A Woman In China

by Mary Gaunt

There was the recording angel with a black face and the open book—after all, the recording angel must often wear a black face—and there was the eternal symbol that has appealed through all ages to all people, and must appeal one would think above all, to this nation that longs so ardently for offspring, the mother with the child upon her knee. But they were all ugly to my Western eyes, and the only thing that charmed me was the silence, the cleanliness, and the quiet of the courtyard, the only place in all the busy little city that was at peace.

When I engaged Tuan I had thought he was to do all the waiting upon me I needed, but it seems I made a mistake. The farther I got from Peking the greater his importance became, and here he could not so much as carry for me the lightest wrap. His business appeared to be to engage other people to do the work. There was one dilapidated wretch to carry the camera, another the box with the plates, and yet a third bore the black cloth I would put over my head to focus my pictures properly. It was not a bit of good protesting, two minutes after I got rid of one lot of followers, another took their place, and as everyone had to be paid, apparently, I often thought, for the pleasure of looking at me, I resigned myself to my fate.

Accompanied by all the idlers and children in the town I climbed the ramp on to the walls, which are in perfect order, three miles round and on the top from fifteen feet to twenty broad. That ramp must have been always steep, the last thing a Chinese ever thinks about is comfort, steep almost as the walls themselves, and everywhere the stones are gone, making it a work of difficulty to climb to the top. Tuan helped me in approved Chinese fashion, putting his hand underneath my elbow, and once I was there the town was metamorphosed, it was again the romantic city I had seen from the plain in the evening light. Now the early morning sunlight, with all the promise of the day in it, fell upon graceful curved Chinese roofs and innumerable trees, dainty with the delicate vivid verdure that comes in the spring as a reward to a country where the winter has been long, bitter, and iron-bound.

The walls of most Chinese cities are built square, with right angles at the four corners, but in at least two that I have been in, T'ung Chou and Pao Ting Fu, one corner is built out in a bow. I rather admired the effect at first, till I found it was a mark of deepest disgrace. There had been a parricide committed in the town. When such a terrible thing occurs a corner of the city wall must be pulled down and built out; a second one, another corner is pulled down and built out, and a third likewise; but the fourth time such a crime is committed in the luckless town the walls must be razed to the ground. But such a disgrace has never occurred in any town in the annals of Chinese history, those age-long annals that go back farther than any other nation's, for if a town should be so unlucky as to have harboured four such criminals within its walls they generally managed, by the payment of a sum of money, to get a city that had some of its corners still intact to take the disgrace upon itself.

I strongly suspect too, that it is only when the offender is in high places that his crime is thus commemorated, for I have only heard of these two cases, and yet as short a while ago as 1912 there was a terrible murder in Pao Ting Fu that shocked the town. It appeared there was an idle son, who instead of working for his family, spent all his time attending to his cage bird, taking it out for walks, encouraging it to sing, hunting the graves outside the town for insects for it. His poor old mother sighed over his uselessness.

“If it were not for the bird!” said she.

The young blood in China, it seems, goes to the dogs over a cage bird, a lark or a thrush, as the young man in modern Europe comes to grief over horse-racing, so we see that human nature is the same all the world over. This Chinese mother brooded over her boy's wasted life, and one day when he was out she opened the cage door and the bird flew away.

When he came in he asked for the bird and she said nothing, only with her large, sharp knife went on shredding up the vegetables that she was putting into a large cauldron of boiling water for supper. He asked again for the bird. Still she took no notice, and he seized her knife and slit her up into small pieces and put her into the cauldron. He was taken, and tried, and was put to death by slicing into a thousand pieces—yes, even in modern China—but they did not think it necessary to pull down another corner of the city wall. Possibly they felt the disgrace of a bygone age was enough for Pao Ting Fu.