No other American representative abroad has quite so easy a time upon arrival at his post. We were going to a home prepared for our reception, adequately furnished, and with a complete staff of servants and attendants who were ready to serve luncheon immediately, if required. In most cases, unfortunately, an American diplomatic representative will for weeks or months have no place to lay his head except in a hotel. Many American ministers and ambassadors have spent fully one half the time during their first year of office in making those necessary living arrangements which I found entirely complete at Peking. That is the crucial period, too, when their minds should be free for observing the situation in which they are to do their work. May the time soon come when the nation realizes more fully the need of dignified representation of its interests abroad.
The residence of the minister I found simple but handsome, in stately colonial renaissance style, its interior admirably combining the spaciousness needed for official entertaining with the repose of a real home. It is made of imported American materials, and a government architect was expressly sent to put up the legation buildings. He had been designing government structures in America, and the somewhat stereotyped chancery and houses of the secretaries were popularly called "the young post offices." But the minister's house, largely due to the efforts of Mr. Rockhill, who was minister at the time, is a masterpiece of appropriateness—all but the chimneys. It is related that the architect, being unfamiliar with the ways of Chinese labourers and frequently impatient with them, incurred their ill-will. When Mr. Rockhill first occupied the residence, it was found the chimneys would not draw; the disgruntled masons had quietly walled them up, in order that the architect might "lose face," and the chimney from the fireplace of the large dining room was so thoroughly blockaded that it remained permanently out of commission.
At a distance from the "compound," or enclosure, which surrounds the minister's residence, fronting on a central plaza, there is a veritable hamlet of additional houses occupied by secretaries, attachés, consular students, and the clerical staff. It is a picturesque Chinese village, with an antique temple and many separate houses, each with its garden enclosed within high walls—a rescued bit of ancient China in the midst of the European monotony of the Legation Quarter. It adjoins the Jade Canal, opposite the hotel called "Sleeping Cars" by some unimaginative director, but more fitly known as the Hotel of the Four Nations. At the Water Gate, where the Jade Canal passes under the Tartar wall, is the very point where the American marines first penetrated into the Tartar city in 1900.
The Chinese are remarkably free from self-consciousness, and therefore are good actors; as one sees the thousands passing back and forth on the streets, one feels that they, too, are all acting. Here are not the headlong rush and elbowing scramble of the crowded streets of a Western metropolis. All walk and ride with dignity, as if conscious of a certain importance, representing in themselves not the eager purpose presently to get to a certain place, but rather a leisurely flow of existence, carrying traditions and memories of centuries in which the present enterprise is but a minor incident. Foreign women have sometimes been terrified by these vast, surging crowds; but no matter how timid they be, a few rickshaw rides along the streets, a short observation of the manners of these people, will make the faintest hearted feel at home. Before long these Tartaric hordes cease to be terrifying, and even the feeling that they are ethnological specimens passes away; it is remarkable how soon one feels the humanity of it all among these multitudes that seem to engulf but that never press or crowd.
Looking down upon a Chinese street, with multitudes of walkers and runners passing back and forth, mingled among donkey carts, riders on horse- or donkey-back, mule litters, rickshaws, camel caravans, flocks of animals led to sale and slaughter, together with rapidly flying automobiles—all gives the impression of perfect control of motion and avoidance, of crowding and scuffling, and recalls the movements of practised dancers on a crowded ballroom floor. A view of the crowds which patiently wait at the great gateways for their turn to pass through affords a constant source of amusement and delight. The line slowly pushes through the gate like an endless string being threaded through a needle. If there is mishap or collision, though voices of protest may arise, they will never be those of the stoic, dignified persons sitting in the rickshaws; it is against etiquette for the passenger to excite himself about anything, and he leaves that to the rickshaw man. All humanity and animaldom live and work together in China, in almost undisturbed harmony and mutual understanding.
Only occasionally a hubbub of altercation rises to the skies. In these days the pigtails had only just been abolished. Under the old conditions, the technique of personal combat was for each party to grab the other by the cue and hold him there, while describing to him his true character. During the first years of the reform era one might still see men who were having a difference frantically grabbing at the back of each other's heads where there was, however, no longer anything to afford a secure hold.
A great part of Chinese life is public. It is on the streets with their innumerable restaurants; their wide-open bazaars of the trades; their ambulent letter-writers and story-tellers with the curious ones clustered about them; their itinerant markets; their gliding rickshaws; their haphazard little shops filled with a profusion of ageless, precious relics. There is the charm of all this and of the humanity there swarming, with its good-natured consideration for the other fellow, its constant movement, its excited chatter, its animation and its pensiveness, and its occasional moments of heated but bloodless combat.