\N bio QforneU Ittioctaitg ffiibrarg 3tl(ata, Ntm Jprk CHARLES WILLIAM WASON COLLECTION CHINA AND THE CHINESE THE GIFT OF CHARLES WILLIAM WASON CLASS OF 1876 1918 "Hie date shows when this volume was taken. Cornell University Library DS 795.W56 "Where Chineses drive. " :English student 3 1924 023 488 590 The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924023488590 ^^C^^c <« '/3 WX\itxt 7 a lantern, the other with a spear. I speak as a scribe in this matter, though. Anyhow, there is a story that the man in front once found the back gate of the Lega- tion open, and was so struck by the fact, that he dropped his lantern and fled. The other man thought he was an unauthorised intruder, and was going for him ; but he explained things, and then they went toge- ther to the escort man, whose house was near the gate, and roused him to an interest in the affair. When he came to look more carefully into it, he found that most of his possessions had departed with the thieves — his new uniform among them. But burglaries were, on the whole, happily rare. Once, indeed, thieves had the hardihood to try and get into the strong-room, and, being foiled by the lock, had apparently attempted to remove the door bodily. Such clumsy methods as this, though, do not com- mend themselves to a Chinaman; at least, not to a southerner. A case of theft from an hotel was up before the Hong-Kong Criminal Court, I believe, it was. The complainant had lost his watch, and gave evidence that he had left it on the dressing-table when he went to bed. The hotel-keeper declared he was not liable, in- asmuch as the plaintiff ought to have put it under his pillow. "Nonsense," exclaimed the judge, " I always leave mine in the watch-case at the head of my bed. . . . In fact," he added, as he felt in his waistcoat-pocket, " I 've left it there now. I don't see the necessity for putting it under the pillow. The hotel-keeper is re- sponsible, undoubtedly." The case ended, the judge returned home, and was met by his wife. 48 WEEEE GHINESE8 BBIYE. " My dear, what has possessed you to-day ? Twenty Chinamen have been round, at the very least, saying that you wanted your watch, and had left it in the pocket at the head of your bed." "What ! " exclaimed the judge, beginning to feel a little uncomfortable. " Well, what did you do ? " " Why," answered the lady simply, " I gave it to the first of them, of course." There is a certain analogy between this and a story current along the coast. The Chief Justice of Hong- Kong was trying a case in court, and had just com- menced his summing-up. He was suddenly aware of a slight commotion in the court-room, and, looking up from his notes, saw a coolie carrying a ladder. He paused, and glared at the intruder : then sent the inter- preter to inquire his business. The coolie said he had come to fetch the clock away for repairs. The Chief Justice had not noticed much the matter with it ; and, anyway, why come for it at such an inconvenient time ? Meanwhile, the coolie carefully adjusted his ladder, mounted it with great deliberation, one step at a time, and proceeded to slowly unfasten the clock. The Chief Justice chafed visibly at the delay, until at last he lost patience, rose, and ordered clock and man to be turned out of court. The coolie deposited his ladder — one attached to the premises — in the yard, wrapped the clock up carefully in a blue cotton handkerchief, thrust a stick through the bundle, and went slowly down the street. Days passed, and nothing more was seen of clock or coolie. In fact, nothing has been seen of either up to the present, and, as they have both been absent for EVBOPBAN PEKING: EARLY DUTIES. 49 some years now, the probability is, nothing will. The Chief Justice, however, never afterwards encouraged larceny in open court. I think, on the whole, that the China boy (to come back to him) is fairly honest : he expects to make a profit on everything he buys for you, it is true, but a European servant could hardly cast the first stone here, perhaps, and, besides, this is strictly in accordance with Chinese customs. If a place is to be found in the scale of domestic servancy (' servitude ' would convey a false impression quite — except of the condition of the masters) for the "boy," he would certainly rank degrees above the scout or gyp : he is cleaner and tidier, and only abuses you behind your back. If you have a wine on, he cannot listen (or understand, if he does) and carry reports to the dean's staircase that may be pro- ductive of disharmony. And you have a pull over him that you certainly have not over the other. You have missed a bottle or two of wine. You call the boy and ask for the wine. He says you have drunk it, and brings the empty bottles in proof. You, feeling certain that you have not, say so, and cut his wages to the amount stolen. But suppose it is a scout in question. Hint that you are inclined to think that he must be mistaken, and, unless you are prepared to apologise, and " come down handsome," you'll get a lawyer's letter, threatening you with an action for defamation of cha- racter, or half-a-dozen other statutable offences. I am convinced that we do these things better in China. I am not prejudiced against cheap labour or the heathen. Indeed, some boys will do a great deal for their 4 50 WEEBE GHINE8E8 DRIVE. masters, waiting on them when suffering from an infec- tious fever with a careful attention that could hardly be surpassed. Such devotion — for only misanthropes or those one-idea'd people who prefer to take a worn-out epigram as a safe rule to judge men's (and especially Chinamen's) conduct by, would style it anything else — is often called for by kindness shown them in such ways as Chinese most appreciate. Wang san was an orphan, and had entered EUerby's service when only thirteen. EUerby felt for his desolate condition, and had him adopted by his head coolie. And when EUerby went home two years later, and proposed to take Wang san with him, he thought it would tend to keep him more steady if he were engaged ; and the adopted father and head coolie received orders accordingly. A little orphan girl of fourteen or so was selected, and all arranged. Just before they left, the boy came to EUerby and asked for ten dollars. EUerby observed that it was a large sum to want all at once : what was he going to do with it ? Wang san hesitated a little, then said it was for his father. EUerby afterwards asked the head coolie, who laughed, and said that Wang san had given him eight dollars, it was true : the other two went to buy presents for his betrothed, to console her for his going away. Wang san was a good boy, but perhaps a Uttle care- less. It was his duty to see that good water was sup- plied for drinking purposes at his master's, and this duty should have been light, as there was a very fair well not far off. But the water at EUerby's was not good. One day, as we were playing billiards, we thought we had EUROPEAN PEEING: EABLY DUTIES. 51 penetrated the mystery. We saw Wang san going jauntily away from the well with an old kerosine tin on his shoulder, into which his pigtail dipped as he walked. Then EUerby explained to Wang san the prejudices Westerns had against kerosine taken internally, and requested him to keep his queue more under control. The fondness the Chinese have for using up old tins and bottles is sometimes carried to excess. These relics, by the bye, the boy considers his perquisite, and makes a good thing out of them by selling them to the dealers in second-hand European goods. There is one such shop close to the Central Canal Bridge, where you may see whole rows of jam-pots or butter- tins, and, invading the footpath, an occasional bath or old lamp. The arrangement by which, as in the case of Wang san and the head coolie, father and son are both ser- vants in the same house, has much to recommend it. The Chinese father has a firm belief in personal correc- tion, and the son, from force of habit, submits to be belaboured for any peccadillo. Paley took on a new boy, quite a young fellow, and the son of his coolie. The first time the boy misbehaved, he was admonished by Paley ; the second, the coolie was sent for. " Been behaving badly, has he ? Son of a turtle ! " and he twisted his left hand firmly in his unhappy offspring's pigtail. " I '11 just beat him a bit." . . . Paley says the adroitness and power of concentration he showed while walking into that boy could only have been acquired by long practice. After this, the boy's conduct was most exemplary, as long as his father was coolie. When he left, the youth showed signs of falling away. 4) * 52 WHERE GHINE8ES DRIVE. This pained Paley very much, and he at once took mea- sures to check it : he sent out and secured the services of the boy's uncle, and thereby, as he said, insured for the future the harmony of his household. The boy, as I said, buys everything for you that you want from the Chinese shops, and sends in his bill at the end of each month. Here is a specimen : — Tea (for the Teacher) Blacking . Brush and dust-pan (made of withes) Duster Curtain-ring Eed felt (for window) Mending clothes „ pipe . „ lamp . Lamp-wick ,, oil (sesame) Basket Buttons Donkeys (hire of) Lantern . Hair-cutting " Peking Gazette " Bread Coals Dollars. Tiao. Pai. £ • s. d. _ 3 lOf — 3 — — — lOf 2 H — 2 3 — — 1 1 10 3 — 1 — — — 3f — 3 — — — 10^ — 6 1 18 — — 1 8* 3i __ ___ 6 — 1 — — ,_ 3f — 7 — — 2 2f . — 7 — — 2 2} — 5 — — 1 n — 2 — — — n — 8 — — 2 6 — 2 — — — n 8 — 1 9 4 8 81 3 2 14 3i The bills were all written in Chinese, and naturally unintelligible to a new comer. But the Chinese numerals were soon learnt, and then we used to make the boys bring a specimen of each item. It made you feel quite wealthy when you gazed at the array of dust-pans and EJJBOFEAN PEKING : EARLY DUTIES. 53 dish-cloths and other things he would surround you with. After a time, fuller knowledge dispensed with the ceremony. The tiao is equal to 500 small " cash," or 50 of the —nominally — larger city cash, one of the most disre- putable coins ever issued. The value of this, as com- pared with pure silver — and this is the Chinese standard — is continually altering, and consequently as the ex- change rate of Mexican dollars and sycee (pure silver) is fairly constant, the number of tiao in a dollar varies too. Of late it has been eleven or twelve, but a few years ago it was as low as eight, while in 1861 it was as high as fifteen. The fluctuations in value often seem most arbitrary, but, as a general rule, any large expenditure of silver in the palace (as during an Imperial funeral), will bring down the exchange : the economy said at present to be practised under the rule of the Empress Dowager, may account for the high rate that just now obtains. These are questions for a banker to settle, but, all the same, the boys keep a sharp look-out, as, since they are paid in dollars, but buy in cash, any alte- ration in the rate nearly affects them. We thought of striking an average, and making say 11|^ (11 tiao 5 pai : 10 pai going to the tiao) the rate for a twelvemonth. The boys made no objection until the exchange fell below 11.5 : then there was a chorus of murmurs, and we finally had to give way. Generally, the boy is amenable to reason, and if his charges are too heavy, quietly submits to have them cut down. Not always. Bertram and two friends went into the store to have some Chartreuse, and Fortune, in 54 WHERE GEINESE8 BEIYE. the form of the twirlimigig, decided that Bertram should pay, not once, but twice. Bertram is a careful man, and likes to know what he is let in for, so inquired. " Six glasses at 20 cents, $1.20." Now a whole bottle only cost $1.50, and, as Bertram pointed out, they had scarcely drunk a quarter of one. He would, there- fore, take a new bottle and return those six glasses. This he accordingly did, taking down half-a-dozen liqueur glasses from the shelf, and solemnly filling them. The boy in attendance, however, could not be brought to see the force of Bertram's argument, and looked despon- dently at the array of glasses and the two bottles, one of which Bertram was carefully corking and transferring to his pocket. Finally he gave way: " But the gentlemen had eaten sweets — 20 cents' worth." Bertram drew out his bottle, and slowly filled another glass. After that he left with the feeling that he had transacted his business in a manner equally just and satisfactory to both parties. Nevertheless, they decline to trade on those terms now at that store, and object to barter in any form. It does not seem to them to pay. Boys in Peking may be roughly divided into two classes : the Pekingese proper and the Tientsinese. The former class do not, as a rule, understand any language but their own : the latter speak some English, even write a Uttle, and understand a great deal. There may be different opinions as to the relative value of the two classes : for our part, we infinitely preferred the former. Indeed, this was so well known among the boys, that I remained for some five months in ignorance of the fact that my boy was really good at English, an(? EUROPEAN PEKING: EARLY DUTIES. 55 then it leaked out through the imprudence of a new domestic. We were discussing at dinner some pecca- dillo of the latter' s, and proposing suitable forms of punishment, thinking that what we said was not under- stood. Soon after dinner, however, the culprit went to his master with a string of excuses. As he had resolved to ignore the offence, he was naturally surprised. In- quiry promptly made led to the painful discovery I mentioned, and to a distrust of Enghsh-speaking boys. In the South you have no choice. There all the boys speak at any rate " pidgin." And they form almost a caste. This is due, naturally, to the system of mutual responsibility : you must either take a friend or acquain- tance of the other servants, or engage a stranger with- out security. The duties of a boy are defined rather negatively than positively. He will fetch you drinking-water, but he will not carry water for your bath ; he will go out and buy you a fan or a pen, but he will not carry a note for you. Such work as that is " coolie pidgin " — the duty of the man-of-all-work, who, with the cook and boy, is necessary to the smallest household in European China. A coolie's position and wages vary considerably. A head coolie is a person of some importance, and gets paid at much the same rate as a boy : an ordinary fetch- and-carry coolie would get some three or four dollars a month. A cook's wages range from six to ten dollars, or higher. I am speaking only of Peking : servants in the South, as a rule, I believe, get much more. But in Peking, at least in the Legation, certain allow- ances were made to the boys in addition to their wages. 56 WHEBE CSINESES DEIVE. In winter, while fires were required, an additional dollar a month for coal-money was given, and on the Chinese New Year's Day (which usually falls somewhere in Feb- ruary) half-pay for the month was added as a " cum- shaw " or tip. Again, it is customary for officials in China to give their servants what we called ' an official cap ' and a pair of ' official ' boots. The cap in summer is a conical hat of straw ; in winter, of black felt, or some such substance, conical still, but with the rim turned up for about two inches all round. In each case (except during times of mourning, public or private) it is topped with a long tassel of red silk or horse-hair. The boots are of black velvet, with the usual thick white sole, and come halfway up to the knee. Foreigners in the public service — as Consular officers, for instance — have adopted this custom, and twice every year the boys have a certain sum (usually three dollars) allowed as " boot and hat money." The day for paying this is settled according to notice from the Board of Ceremo- nies published in the " Gazette, " stating that on such a day the summer hat will be changed for the winter, or vice versa. In the South, some of the merchants deck out their servants in official hats, to the great amusement of the Chinese, who draw a very broad line between the mandarin and the trader. I remember seeing a ludi- crous instance of the practice at one of the ports, Shanghai I think it was. A European carriage drove by with native coachman and footman. Each had on the conical straw hat and red tassel, but in the middle of their backs was embroidered a large circle, and in it EUBOPEAN PEKING: EARLY DUTIES. 57 the name of the hong or firm in Chinese. It was as though — the parallel is not quite exact, perhaps, but it will serve — the Lord Mayor were to add to the official liveries of his attendants a bull's head or a triangle, with teade mark Registered about it, and below, a legend Brown's Tapioca is the Best! But enough of boys — the subject is too trying. Besides, I have said nothing yet about our work or our Teachers. I will turn over a new leaf. 58 WHUBE CMINE8E8 DRIVE. III. Teachees and Taught. With very few exceptions all Chinese surnames are monosyllabic. The surname is written j&rst and is fol- lowed by what corresponds nearly to our Christian-name. This may consist of one, but is usually a combination of two, of these monosyllabic characters. The order of arrangement is the same as in our Post Office Directories, where, for instance, the name Lee Hugh John would correspond, in form at any rate, to Li Hung Chang. The Chinese practice in putting the surname first comes partly from a well-grounded idea that you ought to pro- ceed from the general to the particular, and partly from the notion that, as they say, a man's surname belonged to his ancestor's, and more respect should be paid to it than to his own private name. And so it is not only written first, but written larger than the other two characters. Very few of our surnames can be represented in Chi- nese unaltered : names like May, Lang, or, in the south. King, which happen to correspond to some one or other of the four hundred and odd sounds that may be said to make up the Chinese language, are indeed the only ones admissible. At the same time, it is absolutely TEACHERS AND TAUGHT. 59 necessary that every European, in Peking, at any rate, should have a Chinese name : for the Chinese in all probability would never be able to even approximate to his own, and as regards the great majority of them they would be too prejudiced even to try, or too stupid. And so one of the first things that happens to the newly-arrived student is a sort of re-christening, in the course of which his original surname gets terribly mangled — at any rate, very much cut up. Say, for instance, that his name is Smith or Jones. The nearest approach to these sounds of which a Chinaman's mouth is capable would be respectively Ssii-mi-t^ and Chou-ni- ssii. Accordingly, Mr. Smith would be known as Ssii lao yeh, Mr. Ssu, while his Christian-name, as it were, would be Mi-te. Similarly, Jones would be labelled by a Chinaman as, " surname Chou, name Ni-ssu." All Chinese proper names have more or less of mean- ing, and in choosing an equivalent for your name you must be careful to take characters with a good sense — the more pseudo-humility and cant the better — and not ones that would appear ridiculous or offensive to a Chinaman. It used to be a common joke, they say, among the Chinese, to saddle unsuspecting foreigners with uncouth or contemptuous characters under pretence of providing them with name and surname. And so with their shop names : it is said that in those days you might go to look at some newly-opened foreign store in Hong-Kong, and find a crowd of admiring natives gazing at a signboard on which was written, in huge gilt cha- racters, some such legend as " The One-eyed Shrimp, Foreign Shop," or " Crab in a Kettle, Store-keeper." 60 WHERE 0RINESE8 DRIVE. To take the names Smith and Jones would bear : "Mi- te," by properly choosing the characters, would mean " Complete in moral worth," and " Ni-ssii," " Unre- gardful of self-interest." But a Chinaman has at least one other name besides the surname and name proper. Just as in the case of an individual named, for instance, Sydney Cecil Brown, the Registrar of Births will enter him with all due cir- cumstance as a boy (or, what is far more likely, as a girl) of that name, while his parents call him Sydney, and his associates Brown ; so a Chinaman is down in his Family Eecord, or in the Red Book, if he is an official, by his full name and surname, but only his father or mother would call him by the name proper. His friends give him a hao or " designation," half-way between the schoolboy nickname " Tommy Green " and the manlier "Brown," but derived from, or in some way connected with the sense of, his private name. So Jones's hao might be " Fu-te," " A supporter of virtue," and Smith's " Shou-ch'ien," " One who holds fast courtesy." I was reading some few months ago a paper in one of the Monthlies on English Christian-names. The writer called attention to a case in which twin girls were called Eose and Lily, and another where they were christened as Pearl and Euby. What he thinks most pretty — most artistic, in other words — was the giving to one set of twins the names of flowers, to another, the names of gems. Now the Chinese carry out this rule of art far more fully. The great majority of their characters con- sist of two parts, one giving the genus, the category to TEA.CHEBS AND TAVGHT. 61 which the idea expressed by the character is to be referred ; the other approximating to the sound. Take such expressions as " port-wine," " pine-wood," " water- shed," and invent symbols more or less pictorial for " wine," " wood," and "water," Find other symbols with the sounds " port," " pine," and " shed " (the meanings to be immaterial : they may, for instance, be those which the words bear in " a sea-port," " to pine for," or " a cow-shed "). Then combine the two into one symbol, and you get an idea of the formation of nine-tenths of the Chinese characters. Such terms as "water-spout," "water-fall," " water-wheel," or "hum- ming-bird," "mocking-bird," "love-bird" are the nearest approach, perhaps, to these. The Chinese founder of a family, then, will decide that all his de- scendants in one generation are to be called by names of gems ; in another, of flowers ; in a third, of trees ; in a fourth, of birds ; in a fifth, of virtues, and so on. It is not easy to find an exact parallel to all this in English, and more especially difficult in the case of our male Christian-names. But the arrangement would be much like this : (i) Jasper, Beryl, Pearl, Ruby ; (ii) Daisy, Violet, Lily, Eglantine ; (iii) Ivy, Myrtle ; (iv) Robin, Merle, Mavis ; (v) Hope, Prudence, Charity, and the like. Similarly, to follow out what would seem to us a more natural division of names proper : Zoe, Irene, Agatha, Hector, Philip ; Edwin, Edith, Edgar ; David, Ruth, Samuel, Miriam. Had we as much sense of congruity as the Chinese, we should hardly find in our registers such names as Keziah Lucy or Enid G-eorgina. If parents will give their first daughter a 62 WHERE OEINESES DBIVE. name like Henrietta, let them in future christenings continue in the same style — Charlotte, Wilhelmina, Ernestine, Thomasina. But I have (dreadful thought !) almost lapsed into a lecture, and nearly forgotten what I intended to talk about, the choice of a Chinese surname, not of an English Christian-name. In some cases this is fairly obvious. Mr. Coverdale would be Ko lao yeh ; Mr. Palmer, Pa lao yeh. But for various reasons it often happens that men are not known by the Chinese equiva- lent of the sound of the first syllable in their names. In the Consular Service, for instance, a distinct character is given to each member to prevent confusion. The consequence of this is that men get names assigned to them that in no way suggest the foreign surname, and sometimes represent no foreign sound — such as, for example, Nge — and you are in the awkward and anomalous condition of not knowing how to pronounce your own name. There were two brothers in China named Martin, and as neither could take the whole of their patronymic, they agreed to share it, and were known as Ma and Ting respectively. But it vexed the uninitiated who wanted to find where the second brother lived. One man whose name was Robinson took at first the Chinese sound Lo ; but finding there were half a dozen men in the port with names like Eoberts, Rhodes, or Lawson, that had already led them to choose that character, resolved to find some name that should be peculiarly his own ; so he consulted his dictionary, and sent round a circular to say that he would hence- forth answer to the name of Ch'ien only. It caused TEACHERS AND TAUGHT. 63 deep heart-burnings among the other six Lo's, but the business of the port was not much disturbed. With natives as washermen, it was as well to mark all linen with the Chinese character chosen for your surname. Where coloured things came in, especially if the pattern were of a gaudy and remarkable . nature, this was of less consequence ; but the omission in the case of white clothes was incompatible with a strict sense of the rights of property. Circumstances had reduced me once to two pairs of white socks, and occasion seemed to require the wearing of them. I took a pair. The first sock slipped on easily enough — indeed, somewhat too easily ; the effect was as if I had stepped into a pillow-case in a fit of somnambulism. The second sock, however, stuck fast at my ankle, and refused to budge. I was driven to my last pair. One of these fitted with an accuracy that revived hopes — to be stified at once by the appearance of the other. As old point-lace, or a cotton onion-bag, it would have been of value, perhaps ; but as a foot-covering it was a distinct and distressing failure. . . I spread those socks out in a commanding position and reviewed them. One of them was mine. I recognized it by a great blob of ink that does duty for my initials. The other three were marked iv. © 3 V. G. 9 E. A. 2. 70. The was O'Hara's ; no one else could have shown an equal combination of ingenuity and neatness. The second obviously belonged to Gordon ; but the E. A. 2. 70 64 WEEBE QHINESE8 BEIVE. puzzled me. I became interested and made inquiries. The sock was finally traced back to a student of five generations— or say ten years — before, who had left it, apparently, as an heirloom to the Mess. The common equivalent for " Mr." was the lao yeh I have used three or four times. Literally translated, it reads " old grandfather." But anyone of, or above, the rank of a Consul had the term tajen, " great man," substituted for this. The wife of a fa jen is a t'di-t'ai, and this, pace Mr. Griles (Glossary, p. 141), is applied to all European married ladies, whether their husbands are officials or private persons. Paley, who indulges occasionally in philological disquisitions, drew a strange and startling deduction from this. He pointed out that as t'ai meant " too," t'di-t'ai could only be translated "too too." We assented reluctantly, chiefly for the sake of peace. But when he went on to declare that, since the Chinese had called a lady t'ai t'ai long before the ultra-utter school had described their heroines as " too too," therefore the soul of a dead Chinaman must possess Oscar Wilde, we rose, as one man and protested. As officials, however humble, of a friendly Power, we could not sit quietly and listen to so grave an aspersion on the Chinese people or their ancestral ghosts. An unmarried lady has the affix ku-niang added to her Chinese surname, while a missionary or a clergy- man generally is known as hsien-sheng {" elder born "), or teacher. And this brings me at last, by a round- about way enough, to the subject of Chinese teachers. Each student is provided, soon after his arrival, with one of these men, and provides himself, quocunque modo TEAOHEBS AND TAUGHT. 65 (for the book has long been out of print) with a copy of Sir T. Wade's "Colloquial Course," the well-known Tzii-Srh Chi, which is now, if not the only, at any rate the orthodox, introduction to the study of Pe- kingese. About this time the student will probably have an interview with the Assistant Chinese Secretary, who more particularly directs his studies, and will receive from him a Scheme of Work for the next few months. Working hours are theoretically from 9 to 12, and 1 to 4, but custom has altered these to 10 to 12 and 2 to 4. The four hours thus left will be divided up in the Scheme much in this way : 10 to 10.30 Tone Exercises 10.30 to 11 Beading with Teacher 11 to 11.30 New work 11.30 to 11.45 Writing 11.45 to 12 Character Slips, the Afternoon Scheme being much the same. . There was a certain mystery about the Scheme that fascinated me when I first saw it. What were " Tone Exercises" and " Character Slips" ? A sea bath and a rub down with a rough towel seemed to about meet the requirements of the first; the other suggested a faux pas. But I found it all out, and too soon for my comfort. I mentioned, I think, that there are only some four hundred and odd distinct sounds, as we should transcribe them, in the Chinese language. As there are, say, ten thousand words, many of these should have the same sound. As a matter of fact they have ; but by an ingenious system of inflexions of the voice, the number of separate sounds — to a Chinese ear, at least — -is more than trebled. These inflexions are the Tones. In Peking 6 66 WHERE GEINE8ES DRIVE. there are only four of them, but in the South those who are knowing in such matters declare there are twelve or more. In fact, southern Sinologues look out for a new tone as astronomers do for a new planet ; and an an- nouncement may soon be expected to appear in this form : " Our readers will be delighted to hear that the labours of Dr. Ernst, the eminent Sinologue, have been crowned with complete success. By means of his new instrument, which, it will be remembered, is an ingenious combination of a microphone and a phonograph, he has been enabled to detect a new tone in the Kakka dialect. He has submitted the plate on which the new tone is preserved to the distinguished musician, Herr Franz, for analysis. This makes the seventeenth tone known to be used among the Kakkas, and the discovery of no less than six of these is due to the indefatigable industry of Dr. Ernst." In Peking, as I said, there are only four, and for the sake of future students I hope no more will be invented or discovered. It is agreed that it is almost impossible to convey any notion of these tones to one who has never heard them. But some idea of their importance may be gathered from an instance or two. Take the sound fang, which by itself is meaningless, and run it through the tones, thus : fdng^ t'dng^ t'dng^ t'dn^ The first means ' soup ' (originally ' hot water ') ; the second, ' sugar ' ; the third, to ' lie down ' ; the fourth, to ' burn ' or ' scald ' the hand, T-tzu in the second tone is ' soap ' ; i-tzii, in the third, ' a chair.' TEAOHEBS AND TAUGHT. 67 Again, in the case of words beginning witli the initials ch, k, p, t, or ts, it makes all the difference whether they are followed by an aspirate or not. Bertram has a little daughter who was born in China, and speaks Chinese as well as English, and, in fact, prefers it to English as being easier, (Perhaps her view is not altogether incorrect, by-the-bye, as ch'e is a simpler sound, for instance, than 'perambulator.') Bertram, however, does not go in for the niceties of the language, and so, when in the small child's hearing he one day told his boy to shang fien}, where he meant to have said shang t'ien^, she was puzzled. After thinking it over for some time, she said, " Papa, what for tell boy go up sky ? " Shang t'len?- means to ' ascend to heaven ' ; shang fien^ merely, to ' go to an inn.' As these tones, then, were justly considered of the first importance, we were required for an hour or so every day to drone after a teacher : «!

fi<. TEACEBB8 AND TAUGHT. 81 Invitation in the handwriting of Sung Ku-niang to a Wine Party to he given by her Father.* 4, 3. 2. 1. His Lantino Ching jewelled his lao-ye person honoured BXmG for thither younger CHAN- CHI his This brother knocks exalted he will his consideration hopes on head and that He thus day now sends he proposes earnestly in hopes the eighth lay moon Handed aside on in his the seventeenth on work day the twelfth and at day move the T'ung-hsing of the eighth Eooms moon a slight refection [The numbers 1 to 4 refer to the corresponding colnmua in the Chinese note, counting from the right.] * This invitation, written on an ordinary visiting .card, is very informal, doubtless as being addressed to an intimate friend and one younger than the host. The usual letter of invitation is a sheet of red paper, with the legend, written or printed — "HeedfuUy chosen is the [4th] hour of the [17th] day of the [8th] moon whereon to cleanse the cups and await "TOUE GLORY, A note with the salutation of [Sung Chan- chi]." This is enclosed in an envelope, sealed with a slip of paper, on which is inscribed the name of the guest. The words " honoured younger brother," are properly " cherry-r terrace," " terrace " being analogous to, but of far wider applica- , 6 WHERE GHINESES BBIVE. pointless, moral and all, to monogamic Englishmen), and gave it me to read. She really wrote most beauti- fully, and he said she embroidered equally well. I fancy she used to rule his house from what he would say sometimes. But one day, Sung came to me and asked me if I knew anything about the T'ung-wen Kuan (the "Peking College," as it has been called). I answered, a little doubtfully, yes ; why did he ask ? Well, he said, there were two young fellows there study- ing English, and he was very anxious to learn how they were getting on : what, in short, was their position, and what their prospects, and if they showed ability or not. I said that I thought T might make inquiries, but that I was a little curious to know his reasons for wanting me to do so, I must confess. Then it came out that he wished to engage his daughter to one of the two, but did not know which to choose. One was a little older than the other, and seemed to show more application as far as he could tell ; but the younger — who was only 17, by the way — was more intelligent, perhaps, and — ^yes — was better looking. I fear that after all there was some hitch in the matter, for nothing has come of it as yet, I believe. Still the desire to marry his daughter to a man likely tion than, our "highness." The less obvious connection between cherries and brethren is found in a verse of the ancient Odes : — " Cherry-tree blossom Is it not lovely ? Who among mankind Is like to a brother ? " "Jewelled (person) "=2/m, the gem par excellence of the Chinese, and a common term of polite address, which, however an unfortunate ambiguity in our language prevents us from translating literally as " you jade," TEAOHEBS AND TAUGHT. 83 to be attached to one of the Chinese legations abroad showed an appreciation of the changed path that Chinese foreign poHcy has during the last few years taken, and must continue to take. I do not know whether Sung was an exceptionally enlightened man of his class, or in advance of his age. I see no reason to suppose that he was, beyond the fact that he has been a teacher in the Legation some little time. He used to take in the Shen Pao, a paper published daily at Shanghai, in Chinese, and containing, besides the current news of the Empire, accounts of everything that is going on in other parts of the world. When he ceased to buy it he would go to a tea-house to read it. It is just in this way, by means of this and other good newspapers printed, under Euro- pean editorship for the most part, in the vernacular, that the Chinese have acquired a really surprisingly correct idea of the relative power and civilization of Western nations. The old days of ignorance have almost passed away. If prejudice remains, it is because it is fostered by the officials for their own ends. I do not believe, indeed, that the ordinary Chinaman of fair education has of himself any great prejudices at all, superstitious or otherwise. If the mandarins will allow him, he is ready to adopt any new scientific discovery, should it be clearly to his advantage to do so. He laughs at the idea of feng-shui. (This as it is present in an Englishman's mind — for it is present — equals " that hideous factory chimney spoiHng the view " ; "a railway train, like a long black dragon with fiery eyes belching smoke " ; " our grandfathers were content with coaches, why not we ? " Ruskin would go some way 6 * 84 ' WEUBE 0HINE8ES DEIVK with the professors of feng-shui.) At any rate, few Chinamen of this new middle-class would allow its precepts to interfere with the only prospect they have eyes for — the prospect of gain. But telegraphs, railways, and the like, must be introduced into China in the first instance by the Government, or they will not be allowed to succeed. As examples, the different fate of the Woo- sung Eail- way and the Overland Telegraph from Tientsin to Shanghai. And the object of their introduction will scarcely be the benefit to trade or the mercantile class ; they will be regarded as a means of strengthening the military position of China, and so enabling her to resist the very civilization that has produced them. But there is one impediment to their introduction, which is of far greater importance than the doctrine of feng-shui, but is rather apt to be overlooked. The Chinese Empire is an assemblage of satrapies, independent of one another, and, for the most part, shut off by great natural obstacles from rapid communication with the Central ■ Government at Peking. Owing to the impossibility of applying for and receiving instructions on matters of urgency, the Viceroys or Governors of these provinces have great discretionary power given them. If they fail to put down a revolt or relieve a famine, they will be impeached, and perhaps severely punished ; but if they succeed, little inquiry will, in all probability, be made into the means. It was to the great temptations which this state of semi-independence offered that the Viceroy of Yiin-kwei yielded in 1865. He had been ordered to resign in consequence of his ill- success TEAGSBBS AND TAUGHT. ' 85 against the Panthay Mahommedans ; but, instead of submitting, declared himself Emperor of Yiin-nan, and held the eastern half of the province for several years against the Imperialists. Now, such men as this, and, indeed, all provincial officials, whose power would be curtailed by their introduction, are most unlikely to support the various schemes for opening tip the country by means of railways or telegraphs. It rests with the Central Government to assert itself. When it sees fit to do so, and abandon its old policy of provincialism, the objections raised by feng-shui will cease, since that only masks the real obstacle. Then such stories as the apparition of the late Empress in a dream, saying that she could not rest in peace in her tomb in the Eastern Hills because of the K'ai-p'ing coal-mines, will no longer be encouraged, or even, possibly, allowed. But, meanwhile, whatever changes may be made in China in the direction of an, apparently, more liberal attitude towards Western science, it is too absurd to picture the Pekingese of to-day, as M. Jules Verne does in his extravaganza (it is little better), The Troubles of a Chinaman, as making familiar use of all the most modern inventions, and the newest improvements in them. Little, indeed, or nothing, of any of these was to be seen at Peking, even in the houses of Europeans — I believe, however, that the telephone has been lately introduced into the Inspectorate-General of Customs — and, although the gas-lamp on the wall of the Pro- fessor's house has flared over the dirt and dust of the Kou-lan Hu-t'ung for some years now, the Chinese seem to have shown no desire to substitute in their 86 WHJEBE CHINESES BBIVK streets lamps like it for the wretched paper lanterns that, like wreckers' beacons, only serve to allure you into danger and a pool of filth. But to come back to Sung. I asked him and a friend of his named Chao to a Chinese dinner one day. My boy found a good inn in the Western Quarter, and made all the arrangements for me with the landlord. The invitations were written on the large red visiting- cards used by the Chinese, and duly accepted — by being left unanswered. Six o'clock was the hour fixed, and, as I was going in a cart, I had to leave the Legation early, for the Western Quarter is some way off. I arrived a little late as it was, and after my guests — a highly improper proceeding ; but then I think they were too early. I was received at the gate of the inn by the landlord, who showed me into the room reserved for us. It stood all by itself in a little side court entered by a circular doorway. The room itself was bare of furniture, except for a round table, a few clumsy chairs, and a long and broad bench, used, as I afterwards learned, in opium-smoking. It was winter, and so we had a small charcoal stove on the brick floor. The general aspect of the room and its belongings was that of a respectable scullery ; but my guests seemed more than satisfied. I had heard and read so much of the trials that await a European stomach at these entertainments, and of the troubles that unaccustomed chop-sticks involve you- in, that I had told my boy to bring brandy, and a set of knives, forks, and spoons. I also had a bottle of sherry and another of whisky for my guests. When I arrived, TEAGHEBS AND TAUGHT. 87 the table, bare of table-cloth, was set out with little dishes containing fruit and cold meats, cut into the tiniest morsels. Presently we sat down, and each man had a little saucer, a pair of chop-sticks, and two tiny cups given him. An attendant then went round with a kettle, out of which he poured a luke-warm liquid almost colourless, and nearly, if not quite, tasteless. This was our wine. I wonder a Chinaman ever manages to get tipsy on such poor stuff; but pro- bably this was the vin ordinaire, as it were. And, indeed, their Eose Spirit and " Samshoo " are very much stronger. Sung's friend would help me with his chop-sticks, and heap up my plate with incongruous tit-bits : a little lump of carp, a wafer-like slice of ham, some goose's liver, and a piece of shark's fin. It was no use saying that I preferred to take them by instalments, or that they did not, so to speak, harmonize — he could not see the force of my objections ; and it struck him as slightly eccentric on my part, and probably as a little impolite, to refuse a piece of pork fat he offered me in the spoon with which he had just taken his soup ; for, after the cold meats came in several bowls of fish, flesh and fowl (chiefly fish and fowl), all very hot and very greasy. I tried for some time to swallow some- thing ; then gave up, and went in steadily for the Che-kiang ham, which was really excellent. Course after course was sent in ; but the Chinamen were not satisfied, and finally ordered a sort of hotch-potch, a dish with a pan of burning charcoal in the centre, keeping hot the soup in the outer bowl. Into this At it ^1 *4 f,lkf TEAGHEES AND TAUGHT. 89 Private Note. — Return Invitation to Dinner from 8ung's friend Ohao.* 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. YOUB TOUE High NoE and Mai' Honour Sung Excellence my •And on hsien-shcE ig Days lords I the twenty-seventh on ago A to move beg day my you note their that of this behalf bestowed with jewelled you moon to invite a the salutation ' steps will at refection of Chao and on the yin on Chien-t'ing_ early my hour . me approach behalf to occupy for This invite a many . J. borrowed days hope seat we and at have take the Hung-ch'ing not the occasion Tavern met to enquire- in yesterday after Velvet-thread Lane where we may fill our cups and chat the while I ■ begged [The numbers 1 to 17 refer to the corresponding columns iu the Chinese note, counting from the right.] * The Chinese possess an ample store of pronouns and a suf- ficient system of punctuation ; but they make it a point of culture to avoid, where they can, the use of both. Li their correspondence rhythm supplies the place of commas, and metaphor the absence of pronouns. Neither course is satisfactory to the English trans- • lator, and I have been compelled to introduce various I's and you's ; I have not, though, enclosed them in brackets, lest my translation should resemble too closely an early chapter in Tod- hunter's Algebra. Another peculiarity is still harder to reproduce — the " respectful elevation of characters," as Sinologues describe it. Whenever a direct reference is made to the person addressed, the vertical 90 WHERE CHINESES DRIVE. soup they emptied the contents of any bowl or saucer that came to hand, and after these had seethed and bubbled for a short time, plunged their chop-sticks in, filled their saucers, and continued the feast for some twenty minutes more. When they had quite finished, we ranged ourselves about the room, and smoked, drank, and chatted. They wanted me to play morra, the childish finger-game they and the Italians enjoy. The forfeit is a cup of wine, which the loser drinks. I said I did not in the least know how to play it, but it would give me the greatest pleasure to lose, I felt sure. But they thought on the whole it would not be amusing ; and so we made ourselves some toddy, and left. A few days afterwards I asked the same two China- men to a European dinner in my rooms. Sung said he would come with pleasure, but stipulated that there column is left incomplete, and the character involving the reference commences a new column, and is elevated two spaces above the general level. A mutual friend or a superior enjoys " single elevation " ; on the other hand, where the parents of the recipient are alluded to, these are honoured by an elevation of three spaces. An indirect reference to one's correspondent calls for " single elevation " only. Thus, the words ho-hsia (" your Honour," properly " under the balcony ") are raised two spaces ; yiian chia ("high" or " chiefest excellence ") one space, and similarly with the surnames Sung, Mai, Nge. The " yin hour " is the period between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. ; prac- tically, however, it means 7. " To occupy a borrowed seat," literally " to falsely sit down," is to be a guest at a tavern instead of at the host's own house. " My Lords," properly " Two Dukes." Mai and Nge are not,- however, as yet, entitled. The term hung, in its primary sense a prince or duke, is very largely, if not loosely, applied. I have seen a tomb with the inscription, " Shm liu shih hu/ng." [His Grace a Corpse Washed Ashore.j TEACHERS AND TAUGHT. 91 should be no beef; for an orthodox Chinaman will not eat the " ploughing beast," and, considering that in Peking beef is mostly horse or donkey re-christened, perhaps he is wise. He objected to hare, too, for some reason or other. Finally we agreed on a menu that included nothing taboo, and I sent invitations to Sung's friend and to T'ang. The dinner went off very well, and the behaviour of the guests was most exemplary. T'ang was used to the thing and showed it ; the other two would cast furtive glances at his manipulation of napkin and finger-bowl, and act accordingly. But there was no trace of the excellent appetite of a few days before ; I fancy their faith was small, and they had provisioned themselves for this feast. But Chao took kindly enough to cigarettes and hirsch, and quite unbent over his whisky and water, and insisted on my dining with him that day week. There are drawbacks to entertaining Chinamen. But to resume. Beyond the course of study laid down in the Tzu-erh Chi, we were not required to go in for other reading during the two years we were to spend in Peking, though it was generally understood that we should look at some Chinese novel, and occasionally take up the Peking Gazette. This is published every day in two or three forms. The edition we usually took in was about three inches by six, and consisted of some twenty to thirty sheets roughly fastened together by bits of twisted paper, and enclosed in " flimsy yellow •covers," as Mayers called them. On the back were stamped two characters, Ching Pao, the " Metropolitan Gazette." The paper is prepared beforehand, ruled in 92 WHERE 0HINESE8 DRIVE. red perpendicular lines, seven to the half-page. The documents issued for publication are taken down in manuscript, and then set up in movable wooden type, and printed with an ink that is very apt to come off and stain the fingers of the reader. These documents are of very varying interest, often merely reports of transfers and promotions. But occasionally you come across an account of a trial or curious ceremony that is distinctly entertaining, and throws great light at the same time on some phases of Chinese character. As, for instance, the San P'ai-lou Murder Case, now, by reason of the excitement it caused in the Grazette, and therefore pre- sumedly among the officials, become quite a cause celebre. The report is somewhat long, and, if you are not inte- rested in the Police Column of the oldest daily paper in the world, please skip this and the following pages. On the morning, of the 12th of January, 1878, the body of a man, whose name was unknown, was found near the San P'ai-lou at Nanking. There were marks of wounds in several places : his queue, too, had been cut off and had disappeared. By the side of the corpse lay a parcel of lime, some brown paper, a small cleaver, and a pair of straw shoes. There was no blood on the ground, nor were there any traces of a struggle. The matter was reported to the late Viceroy of Nanking, Sh^n Pao-chen, and he deputed the present Salt-Commissioner Hung Ju-ku'ei to try it. A Colonel Hu was instructed to search for and arrest the mur- derer ; and he succeeded in discovering an eye-witness of the affair, a man named Fang. This man deposed that on the night of the 11th his road led him past the TEAGSEBS AND TAUGHT. 93 spot. By the faint light of the moon reflected on the snow, he saw a dead man lying on the ground, and stand- ing by him three men, one tall and one short, and one who looked like a Buddhist priest. He was startled, and was hesitating what to do, when one of the men went up to him, and told him, with threats, to mind his own business, on which he at once came away. By means of this clue three men were, one after the other, arrested : a priest, Shao Tsung, and two men named Chang and Ch'ii. In Ch'ii's possession was found a five-cornered cash (used either as a charm, or a token of some secret society). At the trial, the prisoner Chang was the first to make a statement. He said that he had been led to commit murder through poverty ; and this was confirmed by Ch'ii, who declared that he had been prevailed on by the priest and Chang to kill a pig-drover named Hsiieh Ch'un-fang for the sake of his money. After carrying away the corpse, they stripped off his blood-stained outer garment, and took it back to the hills with them, where they burnt it. The brown paper Ch'ii had brought with iiim to wipe the blood off his hands ; the lime the priest had used to stifle the victim's cries; the cleaver was the weapon with which the murder was committed ; the grass shoes belonged to the dead man. This confession agreed in every particular with the depositions of the witness; and, moreover, a butcher's knife and a bill- hook were discovered, which the priest and Ch'ii admitted to have used in the murder. Even the ashes of the burnt clothes were found. When questioned about their victim, the priest and Chang said they had 94 WHERE GHINESE8 BBIVE. never seen him before, and all Ch'ii knew was that he had heard him say he came from Hochou. These particulars were laid before the Viceroy, who, in view of the fact that the men confessed themselves guilty of wilful murder, but refused to give a satisfactory account of the antecedents of the murdered man, came to the conclusion that it was a case of assassination of one of their number by the members of a band of robbers. Accordingly he sentenced Ch'ii and the priest to be immediately executed, and their heads exposed in a cage. Chang, as the first to turn Crown evidence, had the capital penalty commuted. His right ear was cut off, he was branded, and sent back to his native place. So the case was closed. Three years afterwards, a man was brought before a police court in Nanking, charged with theft, and while there laid an accusation against two men, whose names where Chou and Shen. They were arrested and brought to trial. The evidence established the following : — Towards the end of the year 1877, Chou had per- suaded a married woman named Liu, of Fu-ning, to elope with him, and had hired a boat to take them south. On the way he came across an old acquaintance named Chu Piao, who, with his comrades Shen and Hsii, was towing his boat along. Chu, seeing a young woman in Chou's barge, asked him where he was going. Chou said he wanted to get to Nanking, but the money for boat hire had run short. Chu on this paid his pas- sage-money for him, and invited him to come into his OAvn boat, and do the rest of the journey in his com- pany. Chu himself had a woman with him whom he TEACHERS AND TAUGHT. 95 had carried off, named Chao. The whole party arrived at a place called Liu Ho, and while there Chu Piao eloped with the woman Liu. Chou was much enraged, but feared Chu's skill with his fists, so persuaded Shen to come with him in pursuit of the pair. Shen had an intrigue with the woman Chao, Chu's mistress, and feared lest it should come to his ears : so readily agreed to go. They stole a small cleaver belonging to Hsii, and started off together for Nanking. On the way, Chou purchased some lime, which they intended to throw into the man's eyes. On the 11th January, they met Chu Piao in Nanking, and learnt from him that the woman Liu was concealed in the house of Miu the Cripple. Chu told them he was hard-up, and meant to rob a candle-store near the San P'ai-lou, and asked them to help him. Accordingly they bought some grass shoes, a chaffing dish, and some brown paper, and went together to the bamboo garden, close to the San P'ai-lou. It was nearly midnight, and the ground was covered with snow, on which a frosty moon was glisten- ing. The three men crouched round the charcoal pan warming their hands. Presently, Chu Piao rose and went a little way off. The two confederates seized this opportunity to arrange their attack, and Shen stealthily twisted his hand in Chu's queue. Chu started and stumbled, when Chou began to hack at him wildly with his cleaver, and in so doing cut off his queue. Shen, coming to his assistance, snatched a dagger from the victim's girdle, and stabbed him once or twice with it till he was dead. They did not remove the body, but, flinging down the cleaver, the parcel of lime, the brown 96 WEEBE GHINE8ES DBITE. paper, and the straw shoes, by the side of the corpse, they fled. The next day they found out and carried off the woman Liu, whom they sold, dividing the proceeds. All this was confirmed by the testimony of the other woman, who said that they had confessed to her what they had done. Hsii, too, recognised the cleaver as his. . . . This case agreed so exactly in place and time with the former one, that a brother of the man Ch'ii, who was executed for the murder, was summoned. He stated that he had sent his nephew to Hochou, where the murdered man was said to have come from, and found that there never had been any such person there as Hsiieh Ch'un-fang. Now, it was extremely unlikely that two murders could have taken place on the same night in such a place of public resort as the San P'ai-lou, without everyone knowing and speaking of it. The whole thing was as clear as a picture. The dead body found on the morning of the 12th was that of Ohu-Piao, that was certain, and the murderers where Chou and Shen. The difficulty was to understand how the two men already executed for the crime, the priest and Ch'ii, and the man Chang, who was branded and banished, came to be willing to falsely confess themselves guilty. And the wit- ness produced at the former trial. Fang, how was it that he was so positive in his testimony ? There was nothing for it but to summon Chang and Fang, which was done. On cross-examination. Fang declared positively that on the day in question he not only had not seen the dead body, but had never been near the San P'ai-lou at TEACHERS AND TAUGHT. 97 all. He had heard people saying that at such and such a place a man had been killed, and on going home had told his mother of it. She told him not to get talking at random in the streets, as he was deaf and slow of understanding. After this he went out to sell sunflower seeds, and met on the road a militiaman who, under pretence of wanting to buy his sweetmeats, took him to the Kuan-yin Monastery, and shut him up in a room. There he was visited by Colonel Hu, who asked him about the San P'ai-lou murder, saying that a beggar had told him that he, Fang, knew all about it. After this, Hu took him to another temple, where he con- trived that he should see the priest Shao Tsung, and ordered him to declare that on the night of the murder he had seen this priest and two other men standing by the corpse. These other two he would tell him about after their arrest. Pang refused to agree, but as Hu continued to press him and to threaten him, or to pro- mise him money, he at last consented to give the evidence he did at the trial. All his answers to the cross-examination of Hung, the presiding judge on that occasion, were prompted by Hu and rehearsed before- hand. When Ch'ii was arrested, one of the Coloners men fetched witness to look at the prisoner through a chink in the window, that he might identify him when called on to do so. Chang was an old acquaintance, and he involved him in the charge out of fear of Hu. Witness was kept under guard until the case was over, when he was released. Chang deposed that he spent the night of the 11th at the house of one Ch'Sn, but that on the trial Hu and 7 98 WHERE GHINE8E8 BBIVE. some of the judges threatened him with torture, and told him, besides, that the priest and Ch'ii had con- fessed, so that he did not dare to refuse to say what was required of him. His account was confirmed by Ch'en, and also by one of the judges at the trial, who said he had seen Colonel Hu apply torture to Ch'u. Hu was accordingly summoned, but refused to confess his guilt. At this point the new Viceroy of Nanking, Liu K'un- yi, from whose memorial all this is an extract, wrote to the Emperor for permission to examine Hu by torture, and to put Hung and his assessors on their trial. This was done, and it became sufficiently evident that Hu, failing to discover the real murderers, and afraid of incurring the degradation that such failure would involve, had contrived this means of procuring defen- dants to the charge. His ingenuity was not appre- ciated, and he was condemned to be at once beheaded. The other actors in the drama met with their deserts, according to Chinese law ; and amid a shower of plati- tudes from the Censorate, the case closed. European journals are much exercised about the Peking Gazette. Letters were often received addressed to " the Editor," and asking for " a copy of his valuable periodical," and proposing that he should take in the Bumbleton Mercury, or arrange exchanges with the Heliopolis Bulletin. One post-card came from Ger- many : — A la direction de la " Gazette " to the expedition of the gazette (gazette french) Peking, TEACHERS AND TAUGHT. 99 X ^ il ^ Two columns of the Pelting Saiiette, asking for information as to terms of subscription and dates of issue. Here, by-the-bye, the Daily Telegraph might have given the inquirer some startUng, if not particularly accurate, information. That estimable but mistaken organ says : " The Chinese name of the paper is the King Pau, which means ' Capital Sheet.' It is one of the most enter- prising journals in existence, having lately taken to issuing three editions daily. The one in the morning is called the Hsing Pau, which means ' Business Sheet ' ; that in . the fore- noon, Shuen Pau, or ' Official Sheet,' which contains all the fashionable in- telligence ; that in the evening, the Titani Pau " (Oh Tzu-erh CM, and " Peking Syllabary " !) " or ' Coun- try Sheet ' ; and all three issues are edited by members of the Hanlin Col- lege." The writer of this is only equalled in his simple faith by the man who wrote to the " Managing Editor of the Pehing Gazette," and said he had an advertisement he wanted to get inserted in all the principal papers of the globe — it was a balm, I believe, or a patent pill — and what, was his charge for a column ? Then, when the "member 7 * 100 WHERE GHINESES DBIVE. of the Hanlin College " was long in replying, the would-be advertiser sent a second note, indignantly reminding him of his first, and remarking, in scath- ing terms, on the way in which people appeared to do business in Peking. Among the novels we took up, or at any rate dipped into, were the Yu Ghiao Li (Julien's Les Deux Gousines), the Hao Ch'iu Ghuan (" The Fortunate Union," as Davis translates it), the 8an Kuo Ghih, and the Hung Lou Ming. They are all, as a rule, exceedingly uninte- resting, and if they have been translated (as the first two, and, I believe, the third, have been), it is because a Chinese book is more or less like a chess problem, or the fifteen puzzle, requiring a certain amount of inge- nuity to work out : whereby translators are able to look on themselves as men of acute mind and fertile in sug- gestion. I seriously doubt whether even the translator can take any interest in the matter of his translation, unless his sympathies are very wide. Occasionally, indeed, the weary plodder comes across some familiar touch that makes him feel more akin to his author. As this from the " Three Kingdoms," the San Kuo Ghih, an old historical romance of the period A.D. 190 to 265, during which three states strove for the Empire — " Ch'en Wei coming in, Ying pointed to Jung and said, ' That is a remarkable boy ! ' 'It doesn't follow,' answered Wei, ' that those who are clever in their youth will be clever when they grow up.' On this Jung, in a tone of polite assent, observed, ' From what you say, Sir, you must have been clever when you were young.' " (Chap, xi.) TEAOEEBS ANB TAUGST. 101 The Hung Lou Meng is a satire in 120 chapters, and, as it is usually bound, in some twenty volumes, on the life of the upper classes in Peking during the eighteenth century, and more particularly on the doings of Ming Chu, a powerful noble in the reign of Ch'ien Lung, who in the end was obliged to commit suicide by strangling, while his property was confiscated. At least, this is the view Hsii held of the object of the book. To the foreign student it usually appears as a succession of wearisome chapters — marriages, intrigues, funerals — strung together without any ap- parent purpose. There is a certain depressing sig- nificance in the fact that one Chinese scholar who has made a special study of the novel has chosen to regard it simply as a text-book for colloquial phrases, and in his Notes, which unfortunately exist as yet only in manuscript, gives no hint of his theory, if he has formed one, of the motive of the work, nor attempts, by furnishing some idea of the plot, to excite in his readers an interest in the story. Indeed, you might as well expect a Chinese student of English to take an interest in, say, Clarissa Harlowe. I think that this last comparison is perhaps a little too severe, for there are some passages in the Hung Lou Meng of real beauty, which seem, it may be, all the more beautiful from their plain setting. Among the songs and versicles scattered through the book are some that are exceedingly graceful. Art, perhaps, is too little concealed, but that is at once the defect and the beauty of Chinese poetry. It is, perhaps, impossible to reproduce in English, in a way that shall suggest the 102 WEEBE GHINESES BBIVE. original, the rhythm of Chinese verse. Indeed, no English metre, except, I think, that of " Piers Plow- man," with its short lines and alliteration (" I was wery forwandered, And went me to reste " — I quote from memory), at all resembles it. Sir John Davis, in his Chinese Poetry, has, by the form in which he has cast his metrical translations, certainly shown him- self a better poet in his own language than a critic of Chinese poems. The chief difficulty is to preserve the parallelisms in which the Chinese poet delights, and to find some equivalent for the cadence of his verse (the " sequence of the tones "), and each epitheton constans he has studded it with. Here, in proof of the difficulty of such a task, is an attempt to render part of a lovely ode in the fifth chapter. It is sung by the fairies, unseen the while, as their Queen comes to meet the hero in Dream- land: — She wons from the woodlands Where wave her willows, She hastes from her homestead Fashioned of flowers : And the birds are af right at her coming, in the trees of the garden, And her shadow is flitting before her, and crosses the corridor. Her sleeves, fairy-broidered, float behind her, And the breezes are laden with fragrance of musk and of orchid : Her robes, lily-woven, swaying softly, In the light air are waking the tinkling of bracelet and anklet. Like the blossoms of the peach in spring-time are her dimpled cheeks, Her halcyon tresses as gathering storm-clouds in heaven : TEAGHSB8 AND TAUGHT. 103 Like the pouting cherry newly-ripened are her parted lips, Than melon seeds whiter the teeth her soft breathing perfumes. The shapely waist, delicate dainty. The light winds may waft it, the snows were too rough for it : Her feathers and xjearls, shimmering flashing Are green as the drake's wing, are white as the eider-down. 'Mid banks of flowers, passing repassing. Most lovely when joyous, when angered most lovely : O'er tarn and fountain to and fro flitting. In semblance of flying, of floating in semblance. Like a moth her eye-brows flutter, now smiling now frowning. The eager lips are parted, tho' no word is spoken : Like the lily are her footsteps, ever swaying ever bending. She still seems to hasten, but still stays her going. But to the student came relaxation sometimes, and respite from Gazette and novel. And he would do as he was done by. 104 WHUBE GHINESm BBIVK IV. Winter. Among the European communities at the Open Ports, the lingua franca is certainly English. The large amount of English trade, as compared with that of other countries, would be sufficient to account for this ; but English is equally the language of intercourse in Peking — French with difficulty maintaining its traditional right to be the language of high-officialdom. One reason is the constant influx of men from the ports, another, the fact that to the cosmopolitan staff of the Customs no one is appointed who cannot read, write, and speak English. The necessity thus laid upon almost everyone in China to learn English, was the reason why Herr Schmidt, who had lately come out, and wished to sell his new pony, carefully got up a few useful phrases. But he rather astonished a prospective purchaser by suddenly introducing himself in the words, " Farevell, I haf Schmidt, I am an horse." Not only is English the common language of the Europeans in China, but that curiously distorted form of it (which is really baby-English in Chinese idiom) known as ' Pidgin English,' is often used as a medium of intercourse between Chinamen from different parts of the Empire, who speak mutually unintelligible dialects. WINTER. 105 The converse of all this often holds true in the case of children brought up in China. They learn Chinese from their amahs, and a French, an English, and a German child, who do not know a word of each other's native language, chatter away in Chinese— to the admi- ration and envy of a newly-arrived student. During the winter, which commences early in No- vember, and lasts till the beginning of March, Peking is shut out almost entirely from the rest of the world ; for its highway, the Pei-ho, is frozen hard, and steamers cannot enter the Gulf. And so there is a bustle of pre- paration towards the end of October, a laying in of stores and clothes and barrels of ale, for nothing heavy will come up when the river is closed. The mails, that have hitherto been sent via Chefoo and Tientsin, must now travel overland some 800 miles from Ohinkiang, on the Yang-tzii, by which they are delayed a fortnight or so. Hence, when winter begins, we were often without letters for nearly a month, though we had had a weekly service through the summer. Then, when the winter ended, the letters came like the tunes out of Baron Munchausen's horn when it thawed, and if it were pos- sible to have too much of a good thing, we had it then. The mind could not digest such a plethora. But it was worse with the popular man who went up country for a couple of months. When he returned, he found an extensive correspondence awaiting him, that had arrived by various mails from different parts of the world. He was conscientious and set to work, and read on steadily (so he says), day and night, for three days, with hurried intervals for refreshments. Then the English and 106 WHURE CBINE8E8 BBIVR French mails came in together, and he succumbed. He invested in 500 international post-cards, and printed on them an impassioned appeal to his friends not to write again till further notice. I consider that man ungrateful. My letters were not numerous, and far too large a proportion of them appeared to be of a commer- cial character — but these I did not endanger my peace of mind by Opening. Besides the English and French mails, which came on alternate weeks (or ought to have done : what they usually did was to come on the same day, or on succes- sive days, and leave us an interesting interval of a fort- night with nothing new to read) ; there was an American mail once a month, and a Russian mail every ten days. This last went overland, through Kalgan and Kiakhta, the border town, taking twelve days to go from Peking to the latter place. As Kiakhta is a telegraph station, and the rate for messages by the Russian line is very much cheaper than by submarine cable from Shanghai, telegrams used often to be sent by this route. An overland wire now connects Tientsin with Shanghai, and brings Peking within a day of the Western world. Three or four years ago the Customs established a postal service between Peking and Shanghai, being desi- sirous of civilising the Chinese, and adding to the Imperial revenue. The rates were somewhat high at first, and the scheme was in danger of falling through. But, fortunately, the enthu- siasm of the new agency proved its safety; in their just pride in the WINTEE. 107 undertaking, the directors had caused stamps to be engraved, labelled " China," and mysterious with sprawling dragons and Chinese characters. No sooner had the news got about, than orders came flowing in from the postage-stamp dealers of all parts of the world, for the new " candarins," and success was assured. I mentioned, I think, that we had a reading-room in the Legation. For this the mails from Europe would bring us the principal weekly periodicals, and a few of the monthly magazines ; and from America, Harper, Scribner (The Century), the Atlantic Monthly, and, that we might have one American paper — these three, I need hardly say, are written in English — the San Francisco Bulletin. Any Peking resident might be elected as a member of the reading-room. The sub- scribers held a yearly meeting in the autumn to decide on the papers to be taken in during the next year, and to frame rules, which were very strict, seldom observed, and never enforced. Bertram, our treasurer, was an old offender. We used to post him up very conspicuously on a black board kept for the purpose. Nevertheless, when a new mail came in, Bertram would come in too, smile benignantly at the board, and then sidle out of the room with the new Punch. It was in vain we pleaded that he was setting us a bad example. So at last we gave way, and took out all the new papers as soon as they arrived, thereby check- mating Bertram, who lived so much farther off. Constant study of the Bulletin showed us the advan- tage of combination ; and so when an autumn meeting was coming on, we met together in the mess-room 108 WHEBE CHINESE8 BBIVE. and resolved ourselves into a caucus. Then we decided that such papers as the Fortnightly were not suited to the requirements of student interpreters ; the Field, on the contrary, would supply a pressing want. We nearly split over the relative merits of the St. James's and the Pall Mall ; for our political opinions were not quite unanimous, and the funds of the reading-room did not allow of both being taken in. But we settled that somehow, and on the day showed a solid and unwaver- ing front that dismayed the enemy. In our triumph, some of us were for carrying the Referee, but, being strong, we were merciful, and forbore. In April we had a sale of the papers, a private sale among the subscribers, Bertram in great form as auctioneer. The most lively bidding was for Punch; after that, perhaps, for the Gornhill and the American illustrated magazines. The Edinburgh Review excited little interest, and the Quarterly went to one man (but that was his good fortune) for 10 cents. One of the Chinese attendants at the office — a t'ing-chai as he is called — was a good hand at binding books, and reaped a small harvest after the sale. In days of old the students, being then, so report says, all men of wit, brought out at intervals what they called the Pelting Punch. Just now it is out of print, so that, to my regret, I cannot obtain a copy. By my time a great change had come over the spirit of students' dreams : we took our pleasure sadly. We found the cares of life press too heavily on our shoul- ders to allow us to edit Punches. The strains of by- gone students had power to move us yet; but we flung WINTER. 109 away ambition. We could not hope to win by it ; and tacitly confessed ourselves degenerate. They were giants, indeed, in those days. During the winter, the chief amusement inside the Legation was the bowling-alley. The building itself was substantial enough, but the alleys were always going wrong. The planks at the bowler's end, where the ball started (and which the ball started), had to be repaired every year. The indefatigable Bertram would bring in a Chinese carpenter and explain matters. The carpenter would look round: "Planking, 4 feet by 6, two men could put that right in a day : say five dollars." Then the men would set to work and find that all the boards were fastened firmly into an iron frame and pierced at intervals by iron rods, and that on a mode- rate computation their work was cut out for the next month. Then the contract had to be re-arranged. But Bertram says he has used up all the carpenters in the city now, and will have to import some if he still wants to get favourable terms. Those alleys were certainly trying. It took some days to get into the way of them at all, and when at last you were beginning to make doubles (= knocking all the ten pins down by the first ball), a plank went wrong and altered the roll entirely. They have some good alleys at Tientsin, and men would visit Peking occa- sionally who rather despised a score of 250 (300 is the maximum), and thought a man hopeless if he got anything under 200. Then they came round to our alley and were chosen in on one side or the other, and put down to play third or fourth. As they watched the Peking 110 WHEBE CHINESHS DBIVK men with much trouble getting eight or nine, they could not prevent their faces from expressing something of the pity and wonder that filled their souls. Then their turn would come on, and they would score six or five, and the wonder was changed to contempt — for our unhappy alley. Our mess dinners were arranged between the mess and wine caterers and the cook. The largest dinner that has been given by the students was, I believe, one in which forty men took part. The special reason for giving the dinner (beyond the desire to see our friends) was, if I remember rightly, the pride that puffed up the mess when the President announced the arrival of two large plum-puddings from Tientsin. But as the dinner drew to a close, the guests seemed to expect that some speech would be made to them, setting forth the great occasion that had assembled them all together. To have put it down to the puddings would have been, we felt, a bathos ; besides, the puddings had not turned out altogether the success we had hoped. Fortunately, just at this juncture, one of the guests had a birthday, and that made everything right. But it was a critical moment. The congratulatory speeches made and acknowledged, we settled down to the more serious business of song- singing. A duet by the German students was followed by the Match-box song from Professor Pavlovski, Our matches are supplied us, more or less indirectly, by a well-known Scandinavian firm, and light only on the box. The boys having handed round match-boxes., just WINTEB. Ill as a pew-opener may distribute hymn-books, the Pro- fessor begins : — J' Allegro maestoso. P m . $ ^^ ::s:i5s= E^ 7-^-" • 1— T nl- rc i We-ners-borgs tand-sticks-fa-brilcB pa-teut pa - raf - fi - ne ra - de. ^ Isi. I =1= It -t it=z =P _l- =t i Sa-ker-hets Tand-stick-or 2mi., ^^^8 cz: u - tan sva -f vel och f os - for. -e2=P2= ^ !t=t och fos-for Tan - tan - tan -da en-dastmot la-dans i p i& ^ i^zq?- ^ plan. Tan - da en - dast mot lad - ans plan. Then Bertram is called on for a song, and protests he does not know one. There is a general shout, " Oh Bertie ! where do you expect to go to ? ' Lord Bate- man,' Bertie ! Silence for Mr. Bertram's song ! " Bertram smiles gently and says, " Well, if Paley will lead the chorus ? But I don't remember the words very well." Paley promises that he will start a chorus, and Bertram begins : — Lord Bateman was [reflectivelij] — Lord Bateman was [a long pause] — Lord Bateman was \trium/phantly'\ — Lord Bateman ! * I give this as O'Hara wrote it. He translated it as well : — The Wenersborg Match-Manufactory's Patent Paraffine-dipped SAFETY MATCHES, Without sulphur or phosphorus. Light only on the surface of the box. 112 WRERE GHINBSES BBIVE. Paley — For the stormy winds do blow And the raging waters flow, And we jolly sailor-boys were sitting up aloft, And the land-lubbers lying down below, below, below, [Emphatically'] — And the land-lubbers lying down below. A silence : then, " Now, Bertram, the second verse ! " Bertram says, with a puzzled air, " I was just trying to think what it was." Paley suggests, " something about Lord Bateman." Then Bertram's face lights up, and he says cheerfully, " Ah, yes — Lord Bateman was [sadly] — Lord Bateman was [dubiously] — Lord Bateman was [gleefully] — ^Lord Bateman ! Paley— ^We shoulder arms, we march, we march away . . . Chorus — We shoulder arms. . . . Bertram turns to talk to his neighbour. The Presi- dent, indignantly, "Now, Bertie, there are some more verses ! " Bertram, in an injured tone, " There are, — several ; but I can't remember them." The neighbour whispers something. " Oh, of course, ' Lord Bate- man' — ■ Lord Bateman was [hopefully] — Lord Bateman was [indif- ferently] — Lord Bateman was [despondently] — Lord Bateman ! Paley and Chorus — Come landlord fill the flowing bowl . . . After this, Lawson gives us "Bosalie the Prairie Flower." He has lungs and forehead of brass, and WINTBB. 113 rolls the song out with most infectious enjoyment, till he culminates fortissimo in the last verse — Then the Angels whispered, Softly in her ear . . . There is a pause to recover breath — for the chorus requires a. good deal of breath — and then O'Hara is asked for his song (each of us has his own, taboo to the rest), and begins the "Vicar of Bray." He is very nervous, and has asked Gordon to strike up the chorus directly he has finished singing : — In good King Charles's golden days, When loyalty no harm meant, A — a — a — Gordon — That this is law I will maintain — O'Hara— A zealous High Churchman was I — Gordon — That I '11 be Vicar of Bray, Sir ! O'Hara— To teach my flock I never missed Kings were by God appointed, And — and — [catches sight of Gordon's mouth opening and hurries v/p] — And damned [con. express.'] are those who do resist Or touch the Lord's anointed ! — " Thank goodness that 's over," Gordon — That this is law . . . — &c., &o., ad infin. Then we called on Thierry. He tried to evade it, declaring he was bashful, and only knew one song. 8 114 WHERE CHINE8JES DBIVE. However, he would sing that through, if we would pro- mise to listen patiently. We promised. Then he sang thirty-three verses of his song — there were eight lines in each verse. It hegan to get late, and somebody whis- pered to the President. As Thierry commenced the thirty- fourth verse, the President rose, and asked solemnly, " Thierry, are there many more verses of that song ? " Thierry said, " Only twenty-one, and I shan't be " " Gentlemen," observed the President — " Grod save our gracious Queen." When we were dining more strictly en famille, we were partial to hymns — Moody and Sankey the favou- rites, as being the most noisy. The great advantage hymns possessed over secular songs was that the tunes vpere simple, and everybody knew the words. Of the topical songs that abounded in the Elizabethan era of student life, the days of the Peking Punch, few or none had come down to us. Some faint reflection of their brilliancy occasionally flashed on our horizon, the summer-lightning, as it were, of poetic wit — and Gordon's addition to a popular ditty was received not without applause : — Says Aaron to Moses, There are across the seas Some Stu-dent Interpreters A-learning of Chinese : At least, that 's what their worthy Chief, Sir Thomas Wade, supposes : They 're mostly singing comic songs — " Oh, let 'em sing," says Moses, As it may interest someone to know what is procur- able in the way of food in the depth of a Peking winter WINTEB. 116 (I know it used to interest us very much), I subjoin the authorised version of our cook's bill of fare on this occasion : — Menu. Hare soup. Mandarin fish, Bouch^es a la Keine. Aspic of quails. Eoast beef. Perdrix farcies. Wild boar. Meringues. Plum pudding. Dessert. In Peking, at any rate, the bill of fare was usually written in Chinese, on an oblong strip of red paper, and known as the hsi tan, or " Paper of the Feast." There is a story that at a dinner-party, a lady, one of the guests, took up this bill of fare, and, after looking through it very carefully for a minute or two, put it down with an air of disappointment. Her host poUtely expressed his regret that his cook had prepared so poor a course, and said that he really must dismiss him. " Oh dear no ; it isn't that at all," she answered. " I was merely looking at the paper to find the only cha- racter I know. That is, I don't know what it means, but it looks like an inverted V." " Dear ! dear ! " said 8 * ^M ^ i;^ WINTEB. 117 The 8th moon 5th day. Paper of the Feast. o Onion flower soup. c3 a Roast crab flesh. Boiled little chicken. Boast sheep flesh. OS a o O Ice Chi-lin. Long original cakes. ^** The sweetmeats are better known, perhaps, as " Ice Cream " and ' Finger Biscuits," confections which we maintained to be of an affinity almost chemical, but which the cook regarded as things apart, t6 be served up separately. 118 WHERE CHINESES DRIVE. the host, in a tone of alarm, " I hope you didn't find it ! That cook of mine believes we can eat most things, but I did think he drew the line at cannibalism ! " For ^^ is the common character for ' a man.' This is one of the current stories that every new comer has to hear sooner or later — like the freshman and the tale of the man with a short gown — and I insert it here with a solemn warning to any tyro who (for such is the way of tyros) may wish to repeat it, either to leave it alone, which is best, or to leave it vague. If he applies it, as thus, "At Mr. E.'s dinner the other day, Mrs. C. . . .," his auditor will probably remark, " I thought it was Mme. F., who, when Herr von D. was dining with them, asked her boy why they had no A (jen) for dinner that day, thinking that it meant potatoes, and wishing to show her knowledge of Chinese." At which the tyro will feel sad, or, if he be disputatious, will argue on the superior probability of his own version. The strong point in our larder in winter-time was game. The Mongols, who came down from the north, brought in a frozen state partridges, pheasants, a sort of wild barn-door fowl (if it can be so described — the Chinese call it a " wind chicken "), quails, wild boar, huang yang (a kind of small deer), hares (which were known as " wild cat "), and other game they had trapped or shot. In the south, by-the-bye, game is always shot. It is often trapped as a preliminary, it is true : but in that case the natives hang it up on a con- venient wall and fire at it. This is because a prejudice WINTEB. 119 which the foreigners apparently entertained against poisoned birds led them to suspect anything in which no pellets of lead or iron could be found. I believe the northern game is above suspicion. It is brought into Peking on the long string of camels that so attracted the attention of a new comer that he asked Lovell, who sat next to him at table, " Where do the camels go ? " Lovell was a little absent-minded, and, looking at his interrogator through his spectacles, muttered, " Where do camels go ? I don't know. Did you ever see a dead ? " "I don't mean when they die," said the other, testily, and went elsewhere for information. Dinners were all very well, very well indeed, at Peking. The food was good, and you knew and liked everyone you met, wherever you went. The trouble was in getting there. The roads were covered with ice, or mud, or dust, according to the weather, so that it was almost as bad to ride as to go in a cart. As a rule, the latter was the only feasible way, and then you arrived at your journey's end considerably ruffled, and cramped and bruised besides. At one or two places private carts were kept. In these the wheels, instead of being in the centre of the cart, were placed further back, and a "well " formed, so that the occupant could sit down in an orderly way instead of having to squat cross-legged. But the ordinary cart that you hired from a stand was as I have described it already. For there were stands, with carts and mules mixed up in the queerest fashion : carts with the shafts in the air, carts with the shafts on the ground ; mules lying down, or rolling about, or talking scandal apparently with other 120 WHEBE VHINESES BBI7E. mules while their drivers slept. When a fare arrives, he stirs up the nearest carter, who dives wildly among the chaos of mules, selects one, sorts it into a cart, and is ready to go to the other side of the city. The carters, or rather our boys for them, would charge four tiao (say Is. 3d.) for taking us anywhere. As we knew that the Chinese paid rather less than a tiao, there used to be endless disagreements between master and boy on this point. A tariff of fares was suggested, but it fell through. The boys would not countenance such foolishness. Paley wanted to hire a cart for the day, and told his boy to get one, saying it w^ould be eight tiao (half-a-crown). The boy imme- diately replied that it was impossible ; the regular charge was a dollar, or twelve tiao. There was no convincing him that he must be mistaken, except by producing a carter who would do it for less than a dollar. That, Paley considered, would be conclusive ; and he was accordingly delighted when, after long searching, he found a man who consented to take nine tiao. He brought him back in triumph, and exhibited him to the boy. The boy looked at him from head to foot, then said, con- temptuously, " That 's a missionary carter ! " " Well ? " asked Paley. "He's a missionary carter," repeated the boy, " and a Christian, so can afford to do things at a loss. He looks for his profit and reward in the next world ! " — and the boy turned away with the disgusted air of a man who finds himself unfairly handicapped. The worst time of the year in which to go about Peking in a cart was during or just after the rainy WINTEE. 121 season (June to August). The main streets have all a raised roadway of earth, from fifteen to twenty feet broad, running down the centre, while on each side is a footpath, three or four feet lower, and beyond that again the sewers, in the most wretched condition, and full of gaping pitfalls. A regular inspection of these is pro- vided for by law, and has taken place at intervals, with a striking and lamentable absence of good results. They discovered recently what appeared to them to account in some way for this. The method of in- spection is to open man-holes along the drain at intervals of half a mile or so, put a coolie into one hole and await his reappearance at the next. The coolie told oflf for this duty in one of the main streets had always performed it with great apparent ease, and the inspectors had congratulated themselves on the cleanliness of that portion of the drain ; so much so, indeed, that they invited a new colleague to come and see the man at work. They started him at one end, and immediately hurried off to the second man-hole to wait for him .... They found him there already, quietly knocking the ashes out of his pipe. Now, the most expeditious coolie cannot do half a mile in a Peking drain in something under four minutes. So they had that coolie out, and bambooed him a bit, to make him explain things. Then he said that "he was not the coolie at all, but his brother, and had instruc- tions from him to wait at that end for a reasonable time — say half an hour— and then appear as the other man. The inspectors had come before he had time to get pro- perly into the drain. As for his brother, he would 122 WHERE CEINE8ES DBIVE. probably be found about ten yards that side of the first manhole. It was impossible to get any farther. When the rains come, large portions of some of the low-lying streets are turned into muddy pools : roadway", footpath, sewer, alike indistinguishable. Carts trying to keep to the roadway have been known to topple over on to the footpath, and the people in them, unable to extri- cate themselves, to be drowned before their doorsteps. But usually if there is a flood the road is staked out by long bamboos, just as one sees a sandbank marked out at the entrance to a harbour — only for the opposite reason. To ride, where it is possible, is perhaps safer. But sometimes coming home over streets that are really a sheet of ice, only covered with dust to look like respectable roads, the pony will stumble and slide, then stop and shiver and almost cry, until regard for your own limbs, if not for the poor beast, makes you dismount and go afoot. One pitch-dark night of wind and rain, several of us who had ridden out to dine said that we should prefer to walk home. Paley declared that he would ride, how- ever, and went off. We others had a mafoo with a lantern, to show us the way down the narrow hii-t'ung full of holes and puddles. It was little use trying to avoid them, and so we tramped and splashed along, seeing nothing but blackness all round. At the mouth of the alley the mafoo suddenly stooped and picked up something out of a puddle, saying, " Pa lao-yeh's cap," in an unconcerned way, and went on calmly. We did not like it at all. Paley was inclined at times to be reckless, and had a theory that the safest way on a dark WINTER 12B night or over slippery streets was to gallop. So we peered as far as we could into the ditches as we went along, and probed the shadows with our sticks, getting more uneasy as we drew near the Legation. We has- tened to Paley's room. He was there, with a steaming glass of toddy, a dressing-gown, and the Light of Asia. We did not like this either, somehow. Here were all the elements of a romantic adventure : Peking, a dark night, rain falling in torrents^ a runaway horse, a cap found in a pool ... it was too bad ! But he comforted us a little by saying that his pony had bolted and had dashed him against the upper bar of the gate- way at the entrance of the hii-t'ung (it was too dark to see it), and had left him in a confused state and a puddle for a minute or two. The pony and he went home by instalments after that. Paley used to say that he preferred the Peking streets to the primness and uniformity of a macadamised road. There was a certain picturesqueness about them : whereas you cannot get any artistic effects out of an asphalte pavement or a succession of area railings. Perhaps he was right ; but it required a severe cold in the head, or the constant use of a smelling-bottle, for the ordinary man to fall in with his views. The Pekingese themselves carry about a small piece of rhu- barb, I think it is, much as we do camphor, when they walk abroad. I think to be favourably impressed by a Peking thoroughfare it should be viewed from a captive balloon, at a height of, say 600 feet. But every now and then some of the streets were put into repair, by the very simple process of plastering 124 WHEBE CHINE8ES BBIVE. them with mud, and keeping off the traffic till this was dry. One such occasion was the marriage of the late Emperor, commonly known as T'ung-Ohih, in 1874; another, the funeral of the late Empress Dowager. At such times not only are the roads, over which the wedding or the funeral procession will pass, carefully made smooth, and all traffic interdicted, but the road- way is screened by matting from the gaze of the common people. There is a good description of such a scene in Simpson's Meeting the Sun. A circular is always sent to the foreign legations, requesting the members of them to avoid these roads between certain days, or hours ; so that few Europeans have a chance of seeing the spectacle. If I remember rightly, Mr. Simpson says that he saw the bridal procession through the chinks of a shutter in the upper room of an opium den. The State procession always passes along the streets at night or in the early morning ; and this was why the little party of foreigners who watched from the roof of a shed the return of the Spirit Tablet of the late Empress over the Northern Canal Bridge, had to take their seats at the dreadfully early hour of 4 a.m. I was not (Sne of them. I consider the curiosity that will drag people out of bed, in winter too, before 11, or, as a con- cession- to weaker brethren, say 10, in the morning, to be morbid and dangerous. Besides, processions are common enough in Peking ; I met three one day, two marriages and a funeral. The Chinese undertakers are more enterprising than ours ; they will undertake with equal readiness for a wedding or for a burial. The matter is simple, though the paraphernalia is [ought WINTER. 125 you to say, are ?] very complex. All the undertaker does is to catch some fifty or a hundred loafers, beggars, and ragamuffins, throw an embroidered cloak over their shoulders, and put a cap of the proper pattern on their heads and a banner, or emblem of some kind, in their hands, and start them in some sort of order. They say that an Imperial procession is much the same, except that the robes are shabbier, and the bearers dirtier and more ragged. There is an intimate connection between the private marriage processions and the State procession that forms part of an Imperial funeral. For as soon as the death of an Emperor or Empress Dowager is reported, every- body who wants to get married hastens to do so ; since marriages will presently be forbidden by Imperial edict until the prescribed term of public mourning is over. The tailors must make a fine thing of it ; for a Chinese trousseau includes clothes for bridegroom as well as for bride. Our boys would always be asking leave at such a time : one had to marry his daughter down in T'ung- chow, another wanted to take a wife himself, and a third was to be a guest at both weddings. The thing got monotonous; perhaps our sympathies were less lively than they should have been. The good effects of an Imperial procession in smooth- ing the streets and clearing away the offensive wattle- and-daub huts that line the roads, last, unfortunately, but a very short time. Presently, these are as full of ruts and filth as before, and as dangerous to an unwary passenger. At night, a lantern is carried by every cart £iBd by every foot-passenger. Qn. it, if the man is of 126 WHEBU ORINHSjEJS BEIVE. any consequence at all, are painted in red characters his name, title, and address. Hsii, my teacher, always carried a lantern, even on bright moonlight nights. I believe because he thought it was the respectable thing to do : he said, because the dogs always attack a man who has not one. Dogs swarm in Peking, and, with the pigs, are the scavengers of the 'city. Between them and foreigners there is a feud of long standing. They seldom venture to attack a European, for, in spite of their size and somewhat fierce appearance, they are great curs ; but they stand at a distance and bark in a peculiarly irri- tating way, which incites the stranger to take up the nearest stone and fling it madly at them. Their owners do not seem to mind ; indeed, very seldom expostulate at all, and, when they do, prefer to put the question generally, " Whether it is the correct thing to rock dogs ? " — to which the natural and apparently satisfac- tory reply is, "What else were dogs and rocks made for ? " The natives think it over for some time, shake their heads softly and solemnly, gently kick the dog in question, and depart. The northern Chinaman — at any rate the Pekingese — is, I think, naturally averse to a row, and would much prefer to argue out any point of dispute. In England, if you tell an angry man to be calm, the chances are that he will resent it and go for you ; but an angry Chinaman pauses to reflect whether, on the whole, calmness would not be the most paying course, and if he (as he usually does) comes to the conclusion that it would, becomes calm accordingly. I have no doubt that a Chinese dog would be equally reasonable, if WINTEB. 127 one had time to try the experiment ; but on the whole it is simpler to rock him. Foreign dogs do not get on with Chinese ones any better than their masters. Keary had a bull-dog, who was a source of continual trouble to him. So long as Keary was content to wait while that bull-dog polished off a street-full of curs in succession, it was all right ; but if Keary was in a hurry, and insisted on his leaving the others alone for that afternoon, he would resent it as an uncalled-for interference on his master's part, and go home in dudgeon with a considerably diminished opinion of him, I have said nothing about our own dogs, and yet they formed no unimportant part of our mess. First of all was Paley's black retriever. Paley was our President, and sat at the head of our table ; while his dog — the Pup, as Paley continued to style him, even in mature doghood — lay at his feet all dinner-time. Paley would call him at intervals, "Come up, you! " then, as he put his nose in his hand, " Come completely up," — and the Pup stood on his hind legs, his fore-paws on Paley's shoulders, gazing earnestly in his face. After dinner, Paley would sling him over his shoulder, and walk off, the Pup pretending vigorous approval with his tail. Poor old Gyp ! He went with his master to retrieve among the brushwood, and came back the shadow of his former self, affectionate still — 'he was that to the last — but listless, and later on a confirmed valetudi- narian. In his puppyhood he had been grievously bullied by Randolph's deerhound, and when he became a dog, remembered his wrongs and avenged them. And 128 WHEBE GEINESES DBIVE. SO the deerhound, Cassius — his lean and hungry look gave him his name — had to be banished from the mess-room. The right of quarrelling there was reserved. But old age and suffering made them forget their feuds, and, when Cassius died, Gyp followed him to the grave as chief mourner, in, alas, a very rusty suit of black. Then there was Ferguson. She was bought by Herington for a dollar, as a curio. She combined so many types of dog, that it was felt to be difficult to find a ready-made name for her. She had as much claim, or as little, to be called Juno as Fifine or Lulu. Herington, in his perplexity, declared that he could not do better than call her by some simple un- compromising name of universal application, such as Jones or Mary Ann. He finally, however, borrowed an idea from the Innocents Abroad, and styled her Fer- guson. Even this had its drawbacks. When distin- guished visitors of that name met Herington running wildly down the Legation, calling out, "Hullo, I say, hi ! Ferguson ! Come here, you little beast ! " they were apt at first to misconstrue his meaning, and address him coldly. And they were not always soothed by an introduction to their namesake. She had a tail curved like a French horn, of which she was not unjustly proud. It was the sole but sufficient foundation on which Herington rested his theory as to her breeding. In vain Gordon pointed out that she had the head of a diminutive mastiff, and the body of a turnspit. Hering- ton would hold her suspended by that tail for minutes, while Ferguson blinked in triumphant satisfaction at WINTEB. 129 her detractor. Gordon had to console himself with Puck. Puck was a black and white Peking pug, and G-ordon's pride. He was all head and shoulders, like a tadpole or a small battering-ram, and was as beautifully ugly as any dog-fancier could desire. In his method of pro- ceeding, Gordon professed to trace a resemblance to the aery sprite, his namesake ; to the rest of us it appeared like a pumpkin coming down-stairs, or a railway-engine with the hind-wheels off. Gordon used to observe, in a complacent pharisaical sort of way, as he contemplated what he called Puck's " fairy form," that he was a very different sort of dog from Ferguson. Indeed, that was the only way, he said, in which Ferguson could be de- fined, by negatives, as it were. She was not like any sort of dog you can name or conceive. Herington, indeed, spent many unprofitable hours trying to match her, as though she were a blade of ribbon-grass. At last he announced, with a certain amount of pomp and finality — like the Pope ex cathedra — ^that she was unique. After this, Gordon was all for labelling her as a new species, not to say genus, and sending her to the Zoo. The Chinese year is lunisolar, and they still keep to the old Metonic cycle. Though this seems to us a clumsy method, yet it has one great advantage, in that their day of the month always gives the age of the moon — the first being no moon, and the 15th full moon. As the sky of Peking is cloudless during a great part of the year, the inhabitants get the full benefit of what- ever moon there is. This is why the meetings of the 9 130 WHUBE GRINE8ES BEIVE. Peking Debating Society take place on or about the 15th of each Chinese month. This society was started by, and is almost entirely made up of, the Protestant missionaries in the city, and in many respects strongly resembles a parochial Mutual Improvement Association at home. The meetings are held at the house of one of the members, and, after the usual opening, the chair- man requests the proposer of a debate, or the reader of a paper, to begin. When he has finished, the brethren are called on, in order, to make remarks on what he has said — which they are not slow, as a rule, to do. There was one man who had certainly a ready flow of speech, but he seemed a little mixed occasionally, as when he said, " We get no help from analogy, and there is nothing else with which we can compare it." And again, " The cream of the question lies at the bottom." But then he had studied Chinese for some years, and it is apt to unsettle most men. The subjects of these debates were usually, and natu- rally, connected with China, and more especially of late with the burning (or rather smoking) opium question. Once, however, it was announced that the Kev. Dr. Z. was to read a paper " On the Best Way of Spending Money." This greatly excited Gordon, who does not care much about opium disputes, but really thought he ought to know something about spending money, and he was exceedingly curious to know if Dr. Z. had found out a new way. When the evening came, Gordon discovered that the half had not been told him. The subject of the paper should have read, " The Best Way of Spending Money in Chinese Missions : Is it advisable WINTEB. 131 to give money to the Chinese ? " He had long made up his mind on that point, and left presently, grieved that time should be wasted in discussing self-evident untruths. We were apt to get rather hazy notions of time in Peking. In the Legation, noon was marked by twelve strokes of a wooden mallet on a cracked iron bell, chained to a tree near the gate ; but the time of striking the bell was settled in various ways. Besides the sun- dial which was alluded to as spoiling the feng-shui of the Minister's entrance, somebody with a turn that way would occasionally take solar observations. But as a rule our time was given us by the Professor of Astro- nomy at the Peking College. The cook went by the mess-room clock : what that went by was a mystery. There was nothing wrong with the works that we could see (we used to take them out and examine them), but one day it would be half-an-hour too late, another, an hour too fast. Such irregularity must have been bad for it : I am sure it was not good for our digestions. At last the mess coolie made a compromise : the dress- ing-gong was sounded at half-past 11 by the clock, and the tiffin-gong at noon by the Legation bell. The only dravrback was, that sometimes the Legation bell sounded before the clock struck 11.30, and it puzzled the coolie to know whether he ought not to strike the second gong first. But a dressing-gong when tiffin was nearly over seemed on the whole rather an anomaly : so he gave up the problem in despair. After all, time was of little consequence in Peking. I never wound up my own clock except now and then 9 * 132 WHERE CHINESES BBWE. for amusement, and, as I did not set it to any time in particular, it used to have a curious effect on too con- fiding and watchless visitors, who would be deluded into staying till it was too late to dine at home, and be triumphantly secured for dinner at the mess. It certainly was a comfort for a lazy man, that there were no trains to catch ; but then there vrere the city gates. These closed at sunset, and if you were shut out, there was no getting in again till sun-rise the next morning ; and probably, as hardly anyone carries money about with him in Peking, you had not a cent to buy such food as could be had. The same rule as to closing holds with the gates between the Tartar and the Chinese city ; only in this case they are opened at midnight to relieve guard. The shortest way to the Legation from the country outside often lay through both cities. Mr. Lord, who was visiting Peking, was one of a riding party along the western wall of the city. Staying behind to look at something, he missed his companions. It was unfortunate, as it was getting dark, and he could not speak a word of Chinese. However, he found himself near a gate and entered. Presently, as he rode on, he came to another gate, and, to his surprise, everybody made violent gestures, directing him to go through it. No, as he said, he had had experience of Chinamen and their ways in his own part of the world, and was not to be fooled. He had only just entered the city, and was it likely that he would go out again ? And so he con- tinued his ride, unmoved. He seemed a long time getting to the Legation, though, and at last made signs to a man to show him the way. The man, naturally, WINTER 133 did not know where he wanted to go, but with great presence of mind took him to an inn, and left, with Mr. Lord's last dollar. Meanwhile, as it grew dark, and Mr. Lord did not return, there was trouble and commotion in the Legation. The Chinese were communicated with, and a search party finally discovered him trying to persuade the innkeeper to take a chit in discharge of his bill. When he was informed that he was in the Chinese city, and had kept himself out of the Tartar city by refusing to enter the second gate, he was at first inclined to be incredulous. Then he reviewed his opinion of his own sagacity. A nice sense of justice seemed to require it. It is not difficult, however, with a little practice, to find one's way about Peking — for, as I said, nearly all the streets run east or north. But even so, there were short cuts, narrow alleys, pleasanter to walk through than the main streets, as being cleaner (or less dirty), and freer from traffic, and dogs and beggars. The day on which a good knowledge of these short cuts was most useful, was the 1st of January. Some say that the Americans got the custom of calling on their friends on New Year's Day from the Dutch, and they again from the Chinese : but, however introduced, it has become firmly established among the Europeans in Peking. On that day everyone is expected to call on each lady- resident in turn. Now the centre of the Tartar city is occupied by the large enclosure of the Imperial City, and the complete circuit of this has to be made by any- one who wishes to do his duty thoroughly. For, besides the Legations and other houses near the south wall, 134 WSEBE GSINFSES DBIVK between the Ha-ta and the Ch'ien (" Front ") Gates, there are estabHshments of missionaries and others in the south-west (in the Jung-hsien Hii-t'ung, or Velvet- thread Lane) ; in the west, near the P'ing-tse Gate ; in the north, not far from the Hon Men, or Back Gate of the Imperial City ; in the great street that runs north from the Ha-ta to the An-ting Gate (by which our troops entered in 1860) ; and in the south-east corner of the city. The Japanese Legation, too, is in the north-east in a hii-t'ung running east from the Ha-ta Street. Eoughly speaking, the houses of the European resi- dents lie on the circumferences of two circles, one very large and surrounding the Imperial City, and one, a small one, taking in the Legations and the various houses belonging to the Customs' Establishment. A map of Pekin ought to be appended to the suggested Guide for Calling, with these circles marked in red and blue, for the benefit of the energetic or conscientious, and the lazy or poniless, respectively. One of the former class would have to start on his round very early in the day, taking a mounted mafoo with him. He will probably, I may say certainly, do the outer circuit first, and, as most callers go round with the sun in running their course of duty, the ladies in the west of the city will receive nearly all their visitors before noon. The same men consequently are being continually met, but that only adds to the amusement of the thing and affords food for conversation — sometimes much needed. One year, several men met together and bound them- WINTER. 186 selves by certain rules to be observed in calling. The chief of these were under the heading of " Conversation." Rule xix. ran : The practice of small-talk being inju- rious to the mind and lowering to the dignity of the nobler sex, it is hereby resolved that no member of this Association shall be permitted, under any pretence whatsoever, to answer or in any way notice such ques- tions as the following : — " Have you been long in China ? " " How do you like Peking ? " " The roads here are dreadful — are they not ? ' " Did you ride, or come in a cart ? " Should any remarks be addressed to him containing any, even the most distant, allusions to the weather, he shall at once rise, and solemnly depart. If the allusion is very direct, he may scream. This will not fail to lead the conversation into a higher channel. Rule XX. was as follows : The choice of suitable subjects for conversation having been left to the Com- mittee, they have, after mature reflection, drawn up the accompanying list. A member is only entitled to speak on one subject, which will be assigned to him by ballot. Any infraction of this rule will be visited by excommu- nication. List of Subjects. The Lost Ten Tribes. The Atomic Theory. Ostriches. Torpedoes. The Digamma. Oscar Wilde. Sardanapalus. Jupiter's Moons. The Eozoon Canadense. Sugar-candy. 136 WHEBE CEINE8ES BBIV^. Rules V. to xiii. regarded the manner of calling and the length of the call. Not less than three, or more than five, men were to call together. The time allowed for the visit was as long as it would take the most dys- peptic of them to eat a sponge cake and drink a cup of tea. Anyone who failed to speak on his subject during that time (for the regulations regarding these subjects members were referred to Rule xx.), was compelled immediately on his arrival at the next place of call to eat a square of butter-scotch (a supply, by Rule xii., was to be issued by the Hon. Secretary), and to simulta- neously commence the conversation. We felt the superior beauty of such a system as this, but reluctantly confessed that it was too hard for us, and continued in the beaten track. At one or two central places, the ladies are kind enough to provide a standing tiffin, or to tell their friends at what hour tiffin will be on the table; and for this the gratitude of many tired and hungry callers is due. The Japanese Legation was always gaily deco- rated on New Year's Day, with archways of artificial flowers and lanterns. The wife of the Minister received her guests prettily dressed in the native costume. By her side was a tray containing wafer biscuits cut into the shape of leaves and flowers and coloured red, yellow, or green. These she would offer through her interpreters (for, unfortunately, she knew no foreign language), who — they spoke English and French respectively — relieved one another according to the nationality of the visitor. Generally, I think, caUing on New Year's Day must have been as much of a trial as WINTER. 135* a pleasure to the ladies. They had, at any rate in the inner circle, to be ready to receive visitors all day long, to pour out tea for them, and cut cake, and make con- VCTsation for people they had never seen before, and possibly might not see again till the next 1st of January. But they decreed that we should call ; and we — we were, of course, their very obedient servants. Some festive proceeding usually ushered in the New Year. There is a homeless club in Peking whose only visible local habitation inside the city is the bar attached to the Skating Eink. Close to the city wall, at the back of the Legation, is a yard on which in winter-time a large mat shed is erected. The yard is then flooded from an adjoining well, and a skating rink formed. One side of this is now occupied by the small building I spoke of, and which, besides the bar, contains a minia- ture dressing-room. On New Year's Eve the whole is illuminated, a Christmas-tree set up, and a supper pro- vided. A piano and a hurdy-gurdy give a completeness to the effect ; and so the old year is skated out. After one such occasion, some five or six of us decided that it would be advisable to see the Customs' students home. They tried to explain to us that they were capable : they went further, they insinuated things. We refuted them with scorn and promptitude, and by a good working majority. Then, crowded into, and on to, a cart, some inside, some on the shafts, two on the board behind, and one on the roof (he tumbled off presently — he explained that the roof was too slippery), we started for the Kou-lan Hu-t'ung. On arriving there we went round to the rooms of those who were in bed, 138 WHEBE OHINESES DBIVK and wished them a Sappy New Year. They did not seem as pleased as they ought to have been ; I cannot say why. When our blinking hosts had refreshed us we went on to the house of a pr&fessor hard by. His gate-keeper (who for some inscrutable reason seemed to look on us with suspicion) promptly shouted through the door that his master had not come back. We were disinclined to believe this, and successfully stormed the place, Kandolph climbing over the gate-keeper's house and opening the door for the rest. The professor was in bed ; and though I am sure he must have been glad to see us, did not, as was his plain duty, reprimand his gate-keeper. Such misplaced leniency ruins servants, as we pointed out to that dull man. After this we went home — on foot. For the ungrateful carter had disap- peared, leaving a message to the effect that he and his cart did not feel equal to the responsibility of conveying us all back. Entertainments were given at the Skating Eink on other occasions besides Nevr Year's Eve. These usually took the form of Fancy Dress — I do not know that they could be strictly called Balls, although the hurdy-gurdy, if not the piano, usually attended and performed — " gatherings " would be perhaps appropriate (for it has some mystic connection with dressmaking, or am I mis- taken ?). Some of the costumes worn had been brought out from home, but the majority were made by Chinese tailors from patterns supplied them. Chinese costumes were not allowed — on the principle, I suppose, that they were so much easier to get, and involved little thought on the part of the wearer. It was hard on the unima- WINTEB. 139 ginative, perhaps, and gave, many sleepless nights. It worried a man dreadfully when he had only two days to make up his mind whether he would look better as Oscar Wilde or as a Tame Gorilla. At the end of it he felt more fit to go as the Skeleton at an Egyptian feast. But these cares are not peculiar to Peking. One year, fortunately on an off-day (the rink was only open four times a week or so), the mat shed caught fire — it was supposed through a lighted cracker falling on it, for it was the time of the Chinese New Year — and was burnt to the ground. In the Legation there are two fire-engines kept, one movable, the other fixed, and known respectively as engines A and B. To each of these a senior student was appointed captain, while one of the rest acted as nozzleman to direct the jet. Hel- mets and belts, with turnscrews and axes, were kept in the engine-room. There were plenty of wells in the Legation and every opportunity for practising. Not that much was done, but it might have been, and in former times, I believe, it was. Then the bugleman would come round at 1 a.m. and wake everybody up. One enthusiast ran down in such a hurry that he collided against a tree in the dark, and was found there after drill and brought to by the aid of the hose, damping his ardour for some time to come. In those days they liked to get wet and be photo- graphed in a mess. We considered such things vanity, and preferred to keep clean. Nevertheless, when we heard the news of the fire at the rink we turned out, and ran the engine round to the scene of the disaster, our Chinese contingent coming in out of breath — they 140 WHEBU CEINESES DRIVE. had the pumping to do. To our disgust there was nothing but a heap of charred bamboos in a half-frozen (half-thawed would be more accurate) muddy pool. But presently a tree was found to be burning, and the hose fixed up and made to play on it. Then it occurred to someone that the right thing to do was to chop off the smouldering limb (what was the good of our axes if they were not to be used ?). So he mounted the tree and set to work. After getting himself in a horrid mess he found that the hatchet was too blunt to be of any service, and that, moreover, the fire was out, and so he concluded to come down. We refreshed ourselves with some smoky whisky — part of the salvage — and ran the engine home again, feeling that we had done our duty : O'Hara, who is good at that sort of thing, blowing a march on the nozzle of Engine A. The Chinese New Year was a holiday season for our- selves and our teachers. On the morning of this first and greatest of days to a Chinaman the teachers would come round in detachments of two or three, dressed in their brightest skirts — not necessarily their newest, for these garments of courtesy are often heirlooms — to pay their compliments. " A happy new year." "A happy new year to us both." " May you obtain promotion ! " " May you beget sons ! " " May you pass your days in riches and honour ! " Then off in a hurry' to the next man's rooms. Boys, cooks, coolies, mafoos, must come too, and drop on one knee, or seem to do so, and say, " Mr. Fang " — as the case may be — " a happy new year," and disappear almost before you can acknow- ledge it. WINTEE. 141 The teachers would bring some little present as a New Year's cadeau, a little tea or some sweetmeats. Sung used often to give me sweetmeats (Mrs. Sung made them, I believe) — biscuits, and jujube jam. The bis- cuits I gave to Gyp ; the jam I privily buried, until one day Fawcett surprised me, and marvelled. He said that this " red fruit preserve " — he objected to the word " jam " — was a thing to be desired. After that I used to send it, whenever it came, up to his rooms instead. The New Year is the time for theatricals in the Chi- nese city. The theatres themselves are not much to see, but occasionally foreigners are represented on the stage, and the lion turns painter, and gives his version of events and things. The foreigner always comes on in a battle scene, and always comes off badly. Your China- man would take Apollo for a bogey, Hyperion for a satyr ; and the Pekin gamin has no more cutting gibe for his fellow mudlark than to point to some advancing European and say, " Here 's your brother coming ! " If we think flattened noses, eyes like a cat's at mid- day, blubber lips, high cheekbones, and a skin like mouldy parchment hideous and ogre-like, we do but feebly echo their opinion of our more prominent fea- tures. So the stage Englishman is the ugliest actor procurable. His dress, as a rule, is as great a libel as his face. But one day a foreigner, sitting in a Chinese theatre, saw among the motley crew in red cotton coats and clumsy native boots that were doing duty as defeated Englishmen, an actor rigged out in evening dress. Swallow-tail, white tie, shirt — nothing was wanting. 142 WHERE GEINE8ES DBIVE. He was the leader of the EngHsh troops, and carried a broomstail by way of musket. And when the inevitable rout took place, he was carefully signalled out for the buffets and abuse of the victorious Chinese. The foreigner went home pensive : the dress suit was undeniable. And its treatment was not calculated to improve it. He mentioned the circumstance to his friends, and they too reflected, long and earnestly. They ascertained that a similar performance was to take place that day week, and resolved on certain measures. They were successful. On the night of the play Dr. Josephs discovered that his dress suit was absent from his wardrobe. The boy was sent for, and at last con- fessed that, as on several previous occasions, it had been hired out to the theatrical company at fifty cents the evening. He pleaded in extenuation that he did not think his master would miss it. For Josephs is one of the most absent-minded of men. He is a very learned Doctor of Divinity, with a mind above the conventionalities of common life. Mrs. Josephs looks after those for him. And so, when they were dining at the Bertrams' one evening the winter before last, she carefully laid out his dress clothes in his room, and saw that the studs were fastened in his shirt. The Doctor was engrossed in his great work on the Comparative Philology of the Chinese and Aztec, and only began to dress at the last moment. He slipped on an overcoat and joined the impatient Mrs. Josephs in her cart. On their arrival at the Bertrams' they found everyone there before them. The Doctor, anxious to regain his wife's good graces by showing that her WINTEB. 143 lectures on loitering were not lost on him, hurried at once into the drawing-room. He was making his way to the hostess when, " Allow me, Dr. Josephs, to assist you off with your overcoat." As Bertram took the garment, there was a horrified scream from Mrs. Josephs. The Doctor stood revealed in a red flannel shirt and blue cotton neck-cloth, framed in the incon- gruous swallow-tail. Nothing pleased our cook so much as the laying out of a table for a large mess dinner. He used to make the most extraordinary centre-pieces, with a substratum of apricot kernels formed into a solid mass by pouring boiling sugar over them. When he had moulded this into the shape of a vase, he filled it with Siberian crabs, dates, quarters of oranges, sugared walnuts, grapes, and other things, and put some more boilingsugar over that, filling in the interstices with artificial flowers. Or he would get a gourd of some kind, hollow it,^ and carve it most elaborately. Inside was placed a lighted candle, and the effect, if quaint, was pretty. Then he would make us cakes, alternate layers of sponge-cake and jam, also covered with artificial flowers. These flowers were very well made, and often exceedingly tasteful. It was formerly, I believe, a custom at the Mess to have a zakouska before dinner, olives, caviare, sliced salmon, and like appetite-provoking dishes ; but whether because this was found to be really a work of superero- gation, or for some other weighty reason, the good old custom has been abolished, and only survives in Peking in places where some Russian has fortunately taken up 144 WHERE GEINESES DRIVE. his abode. After a Mess dinner we adjourned to the " drawing-room," in the daytime known as the library, which had been decorated for the occasion with pictures, curios, and scrolls, and made comfortable with arm- chairs and rugs from our rooms. Sometimes we had a piano up there ; but most of the songs were sung across the walnuts and the wine, unaccompanied. The guests then distributed themselves, some in the billiard-room, some in the bowling alley (if it was a bowling night), while some stayed in the library to play whist or other- wise amuse themselves. Usually at one or two houses there were "whist evenings " once a week, where anyone who came could, be sure of a rubber. Whist accounts were settled by a chit, or simply by entry in the " whist-book." There was a general clearance of these at the end of winter. A " chit," I should perhaps explain, is used in many senses out here : for an I U, as well as for a memo — or generally, for any written message. In sending a chit, a " chit-book " almost invariably accompanies it. The usual form of this is a leather-covered memorandum book fitting into a leather case, and the object is partly to protect the note from contact with the coolie's hand, but chiefly that the signature of the receiver in the book may prove delivery — a very necessary precaution some- times, as parcels and money frequently accompany the chit. Some men used to take great pride in their chit-books : kept them in text-hand, and carefully rubbed or scratched out any frivolous remarks their correspondents might have unduly inserted. Others were as anxious to get WINTER. 145 theirs filled as a young lady her album or Shakespeare Birthday Book. One of these men was bemoaning to Herington the slowness with which his pages filled, when Herington said he would bring his. He was some little time finding it, but when he did appear he showed to his admiring friend columns full of the notables of Peking. Each was initialed in red or blue or black pencil, and followed by some remark ; but the other man had not time to read these, as Herington said there was an im- portant engagement he had just remembered, and left with the book. A day or two after the other received a chit from Herington, and, turning over the leaves of the chit-book, paused to look at the remarks made there by Herington's numerous and distinguished correspondents. Most of them were illegible, and seemed to resemble Tamil in the form of the letters ; but presently against the name of one of the senior ministers he found the legend K.Y.H.O. He says it was this that first shook his faith in Herington's chit-book. He felt that the letters must stand for ' Keep Your Hair On,' but he had not faith enough to believe that this was the reply usually sent by Plenipos. to communications addressed to them. He is convinced, though, that Herington's method of filling a chit-book is more expeditious than his own, but there seem to be one or two features in it to which more prejudiced people might take exception, and he accordingly hesitates to adopt it. Once every winter, generally about the time of the Chinese New Year, the little theatre attached to the reading-room was thrown open for use. Sometimes a 10 146 WHERE CHINESE8 DRIVE. pantomime was performed, more frequently a short play, and once a Christy Minstrel concert. In any case, there were long and mysterious rehearsals, during which the papers and magazines of the reading-room were trans- ferred to the library, and the doors communicating with the billiard-room kept strictly closed. The theatre did not boast many properties, and each actor had to supply his own dress. Neither was a change of scene easy, and so plays that did not require this were preferred. When Frere was in Peking he and Mrs. Bertram agreed to paint a new drop-scene. But Frere thought it a foolish waste of time to get up before twelve, and preferred to do his part in the small hours of the night, when he could be undisturbed. Mrs. Bertram had prejudices in favour of daylight, and so they occupied the stage much as Box and Cox their lodgings, and never met. Suggested alterations were written on chits and pinned to the canvas to await approval. It was better so, perhaps, than to trust to native talent. At one of the ports a Chinese artist was called in to make a large copy of an old-fashioned valentine, to serve as a stage curtain. There was a church in the background, and a winding-path led between tombstones to the porch. On the path a couple were walking arm- in-arm, in chimney-pot and coal-scuttle bonnet. The native copied every detail with commendable fidelity ; then paused to survey his work. It struck him with a sense of incompleteness that saddened him. Presently he became inspired, and, seizing his brushes, painted, behind the largest tombstone, and close to the devoted WINTER. 147 pair, a bright red and very heraldic Chinese lion, pre- pared to devour them. It seemed to him to add soul and motif to the picture. The audience at our theatre were of many nation- alities. Frenchmen, Germans, Hollanders, Russians, Japanese. They did not always understand a far-fetched pun, but they looked as if they did, and applauded the efforts of the pun-maker — ^which came to much the same thing, perhaps. To the dress rehearsal the children came with their amahs. The children were' enthusiastic, but beyond a faint glow of satisfac- tion, the amahs betrayed little emotion. For one thing, the Chinese can hardly understand any but the lowest classes condescending to act on a stage, and the amahs are possibly doubtful how far they ought to encourage that sort of thing by appearing pleased. On the night of the play the billiard-room does duty as a cloak-room. Entrance is obtained by means of steps leading up to and down from one of the windows ; for there is no space to spare in the reading-room, now perverted into an auditorium. The plays I need say nothing about : they were of the usual drawing-room drama type, and hardly deserved to be as well rendered as for the most part they were. The Christy Minstrel concert was got up by some ten or twelve of the community, and came off exceedingly well — as was to be expected, seeing that two Charges d' Affaires (actual or potential) took part in it. The preparations for the great event were concealed with the usual care from the uninitiated, but it leaked out some- 10 * 148 WHERE OHINESES DBTVE. how that each performer was to be supplied with a motto, and have it printed on the programme. As we were always ready to do a kind action, we adjourned to the library and possessed ourselves of a Shakespeare, a Dryden, a Pope, and two volumes of " Elegant Extracts." Then we prepared a list of mottoes that seemed to us quite too perfect; but somehow, when it came to be submitted to the performers, everybody thought his neighbour's singularly appropriate, but for the hfe of him could not see the fan of his own. Indeed, they went so far as to make reflections on the men who had chosen them. They said, for instance, that they did not mind giving their first violin — Paley — such a thing as — Orpheus played so well he moTed old Nick, But thou mov'st nothing but thy fiddle-stick, — for that merely showed want of appreciation on our part of his many excellencies ; but they thought their tenor likely to be discouraged by "An it had been a dog that had howled thus," and the rest of it ; while the temper of their juniorest member would hardly be improved if he saw himself labelled "A peevish school-boy." Grordon objected to his : " Now will he lie ten nights awake, carving the fashion of a new doublet"; but he was privately pleased, for he was conscious of a nice taste in dress. We were disgusted at their ingratitude, and thought of appealing to the public with our Eejected Mottoes, but forbore. Some of them, it is true, were more amenable. Ber- tram, the sociable but unmelodious, received his motto. WINTER. 149 with the smile of cheerful approval he sheds on most things : Who ne'er bad wit nor will for music yet, But pleased to be reputed of a set. And Sileby, a kindred soul, accepted his with wonted calmness : Wbat fluent nonsense trickles from bis tongue, How sweet tbe Terses neitber said nor sung ! Collectively, too, they were not so sensitive, and allowed their programme to be headed with " Less Black than We 're Painted " [Herington wanted to spell the last word with a y, out of compliment to the novelist, but we suppressed him], and — Tbey carefully observed dramatic rules. They all looked natural and tbey all looked . The programme was imposing. It announced that " The Consolidated Cosmopolitan Combination Min- strels " would " appear for the first (and positively the last) time in the Legation Theatre." " This Troupe," it stated, " was under the Patronage and Special Protection of Great Britain, the Netherlands, Rus- sia, Germany, and the United States, and its mem- bers had been selected with care and sent to China at great expense by their respective Govern- ments." Then came the mottoes, the unrejected ones. Then an outline of the performance in three parts. Parts I. and III. were taken up by the usual nigger songs, inter- spersed in the performing by a few jokes and a pun or 150 WHERE GHINESE8 DRIVE. two on the names of the visitors, carefully extemporised. Part II, was a " Variety Entertainment — Musical, Acrobatic, Magical, and Terpsichorean, as exhibited before all the Crowned Heads of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America " (the Sandwich Islands were as yet unvisited). For particulars we were referred to handbills — not, Gordon explained, because there were any, but because people always liked a reference. We were further informed that " Admission was Feee to children under 75 years of age," and (this in the most extensive type admissible) that Peabs' Soap was the Best ! There were some trifling matters of detail that went a little wrong in the Second Part. The Professor of Strength and Legerdemain had caused two weights of 50 and 500 lbs. respectively to be brought in by his panting assistants, and placed near the front of the stage. He was going to show his strength by lifting them unaided, but meanwhile was busy about something else. While his back was turned the small boy who did duty as My Son thought his cile was come, and picked up the weights and was carrying them off, when the horrified Professor caught sight of him and rushed in pursuit. Then he solemnly went through the business with the weights. After which he explained, apologeti- cally, " My sonn, he iss von goot lad, but he iss so yong, he d(5ss not know." Nevertheless, he had a mishap with his senior assis- tant — Gordon. The Professor took down a bamboo pole from the wall, and carefully balanced it on his nose. Then Gordon climbed up the Professor on to the pole. WINTER. 161 But just as he got there the pole slipped. Instead of falling, however, it remained suspended — casting doubts on the strength of the Professor's nose, that should have been uncalled for. I have caught him napping once or twice. You will smile at our finding amusement in tricks so old. Spend a winter, or, better still, two, in Peking, and you will laugh at anything — and the more heartily if it is an old friend. Out of doors there were occasional skating parties before the dust had spoilt the new ice. Herington, Lawson, and Eandolph, skated down the canal to T'ungchow one day — a feat worthy, they said, of record. They provisioned themselves against accidents with a bottle of brandy. But Eandolph and Herington com- plained when they came back that it was not much good to them. For Lawson fell into a hole soon after they started, and when they got him out they gave him the brandy to imbibe medicinally. Then he said that he must skate fast to restore his circulation, and he went ahead at a pace quite beyond them. When they caught him up at last, he was sitting on the bank shying at the empty brandy-bottle with chunks of ice. And Eandolph says he wanted to know if there was not any more brandy. A football match on the An-ting plain, north of the city, was talked about, but nothing came of it. A ball and goal-posts could be had or extemporised : the difficulty was to find the players. Someone suggested Coolies v. Mafoos, but somehow this did not seem likely to give us all the exercise we wanted. 162 WB.BBE CEINE8ES DRIVE. and the scheme fell through. Inside the Legation there was, besides the bowling-alley, the fives court, and this was used off and on right into the summer. Indeed, we have played in it with the thermometer at 95° — when it more nearly resembled the hot-air room in a Turkish Bath than a place of exercise. Balls and concerts were given at some of the Lega- tions and at the Inspectorate-General of Customs. Dinners everywhere. But the pleasantest of all, per- haps, were the carpet dances (with the carpet up) at two or three houses. We shared the misfortune of most European communities in the East : an undue preponderance of the male. Dancing-men were at a discount. As a lady once said of a similar struggle at home (similar, mutatis mutandis), " the competition was terrible." Under such unnatural conditions, it was not surprising that programmes were usually filled up in ink. The modus operandi in filling the programme appears truly formidable to a fresh and bashful student. He is told that he must first call on his lady acquaint- ances and use all his powers of persuasion to secure a partner for Mrs. X.'s dance that day fortnight. If he is fortunate enough to do this, he must then call on Mrs. X., and use all his powers of persuasion to get her to give a dance that day fortnight. And a certain, not inconsiderable, amount of diplomacy is sometimes required. But our hostesses were kind-hearted and yielded to what we considered to be the logic of circumstances. If there were three times as many dancing men in Peking as ladies wishful to dance, the only way to satis- WINTEit. 153 factorily arrange things was to give three times as many dances. And so the dances were given. But grew fewer each week as winter drew to a close, and the opening of the river allowed those whose pleasure or duty it was, to go south. 154 WHERE CHINE8ES BMIVE. V. Spring and Autumn. The opening of the river, while it is the signal of departure for some of us, brings back to Peking the residents who may have been wintering at Shanghai, and at the same time sends north not a few of those who are engaged on the "grand tour" of to-day, and who have been styled, and in most cases good- humouredly accepted the title of "globe-trotters." The average globe-trotter is a very good fellow to meet, with, as is to be expected now that he is half-way round the world, plenty of reminiscences; who, as a snowball pebbles, has picked up a store of topical stories, and so serves the purpose of the pedlar at home, in giving one district a neighbourly interest in another. If he has a weakness, it is perhaps for bringing out on all occasions, possible and impossible, such smatter- ing of the language of the place as he has been able to acquire in a week or two. He is ingenuous, and admits this pleasantly enough: "We . . . think the opportunity a good one to take soundings in Chinese, so ask him in Mandarin speech, with a strong English accent, the name of the next village. He thinks for a SPBING AND AUTUMN. 165 great number of seconds with his wrinkled old face, and with eyes and mouth staring at us fixedly, and at last, with a feeble oscillation of that venerable cranium, shouts out, loud enough to be heard a mile off, ' Pu- toong-wha.' He did not understand our language, though we spoke in his own." (Fleming, Travels on Horse- bach in Manchu Tartary, p. 24). Possibly not, as later on we read : " ' Had we any more men, and how many ? ' he finally queried. . . . Now the similarity in sound between the word yin (sic) man, and tien (sic) days, per- plexed M." (the Chinese speaker) "who luckily thought it was days he meant, and answered, twelve — as this was the time we had been on the road," ib. p. 445. (' How many men ? ' would probably be cM-ho jen^ ; ' how many days ? ' cM t'ien^ — but this by the way.) A tdo-t'ai is a high Chinese official whose rank cor- responds with that of a Consul. And so it did sound a little odd when a globe-trotter, who was going into the city to buy curios, looked doubtfully at his dollars, and observed, " I suppose I had better get them changed for tao-t'ais." His idea was to lay in a stock of tiao notes. But there was one man who had been resident in Peking some months, and had, he told us, the task of translating the correspondence between his Legation and the Tsung-li Yamen, who continued to call the Ch'ien Men, the An-ting Men, and the Ha-ta Men, by the respective names of the " China Men," the " Hunting Men," and the " Gate Men." It was only after long argument that he could be persuaded that as men meant "gate," it was at least peculiar to style the south-east 156 WHERE GEINESE8 BBIVE. entrance to the Tartar City, the " Gate-gate." "We admitted, nay admired, the ingenuity of the " China Men" and the "Hunting Men," but, on the whole, authorities seemed to be in favour of rendering the Chinese characters by some such terms as the " Front Gate," and the " Gate Peacefully Established," or, at any rate, of reading them as the Ch'ien, and the An- ting, Men, respectively. It is a praiseworthy desire on the part of a visitor to wish to take away with him some memento of the place at which he has been staying. And so Bertram was not surprised when a globe-trotter once expressed his regret that he had no time to go to the Great Wall, although he had made a sort of half promise to his people that he would bring them a brick from it. But Bertram was a kind-hearted man, and grieved that his visitor's family should be disappointed, and so rang the bell and told the boy to fetch the Sergeant of the Escort. The boy said he was busy with the contractor, superintending the new buildings in the stable-yard. " Never mind," said Bertram, " tell him to come." When the Sergeant appeared, Bertram told him to bring one of the bricks from the wall. The Sergeant gave a sympathetic smile and left. Then Bertram ex- plained to the globe-trotter that cases like his were not uncommon, and in order to meet them they had im- ported a cart-load of bricks from the Wall, which the Sergeant had under careful keeping. So that globe- trotter went away happy. But the Sergeant said he had great difficulty in settling with the contractor about the value of those bricks. SPRING AND AUTUMN. 157 Perhaps the place which has the greatest attractions for an enterprising visitor (because, may be, it is one of the most difficult to enter) is the Temple of Hea- ven. A paved road runs south from the Ch'ien Men, through the middle of the Chinese City, to the Yung- ting Men, in the centre of the south wall. On the left hand, as you approach the Yung-ting Gate, is a broad stretch of open ground, about half a mile long, and some 200 yards broad. Beyond this, to the east, lies the enclosure of the Temple of Heaven. Gordon had arranged with a friend of his, who was spending a few weeks in Peking, to try to get into the place, and asked me to go with them. We left the Legation a little after 5 in the morning, and calling on the way for Mr. Rearsby, rode through the Ch'ien Men into the Outer City. When we got to the bare tract in front of the Temple, we whipped up our ponies and made for a point Gordon told us of in the south-west of the enclo- sure, where sand and rubbish had accumulated so much, that it was possible to ride right over the wall into the park. We did not do this, however, but dismounting quickly, and giving our ponies to Gordon's mafoo, who had accompanied us, were jumping down into the park, when we were stopped by some dirty half-naked scoun- drels, who would have us believe that they belonged to the small guard-house at the foot of the mound. It is not impossible — Chinese guards are always filthy and nearly always in rags ; but it is much more probable that they were simply local bullies who wanted a squeeze. A V7eek or so before, a globe-trotter who did not know what to do with himself, strolled down to this very place 158 WHERE GHINE8E8 DRIVE. and tried to walk in, when he was stopped, hustled about, deprived of his stick and loose cash, and finally induced to beat a strategic though somewhat hasty retreat. Their success on that occasion had probably made the fellows more insolent, for when we, disregarding them, entered the park, they followed and began to threaten us. Gordon is not the sort of man to stand any nonsense of that kind, so caught hold of the fore- most by his pig-tail, and tripping him up, held him down till he grew calmer. Meanwhile, Mr. Bearsby had taken another persuasively by the arm and escorted him quietly to the gap we had entered by. Then he gently but firmly raised him with knee and foot to the top of the wall, and came away. After this we went on slowly, still accompanied by the bolder of the ragamuflfins, who would stoop every now and then to pick up a stone, tapping their foreheads with their fists, by way of challenging us to fight. Or they would put themselves in our way, an attention Mr. Rearsby regarded as a little too pressing, and removed them accordingly — as you may see a porter remove a bale of goods labelled " with care." Then they con- descended to argue the point. One old rascal asked Gordon " who had given us permission to enter ? " Gordon, a little inconsequently, said that we were officials. " Pretty officials," yelled back the man, dis- appointed of his expected squeeze, " I '11 be bound you appointed yourselves." His other observations, which were numerous, hardly bear translation. By this time we had evidently got beyond the squeez- SPEING AND AUTUMN. 159 ing preserve or beat of these fellows, for, with a few more remarks of a personal and uncomplimentary character, they turned sadly away. We could now see more of the park or outer enclosure. Here were stretches of grass (once used as a cricket ground by the students of some years back), skirted by avenues of trees, and beyond them the curved wall of the middle park, topped with blue tiles. Walking along under this, we passed by the West Gate, where the guards standing about answered civilly to our " How do you do ? " It was no use attempting to enter here, all the same, nor did we try, but went on till we came to the North Gate, which was locked, but without guards. Close to this the tiles have been broken on the top of the wall, and the joists that supported them stand out on either side like the parallel bars of a gymnasium, but some ten feet from the ground. The only attempt at repairing the' breach was a bundle of brambles thrown carelessly on the wall, and kept in their place by an earthenware ornament that had fallen from the gate. Mr. Rearsby was the first to mount, and his appear- ance on the top was greeted by a shout of surprise from inside. While he was haranguing the natives — in English — Gordon gave me a leg up and I joined him, minus my cap and plus a cheekfull of scratches from the brambles. Gordon was a little too enthusiastic in helping a fellow sometimes. Then began a parley with the natives. "It 's very dangerous up there," — ^politic opening from the enemy. " Why not open the gate, then ? " — on the assumption that they wanted us to come down inside, " What will you give ? " But by 160 WHERE QHINESES BBIVE. this time Gordon had swarmed up a tree with an oppor- tune bough overhanging the wall. Then we prepared to descend, and, after dislodging a tile, found an easy drop from one of the rafters. The Chinese were a little disappointed, but brightened up after a successful nego- tiation for recovering the cap. Then we were politic, and, as they showed no intention of leaving us, sug- gested that they should go with us, and act as guides. They agreed to this, but objected when we lit cigarettes, as, they said, the grass was dry and might catch fire. We distributed a few cigarettes judiciously, and smoked on in peace. The middle enclosure is planted with trees like the outer, and after passing through a small wood we arrived at the western gate of the inner court. This is ap- proached by a flight of stone steps, and is in the usual form of Chinese gateways, a large door in the centre, flanked by two smaller ones. On each side of the plat- form, in front of the gate, is a deep stone fosse, sur- rounding the courtyard. But the platform is about two feet wider than the gateway, leaving room to approach the wall, here only five feet high. It was a nasty place to get over, nevertheless, for a stumble on the slippery tiles would probably mean a broken leg, or worse, at the bottom of the fosse. It just suited Gordon, though, who insisted on climbing over and letting us in^ The Chinese were much excited, " He '11 fall, and there '11 be trouble. Tell him to stop : they 've gone for the key." But Gordon was already over and opening the door. The key was inside. As we passed through, Gordon announced that we SPBING AND AUTUMN. 161 were now on the right side — the inside— of all the gates, and that meant success : for the guards, though not eager to let us in, would be only too glad to let us out. Inside this courtyard is the mosque-like building whose blue tiles and gilt apex are seen shining in the sun from a great distance. It is approached by flights of marble steps from the four points of the com- pass, but is a little disappointing when looked at closely. It was looked, but through the latticed panels we saw that it contained little besides an incense altar and its accompaniments. From the terrace looking south we could see the Altar of Heaven and its approaches. For although, from the fact of its being the most conspicuous object in the enclosure, this building is often pointed out from outside as the " Altar of Heaven," it is in reality only the shrine at which the Emperor returns thanks for a good harvest. In the building to the north of it are kept the Tablets of the Dynasty. Descending the terrace we came to the southern gate of the courtyard. It was closed by a heavy wooden bar, but the Chinese removed that with a little persuasion, and we found ourselves on a long stone causeway, with trees on each side. At the end of this was another gate, and after passing that and a building beyond it, we were at the foot of the staircase leading up to the marble ter- races, on the last of which stands the altar. These terraces are circular, concentric ; of white marble, whose polish time has dimmed ; surrounded by a balustrade. The altar is the centre one of five blocks of marble, but slightly sculptured, some three feet high, and a foot in diameter. Below the terrace, to the south-east, stands 11 162 WHERE CHINE8E8 DRIVE. the Altar of Burnt-offering, square, covered with green tiles, with steps on three sides leading to the top, and on the north the mouth of the oven. The floor inside was covered with pieces of charred bone, one of which I took away as a trophy. Bertram, by-the-bye, says that he has lots : but I have an idea that his cook supplies him. We left the Court of the Altar by a small doorway opening into the middle enclosure, having seen every- thing we wished to see. Here we distributed some tiao notes and ten-cent pieces to our " guides," tossing the silver into the air for them to scramble for, and came away. Passing by the Palace of Abstinence (where the Emperor is supposed to prepare himself by fasting for offering the yearly sacrifice, and which, as it was sur- rounded by a moat, and not easily stormable, we decided contained nothing of interest) we came to the west gate of the middle enclosure. All the doors were fastened, even a small wicket we had seen open at a distance. It was evident that the guards meant to make something out of us here. We took it philosophically at first, ex- perience having taught us that there was little fear of our not being let out. But we felt that it was nearly breakfast time, and were not inclined to be late : so, seeing a heap of hay, we declared we would set fire to that if the gate was not opened. The ov^^ner protested so comically against the "impropriety" of doing this that we desisted, and began to try to remove the bar. Only one Chinaman came to our assistance, and laboured with great zeal to stir it in its socket, but in vain. Pre- sently it occurred to Gordon that perhaps he was an SPBING AND AUTUMN. 163 interested party, or ignorant, anyhow, and so at his sug- gestion we hammered, and with complete success, in the opposite direction. That Chinaman was a man of ideas, certainly, but he lost his cumshaw. We had no further difficulty : the next — the outer — gate was open, and was left open. Passing through this we signalled the mafoo, who was waiting for us by the gap ; and when he brought our ponies up we mounted and rode home. The next day Gordon and Mr. Rearsby escorted some ladies into the Lamasery, another of the Peking lions, but in the north of the city. The gate-keeper, a burly baldpate, swore that there was a mandarin visiting the place and he could not let them in. When they passed by him he shouted to someone to close the inner gate, but Gordon, with great promptitude, ran forward and secured the entrance for his party. Within, a service was going on ; and while they were looking at this, Gordon saw baldpate with a whip raised to strike one of the ladies. He ran at him and flung him down, and taught him manners, as William of Wykeham did in his day, by a thorough and satisfactory drubbing. After which they went over the whole place, where a mandarin was not. The priests, who, to do them justice, appeared extremely vexed at their gate-keeper's conduct, showed them every attention. Baldpate, by-the-bye, had the exceeding coolness to ask for a cumshaw as they left. I do not know whether it was this same ruffian who attacked a foreigner a few years before. It was soon after Dr. Best's arrival in China, and, I believe, before he had learnt to speak Pekingese. He rode over to the 11 * 164 WHERE GHINESE8 BBIYE. Lamasery, and, after seeing everything, mounted and was leaving, when the gate-keeper rushed up behind and struck him oflf his pony with a pole. After that he was carried home senseless : but what became of the gate-keeper I do not know — as I say, it may have been this very man. The forcible entry into places to which a most exagge- rated idea of sanctity has been attached — by foreigners (see Gumpach, Butlinghame's Mission, p. 219, where the cricket playing of the students in the grounds of the Temple of Heaven some fourteen years ago is com- mented on with great acrimony) may strike a Western hearer as, to put it mildly, somewhat improper. I do not mean to accuse myself, and so do not put this forward as an excuse, but merely as a statement. To begin with, I doubt if any of the lower classes of Chinamen have any idea of what we call loyalty, or have any feeling of reverence whatever. Therefore the Chinese guard at an Imperial tomb or place of worship does not, as a Moslem would, think it desecrated by the visit of a foreigner ; and if he is liable to be punished for admit- ting that foreigner, is willing to take the risk on being paid proportionately. Every man has his price in China as surely as in England in Walpole's days. But what is far more to the point is the fact that at most of these places the lowest cooHe, the ragged dirty beggar, is admitted, while the door is rudely slammed in the face of a European. Some years ago, when one of our present Consuls was a student, the right of way through the Imperial City was closed to foreigners. EUerby pondered over 8PBTNG AND AUTUMN. 165 the injustice of this as he saw a crowd of Chinese- ragamuffins passing through the gate ; so went back to his rooms and fetched a copy of the Tzu erh Chi and a camp-stool. On presenting himself at the gate, it was, as he expected, immediately shut. Thereupon he seated himself close to the entrance, and proceeded to study intently. Meanwhile a crowd of passengers col- lected, anxious to pass. The gate-keeper hesitated long whether he should open the gate or not, but finally the impatience of the crowd outside decided him. EUerby entered first, with his book and camp-stool, beaming on the gate-keeper through his glasses in mild approval. South of the Chinese City is an immense park known as the Nan Hai-tzu, and " no admission except on busi- ness " is certainly not the rule — as far as Chinamen are concerned. But a foreigner can only get in by strata- gem, and it is considered all but impossible to enter through the north or main entrance. The side gates are less carefully guarded, and so Gordon and two other students who wished to get into the park were riding past the north gate. But when they were only 100 yards or so ofi" it they noticed that it was still open, and, wheeling round, made a rush for it. Lawson, who is a strong fellow with a quick eye, caught one leaf of the door as it was being closed and flung it back with one hand, while he sent a gate-keeper spinning with the other. He and Gordon got through, but Eandolph's pony swerved, and before he could recover he found himself shut out. There is a Tartar encampment inside the park, and the soldiers rode up in pursuit of Lawson 166 WHEBB GHINESES DRIVE. and G-ordon, but, not being so well mounted, bad a long cbase. When they had seen everything Gordon and Lawson allowed themselves to be overtaken and cere- moniously shown out. An eclipse of the sun was announced to take place one afternoon, and a memorial from the Imperial Board of Astronomers appeared in the Gazette four days before, the original of which had been accompanied by a dia- gram. And so the Chinese were all on the alert. I could not quite make out what my teacher, Hsii, thought about it : he understood perfectly the causes of the phenomenon, but he would often drop the proper term for an eclipse and talk about the " dog of the heavens " (t'ien koiii) — for the Chinese say, by-the-bye, that it is a dog, and not a dragon, that on these occasions devours the sun. We had read so much about it, that we got quite ex- cited as the time approached. Gordon had set his watch by that of the Professor of Astronomy, and as soon as the eclipse was due, called out, "Time's up," and pro- ceeded to frantically bang our dinner-gong. When he got tired of that he came out to see if it had produced any effect ; which it apparently had not. When the shadow became plainer I strolled out into the street. Near the Mongol Market service was going on in a small joss-house, but the people about did not seem very much disturbed' — which was disappointing and quite contrary to what the illustrated books on China had led me to expect. Most of them were going in the direction of the Board of Ceremonies, and so I thought SPRING AND AUTUMN. 167 I might as well go too. A side gate stood open, and a cake-seller was coming out. I walked in, the gate- keeper saying nothing. In the first court were more cake-sellers, and a lot of carts. The inner court is traversed by the usual broad stone causeway, and on this, in front of the entrance, is a stone screen. Behind and on one side of the screen were grouped men in em- broidered red jackets, very dirty — both jackets and men. One of these thumped incessantly at a gong suspended from the screen : the rest had drums ready in case of a sudden emergency. In the background was a long low pavilion, and on the terrace in front of this stood officials of various grades, in full uniform. Between them and the screen, and on the causeway, was erected an incense table, and before this a mat was spread. The pavilion fronts due west, and it was now nearly five o'clock in the afternoon : so that all the officials faced the sun. From time to time one of their number came forward, and, taking his place on the mat, solemnly kotowed in the direction of the eclipse. An orderly crowd of Chinese, chiefly of the lower classes, stood on each side of the causeway. When I had been there a short time a small official came up to me and politely requested me to withdraw, as "this was not a place for foreigners " — and on the whole I think he was right. I wondered, though, as I came away, if the presence of a foreigner was embar- rassing as reminding them of the absurdity of this mummery, kept up, as I believe, in the face of fuller knowledge and common sense, simply to delude the people, and to encourage ignorance and superstition. 168 WHERE GHINE8ES VBIVE. So, in a recent Gazette, a young woman is reported to have cut out a portion of her liver to make broth for- a dying parent, her own wound miraculously healing in- stantly, while her mother was at. once restored to health. And the Emperor sanctions the Viceroy's request for the erection of a tablet to commemorate this. These men, members of the Tsung-li Ya-men, some of them, can hardly believe such things ; yet they can publish a dia- gram of an eclipse some days before it occurs, and then, with genuflexions and much beating of gongs, try to save the sun from the dog that is devouring it. . . . But in all probability the request to withdraw was prompted by the practice which I spoke of just now as so humiliating to Europeans — the opening of doors to the meanest coolie that are ostentatiously shut in the face of a foreigner. There are several other " places of interest " in Peking which the visitor is expected to go to. I do not know how it is — perhaps it is an evil habit of procrastination I have contracted somewhere, but more probably that truest happiness which they say lies in anticipation (this last, I know, is why my friends' letters are left un- answered so long) ; but, for some reason or other, I do not appear to have visited so many of these places as I clearly ought to have done. This is a candid admission, and give me credit for it. A less ingenuous man might have purchased Kieruff's Ouide to Peking, and, by working in a personal element, have deceived confiding friends, and led them to beheve that he had been all about the city. I do not claim to have done more than an average amount of sight-seeing, such as the ordinary 8PBING AND AUTUMN. 169 resident goes through as a matter of duty. It is only your visitor that sees everything. But, at any rate, I do not think I was as indifferent to my surroundings as the studious second-year's man who was asked by a casual visitor the whereabouts of the Hanlin College. He said he really did not know : the Tzu erh Chi said nothing about it, and he had not time to go into out-of-the-way parts of the city exploring. It would not pay : for the examiners were hardly likely to ask such a question as that. But he did feel a little distressed when the visitor called two days afterwards to say he had found the Hanlin College all right : it was next door to the Students' Quarters. Though, perhaps, scarcely to be reckoned as a Chinese institution, yet certainly in every sense a place of in- terest in Peking is the Eoman Catholic Cathedral in the Imperial City, the Pei-t'ang, or " Northern Hall." This was rebuilt in 1861 under French auspices, the original building having been destroyed after the retire- ment of the Jesuits. We attended afternoon service there one Easter Sunday. The nave and aisles were full of Chinese, women as well as men, the men wearing their caps, while the heads of the women were un- covered. We were accommodated with chairs near the chancel, but the space behind us was crammed with natives. Here the original purpose for which incense may have been introduced was, as it seemed to me, ex- emplified ; for had it not been for the censers no Euro- pean could have remained near that crowd of malodorous Chinamen a minute — and probably the assemblies in 170 WEBBE CEINESES DBIVK the temples of Ammon struck the cleanly Egyptian priests in much the same way. As it was, the Chinese boys were troublesome. One little wretch kneeling between two prie-dieus kept expectorating steadily and with a certain unction and emphasis that attracted remark. Most of the natives present were doing the same ; but this was in our midst, as it were. And so Bertram, with all the solemnity of a verger, tapped him on the cap with a stick, while Lawson addressed one man who seemed in authority, in Chinese, asking him to cause that boy to be removed. The man turned round with a smile, and showed a pair of blue eyes : he was a Belgian priest in Chinese dress. But he cheerfully assisted in handing the boy out. Nearly all the Eoman Catholic priests here adopt the native fashion. But it looks a little odd sometimes. I remember one man, an Irishman and (as indeed are all the Fathers I have met) a very pleasant gentleman, who had only been out a few months, and was obliged to supplement six inches of auburn hair by a false queue of the only colour procurable, raven black. There was no pretence of assimilating them : the true hair stood up like a horn, two inches from the tip of which the false tail was suspended. After service one of the Fathers was kind enough to take us to his rooms, where he gave us cigars and some wine made on the establishment. The conversation was begun in Enghsh, but presently lapsed into French (I sat modestly silent) ; but such was the force of their surroundings, or so vivid their recollections of the Tzii- erh Chi, that every now and then the speakers would 8PBIN0 AND AUTUMN. 171 burst out into Chinese (and my interest in the talk revived). When BUerby was stationed in the West of China, his nearest European neighbour lived on the other side of the mountains some ten miles off, a French missionary in charge of the converts there. But EUerby thought it right to call on him, and set off - one day with that intention. Several hours later the good Father saw a being bearing down upon him, covered with dust and in a nondescript costume, brandishing a formidable-looking stick. He took it for one of the hillmen, and thought it only prudent to retreat. But just as the priest reached the back-door the hillman shouted after him, "Jesuis chr^tien : j'ai eoif " — and that touch of nature made everything right at once. When we had been refreshed we were shown the grounds and buildings. They have a very large garden, part of which is planted thickly with trees, part laid out as a vegetable garden and orchard. In one of the yards was a cage containing some curious birds, Chrysoptera I think they were called, and in the small museum a col- lection of the fauna of the province. The library was well stocked ; but most of the books were old, though very valuable, tomes. There is a printing press at the Pei-t'ang, where the work is done principally, if not entirely, by natives. The other buildings comprise the seminary, and a range of little guest-rooms some fifty in number. It was, of course, the proper thing to go and see the Great Wall. The ( pace Herr Miillendorff) original wall 1?2 WBEBE CHINES ES DRIVE. built by Shih Huang-ti in 215 B.C., or thereabouts, is some three days' journey from Peking, the nearest approachable point being the Old Northern Pass, or Ku pei k'ou. But a much more modern branch crosses the Southern Pass — better known as Nankow — at only a day's journey to the north-west. And, consequently, any visitor whose stay in Peking is limited, if he goes to the Wall at all, goes to Nankow. Nesbitt, being in this predicament, asked me to accompany him. I had never been before, and vyas glad now to go with so plea- sant a companion. We arranged to do the regular round, through the grounds of Wan shou shan (where the Summer Palace once stood) and the village of Yang-fang'r, to Nankow ; thence up the pass and back through Nankow to Ch'ang-p'ing Chou (commonly known as 'Jumping Joe'), from there to T'ang shan (where the hot springs are), and so back to Peking. A Chinese inn is made up of a courtyard with stables on the right and left (or on one side only, as the case may be), the inn-keeper's rooms and kitchen close to the gate, and the guest-chambers at the farther end facing the entrance. The principal room almost invari- ably consists of three chien or divisions (the term is a crux to translators), either made apparent by an actual partition -wall, or to be traced by the beam of the roof, or to be imagined. In most cases one-third or chien is partitioned off, and has a doorway fitted with a door or hanging mat : the other two chien form one room. In each division there is a h'ang or stove-bed, simply a broad ledge of brick covered with matting. This is heated by a stove that usually is lit from within, and SPBING AND AUTUMN. 173 into which Chinese children occasionally fall. Tumbling out of bed is discouraged in North China. Besides the stove-bed, there is generally nothing in the room but a table, a couple of chairs, and a bench, and, on the k'ang, a tray about two feet square and six or seven inches high. This being the case, it is as necessary to make as many preparations for an overland trip as it was in coming up the river. I hired a cart to take my bedding and boy, while Nesbitt, who had a mind to be comfort- able, hired two, and laid in a stock of wine and provi- sions. We took a mafoo with us and a couple of boys. The first day we tiffined at Wan shou shan in a small summer-house by the side of the reedy lake, quite picnic-fashion — that is to say, everything was laid out on the floor, and we had to sit cross-legged or kneel to get at it. After tiffin we spent rather too much time roaming about the ruins. These I will not describe ; for so much has been written about the Summer Palace, after the War, that my doing so would be foolhardy and super- fluous. (A good deal was written on the Summer Palace during the War, by-the-bye, for we found a regiment of names scrawled on the walls — with accom- panying remarks in noinina stultorum.) Long before we reached Yang-fang'r the sun had set. And, to add to our troubles, my pony fell lame, and I had to lead him. Fortunately we 'had sent the carts on ahead, and so when, tired and hungry, we did reach Yang-fang'r, we found dinner ready and our beds made up on the k'ang. How much those dinners were enjoyed ! (I do not often indulge in a note of exclama- 174 WSEBE CHINI18I1S BBIVE. tion, but here a grateful memory seemed to call for it.) Perhaps the chops were overdone, or the chicken smoked, but we had the old Spartan sauce (and usually Lea and Perrin's to boot), and our boys never forgot the salt, or even the bread. Besides, Nesbitt had tins of preserved soup and pate de foie gras, and other luxuries which he regarded as absolutely indispensable on such a journey. Among these, if I remember rightly, were a packet of black lead for cleaning stoves and a bottle of furniture polish. The next morning V7e rode on to Nankow, slowly, so as not to try my pony too much. We reached the little town at about nine o'clock, and established ourselves in an inn, where we began to make preparations for going up the pass to the Wall. While we were bargaining for donkeys, a Chinaman came to us and said he was a guide, and showed us some testimonials given him by former travellers. One was in French, from a deaf and dumb member of the Alpine Club, I think, and observed that that man had looked after him as though he had been his father. We explained that we were not deaf and dumb, nor orphaned in any way, and really could dispense with his services, whereat he turned sadly away. Meanwhile the donkeys had been hired at the exorbitant charge of a dollar a head. Three City tiao (10-^d.) vrould have more than met the case ; but Nankow is over-visited, and prices have gone up in consequence. We had our pony saddles transferred to the donkeys, for the native pillows were not inviting. The change of saddles has its advantages, but it sometimes proves a little embarrassing. The Bertrams SPBING AND AUTUMN. 175 were riding out to the hills one day on donkeys, Ber- tram the least bit in front, when the hind-girth of Mrs. Bertram's saddle — which was secured under the donkey's tail — broke, and Mrs. Bertram and the saddle were thrown forward on to the donkey's head. She caught hold of Bertram to save herself, but pulled him with her to the ground. When they realised the situation they were sitting opposite one another on the road, while between them stood the donkey gazing earnestly at them, the saddle hanging over his face like a coal- scuttle bonnet. The Nankow donkeys are not large, and Nesbitt cannot weigh less than twelve stone. Still he was a little huffy when I told him he and his donkey looked like an im- proper fraction : said he did not see the point of that joke, and believed it was an old one, anyhow. Then we entered the pass. This is scarcely better than the bed of a mountain torrent : for very little has been done to make a decent road through it, although the trafl&c is great. We met or passed strings of camels laden for the most part with tea for Kalgan and Kiakhta ; drovers with their flocks ; litters swung between two mules ; and passengers on foot or on horseback. There were officials going to, or returning from, their posts beyond the Wall, accompanied by their families. The ladies were in closed mule litters, so small that you would think it no easy matter to get into them ; once in, to change your position would be impossible. It is said that the Korean litters — sedan-chairs they can hardly be called — are smaller still, and that the doubts of the members of the late expedition as to the possibility of entering these 176 WSEBE CSINESES BBIVE. were only solved by the bearers, who — ceremoniously enough — bundled their fares in, neck and crop. The bed of the stream that runs down the pass is full of great boulders, and in and out of these the path winds, no easy going even for the mules who know it well, and tiring enough to our unaccustomed feet. The hills on each side are very picturesque There and there a peach-tree in full bloom, higher up a little pine wood, and, crowning the summit, an old stone fort. Halfway up the pass is a small walled village, its gateways not spared by time, though the old portcullis is still there. Beyond this the hills begin to close in and the pass is narrower and steeper. Just at a bend, where the rocks are almost perpendicular, a little temple has been hewn out of the stone, and hangs some twenty feet above the road. The priests mount to their perch by perilous steps chipped out of the face of the hill. And there were little shrines with mild-faced Buddhas, and at one point carved on the mountain side high above us, the ever-present Fo /Jffl? the Chinese Budh, in strokes many feet in length. The air grew colder and keener, and snowdrifts still lingered in clefts and shadowy caves. We climbed painfully, tired with our four hours' journey, up a steeper ascent, and pausing to look up, there, against the sky-line, was the Wall. I do not think at first that we viewed it in any other Ught than as a place to tiffin at : Nesbitt said he was much too hungry for sentiment. And so we mounted by stone stairs cut in the thickness of the wall to one of the small square towers that guard it at close 8PBING AND AUTUMN. 177 intervals along its whole length. The tower was roof- less, one-storied, with windows or doorways in the four sides. On the floor lay a number of small cannon, rusty and useless — as cannon : piled up they served well enough for seat and table. Nesbitt's boy had packed our lunch, with a bottle of claret and sherry and two of water. It was far too cold for a long drink, and so the remnants of the feast that were given to the donkeymen included two full bottles of water and the modest remainder of the sherry and claret. As we drew near to Nankow, on our way back, I was made arbiter of a dispute. Nesbitt's donkeyman had one of the full bottles tasting and smelling ; my man the other. The first said it really was very like water, but the other declared that as foreigners never drank water it must be a foreign spirit of some kind. When they learnt that it was water after all, they solemnly turned those bottles upside down, disgusted that they had care- fully carried such trash all the way from the Wall. TiflSn over, we felt more equal to the duty of exploring and admiring. Unfortunately the first thing we came across was the skeleton of some poor wretch that had died, or, who knows ? (Nesbitt, at this point, having tiffined, became sentimental and imaginative) been mur- dered, in this lonely spot. We got over that, and looked about us. We were just above the Grate, through which a string of camels was passing, about to descend the valley to Ch'a-t'ou on the plain at our feet. From where we stood the mountains rose one above the other till they faded in the distance, and along their sides, now dipping down into a ravine, now mounting to the 12 178 WHERE GHINE8E8 DRIVE. summit of the peaks, ran the Wall. The air was so clear that all our ideas of distance were changed, and Nesbitt proposed as an afternoon's stroll to walk along the rampart till we reached a tower he pointed out against the sky. The donkeymen said we might get there that day week : only as we were not used to that sort of work we should probably succumb before we were half-way. So Nesbitt reluctantly abandoned the idea. But we did climb up to the next tower, and hard enough work I found it : for every now and then the wall rose so steeply that steps had been built, not com- fortable, jog-trot steps, but steps two feet or so high. A little of this went (in one sense) a long way, and I sat down presently and firmly declined to budge. Nesbitt said this was a weak surrendering ; he meant to mount higher. Soon, however, he came down and said he wondered how those fellows had managed to build the thing, and when they had built it to walk along it : he had seen enough, he thought, and had not we better be getting back ? So we got back. The next day we arranged to go to the Ming Tombs. The " Thirteen Sepulchres," as they are called, lie at the upper end of a long valley that narrows at its mouth, through which the road runs southward to Peking. Ap- proaching the valley from Ch'ang-p'ing Chou, the entrance is marked by a p'ai-lou, or portal, of five arches. The road to the Tombs, however, no longer passes under this, but winds round it in a deep track worn down by the feet and the rains of centuries. Beyond, a triple gateway, massive and heavy, without ornament of any kind, plastered red and topped with yellow tiles. A few yards SPRING AND AUTUMN. 179 further on, the Tablet of the Ming, a huge slab of marble borne on the back of a tortoise, in a building four-square, with arched gateways on every side. In the direction of the diagonals, some forty feet from each corner, stands a pillar, with the curious rostrum at its apex. Beyond is the celebrated Avenue. Eanged on each side of the road are stone figures of tigers, horses, camels, and elephants, and a nondescript sort of animal which may be a leopard or a lion. These are in pairs, standing and kneeling. The elephants and camels are perhaps the best executed : the feet of the kneeling elephants are turned out in the orthodox way, by-the- bye. But a pony, if he does not (as is his wont) shy at the first figures and refuse to pass them, has been known to neigh to the stone horses and of his own accord to go up to them. It is rather stupid of the pony, though, for the figures are after all clumsily carved : the legs are of a uniform thickness of some eight inches in diameter. Beyond the animals are several statues of kings and sages, aU of superhuman size. The Avenue is closed by a p'ai-lou. From this point the valley descends and widens, till it is closed by a vast amphitheatre of hills, at the foot of which are seen the Thirteen Tombs. The road through the valley is now very irregular. In parts it has been completely washed away by mountain streams, once crossed by bridges whose broken arches still remain ; in parts the cart-wheels of the peasants who now cultivate the valley have worn through pavement and soil to the depth of several feet, leaving slabs of stone on each side to mark the old level. 12 * 180 WHERE GHINE8E8 DRIVE. Nesbitt and I left Nankow in the morning, and took tte shortest way through the hills, striking the valley between the Avenue and the Tombs, by which we lost the full effect of the approach. We had for guide a donkeyman. He took us to the show-tomb, that- of Yung-lo, the third Emperor of the Ming, who transferred his capital from Nanking to Peking at the commencement of the fifteenth century. Each tomb is surrounded by a wall, with the Imperial red plaster and yellow tiles, and in the centre of this is the usual triple entrance. Our guide hunted up a fellow with the key, who let us in by one of the side doors. Inside, the courts we passed through in succession were planted with trees that even in the faint breeze kept up a murmur strangely mournful. Opposite the entrance was the Hall of Incense, approached by marble steps. Within stood a small shrine, containing the tablet of the deceased monarch, and protected by a screen of lattice-work, in front of which an incense table was placed. The pillars that support the roof of this hall are of immense height, and consist each one of the single trunk of a tree, floated down from the forests of Ssii-ch'uan, in all probability. - Behind the hall is another courtyard closed by a massive square tower of stone, in which are staircases leading to the top of the wall that surrounds the tumulus, an enor- mous artificial mound covered with trees. I think that this tomb is the most impressive of all Chinese buildings I have seen : for here neglect only seems to add to its beauty. And yet, perhaps, the Ming tombs are less neglected than many other places. For as a matter of policy the SPEING AND AUTUMN. 181 present dynasty make some effort to keep them in repair (though it is said that much timber and marble was at one time carried away from here to ornament the palaces at Yiian-ming Yiian). And every year the head of the dispossessed family, the Marquis Chu, is sent by the Government to worship at his ancestral tombs and to report on their condition. I never met him, for on the first occasion on which I visited the tombs (when I was with Nesbitt), I found he had just returned to Peking ; and on the second, he was just expected to arrive — and in fact did arrive, and was interviewed by a party of Europeans who had started a little later than Gordon (who was then with me) and myself. It was on this latter occasion that one of the disad- vantages of a Chinese inn was unpleasantly brought home to me. Gordon and I put up for the night at " Jumping Joe," and, as the weather was cold, we had a pan of charcoal brought into the room : for the extravagance of a fireplace is undreamt of by the natives of North China. We made ourselves comfortable on the k'ang and were soon asleep. In the middle of the night I was awakened by a feeling of sufibcation, but managed to grope my way to the door, and to shout for the boy. Then I felt dizzy and sat down on the door- step. However, the boy brought me some water, and I soon was all right again. But I declined to have the brazier in the room after that. I was acting as guide on my second visit, but some- how we went to the wrong tomb. They are so much alike that for a long time I could hardly be sure that it 182 WHUnu 0HINE8E8 DBIVE. was the wrong tomb after all. But G-ordon was so dis- appointed with the size of the pillars, after my enthusi- astic description of them (and they really did seem to me to have dwindled considerably), that I was convinced at last that we were astray. It seemed that the tomb we visited was that of Chia-ching (1521-1566), but as it was called the Yung ling (lingua, sepulchre or tumulus), I had rashly jumped to the conclusion that it was the tomb of Yung-lo, which is 1 40 years older, and known as the Ch'ang-ling. It was sad : however, Gordon thought that if they were so much alike as all that, it was per- haps hardly worth while to go to the other tomb — besides, we wanted to return to Peking that day. On the way back we met Owen in great form, with a mafoo, a boy, and two donkeymen. Owen proposed a drink, and his boy produced a bottle of whisky, one of water, and two tumblers. Fancy the luxury of two tumblers in the middle of that lonely valley ! In return we warned him to go to the right tomb, at which his boy looked really hurt. He said he had taken several foreigners there before. He evidently thought that we had brought our misfortunes on ourselves by not having taken a boy. Nesbitt and I, having a donkeyman as guide, had been all right. The day after our return to Nankow, as rain threatened, we decided to leave T'ang shan alone, and go straight to Peking. We did go to Peking, though not exactly straight : for we wasted much time, owing to Nesbitt's fondness for short cuts and my con- fused notion of the points of the compass. But we got back at last, and in time for dinner. SPUING AND AUTUMN. 183 I went to the real old Wall, as we used to consider it, at Ku pei K'ou, at the close of winter. This journey takes six days, and winter travelling requires more preparation than a trip in spring-time. I bought a Mongolian cap, a huge thing, of red flannel, wadded, and trimmed with fur, having ear-flaps that could be tied under the chin and leave little of the face unco- vered. Also a pair of Mongolian socks made of some sort of felt. These were to be drawn over the boot, and did, it is true, keep one's feet comfortably warm, but the getting them off at night . . . ! The first evening I managed to pull one off after half-an-hour's painful effort, then tried again at the other after dinner with no success ; so, thinking things would be easier if I could unlace my boot, made a slit down the front to get at the lace, but in so doing cut it to pieces. How- ever, I became used to the socks in time and learnt to be patient. In the cold night we thought it ill-advised to undress : on the contrary, we put on more clothes, doing as North China does. For some time our course lay along the banks of the Pei-ho, now frozen fast. In places where fords are found in summer were bridges made of turf and the stalks of the kao Hang laid on the ice. After leaving the Pei-ho we encountered a dust-storm, and had a miserable morning, leading our ponies across a bare sandy plain in the teeth of an icy wind, half blinded and choked by the dust. These dust-storms are the plague of Peking in the dry season. The dust is so fine that it will get inside the glass of a watch ; and in the morning after a stormy night, though the windows 184 WHERE GHINE8E8 DBIVE. have been carefully pasted up (as they are in the winter time), it covers the vfindow-sill. Probably the noisy and most objectionable coughing the natives keep up is due to the irritation produced on their lungs by this dust. If soj it has much to answer for. The end of the plain brought us to a small walled town and our tiffin. Warm water was produced in wooden tubs, and we washed our faces — very gingerly, though, for they were cut and bleeding from the effects of that horrible dust. The rest of the journey was got through in very plea- sant weather. A few hours brought .us to the foot of the mountains, which we entered by a narrow ravine. On one side was the pathway, only a few feet broad, and on the other a stream now frozen, in spite of the steep inclination of its bed, and producing a strange effe'ct, for at a distance it looked as though it were still flowing. The third day we took a short cut, a bridle- path that led over the mountains into a small valley ; then past some forts on to Ku pei K'ou. The valley was used, we were told, as an exercise-ground for the garrison of the forts, I suppose in their old-world manoeuvres, though we called it the " Artillery Ground." The town or fortress of Ku pei K'ou is nearly in the form of an S, the road winding upwards between hills topped with crumbling fortifications, till after passing through the upper town it reaches the gate in the Great Wall. Every spur has its rampart, and we were puzzled to know which of these was the real Wall. We climbed painfully up to one, but, looking towards the north, saw another beyond it. This we decided to leave till the SPBING AND AUTUMN. 185 next morning, and meanwhile adjourned to an inn for dinner. After breakfast on the morrow we made our way to the Wall through the streets, or rather street (for it has but one), of the town. At the gate our mafoo was asked for our passports. These are required by all foreigners travelling in China beyond a distance of some thirty-fiye miles from Peking or any of the Treaty Ports. These vised, we climbed some little way up the Wall and made remarks more or less suited to the occa- sion. But we took Bertram's advice, and brought away no bricks. The country beyond Ku pei K'ou is a part of the province of Chih-li, and not, strictly speaking, Mongolia. But shooting excursions beyond the Wall are often described as "trips in MongoHa." These usually come off in the autumn. The country is a succession of hills and dales, covered in summer with grass and brush- wood, which is fired towards the end of autumn, and the hills left for the most part quite bare. There are few trees, though here and there is a belt of pine-wood. The ground is covered with snow at the beginning of winter, and a tramp through this soaks the thickest boots : then they freeze and have to be cut down to the heel before they can be put on again. When Randolph and Manners were in this country they travelled with the usual complement of carts and a mafoo. But one afternoon they found themselves some three miles from their sleeping stage, and the sun nearly setting. They told the carters to hurry up, and meanwhile rode on with the mafoo as guide. On the 186 WHEUE CHINESES DRIVE. way they came across a head or two hung over the road, and the mafoo explained that these were the remains of some of the numerous robhers that infested those parts, gibbeted in terrorem ; and added that it was hardly likely the carters would pass the horrid things in the twilight. But Randolph and Manners hoped better things — for all their food and bedding were on the carts — and pushed on. They reached their inn in time, and waited with growing impatience, unrewarded, for no carts appeared. The inn was as bare as all Chinese inns are, and abnormally draughty, and it was freezing hard. Finally the landlord borrowed some felt rugs and rough sheep-skin coats for them, and with these they made shift for bedding. Randolph says a sheep- skin coat is not bad if you put your legs through the sleeves and curl yourself up in the rest of it. They fared indifferently that night on some greasy preparation of the landlord's, so next morning Manners announced that he would cook. He got hold of a sort of frying-pan, but the only meat he could find to operate on was part of an awfully sinewy leg of beef. Manners declined to use any pig's fat to lard his pan, and Randolph says the result was not exactly what one would call savoury ; in fact, at first he thought Manners had helped him to a little of the charcoal by mistake. However, they made up all short-comings by a good appetite and profuse Ido pings. These lao pings are small lumps of dough that are just allowed to rise in the pan and are then considered cooked : very indi- gestible things, but, Randolph says, in Mongolia, and when you take plenty of honey with them, they are SPRING ANB AUTUMN. 187 almost nice. But apparently you can eat anything (you can get) in Mongolia. They (as the men before them) put up at a kind of farm-house, overrun by huge MongoUan dogs, so savage that there was no venturing outside their door after nightfall without an escort. These quarters reached, they did not roam about much, for there was plenty of sport for the energetic in the neighbourhood. They say the average bag for a day in Mongolia is thirty brace, ten brace being considered good at Shanghai. But, if this is so, our sportsmen must either have been lazy and not gone out many days, or else have lost most of their birds on the way back, for when, on two or three occasions, we counted over the spoils brought home, and did a little division sum, the result was by no means so satisfactory. To reach Mongolia Proper the shortest way is, per- haps, through Nankow and Kalgan. Here the ground is a vast level, where the grass grows above one's head. A clearing in this is most picturesque, the hut and grazing ground shut in by a wall of grass. In autumn all this is cut down or fired, and nothing is to be seen but the open plain, unless it is a Mongol encampment or a troop of shaggy ponies. The traveller must sleep in a Mongol tent, a circular or hexagonal structure of willow-work and felt, with a stove in the centre, above which is an opening for the smoke, closed at night. Jackson, who spent some little time there, describes the Mongols of this district as hospitable and well- disposed. He was very much amused when he was taken to see a bride who, for the last week, had been 188 WHERE GHINESES DRIVE. dressing for her wedding, though it was not to come off for ten days or so. From her appearance, he thinks that all her friends must have been invited to make suggestions for her toilet, and if this considers a blue petticoat becoming, and that a red one, both are put on — and remain on. The autumn, say September or early October, is the best time for travelling in North China. Except that then the insect world is particularly active — knowing there is little time to be lost, I suppose — and that Chinese inns are its favourite haunt. On the wall, about a foot and a half above each k'ang, may be generally seen a mysterious mottled line ; it is the execution ground of these disturbers of a Chinaman's slumber. In autumn, too, and occasionally in spring as well, are h^ld the Peking Eace Meetings. The race-course lies in the country a mile or so from the western wall of the city, and was, I believe, a gift of the Tsung-li Yamen. It is under the management of the Peking Club, of which, indeed, its tiny Grand Stand and the little buildings attached to the Skating-rink are the only visible sign. This Grand Stand is built on the east side of the course, and consequently fronts west and the hills some eight or nine miles away. During the summer months it is let (or at any rate offered) as a kind of bungalow. The circular inviting tenders for the season states that it " contains two rooms, 26 ft. by 15 ft. and 14 ft. by 15 ft. respectively, a kitchen, and a kitchen-garden." They have not called it a SPRING AND AUTUMN. 189 "desirable family residence" or a "detached villa" yet ; but when the railway runs from Tientsin to the valley of the Hun, and brings its excursionists to the Derbyshire of North China, such will doubtless be the case. However, except that it must be a little hot, it might prove a good place to read in ; there would not be many distractions. At present they have insti- tuted a very pleasant arrangement by which tea and other things may be obtained there by thirsty people on Saturday afternoons. Eace-meetings are necessarily very much alike — though perhaps in Peking they are less so than else- where, as Gordon put it. After appointing a Eace Committee, two Judges, a Starter, and a Clerk of the Course, entries are invited for the various races. Here is a programme of a recent meeting : — 1st Eace : MAIDEN PLATE. Value #75. One mile. For ponies that liave never run before. Entrance ^^5. 4 entries. 2nd Eace : TAMEN PEIZE. Presented by the Ministers of the Tsung-li-Tamen. Tls 75 to the first pony ; Tls 25 to the second; third pony to save his entrance. Two miles. For Peking-owned Ponies only. Entrance $10. 4 entries. 3rd Eace : LADIES' PDESE. Presented by the Ladies of Pe- king. For Ponies owned and ridden by Peking Eesidents only. Weight 12 stone. Once round. Entrance $6. 3 entries. 4th Eace : MINISTEES' CUP. Value ^^100. | Mile. Presented by the Foreign Eepresentatives at Peking. Second Pony to save his Entrance. Entrance $6. 9 entries. 5th Eace : HAIKIJAlSr CHALLENGE CUP. Value Tls 100 and WO added from the Fund, if won for the first time. Presented by Egbert Hakt, Esquire, and other Gentlemen of the Imperial Maritime Customs. The 190 WHERE 0HINE8E8 DRIVE. Cup to become tte property of any Grentleman residing at Peking whose pony, or ponies, win it two years consecutively. 1^ mile. Entrance $5. 8 entries. 6th Race : HACK STAKES. Value ^50. For all Peking-owned ponies regularly ridden as Hacks and not otherwise entered for this meeting. Once round. Entrance $5. 3 entries. 7th Eace : CHAMPION STAKES. Value 100. A forced entry of ^10 each for all winners except the Hack Stakes ; optional for all other ponies that have run at this meeting. One mile. 15 entries. This programme settled, the next thing is to have the Tiao Lottery. Anyone can take one or more tickets— price 2 tiao (say 7^d.) apiece — in a lottery for each race. When the numbers are all taken there is a solemn drawing in the Eeading-room (which, for this occasion only, O'Hara says, ought to be called the "Drawing-room "). Tables are ranged the whole length of the room, and at the end sit three members of the Eace Committee. Before Ehadamanthus stands the Urn — one of the mess soup-tureens. This is filled with gun-wads, numbered from 1 to 120 or 150, as the case may be. Then a pony and a number are drawn and the winner named. This is slow work so far, especially for those who do not draw a pony. But after this the ponies are put up to auction, and sometimes, when a favourite is up, the bidding is most lively. The purchaser of a pony pays twice his bid, once to the drawer, once into the fund, the prize being the amount of tickets taken, plus the sums given for all the ponies in each race ; so that where the bidding has been brisk it might come to 600 or 700 tiao, or between 50 and SPRING AND AUTUMN. 191 60 dollars. That oyer, the next thing is to wait for the race-day, which is usually a Saturday. The first race is advertised to take place at 11 ; but some hours before that the road to the course is filled with Chinamen on foot or on donkeyback, in chairs or on ponies. Through fields unenclosed, except by a low mud wall— covered, if it be spring, with violets, scentless, it is true, but still violets^ — past temples and grave-yards, the road winds until a semi-circle of sand- hills is reached. Within their arc is a large pool or marsh, where countless frogs are croaking disapproval of the meeting, not, indeed, with the energy they would have displayed at night, but in a drowsy, half- hearted manner. The outer rim of the sand-hills touches the course, and where their curve ends is built the Grand Stand ; so that a capital view of the races can be had even by the unprivileged, who will stay there all day, a long line of faded blue, watching their mandarins arrive, and the foreigners develop a new phase of — well, put it mildly and say, eccentricity. Lunch is provided in the upper rooms of the Stand, and early in the day a Committee-man or two will appear, anxiously scrutinising the cook's arrangements, or looking out for the guests. Some half-dozen of the latter are Chinamen, members of the Tsung-li Yamen for the most part : one, the Commandant of Peking, who sometimes brings his little son. They are pre- ceded by a few of their subordinates or satellites, white or blue buttons, who while away the time by trying to make sense of the Chinese race-cards, and are puzzled that a pony should be described as "green," but, 192 WHERE CHINE8ES DRIVE. being polite, make allowances. Presently their seniors arrive and are taken possession of by the Foreign Ministers or their Chinese Secretaries. They profess themselves delighted with everything, and hazard a few remarks about the racing, truisms for the most part, whereof your literary Chinamen has always an abun- dant stock : " Strong ponies generally run farther and faster than weak ones." "It is not always the horse who gets away first that wins," and the like. They are plainly affected by the tiffin,, and become inquisi- tive. The weighing-machine attracts them, and they even condescend to be weighed — result, in one case, 216 lbs. Two or three races are first run, then everyone settles down to the real business of the day — the tiffin. For Peking race-meetings are picnics first, and race-meetings a very long way after. Tiffin drawing to a close, the Doyen proposes the health of the members of the Tsung- li Yam^n, who, through bashfulness apparently, do not reply, though most of the cosmopolitan assembly have a smattering of Chinese. We are a very fair epitome of all mankind : one nationality to every two men and a half, O'Hara calculates. O'Hara is our prize poly- glot ; nothing comes amiss to him, and his only regret is that the Inspector-General of Customs does not see his way clearly enough to appoint a Hottentot to the staff of the Peking office, and give O'Hara a chance of testing his theory as to the identity of the Hottentot dental click and the Chinese fourth tone. Herr von Z. was, it is said, an enthusiast in a similar line. His G-overnment sent him out to study Pekingese, SPBING AND AUTUMN. 193 and after twelve months had elapsed his Minister sum- moned him and asked what progress he was making. " Excellent," was the reply, " I 've just completed the second volume." " Second volume ? Ah! oi ihe Tzii- erh Chi, I suppose?" "The Tzu-erh Ghi? What Tzu-erh Ghi ? Oh, Sir Thomas Wade's Chinese Course ! No, to tell the truth, I haven't begun Chinese yet : I meant the second volume of my work on Hungarian Syntax." And yet the Minister recommended his Government to recall him. " Our own correspondent " attended the Race-meeting, and in his " Peking Letter " was quite excited over " the vast numbers of Chinamen present." There were three or four hundred, perhaps ; but the Correspondent could hardly have had time to count them before tiffin. In this Letter he, for some reason or other, developed an unusual moroseness, and declared that " the proceedings were brought to a close by a donkey-race which was a miserable failure." Now that donkey-race the students had been at great pains to get up, and it was therefore in the nature of things impossible that it could be a failure. Nor was it : indeed, from the proper point of view, it was a magnificent success. The regulations were carefully drawn up : " the donkeys to be bond fide donkeys " (we were not quite sure what that meant, but it sounded well), and " shall be ridden without stirrups and on a Chinese pack-saddle " (the grammar was in- volved, but scarcely as hard as the condition) ; lastly, "it is immaterial whether the donkeys carry their riders or their riders them." We had some eight or ten entries. My donkey was 13 194 WHERE GHTNESE8 DRIVE. a little wiry black fellow, and I had hired him on the terms that the owner was to have four dollars if he won, and nothing if he lost. (Every Chinaman is at heart a gambler — in so far as he can be said to have a heart at all.) A table was placed in front of the Grand Stand, and in the centre of the course. Bound this we had to race, the whole distance being some 300 yards. My donkey started off at a furious pace and led ; then stopped suddenly, and, while he was trying to remember what it was he had forgotten, I went over his head. I attempted to get on again ; but whether he was too small, or I too impetuous, I do not know : somehow I missed the donkey altogether, and came over on the other side, " as though I was playing leap-frog," Gordon said. (Gordon was busy at the time trying to catch his beast, which had bolted, and I do not believe he saw me.) Meanwhile the leading donkey had turned the post, or, more strictly speaking, got round the table, and the owner of mine began to think I had fooled long enough, and, not being able to control his feelings, ran on to the course and tried to drag my beast along. I have very confused notions as to what happened after that. I got mixed up, irretrievably as it seemed at the time, with the donkeyman and the donkey, but the three of us came in at last, beating Gordon by a neck. Bertram, who was judge, said that we were only twenty minutes behind the winner, the one man, by-the-bye, who had contrived to keep his seat. And they call that a " miserable failure ! " The students were, by some unaccountable error in judgment, discouraged from taking part in any but SPRING AND AUTUMN. 196 scratch races, except as spectators. We felt hurt, but did not wish to show it by being conspicuously absent. On the contrary, we resolved to be conspicuously present. We held a mess meeting, and various striking effects were suggested. Finally it was resolved that we should each hire a camel, and, having carefully strung the camels together with due regard to seniority (of their riders), should defile on to the course preceded by the head coolie with the dinner-gong, and supported on either side by boys and mafoos on donkeyback with trumpets. We were to arrive just as lunch was begin- ning, and march solemnly past the Grand Stand. We were convinced that the thing would attract remark. I forget why the scheme ganged agley, but it did. Later on in autumn, when all the crops were in, took place paper-chases on ponyback. As the hares always let the line of country they were going to take be known, there was much more steeple-chasing than hunting about these runs. Indeed, the usual thing was for two or three enthusiastic rival spirits to rush away at the start, and, with supreme disregard for the track, go straight across country. It tried the Master of the Hounds considerably, and the ponies' legs even more. And when the whole thing was over (by which time the hares, tired of waiting to be caught, had come to look after the hounds), there would be animated disputes as to who, allowing for the number of ditches leaped and fences cleared, had really come in, or come out, first. There was a challenge cup labelled " for the high 13 * 196 WSEBE OSINESES BBTVB. jump," but I am not aware that anybody ever competed for it. Why, I do not know : perhaps its singular ugli- ness (it professed to be a Kang-hsi porcelain vase) had something to do with it. It seems aimless to win a thing when you have to stow it away out of sight immediately afterwards, lest its hideousness should compel you, however reluctantly, to smash it. Then, again, your name and exploit cannot well be engraved on a china jar, and that deprives it of half its value at once — ^for what paper-chaser would consent to hide his light under a bushel ? 197 VI. At the Hills. Looking westward from the race-course you can see at some nine miles' distance a long range of hills. These are the Hsi Shan, or Western mountains. At the point in these hills where the line of the north wall of the city would, if extended, cross the range, a gorge winds down to the- plain, broadening as it descends. Here the sides of the hill have been terraced and planted with trees, and on as many dijBferent levels stand the Eight Temples which have given the place its name. The hills on each side are bare, except for the scanty grass ; and across the great plain Pa ta ch'u seems a dark blot on the side of the mountain, near the bottom of which is a streak of white. This is the pagoda of Ling-kuang Ssu, the second in order, and perhaps the largest in extent, of the Eight Temples. Approaching Pa ta ch'u from the city the first of the temples is the one known as Ch'ang-ngan Ssu, or the " Temple of Perpetual Peace," as its present lessee 198 WHEBE GHINB8E8 BBIVE. translates it. It stands on the plain at the foot of the hills, and is at some little distance from the stone path that winds up to the other temples. In front of it is the bed of what in the rainy season is a torrent, used, in spite of the boulders that fill it, as a road in the dry season, nevertheless. Following this road to the right you come first to a group of huts, then to the path leading to a small plateau where some rough stables have been built, then to a tea-house lately repaired. Beyond this the valley divides : or perhaps it would be more correct to say that here two of the ravines that form this valley meet. A road running by the side of the northern ravine brings you to the temple of Pi mo yen ; another leads up to the remaining six temples. These, in order, are Ling-kuang Ssii (it is more easily approached by a road below the tea-house), San-shan An'r, Ta-pei Ssii, Lung-wang T'ang, Hsiang-chieh Ssii, and Pao chu tung. Of these the first three are not far from the foot of the hill ; from Ta-pei Ssii to Lung-wang T'ang is some five or six minutes' climb ; thence the paved path winds among the trees and along the edge of the ravine for some little distance till Hsiang-chieh Ssu is reached. The highest of all is little Pao chu tung, perched on a terrace not far from the summit. With the one exception of Pi mo yen, all these temples were leased or let to Europeans. In our time Ta-pei Ssii was knov^n as the "Students' Temple," San-shan An'r, as the " American," and Lung-wang T'ang and Hsiang-chieh Ssii, as the " Kussian " and the " Secretaries' " temples respectively. Ch'ang-ngan Ssii was rented by a medical missionary, Ling-kuang Ssu, on AT THE HILLS. 199 a short lease, by several missionary families, while Pao ehu tung was more or less in the market. The rents in these various temples varied very much according to the accommodation in them and their height above the plain, the lower temples bearing a higher rent. They vpere either leased for a term of years or taken for the season from the end of April to the middle of October — the greedy priests making no reduction for shortness of tenure. For Ta-pei Ssu we gave $100, while I believe the rent of Ling-kuang Ssu was double that sum. The approach to Ta-pei Ssii was very beautiful. The paved road ran along the edge of a mountain torrent, the bank being built up for greater security with large rough blocks of stone. On the other side of the path w^as the rock, and, for the ravine here was very narrow, trees met overhead, shading road and stream. The main entrance to the temple, a flight of stone stairs, has been blocked as a punishment to the priests (or the deities ?) for permitting a suicide to take place in the enclosure. One of the bonzes* had greatly insulted a coolie, so the story went, and he, instead of attacking his persecutor, had, with the perverseness of your true Chinaman, taken vengeance on him by committing sui- cide. It was difficult for us to sympathise with him, as in consequence we had to go some little way round to reach the court. Here, as a further punishment to the temple, a stone tablet had been set up in record, and one of the two poles, that with their acorn-shaped tops of yellow porcelain should mark the entrance, had been * Bonne, ' a priest,' Portuguese honzo, from Japanese husso, ' a pious man.' 200 WEEBE 0HINE8ES BBIVE. removed. On the right of this court a small gateway led to the back of the entrance-hall. Thence a steep flight of steps ran up to the second court, in the middle of which stood the principal "joss-house." Side build- ings formed the guest-chambers, of which there were three, and the rooms for the priests. A side door in the guest-chamber to the right opened on to a small plat- form with a drop of ten or twelve feet on the other three sides. Upon it stood a round stone table shaded by a tree. Here was the summer dining-room of the stu- dents, overlooking the plain, the slope leading up to Pi mo yen on the left, and on the right, some hundred yards below, the terrace of San-shan An'r. Twelve or fourteen feet above the second court was a third, like it approached by a stone stairway. Here a range of joss-houses ended in a fourth guest-chamber, somewhat larger than those below, but having, like two of them, one-third partitioned off to serve as a bed-room. On the wall was traced a Eussian monogram, the strokes some eighteen inches in length, with the date 1832. What value it had in the eyes of the priests, I do not know — perhaps they regarded it as a specimen of Wes- tern belles lettres, much as they themselves hang up grotesque and, to us, illegible scrolls, and admire them as triumphs of penmanship — but, anyway, they had preserved it religiously, and, in papering the walls, had left it uncovered. Ta-pei Ssu must have been a favourite resort of the members of the Russian Mission between 1828 and 1840, by the way, for scratched on the wall outside this room are many traces of their presence ; as these — I translate the Russian, or rather our poly- AT THE HILLS. 201 glottic O'Hara has done it for me, and I have taken it on trust — 1828 Xp. 1831. Here were Christians. KOI eyo) €v ApKO&iq,. Dr. Bunge 1831. (The accents are Dr. Bunge's own.) Here is Arcadia, but where are the shepherdesses ? 1834 (in a doggrel couplet). In another place some Russian names, and the date 1850. If the number and length of the services performed there is a proof of devotion, the priests at Ta-pei Ssii vere very devout indeed. They began at four in the morning and had three or four performances in the course of the day. There was one little shami or novice vrho chanted rather well. He used to come to us for fruit and cakes, and visitors usually tipped him — though I suppose the old pries.ts took everything. I gave him a bright ten-cent piece one day, saying that he was a small boy and should have a small coin ; but presently up came a fat priest and had the coolness to ask for a dollar, on the ground that he was a big man. It does not pay to argue with a Chinaman in his own language, so I made sundry forcible remarks to him in English and went my way. There is a great deal of human nature in these fellows, and perhaps even more in their followers. Tou will see a band of pilgrims kotowing at the various shrines. Presently a priest comes round to make the collection, and each pilgrim carefully brings out his store of worn- out and broken cash, and the iron cash no tradesman could be persuaded to take, and drops a selection into 202 WHERE GHINE8E8 DRIVE. the plate. The priest goes away, and slowly looks through the coins. Then he sadly empties the plate into the nearest dust-bin, and reflects on the decay of piety in modern China. The surroundings of Ta-pei Ssii were worthy of the approach to it. On the south side it was overhung by rocks, over which a little stream tumbled. Above and below were trees, with climbing wild vines. On the north side and in front of the temple ran the mountain torrent that has carved out this valley. At certain seasons of the year it was dry or nearly so ; but former students had removed the boulders from part of its bed, and formed a small basin that made a capital bathing- place when the rains had filled it. It does not often rain at Peking, but when it does the windows of heaven are opened, or, as the Chinese say, it is as though a bucket had been upset. The rain has no time to divide itself into drops ; it comes down all at once, and it keeps on with the same energy for three or four days. After one of these storms every road leading to the hills, and every channel in the hills, becomes an almost impassable torrent. Poor Von Gumpach, then professor at the T'ung-w6n Kuan, was riding out to the hills with one of the students — the latter in charge of despatches for the Minister. Passing along a hollow they were met by a sudden rush of water that swept them away, and it was with considerable difficulty they got to firm land. Von Gumpach lost a box of valuable MSS., while the student handed in a mass of pulp to the chief that, as he ex- plained, had once been despatches. The Professor was convinced that the Chinese Government were respon- AT THE EILL8. 203 sible for his loss — how he could never clearly make out. And he had a suspicion (see the BurUnghame Mission) that the foreign Inspectorate of Customs had something to do with raising that storm. On another occasion a Minister was the victim, and remained four hours on a sand-bank dum defluat amnis. He was rescued by a search party led by a small villager. They found him damp but undaunted, and brought him back in triumph and administered whisky-toddy. There is a graphic account of what might have been a serious accident given in the first part of Margary's Journey (pp. 6-10) : — " About four miles from this B and G- were overtaken by the rain, and in less than half an hour their ponies were up to their knees in water. They were above three hours getting across the last bit of their ride, and it was by a miracle they escaped. There was not a foot of sound ground the whole way, and they had to flounder through mud up to their knees. The roads, from their nature, were soon converted into rush- ing torrents, strong enough to carry away oxen like feathers. ... At last they reached a house, and though standing up to their knees in water, the inmates would not give them shelter, thinking they were robbers. A half-idiot boy at last came out, and boldly offered to take them to a good road and a ford. But at this ford the boy and the horses were simply carried away by the force of the current. . . . B and G continued their way and pulled each other through three streams up to their necks in water. When they reached a hut below us here, they shouted for help, and were there for 204 WHEBE CSINE8ES DBIVE. nearly an hour, shivering, exhausted and half-frantic, before their cries were heard. G at one time threw off everything, and plunged in to swim across, but was pulled back by B in the nick of time. At last we came to the rescue. . . . Guided by the shouts, we went about 100 yards to what in the morning had been a road, but was now a deep rushing mountain torrent, and on the opposite side stood B — ■ — , shouting ' Brandy, for heaven's sake, G is fainting ! ' I flew back, filled a flask, and was in the torrent up to my waist before I knew its force, but was stopped in time by B , to whom I threw the flask. It was almost dark, and for some time he could not find it ; but when he got hold of it, he rushed with it into a little hut, where G was almost, indeed as nearly as possible, done. Mean- while we had torn our awning rope down, and I had been trying for nearly five minutes to throw it across, when S shouted out that the torrent was more practicable above, where was, most fortunately, a tree, to which our servants tied the rope. S dashed nobly in with the other end, and, after a severe struggle, gained the opposite bank. I stood up to my waist, holding the rope next to him ; G — ■ — then seized the rope, and he and S — — plunged in, and in a moment were carried out in a semi-circle, G completely immersed for a few moments. While hauling away for very life I felt that one of them must go, but they held on nobly, and we pulled them in with a shout. S then repeated his feat, and we brought B across in the same way, he all the while rolling over and over like a log. Both of AT TEE HILLS. 205 them were fearfully exhausted, and G we put to bed . . ." The temples suffered a great deal from these storms. The Bertrams were staying one year at Ling-kuang Ssu, when it began to rain. At first they were vexed, for a contemplated picnic was spoilt. Then, after a day or two, the rain steadily continuing, the cook came in to say that proyisions were running short, it was impossible to get to the villages to buy more ; might he be excused from showing up an elaborate bill of fare ? In the course of that afternoon the roof of the dining-room fell in, and they dined in the bed-room. During the night they were awakened by the rain that was trickhng through a small but rapidly-spreading leak overhead, and thought it prudent to retreat to an outhouse. They were dis- covered there in the morning : Mrs. Bertram, with umbrella and waterproof, balancing herself on some bricks, while Bertram propped the roof up with his alpenstock.. After that they returned to town and dry rooms and comfort. The summer storms did good in many ways, how- ever. For one thing, they filled the water-courses and wells. Before their coming it was difficult, especially in the higher temples, to get fresh water ; indeed, this was the one drawback to life at the hills. At Hsiang- chieh Ssii, eight dollars a month was charged as " water-money " by the priest, on the ground that all water had to be fetched by coolies from a well haK a mile off. For this, by-the-bye, the priest paid the two wretched coolies two tiao^ one-sixth of a dollar, apiece per month ; the rest he pocketed. On one 206 WRBBE CHINESES BEIVE. occasion the water-money was paid directly to one of the coolies. The priest declared it had not been paid, and demanded it again. He was, of course, refused, and told that the money was not his, but the coolie's. Thereupon he tried to get it from the coolie, who, seeing himself supported by the foreigners, refused to give it up, and was at once sacked by the angry priest. At Pao chu tung the charge, if I remember right, was six dollars, the priest making, of course, a heavy squeeze. Ta pei ssii only contained rooms for four men, and so, when there were more than four students in Peking, they would overflow into the higher temples, Hsiang- chieh Ssu and Pao chu tung. Hsiang-chieh Ssu was very large, containing as it did several courts. The series on the north side were formed by two rows of guest-chambers, with a passage or gateway in the middle of each. More strictly speaking, there was a room on each side of a passage-way that ran through the middle of the courts up to a t'iifig'r or pavilion at the end. Behind the pavilion the rock rose steeply, covered with ferns and trees. The courtyard on the west was planted with pear and fig trees, flagged cause- ways intersecting it. Here the two guest-rooms faced one another, the principal shrine being at right-angles' to both, and fronting south. The guest-room in a Chinese temple is much the same as the principal room in a Chinese inn. It is perfectly bare, except for a table and a rough chair or two ; it contains one, or perhaps two, k'angs (stove- beds), and is paved with bricks — it is, in fact, as I have AT THE KILLS. 207 said, very like a respectable scullery at home. Chinese architects avoid variety, and all Chinese buildings may be reduced to one simple form : an oblong, of which three sides are of solid brick, and the fourth for three or four feet of brick, for the rest of its height of lattice- work and paper, the whole surmounted by a roof, of which the ridged tiles imitate a layer of bamboos. Divide the interior into three parts, and you have the ideal Chinese house ; all larger houses are multiples of this unit. It is as well to bear this tripartite division, which is often quite impalpable, in mind when engaging, or taking a lease of, rooms at a temple. Abbott took, as he thought, six "rooms" in the ordinary sense. When he came over with his family and any quantity of furniture to take possession, he found that a small out-house, which was to serve as kitchen and boys' room, had been reckoned as three " rooms," which left him only one compartment, some fifteen feet by ten, for the sleeping and feeding accommodation of all his party. The priest stuck to the letter of his bond, and Abbott had to submit to be fleeced. Everything that could make such rooms comfortable had to be brought from town — mattress and bedding, mosquito curtains, chairs, tea-tables, desks, often rugs and carpets. In fact, it was a removal into unfurnished lodgings. Knives and forks, crockery and glass, had to come, too, -with, cook-boy and mafoo. I do not know that it was much cooler at the hills than in town ; indeed, it was probably hotter. But then the air was clear of dust, you were quite away from the noise and bustle and evil smells of the streets, and there were 208 WHEBE GHmHSES BBIVE. plenty of walks to be taken on the hill-side by exercise seekers. Mosquitoes and " sand-flies " (a wretched little gnat, almost invisible) were harder to keep out, but most of us rigged up in our rooms a large tent of mosquito-netting and sat under it with the teacher. For the teachers had to accompany us. Sometimes they — perhaps not unnaturally — objected to leave the seductions of town to live, as it were, in the desert. If all of us went out there was no help for it : the teachers had to go with us, or leave. But if two or three re- mained in town, there was intriguing and excusing enough, till all was settled by making the teachers draw lots. Sung, however, came out with me quite readily. He brought very little with him : a mat for his bed and a mosquito-net with an elaborate door in it, a basket filled with some edible bulbs, a tea-pot, and two or three of the handleless Chinese cups. By way of ornament he had a pair of scrolls. These scrolls form no inconsiderable part of the furniture of a Chinese parlour. Usually, indeed, the room contains little else, except, perhaps, a few cushionless chairs, a table, and an inverted flower-pot or two. It was a common thing for our teachers to write a pair of scrolls (a tul-tzd) for us, with some moral sentiment taken from their books, each word in the first clause carefully balanced in the second. Her- ington thought most of these exceedingly feeble. They were wanting in originality, and not at all applicable to Student Interpreters. So with great pains and much consulting of dictionaries he elaborated one that seemed to meet the requirements of the case. He had it written AT THE HILLS. 209 out in gold characters on a blue ground, and was very proud of it. Being interpreted it ran : My pay is not sufScient for my modest needs : My debts prove too much for my impudent creditors. In Peking you have to be careful about the senti- ments of your scrolls. People who know all about it come in and ask you, innocently enough, to explain, and are unnecessarily gleeful when they have entrapped you into some damaging admission. In the South it is different. Sterling had a tui-tza painted on each side of his fire-place, which was the admiration of his friends. When he was asked what it meant, he used to observe, in an off-hand sort of way, " That ? It 's a moral saying of Confucius'." And they were satis- fied. But one day Dr. Ernst called and found three or four men there waiting for Sterling. They drew his attention to the inscription, and asked him to translate it. One of them added that it was taken from the works of Confucius. Dr. Ernst peered at the tui-tza through his spectacles, then at his interrogator, and said solemnly : " Dat iss not so. Dis say, ' Coals iss seven toUar von ton ; Charcoals iss nine cash von catty.' " His friends are not nearly so enthusiastic about Sterling now. O'Hara and I took Pao chu tung for the season. It is, as I said, quite a tiny temple, and the highest of all. Here two terraces, one some fourteen feet above the other, have been formed in a small guUey, and on them a few temple buildings set up. These are ap- 14 210 WHERE CHINESE8 DRIVE. preached by a broad level pathway on the side of the hill, protected by a low stone wall, and entered through a p'ai-lou of three arches. The temple consists of three little courts. The first, the principal court, containing the shrine, on the side nearest the hill ; a guest-room, opposite the entrance ; and, overlooking the precipitous descent into the valley, a t'ing'r or pavilion. A door on the south leads into a smaller courtyard containing another guest-chamber ; beyond this is a second door opening on to the hill-side. On the right-hand, as you enter the temple, a small gateway leads to the back of the shrine and to a flight of rough stone steps. Behind the shrine is the little cave that gives its name — Pao chu tung, the Cave of Precious Pearls — to the temple. The entrance is low and narrow, and the cave itself not much to see. The roof is formed by a mass of con- glomerate (" pudding-stone " with white pebbles, which, I suppose, are the "pearls"), and the cave contains a table or wooden platform, with a cross-legged Buddha on it. Under the table was a pair of enormous shoes. The flight of steps led up to the second platform, much narrower than the other. Here again was a shrine in the centre of a building, the two ends of which formed small guest-chambers. O'Hara and I tossed up for choice of rooms, O'Hara taking the ones in the lower court, and I those in the upper. We allotted the guest-chamber opposite the entrance to Sung, who was delighted, and thought we were improving in Chinese li (the rules of propriety) in giving up the principal room to our teacher. It was so blackened by smoke, and so frowsy, that we could not AT THE HILLS. 211 live in it ; but it realised Sung's ideas of comfort. He used occasionally to invite a town friend to come out for a day or two, and they would shut themselves up inside and jabber incessantly instead of walking about the hill. Sung would, it is true, bring out a few maxims showing that it was a good thing to take exercise in the country, but he never thought of applying them to himself. A Chinaman's dislike to fresh air is truly wonderful. You will see the Chinese passengers on one of the coasting steamers crowd into the lower deck like herrings in a barrel, all ports and scuttles shut close. Presently, if one of them has to come on deck, he will appear with mouth and nostrils carefully covered up in his long sleeve,- lest he should breathe the pure air and find it disagree with him. I had two rooms up-stairs, each about twelve feet by ten, and separated from one another by a small joss- house. One of these we reserved for casual guests, making a small bed on the k'ang, and rigging up the inevitable mosquito-curtain. I had very little more furniture in my room : a table, a couple of benches, two trunks, and a bathing-tub, made up most of it. There was no fastening to the door, but I was never robbed — never, I was going to say, even disturbed at night ; but I had forgotten. One evening, about 8 or 9 o'clock, we were startled by what seemed like the screams of some creature in mortal agony. We extemporised torches and went out to look, but found nothing. I inquired of the old priest what it was ; he said a kind of fox, but Sung and the boys were disposed to believe that it was an evil spirit. Sung, indeed, told me to 14 * 212 WHERE CHINESES DRIVE. keep a bright look-out till 12 o'clock; after that it would be all right. At Ta-pei Ssu they had a ghost— a veritable ghost, they used to assure us. In fact, they were rather proud of it — and I suppose the possession of a ghost does add a certain amount of respectability to a place, even in China. It used to walk at midnight (that of course) along the upper terrace. It was not visible, or, at any rate, it was never seen, but you could hear it pass with a slow halting step, that made you think it foolishness to get out of your comfortable bed to indulge a morbid curiosity. And yet you had an uneasy feeling that the door was not locked after all. I was sitting in my room one morning, when I heard something fall with a flop on to the pavement outside. I seized a stick and ran out in time to kill the snake before he got away. We were not so much troubled by snakes, though, as they were at Hsiang-chieh Ssu. It was there that Horton, just as he was getting into bed, paused and looked about for a thick stick and his revolver ; for, curled up comfortably between his blankets, was a snake some six feet long. And Dr. Bernard was arranging his botanical specimens one day at a table near the window, when one of the reptiles dropped down on to the book in front of him. Dr. Bernard was equal to the occasion, and had him bottled and preserved in spirits, and, I am told, properly classified and labelled, before he had time to realise the situation. The rats, too, would seriously annoy us at times. They used to steeple-chase inside the walls and along AT THE HILLS. 213 the rafters, and keep it up all night. They really seemed incapable of self-control. It did not disturb us much, for we slept soundly at the hills : but what vexed us was that, when they had made themselves hungry by their violent exercise, they used to sit down and make a good square meal out of the paper on the ceiling. Some years ago a student thought something must be done to restrain the unpleasantly high spirits of his rats. So he purchased four owls and trained them. They used to spend the day roosting symmetri- cally on the posts of his bed, or in a row on his towel- rack ; in the night they went on the war-path, until the rats, disgusted at such conduct, decamped. In the summer, when we were all out at the hills, three or four separate messes would be formed, all under the direction of the head cook, who issued the rations to his subordinates. We had to be content with plainer fare than in town ; fish, for instance, was hard to get, for it had to be fetched from the city. But we got plenty of fruit : apricots, peaches, grapes. There was a vineyard among the hills a mile or two away, where, at a charge of 3 tiao (say lid.) a head, the greedy could feast all day on the long white grapes or round purple ones ; or, if they preferred it, derange their digestions with unlimited peaches — apricots were despised. One such peach-garden I remember well. Paley and Lawson were the fortunate discoverers, and took toll of its contents, the proprietor gazing open-mouthed the while. Then Paley felt in his pockets, and found only his cook's last bread-bill — unreceipted, but stamped 214 WHERE CHINE8ES DEIVE. with various " chops." This he solemnly handed to the rustic, who, through want of education or excess of faith, took it for a tiao note of large amount, and in his gratitude insisted on kotowing. When they came again a week later, the rustic confided to them his doubts of the credit of the bank which had issued that note ; said he had taken it round to seven or eight villages to get it changed, but the shopkeepers had declined to cash it. Bread-bills do not pass current everywhere about Peking. It was here that Lawson and Kandolph used to come when they were busy over the " Forty Exercises " in their Chinese Course, and inform the bewildered rustic that "stones are of different sizes," and that "there are mountains full two hundred li high." At least, that was the idea Randolph had in his mind, and he said he did not see why the rustic should regard it as at all funny. It distressed him so much that one day, to soothe him, Paley said he would examine into the matter. Then he found that Randolph, instead of saying erh pai It {" two hundred li "), had been telling the rustic that there were mountains whose height was erh pai li ("two white pears"). And the bucolic mind had failed to grasp the profound depth of the remark. O'Hara's boy and mine and our coolie slept in the principal joss-house, and made themselves comfortable enough on either side of the Buddha and under the altar. They were not much impressed, it would seem, by the sanctity of the place. In fact, after dinner, they used to wash up the things on the altar and hang the AT THE HILLS. 216 dish-cloths to dry on the head and arms of the image. The old priest made no ohjection ; it did not interfere with hia comfort or his duties ; for he lodged in the gate-house, and he only performed one service a day, at sunset. It consisted in banging a bell three times, not very loudly, and in setting up and lighting three incense-sticks in front of the Buddha. At Pao chu tung we dined in the t'ing'r. This was a small pavilion with the usual tent-like roof supported on eight pillars plastered, and painted red. The floor was paved, and a low wall ran along the edge of the platform, here some fifteen feet above the slope of the hill, and served at the same time as a seat. At that height, nine hundred feet or so above the plain, the view was magnificent. To the right a spur of the hills ran down to the Hun river, six or seven miles off. Below was the valley, covered with trees, through which peeped the roofs of the lower temples. On the left more hills stretching to Yu-ch'iian Shan and the grounds of the Summer Palace. Eight in front of us lay the Great Plain, losing itself in the sky. We could trace the walls of Peking, and count every gate, and see the yellow roofs of the palace buildings flashing in the sun. On a clear day the pagoda of T'ungchow, twenty-five • miles away, could be made out. And the Plain was never the same, changing as it did with every cloud : brown in winter, light green in spring, then through yellow to brown again as autumn came and passed. But I think it looked loveliest at night, when a great moon was riding overhead and touched the lake at Wan Shou Shan and the river of the Hun with silver light. 216 WHERE CHINESES DBIVE. All was SO still that we could even hear the sound of the gun fired . by the peasants keeping watch over their crops, as a warning to pilferers, or the faint barking of some village dog. But it was no joke, the climb up the hill to see our view, and especially after a long ride out from town. We seldom went down to the plain, and our ponies grew fat and lazy. I remember one evening, when O'Hara and I went to dine at Ch'ang-ngan Ssii, the farthest temple of all from ours ; for, as I said, it stood at the foot of the hill, , at some distance from the rest. We did not leave till after 11, by which time the moon was rising. But all the valley was in deep shadow, and we knew the mountain path by which we had to climb would be darker still, so took a lantern. Half- way up, in the gloomiest place of all, the lantern flickered and went out, and we had to grope our way under the trees until we passed Hsiang-chieh Ssu. Here the hill-side is more open, and as the moon rose higher we had plenty of light. Indeed, by the time we reached Pao chu tung the moonbeams had had their effect on O'Hara's brain, for, on my expression of thankfulness at having got back at last, he said he was prepared to do it all over again. In fact, he would bet me a dollar he would go back to Ch'ang-ngan Ssii, hit the door with his stick, and return. I saw him off (I thought it better to humour him) and went to bed. I believe he got back some time in the early morning. But on the next occasion of our calling at Ch'ang-ngan Ssii they had a thrilling story to tell us. A few hours after we left them that night, the gate-keeper came running into the AT THE HILLS. 217 courtyard in a great state of alarm. He had been roused by a violent knocking at the gate, and on peeping through had seen a great devil with long horns and a face like yellow paper. Before he could say " Ai yah," it turned and fled towards the mountain. Of course, they said, it was a thief, and it was a lucky thing for him that they had not seen him, as revolvers were kept handy in that temple. O'Hara was not as keen on midnight expeditions after that ; he said it was bad enough to be told that you looked like a yellow-faced fiend, but to be threatened with revolvers was too trying. Still, he was so confident of his powers of endurance that we got up a match for him with Herington : a race down hill and back, go as you please. We were to be at the top with long drinks for the survivor, should there be one. Both seemed ready enough ; but somehow or other they kept postponing it till the summer was over and we back in town, disappointed and disgusted. We were fortunate in having a moonlight night when coming back from Ch'ang-ngan Ssu (except in so far as O'Hara's head was affected by it) ; for a few years before two men had left that temple after dinner, in the dark, but with plenty of spirits for the journey, and contrived to get half-way up the hill. Then one of them somehow sat down, and thoughtlessly "rolled over into the gulley. The other reflected that he ought to recover the body, if only for the satisfaction of its relatives ; so he began the descent, but presently felt sleepy, and considered that, as the night was cold, it would keep till the morning, made himself comfortable, and woke at day- break. Opposite him sat the body, yawning and rubbing 218 WHERE OHINESES DRIVE. — well, he had not an easy seat where he was. He had brought up between a tree and a boulder, and thought that now he was there he might as well stay there. At least this, or something like it, was the account they gave to those who considered their conduct in spending the night in that guUey eccentric and quaint. The days passed quietly enough at Pao chu tung. We seemed above the world, shut out from it, as we often were, by mist and cloud. Then it was pleasant to be independent, to rise when we wished, and to dine when we pleased, and as casually as we pleased. We seldom went down the hill, but took our walks along the top. Here, I was assured, grew plenty of mushrooms, but as from early childhood I never could distinguish a puff-ball or poisonous fungus from the edible toad-stool, I preferred to let the cook procure them. Besides, O'Hara objected to my supplying the larder, observing that if the cook were to poison him he could cut the cook's wages, but if I did he could not well do anything else but haunt me ; and he thought that that was not a gentlemanly thing for a ghost to do. Half a mile or so to the north-east of the temple the hills met in a watershed, known to us as The Gap. This was the head of another valley at the back of our hill, a lovely valley that stretched away down to the Hun river, and was shut off from the plain by the moun- tain spur I spoke of just now. On the other side of this valley rose Mount Balluzec. For all the more prominent mountains about here, that had no easily- remembered Chinese names, have been christened after AT THE HILLS. 219 the earlier Peking residents, or such of them as were the first to cHmb them. Thus the hill that overhangs Ch'ang-ngan Ssii is called Mount Bruce, and the moun- tain across the river, dim in the distance, behind which the sun sets, is known as Mount ConoUy. We of a later generation were sometimes apt to confuse an un- familiar name, and Mount Balluzec was '* Mount Balzac " to us for many months. I wish I could paint this valley for you as I saw it in early summer or in autumn. A stone path ran down it, and lost itself among the villages that were dotted about, half hidden among the apricot trees. And there were wildering little glens that led up into the hills, full of white and scarlet lilies and yellow flowers of every shape. Under the foot of Mount Balluzec was the channel of a mountain stream. Here, when the rains came, were deep cool rocky pools, where it was pleasant to lie after a long stroll, and listen to the plash of water among the stones. I used to think that valley the most home-like of all Peking scenes. There was Uttle to remind me of China, nothing except a dagoba in the distance, or the twisted roof of some tiny temple peep- ing through the trees. And the sunshine lingered there long after it had left our eastward slope, and shone on the little fields so painfully and carefully terraced, and on the upland pastures where the cattle were already being gathered for their homeward journey. I loved to lie there lazily, till the last ray had faded from the distant river, and it was time to be gone. But there is one thing wanting in the Peking summer : the birds never seem to sing there, or, if they do, cannot 220 WHERE GHINESES DRIVE. be heard. Every tree is full of the wretched cicadas we know as " scissor-grinders," and the miserable "wee- wees." " Miserable," by-the-bye, is rather a good epithet here : for the creature's note is a sort of pro- longed wail. The scissor-grinders keep up their noise incessantly, and it is possible to get used, or, at any rate, resigned to it, but the wee-wees rile you at unex- pected times. First one insect starts and wees for a minute ; then another gets excited (I suppose the first is a challenge), and tries to out-wee him. After five minutes of this they pause to take breath, and things are comparatively quiet. Then on the tree behind you begins the ominous wee-wee-wee, ee, ee ! and you madly fling the next thing to hand in that direction, and retire. But though the birds do not sing, they, or some of them at least, contrive to make a noise. There are a great many kites in Peking (feathered kites — there are plenty of paper ones too), and to frighten these, so they say, small light whistles are attached to the pigeons there. A flock of these is not unmusical, though rather bewildering at first : Paley vpas some months in the north before he could get out of his head that it was not the sound of a threshing-machine he heard. We made many excursions among the hills, losing ourselves sometimes in glens where a little stream or low stone wall would bring back memories of home. But I often longed for the sight of a hedge -row, with its nut-trees and climbing blackberry-bushes, and I re- member sitting for half an hour fascinated by an engraving (in Harper, I think it was) called " The Edge AT THE HILLS. 221 of the Field." Meanwhile the stone walls in these glens were refreshing after the mud dykes of the plain. Gordon and I settled that this country should be the Derbyshire of North China, and O'Hara had a scheme ready for a railway that was to run from Tientsin to these hills, and bring invalids to a new Matlock. The idea was not altogether original ; for the Peking and T'ungchow missionaries had already decided that here would be an excellent place for a sanatorium, if only difficulties in the way of purchasing land could be got over. The missionary pioneer is very useful, and does a great deal of good : he is a thoroughly trustworthy guide to places where one can live comfortably and pleasantly. And in the interests of science he will consent to live there himself. Those unfortunate people whom business obliged to spend the summer in town would often ride out on Sunday to see us, or would come and stay with us from Saturday till Monday. Very little preparation was re- quired, beyond rigging up a hammock or getting ready a bed on an unoccupied k'ang. Then we would ride over to Wan shou Shan, sending a mafoo on before with our tiffin. Just where the stream leaves the lake is the Hunchback Bridge, and here the water is deep and clear. And on each side under the bridge is a ledge of stone, where we are secure from the inquisitive natives, or, at any rate, from contact with them. These all assemble on the other side, and watch our proceedings as we strip and plunge in. One of them can dive, too, but he does not care to do it for mere amusement. Chuck in 222 WHERE CHINESE8 BBIVE. a cash, or, better still, a five-cent piece, and he will be after it, and secure it before it reaches the bottom. When Grordon and I had finished the bottle of sherry we brought with us, on one occasion when we visited the place, we amused ourselves in this way for a little time, then mounted to ride back. I suppose watching the rustic dive had excited us, but anyhow we raced home between the fields of kao-liang ventre a terre. That was when T discovered that my lazy pony could go, for he came in first. I had very little to do with it, and was as surprised as Gordon. Wan shou Shan had other attractions, for there was good snipe-shooting among the paddy fields in the season. Small Chinese acted as retrievers, and were quite proud of a good bag. There was some danger, though, in the sport sometimes : as once when Eandolph fired at a bird flying low, and from among the rice on which his shot was rattling three heads popped up to see what was the matter. They belonged to villagers who were thinning the crops, and, being above their knees in mud and water, were quite invisible from where Eandolph stood. On another occasion, Eandolph was attacked by a mad- man, who laid hold of his gun and tried to wrest it from him. It was loaded, and Eandolph feared to let go ; so held on, and presently got the gun away. The madman, however, closed with him, intending to throw him into the paddy, apparently. Eandolph was loath to hurt him, but, seeing nothing for it, struck out and knocked him head over heels into the mud. Then it was that Eandolph at last satisfied himself on a point about which he had long been anxious to obtain trustworthy evidence AT THE HILLS. 223 — the effect on a Chinaman of a knock-down blow be- tween the eyes . . . The madman picked himself up, composedly, and came on again with equal enthusiasm. Nor was it till Randolph had got him down, threatening punishment, that the surrounding rustics interfered. So far they had looked on cheerfully, in the hope, it would seem, of seeing a foreigner mauled by an irresponsible lunatic. Bertram was persuaded once to accompany Horton on a three days' trip to the hills — a shooting trip it was to be. Bertram had no gun, but he thought it would pro- bably be all right. The morning after their arrival they set out together " snipe-hunting," as the Americans have it, in the direction of Wan shou Shan. Horton carried the gun, but, for fear of possible accidents, left it for the present unloaded. Bertram had a field-glass. After some time Bertram caught sight of a bird in a tree, which Horton, on examining through the field- glass, pronounced to be a snipe. Then they sat down to load the gun. Horton produced out of one pocket a piece of newspaper ; out of another a dozen pellets of shot. The newspaper contained powder, or rather had contained it — it had nearly all leaked out, some- how, and there was only enough for one charge left. They rammed this home, and were preparing to stalk the snipe, when it occurred to Horton to offer Bertram the chance of shooting it. Bertram could not think of it ; privately, would much rather not. Then they tossed up, and Bertram manipulated the dollar — ^Horton had to shoot. He made his approaches, and, to Bertram's joy and surprise, the gun went off without hurting any- 224 WREBE GRINESES DRIVE. one but the bird. They carried that home and showed it to Eandolph. , . . Bertram says that it was rather mean of Randolph, since he could not deny that the bird had been shot, to declare that it was after all only an ordinary, a very ordinary, magpie. In the hills behind the Summer Palace is the Imperial Hunting Ground, where some years ago a deer was shot, greatly to the distress of the Chinese Government and Baron von Gumpach. Since then it has not been possible to commit a like trespass ; but Ashton, who is an able sportsman, noticed that the wall was broken in places, and thought it not improbable that the deer sometimes strayed — so promised a neighbouring rustic a dollar if he would give him notice. A few days later, as Ashton was sitting at breakfast in his temple, the rustic rushed in in an excited sort of way, and exclaimed that there was a deer outside the wall. Ashton took down his rifle and followed. Presently he saw the deer, browsing under a tree, and signed to the rustic to lie close while he carefully stalked it. Just as he was get- ting within range he slipped on a stone. The deer, though evidently startled by the noise, did not move off, and Ashton's suspicions were aroused. On coming nearer, he found that the unfortunate beast had been carefully tied by the leg to the tree. The rustic was dis- gusted when Ashton refused to shoot, explaining that he had been at great pains to convey that deer out of the park. But there was really no accounting for the eccentricities of foreigners. There used to be little difficulty in getting into Wan shou Shan, but quite lately the gate-keepers and others AT THE KILLS. 225 there have become vicious. Their last victims were two men who unfortunately knew no Chinese, and these they contrived to shut up inside the grounds somewhere, demanding a ransom of ten dollars. The men held out for a few hours, then sadly gave way. It is not often that the natives give any trouble at all, and, when they do, it is almost invariably to people who do not understand them or their speech. This was not the case, however, with the students who, some few years ago now, went on an expedition to Po-'hua Shan (the " Hill of a Hundred Flowers")- It so happened that it was at the time of a pilgrimage to the temples there, and the foreigners could only get a very small room to spend the night in. Scarcely sufficient though it was for their own accommodation, presently some pilgrims came and insisted on sharing it with them. They were naturally turned out, and all was quiet that night. The next morning, however, a crowd of natives assembled in the yard, and began to throw bricks through the window. The students had with them two shot-guns and a revolver. These they fired over the heads of the rioters, with no effect. It would have been madness to fire into the crowd, for the first shot that told would mean their own death. The bricks, meanwhile, had broken the window into splinters, and were coming in faster, so they determined to make a sortie. They managed to get through, and after that adjourned to a neighbouring wood, and stayed there till the people grew calmer. When that happened they returned, and both sides proceeded to count the wounded. One of the foreigners had been banged on X5 226 WEEBE GHINESE8 DBIVE. the head with a club, and a small native hit by a spent bullet as he lay on the side of the hill. In the upshot a great number of the rioters were arrested and pun- ished, while an opportune dollar healed the youngster's bruise. Silver in all such cases is an efficient plaster for wound and tongue. Ashton once by accident lodged some pellets of snipe-shot in the cheek of a Chinaman. The man, with that readiness for seizing a small advantage which is a sixth sense in his countrymen (or, rather, which makes up for the non-existent sense of smell), at once dropped down dead. Ashton stirred him up with the butt-end of his gun, and sent him with a chit to the doctor. The doctor extracted the shot with a pen-knife, and, as requested in Ashton's note, gave the man a dollar. A week later the rustic came round again, the wounds on his face very much inflamed, and asked for additional compensation ; he would take three dollars. The doctor thought it strange ; the scars were healing when he last saw the man — quite beautifully, in fact. But before he reported it as an interesting case to the Lancet he made careful examina- tion. Then he found that the rustic had been supplied by a friend with some irritating mixture, on condition of sharing the proceeds. As the doctor was observed to eject the man with a certain amount of emphasis, the speculation was, there is reason to believe, a losing one. The Temples were a convenient starting-point for many excursions — to Miao-feng Shan, up the valley of the Hun to Mount ConoUy, to Fang Shan (where the AT THE HILLS. 227 great cave is that runs no one knows how far under- ground, for a subterranean river stops the way), or to the Nankow Pass. When Trenton was staying with me, he and I strolled off one day in the direction of Yii-ch'iian Shan, and the encampment of the Peking Field Force. When we got somewhere near the place we turned into a small tea-house, and found an itine- rant story-teller, with his lute, and a circle of admiring villagers. He broke off his story when he saw us, and though Trenton begged him to go on, it was evident that he considered himself cut out by the new attrac- tion — two genuine foreigners, ready to drink tea, and smoke, and answer questions. The villagers insisted on our taking pulls at their hubble-bubbles, brass water- pipes, with a bowl the size of a small thimble, and filled with a substance in taste and appearance more like powdered straw than tobacco. Then they began to tell us about themselves. This man had been in Tientsin, and had gone through the foreign drill ; why, see what a lot of English he knows ! Then the man is trotted out, and jerking his arm up and down, says, " Show-ter Aah-mi-sse ! Kwei-k Mdh-tch ! Fai ! " and looks round well pleased, while a comrade trans- lates. They are all Bannermen, they say, and should be posted in the foreign manoeuvres. They possibly are. On some of the mountains ling yang, a small species of deer, are to be found, on which the natives set great store ; for the horns, heart and blood are all used by them as medicine, in that curious pharmacopoeia of theirs, and it is very difficult, after shooting the beast, 16 * 228 WHEBU GHINESE8 . BRIVE. to preserve any memento of him from thievish boys and coolies. Besides the rarer ling yang there are pheasants and hares on the hills. Occasionally a wolf is seen. Fawcett - met one on a retired path, he says, vrhen he was going down to Ch'ang-ngan Ssii one day. After staring at one another for a few seconds, they each went back the way they had come, Fawcett taking a longer road to the temple. When he got there he found his wolf quarrelling with another temple- dog over a bone, and a small boy flogging them both. It reminded him, he said, of a certain consul (magna componere), who was walking out one day in the country when he was accosted by a ferocious bull. Dignity required that he should take no notice of the bull ; prudence said, Climb the next tree. Prudence prevailed, and the consul remained a prisoner till a little girl came out with a piece of string and led that cow home to be milked. This is Fawcett's story. I will not vouch for it; I believe he invented it to cover his own retreat. There are all sorts of picnicatable places within easy distance of the temples, and the opportunities afforded us were not neglected. Wan shou Shan was a common meeting-place for people out at the hills and their friends in town ; and so Kirkman was invited to join the Bertrams at their picnic there. The spirit in Kirk- man was willing, but the flesh — there was the rub. He touched sixteen stone the last time he was weighed, and that was two years ago. His boy assured him, though, that a Peking mule could stand anything ; so a mule was brought. But as soon as Kirkman was in the saddle, the mule, as he put it, " collapsed Uke an AT THE SILLS. 229 umbrella in a high wind." A cart Kirkman refused to squeeze into, a waggon he thought undignified. Finally someone suggested a camel. Kirkman jumped at the suggestion (metaphorically jumped, that is), and mounted his camel at the friend's door, dressed in his summer suit of white drill. He had scarcely left his gate when he found he had forgotten something, and dismounted. His friend greeted him much as the blessed gods did Hephaestus when he acted as cup-bearer, and he dis- covered, to his dismay and horror, that the camel had only too recently been engaged in the coal trade, and — but the rest is too awful. Pao chu tung was, fortunately for us, on the list of places visitable, and we had the pleasure of persuading some of the dwellers on the plain and their visitors to come and see our view. Our small household could not provide sufficiently for all the expected guests, and there was a running up and down hill of coolies bearing baskets of crockery and cutlery and glass, and a bor- rowing of boys and cooks. On one occasion I had the honour of entertaining Ch'ung Hou, the late Ambas- sador to Eussia. He was staying in the neighbourhood, at one of the temples, and had come up to Pao chu tung to see the place. I did not know who he was, and only noticed a mild-faced old gentleman, who bowed to me as I passed, and three or four younger men talking with him. When I came back from my walk, my boy told me who it was, and said that the ta jm, on hearing I had rented the temple, had wished to apologise for intruding on me (some polite phrase, I expect, that the boy had expanded a little). I answered that I hoped 230 WHERE OHINESES DBIVE. he would come again when I could receive him more fitly, and I wrote a little note to say so. Presently came an answer in the ex-Minister's handwriting, thank- ing me, and promising to come. About a week later my boy ran in to say that Ch'ung Hou and some of his family had arrived at one of the lower temples, and, as it was a fine day, would probably visit Pao chu tung. And so he had made his preparations, and laid out a table in the t'ing'r, with flowers and fruit, crackers and bon-bons, tea, sherry, claret, and cigars and cigarettes. In a short time Ch'ung Hou did arrive, with his sister, and two young married ladies, and their attendants. He introduced me to his sister, and began to talk very pleasantly, about London and America, and the scenery here and there, his sister occasionally adding some re- mark, until I thought the orthodox quarter of an hour exhausted (not being quite sure of the Chinese etiquette, I regarded myself as paying a call on them), so made my adieus and left them. My boy told me that the young ladies took away with them the crackers and bon-bons that remained, and asked if there were no more ? Ch'ung Hou remonstrated, but the boy said it was all right ; he was sure I should be sorry that so few had been provided. The boy himself was evidently well satisfied — I expect his douceur was beyond his merits. On another occasion the old Duke Liang, from whom the British Legation is rented, visited the temple. Indeed, Pao chu tung was much afiected by Peking notables engaged in sight-seeing among the hills. My boy grew very particular, and one day, when I asked AT THE HILLS. 231 him who it was that had just left the temple, said in an off-hand sort of way, " That one ? He 's only a Censor ! " I like my boy to have an honest pride in himself — and his master — but I thought this sort of thing required checking, and resolved to move back into town at an early opportunity. Gordon was a most hospitable man, and had a birth- day each summer, which he invited us to celebrate at Ta-pei Ssii. Then night would be made vocal, and the Russian part-songs at Lung-wang T'ang yielded to superior energy, and the peaceful slumbers of the visitors at San-shan An'r turned into a confused con- sciousness of — let us say, seeing that we were the authors of it — melody, somewhere about. The worst of it was that the dogs would regard the proceeding as a sort of challenge, and start an opposition that did not appeal to the better feelings of our nature. Sometimes we made a raid, and a dog would be shot and carefully deposited in a guUey and covered up with rocks. Then followed days of duplicity and pretended sympathy with the priests' loss, that all went down to the score against the next dog. After the dogs, the greatest nuisance were the beggars. There was one fellow who presented him- self at the back gate of Hsiang-chieh Ssii, and began to howl, and kept on howling till Randolph, who was busy on the Tzu-Srh Chi, got up and expostulated. Expostulations proving vain, recourse was had to unripe apricots. Then, as the howling went on with unabated vigour, small rocks came into play. The beggar seemed to prefer them to the apricots. At 232 WHERE CHINE8E8 DRIVE. last a gun was taken down and filled with No. 2, and a message sent by the boy to say that ' ' the ta lao yeh was grieved, but there really seemed no other way open to him. Yet, being humane, he . thought that if the hua-izd [beggar] would only turn round while he was being fired at, he might take it easier." The hua-tza paused in his howling, and, looking up, saw the gun pointed at his legs. He reflected a Uttle, then slipped nimbly behind a door and was still. Randolph was a good man to go to when you wanted a charge of shot put through anything. Gordon and I were calling on him one day when he said, anent Herington's reading, " He has been pottering over Williams' Middle Kingdom this last week. He came to me yesterday, while I was sitting- in a long chair, shoot- ing sparrows for supper. ' Shooting at,' you say ? Gordon, just hand me a rock, or something, will you ? Thanks. Well, when I was shooting sparrows, with a saloon-pistol " — here Randolph fingered his rock, but, as no one interrupted, put it down regretfully and went on—" Herington came along, holding up the Middle Kingdom by its cover. He said, ' For Heaven's sake, Randolph, put a bullet through this awful book ! ' And so we hung it up carefully and had pot-shots at the Portrait of Abeel." Gordon here remarked that he did not remember that picture. " No ? " said Randolph ; " you can't have read much, then. Why, it 's the Frontispiece." " Oh," answered Gordon, naively, " I never got beyond the cover." It is a pity to spoil your shooting for want of practice — a conclusion Herr Dronsdorf came to when AT THE HILLS. 233 he missed a thief who was breaking out of his temple with his watch and one or two other things ; so Herr Dronsdorf got the carpenter to make a rough wooden figure, and put it up in a corner of the room. The boy thought it was a joss, and got Dronsdorf some incense- sticks to burn to it. He was fixing these up the next morning, when, to his amazement, Dronsdorf told him from the bed to get out of the way, and then emptied his revolver into the "joss" — or the wall in the imme- diate neighbourhood. We used to take our turns, week by week, in going into town for office-work ; and, indeed, though life at the hills was delightful enough, it was the least bit monotonous, if the truth must be told. Some of us were so decidedly of .this opinion that when they got back to town they stayed there. This was not Paley's view, however. The first year he was up he remained at the Hills till well into November, and persuaded Fawcett to keep him company. He says it was alto- gether delightful, and quite different from the summer- time. They used to ride out every morning from 10 to 1, jumping banks and ditches, or chatting with the peasants. But the old priest at Ta-pei Ssii, where they were staying, was not sympathetic, and was anxious, it seemed, to have his temple to himself again. He wrote to the then President of the Mess a long and earnest letter, urging him to use his influence with them to advise them to go into town. " There were indigent vagabonds on the hills," he said, " who would not scruple to enter the temple rooms, and rob, 234 WHEBE GHINESE8 DRIVE. and perhaps wound and ill-treat them." The President made a careful abstract of this letter, and sent it on to Paley. Paley was not disposed to take the priest's hint and depart ; but thought perhaps there might be some- thing in what he said about the prevalence of robbers. Anyway, it was as well to take precautions ; so he sent for his boy and began to tell him not to enter the rooms at night without calling out, for he might get shot by mistake. Paley says, " I suppose my Chinese wasn't perfect, as he didn't seem to take it in exactly ; so I illustrated it. One door of my room— there are two — was shut, and I took my revolver and put a bullet through it. From the way in which the boy disappeared out of the other door, I 'm afraid he didn't catch my idea, after all. He seems to have thought I meant to put the bullet through him." Fawcett was not so enthusiastic about November at the Hills. He came away presently, and reported that Paley was spending all but two hours in the middle of the day in bed, under a pile of blankets, sheep-skins, Mongolian rugs, and any odds and ends of clothing that he could not find room for on his person. It was the only way to keep warm. For himself, he preferred a fire — there were no stoves in the temples — so had left him and come back to the comforts of town. 235 VII. SuMMEB IN Town. SuMMEE in Town had not as many attractions as winter, perhaps, but there was tennis on the Legation lawn, and in the play-ground of the Customs' Students, and there were garden-parties at the American Legation, and the Inspectorate-General of Customs. It seems to be impossible to get good turf in Peking ; what grass there is grows in coarse tufts, that no amount of mowing or rolling will keep short ; and it wears out at once, so that a lawn has to be relaid every year. Besides all these disadvantages, our courts in the Lega- tion lay east and west, and, as it was too hot to play until an hour before sunset, one of the players, having the sun in his eyes, was perforce quite in the dark as to everything else. It was useful in handicapping, though. The Customs' Students, accepting the fact that grass would not grow, went in for an unpretending mud court. For this the clay of which the Chinese make their threshing-floors serves admirably. The "play-ground" where this tennis-court was laid down was in the Kou- lan Hii-t'ung, a little below the Customs' Quarters, and on the other side of the lane. It was fairly large, and perfectly bare, except for one tree and four stone seats. 236 WHERE GHINESES DRIVE. A set of quoits and a stone ball for putting the weight were the other attractions of the place. Play went on every evening, and by way of refreshment boys would appear bearing trays loaded with bottled beer, long drinks, tea, and a huge pile of buttered toast. The western windows of the Library above our own mess-room looked out into the " Carriage Park." The wall surrounding this is, as I have said, some thirtaen feet high, with a covering of slippery yellow tiles, six or seven feet broad. Formerly a small balcony was stretched along the space between this wall and the Library; but it fell in one day, and has never been restored. However, it was easy enough to get from one of the windows to the top of the wall, and then, by lowering a ladder, descend into the park. It was a most disreputable ladder ; there were only three rungs re- maining — the rest were supplied by pieces of clothes- line, or left to be imagined. When Paley stayed in town one summer, he used to take Gyp for a run in the Park every afternoon. Then the gardener hung on to the top of the ladder to keep it steady, while Paley slowly descended, the unhappy pup slung like a coal-sack from his shoulders. Some years ago the students adopted more heroic methods of entering the Park. Setting an unreason- ably high value on their necks, they declined to go down a ladder, but went to work to tunnel the wall. This done, they arched the opening in a tasteful and scientific manner, and fixed up a wicket-gate. Their industry and ingenuity were greatly admired by the officials in charge of the Park; but, as they repre- SUMMEB IN TOWN. 237 sented to the then Minister, such a mode of entry into Imperial property was not common in China. Their prejudices were respected, and the entrance ordered to be bricked up. Formerly, they say, a state elephant used to be kept in one of the buildings here, and was led out on grand occasions, secured by a hundred ropes, with two men to each, while the natives crowded in to see the sight. In our time the park was deserted, and was very seldom entered by officials. Sterling was fond of roaming about . in it when he was a student, and liked to climb the trees and meditate on things. He was perched on a bough one day when the officials inspecting the place came in, and stared at him in amazement for a bit, then began to entreat him to come down. They said it was not that they objected to his being there so much, only they feared he would fall and hurt his jewelled person, and that would cause them pain and grief. So Sterling, not liking to do that, came down. We hunted out some old bats one summer, and tried to play cricket in the park. There were several draw- backs. For one thing, the bats were very old — we computed their age at between fifteen and twenty years — and used to split at the first drive. Then the grass was so long, or the place -so strewn with broken tiles and bricks, or overgrown with briars, that it was not easy to find a pitch. And fielding was difficult because of the number of trees about. But we managed to get up some matches occasionally — only four or five a side, though, for it would have been hard to find twenty-two 238 WHERE GHINE8ES DRIVE. young men in Peking, and harder still to persuade them to play cricket with the thermometer at 96°. We managed it all right by having a single wicket, and making everybody field. The lawn-tennis net, more- over, did duty as a long-stop, and boundaries were well defined. The streets of Peking offered as little inducement to walking exercise in summer as in winter. Those who went in for that took it by preference on the city wall. At intervals along the line of the wall were inclined roadways or ramps leading to the top. (When our troops held the An-ting Gate in 1860, the guns they planted to command the approach from the Te- sh^ng M^n were dragged up along one of these.) They are closed by doors of open wood-work, and the side wall further protected by bundles of brambles. A guard- house is built near the entrance. Until quite recently the guards at the ramp near the Skating Rink reaped a small harvest of cash and silver from unlocking their gate to foreigners ; but the authorities having discovered that kegs of spirits had been smuggled over the wall to avoid the octroi, strict orders were given to close all the ramps but those near the city gates, and boards bearing the proclamation to this effect were fastened on the doors. After that we had to go to the Ha-ta M^n before we could get on to the wall. Here a very civil but very ragged "policeman" (it really seems absurd to dignify him by such a name ; but I would not be out of fashion and cease to talk of Chinese " viceroys," " admirals," " colonels," and the rest of it) will open SUMMER IN TOWN. 239 the door and take his pour-boire as demurely as a railway porter. Ascending the ramp, you come at once to the huge erection over the gate, so familiar in illustrations of Peking. On one side of it are pasted some notices issued from the Office of Grendarmerie. One of these states that complaints had heen received from the German Legation of the practice of stone-throwing from and on to the wall, which one of the members of that Legation had noticed (and presumably suffered from). Others refer to the smuggling of wine or opium, or the stealing of rice from the granaries. Beyond the gate-house is a small brick hut, at the door an old man smoking his long wooden pipe, with its ridiculous little bowl ; a wretched, half-starved puppy playing listlessly at his feet. This hut is one of a series erected, they say, for the troops who were to have manned the wall when the Allies marched on Peking. Many of them are in ruins, but here and there some more tasteful sentry has taken up a few bricks and formed small beds, in which hollyhocks and chrysanthemums are planted. The buttress nearest the ramp at the back of the German Legation, and the wall for some twenty yards on the east of the hut there, are full of young trees, which, though self-planted, are apparently carefully tended. As a rule the wall is quite neglected, and is overgrown with briars and young jejube bushes, through which a narrow path has been trodden. Our usual walk along the wall was eastward to the south-east corner of the city, then as far as we had time or energy northwards. On the sandy tract between 240 WHERE CHINE8E8 DBIVE. the south wall and the moat a fair is held in the spring, and a good view of what goes on can he had from the wall. I noticed a number of refreshment-booths, and an enclosure in which wrestling and feats of strength and legerdemain were going on. But apparently the greatest excitement was caused by the horse-and-cart races. I could not quite make out whether these were intended for time races, or a kind of bumping race, as it were. The ponies would start off one by one at short intervals, and, with a great jingling of bells on their part and much shouting from the spectators, would gallop a few hundred yards and then come back again. The carts did much the same. I asked Sung about it, and he said that formerly there were breast races in the foreign fashion ; but a few years since a couple of horse-racing yellow-girdles disputed over the behaviour of their respective jockeys, and from this turf quarrel a feud arose, and a free fight between their followers took place on the Beggar's Bridge, before the Ch'ien M^n ; and so the Government put down horse-racing abreast. Not very far from the south-east corner of the city, on a square tower built out from the wall, is the cele- brated Observatory. The proper approach to it is from the interior of the city, and it would not be easy to get on to it from the wall — for it is some twelve feet higher — if it were not for a slanting beam supporting some kind of flag-staff at one corner. This beam is two or three feet from the side of the tower, and the bricks near it have been so knocked about by climbers that it is not difficult to scramble up to a small window, and thence to creep on to the parapet. But, after all, there SUMMER IN TOWN. 241 is no need to get up in this way, for there is little or no objection made to entering in the legitimate manner — so long as a cumshaw is to hand. The various instru- ments, cast in bronze by the Jesuits of the seventeenth century, are in wonderful preservation still, thanks to the climate — not, be sure, to any care that ofiBcials have taken of them. But these have been described over and over again, and so I will say nothing about them. Besides, I do not know an astrolabe from a — well, say from an " azimuth " ; and I have a faint uneasy feeling that this last is not an instrument, whatever the first may be. Looking down into the city in summer, very little was to be seen of the houses, so thickly are trees planted about them. Indeed, Peking might seem to be a green wood surrounded by a high wall, if it were not for the long line of Imperial buildings running from the Ch'ien M^n to Ching Shan. The latter is " Prospect Hill," the artificial mound (it is said to be formed of coal) in the middle of the city, on which the last Emperor of the Ming hanged himself to escape capture by the rebel Li Tzii-ch'eng. Just before sunset the view from the top of one of the ramps over the city to the Western Hills is very beautiful. Nothing can be seen of the squalor and dirt of the streets and houses. Everything is hidden by the green fohage of the trees and the golden light of the setting sun, while all the picturesque outlines of the gate-house and the yellow- roofed palace buildings are clear against the sky, and in the distance are the hills, a purple haze. Close to the East Wicket (the Tung pien M^n) the 16 242 WHEBE OHINESES DRIVE. canal from T'ung-chow approaches the city, and here, when the grain-junks arrive, is a busy scene. Chinese ingenuity has at this point thrown a bridge over the canal too low to let the barges pass (besides, I believe there is a difference of level hereabouts), so that every bag of rice has to be carried by coolies from a barge on one side of the bridge to a barge on the other, the granaries being a little way to the north, near the Ch'i-hua Gate. From the wall, where I have often sat to watch them, the coolies with their loads look very like a disturbed ants' nest, where the ants scurry about with their white sacks (are they grains or larvae ?) as big nearly as themselves. I have no doubt that a philosopher would get much profit from a walk on the Peking wall. He would feel himself in his proper place, looking down upon the toiling crowds, and could moralise undisturbed, until one of the ubiquitous dogs became noisily suspicious. When Keary wanted to philosophise on the wall, he took his bull-dog with him. The bull-dog was cunning, and watched his opportunity to shut off his foe in a buttress. Then he made his approaches, and the other dog retreated to the parapet. Finally, seeing nothing for it, the enemy took refuge in a gargoyle, when the bull-dog dexterously butted him through — a drop of fifty feet or so — and came back to Keary with the self- satisfied air of one who had done his duty by dog-kind. It was rather a long tramp right round the city on the wall, but some of us would do it, I suppose as the correct thing. Jackson, I know, declares that he makes a point of walking round every walled city he may be SUMMEB IN TOWN. 243 stationed at or near. He contracted the habit, he says, from the book of Joshua. Formerly the mania was utihsed, and best times put on record and betted against. As when Ellerby undertook to beat the best time by a quarter of an hour, and came within twenty yards of the finish with ten minutes to spare, eight of which he spent in sitting down and crowing over the discomfiture of the other side. When he thought he might as^well win his wager he tried to stand up, but found he had taken cramp, and there was no chance of moving for half an hour or so. He describes their joy as most improper and unfeeling. Jackson and some friends of his determined to try to see the late Emperor returning in the early morning from the Temple of Heaven. They managed to get on the wall near the Ch'ien Men, through which the pro- cession was^to pass, unobserved. Then, seeing sentries posted, they were obliged to crouch down behind a guard-house. It was a frightfully cold night, and they shivered and shook till nature could stand it no longer, and they came out of their hiding-place and were politely requested to withdraw. Fortunately, just at this time the procession passed, and, having caught a ghmpse of H. I. M. — all they wanted — they were only too glad to be ushered out, and get back to a place where early rising was not de rigueur. The walls of the Chinese are much lower than those of the Tartar city, and, as the ramps are less strictly guarded, it is possible to ride up to the top. But they were seldom mounted at all, except by those who wished to see the Temple of Heaven without the trouble of 16 * 244 WSEBE GHINESES BBIVE. scaling it. The wall of the Northern City, on the other handj is fast becoming a fashionable promenade for Europeans, especially on Sunday afternoons. It was suggested that we should ask for a key and formal per- mission ; but there was so little likelihood of either being given, and it was so easy to dispense with them both, that the suggestion went no farther. In the first part of Margary's Journey is an account of Peking Sundays as they were to the students of his day. It may serve, with modifications, for an account of ours. There was morning service at the Legation Chapel at 11 o'clock, and in the evening a Meeting at the house of one of the English or American mis- sionaries. This was popularly known as " Conventicle." Frere was speaking about his student days, and other things. " I came into my room one Sunday afternoon," he said, "just before dinner, and found Lovell and Jackson with my last bottle of Klimmel. Jackson was proposing toasts, and Lovell drinking them— very solemnly, as his wont was. When I entered they proposed mine, and handed me the bottle to drink it. It was empty — insult added to injury, wasn't it ? However, I forgave them and saw them safe into the Mess-room. I felt they needed it. At dinner Jackson was very talkative, but Lovell sat calm and solemn, gazing at me through the Chinese spectacles he insisted on wearing — ^things four inches or so in diameter, and more like bull's-eye lanterns than rational spectacles. I began to think that all would be well, in spite of the Kiimmel, when some rash man said he was going to Conventicle. Then Lovell rose and declared his intention of going too. SUMMUB IN TO WN. 246 This was strange and portentous — Lovell had never done anything of the sort before. We tried to dis- courage him ; but he got obstinate and ordered a cart. We let him get inside, for there was no help for it ; but we skilfully hung on behind, so as to give him time to change his mind. Do you know, that cart took twenty minutes getting from the Quarters to the Legation Gate, and all the time Lovell sat like a Buddha, and appa- rently thought he was going ahead. When he got out- side the gate, we gave up, and took carts on our own account and followed. " They had quite a flourishing congregation at Con- venticle that night ; it was held in Dr. Joseph's drawing-room. We let Lovell go in first. He walked straight in, to a chair right in front of everybody, and opposite the extemporised pulpit. I do not know whom it was meant for — it was a light cane chair with an open back — anyhow, Lovell sat down in it. But he stood up first and took a calm comprehensive survey of everybody through the spectacles ; then removed his skull-cap, for it was summer, and he had shaved his head all but a small patch over each ear, and sat down to listen to the discourse. Apparently it attracted him, for he began to lean forward more and more, gazing gravely at the preacher. It was the Reverend Mr. X., I remember, and he seemed awfully struck by Lovell's earnest atten- tion, and worked himself up to his most telling points. Just as he reached his finest climax, the laws of gravity proved too much for Lovell. The fore-legs of his chair slipped, and: Lovell slid abruptly, but gravely, to the floor, while the back of the chair, falling forward, lay 246 WHEBE GHINH8JE8 BBIVE. gracefully on his shoulders, and formed a neat and effective frame for the bald head and big spectacles. The preacher paused and glared at Lovell. Lovell continued to beam on him, undisturbed. ' This conduct is very reprehensible ! ' said the preacher. Lovell took it for a pulpit utterance, which may not be answered aloud : so nodded gravely, in approbation. ' You 're drunk ; get up ! ' said the preacher. Lovell gazed at him in mild astonishment : this did not sound like a pulpit utterance. ' Remove him,' said the preacher. Then Dr. Josephs came forward, and requested Lovell to rise. When Lovell saw who it was, he got up, the chair still round his neck, observed, ' I don't agree with that article of yours, Doctor, about the Chinese and the Lost Ten Tribes,' drove the Doctor into a corner, and began a hot argument to prove his pet theory to be all wrong. " The meeting then broke up, and resolved itself into a Committee of Elders in the remaining three corners, for the discussion of Lovell' s behaviour. Before they had time to frame a resolution sufficiently condemnatory, Lovell shook hands vrith the Doctor, and walked rapidly out of the room, Mrs. Josephs dexterously re- moving the chair as he went by. They never passed that resolution, for Dr. Josephs said he was convinced, from the way in which Mr. Lovell had fallen in with his views about the Lost Ten Tribes, that there really was nothing at all the matter with him . . . "Lovell," observed Frere, reflectively, "always managed to fall on his feet somehow. That is," he added, hastily, " metaphorically speaking, of course." Service in the Legation Chapel was suspended for SUMMER IN TOWN. 24,7 some six weeks in the height of summer : when most people were at the hills, and those in town unequal to a walk in the middle of the day. The Chapel is a great boon to missionaries in Shansi or Kansu. Two of them were married there a few months ago, and in Chinese costume. The bridegroom had travelled several hundred miles to meet his bride, and possibly thought it less picturesque, or more inconvenient, to resume the gar- ments of civilisation and the discomforts of a shirt collar. And a Chinese woman's dress is pretty enough to wear for its own sake. When we were not busy in taking our walks abroad, or in paying calls, or in playing tennis, we could get a little mild excitement from looking after our garden. The piece of ground of which the Quarters and the Mess-room form the north and west sides respectively, was at first a mere yard. But presently a proper sense of the impropriety of this being aroused, Bertram, with the assistance of two or three of the then students, set to work to make a garden. Mud from the " Imperial Canal " just outside the gate of the Legation served for soil, and was brought in wheel-barrows by the amateur gardeners, while the dispossessed brick-ends and rubble went as return cargo to the canal. A few weeks of con- fusion and a few years of order produced the garden as we saw it. Then a large wistaria climbed along the front of the Quarters, and creepers overran the outer wall of the Mess-room and the little dressing-room of the Theatre. A cluster of flowering trees, lilac, rose, mimosa, nearly concealed the Mess-room, and set out in 248 WHEBE GKINESES DBIVE. pots or planted in the beds were fig-trees and scarlet or white pomegranates. In autumn a great pit was dug and all the " bedding- out " plants put in it for the winter. It was covered with stalks of kao-liang and earth, and had air-holes with straw stoppers. It was in one of these stoppers that a hedgehog used to take up his abode in winter. He was an old friend of our dogs : they would hunt him out at 11 o'clock for several nights running, and bark till we got irritated and shied things at them. Every- thing in North China that has to be kept is buried : ice, grapes, pai li (" white pears "), as well as flowers. In the spring a rose-bush will be taken out with buds still undecayed and bright green leaves : indeed, our last season's roses supplied Gordon with button-holes for more than a fortnight after the pit had been opened. Men from the nursery-gardens used to bring us plants to purchase — in spring a peach-tree nine feet high and in full bloom, that died a few days after it had been transplanted ; later on, all kinds of flowers that required careful examination before buying — for many of them were rootless. Once, I remember, a small orange-tree with fruit, yellow fruit, on it,, was brought, and looked so pretty that we thought of buying it for the Mess- room table, when someone discovered that every fruit was wired on to its bough ; and as the seller could not guarantee their keeping fresh, negotiations were broken off. When we first came up, a crowd of curio-sellers used to appear with their goods and get large prices out of our inexperience, until we grew more wary. Too wary SUMMER IN TOWN. 249 sometimes, perhaps, for we refused to give six dollars a pair for " Peking bowls " that the men would not sell under fourteen the year after. The Peking curio market has been spoilt by the high prices recklessly given by passing visitors or the agents of foreign shops. One curio-seller was always coming round. He was a most amusing fellow, named Wang. If any rival appeared he would put on quite a " Codlin's-the-friend " sort of air, and declare that we should not think of shifting our custom from such an old acquaintance. Eandolph used to say he did not approve of wasting dollars over " crockery," and, as we knew, he did not go in for brass. But when we asked him how he came to be possessed of the cups and bowls on his mantelpiece, he explained that after all he did not wish to be singular ; and, besides, he had bought them as a job lot at Kirkman's auction — a great bargain, didn't we think ? And he had had a toasting-fork and an iron kettle thrown in. Other tradesmen, too, would come with their wares. There was one man, an artist, who really had some excellent pictures of Chinese life. The perspective was extraordinary, but the work was wonderfully minute. He would bring you two or three dozen outlines to choose from, and these were afterwards filled in with the proper colours. The most amusing things in his col- lection were the pictures of the Signing of the Treaty of Tientsin, and the Audience before the Emperor T'ung- chih. In the former the English and French were care- fully distinguished by their red and blue coats. In the foreground a man with a couple of epaulets was holding 260 WSUBE 0HINE8U8 BBIVK in one hand an extraordinary affair intended to represent a rifle, and leading a horse with the other ; in the back- ground were the plenipotentiaries seated at different tables, and apparently all talking at once. But though he was proud of these productions, we did him more justice, and judged him by his other works. Three times a month a fair is held at a temple in the city known as Lung-fu Ssii. It is as crowded as, but less noisy than, a country fair at home, and it is intended rather for a market than a place of junketing. Here we used to go to buy the little mud figures that imitate so cleverly the scorpions, centipedes, and crickets that abound in the hills. Curios proper, porcelain and bronze, were sold for the most part in shops in the Chinese City. Here, too, was " Picture Street," where we bought our lanterns and scrolls. But shopping in Peking soon palled : you were obliged to go on foot, and that might involve a crowd, and certainly insured your getting dusty or dirty to a degree noticeable even in Peking. Our gardener (in winter one of the bowling-alley coolies) was a queer character. He had only one eye, but plenty of zeal, and any number of new ideas ready to hand, should we be wanting in them. He it was who inspired us with a desire to keep gold-fish, and remotely hinted, as we supposed, at a bamboo grove. We thought we would try the bamboo grove first, and gave orders for fifty roots. The next day the gardener brought a bundle of sticks and left them in the middle of the garden. After they had been there some days we ven- tured to remind him of those bamboo roots. Then he introduced us to the bundle, and said that here were SUMMER IN TOWN. 251 bamboos, but what we wanted them for he could not quite make out. As for planting live bamboos, that, he said, was contrary altogether to reason and propriety : they would not thrive in a soil made up chiefly of brick-bats and broken tiles. So we fell back on the fish-pond. A large earthenware jar stood half buried in the ground near the garden gate, filled with flowers. This the gardener proposed to unearth, empty, transfer to the middle of the garden, and fill with water. All went well till he discovered that the thing had no bottom to it. He was not therefore discouraged, but decided to get some wood from the carpenter to mend it. So he presently appeared with two or three boards and a few tools, and was very busy all the afternoon. When he had nearly finished, a sound of loud wrangling brought us out, and we found the carpenter abusing the gardener for having carried off his property, while an escort-man stood by and threatened to have him sent to the Yamen. It seems that he had gone to ask the carpenter for wood, but, not finding him at home, had walked away with the first planks he came across. We appeased the car- penter : we said that a one-eyed man could not be expected to look at things in the same way as he did. And we admonished our gardener. After that the jar remained unsightly and unrepaired for a week or so, when the gardener brought a friend of his to lay a plaster bottom. This took some time ; and when it was finished, he observed that we ought to have water-lilies in the thing and they required mud. So buckets of mud were brought, and finally some water-plants and a dozen 262 WHERE CHINE8E8 DRIVE. gold-fish. The gardener added a couple of frogs and a small eel, out of mere exuberance of spirits ; and so, after many weeks of suspense, we were at last made happy. The jar is right in front of the entrance to the Quarters, and will doubtless be the scene of a comedy or two before a new generation of students send back it and the gardener who planted it to their original stations in life. But our garden in winter had its dangers before the exodus of the jar (which O'Hara, by-the-bye, called the Hejara). Some enthusiastic spirits started a slide, and made themselves and the corridor wet and uncomfortable by lugging along buckets of water at unreasonable hours of the day and night. The danger to unwary strangers was great, and always present to us. One Christmas Eve we were sitting in the Mess-room, after dinner, on chairs — or the floor — in front of the fire, and had brewed a loving-cup, when Paley was called away. He was heard to lead the visitor carefully through the gar- den, then stop, and say, in an agitated voice, " Mind the slide " ; but what happened after that is shrouded in mystery. One rumour has it that the visitor took it for anew edition of "Mind the step," and behaved like Naaman the Syrian when he remarked on the waters of Israel. Another declares that Paley could not be got to say anything else, and the visitor found it impossible to keep up a lengthy conversation on those terms. Any- how, Paley came back presently, alone. We have examined him at intervals since, but he preserves a diplomatic and sphinx-like silence. It will be a question for future ages to publish monographs on, like the SUMMER IN TOWN. 253 Moabite Stone, or to discuss in the Quarterly, as the Authorship of the Letters of Junius. The greatest luxury in the way of food at Peking was undoubtedly pork. We did not dare to eat the Peking pigs, because they are brought up so badly; but we thought we might safely venture on one that had been reared under our own eyes, as it were. So we bought a sucking-pig, and the gardener built him a sty. O'Hara undertook to be overseer, and to assess and collect the money for his keep. Unfortunately, after three months or so, O'Hara found he was a considerable loser by it : so laid the account before the Mess, who decided to make over the pig to O'Hara to defray expenses. So our experiment was not a brilliant success. We had some amusement out of that pig, though, while he was in our possession. One evening when we had invited some men to dine with us, and among them a man who was great at mimicry, and really could do the cat-and-dog business to perfection, we determined, should he, as was expected, try the pig as well, to have an echo behind the curtains. At the last moment our arrangements went wrong, but we had the pig intro- duced all the same in propria persona, and ran him round the Mess-room table, amid an uproar of squeals from the victim and furious barkings from the asto- nished and excited dogs. After this introduction to polite society a good deal of notice was taken of our pig, and a rosette of pink ribbons to be tied to his tail on New Year's Day was promised by one lady-resident. He perished, unhappily, before the time, and his tail with him. 254 WHERE GSINESES BBIVE. Besides the pig, four of us kept a cow for some months, fresh milk not being otherwise obtainable. But the cow was hardly more successful than the pig. In fact, we were reluctantly forced to the conclusion that the garden and the boys' quarters did not comprise all that was necessary to make a stock-farm successful. 256 VIII. Exam, and Exit. We were not deeply read in Domestic Economy, and we were ruled a great deal by precedent. But, fortunately, as a Mess we were under the management of a most capable caterer, and so kept within bounds. I have found the old Mess-bills I spoke of, and copy one of the heaviest of them here : — Mess Bill. Messing . ns.oo Guests 1.75 Cook's bill, etc. . 1.92 Coolie's do 1.66 . Store Fund 2.00 Mess Coffee (five months) 2.34 „ Bread 0.70 „ Washing . 0.31 Napkins 0.25 Coal .... 1.56 Christmas Puddings . 1.12 Glass .... 2.28 Miscellaneous : Clock repaired, coffee- 0.96 machine, window-panes, stove ort'watyn oiivTQTn K\r\Ii3C! oKjL xiKjllj \j\XL uailLl- UUlciSi jg31.85=^5 17s The " Store Fund " was raised to supply the cook with such condiments as, being foreign imports, he could not be expected to provide under the terms of his con- 256 WRERE CHINESES BBIVE. tract. We procured them from Tientsin or Shanghai, or from one or other of the two European stores in Peking. It would, perhaps, have been better to have got them out from England, and it is a pity that a Students' Store has not been started with that object. It was suggested and approved, but fell through, chiefly for want of capital. The best method in future would be, immediately on the arrival of new students, to lay an attractive prospectus before them, and show by clear argument the advantage of "taking shares in the con- cern. It is only new students who have superfluous dollars, and if these are not directed into some proper channel such as this, they will, in all probability, be squandered in curios. Twice a year we were visited by the travellers of the large European stores in Shanghai and Tientsin, and received circulars to the efiect that " our Mr. Z. will show at the French Hotel," or elsewhere, between certain hours — when it was considered proper to attend, and discuss the new fashions. But many things can now be got from Chinese shops ; and there are plenty of native tailors — Canton men, for the most part — in the employ of Tientsin native firms, who will make a suit of clothes to any pattern. The English these men speak is almost as bad as their Pekingese, and I have sometimes had to interpret between the tailor and my teacher. For Sung used to take a great deal of interest in the trying-on of my coats ; one day in particular I remember, when my tailor had brought home a black alpaca jacket. Sung could not be got to approve of it at all. He said it made me look too thin. The tailor EXAM. AND EXIT. 267 said it did not. Then they argued the point for a bit, till the tailor shifted his ground, and declared that if it did make me look thin, it was because I was thin. With this he prodded me in the waistcoat to show that it was wadded. I sternly rebuked him, and adjourned the discussion sine die. It was taking an unflattering turn. Our dress in summer was simplicity itself — a patrol jacket of white drill, and trousers to match. But O'Hara could not easily divest himself of early preju- dices, and clung to coat-tails and shirt-collars. We used to humour him when riding out to the hills together to pay our calls. A mafoo was taken with the impedimenta, and the garments of ciyilization were donned in some adjacent cemetery. O'Hara had long made up his mind to walk into town from the hills, and started one afternoon shortly after tiffin. Ellerby saw him safely off, and gave him much good advice, and two bottles of beer. Presently he disappeared on the horizon, the bottles bulging out from each coat-pocket like panniers. He was deposited at the Legation in the course of the evening by a carter. When asked for his story, he, like the knife-grinder, had none to tell. He had walked a mile qr two, and had found the bottles' heavy ; another mile, and remembered they contained beer. At an opportune tea-house he had knocked off the tops of the bottles, the centre of an admiring crowd, and drunk their contents by instalments out of little tea-cups. After that he felt drowsy, but recollects hailing a cart. Exhausted nature somehow seemed to require a siesta. 17 268 WHEBE CHINESES DRIVE. Our coals were all brought from the Western Hills on camel-back. They were of different qualities, from "hard coal" to coal-balls. These last were simply balls of coal-dust mixed with a little clay and dried in the sun. Our chief difficulty at the beginning of winter was to decide how much we ought to pay the boy a month for supplying us with fuel, and in what pro- portion coal-balls might be used. The last quotation is eight dollars a month for hard coal, and seven dollars for " seconds." The escort used to rear poultry in the stable-yard, and every December a certain number of turkeys were balloted for, or sold by private contract. Anything of foreign bringing-up was, naturally, a luxury in Peking. (O'Hara thinks this statement too general ; Student Interpreters, he believes, were not so regarded.) But the Euro-Pekingese (or shall I say "Pekingites," to distinguish them from the Pekingese, just as the native Fohkienese from the foreign " Foochovite " ?) were better off in the way of food than the people at some of the southern ports, Amoy, for instance. I think it was at the latter place that great consternation was once caused among the foreign residents by the news that all the beef -butchers had been put under arrest. Mutton is very rare, for it has to be brought from Shanghai, and lamb is looked on as a curio ; so famine, or worse — a course of Chinese diet — stared the unfortunate settlers in the face. Finally, diplomatic pressure was brought to bear, and strong expostulations with the native authorities at last restored hope and beef. EXAM. AND EXIT. 259 The near approach of our Final Examination led us to review our financial positions, collectively and indi- vidually. As the second year drew to a close, Herington began to evolve many schemes for settling his accounts. After much thought he drew up a schedule : liabilities so much, assets so much ; Jones & Co. to receive such a portion of their account at the end of the quarter, Robinson Bros, half theirs in four months' time, and so on. It was flawless, and really looked very well when neatly written out and ruled in red ink, and fastened on the wall with drawing-pins. But there were unexpected hitches, as Herington had to confess. " Here are Robin- son Bros.," he said one day, " insisting on being paid at the end of the month. Now, would that be fair on Brown and Smith, who are down on the schedu e for that date ? Obviously not. But it is only proper to give Brown and Smith the opportunity of doing a gene- rous action. I will write and put it to them whether, seeing that Robinson Bros, are so importunate, they are willing to change places. If they are not, I must make some arrangement with Jones. " Talking of duns, did Bertram tell you I met Schmidt — the storekeeper, I mean — at Corry's omnium gatherum a month or two ago ? Curious, wasn't it ? but I did. Schmidt had been very rude to me last year, if you remember, about my little account — declined to accept a composition ; declined to wait till July twelve- months for the first instalment ; threatened all sorts of quaint proceedings. Well, I thought it was a good opportunity for showing that I bore no malice, so at supper-time I insisted on helping him to various luxu- 17 * 260 WHERE 0EINESE8 DBIYE. ries. I brought some ham along, and gave him some. He declined it ; but I forced it on him, and he ate it. Also I engaged him in pleasing conversation — or tried to, at least ; it wasn't much of a success. Still, I feel confident I should have melted him, metaphorically speaking, to tenderness at last, but for Bertram, He was between us at the supper-table, and he kept up a running accompaniment of encouraging remarks to me in a stage whisper : ' How nicely you do it ! ' ' He can't resist that ! ' ' Have at him again ! ' ' He '11 send you a receipt to-morrow.' And all the time Schmidt was glowering at me in what struck me as an eminently unfriendly vyay. The next day he sent me a vindictive dun, reminding me, in his coarse, uncultured way, of the length of time that had elapsed since I last paid him anything. He wound up by demanding an immediate settlement. I considered this very ungracious, seeing how attentive I had been to him the night before, and I thought of writing to tell him so ; but, after all, it seemed more becoming to pass over his ingratitude in silence. However, from the tone of his later letters (the correspondence has been all along a one-sided one) he hardly seems to have thoroughly appreciated my delicacy. " I do not know," he went on, " why I am troubled in this way. It may be for my sins, but I rather think not. It is more probable that Fate is adverse, and must be propitiated." Here he rose (we were sitting on the balcony at the time, after dinner) and went into his room, and brought back something in his hand. " You see this cup ? Yes. Well, it is one of a pair I bought EXAM. AND EXIT. 261 when I first came up, and I think it 's pretty good, don't you ? I mean to throw it away," and as he spoke he flung it into the garden. " The pair to it had a mdo ping [flaw] in it, and I was strongly tempted to take that, but was resolved that the sacrifice should be complete." He sighed so lugubriously here that we could hardly help laughing. " And now to pick up the pieces." He was absent a minute or two, then came back with a very long face. "What is the matter?" " Look at this ] Not broken — not even chipped ! ' Poly- crates' ring,' you say ? Maybe ; but it 's a bad omen for Brown and Smith. "I am unfortunate in all my schemes, somehow. You know I started one for working that seemed admir- able. Get up at 6 and work till 12, half an hour being allowed for breakfast. Tiffin, a light one, at noon, and sleep till 2. Then more work till 4. One hour's exercise, and Chinese till dinner-time ; and as many hours after dinner as can be managed. There was a hitch in this scheme, too. If I worked in the evening I could not get up at 6 ; if I slept in the evening I woke at 2. This waking at 2 was annoying, for the fire would be going out, or the lamp ; and so I tried sitting up a little later. It was just the same ; I woke at 2. I got irritated ; but I thought it was as well to do things systematically, so I made up my mind to wake at 1.30, and, after a few failures, succeeded. The next night I contrived to wake at L ; and so I- went on, getting up a little earlier each night. At last perse- verance was rewarded. I woke up before I went to sleep. But it ruined my system — oh no, I do not 262 WHERE CHINE8E8 DRIVE mean my constitution ; that 's all right ; I mean the scheme. " But, talking of ruining the constitution, and harassing cares, and the rest of it, have you noticed Chapman since he has had charge of the keys of the chest ? He ought really to stay in a tomb all daytime, and only haunt the place at night. I tried to get him to talk the other day ; but his mind keeps running on keys and locks in the most, gloomy way. Apropos of keys, X. was telling me that he was calling one day on the Z's. ' It is curious,' said Z., ' how things turn up. You remember my losing the key of that safe a year ago, and how we hunted everywhere for it, and what trouble there was in getting the safe forced ? Well, for the last few days there has been something wrong with the water-tank outside, and so I had it emptied, and found at the bottom — this.' ' Why, it must be the very key ! ' exclaimed X., as he turned over the rusty bit of metal. ' Without doubt,' answered Z., wrapping it up again. Just then Mrs. Z. came in looking rather annoyed. ' My dear, I wish you would speak to the coolie for me. I left the door of my store-closet open, and Johnny has been making himself ill with the candied fruits.' ' Give him a pill, my love,' answered Z. ; 'he will be all right.' ' Oh, but it is not that so much, only Johnny said he was not going to let the store-closet be locked up any more, and he has thrown the key into the water-tank.' ' It is remarkable,' ob- served X., ' how hastily we jump at conclusions.' And so they parted. " But here is my teacher coming, and I really cannot HXAM. AND EXIT. 263 have you fellows disturbing me any longer. You don't mind, do you ? Good-night." Student-life had much that was enjoyable ; even our work was not without a certain fascination of its own. (The characters, we were told by an eminent authority, were particularly engrossing, and Herington used to read out part of the preface to the Tzu erh Chi with great emphasis, and earnestly entreat Gordon "not to be led away by the attractions of the written character." Gordon said he would not.) The only drawback was the fact that we were working against one another, since our seniority in the Service was to be decided according to our place in the Final Examination. I hardly venture to say anything against the principle of competition, but it seemed a pity that it should be applied in this case. Competitive examinations and the preparation for them are natural to the modern school-boy, and comparatively harmless, perhaps, in the climate of England. But I think this is by no means the cas6 in Peking ; and, to increase the danger, it almost invariably happens that the examination is held in the middle of summer, when the thermometer may be standing at 105° or 106° in the shade. Gordon took it into his head one evening to have a fit. He had wandered out of the room in an aimless sort of way, and so, as he did not come back, EUerby went in search of him. He says, " I went outside, and called * Gordon ! Gordon ! ' but as nobody answered, I was coming in again. It was very dark, but I made out a sort of brown shadow in the gutter, I thought it 264 WHUBE GSINESHS BBIVK was a Chinaman, so I kicked it, and said, ' Shen mo ? ' [' What ? '] It did not answer. Then I kicked it again, and said, ' Shui ? ' [' Who ? '1. Then I saw it was Grordon. He cannot have read much, can he ? if he did not know what Shen-mo meant." After that we put Gordon to bed, and sat up to watch him. It is hungry work, watching in the small hours; so we decided to have supper, and ransacked Gordon's cup- board with that end in view. We found a ham, and some boxes of sardines, and other things, with bottled beer and whisky. Gordon was all right in a day or two ; but he says it does not pay to have fits, especially if you are thinking of giving a picnic, and have laid in stores accordingly. But to come back to our work. At the start all were the same, as the Chinese horn-book has it. Our teachers knew no English, and we soon found the value of such words as "just like " and " for instance." One man, some years ago, when about to be left alone for a few months, was asked by someone who thought him not altogether proficient in Pekingese, how he would manage ? He answered, confidently enough, " Oh, I shall pi-fang [' for instance '] it through all right." And he probably did. Our course was, as I have said, to a great extent laid down for us ; but each man had his special fah-tza — his method of work. Not altogether rightly, perhaps, for, on the whole, it is better not to leave the beaten track. To bring your mind to bear in any way inde- pendently on the study of Chinese is to needlessly endanger it. For some time a growing fondness for EXAM. AND EXTT. 265 fah-tzas on Duncan's part had given EUerby great anxiety. One day, as he had seen nothing of Duncan for some time, he went round to his rooms. He found him bending over a saucepan, in which he was busily stirring something over the fire with a pair of chop- sticks, muttering to himself the while. EUerby said, " Hullo, Duncan ! what on earth are you up to now ? A new fah-tza ? " Duncan did not answer, but kept on stirring. Presently he murmured, " It will nearly do, now," and he fished out with the chop-sticks a sodden mass of pulp, that looked as though it might have been a book. Then he turned to EUerby, and said, in a sad and subdued voice, " This was once the Elements of the philosopher Euclid, the symbol of hard material- istic fact. This " — and he took from the saucepan a second lump and held it up — " is a shred, a remnant. Before, it embodied the spirit of divine fancy. Then it was known as the Idylls of the King." EUerby did not feel exactly cheerful ; but as Duncan seemed to expect some remark from him, he said encouragingly, " All right, old man ; go on." Duncan was gazing straight before him, with a far-away look in his eyes, and holding the dripping mass in each hand. He said, "Without these life exists not; but man should drink of the essence of both. See, I have boiled them down ; and lo, the divine draught ! " Here he snatched up the saucepan, and drank off its contents. EUerby edged round to the door ; then, as Duncan began to wave the saucepan about, and to yell, he promptly slipped to the other side of it. He heard the saucepan crash against the panel ; then he turned the key, which 266 WHEBE GHINWES BBIVE. happened to be outside, and went for the escort men and an extemporised strait-waistcoat. Later on in our reading, some of us used to engage professional story-tellers to come to our rooms and tell their tales. O'Hara, again, thought he was getting a little out of practice and ought to read aloud more ; so he had his teacher in, and went through the " Hun- dred Lessons " — part of the Tzu erh CM — as fast as he could. He noted the time, and afterwards took to reading against it with a stop-watch. The system, he thinks, is, on the whole, good, but distinctly dry ; and too much beer, he is told, is bad for the liver. O'Hara was a neat hand at map-making, and had a theory that the proper way to construct a map was to collect the latitude and longitude of as many places as possible, and then lay them down accordingly. He says he tried it with Korea. The first big town he fixed fell some hundred miles out to sea; but he was not discouraged, and decided that it was on an island. Then he got the bearings of the mouth of a river, and found that that lay a hundred and fifty miles or so from the nearest coast. After that he made several forcible remarks about his system, and gave up map-making for the time. Our Examination was not, after all, a formidable affair ; it erred, if anything, on the side of simplicity. But it was held in the height of summer, when even to hold the pen seemed to increase the heat we suffered from. Our paper -work was done in our own rooms, or in the Keception Hall of the Minister's residence. Here EXAM. AND EXIT. 267 right opposite the entrance, is a life-size portrait of the Queen. (Dr. Eennie, in his Peking and the Pekingese, vol. i. p. 230, describes the excitement caused by its arrival. ) While we were waiting for our examiner, a sudden desire seized Gordon to show his loyalty, after the custom of the country ; so he dropped down in front of the portrait, and solemnly knocked his head nine times on the floor, kotowing in proper form. He seemed much inspirited by it, and had a feeling that he was now in some way under the special tutelage of Her Majesty, and could be trusted to floor the paper. A few days after the result of the examination had been declared, a few of us received orders to go down South, as Acting Second Assistants at different ports. Then there was a bustle of packing-up, and a round of P. P. C. calls to be made. The visiting was done while the boy looked after one's things — there was no time to personally conduct both. We were obliged to leave others to arrange for the sale of our furniture, by auction or by private contract. Herington used to declare that, partly because he wished other people had done the same by him, and partly because he had no hope of selling it at its proper value, he meant to leave his furniture as a Bequest. It was not to be removed from the room under any pretence whatever, certainly not under any such frivolous pretence as a desire to have the floor scrubbed. He said that the places where great men had lived and thought should not be dis- turbed by mops and pails ; the very dust should be held sacred. To add to the value of the Bequest, he 268 WHEBS OHINESm DRIVE. was prepared to affix his autograph to every article, and, provided Brown and Smith would give him credit, to have a brass plate fastened to the door, with an honorific inscription to himself and his many virtues, in English, Latin, and Chinese. Then, if O'Hara would paint on the lower panel, in his best German text, Non omnis moriar, he thought he might go down happy, to posterity and the Ports. Gordon and I were among the first to leave, and we arranged (or he did ; he always, as he said, had to do the arranging in our joint expeditions) to send on the carts with our luggage to T'ungchow, to be placed on board the boats there, while we left by the Tung-pien M6n (the "East Wicket"), and went by canal to join them. He invited the friends who wished to see him off (to sung him, as. we, following our teachers, used to call it) to breakfast at the " Princess's Tomb." A walled enclosure stands a little way back from the north bank of the canal that runs from T'ungchow to the city, and leading up to the entrance-gates (which are kept strictly locked) is an avenue of roughly-carved stone figures. Two large stone lions stand in front of the vestibule, one on each side. Six or seven of us rode down on ponies or donkeys to the East Wicket, and got on board one of the clumsy canal-boats moored to the bank near it. These in summer take the place of the winter sledges, or "beds," as the Chinese call them, that look like low tables on wooden runners, and get over the ground, or rather ice, at a tremendous pace. The boats are slow enough, as they are punted or pulled EXAM. AND EXIT. 269 along by men in whose lives an extra day or two is of no particular consequence. It was still early morning when we pushed off, and the sun's rays lay level on the water or shone through green reeds on either shore. And so we paddled slowly on, till the city walls dropped out of sight. I do not think that I regretted then leaving them behind ; the day was so fine, and, besides^ we had just come to a lock, and were forced to tranship. A "lock" is rather a misnomer, for, though there are several levels between Peking and T'ungchow, at each of them there is now only a sluice, and no boats can be sent through. We got on board our second boat, and presently arrived at the Tomb, where we were joined by those who had ridden the whole way. The boys were laying breakfast when we arrived, in the vestibule, on the pavement in front of the gates. There being no table, we had to lie on the stones, or extemporise seats out of hampers, while at a respectful distance (being kept off by our boys) stood a semi-circle of villagers and their children, gazing open-mouthed. We fed the youngsters and chaffed their fathers, and, when breakfast and speech -making were, over, put the empty champagne-bottles on the top of the lions and potted them with brick-bats. Having thus given vent to our emotion, we felt equal to saying good-bye. Victor, who had an off-day, came with us; the rest went their several ways. So we proceeded towards T'ungchow in a sufficiently lazy and pleasant manner, except for the nuisance of 270 WHEBE 0HINESE8 DRIVE. having to tranship ourselves and our belongings at each weir, and bargain for a new boat to take us along the next level. I believe the Chinese have a system of through tickets, and get from Peking to T'ungchow by water cheaply and easily enough ; but we were strangers, and therefore, I suppose, they took us in. The canal is very pretty in parts, and nowhere, at least on a bright day, ugly, though its course is very straight, and the country around it very flat. As we came in sight of the Pagoda of T'ungchow, we found ourselves close to Pa-li Ch'iao, the bridge where the Chinese made their last stand in 1860, and whence the Comte de Palikao derived his title. How he came to spell it in that way I have never heard, for, extraordinary and eccentric as is the French system of transliterating Chinese cha- racters, it is scarcely as bad as this. The only other title derived from a place in China is, as far as I know, that of Gough of Chinkiangfu, and there the spelling does, at any rate, approximate to the local pronunci- ation. The water under the bridge looked so cool (for now the sun was hot upon the canal) that we had our boat brought up close to the arch, and stripped and plunged in. The inevitable villagers assembled on the bridge, meanwhile, and made audible remarks on our perfor- mance, Victor, who, though scarcely of age, has a great beard, of which he is not unjustly proud, was described as the " old-head," to his intense delight. A Chinaman shaves beard and moustache till he is forty, and, judging from their scantiness, is wise in doing so, for, otherwise, he might not have them then. EXAM. AND EXIT. 271 Sung used to count the hairs on his upper lip with the aid of a small pocket-glass. He said that he had been growing a moustache for three years, and there were now nineteen hairs. His wife declared there, were twenty-one ; but she had better eyes than he. He thought the rate of progress very satisfactory. As a rule, he said, he admired the beards of Europeans, but sometimes they were too bushy, and the colour was not good. And, indeed, it seems rather a pity that a rigid rule has not been passed forbidding red-haired men to come to China, unless they will agree to dye. It is a cruelty to them. You might as well expect a green- haired man to walk down the Strand without attracting remarks from the City Arabs, as an Englishman with flame-coloured hair to pass unmolested in China. They probably will not heave half bricks at him (that is con- fined to our own Black Country), but they will use him to point the moral that the genuine English devil has hair like fire, and is not to be confounded with Parsees or Portuguese. And of all irritating things I know,- the worst is to be pointed at as a bogy. The thing does not admit of argument ; if you look like a bogy, to all intents and purposes you are one. The only thing to soothe your melancholy is, as of old, to dye. As the Chinese resemble most other people in judging foreigners by themselves, a very callow moustache is sufficient to add twenty years or so to a European's age. They are equally unfortunate in distinguishing a man from a woman in a foreign picture. If only faces are given, they are often altogether at a loss ; and even the dresses do not always help them, for in China, as 272 WHERE CHINESE8 BBIVE. someone says, the men wear petticoats and the women trousers. But it seems to them most unreasonable that no difference of coiffure should necessarily dis- tinguish a matron. My boy was very puzzled to know whom he should address as hu-niang (Miss) and whom as t'di-t'ai (Madam). He carefully noticed how the ladies wore their hair, and, thinking that the youngest were most likely to be unmarried, settled the whole thing to his satisfaction. He was heard to explain to another boy that " after all, there was very little dif- ference between the Chinese and the foreign fashions ; the foreign girls wore their hair in a pig-tail, while the married women did it up in a top-knot." It was past 5 o'clock when we drew near T'ungchow. The last reach of the canal is perfectly straight. On the right hand is the crumbling wall of the city ; on the left, a bank overgrown with tall reeds. At the end of the vista so formed is the Pagoda, of thirteen storeys, and in front of the Pagoda trees overhang the water. Beyond is the landing-place, where a score or so of barges are moored. To reach the bank of the Peiho, " and the house-boats we had ordered to be ready for us, we had to defile through a narrow lane, then trudge across the sandy common that is between the city, walls and the river. We found our boats among a crowd of others, and stirred up the boys, and gave ourselves a dinner-tea. After this Victor left us, for his pony was waiting, and had to be ridden fast to reach Peking before the gates closed. Then our boatmen unmoored and pushed off into the stream. UXAM. AND EXIT. 273 So we began our journey southwards,' and regret- fully, perhaps, for many pleasant memories remained of those two years, but still with the -feeliag that this was the last of our pupilage, ended our Student Life at Peking. 18 274 WHERE 0HINE8E8 DRIVE. NOTE. Paley objects to the title of this book. But it seemed necessary to have a title, and his suggestions I could not bring myself to approve. He was all for something sweet and mystic, after the fashion of " Sesame and Lilies," and he assured me that these elements were to be found in " Kaoliang and Cucumbers." I am not always able to follow Paley' s reasonings, which are very subtle ; but I was pained at the want of intelli- gence that refused to recognize the force and beauty, and general appropriateness of "Where Chineses drive." I turned out the passage in Paradise Lost— On his way lights on the barren plains Of Sericana, where Chineses drive With wind and sail their cany wagons light — Bk. iii., 438. but he was apathetic. I showed that this must refer to North China, because Chineses did not drive wagons, cany or otherwise, anyhow, anywhere else. He said I had not been there to see. I explainecl the almost NOTE. 276 prophetic reference to Sung's coaching. Then he rose hurriedly, and said he would not countenance anything of that sort, and left. He was a very Egypt, a hruised reed, to lean upon in the matter of titles. LONDON ; PKINTED BT W, H. AUJSS & CO., 13 WATERLOO PLACE. S.W.