Intimate China: The Chinese as I Have Seen Them

by Mrs. Archibald Little

But it was at Tungchow in the old days that the tug of war in getting to Peking used to begin. You had bought all your stores, and furnished your boat, and spent days and nights in it; but all that was nothing to the great business of getting to Peking. There were thirteen miles yet to do, and the question was, How did you mean to try to get over them? My own firm conviction now is that the easiest way would have been to get up very early in the morning and walk. But as it was, I came into Peking in the traditional style, feet foremost in a springless cart, holding on hard to either side. We started at eleven in the morning from Tungchow, paused for an hour at a wayside inn to eat and rest, and did not reach Peking till six, only just before the gates were closed. At first starting I thought the accounts of the road had been exaggerated. It is true it was so dusty at intervals I was more reminded of a London fog than anything else. It is true I could not leave go with either hand without getting a tremendous bump on the head. But still I did not think the road was quite as bad as I had expected. Alas! the road was so bad we had not started by it at all, but were simply getting along by a way the carts had made for themselves. At Pa-li Chiao we came upon the real grand stone road, with the grand bridge made by the Ming Dynasty—when they moved their capital from Nanking to Peking, in order better to repel invading Tartar hordes—and never in the centuries since repaired by the Tartar horde of Manchus, who at once conquered them, when they thus obligingly put themselves within easy reach at the very extreme limit of their vast empire.

FARMER AND WATER BUFFALOES.
By Mrs. Archibald Little.

There was the road, with huge blocks of stone, some of them five feet long, and wide and thick in proportion, but sometimes worn away, sometimes clean gone. Now to hold on like grim death! How the smartly varnished little carts with their blue tops kept together at all I cannot imagine. But I know I immensely respected the mule that could pull us into and out of the holes and ruts, into which we dropped with a veritable concussion, not a jolt. Of course it was a new sensation—but a new sensation it can do no one any good to experience; and before I had had half an hour of it I had had enough, and asked for a donkey. However, the donkey brought was so tiny that, after a rest on its poor little thin back, I tried the cart again. The road did not seem quite so bad as before, until we got nearer the capital. Then—then I got out and walked. There was no help for it. And walking was decidedly less fatiguing. But an increasing crowd followed me. Every one spoke to me—I hope complimentarily. Men selling clothes waved them at me, and sang to invite purchase. It was hard work to avoid the carts, and donkeys, and mules, and camels, and men carrying things, and Manchu women with feet of the natural size, violently rouged faces, and hair made up into teapot handles, sticking out quite six inches behind their heads, or made into stiff wings, projecting about three inches on either side, and always with flowers stuck into their hair. It was hard work to avoid all these, and to keep up with the carts, and disagreeable to be choked and smothered in dust, and to feel oneself all the while appearing to every one as an escaped lunatic—ploughing through dust on one's own feet, instead of being driven along properly. But anything was better than jolting along that road till the great mock fortress came into view. We were about to enter the gates. The crowd there was too great to try to press through; so I climbed into the cart once more, and thus entered Peking comme il faut, in a springless cart.

PAPER-BURNING TEMPLES.
By Mrs. Archibald Little.

It is the custom to say the road to Peking from Tungchow is desperately uninteresting. It may be so. I feel I ought hardly to hazard an opinion, for I was afraid to leave my eyeglasses dangling, and thus only once or twice managed both to get them out and up to my eyes sufficiently steadily to see through them; but to my shortsighted gaze there appeared to be a constant series of interesting graves and gateways and monsters, which I longed to examine more closely. Then the long procession of camels carrying brick tea northwards, or coming south empty to fetch it, did not become monotonous, even after I had seen some thousands or more of them. The men riding upon them had handkerchiefs tied in a very simple way, which, however, I at once saw was the original of the old homely English sun-bonnet. The men walking by their sides had conical oil-paper hats, which were equally evidently the original of the Nice hats of my youth. They had even red linings to them, such as I had so often worn myself in Europe, and three little spots of black, whose nature I could not quite make out, but which on my hats used to be represented by three little stars of black velvet. I had always thought a Nice hat looked Chinese, and, since I came to China, that it would be the very thing to wear in summer; and now here I found these camel-drivers wearing the old original model, which probably the Jesuits carried over long ago to North Italy.

The camels placed their springy hoofs softly on the hard, stony road. Those that wore bells carried their arched necks high. Their grave eyes looked down kindly on the clouds of dust. Between their two humps rode a man, as in a natural saddle. Their yellow necks shone in the slanting rays of the sun, while the great tufts of hair at the tops of their legs stood out darkly. I thought I should grow tired of them, but I had not even by the time we had reached the gate of Peking, at the end of our long day's travel of thirteen miles.