Rain began to fall, putting terror into the heart of my “boy,” convinced like most Chinese, at least of the north, that he was merely a pillar of salt—or is it sugar? But the donkey-man was made of sterner stuff. A positive word was always enough to make him push on, and it was quite immaterial whether the “boy” followed or flung himself over a precipice. This time, however, the shower became a deluge that showed no signs of abating. All the region had fled for shelter. One wrinkled coolie had monopolized a little wayside shrine, in which he sat in the cramped posture of the Buddha, literally in the lap of the gods, serenely smoking his pipe until they chose to let him go on again. By the time we were soaked through it was evident that we also must take refuge, and give up the hope of cutting the record from Malanyü to Jehol down to three days.
The only stopping-place available was a peasant home that offered accommodations to passing coolies. It boasted the name of Hsiao Pai Shu, but then, every spot in China where human beings dwell has a name, and this one after all meant nothing more than “Little White Tree.” If it had been called “Unworthy Human Pigsty” there would have been less reason to quarrel with the man who named it. There was a kind of k’ang in one of the three mud stables, but to have demanded that would have been to drive even my own men out and leave nothing but the bare earth for a score of fellow-refugees to sleep on. I won the whole race of outside barbarians a new reputation, therefore, by setting my cot on the ground at the foot of the k’ang and leaving that free for all the coolies who could crowd upon it. But I paid for my heroism through other senses than those of smell and hearing, for not the slightest movement did I make, not a possession did I withdraw from my baggage, that half a hundred eyes did not delve into the utmost depths of my personal privacy. No Westerner who has not himself had the experience can conceive of the ingenuous meddling which a crowd of low-caste Chinese can inflict upon him; but it is ingenuous after all, and those few naïve remarks of which I caught the meaning made me deeply regret that I was incapable of understanding the respectful chatter that constantly called attention to my innumerable extraordinary idiosyncrasies.
At Hsi-nan-tze, still sixty li from Jehol, a police soldier was sent running for more than a mile after me to ask for my card. It was early, and evidently the town had been slow in waking up to the fact that a foreigner was passing through. Plainly this was an unusual occurrence, but there was no suggestion of detaining me, either here or at the village where we made the usual breakfast-lunch stop from ten to eleven, in which a similar courteous request was made. A visiting-card, as I have said before, has a weight in China out of all keeping with the ease with which any one can have it printed. The fourth hard climb of the trip, up a trench-like trail slippery as new ice from the rain of the day before and almost impassable with pack-animals sprawling and sliding under ungainly burdens, uncovered such a panorama of wrinkled blue mountain ranges entirely around the horizon as even the perpetual wanderer seldom sees equaled. Then we descended among bare foot-hills and plodded the last half-day down a wide sandy and stony river valley, with one poled ferry and several wadings across the swollen yellow rivulet which wandered along it. Several earth-and-branch bridges had been partly carried away and were being repaired in the same time-honored, inadequate style; that is, the huge baskets filled with stones that served as almost continuous pillars were having more branches and kaoliang-stalks laid across them and covered with treacherous loose earth. No other nation has the genius of the Chinese for doing some things in the worst way. There was a continual procession, for instance, of carts heavily loaded with grain and drawn by five to seven mules each, the wickedly exhausted animals staggering through the deep sand and the deeper rivulet panting as if they were in the final throes. The Lwan Ho on which the grain is shipped to the coast washes the edge of Jehol, and the boats could as easily tie up at the very foot of the warehouses; but the carters’ gild required them to anchor twenty-five li down the stream! Not even our own labor-unions could exhibit anything to outrival this sacrificing of the general good to the selfishness of a group.
Jehol is a compact, unwalled town lying prettily up the slope of a hollow between two foot-hills, brightened by a few spring-green trees here and there above its low gray roofs and surrounded on all sides by beautiful broken ranges. The region is famous for curious natural features, the most striking of which is the “Clothes’ Beater,” a mammoth rock looking precisely like that aid to the Chinese washerwomen who squat at the edges of streams or mud-holes, or an Irishman’s shillalah, standing bolt upright on its smaller, handle end, and visible more than a day’s travel away in almost any direction. But while the scenery is magnificent and the town busy and prosperous, the fame of Jehol is due to the imperial summer palaces and the lama temples that grew up about them, as did the town itself. This whole territory, originally Mongol, was given as the dowry of a Mongol wife to a Manchu emperor of China. K’ang Hsi, who died just two hundred years ago, was the first of the Ch’ing dynasty to visit the region, of which he grew very fond. He hunted throughout it, riding also on an ass—the cost of keeping which is said to have been paid regularly out of the imperial treasury until the revolution! Yung Cheng, who succeeded him, met here the mother of his own successor, the famous Ch’ien Lung, who was born at Jehol. Perhaps I should say the alleged mother, for there has always been a strong suspicion that the brilliant Ch’ien Lung was really a Chinese boy switched at birth for a girl born to the empress or concubine in question. At any rate the bare, half-ruined cottage in which he is recorded to have been born is still standing in the wooded hills beyond the imperial summer palace.
This is enclosed within a great wall on a minor scale which clambers over the hills as easily as it stalks across broad flatlands, several miles in extent and still in almost perfect repair. The same can by no means be said, however, of the former palaces inside it. Time, the elements, and particularly the wanton hand of man have reduced them to the saddest state among all the decaying remains of imperial China. The simpler structures near the gates, no doubt built for minor retainers and servants, are occupied by the “Tartar General” and his far-famed “I-Chün” troops, semi-autonomous rulers of this “special area,” and have been more or less kept up accordingly. But the erstwhile palaces scattered beyond the immense half-wooded meadows behind these, to which a soldier guide conducts the few “distinguished visitors” who have credentials, influence, or assurance enough to pass the gates, are synonymous with the word “dilapidation.” A single building has remained comparatively intact, because it is made of solid bronze. Structures that must in their heyday have equaled except in size anything in Peking are mere tumbled ruins of rotten timbers, collapsed roofs, and broken tiles still bearing their glorious Chinese colors. Some of the mammoth gods with which the place seems once to have been overpopulated have survived almost intact in more durable shelters, like the remnants of a fallen dynasty that had their refuges carefully chosen long before the catastrophe came. Others were less fortunate, or foresighted, and, left out in the open by fallen roofs, they are gruesome testimonials that the most brilliant and the most terrifying alike of Chinese gods are but statues of mud. A striking pagoda still stands high above all else except the higher hills within the enclosure, but only the foolhardy climb it now, and the great cluster of temples which seem once to have risen among the venerable evergreens about it have corrupted almost beyond the possibility of identification. A carved stone, in the front rank among Chinese tablets, one whole face of it covered with a Tibetan text, is the only thing that stands erect and defiant against the forces of destruction.
Great numbers of the magnificent old trees that once made the parks a forest have been recklessly destroyed, but the velvety stretches of grass survive, and on this graze the descendants of deer brought here long before America had thought of throwing off European allegiance. No one was agreed on the number that dot the enclosure, for statistics are not at home in China; but the average of the guesses was about seven hundred, of which I certainly saw half in my stroll through the grounds. There must surely be some powerful superstition as well as mere orders against their destruction, in a land where even dead camels are consumed with such apparent relish. There is a shallow lake within the palace wall, on which some of the sturdier emperors are reputed to have tried their amateur skill at paddling and poling, but one suspects that they spent more time on the little island with its artificial rock hillocks and soughing pine-trees overlooking it. There is a warm spot in this lake which never freezes over, it is said, whence the name Jehol, which means “Hot River,” and, thanks to the often inexplicable Romanization of Chinese which has come down to us from an earlier generation of foreign residents, is pronounced “Jay-hole” by tourists and uncorrected bookworms; others do their best to approximate two guttural Chinese noises which might somewhat better have been spelled “Ruh-Hur.”
The dozen or more great temples scattered along the valley across the river from the palace grounds are still occupied by a few lamas and are in a somewhat better state of preservation. Ch’ien Lung built most of them, beginning just beneath his birthplace and stretching on into the hills, whence delightful views of Jehol and all its region may be had for the climbing. The emperors who summered out here beyond the Great Wall were Manchus, kin to the race of Kublai Khan, and the temples are not Chinese but Mongol, which means a world of difference in spite of many similarities. Lamas who still claim to be Mongol, and who certainly are not purely Chinese either in features or manner, dawdle through their useless lives in them, making out as best they can without the imperial aid that disappeared with the revolution, including such sums as they can wheedle or bluff out of the baker’s half-dozen of foreign visitors a year, including anything, in fact, this side of actual work. In their halcyon days these temples must have been more than impressive; they are still that in their decline. In the “Temple of the 508 Buddhas” that number of life-size wooden images gilded to look like well aged golden statues stretch away down dark aisle after dim musty passageway to approximate infinity. There are fat and merry, thin and esthetic, sour and licentious, imposing and silly Buddhas among these 508 yellow-robed figures seated with their spirit-tablets and incense-bowls before them; every vice and virtue, every mental, moral, and physical characteristic of the human race is depicted here as exactly as the art and the breadth of experience with mankind of the Oriental artificers made possible. There is a temple filled with similar figures near Peking, but it is small compared with that of Jehol. Mammoth gold dragons gambol up and down the golden roof of another sanctuary; one entire building is taken up by a gigantic female Buddha riding a dog-like monster; figures that would terrify a nervous child out of its wits glare out from many a half-lighted interior; a man whose tastes and training ran that way could easily find material for a whole fat volume on Tibetan-Mongol art and lamaism within this stretch of a mile or two along the Lwan Ho. The tallest of the temples contains a standing Buddha several stories high, with forty-two hands, each bearing a different gift—whether for mankind as a whole or merely for the lamas was not clear. The figure, said to be made of a single tree-trunk, is larger than that which so often startles tourists at the Lama Temple in Peking, and it is identical, according to the reasonably intelligent chief guardian, with those of Urga and Lhasa. The face is of the same maidenly simplicity as that in the Mongol capital, but the edifice was much less filled to semi-suffocation with the almost gruesome paraphernalia which makes the ascent of Ganden like a peep into the barbaric heart of the Tibetan-Mongol religion.
The climax, however, of the sights about Jehol, at least to the average Westerner, is the Potalá, said to be an exact copy, on a smaller scale, of that great heap of buildings in Lhasa which so few white men have seen. It stands just over the river from the palace grounds, a striking feature in a notable landscape. There must be a dozen structures in all, so close one above another as to seem, until one is among them, joined together into one mammoth pile covering a whole hillock. In general color they are pinkish, except where the plaster has fallen off, with the huge square structure at the top a dull, weather-worn red. This is in appearance five stories high, with as many large superimposed shrines and long rows of false windows on the face of it; and, the visitor finds at last, when a dozen lamas with as many bunches of medieval keys have escorted him to the summit of the long climb, it is roofless, a mere wall surrounding the most sacred of the temples. Within, if the seekers after cumshaw who constantly surrounded and kept their eyes upon me are truthful, two services a day have been held without a break since Ch’ien Lung built the Potalá a century and a half ago. Two of the older, half-dignified lamas claimed to have been in Lhasa, and they asserted that even in its minor decorations this was an exact replica of the chief temple of the Dalai Lama, pointing out the spots where he stood or sat during ceremonies in the original. The holy of holies, which opened at the gleam of small silver, may indeed be the equal, except in size, to anything in Lhasa; with its remarkable tapestries, its enamel pagoda, golden Buddhas of every size, and all the sacred paraphernalia of lamaism, there is an impressiveness about it that is in keeping with what the imagination pictures the mysterious Tibetan capital to be.
Two emperors of China died at Jehol, and the court fled here when the Allies entered Peking in 1860, as that of the Dowager and her favorite eunuch did to Sian-fu in 1900. Hsien Feng, half-forgotten husband of that notorious old virago of Boxer days, was the second Hoang-ti to die here, just as our Civil War was beginning, and no emperor has ever come to Jehol since the son who succeeded him at four years of age fled a place of such sad memories and evil spirits. Thus the once favorite summer home of the Manchu emperors, tossed aside like a plaything of a petulant child with too many toys, has fallen into the decay in which the rare visitor of to-day finds it.
If there is one thing more than another that arouses my ire it is to be mistaken for a person of importance; yet that is exactly what happened to me in Jehol. Perhaps any foreigner so far off the foreign trail, particularly after he and his kind had been specifically warned to keep away, would have been considered somebody, but to make matters worse I had been officially requested, just as I was leaving Peking, to allow myself to be called a special investigator of the antiopium league. I should not be expected, it was explained, to do anything more than bear the title; no one would dare actually to investigate the mountain recesses beyond Jehol in which every one knows the stuff is grown, let alone a new-comer who could not tell a poppy-sprout from a radish. But the League of Nations wanted to be told that a foreigner had been sent to visit each suspected district, and as no one else seemed to be going that way my name would fill the dotted line as well as any other.