CHAPTER XV

CHINA IN 1865-1866

In “Un Pèlerin d’Angkor,” which for the sake of its wonderful descriptions of tropical scenery is to me one of Pierre Loti’s most charming books, he tells us how when he was a little child he was held in chains by the idea of the mysterious temples hidden away, forgotten, buried in the teeming jungles of Cambodia, and how at last his dream was realized in that long pilgrimage up the Mekong river of which his poetic descriptions, carrying us with a magician’s wand into the mysterious silences of tropical forests, are tinged with that melancholy which seems inseparable from his genius, even when he calls up the happiness of reaching the long-wished for goal of a cherished ambition. I once asked him why he was so pessimistic—why that persistent note of sadness? He answered very simply, “La vie est triste,” and his eyes had that far away, yearning look, a characteristic of his, which seems so strange in a man whose life has been one long chain of brilliant successes.

Well! I too, as a child, had dreams which carried me far away. A kind aunt had given me a set of so-called rice-paper pictures of lovely imperial ladies with architectural structures of hair on their heads, gentlemen clad in purple silk robes with ephods embroidered with five-clawed golden dragons, drawings of vividly-coloured flowers and fruit, of horror-striking tortures, unheard of out of Tartarus, being inflicted upon bleeding criminals. But beyond all was the story of Aladdin falling in love with the Princess Badroulbadour on her way to the bath at Peking. My young brain was aflame with the longing to go to China and see all these things. How to manage it? Should I ever get nearer to that land of wonders than a certain fascinating curiosity shop in Hanway Yard—now Hanway Street—a beloved and much-haunted place full of bowls and jars, eggshell china, rosebacked plates and lange Elizen, which now would fetch several pounds for every shilling that they cost then. That dream never left me. It haunted my boyhood and my young manhood and, like Pierre Loti’s cherished dream, it came into life at last.

One day in the month of February, 1865, Mr. Hammond came into the French Department of the Foreign Office evidently rather uneasy. He told us that he was very much put out by not being able to get a man to go out to Peking, to take the place of St. John who was coming home at once across Siberia. He had tried in vain to find someone and was in great difficulties. A sudden thought struck me. “Will you send me out?” I asked. He hesitated for a moment and said, “Well, if you are really willing to go, we might arrange a transfer. How soon could you be ready?” “As soon as you please,” I answered. “Can you be ready in a fortnight?” I jumped at the offer and went out then and there to start on getting together my outfit. It was rather a sudden surprise to my people when I reached home that afternoon laden with a sun-helmet and various small purchases of which the purpose did not at first sight seem quite clear to them.

The last few days before my departure were spent a great deal with Sir Frederic Bruce, our minister at Peking, who was at home on leave, and who gave me all the advice that would be of value to a novice going out to the Far East. He was one of those men whom it is good to have known, singularly handsome, with a smile and laughing brown eyes which seemed to carry sunshine into every room that he went into; he was a diplomatist of rare ability. Lord Elgin, indeed, with whom he first went out to China, used to say of him that he was by far the ablest of the four brothers, all of whom were certainly men of mark.

At Peking he was an unqualified success. The Chinese, impressed like all Asiatics by a fine reverence for lineage and blue blood, saw in him a great gentleman whose transparent honesty they could trust. There were not very many legations in China in his time, but the ministers who were his colleagues, men like M. de Bourboulon, the Frenchman, and General Vlangaly, the Russian, were devoted to him. They listened to him with the most profound respect and affection, and General Vlangaly told me that whenever any knotty problem cropped up the first question was “Qu’en dira Sir Frederic?” His own staff from Wade downwards worshipped him. “Wade is a great mimic,” he said to me once, “mind you ask him whether he has added me to his Gallery of Illustration.”[51] He had done so, for when I asked Wade the question at Peking, he went off at score and told me how on one occasion he was interpreting for Sir Frederic at the Tsung Li Ya-mên (the Foreign Office) when he, Wade, who was pepper itself, got extremely angry, while Sir Frederic was quietly puffing away at his cheroot. “But,” said the Prince Regent, “I see that you are very angry—yet I believe that you are interpreting for Pu Ta Jên (Sir F. Bruce); he, on the contrary, appears to be quite calm—not a bit angry.” “There, Sir Frederic,” said Wade, furious, “the Prince says that you are not angry—that it is only I who am excited.” “Oh! Damme,” drawled Sir Frederic in his large, good-humoured way, taking the cheroot out of his mouth, “tell him I’m deyvlish angry,” and with that, beaming upon Prince Kung and the assembled mandarins, he smoked away as contentedly as before. Wade was telling the story against himself, and as he told it I could almost fancy that Sir Frederic was in the room.

The day before I left I went to say good-bye to Sir Frederic. When we shook hands he said, “Remember that when you come back from China you must come to me wherever my post may be! That is to say,” he added with a sigh, “if I survive the age of fifty, which seems to be fatal to all of my family.” The sad “if” was justified! He went out as Minister to the United States, won all hearts there as he did everywhere else, and died of heart failure at some small railway station. I was told afterwards that a tablespoonful of brandy might have saved his precious life! His death in 1867, at the age of fifty-three, was mourned in the East and in the West.

1865

I reached Paris on the 8th of March; I was obliged to spend forty-eight hours there, as there were certain matters to which I was compelled to attend, also I was anxious to see Mr. John Dent, the head of the famous China house, and Baron Overbeck, the Austrian Consul General in Hong Kong, who was going East by the same mail. It was no great penance having to pass two evenings in Paris with them, for there was much going on, and Offenbach’s “Belle Hélène” a delight, with Schneider and Dupuis, was in full swing. Was there ever a piece half so gay, half so witty, or half so impudent! The face of Paris when Helen showed him “mes portraits de famille,” Jupiter and Leda, Jupiter and Europa, Jupiter and Danae, etc., was something to remember!

The 10th of March, 1865, was a fateful day for the Napoleonic Dynasty, for on that day the Duc de Morny, Louis Napoléon’s half brother and most devoted friend, died. He was attended by Sir Joseph Olliffe, the physician of the English Embassy, arousing great jealousy among the French doctors, who of course swore that his life might have been saved. Morny was the son of the Comte de Flahault, an old friend of my father’s whom I knew when he was ambassador in London, and Queen Hortense. When Louis Napoléon became President of the Republic the two brothers met for the first time, and the deepest affection immediately sprang up between the two. Under the Empire, Morny who with Maupas, Persigny, and St. Arnaud, had been one of the chief actors in the _coup d’état_ of 1851, became President of the Corps Législatif, and held that office until 1856, when he went as ambassador to St. Petersburg, and in great splendour represented Louis Napoléon at the coronation of the Emperor Alexander the Second. On his return to Paris in 1857 he again took up the post of President.

He was a dandy and _viveur_, a man of many accomplishments, and a capable if rather erratic statesman, but he was one of those members of the Imperial group who were fiercely accused of gambling on the Bourse. However that might be, he was immensely popular. Paris loved him, fascinated by his reputation of irresistibility, and even by the contemptuous, haughty look with which he strode through the world; when he died, the grief was general and unfeigned; and poor Sir Joseph Olliffe was very cruelly attacked by the Faculty who were sure of the applause of the mob. The story of Morny’s life and death furnished the “motif” of Alphonse Daudet’s book “Le Nabab,” which was certainly not written in the Napoleonic interest, for indeed Daudet was a partisan of the old régime. When Morny offered him a post in his private office he felt bound in common honesty to say that he was a legitimist. “Ma foi! L’Impératrice l’est aussi,” answered Morny, with his quiet, impertinent smile.[52] The frivolous side of Morny, the “Richelieu-Brummell,” as Daudet called him, was always very much in evidence, and it was said, not without truth, that he showed far more interest in the rehearsals of _M. Choufleuri restera chez lui_—a rather poor operatic farce of his for which Offenbach wrote the music—than ever he did in the discussions of the Corps Législatif. Indeed, while _M. Choufleuri_ was in preparation he was neither to have nor to hold, he would attend to nothing else.

Louis Napoléon went to take leave of his brother on his death-bed. When the moment for leaving came, the dying man, holding the Emperor’s hand in his, summoned up strength enough to say: “Sire, méfiez-vous de l’Allemagne!” Those were his last pregnant words to the Sovereign and brother whom he loved so well. This was told me by one who was present at what he described as a most touching death-bed scene, for the love between the two men was very real. That dying speech was prophetic.

Had Morny lived things might have been very different; but his death left a blank which could not be filled; Louis Napoléon was fast growing old, martyrized by the disease which ultimately killed him; he needed a strong man at his elbow—a man with political prescience; failing that he fell into the hands of a gang, Ollivier, Gramont, Lebœuf and others, with female influences at work behind them, who led him to his ruin. Morny in spite of his gay, devil-may-care dandyism, could see clearly ahead; he and he alone among the Emperor’s surroundings might have saved the dynasty. But that was not to be; it was doomed. The passing bell for Morny rang the knell of the Empire.

The intimacy between Morny and Sir Joseph Olliffe, an old friend of ours whom we all loved, was something more, if possible, than that between physician and patient. There was a very firm attachment between the two, and they were engaged in an affair in which they both took the greatest interest. It was they who built Deauville upon a site which I remember a flat wilderness of sand, with a few scanty bristles of rushes cropping up here and there, opposite Trouville, on the other side of the outlet of the river Toucques. It is only fair to say that if Mora in the “Nabab” was a more or less faithful portrait of Morny, Jenkins, the quack Doctor, was certainly not drawn from Sir Joseph Olliffe, who was as upright and transparent an English gentleman as ever entered the medical profession. He was respected and loved by all who knew him.

On the night of the Duc de Morny’s death I left Paris for Marseilles. A terrible voyage on board the P. & O. s.s. _Massilia_. The Gulf of Lyons was in a perfect fury, and the passengers sea-sick and mostly sulky at having to go out to “meet” the hot weather on the other side. This made ladies out of season, but my cabin-companion—one of those grumblers who are such a misfortune in the East—told me that even if it had been to “meet” the cool weather he should have left his wife and children behind; according to him India was not a fit place for an English sow, let alone an English gentlewoman. The sea was so high that even the live stock on board suffered. Bets were going as to whether one bullock would survive the night of the 17th of March—odds against were laid freely. I do not remember which won—the sea or the bullock.

When the railway deposited us at Suez (there was no Canal in those days) we were shipped on board the _Simla_, a crack ship. I had the luck to be separated from my grumbling ship-mate of the _Massilia_, and was doubled up with Colonel Gloster, who was going out to command the —— Regiment in India. He and I and Overbeck with one or two others made a very pleasant little coterie. How much more delightful were the ships of those days, with their beautiful, free, white decks and a view of the sea all round, than the modern floating castles, with all their extravagances and luxurious discomforts. Everything was spick and span, the metal fittings and binnacle shone like the gold in a Regent Street jeweller’s shop. The decks were so clean that you might have eaten your dinner off them, and the quartermasters, as smart as blue-jackets in the Navy, were always on the alert to put the crooked straight or render some small service. It was like yachting in its highest perfection.

A few days of lovely weather in the balmy air of the Indian Ocean, lounging, dozing, dreaming, watching the wild leaps of the flying-fish escaping from the dolphins, speculating upon the unknown that lay ahead—those were days of which every hour was precious. The four or five of us older men who had made friends sat together in a well-chosen corner. The griffins and youngsters bound for the far East left us severely to ourselves; we were told that they called our corner the lions’ den. Well, we were very happy and did not growl too much. At Pointe de Galle Overbeck and I bade Gloster good-bye.

At Hong Kong, after three or four delightful days, thanks to the hospitality of Messrs. Dent, I parted from Overbeck, and the last link with the “lions’ den” of the _Simla_ was finally broken. He, Gloster and I corresponded fitfully, but we did not meet again for nine years, and then in rather a curious way—indeed, if it were not for the wish to record the meeting later on, and to explain its significance, I should not have ventured to write about the voyage.

All the “old China hands” of the sixties will remember with affection Captain “Ikey” Bernard, who commanded the _Ganges_ which carried me from Hong Kong to Shanghai. Captain Bernard was a great character in the China Sea. He was the son of a former professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, from whom he had inherited literary tastes of which the choice little library in his cabin gave proof, and he kept glowing more than a small spark of that sacred fire which burns upon the University altar. He made me free of his cabin, and I spent many hours there in great comfort, and with some profit.

He was, moreover, something of an epicure, and he and I and two other passengers dined and had luncheon in his cabin, where we had the best that the ship could afford: it was a coasting voyage through narrow island passages, where one could almost hear the fury of the sea dashing itself against the black rocks frowning on either side, we passed many fishing junks with their busy crews, and the skipper, who never could resist the temptation of fresh fish, would stop and buy quantities of pomfret, all alive, paying for them in ship’s biscuit. Those were the halcyon days of monopoly. Fancy stopping a mail steamer to buy fish in these times of ocean-racing and competition! Fifty years ago, “Ikey” Bernard did not hesitate. His father must have been a very cultivated and remarkable man. I remember a book of essays upon various subjects by him, full of wise and clever thoughts, amongst others one on Inspiration which fascinated me. I often met my friend “Ikey” during the years that I spent in the Far East, for, welcome whenever his ship touched the shore, he was one of those much-invited men, whom everybody is glad to secure, and we had many pleasant talks about all things and some others.

Often I wondered what took him to sea; with his literary tastes, which must have developed very young, he would have been so perfectly suited to a student’s career, so entirely at home installed in the comfortable arm-chair of some common room, sipping his port after a good dinner in hall at the end of a day congenially spent in the thumbing of folios and quartos. He would have been an ideal Don—he _was_ a splendid seaman. My old shipmate has probably long since gone to his rest. If he be yet alive, my duty to him! If not, may that rest be peace! He was a genial, honest, cultivated gentleman, and there are many less worthy names whose memory has been celebrated by far defter pens than mine.

When I left Shanghai for Tientsing on the 11th of May I was at last alone in the world. Up to that time I had had a succession of pleasant companions on board; now, besides the very offensive native families huddled in the steerage, who, when the sun shone, spent their time in the hunting of fleas—and worse—there was but one other passenger—one of the curious waifs and strays of Europe who at that time used to float about the China Sea, hoping to get a job, if not out of the Peking Government, at any rate out of some provincial Governor or local mandarin. I suppose that they sometimes succeeded; at any rate they were always ready to stake their small capital upon the venture; if they failed, when the hundred or two of dollars were spent they went under and joined the seething mass of undesirables who used to loaf about the open ports, picking up a meal and a drink—oftenest a drink—wherever the fates would be kind.

It was a dull voyage through a leaden sea into which we steamed after a thick fog had sent us hard and fast aground on one of the treacherous shoals of the Yang Tsě Chiang. Then came a spell of dirty weather, till we reached the fine broad headland of the Shantung promontory with the outlying rocky islands, which are the danger of this part of the China sea. There was a strong colony of rats on board, and in the great river we had shipped a host of the most ravenous mosquitoes, whose singing was almost as bad as their biting. Altogether a trip that is best forgotten.

There was plenty of time to think over all the wonders that I had seen since leaving Suez—Mount Sinai—the yellow desert of Eastern Africa; the fiery rocks of Aden; the palm groves of Ceylon, lapped by the waves of the Indian Ocean; the nutmeg orchards of Penang scenting the air; the pineapple hedges of Singapore; brown huts teeming with even browner life, lifted above the fever-swamps like the old lake-dwellings of the men who lived before history was; Canton, with its narrow streets and many-coloured, gilded perpendicular signs, as if a pantomime procession had been suddenly arrested and turned to stone by the head of a Medusa. But above all, the boundless hospitality and kindness of the merchant princes of Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Those were the last of the days when the China trade was in the hands of a few great houses; when the wonderful yearly ocean race took place to land the first cargo of tea in London; when the opium-clippers from Bombay would lie under Pok-Fa-Lum, land the supercargo and wait till he and the house to which his ship was consigned had made the price and then sail gallantly round the corner into Hong Kong. Vast fortunes were made in opium, silk and tea, and right royally were they spent. The men who used up their lives in unhealthy climates, far away from home and family, sacrificing much and often suffering much, felt that they had a right to find what compensation they could in making their banishment tolerable; but what they seemed to delight in more than aught else was in welcoming those fellow countrymen whom duty or pleasure carried within possible range of their kindness.

There were no hotels in the old days, but any man who had a letter for one of the great houses would be sure of as hearty a welcome as if he had been an old and a dear friend.

Our one port of call was Chifu, a quaint little seaside town with rather a pretty background of hills, used as a sea-bathing place by some of the Europeans in North China. Here it was that a few months before a not very large packing-case was delivered, which, on being opened, was found to contain human fragments which were the remains of the traitor Burgevine, an adventurer who, having been first in the service of the Imperial Government, went over to the Taiping rebels, and finally falling into the hands of the Imperial army, was sentenced to death by Ling Chi—hacking to pieces in small morsels, the punishment of high treason.

Here I made the acquaintance of a notable man, one of those heroes who disappear, unknown and unrecorded, swallowed up by some cataclysm of fate before the world has had a chance of knowing what it has lost. Mr. Thomas was a missionary sent out by the London Missionary Society to China; he had a real genius for acquiring languages—speaking French, German, Russian, without having had any facility save his own talents and industry. It was not long before he attained quite a considerable proficiency in the spoken language of northern China, but when he had been eighteen months in the country he was called upon by the Society to preach in Chinese. This he refused to do, for he was too clever a linguist not to be aware of the pitfalls created by a modicum of knowledge, and he declined to make Christianity ridiculous. So he and the Society parted, and he continued to work, living upon a miserable pittance as best he might.

In the meantime he had become bitten with the desire to learn Corean—a language of which practically nothing was known. He made friends with the skipper of a Corean junk trading with Chifu, on board of which he lived for some weeks. He urged his friend to let him sail with him for Seoul, but the Hermit Kingdom, as it was called, resolutely shut its gates to all foreigners, and to approach it was death. Nothing daunted, Mr. Thomas ended by gaining his point, and the skipper consented to take him, on condition that he should wear the native dress, in mourning, which meant that a veil should hang from the brim of the tall hat, completely concealing the face. The voyage was successful, the venturesome Englishman was not discovered, and it was not long after his return that I met him. He was a singularly attractive personality, handsome, clever and, in spite of a certain modest reticence, very interesting.

There is an old French saying, _Qui a bu boira_. Mr. Thomas was not contented with his unique achievement; he must needs go back again. He could not rest. At last, after many vain trials, by holding out prospects of great gain, he persuaded the captain of a small American ship to sail for Corea with himself as interpreter. It is known that they reached Chemulpho and anchored in the Seoul River. In the night the Coreans came down in force and set fire to the ship. “The rest is silence!”—not a soul escaped. It was at Peking that I heard the news some months later; and it was there that I realized how wise he had been when he refused to degrade our Faith by attempting to expound it to a people singularly alive to the dignity of letters.

There was in Peking in my time one of the best men that I ever knew. He was a Scot, possessed of some means of his own, besides a salary from the Society which sent him out as missionary. He worked like a slave at the language, and translated the “Pilgrim’s Progress” into Chinese, which he published with pictures of Christian and all the great characters dressed in the Chinese costume with pig-tails. Alas! in many removals my copy, which he gave me, has been lost. He also wore the native dress, lived on a _tiao_, something like sixpence of our money, a day, and gave the rest of his ample means to the poor. He had no particle of linguistic talent, and yet he would preach! I have heard him address a crowd of Chinese outside the Chien Mên, the great gate of the Tartar city, from the top of a cart, preaching in Chinese pronounced with a strong Aberdonian accent, and when he had finished call out “_Ni mên tung tê pu tung tê_” (“Do you understand?”), and with one accord the crowd cried back, shaking their hands from side to side: “_Pu tung tê!_” (“We don’t understand”).

And now try to realize what this means. Fancy a Chinese missionary standing on the top of a taxi-cab at Charing Cross, preaching Buddhism in pidgin English to a cockney mob, and you have the analogy. Here was a good man, a very good man, whose whole life was an example of the purest Christianity, turning that Christianity into a farce, for the “heathen” to mock at.

How well I remember a few days after my arrival at Peking, as I was riding out of the Legation gates, being greeted by a gentleman in Chinese dress, who was sitting on the bench by the escort’s guard-room, in the broadest Scotch. It was my friend the missionary. He had a little church of his own at which his few converts attended, and there was one little boy, by whom he set great store, who was by way of acting in some sort as attendant. When the good man was engrossed in his sermon, John (for he had been baptized) would quietly run out and indulge in foot-shuttlecock—a very pretty game, by the bye—or some other sport dear to the Pekingese street arabs, until the voice of the preacher ceased, when he would be sternly called back to his duties.

Mr. Thomas knew better than to risk the ridicule of preaching. When the Society insisted, they lost the services of a saint, a devoted apostle who was, above all other men whom I came across in the Far East, fitted by genius, by learning, and by courage, to have done the work which they and he had at heart. Few personalities that I have met in the long days of my life have impressed me more. He was a young man, about eight and twenty. Had he lived he must have made his mark; he fell a sacrifice to ignorance and stupidity, the two demons which have wrought so much evil in the world.

We left Chifu in the afternoon of Monday, the fifteenth of May, and on the Tuesday morning took in the pilot who was to steer us up the tortuous course of the Pei Ho river. The first sight of the Taku Forts filled me with pity for the two garrisons—the one British, the other French—which had occupied them since 1860 lest the disaster of 1859, when Sir Frederic Bruce tried in vain to reach Peking for the ratification of the Treaty and two of our gun-boats were sunk, should be repeated. The desolation of the place was chilling. On the side of the fort occupied by our troops were a few mud huts and a sort of wretched inn, the rendezvous of pilots.

On the French side it was even worse—nothing but an endless bleak tract of mud, flush with the filthy water, all of one colour with the land, so that it was hard to say where the mud ended and the sea began, and even the wild fowl seemed sad and desolate, and I wondered why, having wings, they did not fly to some more cheerful home. No more filthy little stream than the Pei Ho ever defiled a sea. As I wrote at the time: “Mud forts, mud houses, mud fields, and a muddy river discharging its daily burthen of mud into a muddy sea—everything is mud.” It is difficult for water, especially running water, to be ugly and uninteresting, but the Pei Ho accomplished that feat. Higher up the stream there were some stunted trees and green fields, but the country was utterly dull and featureless. The navigation of the river was difficult enough; perpetually shifting mud-banks in mid-stream made the channel as crooked and uncertain as Chinese diplomacy.

Several times we collided with junks, and on more than one occasion our pilot had to send men ashore with a hawser which they fastened round a willow tree to let the ship swing. She was a queer little tramp, stout enough and fast enough, as times went, for she could do her eight knots, and perhaps a half, in the open sea, but the strangest thing about her was that, although nominally belonging to a German firm, she was really owned by a Chinese merchant in Tientsing, to whom the whole of her cargo was consigned. That fifty years ago the Chinese, so stiff-backed against all that was European, should have owned a foreign-built steam tramp seems almost incredible. But the little _Yün tsě fei_, “Walkee all same fly,” as a Chinaman translated her name, did her little commercial patrol of the Gulf of Pei-chi-li with great regularity.

I found Tientsing holiday-making. Saurin, my old friend and colleague, had come down from Peking for the races with M. Glinka, an attaché of the Russian Legation, and they were staying with M. Buitzow, the Russian Consul, who very kindly put me up also; I met him again eight years later, on the occasion of my second visit to Japan in 1873—a very agreeable man.

It was a stroke of luck falling in with Saurin, for we left Tientsing together the next day and so I had a friend under whose auspices I was able to reach Peking in far greater comfort than I could have expected. We wriggled up the ugly corkscrew stream in three boats; up one reach we had the wind with us, in the next it would be dead against us, and we could only get along by towing and punting. The shoals were as innumerable as ever and so we were constantly crossing the river along a course mapped out by twigs of willow stuck in the mud. However, at last, at two in the afternoon of Sunday the twenty-first, we reached Tungchou—famous for the tragedy of the capture of the English prisoners in 1860—and outside the walls of the city, under the pleasant shade of a great tree by a wayside inn, we found our horses and an escort which had been sent to meet us. My horse was a grey Arab that had been the charger of my gallant friend Colonel Fane of Fane’s Horse who, like my friend now of more than half a century, Sir Dighton Probyn, had played a conspicuous part in the war of 1860.

The country between Tungchou and Peking is absolutely flat, very populous, with many villages and endless graveyards, the most sacred of all objects to the Chinaman. There are plenty of fine trees and a wealth of greenery in the richly cultivated fields, so that I was rather agreeably surprised, for I had expected nothing so refreshing to the eye: to be sure, it was the early summer, before the scorching heats and long droughts had come to tan the crops to one uniform brown. All of a sudden, at a turn of the road close in front of us, quite unsuspected, invisible until we were immediately under it, I saw before me the city of Peking, the city of my dreams.

There at last were the grim, dark grey walls just as I had fancied them, formidable, frowning; behind them the mystery of centuries. At intervals rose the great towers, rearing their fantastic roofs with curved eaves above huge gates in and out of which the yellow crowds were hurrying, jostling, eagerly busy. Coolies carrying their burdens at each end of a bamboo pole slung across one shoulder, merchants, small gentry, carts tenanted, some by mandarins surrounded by retainers with their red-tasselled caps, others by much-painted ladies with gaudy ornaments in the edifices of their quaintly-dressed, shining black hair; old women in charge of babies; a prisoner guarded by two jailers, his head protruding out of the heavy wooden _cangue_; the beggars, quite worthy of their fame for filth and repulsiveness—just such a crowd as existed in Kång Hsi’s time two hundred years ago, nothing changed, save that the city has grown a little more shabby, with more ruined spaces caused by fire and neglect in a country where nothing is ever repaired; above all, a whole series of seemingly familiar pictures—the rice-paper drawings of my childhood in the flesh!

But the dust! I have seen dust in many lands—one of the meannesses of Providence, poor Alfred Montgomery used to call it—notably in South Africa which, in that respect and some others, is bad to beat; but Peking outdoes them all. Fancy riding up to your horse’s hocks in a fine black powder, which, when the wind blows over the desert of Gobi, pervades everything; insidious, ineluctable, streaming in thin rays like the motes in a sunbeam through unsuspected chinks and crevices until you may trace your name with your finger on any single thing in your most cunningly protected room.

In one of those dust-storms, thick as a London fog, I have known a boat leaving a ship outside the Taku forts, forced to pull round and round in blind circles until the black veil should lift, or rather fall, and daylight once more break through the gloom. And when the rainy season comes, then the streets of Peking are like canals in which what once was dust is now a noisome Acherontian slime.

Peking stands in need of forgiveness for much. Smells that must be smelt to be believed; sights such as the Beggars’ Bridge, which are sickening horrors; squalid houses, suggesting indescribable interiors, for the manners and customs of the Po Hsing[53] are not attractive; streets ill-paved and never cleaned; much to offend the senses at every step, and yet, abuse it as we might, Peking as I knew it fifty years ago had about it a certain mysterious charm which I think most people felt, and which has never been so well described as by Baroness von Heyking in “Briefe die ihn nicht erreichten.” How cleverly, without any attempt at description, by a few magic words scattered here and there, she makes us feel the magic of the old, sad-coloured, grey, ruinous city!