Emperor is the sole male inmate of the Forbidden City, a gigantic harem, beside which even the seraglios of Stamboul pale into insignificance, for the moon’s cousin is surrounded within his golden tiled walls by a population of no less than three thousand women and eunuchs.

Kwang-Su has very little notion of what his capital is like. When he is taken for a drive, it means weeks of careful preparation, the sums of money devoted to patching up the streets through which he passes are fabulous. Were one half of the millions which are supposed to be expended on the keeping in order of the city honestly laid out, Pekin would be a very different place to what it is. But so long as the filching and robbery carried on by the mandarins and others in office continue, the Chinese capital must always remain the dirty dust-heap it now is. A case in point came under my notice while in Pekin, and is one illustration of the enormous sums that yearly find their way into the pockets of the mandarins. A drain had to be built from the French Embassy to the Imperial canal, a distance of about three hundred yards. For this the Government was charged twenty-three thousand taels, the European contractor being paid three thousand five hundred taels. The mandarins pocketed the balance!

When Kwang Su takes an airing all European residents are warned by their ministers to remain within doors, or at any rate away from that part of the city through which the Emperor is to pass, and the most stringent precautions are taken that no man, European or native, may look upon the features of the sovereign. The doors and windows of the houses are closed, and rich silks and tapestries hung from their walls, the streets are carefully swept and watered, every hole carefully filled up, every scrap of litter or offal carried away far from where, at a stated hour, and punctual to the moment, the royal train rolls slowly along through the empty, deserted streets. The Emperor must, therefore, have very different ideas of Pekin from the ordinary run of mankind. Save for the dust, which is of course unavoidable, it must seem a fair place enough to Kwang-Su. Could he but see it as we did, I doubt if he would ever again wish to leave the palaces and gardens, the deer-parks and lakes of his beautiful prison.

The preliminaries for Kwang-Su’s nuptials were being carried out when we were at Pekin. They are curious enough. The bridegroom is, or ought to be, the chief party concerned in the choosing of a wife; not so the wretched Kwang-Su. The sharer of his joys and sorrows is chosen by the Empress Regent out of some three hundred or four hundred girls (daughters of mandarins and others of high position), sent up to Pekin from all parts of China for the purpose. Nor is the Emperor allowed to see his fiancée’s face even for a moment till the evening of the wedding day. Though the Emperor is allowed but one actual wife, he can make his choice and select as few or many concubines as he pleases, four hundred or five hundred of the latter being sent to the capital on the occasion of an Imperial marriage. The majority of them are women of low birth, though some of the higher officials who wish to curry favour at court also occasionally send their daughters.