It was worth it, it was well worth it.
They say that the old in China is passing away. “Behold upon the mountains the feet of him that bringeth good tidings.” Will they sweep away these tombs and give this land to the people? I hope not, I think not, I pray not. The present in China is inextricably mixed up with the past. “Oh Judah keep thy solemn feast, perform thy vows.” Sometimes it is surely well that the beautiful should be kept for a nation, even at great cost.
CHAPTER XI—A WALLED CITY
Numerous walled towns—The dirt of them—T'ung Chou—Romance of the evening light—My own little walled city—The gateways—Hospitable landlady—Bald heads—My landlady's room—A return present—“The ringleaders have been executed”—Summary justice—To the rescue of the missionaries at Hsi An Fu—The Elder Brother Society-Primitive method of attack and defence—The sack of I Chun.
Oh that first walled city! It was the first of many walled cities, many of them so small that it did not take us more than a quarter of an hour to cross from gate to gate; but to enter one and all was like opening a door into the past, into the life our forbears lived before the country I was born and brought up in was ever thought of. When I was a little girl, I cherished a desire to marry a German baron, a German baron of the Middle Ages, who lived in a castle, and I could not help thinking, as the influenza left me and I regained my powers of thought, that here were the towns of my German baron's time—dirt and all. In my childhood I had never thought of the dirt, or perhaps I had not minded. One thing is certain, in the clean land of my childhood I never realised what the dirt that comes from a packed population, from seething humanity, can be like. The Chinese live in these crowded towns for the sake of security—of security in this twentieth century—for even still, China seems to be much in the condition of Europe of the Middle Ages, safety cannot be absolutely counted upon inside the gates of a town, but at least it is a little safer than the open country.
We passed through T'ung Chou when the soft tender evening shadows were falling upon battlements and walls built by a nation that, though it is most practical, is also one of the most poetical on earth; we passed through Chi Chou when the shadows were long in the early morning, and in the sunlight was the hope of the new-born day. Through the gate was coming a train of Peking carts, of laden donkeys, of great grain carts with seven mules, all bound for the capital in the south.
I remember these two perhaps because they were the first of many walled towns, but Tsung Hua Chou will always remain in my memory as my own little walled city, the one that I explored carefully all by myself, and, when I think of a walled town, my thoughts always fly back to that little town, three-quarters of a mile square, at the foot of the hills that mark the limit of the great plain of China proper.