CHAPTER XVI

PEKING

We rode into Peking at the Hata Gate and threading our way through the throng, soon found ourselves outside the Liang Kung Fu, the palace of the Dukes of Liang, which was the English Legation, separated by a road from an almost dry canal. The great gates were thrown open by the escort man on duty and we rode in to receive the warmest welcome from Mr. Wade, the _chargé d’affaires_, who later became Sir Thomas Wade, K.C.B., G.C.M.G., and British Minister.

I soon found that Sir Frederic Bruce had in no wise exaggerated the delight that was to be had in Mr. Wade’s society. He was at that time a man of forty-seven, but he looked older, for climate and a strenuous life during a quarter of a century into which he had packed more adventures and experiences than fall to the lot of most men in twice the time, had told upon him; but in character he was as gay as a boy, full of fun, with a keen sense of humour, and an excellent story-teller, a talent to which his powers as a mimic, of which I have already spoken, contributed not a little.

He had been a soldier for a time, like his father, holding a commission in the 42nd Highlanders and afterwards in the 98th, of which Colin Campbell, Lord Clyde, was Colonel, and which was to take part in the first China war in 1841. On the way out round the Cape, being already an expert in European languages, he set to work to learn Chinese. It was a colossal task which few men would have attempted; indeed, remembering the very scanty books which then existed, I can hardly conceive how he took the first plunge. During the war he was of the greatest use and so, when peace came, he was appointed interpreter to the garrison at Hong Kong.

The part which he played in all subsequent events in China till the end of the war in 1860 is well known, though it was not sufficiently recognized until long afterwards. He was always building nests for other birds to lay in. Take, for instance, the case of the Maritime Customs of China. Out of ten thousand well-informed men there is perhaps not one who does not believe that the Imperial Customs Service of China was formed and organized by Sir Robert Hart. Yet that is not the case. The service was started and organized in 1854, when Hart was an unknown quantity and just leaving Belfast as a boy of nineteen, by an international committee, English, French and American, Wade being the English representative, and the working man of the three; so much so that the other two, feeling that they were not necessary, retired, leaving the Englishman to finish the job, and carrying into practice Lord John Russell’s dictum that the best committee is a committee of three, of whom two are silent.

As soon as the new department was well on its feet Wade, who had no mind to become a Chinese official, resigned, and became Chinese Secretary under Sir John Bowring, Governor of Hong Kong. He was succeeded as Inspector-General by Mr. H. N. Lay, a very able man, the originator of the Lay-Osborn fleet which was commanded by Captain, afterwards Admiral, Sherard Osborn in 1863, a scheme which broke down owing to the faithlessness of the Chinese Government. Lay, clever as he was, had the misfortune to be what the French call a _mauvais coucheur_ in affairs, and his demands upon the Chinese were rather more peremptory and dictatorial than they were prepared to admit; the result was a quarrel and Hart was appointed in his place. There were, therefore, two Inspectors-General before Hart. Nobody denies the powers of the latter as an organizer—least of all did Sir Thomas Wade question them; on the contrary he was, perhaps, Sir Robert Hart’s greatest admirer, and far too generous even to hint at the fact that the service was his own child. I did not share his admiration of his successor and we had many arguments upon the subject. Had Wade, who was loyalty itself, lived to see the Boxer riots and read the two articles in an English magazine in which, when the trouble was over, Hart professed that the Boxer rising was a patriotic endeavour, and practically advised the Boxers to begin over again with the proviso that they should have a care to be better equipped and prepared, I think that he would have come round to my opinion.

Sir Robert Hart knew that his articles would fly under the seas by cable; he also knew, none better, the effect that they would produce; how sweet his words would be to the Empress Tsŭ Hsi, to her eunuchs and the whole Court over which they ruled and before whom he bowed the knee! In the meantime honours were showered upon him. He was made a baronet, and at one time Lord Salisbury who, great as he was, never quite seemed to recognize the importance and needs of China, actually appointed him to be British Minister at Peking, a post which, happily, he did not take up. What Lord Salisbury failed to see was that, great as Hart’s influence with the Chinese undoubtedly was, that influence would die the death the day he left their service to enter ours. They would have looked upon him as a turncoat who had wormed himself into their secrets in order to use them on our behalf, and he would have had far less influence than any average Englishman promoted in the ordinary course. Nay more; it might conceivably, indeed it probably would, have wrecked the Customs service. There were not lacking mandarins who would gladly have returned to the old system of bribery and squeeze, and would have been ready to do all in their power under the guise of patriotic objections to get rid of an organization which was death to their methods and of all the foreigners who controlled it. The cry would be: “See the danger of admitting the foreign devils to our councils.” Nobody knew this better than Hart himself; moreover, had he accepted the post he would have been making a great monetary sacrifice and would have given up what was practically an autocracy for a position which, however honourable, would have placed him under an oversight to which he had long been a stranger.

Sir Robert Hart’s attitude after the Boxer affair showed how he clung to the goodwill of the Tartar Government, and how little he cared what his countrymen must think of him so long as he might retain the favour of the Empress Tsŭ Hsi—the “old Buddha”—and her creatures.

No sketch of Peking, however slight, is possible without some mention of that remarkable man. He was a maker of history, and may have been a good friend to China. To Europe he certainly was not; but he was an excellent friend to Sir Robert Hart, and to those whose careers, in the interest of his own, he chose to push.

The British Legation, as I first saw it before it was pulled about and vulgarized, was certainly a very striking place, with huge courtyards shaded by trees, among them the famous lace-bark pine[54] which is such a feature in Northern China; immediately inside the courtyard, mounting guard over a picturesquely roofed stately hall or pavilion open to the winds of heaven, were two great stone _shi-dzŭ_ (lions), grinning vain defiance at the foreign devils who had invaded the sanctuary over which they watched, then a space, beyond that a second open hall, and after that the minister’s quarters decorated in the most classical Chinese fashion—the last word of Pekingese art.

In one of Lord Elgin’s picturesque despatches—to Lord Malmesbury if my memory serves me—but that is immaterial—he wrote that he could not better describe the desolation of Nanking, the ancient Southern Capital, than by saying that while riding through the city he flushed a cock-pheasant. Had he been as well acquainted with China then as he was afterwards, he would have known that this was but evidence of the great luxury of space which the Chinese nobles allowed themselves—their palaces were surrounded by grounds as broad as, or broader than, the gardens of suburban villas at Putney or Richmond. That of the old Dukes of Liang was exceptionally rich in elbow room. One night—to follow Lord Elgin’s lead—one of our escort men, who kept fowls and had been sorely tried by depredations, shot two foxes close to his quarters. There was no hunt and no poultry committee at Peking, so he had to take the law into his own hands. There was a legend that even wolves had been seen in Peking in severe winters. I at once fell in love with the old Liang Kung Fu and I was savage when the great open halls—such a picture of the past—were bricked up and turned into chanceries and offices, which might well have been placed elsewhere. No wonder the very stone lions tried to growl! The beautiful Liang Kung Fu! I wonder what it looks like now after fifty years of vandal ministers and the Boxer siege!

Saurin and I dined with Wade that night—an excellent dinner; the Chinese are first rate cooks—for cooking is a fine art in which they excel, probably because it does not involve a knowledge of perspective. What a host he was! so light in hand, so delicate in his wit, so full of conversation, the edge of which was sharpened by reading in many tongues. For Wade was no dried up sinologue—skilled as he was in the learning of the Chinese, he had kept himself well on a level with the times by reading all that was best in the literature of the West; but the memories of his long and varied experiences gave to his talk a flavour rich, varied, and outside of the common.

In poetry he was eclectic—devoted to the great classic singers of all countries. For Tennyson he had no great admiration—said he was the sort of boy who would be sent up for good once a week—and yet I have known the tears come into his eyes when he was quoting a stanza from the poems of some far lesser light. If he read aloud a favourite passage, something that touched his heart, his voice would break, compelling his listener to feel with him. What a lovable man he was! He was so sympathetic, so modest in talking of his own work, so generous in his estimate of that of others; deeply though unostentatiously religious, brave as a Bayard, devoted to duty, Sir Thomas Wade was one of those men in whom our public service is happily rich, men who for a mere pittance as compared with what they might have earned in other walks of life, and with very little prospect of high honours, are content to pass their lives in exile, making light of health, risking death as he often did, and sacrificing to the interests of the Empire all the attractions of social, literary and artistic life, happy only in the thought that they are spending themselves for their country.

Wade was very much pleased when I told him of my ambition to learn Chinese and promised to help me as much as he could, and most kindly was that promise fulfilled, for in about a fortnight he brought me the first two or three sheets of a series of conversational exercises which afterwards developed into the “Yü-yen Tsŭ-êrh chi,” a book of the greatest value.

It was the irony of fate that, essentially a scholar by nature, the line which his scholarship had taken forced him into an official groove, which was outside the scope of his wishes but from which there was no escape. He would have been so happy working at philology. He often used to express to me his longing to be at rest in some congenial seat of learning, there to pursue his studies and literary labours. His wish was gratified at last; but not before sticking manfully at his post he had become minister and K.C.B.; for when he retired in 1883, he settled at Cambridge, where he became professor of Chinese, with no pupils, as he lamented to me, and where twelve years later he died. One of my greatest treasures, which never leaves me, is a little old shabby Bible which he gave me at Peking fifty years ago. Dear Wade!

Not long after my arrival in Peking the great heat set in, and the thermometer rose to 108° in the shade; the smells became intolerable—it was as if the city were one vast shrine in honour of Venus Cloacina—it was time to fly to the hills. Saurin and I had engaged a lovely Buddhist temple called Pi Yün Ssŭ, the Temple of the Azure Clouds, and thither we rode out one fine day in July, passing over a beautiful plain studded with farmsteads picturesquely shaded by tall trees, prosperous villages, and burial places, the romantic charm of which apparently compensates the Chinese peasant in death for the dreariness in which he contentedly passes his life—a mechanical process of eating, drinking and sleeping without hope, without ambition, without more thought for the morrow than is involved in ploughing and sowing, reaping and threshing.

The trees which bear witness to the loving care with which the graveyards are tended, and make the villages look so snug and homelike, were a delight. Groves of poplars, ailanthus, the aromatic cedrela and willows, cast refreshing lights and shades, good to look upon. Not far from Pa Pao Shan stands a noble group of the maidenhair tree, Salisburia adiantifolia, while the cemeteries are darkly shaded by tall Chinese junipers, and the weird lace-bark pine, Pinus Bungeana, whose stems and branches, richly embroidered with silver patches, gleam ghostlike among the more brilliant foliage.

Nestled among the picturesquely wooded recesses of the western mountains, some twelve to fifteen miles from Peking, are a number of temples, each more enchanting than the last, marvels of architecture, decorated with all the skill in which Chinese art excels. Here at least there is no decay—no ruin. Worm and weather are kept at bay by the offerings of the faithful who come to _Kwang Miao_, to pay homage to the temple, and by the few dollars for which the priests are willing to hire out their guest-chambers to the foreign devils seeking a refuge from the pestilential terrors of the urban summer.

Quite one of the most beautiful of these was the Temple of the Azure Clouds. As picturesque as its name, it was built in tiers on the mountain side, and on each terrace was a shrine—statues of black marble and white, alti-rilievi and bassi-rilievi portrayed kings and warriors, gods and goddesses and fabled monsters, all of rare workmanship, legends writ in stone that the study of a lifetime would hardly suffice to master, and all set in a surrounding of rock work, fountains, woods and gardens before which an European landscape gardener might commit suicide in sheer despair. From the highest of these terraces, in front of a marvellous Indian idol with ten heads in tiers of three surmounted by one, there is a grand panoramic view, with the sad-coloured walls and quaint towers of Peking in the dim distance.

Our quarters were ideal. Our dining-room was an open pavilion, surrounded by a pond and a rockery which looked as if, like poetry, it had been born not made, feathered with ferns and clothed with a profusion of mosses; high trees sheltered us from the scorching sun and a pond fed by an icy fountain cooled our drinks to perfection.

Here we led the simple life—rose and bathed in the pond soon after daybreak—a frugal breakfast at eight—work till three—then dinner—after that a ride or a scramble over the beauty-haunted mountains, peering into the homes of fairies and wood-nymphs and heavenly beings; back for tea at eight or nine—a smoke—and then bed, to be awakened long before the sun by the silvery tinkling of the bell for matins. Sometimes in the dead hours of the night, dreaming, I hear the music of a little bell and know that I am being wafted across fifty years of memory, over twelve thousand miles of sea and land, to the Temple of the Azure Clouds, where the sacristan is as of old calling the good monks to morning prayer.

I had my teacher with me and was hard at work. There is a pretty fable which tells how Confucius and his disciples in surroundings not more romantic than these used to work on into the night, studying by the light of the fire-flies. Here, too, the pretty creatures swarm, tiny wandering electric lights, winging their bright way among the shrubs and trees of the sacred gardens; but we, more prosaic than the sages, are content to work by day, letting our evenings treasure idleness. What more fascinating study can there be than that of a strange language opening out a whole vista of new thoughts and ideas? But if that language be of the East, the expression of all the poetic imagery, of the original conceptions, of the unexpected twists and turns of the volutes of the Oriental brain, then the charm is complete. There is, moreover, as an incentive the difficulty: at each step gained the sense of achievement, of victory. In the absence of books the task is well-nigh hopeless.

When I reached Peking there was one much thumbed and tattered copy of Medhurst’s dictionary for the use of the whole Legation. Naturally it was wanted for the student interpreters: Morrison’s dictionary was out of print, and Giles, whose great work is now the authority, had himself, so far as China was concerned, not yet been invented. My teacher, a quaint little man, so transparently thin that I felt almost able to see the garlic which otherwise so richly asserted itself, knew no syllable of any tongue save his own, so it was a hard matter to come to terms. Substantives—a table, a chair, a cupboard—it was easy enough to acquire; some verbs are capable of being denoted by signs. But adjectives! How explain that you wish to know the difference between a good table and a bad? Great was my joy when, one fine day, Wade produced the first page of his book in MS. Then matters began to go swimmingly, and by the end of the summer I began to babble—very childishly—but we must totter before we can walk.

Students have an easier time of it now, Wade, Giles, Hillier and others have beaten a golden road for them and there are plenty of books. Soon, moreover, we hope to see a properly equipped school of Oriental languages established in London, so that a young man may start his work abroad with some previous equipment, however slight, to help him in overcoming the first difficulties, saving him much vexation and disheartening delay.

We passed the days of our cloistered life in calm and peaceful contemplation as beseemed sojourners sheltered by a Buddhist monastery. The studious mornings were relieved by afternoon excursions as varied as they were delightful. There were many interesting temples to be visited—among others a fane of great sanctity called Wo Fo Ssŭ, the temple of the Sleeping Buddha, a gigantic figure lying down with a pair of soft velvet boots by the couch ready to be put on when it should please the Wise One to awaken from the slumber of centuries. Some shrines were perched up like eagles’ nests upon almost inaccessible crags, others were easily reached. The monks and the poor peasants who lived around us were always kind, civil, and ever welcoming to the red-haired devils.

All had some element of attraction; a favourite wandering was through the romantic gardens and grounds of what had been the Summer Palace—and yet it was sad to see the charred ruins of what must once have been a succession of scenes each one more beautiful than the last, the final masterpiece of gorgeous Oriental luxury and splendour. The Summer Palace really consisted of three parks, of which Yuen Ming Yuen, “the round, bright garden,” was one, and the name became among foreigners the generic name for all three. The park that we used to visit was called Wan Shao Shan, “the Hill of Ten Thousand Longevities.” It was strictly forbidden ground, but the soldiers in charge were a poor tatterdemalion crew, and a silver key opened the gates. The third park had an even more poetic name that might fit an extravaganza in a Western theatre, Yü Chuan Shan, the “Hill of the Fountain of Jewels.” In the gardens of the Hill of the Ten Thousand Longevities we passed from court to court, from terrace to terrace, where the wicked fire had hardly spared a stone—carvings, the loving handiwork of consummate artists, had all fallen in scales, gradually being ground to powder, lurking places for scorpions and lizards and centipedes. Crazy and crank were the steps that led from one level to another, steps that had once been trodden by the eunuch-guarded beauties of the Court of a magnificent Ch’ien Lung.

All was one tangle of climbing plants, brambles, wild vines; such stones as remained were overgrown with mosses and lichens, silver-backed ferns, wild asparagus; strange, sweet-scented herbs peered from out of the crannies and chinks. Here and there a tiny pavilion, and just one little bronze shrine, a miracle of art, which had defied the devouring flames, only served to accentuate the devastation. At our feet lay the great lake, the surface almost smothered with the pink blush of the lotus flowers, now at their best, and on it were a few humble fishermen casting their nets for such poor, muddy fish as the waters of North China can produce. To think of the gaudy court that once housed here an Emperor like Solomon in all his pomp, surrounded by ladies “all glorious within,” gorgeously-clad eunuchs, officers, ministers, and then to look upon the squalor and filth of its present guardians!—wretched, half-starved, hardly clothed creatures, with such small pay as should have been theirs probably no more than an arrear never to be realized. No wonder they fell and betrayed their trust before the seduction of a Mexican dollar, even though it was offered by a foreign devil.

By the beginning of August the great heat was due to pass away. There came a mighty thunderstorm, like the bursting of giant shells. Hailstones as big as pigeons’ eggs, made up of a nodule of ice, a layer of snow and then an outer coat of ice, came rattling down in volleys, driving scorpions and centipedes and other horrors to take shelter in our rooms. In three hours the thermometer fell thirty degrees, and would not rise again till the following summer. It was time to fly back citywards.

In the two or three days that it took to pack up our various belongings the torrents of rain had wrought a transformation scene. The dry fields and banks were all bright with a young green growth, and in the meantime the giant millet had sprung to a height of some twelve or thirteen feet, so that we rode along the dense paths like Gulliver in the fields of Brobdingnag, guessing at our way.

Now came a season during which the weather was such a joy that life was worth the living just for its own sake. Those of us who could claim an immunity from official work for two or three weeks made ready for a trip to Mongolia or some other happy hunting ground. Saurin, after two years, had well earned a holiday, and was bound with another man for an expedition beyond the Great Wall, and I, having a few days at my disposal before the next mail, agreed to go with him as far as Ku Pei K’ou, the great pass between China and Mongolia.

Among the great monuments of the world there can be few more striking than those of the North of China. Peking itself, that grim and grey city with all its mysteries and tragic secrets, is difficult to beat. The Great Wall of China at Ku Pei K’ou, a most lovely spot, where it is still in good repair, overtopping the glorious peaks of the mountains, climbing for miles and miles up and down precipices where there would seem to be hardly foothold for a goat, let alone for a bricklayer and his hod, is a marvel. In places which I saw once when I followed its course for some two hundred miles, it has now fallen under stress of weather and neglect into mere heaps of rubble. But at Ku Pei K’ou it is as imposing as it was when the Emperor Shih built it, some two hundred and thirty years B.C., to hold the Mongol hordes at bay.

It is perhaps an impertinence to speak of the Tombs of the Ming Emperors in the same breath with the great relics of Egyptian magnificence. Here we can count at most five centuries—there as many millenniums. The great Pyramid of Cheops and the Sphinx are in a category by themselves; and yet in “The Thirteen Tombs” there is something of the same largeness of thought, the same fight for immortality. About five miles away from the little town of Chang Ping Chou—famous, or rather infamous, as the scene of the torture of the British and Sikh prisoners of war in 1860—is a wide plain surrounded by hill scenery of great beauty.

In the midst of this plain, standing out in solemn isolation, rises a magnificent stone gateway, designed by some rarely skilled artist, by far the finest specimen of Chinese architecture that I ever saw; altogether a most imposing work. Some way beyond this wonder is a second gateway of brick, roofed with imperial tiles, leading to a large, square granite building, cruciform inside, in which is a colossal marble tortoise, bearing a high, upright tablet, graven on both sides with inscriptions, the one telling how the tombs were built for the Ming Emperors, and the other how they were restored by the Emperor Ch’ien Lung in the eighteenth century. At each corner of this building is a triumphal column. Then comes the famous avenue of colossal figures in double pairs—the one pair sitting, the other standing. Lions, Chih Ling (Kylins), camels, elephants, scaled and winged dragons wreathed in flames, horses, warriors in full armour, with breastplates reminding one of Medusa’s head, carrying in their hands swords and maces; warriors in repose, with their swords sheathed and their hands gravely folded on their breasts; councillors; chamberlains. Beyond this dumb and motionless procession, which looked as if it had been congealed and turned into marble by some magician’s wand, a broken and ruinous stone road, with decayed granite and marble bridges, leads the pilgrim in melancholy fashion to the Chief Temple, or Funeral Palace, where the great Emperor Yung Lo lies canonized under the name of Wên. The spot is one of rare beauty, for in a country where even the humblest peasant must needs sleep his long sleep in some choice place, the Emperors of the glorious Ming Dynasty would naturally choose for their graves a sanctuary worthy of their race.

Behind the great shrine, decorated with all the sumptuous splendour of which Chinese art is the mistress, is a hillock, an artificial mound covered with trees and shrubs; in the speaking silence of that fair retreat, far from the madding crowd, lie the remains of the Son of Heaven. There is a Chinese proverb which says, “Better a living beggar covered with sores than a dead Emperor.” I wonder!

We rode back to Chang Ping Chou, our horses terrified at the great images, in which heaven knows what horrors they saw. It was a lovely night, and the harvest moon rose in full glory. After supper I was impelled to go back, at any rate as far as the mysterious Avenue of Statues. I felt that, like Melrose, it should be visited “by the pale moonlight.” I am glad that I had that inspiration. When I reached the avenue the moonbeams were casting their spell upon the great, silent, motionless procession. Grim and gruesome flickers were playing upon the marble features, showing a sort of life in death; near the further end a vagabond crew—in England we should have said of gipsies—had encamped for the night, and were crouching round their fire, smoking. The flames cast dancing and uncertain lights and shadows upon the giant figures till I half felt as if they were moving. Far away in the gloom were the thirteen shrines, half hidden, nestling among the dark, pine-clad hills—altogether a weird and ghostly scene which I can never describe, but which lives with me to-day, after all these years.

* * * * *

The event of our lives in the autumn of 1865 was the arrival of the new British minister, Sir Rutherford Alcock, with his family, in succession to Sir Frederic Bruce. Sir Rutherford was an able man who would probably have made his mark in any profession and in any position. But he had so fitted his life to the peculiar exigencies of China and of the public service in that country, where he had been for many years a Consul, that his name as the follower of Sir Frederic was indicated.