Intimate China: The Chinese as I Have Seen Them

by Mrs. Archibald Little

LOTUS POND AND DAGOBA IN EMPEROR'S GARDEN.
Lent by Mr. Willett.

The Roman Catholic Fathers, who have for centuries lived under the shadow of the Imperial Palace, were having then to turn out before the New Year, as also the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, with their innumerable foundling children. For it was said that the Empress herself intended to reside in the Fathers' European house. It was she who originally so objected to the high towers of the church, as destructive of Fung shui. Then she was saying she observed ever since they were built she had been particularly fortunate, and she begged that church and towers and organ might be handed to her intact, together with Père Armand David's valuable collection of birds. Fortunately, there are counterparts of these in Paris, for it was feared she might give one specimen to one favoured courtier and one to another, and thus destroy the whole value of the collection. For the shrewd Father, observing the extraordinary pride of the Chinese heart, beside their own somewhat demure-coloured birds and butterflies, had placed a collection of the most gorgeous specimens from Brazil and Java, that he might say drily, when showing Chinese officials round, "See how favoured are the other nations of the earth!" From the towers the Empress may possibly intend to look down upon the Palace garden, as no one hitherto has been allowed to do. For the Fathers were only allowed to retain their cathedral on condition that no one ever mounted the towers, from which a bird's-eye view can be obtained of nearly the whole Palace garden. The church, it was then announced, she would use as an audience hall, and, it was added, receive foreigners in it. But such great changes as this have not yet come about in Peking. No people better than Chinese understand saying they will do a thing, and yet not doing it.

But, whatever happens in it, Peking, as long as it exists, can never lose its character of a great caravanserai, in which one is always coming upon the unexpected. For instance, a Red Button's funeral, as we saw it one day, with about a hundred of the greatest ruffians, misshapen, patched, tattered or naked, hideous, yet rejoicing in being employed, each with a long red feather stuck strangely upright in the oldest-looking Jim Crow sort of felt hat, carrying a banneret or a parasol; the red chair of the official carried aloft; then afterwards paper images of his wives, etc.! Or, if not a dignitary's funeral, one comes across a bird market, every man with a well-trained, red-throated bird sitting on a stick, crooked like a magnified note of interrogation, or a hooded hawk. Then a street row—filth unutterable! Perhaps a hundred camels sitting in little rings round their baggage, and not obstructing traffic in the least; elegant curios laid out in the dust of the street for sale; three carts all at once stuck in the same rut, all their horses and mules resting, panting, after vain efforts to get them out; Manchu women, with natural feet, very long silk gowns of the most villainously tawdry hue; or mandarins in exquisitely coloured silks, with only two wheels to their carts, and those far behind it, so as to indicate their dignity, twenty gaily clad retainers trotting after them on ponies! At one moment squalor and filth, such as to make one think of St. Giles's as cleanly by comparison; at the next or at the same moment gorgeous shop-fronts, all of the finest carving, with most brilliant gilding.

But of all the sights on view in Peking, the finest sight to my mind was the British Legation—a grand old Chinese palace, at that time perfectly kept up, and gorgeous in colouring, deepest blue, pure green, golden-dragoned, and lighted up with vermilion touches. Whether one looked at the mortised beams, projecting outside as well as inside, and thus forming the most complex, highly coloured eaves, or at the decorated beams in the reception-rooms, each one a revelation of colour to a London art-decorator, the eye was alike perfectly satisfied. And at that time, owing to the exquisite taste of the then British Minister's wife, as also probably to the liberality of Sir John Walsham himself, the decorations of the Embassy thoroughly harmonised with its architecture and colouring. If Peking outside was an embarrassment of D's, the Legation was then all cleanliness, comfort, and charm.

One cannot help reflecting sadly on what an object-lesson the capital conveys to all the innumerable officials who have to travel thither, as also to the crowds of young men who go there year after year to compete for the highest honour to be obtained by competition—admission to the Hanlin College. When the distances are considered in an empire about as big as Europe, and also the difficulties of travel in a country without roads and without railways, it is the more astonishing this custom was ever started and can still be kept up. Each expectant is mulcted in a heavy sum, as bribes to the officials about the Palace. Thus the rabble of Peking live by tribute from the whole empire. And so rooted is the custom, even the gatekeeper at the British Legation would demand his toll, whilst the sums that have been paid to get into the Imperial Palace often run into six figures. And all who come to Peking know how things are administered there by bribery and corruption, and see for themselves that nothing there is cleaned, nothing ever put in order. As Sir Robert Hart himself says, but for the clouds of dust continually kept in movement by the winds, and brought in from the ever-increasingly impoverished country round, they must have been all dead men in Peking long ago. The dust serves as a great disinfectant, whilst it so permeates all clothing worn there, that no dress in which one has once gone out in Peking seems fit ever to put on again for any other purpose.

Peking is probably the only large city in the whole world where no arrangements whatever are made for sanitation or even for common decency. The result is alike startling and disgusting to the traveller. But on inquiry it becomes even worse. There were drains—sewers—in the time of the Ming Emperors, and it is now the duty of a special official to report upon their condition every year, and see that they are kept in order. But the drains are all closed up; and though a boy in peculiar clothing is let down into them each year, as it were at one end, it is another boy, though in the same peculiar clothing, who is taken out at the other end.

MOUNTAIN VILLAGE, WITH SHAM BEACON FIRES TO LEFT, FOOCHOW SEDAN-CHAIR IN FRONT.
By Mrs. Archibald Little.