On account of its flat surroundings, Tientsin is the least picturesque city of China. There is a recreation ground, Victoria Gardens, native gardens, a race course around a graveyard, a jockey club, much society, naval and military life, theatricals, and facilities for the many athletic, swimming, boating and skating clubs. Except in summer the climate is charmingly dry; the wind and sand storms are greatly feared, however. The loess dust is as penetrating as the alkali dust of Arizona. A British military cemetery has many melancholy monuments of the foreigner’s occupation of an alien land, where disease and the casualties of many famous bombardments have mowed down their costly toll. There are electric cars, electric light, gas and water plants, fine clubs, churches, consulates, missions, a Y. M. C. A., the magnificent Gordon Hall, science and military colleges of the best, hospitals, native and foreign schools of all grades, excellent roads like the bund and Tai Ku, fine fur, silk and pottery shops. The English newspapers like the Times and China Critic are important, and many Chinese papers like the Ching Wei Po are very influential in the coming New China. There is much foreign military music, and the natives are learning the delightful art, the viceroy’s band already being clever. Many Chinese have made their names here under foreign tutorship, Yuan Shih Kai and Tang Shao Yi, for instance; and Li Hung Chang held forth here in his yamen on the river bank in his most influential days. The Pei Yang University is the best native modern university in China. The medical school trains with foreign help, what China needs most at the moment, native physicians and nurses. The port, more than any other, has for many years had a restraining influence on the Manchus. Without it, no one knows what the reactionary dynasty would have promulgated in the way of edicts. Tientsin is interesting for its wonderful colored clay images, its excellent rugs, its salt heaps, its fish-pies and hot potato pedlers, who shout their goods along “Eternal Prosperity” and other native streets. There is interesting French life on the Tai Ku Road in the French settlement. The native walled city is a model in Chinese municipal government, as far as activity and order, but not so far as beauty is concerned. Among the many steamship lines, the native China Merchants (a government line) has a branch here. A Conservancy Board has much work cut out for it by the Pei Ho bar which hampers the growing shipping. The National Chinese Posts and Telegraphs have branches. There are native temples, and mosques for the Mohammedan Chinese, who have absorbed the old Honan Jewish Chinese. Tientsin is very hot, and the summer resort for bathing is up the coast of Pechili Gulf at Pei-Tai-Ho, where the Great Wall meets the sea. This is the water resort also for the Pekingese foreigner and foreignized native.
There is much industrial activity, and Tientsin, with its million of inhabitants, will be a great center for the import of machinery for the rich provinces of Pechili and Shansi and the vast territory of Mongolia, as it will also be the port for the mining and agricultural wealth of those rich provinces, including chilled meats, millet, sugar, flour, wheat, beans, fruit, nuts, skins, furs, vegetable oils, ores, etc. In some respects the possible new ports of Chin Wang Tao, Chung How So, and Jinkow, on the Gulf of Pechili, could compete with Tientsin. The Peking (British) Syndicate, of Shansi, and the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company, of Pechili, with their immense capitalization of $6,000,000 and $5,000,000, respectively, operate and make loans from Tientsin, and, as in all the ports, there are many land, coal, iron and milling companies, in which Chinese have shares. The tendency is to grant fewer franchises to foreigners, and let the Chinese exploit their own wealth in mines, transportation and public service, buying only from the foreigner the necessary machinery, and paying only to the foreigner a proper interest for loans, instead of the immense bonuses and concessions that have often been obtained. The tendency to water the stock of public service corporations and monopolies so as to hide the immense earnings from an overcharged public is creeping into China, and will be attacked by a courageous and indefatigable government. Tientsin is one of the two places (Peking being the other) from which it is most convenient for tourists to set out to see the Great Wall of China, the world’s grandest monument. The railway takes the tourist about one hundred and twenty miles along the Pechili coast to Shan Hai Kwan, where the wall meets the sea, and turning back climbs the vast mountain ranges, to the speechless wonder of the sightseer. One of the Chinese proverbs on this subject is: “Those who have seen least, stare most!” There are more Jews (not the lost colonies of Chinese Jews absorbed by the Chinese Mohammedans of Honan, Kwangtung and Kansu provinces) in business at Tientsin than at any port in China, not excepting Hongkong. In the warehouse of the American Trading Company, at Tientsin, six hundred men of the Fifteenth United States Infantry were quartered in the stormy days of the first months of 1912.
Peking stands at the end of the great seacoast plain as you go up from Tientsin by railway or by boat. Beyond rise the Hsi Shan (Western Mountains) and the Mongolian plateau and mountains. It is the most expansive city in the republic, because it is more built up than spacious Nanking; a court, a legation, a trading, an art, an educational, a health center in autumn, a military, but not a manufacturing center as yet, though it will be. It is more Mongolian and Manchu, perhaps, than pure Han Chinese. It is splendidly laid out, and with drainage and paved roads will attract fine equipages and even greater wealth than now resorts there. It has a water system, electric light, telephone, telegraph and railway service, wireless connection with the coast, a modern railway station at the famous Chien Men gate. Its fine Gothic Pe-Tang Cathedral, strangely within the purple imperial city, with its spires, looks as though it had been transported from France. Its porcelain temples are centers of wealth, if not of zeal and history. Its monuments, especially the city wall and gates, are the noblest. Its pavilions, like those in the late emperor’s garden, are the most artistic in the land. It is comparatively modern among the cities and capitals of China, going back only to 1150 A. D. as a provincial and national center. Coleridge has sung of the city. Kublai Khan, Marco Polo’s protector, was its first great emperor. The creator of Ming monuments, the artistic Yung Lo, is its next greatest emperor, and it was he who gave the present stamp to Peking. Its most illustrious Manchu emperor was Kang Hi, the potter, to whom Louis XIV. of France, signed himself as “your most dear and good friend, Louis.” The city is laid out on the plan of an immense Mongol camp of the plains, defense line within defense line three times, and not unlike Cæsar’s plans when on the march. The trading section of the city is filled with an immense gathering of camel, mule and pony trains, and the new railways bring coal from east and south. A master hand could turn the great camp into a hive of modern industry. Some day, perhaps soon, that will occur. The Peking market is well supplied by the Mongols of the plateau and the farmers of the Pechili plain, not to speak of what railways, canals and roads bring in from all points. More races and varied costumes are seen at Peking than at any other city, and the teak-barred shops are treasure houses. The Tartar city faces the north and in its center is the Forbidden, or Purple City, of the old Manchu court. Between the wall of the latter and the south wall of the Tartar city are the Wai Wu (Foreign Office), legations, hotels, railway station, banks, churches, missions, universities, hospitals, clubs, newspaper offices, shops, etc., all saying, according to the conservative Hanlin Chinese, in the words of our Belle of New York, “Of course you can never be like me, but be as like me as you’re able to be”. The union of Protestant medical missions at Peking, so as to form a hospital, medical college and nurses’ school of wide scope, has attracted nation-wide and world-wide attention. The beginning of the unifying of Protestants thus takes place effectively in the capital of oldest China, instead of at Geneva, Berlin, London or New York.
How much of the modern and the old, the Oriental and the Occidental, are mixed up in this wonderful city? There are modern steam rollers; donkey and camel trains, blue-turbaned couriers on Mongol ponies; springless, hooded Peking carts, the mule wearing a velvet cloth; bouncing mule litters; camel trains swaying up and down like the billows of the Yellow Sea; modern water tanks borne by steel towers; a modern zoo with a dragon-carved gate; automobiles; victorias drawn by swift Mongol or black Szechuen ponies; Russian droshkes drawn by three ponies going different paces; men tugging single-axle carts by long ropes and harness; coolies with baskets and boxes balanced from the bamboos on their sweating shoulders; wheelbarrow men transporting huge bags of millet or salt; men throwing water on the streets with big wooden spoons; rickshaws, and passenger chairs with ventilators and windows. There is a great military camp outside the walls. In the Portuguese cemetery outside of the west gate lie the famous Jesuits who nearly made the Manchu dynasty Catholic in Kang Hi’s day. In the revered British cemetery lie the bodies of the famous pioneers of our race, who, during the centuries, have fought forward the most advanced line of our civilization. Many of the graves and memorials, the trees and walls were desecrated in the “Boxer” outrages of 1900. There is a cemetery for that notorious tribe of palace eunuchs in the northwest of the Tartar city, and sons had to be bought, or “forged” for them so as to pay the necessary grave worship of Confucianism. There is the new Peking Club, the second in cost in the Far East; the Tsung Hua College, which trains students who are to go to America and England; and where the old examination stalls and the Hanlin College stood under the ancient “literati” system, are the modern parliament buildings (Tzu Cheng Yuan); also National University, and the Wai Wu Pu (Foreign Office) halls, where Yuan Shih Kai had his headquarters in the exciting days of 1911–12. Towering over the Tartar city are the Gothic towers of the French Pe Tang Cathedral, which was successfully defended by Bishop Favier during the 1900 siege. The white marble pailoo arch to the German ambassador, who was assassinated in 1900, is notable, as are also numerous other marble, porcelain and painted arches, and marble bridges, balustrades and statues of lions. The statue to the German was erected under foreign compulsion and is hated. The wonderful street bazaars of Chien Men gate, Lung Fu Temple Street, wide Kaiser Street; the important Methodist and Union Hospitals of Hatamen Street; Legation, Tsung Pu, Tung Tan, Liu Li, Koulan, Butcher, Fan Tan, Lantern, Jadestone, Bamboo, Meridian and other leading streets should be visited. There is a Peking Tiffany; the firm name is Hsing Lung Tien. The city’s kilns and weavers are famous for their porcelain, cloisonné and tapestries. Pedlers, however, bring almost everything, from the cheapest to the costliest, to one’s door. There are many native papers like the influential Chun Kuo Pao.
Some of the legations have been rebuilt since the 1900 siege, the Americans in particular occupying near the Chien Men gate a series of costly, but not architecturally proper buildings for artistic China. The British legation near the Wu Men gate is notable for two reasons: because it occupies Duke Liang’s Chinese palace, and because its compound was the center of the foreigners’ quarters in the Peking siege of 1900. The French legation rented Duke Tsin’s palace. In the sacred urns in the Temple Park in the south of the Chinese city, the bodies of the Sikh soldiers, who died or were killed in the 1900 siege, were cremated. The Art Gallery in the imperial city is of particular interest. The Lama (Tibet Buddhist) Temple, with its ornate pailoo arch, should be seen. The priests wear orthodox yellow robes and hats, and a red cloak with squares, which represent the rags of poverty as realistically as art cares to go. There is an immense statue of Buddha, and some small obscene statues which have been draped by the request of the legations, to the great and joyful surprise of the priests, who have discovered that they are now able to make more money in fees than when the statues were undraped, so perverse is tourist curiosity! A walk on the walls should not be neglected, especially where, between the Chien Men and Hata Men gates the American, British and other foreigners made their long stand in 1900. The ponderous fort-temples on the walls, with their interesting exhibit of columns and galleries, are characteristic. Red is the color of the Chinese, yellow and green the color of the Manchus, and the tiling of the roofs indicates where each predominates.
Peking has its many military memories. In 1900 the Ninth and Fourteenth Infantry, the Sixth Cavalry and the Marines of the cruiser Newark of the Americans fought their way here from the coast in General Gaselee’s union column of relief. The Wei-Hai-Wei Regiment of British Chinese in blue and white, came, too, with quotas from the forces of France, Germany, Russia and Japan. The Sun Wui Club brings leading Chinese and Occidentals together; that is, those Occidentals who have a maximum of good sense and national ambition and a minimum of out-of-date, insular “snobbery”. We once had a similar international club in Canton, which did good work in destroying difference and welding approximation. The Russian Mission in the Pei Kwan section of Peking is almost the only effort of the vast Greek Church to missionize China. Good music is now available, for both the National Customs and native armies, and all the foreign legations have trained bands, and there are some orchestras. The Union Medical College and Hospital on Hatamen Street is most notable, not only because of its effectiveness, but because the various evangelical denominations have first united in far away China. Some writers, like Lord Salisbury’s son, Lord Cecil, think this is the forerunner of union elsewhere. The example has been copied generally in China, as at Nanking, Tsinan, Canton, etc., and before long all medical, hospital and teaching work will be on the union plan in all the large centers. The Chinese are eager to assist, and join in with a whole heart. Reform started in Peking in 1898, when Kang Yu Wei and other Cantonese, trained at Hongkong, got the ear of the Manchu emperor, Kwang Hsu, and induced him to issue the famous reform edicts.
The peony gardens are notable, and the courts and gardens of the many temples, inside and outside of the walls, exhibit many horticultural treasures, but Northern China in general is more notable for wild flowers than hothouse products. There are Manchu tombs, and the Manchu palaces and gardens of Yuan Ming, Wan Shou and Ih Ho to the northwest to visit, and temples in the western hills, where the foreigners resort during the blazing summer of the plains, if they do not care to take the railway down to the bathing resort of Pei Tai Ho, or Chifu. The scenic railway running north takes one to the glorious Nankou pass in the Great Wall and to the Ming tombs. The station is at Liu Tsin outside the walls. To the northwest are the villages where the Manchu pensioners or bannermen were kept in idleness, which was one cause of the 1911 rebellion. As in many of the Chinese cities, there is a clepsydra water clock to be seen. Mints, banks, engraving plants, printing presses, electricity, modern water-works; primary, intermediate, trade and high schools, have all come to the reforming capital. There have been large hoards of bullion in the imperial city. The empress dowager, Tse Hsi, left many millions of silver, which were used to run the government for weeks during the rebellion in 1911–12. This money was collected by the eunuchs, compelling every official to pay for his daylight audience and honors, and crimes were “planted” on officials so as to have the excuse of fining them and thus adding to the Manchus’ imperial reserve. Great granaries exist where the tribute rice from the southern provinces was stored for a million or more subsidized Manchu soldiers and hangers-on. This rice formerly came to Tientsin and Peking by the Grand Canal and Pei Ho River. It was later brought north, through Li Hung Chang’s intervention, by the China Merchants’ Steamship Company, in which the government held the majority of the shares. The history of spying, intriguing, concession-hunting and diplomatic contests swells its largest at Peking, and old Legation Street and the Wai Wu Pu have heard perhaps more secret stories than any other diplomatic quarter of the world. Men of all nations, Manchus and Chinese, eunuchs, women, human parrots, dictographs secretly placed, waste-paper baskets, keys to private codes, the kitchen cabinet, keyhole sentinels, tapped telephone wires, field-glasses masked behind curtains, letter sweaters and those adders in the bosom, society detectives, have all had their part in the old Peking game of intrigue. Foreign trusts have come over the water to battle with local distrusts! Understanding has not always honestly wooed misunderstanding. Evasion has alternately successfully and unsuccessfully battled with invasion. “When is a promise not a promise” has been answered by, “At Peking, on both sides of the ethnological pale”.
Culture, learning, fashion and fools have often mixed in the drawing-rooms which face Legation, Meridian and Great Wall Streets. In dignity, the National Customs Service, managed by foreigners, takes its way somewhat apart on Koulan Street. With the British Legal, it is the best civil service in the Far East, the other legations depending in various degrees upon missionaries for their knowledge of Chinese. The American legation in recent years has equipped its staff with student interpreters. Foreigners learn attachment for the life, as their wits are kept at work. It has been a wonderful capital in exciting life, as it is in physical appearance. Foreign press bureaus have vied with one another in sending out men fitted to obtain privileged information. In summer, the working Pekingese throws away all the clothes that the law will allow; in winter, he puts on so many cotton-wadded coats that he looks like a balloon ready to ascend, if he were not weighted with a charcoal brazier tucked under his coat or up his sleeve. He has a stone or brick kang (stove), but he must lie close to it to get its meager warmth. He, therefore, uses it for a bed, and so does the whole insect race, who make it warm for him, even if the brick stove does not. When the schoolboy wrote his ambiguous essay that “crowded China is too thickly populated to be comfortable”, he may, therefore, have referred to other inhabitants than the men and women. The furs of Peking are famous, and many black chow-dog farms have been started in Mongolia to supply the foreign fur markets. Peking has been so looted by war and by collectors of its ceramic prizes that the shops and potteries of Liu Li Street contain less that is valuable than the museums of America and Europe. For the ordinary traveler who wants something beautiful, even if it is not old, there are thousands of shops and bazaar tables that display their tempting wares. As China reforms, and art is not sweated out of the provinces by grasping officials and courtiers, the traveler will be able to follow his quest back to the many old centers of production in the central and southern provinces; and this will be better for art, and better for the traveler. The whole nation used to tremble when an official, dowager, baby emperor, prince, regent, etc., had a birthday or one of their various anniversaries, because it meant that jade, jewels, costly furniture, tapestries, porcelain, etc., must prove the sincerity of congratulations, and as we fill the papier-mâché rabbit with candies on Easter Day the vase had to be filled with coins of worth. These presents were no sooner received than they were pawned by the indigent Manchus to the shopkeepers of Peking, or they were stolen and sold by the palace eunuchs. The Chinese system of keeping art in drawers instead of in glassed cabinets, in view, aided this thievery, for the rascally eunuchs were not soon found out.
Many wonderful stories are told of the mysterious ceremonies of the Manchu court at night; how soldiers suddenly lined Meridian Street, and no Chinese could leave his house but on pain of death. Then the Wu Men gate of the Forbidden City was thrown open under the smoking torches, and the pale Emperor Kwang Hsu was carried forth, robed in yellow, and his courtiers in red, gold and blue. Down Meridian Street they noiselessly marched southward, the soldiers turning volte-face along the street. The Chien Men gate into the Chinese city was thrown open, and through its Meridian Street the procession continued south for two miles to the temples and the open altar of Heaven, where midnight sacrifices of a black bullock, burned silk, grain and wine were made; a worship as old and as simple as that of the patriarchial days of Abraham. It was the worship of the ancestral Chou clan, which Confucius chronicled and the Manchu adopted so as to keep himself in veneration; and this right of sacrifice he has maintained in his abdication. The Pope Mikado has also retained his right to make similar sacrifices. Surely if the main hold on eastern peoples is to be a superstitious one, it is not so strong a hold as the republicans of China intend to set up in the minds and hearts of the new nation. God’s name was simply called “Tien”; i. e., heaven or sky. Then the procession hurried back long before the non-Manchus were awake. Other mysterious things happened in the night. The Wu Men gate was opened, and all courtiers and ministers then alone had their audience with the screened crown head. During the long regency of the Dowager Empress Tse Hsi and her predecessors, China was a land ruled by midnight decisions, and justice was as dark as the muffled and mysterious hour. Executions of the prominent were held at night on the common Meridian Road, which had been blocked off by soldiers. You never know at Peking when your passenger cart is standing over the altar of a life which was persecuted and sacrificed for opinion’s sake. No wonder that the Chinese, like other long-suffering reformers, are saying under their breath: “We have had enough of ‘plants’ and deeds done in darkness; let there be light.”
This wonderful walled capital of Mongol, Ming and Manchu dynasties, is not so old as the Great Wall of China, for it has been rebuilt several times, the imperial portion being about 1,000 years older than the inferior Chinese section to the south. It was as though the Chinese traders camped before the southern Chien Men gate to supply the Manchu court, and the Emperor Kia Tsing rose up and said: “Let us now take thought, and throw a wide wall around our purveyors’ bazaars also.” There is only one good thing about absolutism; i. e., to say is to do, and it was done. Peking has had many rivals as the capital of China: Nanking, the southern capital of the Mings, in particular; Hangchow, of the Sungs; and Canton, Wuchang, Chingtu and Shanghai have all put in their claims and maintained their flag in the breeze for a regal season. Geographically and strategically, Chingtu would be the proper capital of a united nation, and Wuchang would be almost as central and afford better trading facilities, a London of China, but it would not be so strong a strategic center. From a Chinese republican point of view, Canton, Nanking and Shanghai are foremost in their claims. Peking is weak because it is always within striking distance of Russia’s and Japan’s mighty armies. Almost alone of the world’s capitals, it is not at the water’s edge.