A Woman In China

by Mary Gaunt

“No—can—read.”

Well, I could read English, so with great empressement and as if I were conferring a great favour, I read that erudite document aloud to the admiring crowd, even to my own name, and such was the magic of the written word, that in about two minutes the lost luggage appeared, and was handed over to my waiting coolie! Only when I was gone doubt fell once more upon the company. Could a woman, a masterless woman, be trusted? they questioned. And the stationmaster sent word to Lu Tai Fu that he must have his card to show that it was all right!

If a woman counted for so little in a town where the foreigner was well known, could I expect much in out-of-the-way parts. I didn't expect much, luckily. The people came and looked at me, and they were invariably courteous and polite, with an old-world courtesy that must have come down to them through the ages, but they did not envy, I felt it very strongly—at bottom they were contemptuous. As I have seen the lower classes in an Australian mining town, as I myself have looked upon a stranger in an outlandish dress in the streets of London, so these country people looked upon me. It was just as well to make the most of a show, because their lives were uneventful, that was all.

It began to get on my nerves before I had done, this contemptuous curiosity. I don't know that I was exactly afraid, but I grew to understand why missionaries perish when the people have all apparently been well-disposed. These people would not have robbed me themselves, but had I met any of the robbers I had been threatened with in Peking, I am sure not one of them would have raised even a finger to help me, they would not even have protested. I was outside their lives.

And at last, at Malanyu, the hills that at first had loomed purple on the horizon, fairly overshadowed us, and I had arrived at the first stage of my journey, the Tungling, or Eastern Tombs. We did forty miles that day over the roughest road I had gone yet, and thankful was I when we rumbled through the gates of the dirty, crowded, little town.

We put up at the smallest and filthiest inn I had yet met. Chinese towns, even the smallest country hamlet, are always suggestive of slums, and Malanyu was worse than usual, but I slept the sleep of the utterly weary, and next morning at sunrise I had breakfast and went to see the tombs. I went in state, in my own cart with an extra mule on in front, I seated under the tilt a little back, and my servant and the head “cartee man” on the shafts; and then I discovered that if a loaded cart is an abomination before the Lord, a light cart is something unspeakable. But we had seen the wall that went round the tombs the night Before, just the other side of the town, so I consoled myself with the reflection that my sufferings would not be for long.

When the Imperial Manchus sought a last resting-place for themselves they had the whole of China to choose from, and they took with Oriental disregard for humbler people; but—saving grace—they chose wisely though they chose cruelly. They have taken for their own a place just where the mountains begin, a place that must be miles in extent. It is of rich alluvial soil swept down by the rains from the hills, and all China, with her teeming population, cannot afford to waste one inch of soil. The tiniest bit of arable land, as I had been seeing for the last three days, is put to some use, it is tilled and planted and carefully tended, though it bear only a single fruit-tree, only a handful of grain, but here we entered a park, waste land covering many miles, wasted with a royal disregard for the people's needs. It lay in a great bay of the hills, sterile, stony, rugged hills with no trace of green upon them, hills that stand up a perfect background to a most perfect place of tombs. I had thought the resting-place of the Mings wonderful, but surely there is no such place for the honoured dead as that the Manchus have set up at the Eastern Tombs.

Immediately we entered the gateway, the cart jolting wickedly along a hardly defined track, I found myself in a forest of firs and pines that grew denser as we advanced. Here and there was a poplar or other deciduous tree, green with the greenness of May time, but the touch of lighter colour only emphasised the sombreness of the pines and firs that, with their dark foliage, deepened the solemnity of the scene. Through their branches peeped the deep blue sky, and every now and again they opened out a little, and beyond I could see the bare hills, brown, and orange, and purple, but always beautiful, with the shadows chasing each other over them, and losing themselves in their folds. Spacious, grand, silent, truly an ideal place for the burial of Emperors and their consorts is hidden here in the heart of mysterious, matter-of-fact China, and once again I was shown, as I was being shown every day, another side of China from the toiling thousands I saw in the great city and on the country roads.

Dotted about in this great park, with long vistas in between are the tombs. They are enclosed in walls, walls of the pinkish red that encloses all imperial grounds, generally there is a caretaker, and they look for all the world like comfortable houses, picturesque and artistic, nestling secluded and away from the rush and roar of cities, homes where a man may take his well-earned rest. The filthy inn at which I stayed, the reeking little town of Malanyu, though it is at the very gates, is as far-removed from all contact with the tombs as are the slums of Notting Dale from the mansions in Park Lane, or the sordid, mean streets of Paddington from the home of the King in Buckingham Palace. The birds, the innumerable, much-loved birds of China sang in the trees their welcome to the glorious May morning, and the only thing out of keeping was my groaning, jolting, complaining Peking cart and the shouts of the “cartee man” assuring the mules, so I have been told, that the morals of their female relatives were certainly not above suspicion.

Here and there, among the trees, rose up marble pillars tall and stately, carved with dragons and winged at the top, such as one sees in representations of Babylon and Nineveh, there was a marble bridge, magnificent, with the grass growing up between the great paving-stones that here, as everywhere in China, seem to mark the small value that has been put on human flesh and blood, for by human hands have they been placed here, and the uprights are crowned by the symbolic cloud form, caught in the marble. This bridge crosses no stream. It is evidently just a manifestation of power, the power that crushes, and beyond it is an avenue of marble animals. There they stand on the green sward, the green sward stolen from the hungry, curving away towards the p'ia lou stand, as they have stood for many a long year, horses, elephants, fabulous beasts that might have come out of the Book of Revelations, guarding the entrance to the place of rest. They are not nearly so magnificent as the avenue at the Ming Tombs, they are only quaintly Chinese, it is the winged pillars, the silence, the sombre pine and fir-trees, and the everlasting hills behind that give them dignity.