A Woman In China

by Mary Gaunt

There are people—I have heard them—who complain that Peking is dull. Do not believe them. But, after all, perhaps I am not the best judge. As a young girl, trammelled by trying to do the correct thing and behave as a properly brought up young lady ought, I have sometimes, say at an afternoon call when I hope I was behaving prettily, found life dull, but since I have gone my own way I have been sad sometimes, lonely often, but dull never, and for that God be thanked. But Peking, I think, would be a very difficult place in which to be really dull.

It is even possible to go to the theatre every night, but it is a Chinese theatre and that will go a long way. Nevertheless, I felt it was a thing I should like to see; so one evening two of my friends took me to the best theatre that was open. The best was closed for political reasons they said, because the new Government, not as sure of itself as it would like to be, did not wish the people to assemble together. This was a minor theatre, a woman's theatre; that is one where only women were the actors, quite a new departure in the Celestial world, for until about a year before the day of which I write, no woman was ever seen upon the stage, and her parts, as they were in the old days in Europe, were taken by men and boys. Even now, men and women never appear on the stage together, never, never do the sexes mingle in China, and the women who act take the very lowest place in the social scale.

One cold night in March three rickshaws put us down at an open doorway in the Chinese City outside the Tartar wall. The Chinese the greatest connoisseurs of pictures do not as yet think much of posters, though the British and American Tobacco Company is doing its best to educate them up to that level, so outside this theatre the door was not decorated with photographs of the lovely damsels to be seen within, clad in as few clothes as the censor will allow, but the intellects of the patrons were appealed to, and all around the doors were bright red sheets of paper, on which the delights offered for the evening were inscribed in characters of gold.

We went along a narrow passage with a floor of hard, beaten earth, and dirty whitewashed walls on either side, along such a passage I could imagine went those who first listened to the sayings of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The light was dim, the thrifty Chinaman was not going to waste the precious and expensive light of compressed gas where it was not really needed, and from behind the wall came the weird strains of Chinese music. There appeared to be only one door, and here sat a fat and smiling Chinese, who explained to my friends that by the rules of the theatre, the men and women were divided, and that I must go to the women's gallery. They demurred. It would be very dull for me, who could not understand a word of the language, to sit alone. Could no exception be made in my favour? The doorkeeper was courteous as only a Chinese can be, and said that for his part, he had no objection; but the custodian of the theatre, put there by the Government to ensure law and order, would object.

I wanted badly to stay with these men who could explain to me all that was going on, so we sent for the custodian, another smiling gentleman, not quite so fat, in the black and yellow uniform of the military police. He listened to all we had to say, sympathised, but declared that the regulations must be carried out. My friends put it to him that the regulations were archaic, and that it was high time they were altered. He smilingly agreed. They were archaic, very; but then you see, they were the regulations. He was here to see that they were carried out, and he suggested, as an alternative, that we should take one of the boxes at the side. The question of sitting in front was dismissed, and we gave ourselves to the consideration of a box for which six dollars, that is twelve shillings English currency, or three dollars American, were demanded. We demurred, it seems you always question prices in China. We told the doorkeeper that the price was very high, and that as we were sitting where we did not wish to sit, he ought to come down. He did. Shades of Keith and Prowse! Two dollars!

We went up some steep and narrow steps of the most primitive order, were admitted to a large hall lighted by compressed gas—in Cambulac! here in the heart of an ancient civilisation—surrounded by galleries with fronts of a dainty lattice-work of polished wood, such as the Chinese employ for windows, and we took our places in a box, humbly furnished with bare benches and a wooden table. Just beneath us was the stage, and the play was in full swing—actors, property men, and orchestra all on at once. It was large and square, raised a little above the people in the body of the hall and surrounded by a little low screen of the same dainty lattice-work. At the back was the orchestra, composed only of men in ordinary coolie dress—dark blue cotton—with long queues. There were castanets, and a drum, cymbals, native fiddle, and various brazen instruments that looked like brass trays, and they all played untiringly, with an energy worthy of a better cause, and with the apparent intention—it couldn't have been so really—of drowning the actors. Yet taken altogether the result was strangely quaint and Eastern.

The entertainment consisted of a number of little plays lasting from half an hour to about an hour. There were never more than half a dozen people on the stage at once, very often only two in the play altogether, and what it was all about we could only guess after all, for even my friends, who could speak ordinary Chinese fluently, could not understand much that was said. Possibly this was because every actor, instead of using the ordinary conversational tone, adapted as we adapt it to the stage, used a high, piercing falsetto that was extremely unnatural, and reminded me of nothing on this earth that I know of except perhaps a pig-killing. Still even I gathered something of the story of the play as it progressed, for the gestures of these women, unlike their voices, were extremely dramatic, and some of the situations were not to be mistaken. Scenery was as it was in Shakespeare's day. It was understood. But for all the bare crudity, the dresses of the actors which belonged to a previous age, whether they were supposed to represent men or women, were most rich and beautiful. The general, with his hideously painted face and his long black beard of thread, wore a golden embroidered robe that must have been worth a small fortune; a soldier, apparently a sort of Dugald Dalgety, who pits himself against a scholar clad in modest dark colours, appeared in a blue satin of the most delicate shade, beautifully embroidered with gorgeous lotus flowers and palms; and the principal ladies, who were really rather pretty in spite of their highly painted faces and weird head-dresses, wore robes of delicate loveliness that one of my companions, whose business it was to know about such matters, told me must have been, like the general's, of great value. The comic servant or country man wore a short jumper and a piece of white paper and powder about his nose. It certainly did make him look funny. The dignified scholar was arrayed all in black, the soldier wore the gayest of embroidered silks and satins, the landlady of the inn or boarding-house, a pleasant, smiling woman with roses in her hair and tiny maimed feet, had a pattern of black lace-work painted on her forehead, and when the male characters had to be very fierce indeed, they wore long and flowing beards, beards to which no Chinaman, I fear me, can ever hope to attain, for the Chinaman is not a hairy man. When a gallant gentleman with tight sleeves which proclaimed him a warrior, and a long beard of bright red thread which made him a very fierce warrior indeed, snapped his fingers and lifted up his legs, lifted them up vehemently, you knew that he was getting over a wall or mounting his horse. You could take your choice. A mountain, the shady side of it, was represented by one panel of a screen which leaned drunkenly against a very ordinary chair, giving shelter to a very evil spirit with a dress that represented a leopard, and a face of the grimmest and most terrifying of those animals.

This was a play that required much property to be displayed, for a general with a face painted all black and white and long black beard, with his army of five, took refuge behind a stout city wall that was made of thin blue cotton stuff supported on four bamboo poles, and this convenient wall marched on to the stage in the hands of a couple of stout coolies. A wicked mountain spirit outside the walls did terrible things. Ever and again flashes of fire burst out after his speech, and I presume you were not supposed to see the coolie who manipulated that fire, though he stood on the stage as large as any actors in the piece.

It is hard, too, talking in that high falsetto against the shrieking, strident notes of the music, so naturally the actors constantly required a little liquid refreshment, and an attendant was prompt in offering tea in tiny round basins; and nobody saw anything incongruous in his standing there with the teapot handy, and in slack moments taking a sip himself.