“She was old, she was not pretty, but she was wonderful. She had the greatest charm of manner of any woman I have ever known. She reigned for practically fifty years, and therefore her experience was unbounded. Above all, she was a diplomat. For instance, one day in 1907, she sent for me. I went. She talked pleasantly for some time on many subjects, and then she said, ‘We cannot always do what we like. We have to remember our country. We must always work for its good. You have been in England, and you like it. You are back in China, and perhaps you like it better because your home is here.’ I bowed. ‘But,’ she said, ‘London wants you. It is necessary to send a Minister to the Court of St. James’s, and, moreover, to send someone who understands the English people and is in sympathy with them, and who can be relied upon in every way. It is not a matter of pay. I know money does not tempt you. It is not a matter of position. You have that here, but your country needs your services. You can do much for China in England, and I am going to ask you to renounce your home life for several years and go to England.’
“It was charmingly put, and I felt touched at the many kind things she said, but still I hesitated. Then she looked straight at me.
“‘Li, your father left China for the good of China. We owe him a great debt for what he did in Paris. Will the son not follow the example of so excellent a father?’
“That did it. I left my home, and here I am, very happy, for England is to me a second home, and although I miss my wife and married daughters, I have my son with me, and many friends. Yes, she was a wonderful woman, our Empress. Her death was a great loss to China.”
Then I asked him why this boy of three was put upon the throne. “Because,” he said, “the late Emperor was a nephew of the Empress, and it is a rule with us that these dignities cannot descend from brother to brother, but must always come down one generation. When the Emperor died childless, it was therefore not his brother, but his brother’s son who succeeded him. As he is only three, his father has been made Regent, and is virtually the Emperor of China till the child is grown up. That little boy will be employed in learning to read and write four Chinese languages fluently till he is twelve or thirteen. After that his more general education will commence, but he has a difficult task before him, because he will take up the reins as Emperor at the very time when I think China will be having its greatest struggle.
“We must never forget the teachings of Confucius, but we must model our present Government according to the rules of modern civilisation.”
(Barely two years later the Manchus were overthrown.)
My own father had a great idea that everything in the world was good to eat if only we knew how to cook it.
Therefore, I was brought up to eat all sorts of queer things, a training that proved very useful in after-life when my travels took me from Iceland to Africa, from Lapland to Sicily, from Canada to Mexico. Sometimes I have lived on foie gras and champagne, at others been glad of black bread—sometimes I have been amongst thousands of cattle on a ranch without a drop of milk or a pat of butter within hundreds of miles; often I have been far from butcher’s meat, and drunk milk from the cocoanut, or eaten steak from the elk, turtle from the river, or bear from the woods.
Therefore, this paternal theory often held good and helped me over many an awkward moment. Which philosophy, however, was by no means called upon when the Chinese luncheon, to which I had been invited at my little tea-party, became soon after an accepted fact.