“All my life,” said the amah, “I have served in Manchu families, and yet see, it is through a foreigner I come here,” and it was as if the seeing had crowned her life. But still there is a little dribbling in of the favoured few of the lower classes. It may be they were the palace servants who speared great black bass in the lake. It might have been they who carried out baskets of lily root and sold them with the fish outside. I bought bass easily enough for my hostess, great things still alive and bleeding from women's temple.
Sometimes there are rumours of art treasures sold from the palace, and then again it is contradicted: but I wondered, as I looked at those great baskets of lily roots that were constantly going outside, if here were not an excellent way to conceal contraband. It may be though that the guards at the gate are not to be bought, and possibly I do them an injustice.
I had written this and felt apologetic for my suspicions of the humble guard, forgetting that this is China, where anything may happen, when before my book could go to press a greater than the guard, no less a person than the Premier himself, Hsiung Hsi Ling, the great Tartar General, was accused of taking away the precious curios from Jehol. He had brought away curios valued at tens of thousands of pounds but he succeeded in proving to the satisfaction of the President that he had brought them away only that they might be stored in one of the great museums in Peking, where not only could they be cared for, but they might be seen by far more people. Again I thought of the Babylonish gentleman. Doubtless he, too, would have moved the nation's treasures from one place to another without saying by your leave to any man. To whom was he responsible? Perhaps to the King upon the throne. Hardly to him, if his army was strong and faithful.
We lingered on the veranda of the Empress's house over our afternoon tea—wherever we went hot water was procurable—and the sunshine came through the branches of the pines and firs, the great willows dipped their weeping branches in the clear waters of the lake, the deep blue of the sky contrasted with the green of the pine-needles, and a long snake came slowly, slowly, through the grass to take his daily drink, unperturbed, though all the servants and the German girl and I ran to look at him. He knew he was quite safe, no one would harm a sacred snake. A small eagle screamed from the rocks above, there was the mourning of a dove, the plaintive cry of a hoopoe, and a chattering black and white magpie looked on. A tiny blue kingfisher, like a jewel, fluttered on to a stone, and a bird something like a thrush, sang sweetly and loudly as the evening shadows lengthened. A great blue crane, tall almost as a man flew slowly across the water, and the brown deer clustered in the glades and began to feed. Truly it was an ideal spot up among the barren hills of Inner Mongolia, this Park enclosed by miles of high wall and still carefully guarded and jealously secluded by the Republic as it was by the Manchus. When France became a Republic they threw open her palaces and desecrated her most holy places. Not so here in the unchanging East. What was secluded and difficult of entrance in Manchu times is secluded and entered only by favour still. China absorbs the present and clings to the past. Are they past for ever those dead and gone rulers who made these pleasure-grounds?
Their last representative is a little boy hidden away in the heart of Peking, hardly realising yet what he has lost.
“If he comes again,” said a Chinese gentleman, “he will be Emperor by force of arms.”
Will the power come back to him? I can no more believe that the Chinese will become a modern nation, forgetting these glories of their past, than could the women's bathing place. prophet believe that the Lord would leave His chosen people in captivity.