The Last Days of Pekin

by Pierre Loti

The Chinese chariots are very small, very massive, very heavy, and entirely without springs; mine has something of the elegance of a hearse; the outside is covered with a slaty-gray silk, with a wide border of black velvet.

We are to journey toward the northwest, in the opposite direction from the Chinese City where we were yesterday, and from the Temple of Heaven. We have five or six kilometres to go almost at a walk, on account of the pitiable condition of the streets and bridges, where most of the paving stones are missing.

These Chinese chariots cannot be closed; they are like a simple sentry box mounted on wheels,—so to-day we are lashed by the wind, cut by the snow, blinded by the dust.

First come the ruins of the legation district, full of soldiers. Then more lonely, almost deserted and entirely Chinese ruins—one gray, dusty devastation, seen vaguely through clouds of black and clouds of white. At the gates and on the bridges are European or Japanese sentinels, for the whole city is under military rule. From time to time we meet soldiers and ambulances carrying the flag of the Red-Cross Society.

At last the first enclosure of the Yellow or Imperial City is announced by the interpreter of the French legation, who has kindly offered to be my guide, and to share my chariot with its funeral trappings. I try to look, but the wind burns my eyes.

We are passing with frightful jolts through great blood-colored ramparts, not by way of a gate, but through a breach made with a mine by Indian cavalrymen.

Pekin, on the farther side of this wall, is somewhat less injured. In some of the streets the houses have kept their outside covering of gilded woodwork and their rows of chimæras along the edges of the roofs; all this is crumbling and decayed, it is true, licked by the flames or riddled by grape-shot. An evil-looking rabble, dressed in sheepskins or blue cotton rags, still swarms in some of the houses.

Another rampart of the same blood red and a great gate ornamented with faience through which we must pass,—this time it is the real gate of the Imperial City, the gate of the region which no one was ever allowed to enter; it is to me as though it had been announced as the gate to mystery or to an enchanted land.

We enter, and my surprise is great; for it is not a city, but a wood,—a sombre wood, infested with crows which croak in the gray branches. The trees are the same as those at the Temple of Heaven,—cedars, arbor-vitæ, and willows,—old trees all of them, of twisted shapes, unknown in our country. Sleet and snow cling to their branches, and the inevitable dust in the narrow, windy paths engulfs us.