But he is not long in realizing that China is preëminently the Land of Walls, and that what the streets and the alley-like hutungs lose by being crowded between their mud-made barriers the dwellings along them gain in space and privacy within. Once the heavy door-leaves, bright red in color, with a few big black characters on them calling poetically for blessings upon the inmates, growl shut behind him, he finds the sense of unpleasant proximity was a mere delusion. A short tiled passageway leads, almost certainly at right angles, into the first court, from which another, very likely with a different direction, that evil spirits may be completely nonplussed, opens upon a second, and beyond this, perhaps through a big ornamental gateway with brilliant flare-eared roof, there may be a third and even a fourth courtyard; though this would imply that the ordinary house-hunter might better discreetly withdraw before the matter of price comes up. Usually the brick walls and the tiled roofs of the separate buildings about these courts are of that same blue gray that makes Peking so much more drab than the imagination had pictured it, for all its innumerable palaces, temples, and monuments. But the eaves and the cornices, the doors and the passageways, with their red and green and sky-blue decorations of Chinese motif, the bright blues and reds of the rafter-ends and corbels under the slant of the roofs, the white-papered lattices of the windows, make up for this. Probably, too, there is a venerable old tree rising out of somewhere high above the place; and almost always, winter or summer, there is that bright blue sky overhead which makes Peking so delightful a home. What usually troubles the foreigner longest is the lowness of the houses. A child could throw a cat over any of them; they have no basements, no garrets, nothing but the low room or two of each building, generally without even a ceiling, but only the roof-beams, papered or whitewashed, sometimes painted with dragons and other things Chinese.
I have been speaking, of course, of Chinese houses. There are many two- and even three-story dwellings in Peking; there are big compounds full of houses that might have been shipped intact from Massachusetts; but we could see no reason for coming all the way to China just to live inside a little walled-in duplicate of England or America. So we roamed the hutungs. According to treaty all Westerners in Peking still live within the Legation Quarter. But the foreign community has long since outgrown such limited accommodations. Chinese with houses to rent, merchants with goods to sell, every caste and variety of Pekingese who covets some of the contents of foreigners’ plump purses, is glad to overlook this fiction in practice, so that brass name-plates in Roman letters, and flagpoles flaunting various Western colors, are widely scattered within the Tartar City. We found them clustered most thickly in the southeastern, or at least the eastern, part of it, thinning out toward the northwest; but foreigners live even inside the Yellow Wall, as the Chinese call the Imperial City. There seemed to be few if any in the broad Chinese City south of the Tartar Wall, or outside that mighty barrier at all, except for the little suburban community far out at the race-course.
Our home in Peking was close under the great East Wall of the Tartar City
The indispensable staff of Peking housekeeping consists of (left to right) ama, rickshaw man, “boy,” coolie, and cook
A chat with neighbors on the way to the daily stroll on the wall
Street venders were constantly crying their wares in our quarter