The Last Days of Pekin

by Pierre Loti

Our commander and his officers have improvised lodgings and offices in some of the larger Chinese houses, hastily repairing the roofs and walls. In strong contrast to the rudeness of these places are the sumptuous wood carvings and the tall Chinese vases found intact among the ruins.

They promise me carriages and horses for to-morrow morning to be ready at sunrise on the bank near my junk. When all is settled there is about an hour of daylight left, so I wander about the ruins of the city with my armed followers, Osman, Renaud, and Chinese Toum.

As one gets farther away from the quarters where our soldiers are, the horrors increase with the solitude and the silence.

We come first to the street of the China merchants, great warehouses where the products of the Canton manufactories were stored. It must have been a fine street judging from the carved and gilded but ruined façades which remain. To-day the yawning shops, almost demolished, seem to vomit onto the highway their heaps of broken fragments. One walks on precious enamel decorated with brilliant flowers, for it literally covers the ground so that one crushes it in passing. There is no knowing whose work this was; it was already done when our troops arrived. But it must have taken whole days of furious attack with boots and clubs to reduce it all to such small bits; jars, plates, cups, are ground to atoms, pulverized, together with human bones and hair. At the back of these warehouses the coarser wares occupied a sort of interior court. These courts with their old walls are particularly lugubrious this evening, in the dying light. In one of them we found a mangy dog trying to drag something from underneath a pile of broken plates—it was the body of a child whose skull had been broken. The dog began to eat the flesh that was left on the legs of the poor dead thing.

There was no one to be seen in the long devastated streets where the framework of the houses, as well as the tiles and the bricks, had tumbled down. Crows croaked in the silence. Horrible dogs who feed on the dead fled before us, hanging their tails. We had glimpses of Chinese prowlers, wretched-looking creatures, trying to find something to steal, or of some of the dispossessed timidly creeping along the walls attempting to find out what has become of their homes.

The sun is already low, and the wind is rising as it does every night. We shiver with the sudden cold. Empty houses fill the shadows.

These houses are all of considerable extent, with recesses, a succession of courts, rock work, basins, and melancholy gardens. Crossing the threshold, guarded by the ever-present granite monsters worn by the rubbing of hands, one finds oneself in an endless series of apartments. The intimate details of Chinese life are touchingly and graciously revealed by the arrangement of potted plants, flowerbeds, and little balconies where bindweed and other vines are trained.

Here, surrounded with playthings, is a poor doll, which doubtless belonged to some child whose head has been broken; there a cage hangs with the bird still in it, dried up in one corner with its feet in the air.

Everything is sacked, removed, or destroyed; furniture is broken, the contents of drawers thrown about the floors, papers, blood-stained clothing, Chinese women's shoes spattered with blood, and here and there limbs, hands, heads, and clumps of hair.

In certain of the gardens neglected plants continue to blossom gaily, running over into the walks amongst the human remains. Around an arbor which conceals the body of a woman, twines pink convolvulus in blossoming garlands. The blossom is still open at this late hour of the day and in spite of the cold nights, which quite upsets our European ideas of convolvulus.