The fact is that rickshaws are too numerous in Peking and their fares too low. Even foreign residents grow flabby from so habitually jumping into one rather than walking a block or two, though I confess it is easier to do so than to endure the endless gauntlet of persistent shouting, and even subtle ridicule in the case of “foreign devils” supposedly ignorant of the language, which every well dressed pedestrian must run. Hard-hearted men assert that the oversupply is due to the laziness of the runners also, that coolies would rather wander about with a rickshaw than work all day at some steady labor. What will become of them when the street-cars arrive, for which the French were long ago granted a much-opposed franchise, is a question which men of higher intelligence than the runners themselves cannot answer. Yet they are coming; cement poles are already creeping into the Tartar City from the northwest, and rails are being piled up before the Forbidden City; unless Mukden outstrips her, Peking will be the first to follow foreign-influenced Tientsin and Shanghai by desecrating her streets with the ugliness and clamor of electric tramways. We are glad to have known the inimitable Chinese capital before they came.
The slowness of her man-drawn carriages and the dead flatness of Peking give an exaggerated impression of its size; everything seems farther away than it really is. In my school-days we used to hear wild tales about this being the largest city in the world. Perhaps it has a million inhabitants, though eight hundred and fifty thousand seems nearer the mark. There is no “squeeze” to be had out of a census, however, and guesses will probably continue to be the only available information on that point for years to come. A one-story city with the courtyard habit, to say nothing of enormous palaces and monuments that scarcely shelter a human being each, and of big vacant spaces even inside its principal wall, can hardly vie with New York and London, however like rats many of its people may live. In what we foreigners call the Chinese City there is a maze of shops and dwellings outside the three south gates of the capital proper, human warrens here and there, swarming sidewalk markets by night as well as crowded rows of booths by day; but vast graveyards, cultivated fields, even great unoccupied areas take up much of this secondary enclosure, not to mention the huge domains of the Temples of Heaven and of Agriculture, playgrounds now of those with the price of admission, with tea and soda-water and pumpkin seeds served almost on the very spot where the Son of Heaven so long held his annual vigil.
Distressing are many of the noble monuments that make Peking justly famed the world over, not merely because of the ruins they are becoming under an anarchistic republican régime, but by reason of the rabble that is permitted to overrun and defile so many of them. Ragged beggars masquerading as caretakers beset the visitor in almost all of them; foreigners, or Chinese with money but without influence, may still be required to pay their way into Pei-Hai and the Summer Palace, but once inside they find themselves jostled and gaped upon by loafing soldiers and ill-mannered roustabouts whom the gate-keepers have not the power or the moral courage to exclude. How long before imperial Peking will be but another Baalbek or Nineveh, for all the busy streets that surround it, is another subject for guessing.
We found few soldiers in Peking, however, compared with such places as Mukden, and those are still curbed in a way that would bring gasps of astonishment from their fellows in the provinces. Before the Boxer days Peking had no police force in the Western sense; to-day the little stations are as numerous as in Japan, while the white-legginged gendarmes under a Norwegian general stroll the principal streets in pairs, with drawn bayonets and an eye especially to the protection of foreigners. We have tried in vain to impress upon our friends at home that Peking is safer than any city we know of in our own land. A lone woman not even speaking the language, and bespangled with jewels if you like, can go anywhere in Peking, whether on foot or with a rickshaw coolie picked up at random, at any hour of the day or night, without the ghost of a chance of being molested, to say nothing of running any real danger. They are a curious people, the Chinese. They will often starve with riches within easy grasp rather than screw up their courage to an act of violence, as they will display the cheerfulness of contentment far beyond the point where Westerners would have even a transparent mask of it left. There is something uncanny, if we ever paused to think of it, in being so well protected by a police force whose meager wages are many months in arrears; and the petty graft they inflict upon foreign residents may almost be justified. Their task is greatly lightened, of course, by the pacifist temperament of the Chinese; but criminal, even violent, characters cannot be lacking even in Peking. Punishments are still drastic, after the Chinese custom. Out toward Tungchow and over beside the outer wall of the Temple of Heaven groups of men are frequently shot, and they are by no means all assassins. When the invasion from beyond the Great Wall was being repelled last spring and bullets were singing across our corner of the city, the police were instructed to punish with summary execution anything suggestive of looting. A Chinese of some standing, friendly with several foreigners of our acquaintance, went up broad Hata-men Street to borrow a few dollars from an exchange-shop that had often favored him with small loans. The proprietor happened to be out, and the youth in charge did not know the client. “Oh, that’s all right,” the borrower assured him; “your master always lets me have small sums when I need them, and I am in a hurry.” He picked up a few dollars, jotted the amount down on a slip of paper, and started away. The youth shouted, the police came running up, and although the proprietor appeared at that moment and identified the prisoner as an old friend who had acted in no way improperly, a headless corpse was left lying in the dust before the shop.
There are incredible contrasts, too, among the scenes past which the pony and I jog on our afternoon jaunts. Legation guards of half a dozen nationalities play their boyish games almost across the street from rag-pickers who are scarcely distinguishable from the garbage-heaps out of which they somehow claw a livelihood. Along “Piccadilly,” as foreigners call what is “Square Handkerchief Alley” to the Chinese, we can easily imagine ourselves in the days of Kublai Khan; and around the corner from it the Wai-chiao-pu is a more modern foreign office, outwardly at least, than London, Washington, or Paris can muster. Beneath the “Four P’ai-lous” motor-cars speed north and south while barbaric funeral processions crawl under them from the west between two long rows of squealing pigs, resenting the cords that bind their four legs together and the discourtesy with which they are tumbled about by sellers and purchasers. City gates like mammoth office buildings tower above long vistas of lowly human dwellings; lotuses bloom on the lake of the Winter Palace, and the visitor thither is pursued by all but naked mendicants—yao-fan-ti (want-rice-ers) the Chinese call them in their kinder language. Sumptuous private cars stand before most modern buildings, and Peking street-sprinklers, consisting of two men and a bucket, with a long-handled wooden dipper, attempt to lay the dust about them. We remember these sprinklers only too well, “Hwei-Hwei” and I, for during the winter the sprinkling turned to ice almost as it fell, and our progress was a kind of equestrian fox-trot. But for them, and the water-carriers whose screeching wheelbarrows drip so incessantly, Peking streets would be easy going the year round, for the whole winter’s snow has been but a napkin or two that faded away almost as it fell. Nor have I ever known a genuine Peking dust-storm, though I have seen the air and the heavens, the inmost recesses of my garments and my food, even the contents of locked trunks, filled with those flying particles of her own filth and her surrounding semi-desert which the capital of Kublai Khan has always charged against the distant Gobi. Old residents tell us that this season’s dust-storms have been unusually rare, but my family was vouchsafed one of the first magnitude during my absence. A welcome wind blew all one hot spring night, and only in the morning was it discovered that it had carried volumes of dust with it, so that the sleepers looked as if they had been traveling across Nevada for a week without so much as a wet cloth available, and everything from hair to mattress-covers had to be washed at once, which was particularly difficult with the blowing dust obscuring the sun for several days to come.
Often our way through a city gate or along a narrow street is made disagreeable by passing wheelbarrows filled to over-slopping with the night-soil of the city—sewers being as great a luxury as running water in most Peking households. This is dried along the outside of the city walls and distributed among the vegetable-gardens which, protected from the north by rows of tall reed wind-breaks, take up much of the land immediately outside the city. It goes without saying that the use of chloride of lime is as fixed a habit in the kitchens of foreign residents as boiling our drinking-water. The Chinese cannot understand why Westerners persist in wasting the richest substitute for potash, spending money to have it destroyed instead of gaining money by selling it. Sometimes the foreigners are converted to the Chinese point of view; I know at least one American mission school which supports two of its girls on what it contributes to the fertility of the neighboring fields.
But it is not difficult to forget all such drawbacks when one looks down upon Peking from her mammoth wall or the lonely eminence called Coal Hill. Obviously “Hwei-Hwei” cannot climb Mei-shan; it is bad enough to have outside barbarians of the human kind looking down upon the golden-yellow roofs of the Forbidden City. This is not especially forbidden now, with more than half of it open to the ticket-buyer, and the rest hardly free from intruding politicians and their protégés. But there still hovers an atmosphere of mystery, of something mildly akin to the Arabian Nights or the Middle Ages, about the northern end of the enclosure, within the moat in which coolies gather submerged hay and set up fish-traps, and above which tourists shriek their delights from Peking’s lone hill, even from airplanes. For, sadly shrunken as it is, the imperial Manchu dynasty still holds forth within.
China is, I believe, the only republic on earth with an emperor. It was stipulated in the agreement of 1912 between the imperial court and the republican party that the emperor should keep his title, his imperial abode, and certain other privileges, should receive a large annual allowance from the Government for the upkeep of his court and household, and should “always be treated by the Republican Government with the courtesy and respect which would be accorded to a foreign sovereign on Chinese soil.” Thus the young man who, as a child, abdicated the dragon throne can still go and sit on it any afternoon that it pleases his fancy to do so. Perhaps no such caprices come into his head, for if we are to believe his English tutor he is wise, as well as regally polished, beyond his years, and does not really consider himself emperor. He has lived in the imperial palace of the Forbidden City ever since he was actually Manchu sovereign of China, however, and is still accorded imperial honors there. Any one who rises early enough may meet Manchu courtiers in ceremonial dress, a trifle shabby, their red-tassel-covered hats still not entirely out of place in modern Peking, jogging homeward on their lean ponies from an imperial audience at the unearthly hour at which these have been held in China for centuries.
Most Chinese have several different names, and emperors are no exception to this rule. There is a “milk name” during infancy, a hao, or familiar name by which one is afterward known to one’s intimates, a school name, a business name, finally, but not lastly, in the case of an emperor, a throne name or dynastic title. But though the present occupant of the Forbidden City has such a name, to wit: Hsuan T’ung, even this cannot be freely used; you cannot call a man to the billiard-table by his dynastic title. The names by which we know former emperors of China are really their “reign titles” and not personal patronymics. This left the present head of the Ch’ing dynasty handicapped, for, not being a real sovereign in spite of his legally imperial title, and unable to have a reign title at least until he is dead, there was no name by which he could be properly and generally called, whether to dinner or to an audience. Being a sensible young man, of modern rather than reactionary tendencies and by no means hostile to foreign influence, noting moreover that not only do foreigners who remain long in China have a Chinese name but that Western sovereigns have personal appellations, he decided to take a foreign name. The fact that his foreign tutor is an Englishman may or may not account for the fact that he has chosen to be called “Henry.”
Those who have seen him describe “Emperor Henry” as a tall, slender young man who is still growing, with the Chinese calligraphy of an artist and some of the poetic gifts of his imperial ancestor known as Ch’ien Lung. Not merely does he wield a wicked brush in both the classic and the modern colloquial Chinese, now and then having a poem published under an assumed name in a Peking paper, but he writes a very legible English with pen or pencil. His English speech is described as slow but correct, with a strong British accent. He reads newspapers voraciously and is said to be unusually well abreast of the times, both at home and abroad, for his years. His greatest single blow to date against tyrannical conservatism, however, and the mightiest example of his progressive tendencies occurred last spring at one fell swoop—he had his cue cut off. The three imperial dowagers and his two distinguished old Chinese or Manchu tutors tore what was left of their own hair in vain. “Henry” was determined to be up-to-date even if he is confined in one end of the once Forbidden City. The result is that for the first time in nearly three hundred years there is hardly a pigtail left within the Purple Wall, though the two old tutors, as a silent protest against what they consider an act of disloyalty to the traditions of “his Majesty’s” house, still wear their cues.