[CHAPTER II]
PEKING TO ICHANG
The first part of my journey was accomplished with great rapidity, and my description of it will not occupy long in the telling. I had no desire to spend a longer time than was absolutely necessary in northern China, and was glad enough to avail myself of every facility for reaching Ichang—the port on the Yangtse where steam navigation ceases—as soon as possible. The recent completion of the northern section of the great trunk railway of China has rendered it possible to travel from Peking to Hankow in four days,[2] and so makes it unnecessary to undertake a long and somewhat dreary journey on horseback or in springless carts over hundreds of miles of dusty plains and impossible roads.
I left Wei-hai-wei on 6th January 1906 in the steamer Shuntien, and reached the ugly and depressing little port of Chin-wang-tao on the 8th. In the evening of the following day, after a night spent in Tientsin, I reached the capital, and was glad to exchange the discomfort of a monotonous railway journey for the luxury of that excellent Peking hostelry the "Hôtel des Wagons Lits." The next four days were spent in paying visits at the British Legation and elsewhere, and in fighting ineffectual battles against an unusually aggressive dust-storm. No one, except perhaps a traveller in the desert of Gobi or over the sand-dunes of Khotan, can form any conception of the penetrating power of Peking dust. Parched throats, husky voices, bloodshot eyes, are the price that must be paid for the pleasure of a walk through the streets of Peking during a dust-storm; even one's own residence is no sanctuary, for double window-sashes and padded doors are alike powerless to withstand the scourge. Most of the legations are fairly well protected by their lofty park-walls, but how to keep an ordinary Peking house or hotel free of dust is as insoluble a problem as that which baffled Alice's Walrus and Carpenter.
A FLEET OF JUNKS.
PEKING
Peking being now one of the ordinary objectives of the modern globe-trotter, I will not encroach upon the province of the compiler of tourist guidebooks by attempting a description. Even the Englishman who has never left his native soil knows something of the city that defied all the Powers of Europe seven years ago, and paid so bitterly for her defiance. There have, of course, been great changes in Peking since those dark days; but away from the railway stations and the legation quarter, with its bristling guns, its battlemented walls and its heterogeneous army of foreign guards, there is little to show that Peking was so recently in the grip of a victorious and remorseless enemy. Its streets, temples, shops and palaces are very much as they were in 1900, showing the same mixture of grandeur and sordidness, splendour and decay. As for its people, who will venture to say how much or how little they have changed? That they love the people of Europe no better than they did eight years ago may be taken for granted: I am not aware that we have done anything to win their affections. That they have learned something of the secret of European prowess, and have realised why our arms were resistless, even against their Boxer champions, is no doubt true; and if this lesson does not, for some strange reason, fill them with admiration and reverence for Europe, it is certainly teaching them where to seek a cure for the ills of their own country. Events are now making it clearer every day that a true spirit of national feeling is rising among the people, and that the best minds in China are devoting themselves to the problem of their country's salvation. Nowhere is this state of things more obvious than in Peking, but it is not only in the capital that the new spirit is working strange wonders among the Chinese people. China is, indeed, rapidly growing to be more than a mere geographical term. The racial solidarity that is the underlying cause of her wonderful power of passive resistance shows no signs of disintegration at the present time, and it will form the best possible foundation for a new national patriotism. Only ten years ago an English traveller and politician, predicting the partition of China, explained that he used the word "China" only for convenience, for "there is really no such thing as 'China' at all."[3] For such a view there was some excuse at a time when humbled China was lying wounded and helpless at the feet of victorious Japan, but few, I fancy, will be inclined to endorse it now.
CHINESE POLITICS