A Woman In China

by Mary Gaunt

And at last in the pleasant noontide we came to the p'ia lou at the entrance, the greatest p'ia lou in China, that land of p'ia lous, and standing there I realised, not only the beauty of the archway, but the wonder of the place the Mings had chosen to be theirs for all time. It is a great amphitheatre among these barren hills. St Paul's or Westminster could not hold these tombs, for Hyde Park might be put in this valley and yet not half fill it; and round it, set against the base of the hills, in great courts enclosed in pinkish-red walls, the counterpart of those round the Forbidden City, and planted with cypress and pine, are the various tombs. A magnificent resting-place, truly! And the dignity is enhanced by the desolate approach. Through the p'ia lou is the famous Holy Way, the avenue of marble animals, of which all the world has so often heard. What mystic significance had the marble elephant and the camel, the kneeling horse and the sedate scholar? Possibly they had no more than the general suggestion that all things did honour to the mighty dead laid away in their tombs. A paved way runs between them, paved with great blocks of marble brought from the hills, placed there in Bygone ages by the hands of slaves, sweating and struggling under their loads, or possibly by men just exactly like the men who were bearing me, men slaves in all but name, who each day must earn a few pence or go under in the pitiful struggle for life. The paved way that runs on for three miles is worn and broken, the grass comes up between the blocks, the bridges are falling into disrepair, but these things are trifles in the face of the amphitheatre set among the eternal hills, the blue sky and the sunshine, these are a memorial here, a memorial that makes the work of men's hands but a small thing.

Nevertheless that work is very wonderful. No one, I suppose, except he were making Chinese art or antiquities a special study, would visit every tomb in turn. It would take a week, and we, like the majority of visitors, contented ourselves with that of Yung Lo, the principal one. And here is a curious thing worth noting, a thing that possibly would happen nowhere else in the world, showing how irrevocably China feels herself bound to the past. The Ming Emperor was a Chinese, and the Republic that has just overthrown the Manchu Dynasty, is also Chinese, so as a mark of respect, they have repaired, after a fashion, this, the tomb of the greatest of the Ming Emperors. That is to say—oh China! they have whitewashed the marble, painted the golden-brown tiled roof of the temple, and swept and garnished the great audience hall.

A tomb in China reminds me in no way of death. We entered through a door studded with heavy brazen knobs a grass-grown courtyard, where were trees, pine and cypress. We went along a paved way, and before us was a building with a curved roof, with the tiles broken here and there; it was set on a platform reached by flights of marble steps, or rather the flights of steps were on either side, while in the centre was a ramp on which was beautifully carved in relief the dragon, the sign of Empire, and the horse, which I have heard some people say is the sign of good-fortune. On the platform, through all the cracks in the marble, violets were forcing their way, making a purple carpet under the golden sunshine. We crossed to a hall, which is surely most wonderful. The light was subdued a little, and the hall that contains in its centre the memorial tablet of red and gold is as magnificent in its proportions as York Minster. The roof is supported by trunks of sandal-wood trees, smooth, straight, and brown, they run sixty feet up to the roof, and after more than five hundred years the air is heavy with the sensuous scent of them. Where did they get that sandal-wood, those trunks all of such noble proportions? They must have cost an immense sum of money, for they never grew in Northern China.

Another courtyard is behind this hall of audience, where is a marble fountain, whitewashed, and a spring that is supposed to cure all ills of the eyes, and a door apparently leading into a hill-side, behind which is a grove of cypress trees. The door being opened, we entered a paved tunnel which led upwards to a chamber in the heart of the hill, whence two more ramps led still upwards, one to the right and the other to the left, into the open air again. Here the coffin was placed in the mound through the top of the ramp. The stones with which the ramps were paved were worn and slippery, the angle was steep, the leaves from the trees outside had drifted in, and the effect was strange and weird. Nowhere else but in China could such a thing be. And right on top of the mound, over the actual grave, is another memorial tablet to the dead Emperor, looking away out over the valley to the stony hills, that are the wall which hedges off this sacred place from the outside world.

And Yung Lo, the Emperor, died in the first half of the fifteenth century. How many people in England know or care, where Henry V. lies buried?

The evening was falling when we went back by the stony mule path, by the little stony villages, where the mothers were calling their children in from the fields, and the men were gathering at the meeting-places for the evening gossip. Of what did they talk? Of the Emperor dead in his tomb hundreds of years ago? Of the New Republic away in the capital? The Emperor seemed somehow nearer to the village people. There was the sound of quaint, tuneless, Eastern music, and sitting with the sun on his sightless face, surrounded by a listening little crowd, was a blind musician holding across his knees a sort of lute. The people turned and watched as the strangers and the aliens passed, and the musician thrummed on. Light or dark was the same to him. The clouds piled now in the western sky, and the stony land looked unutterably dreary in the gathering gloom, the coolies must have been weary, but they went steadily on, changing the chair pole from one shoulder to the other. The slopes that had been hard to scramble up were harder to scramble down, but they made no complaint. This was their work, and the night was coming when they might rest. The night was coming fast, but we were nearing the end of our journey. The hills looked cold, and gloomy, and threatening, and then the heavy clouds above them broke, and through them burst the setting sun in all the glory of silver, and purple, and ruddy gold. Down on the barren hills, like a benediction, fell his last rays, telling of hope for the morrow, and we turned into the yard of the little inn, and the coolies bowed themselves to the ground, one after the other, because they got a pitiful little over and above their hard-earned wages.