A Woman In China

by Mary Gaunt

“Those carters,” said he, “in the interior as it gets colder just pile one garment on over another, and never take anything off, and by February—phew! If you want to smell a tall smell”—I said I didn't, the smells of Peking were quite recondite enough for me—but he paid no attention—“you just go and stand over the k'ang in a room where five or six of them are crowded together.”

And the carters, it seems, are highly respectable, sometimes well-to-do men. I felt I had a lot to learn about the Chinese, these men whose ancestors had built the walls.

Of course there are gates in the walls, nine gates in all in the Tartar City, great archways with iron-studded doors and watch-towers above. I count it one of the assets of my life, that I have stood under those archways, where for centuries has ebbed and flowed the traffic of a Babylonish city, old world still in this twentieth century. They are lighted with electric light now, instead of with pitch-pine torches, but no matter, the grey stones are there.

The gate of a city like Peking is a great affair. Over every archway is a watch-tower, with tiled roofs rising tier above tier, and portholes filled with the painted muzzles of guns. Painted guns in the year of our Lord 1914! So is the past bound up with the present in China! And these are not entirely relics of the past like the catapult stones. In the year 1900, when the Boxers looted the Chinese City, and the Europeans in the Legations north of the Tartar wall trembled for their lives, the looters burned the watch-tower on the Chien Men, all that was burnable of it, and, when peace was restored, the Chinese set to work and built their many-tiered watch-tower, built it in all the glory of red, and green, and blue, and gold, and in the portholes they put the same painted cannon that had been there in past ages, not only to strike terror into the enemy, but also to impress the God of War with an idea of their preparedness. And yet there was hardly any need of sham, for these gateways must have been formidable things to negotiate before the days of heavy artillery, for each is protected by a curtain wall as high and as thick as the main wall, and in them are archways, sometimes one, sometimes two, sometimes three ways out, but always there is a great square walled off in front of the gate so that the traffic must pause, and may be stopped before it passes under the main archway into the city. And these archways look down upon a traffic differing but little from that which has passed down through all the ages.

Here come the camels from Mongolia, ragged and dusty, laden with grain, and wool, and fruit, and the camels from the Western Hills, laden with those “black stones” that Marco Polo noted seven hundred years ago, and told his fellow-countrymen they burned for heating purposes in Cambulac. You may see them down by the Ha Ta Men preparing to start out on their long journey, you may see them in the Imperial City, bringing in their wares, but outside the south-western gate, by the watch-tower that guards the corner of the wall, they are to be seen at their best. Here, where the dust is heaped high under the clear blue sky of Northern China, come slowly, in stately fashion, the camels, as they have come for thousands of years. The man who leads them is ragged in the blue of the peasant, his little eyes are keen, and patient, and cunning, and there is a certain stolidity in his demeanour; life can hold but few pleasures for him, one would think, and yet he is human, he cannot go on superior, regardless of outside things, as does his string of beasts of burden. The crenellated walls rise up behind them, the watch-tower with its painted guns frowns down upon them, and the camels, the cord fastened to the tail of the one in front, passing through the nostrils of the one behind, go steadily on. They are like the walls, they are older than the walls, possibly they may outlive the walls; silently, surely, in the soft, heaped-up dust they move; so they came a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, before the very dawn of history.

These Babylonish gates have for me a never-ending attraction. I look and look at the traffic, and always find something new. One sunny morning I went and sat in the Chien Men, just to watch the never-ending throng that made their way backwards and forwards between the Chinese and the Tartar Cities. I took up my position in the centre of the great square, large as Waterloo Place, enclosed by the curtain wall, and the American Guard looked down upon me and wondered, for they watch the traffic day in and day out, and so long as it is peaceful, they see nothing to remark upon in it. There are three gates in the curtain wall, the one to the south is never opened except for the highest in the land to pass through, but from the east gate the traffic goes from the Tartar to the Chinese City, through the west it comes back again, meeting and passing under the great archway that leads to the Tartar City. And all day long that square is thronged. East and west of the main archway are little temples with the golden-brown roofs of all imperial temples, the Goddess of Mercy is enshrined here, and there are bronze vases and flowering plants, and green trees in artistic pots, all going to make a quiet little resting-place where a man may turn aside for a moment from the rush and roar of the city, burn aromatic incense sticks, and invoke good fortune for the enterprise on which he is engaged. Do the people believe in the Goddess of Mercy, I wonder? About as much as I do, I suspect. The Chinaman, said a Chinese to me once, is the most materialistic of heathens, believing in little that he cannot see, and handle, and explain; but all of us, Eastern or Western, are human, and have the ordinary man's desire for the pitiful, kindly care of some unseen Power. It is only natural. I, too, Westerner as I am, daughter of the newest of nations, burned incense sticks at the shrine of the Goddess of Mercy, and put up a little prayer that the work upon which I was engaged should be successful. Men have prayed here through the centuries. The prayer of so great a multitude must surely reach the Most High, and what matter by what name He is known.

Besides the temples there are little guard-houses for the soldiers in the square; guard-houses with delicate, dainty lattice-work windows, and there are signboards with theatre notices in Chinese on gay red and yellow paper. There are black and yellow uniformed military police, there are grey-coated little soldiers with just a dash of red about their shabby, ill-fitting uniforms, and there are the people passing to and fro intent on their business, the earning of a cash, or of thousands of dollars. The earning of a cash, one would think mostly, looking at many a thing of shreds and patches that passes by. To Western eyes the traffic is archaic, no great motors rush about carrying crowds at once, it consists of rickshaws with one or, at most, a couple of fares, of Peking carts with blue tilts and a sturdy pony or a handsome mule in the shafts, and the driver seated cross-legged in fronts of longer carts with wheels studded, as the Peking carts are, and loaded with timber, with lime, and all manner of merchandise, and drawn sometimes by three or four underfed little horses, but mostly by a horse or mule in the shafts and a mule or a donkey so far in front one wonders he can exert any influence on the traction at all. The rickshaw coolies clang their bells, men on bicycles toot their horns, every donkey, and most horses and mules, have rings of bells round their necks, and everyone shouts at the top of his voice, while forty feet up on the wall, a foreign soldier, one of the Americans who hold the Chien Men, is practising all his bugle calls.