THE CITY OF PEKING AND ALL ITS GLORIES
11th June, 1900.
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You do not know this Capital of Capitals, perhaps—that is, you do not know it as you should if the scenes which may presently move across the stage, now in shouting crowds of sword-armed men, now in pitiable incidents of small account, are to be properly understood, and their dramatic setting, stirring blood-thrilling, incongruous as they must be and can only be. I feel that something will come—I even know it. I have been talking vaguely about this and about that; have begun preparing colours, as it were, in the usual careless fashion without explanations or digressions—until you possibly wonder what it is all about. For you have not yet seen the barbaric frame which will hedge in the whole—the barbaric frame in all truth, since it is gradually closing in on us on every side until, like some mediæval torture-room, we may have the very life crushed out of us by a cruel pressure. But enough of fine phrases; while there is time let me write something.
Peking is at least two thousand years old. Several hundred years before Christ, they say a Chinese kingdom made the present site the capital, and began building the outer walls; but the Chinese, the gentler Chinese who had all military spirit crushed out of them five thousand years before by having to tramp from Mesopotamia to where they now are in the eighteen provinces, these Chinese, I say, never had in Peking anything but a temporary trysting-place. For Peking stands for a sort of blatant barbarianism, mounted on sturdy ponies, pouring in from the far North; and the history of Peking can only be said to begin when Mongol-Tartars, who have always been freebooters and robbers, forced their way in and imposed their militarism on a nation of shopkeepers and collectors of taxes.
Even before the Christian era, the Chinese chronicles tell of the pressure of these fierce barbarians from the North being so much felt and their raids so constant, that Chi Huang-ti, the ruler of the powerful Chinese feudatory state which laid the foundations of the present Empire of China, began to build the Great Wall of China and to fortify old Peking as the only means of stopping these living waves. The Great Wall took ages to build, for the Northern barbarians always kept cunningly slipping round the uncompleted ends, and the Mings, the last purely Chinese sovereigns to reign in Peking, actually added three hundred miles to this colossal structure in the year 1547, or nearly two thousand years after the first bricks had been cemented. That shows you what people they were, and what the contest was.
For hundreds of years the war with the semi-nomadic hordes of the North continued. Sometimes isolated bands of Tartars broke through the Chinese defence and enslaved the people, but never for very long; instinctively by the use of every stratagem the cleverer Chinese compassed their destruction. While Attila and his Huns were ravaging Europe in the fifth century, other Hwingnoo, or Huns, veritable scourges of God, forced their way into China. In this fashion, while China itself was passing through a dozen different forms of government, and had a dozen capitals—sometimes owning allegiance to a single Emperor such as those of the T'ang dynasty who added Canton and the Cantonese to the Empire, sometimes split into petty kingdoms such as the "Ten States"—this curious frontier war continued and was handed down from father to son. Chinese industrialism and socialism, content to accept whatever form of government Chinese strong men succeeded in imposing, instinctively kept up an iron resistance to these Northern invaders. Such was the fear inspired, that a proverb coined thousands of years ago is still current. "Do not fear the cock from the South, but the wolf from the North," it says. Everybody is always quoting this saying. I have heard it twice to-day.
It was not until the tenth century that the Tartars finally broke through and established themselves definitively on Chinese soil. The Khitans, a Manchu-Tartar people, springing from Central Manchuria, then captured Peking and made it their capital. The Khitans were a cheerful people, with a peculiar sense of humour and a still greater conviction of the inferiority of women. To show their contempt for them, it is still recorded that they used to slit the back of their wives and drink their blood to give them strength. For two and a half centuries the Khitans, under the style of the Liao or Iron dynasty, maintained their position by the use of the sword, and then succumbing to the sapping influence of Chinese civilisation, they in turn were unable to resist a second Manchu-Mongol horde, the Kins. The Kins, under the style of the Silver dynasty, reigned in Northern China for a term of years, but there was nothing of a permanent character in their rule, since they were uncouth barbarians who soon drank themselves to death and destruction.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century Genghis Khan, the great Mongol, born in the bleak Hsing-an Mountains, gathered together all the restless bands of Mongolia, and sweeping down on Peking drove out the Kins and established the purely Mongol dynasty of the Yüan. Up till then Peking had consisted of what is to-day the Chinese city, or the older outer city. Kublai Khan, Genghis's grandson, fixed his residence definitively in Peking in 1264, and began building the Ta-tu, or Great Residence—the Tartar city of to-day. The Chinese city is oblong; the Tartar city is squat and square and overlaps and dominates the northern walls of the older city. Kublai Khan, by building the Tartar city on the northern edge of the Chinese city and fortifying it with immense strength, may be said to have fitted the spear-head on to the Chinese shaft, and to have given the key-note to the policy which exists to this day—the policy of the North of China dominating the South of China.
In time the Yüan dynasty of Mongols passed away—their strength sapped by confinement to walled cities because their power was only on the tented field. Ser Marco Polo, that audacious traveller, never tires of telling of the magnificence of the Mongol Khans and their resplendent courts. It requires no Marco Polo to assure us that the thirteenth century of the Far East was immeasurably in advance of the thirteenth century of Europe. The vast and magnificent works which remain to this day, weather-beaten though they be; the fierce reds, the wonderful greens, the boldness and size of everything, speak to us of an age which knew of mighty conquests of all Asia by invincible Mongol horsemen....