A Woman In China

by Mary Gaunt

I was bound to go and see those temples, indeed I think the man or woman who went to Jehol and did not make a point of going up that valley must lack something.

The drawback for me was that I had to go in a Peking cart, and even though those temples were built by an Emperor I had no reason to suppose that the road that led to them was any better than the ordinary Chinese roads. It wasn't, but I don't know that it was worse. Tuan engaged the old white mule of venerable years, and I think that was an advantage, he went so slowly that often I was able to walk. I did not propose to visit all of them, there is a family likeness between all Chinese temples, whatever be the name of the deity to whom they are dedicated, and seeing too many I should miss the beauty of all.

It was a gorgeous June morning the day I set out, sitting as far forward as I could in the cart with Tuan on the tail of the shaft and the carter walking at the mule's head. All round one side of Cheng Teh Fu is built up a high wall that the Chinese call a breakwater, and a breakwater I believe it is indeed after the summer rains, though then, the Jehol River ran just a shallow trickle at its foot. There were many little vegetable gardens along here, the ground most carefully cultivated and showing not a weed, not a stray blade of grass. “The garden of every peasant contained a well for watering it,” writes Sir George Staunton in 1793, “and the buckets for drawing up the water were made of ozier twigs wattled or plaited, of so close a texture as to hold any fluid.” He might have been writing of the peasants of today. As I passed, with those selfsame buckets were they watering their gardens.

The people were streaming out of the town, most of them on foot, but there were a few fat men and small-footed women on donkeys, and one or two of the richer people, I noticed by the women's dresses they were mostly Manchus, had blossomed out into Peking carts. For there was a fair at one of the temples, a very minor temple; and a fair in China seems to be much what it used to be in England, say one hundred, or one hundred and fifty years ago. It attracts all the country people for miles round. Here they were all clad in blue, save the lamas, who were in bright yellow and dingy red. There were the people who came to worship, followed by the people who came to trade, who must make money out of them, men buying, selling, begging, men and women clad in neat blue cotton, and in the dingiest, dirtiest rags, men gathering the droppings of the mules and donkeys, and—how it made me think of the historical novels I used to love to read in the days when novels fascinated me—gentlemen with hooded hawks upon their wrists. All of them wended their way along this road, this beautiful road, this very, very bad road, and I went along with them, the woman who was not a missionary, who was travelling by herself, and who, consequently, was an object of interest to all, far outrivalling the fair, in attraction. It was a scene peculiarly Chinese, and it will be many a long year before I forget it.

On the left-hand side rose a steep ridge well wooded for China, and on the very top of the ridge ran the encircling wall that shut out all but the favoured few from the pleasure-grounds of the Manchu Sovereigns. Six weeks before, up among these mountains of Inner Mongolia, all the trees were leafless, and on this day in June the leaves of the poplars and aspens, acacias and oaks still retained the delicate, dainty green of early spring, and on the right were the steep, precipitous cliffs overlooking the town. One of these cliffs goes by the sinister name of the “Suicide's Rock.” The Chinese, though we Westerners are accustomed to regard them as impassive, are at bottom an emotional people. They quarrel violently at times, and one way of getting even with an enemy or a man who has wronged them is to dare him to go over the “Suicide's Rock.” To my Western notions it is not quite clear how the offender is scored off, for the challenger must be prepared to accompany the challenged on his dreadful leap. Yet they do it. Three times in the six years the missionaries have been here have a couple gone over the cliff, to be dashed to pieces on the rocks below.

But that sinister cliff was soon passed, and turning a little with the wall we went up a valley, and up that valley for perhaps eight miles, embosomed among the folds of the hills, hills for the most part steep, rounded, and treeless, are the temples, red, and gold, and white, against the green or brown of the hills.

To the glory of God! Surely. Surely. An ideal place for temples whoever placed them there, artist or Emperor, holy man, or grateful son.

“Idols. Idols,” say the missionaries at Jehol sadly, those good, kindly folk, whose life seemed to me an apology for living, a dedication of their whole existence to the austere Deity they have set up. But here I was among other gods.

“We go last first,” said Tuan, and I approved. There would be no fear of my missing something I particularly wanted to see if they were all on my homeward path.

“B-rrr! B-rrr! B-rrr!” cried my “cartee man” encouraging his old mule, and as we went along the road, up the valley, and everywhere in this treeless land, the temples were embowered in groves of trees, sometimes fir-trees, sometimes acacia or white poplar, and always on the road we passed the blue-clad people, and out of the carts peeped the Manchu ladies with highly painted faces and flower-decked hair, till at last we came to a halt under a couple of leafy acacia-trees, by a bridge that had once been planned on noble lines. And bridges are needed here, for the missionaries told me that a very little rain will put this road, that is axle-deep in dust, five feet under water. But the bridge was broken, the stones of the parapet were lying flat on one side; the stones that led up to it were gone altogether. And as the bridge that led up to it so was the temple.