“The better-class Chinaman gets up when it is light and goes to bed when it is dark. I cannot do that in London because you keep me out so late at night, but I am called at half-past seven, when I get a cup of tea; with my bath I have another cup of tea. With my breakfast at eight-thirty I have rice, vermicelli, fish, fruit, and more tea. Then I go down to my office, and during all the hours from nine to half-past twelve, when I am working with my secretaries, we all drink tea every half-hour or so, and some smoke pipes, but not opium. That is rare in China. Next comes lunch; but you must come and have a real Chinese luncheon and see how we eat it with chopsticks. Not an official party such as you have been to before at my house. Then it is the French cook, but my own cook, when I am alone, is a Chinaman.
“At four in the afternoon we have our third meal, and for the first time no tea, but cakes and light things. At half-past seven we dine, a dozen little dishes all at once. Then, if I were in China, I should go to bed, but as I am in London, I do as London does.”
“Last thing at night I still drink tea. The kettle is always boiling at the Legation, the cup is always ready, and my servant puts in the tea and pours on the water; then by the time it reaches me it is ready.”
The Chinese Minister is a very interesting man, and having finished our tea-party, during which he laughingly suggested that I should give him a certificate as a good cook, he told me many interesting things by way of exciting my interest and persuading me to write a book on China.
The children of the high-class families in China are betrothed very young, often when four or five years old, and never later than fifteen. The parents get a third person to negotiate, and if a union is considered desirable between the two families (they never marry out of their own social position in China), the parents meet and more or less settle the future line of education for their offspring, and sign letters officially agreeing to the betrothal. Nothing more happens. The wife, however, sometimes sees her future son or daughter-in-law.
When these children reach fifteen or twenty years of age their final marriage takes place. They never meet until the wedding-day, and the property settled on the girl by her father is her own by the law of China. After her marriage she belongs to her husband’s family, and goes to live in the house of her father-in-law.
If by the time a woman is thirty she has no son to continue the traditions of the family—and family counts for everything in China—the husband is legally allowed to take unto himself a mistress. She is not well born. He chooses her from the people, and she is officially accepted by the house, allowed to sit at the table, and if she bears sons, the first belongs to the legal wife, the second to herself, and if there is only one son, both wife and mistress share him, and, strange as it may seem, they generally get on quite well.
We had a long and interesting talk on the future of China.
“We are going to be the greatest country in the world in the middle of this century, but now there are troubled days ahead for us,” he said. “We are far more conservative than Japan. It has taken us longer to adopt Western civilisation, but when I went back from England some years ago, after serving many years in this country, I was one of a number of young men who tried, and in some cases succeeded, in making reforms. Those were early days, but boys like my son, now at Cambridge, are being educated in Europe in 1910; and they will go back with even stronger and more modern ideas. Indeed, I can see perfectly well that in the next twenty years there will be many reforms attempted in diplomatic and other circles in China, before we settle down. Every country must broaden and widen if it is to keep pace with the march of civilisation, and China must not be behind. We have a great past, and we must make a great future.”
Then he spoke with the utmost enthusiasm of the late Empress.