CHAPTER XVII

1865

PEKING

Mr. Alcock’s first great promotion to be Consul-General in Japan, newly opened to foreigners by Lord Elgin’s treaty of 1858, though it answered well enough, was based upon a mistake of the English Government, which was under the delusion that China and Japan were one and the same thing, and that experience in the one country must of necessity specially fit a man to take up work in the other. It was like what Victor Hugo said when he was asked whether he had ever read Goethe. “Non, mais j’ai lu quelques traductions de Schiller; et après tout, Goethe-Schiller, Schiller-Goethe, c’est toujours la même chose.” Well, China and Japan were anything but “la même chose,” and perhaps Mr. Alcock’s life and experiences in China were rather a hindrance to him than otherwise, as they undoubtedly were in the case of some of the first merchants who established themselves there.

However, Mr. Alcock came well through the ordeal, showing great courage and determination, and never allowing any affront to England to pass unnoticed. Never perhaps did he show more moral courage than he did when one fine day in writing to the Japanese Government he signed himself Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary instead of Consul-General, with the intimation to the British Foreign Office that they might accept or reject what he had done, but that it was necessary in the event of his rejection that whoever should be appointed should, in order to hold his own both with the Japanese Government and with the foreign colleagues, hold that rank. It was a most audacious stroke and it succeeded, because he was quite right, but it probably is the one and only case of a man accrediting himself as minister to a foreign Power. Whether he also named himself K.C.B. history records not. But at any rate the honour was most deservedly bestowed upon him.

Sir Rutherford Alcock was a man of great ability and high courage. During his official life in the Far East he had plenty of opportunities to give proof of both. In early life he had been a surgeon, and had been attached to the British Legion in Spain, where he earned no little reputation for a skill which stood him in good stead when the temple occupied by the British Legation at Yedo (Tokio) was attacked by Rônins in July, 1861, and poor Laurence Oliphant and others were so badly wounded. Oliphant, who had nothing but a hunting-crop to ward off the cruel sword-cuts, must have been killed had it not been for the merciful beam of the low, narrow passage in which he was fighting, which caught the worst blows. For long years afterwards the deep cuts on the woodwork were still visible, but the last time I was in Japan, in 1906, I went to see the place, and found that the temple authorities had removed the tell-tale beam.

When he returned from the Peninsula he went back to his profession as a lecturer; but rheumatism, due to exposure, had crippled his hands and hindered him as an operator; moreover, he was bitten with the spirit of adventure, and in 1844 he accepted an appointment as Consul at the newly-opened port of Fu Chou. But it was at Shanghai a year or two later that he made his mark, and there it was that he achieved what was the most successful work of his life in the establishment of the municipality, a new and original venture, needing great tact and judgment in order to avoid international and other jealousies, besides involving a distinct talent for organization. It was altogether a formidable undertaking, but it succeeded, and laid the foundation of similar institutions throughout the Treaty Ports of the Far East.

When Sir Rutherford returned to China as Minister he was far more in his element as a diplomatic agent than he had ever been in Japan. He had an intimate knowledge of Chinese affairs, which it is in no way derogatory to say that he had not of Japanese politics. In Japan he, like everybody else, was under the influence of the old Dutch fallacies, and he did not fully realize the relations between the Mikado and the Tycoon. The great scholars, such as Satow and Aston and others, had not yet pricked the bubble and babble about spiritual and temporal Emperors, and all the other nonsense of those days. Sir Harry Parkes had the luck to profit by the new-born knowledge. Sir Rutherford was the victim of the old tradition. But when he arrived in China he was master of the situation. He was thoroughly at home and up to every move on the board.

He was a kind and considerate chief, and we all liked him except in the neighbourhood of mail-day. Sir Rutherford’s weakness was the idea that he was essentially a writer—he would have been a greater man if he had never written a book about a country which he did not understand, or a grammar of a language which he could neither speak nor read nor write. But we all have our weaknesses; his was authorship. The despatches which he used to write contained excellent stuff, but they were spoilt by being spun out to interminable lengths of impossible verbiage. To copy those effusions with the thermometer at 108° in the shade, with a double sheet of blotting-paper between my hand and the foolscap, and a basin of water to dip my fingers in from time to time, was like being private secretary to Satan in the nethermost regions.

At the Tsung Li Ya-mên, the ministry of foreign affairs, Sir Rutherford was perfect. However knotty might be the point which he had to argue, however patent the trickery which he had to resent, he was always calm, always courteous, and so the Chinese liked him as much as we did. He certainly was _persona grata_ with the Regent, Prince Rung, who was the very real head of the Tsung Li Ya-mên.[55]

The Prince Regent was at this time a tall, well-favoured man, shortsighted and pitted with smallpox, which in Chinese eyes would be no hindrance to his good looks, for indeed a Chinaman hardly thinks of himself as complete until he has “put forth the heavenly flowers.” Messrs. Bland and Backhouse quote a decree of the wretched Emperor Tung Chih in which he announces “we have had the good fortune this month to contract smallpox”—in the next month he ascended the Dragon and was wafted on high.[56] The Emperor’s edict might serve as a text for the anti-vaccinationists, nor would his death in the following month have injured their cause, for he was such a mass of disease that he was already foredoomed, so the “heavenly flowers” were not by themselves accountable for his end.

The first time that I saw Prince Rung was in the month of May, a few days after my arrival at Peking. He came to the Legation to discuss business with Wade, accompanied by two other ministers of the Tsung Li Ya-mên. The Prince was in high spirits, laughing and joking merrily; he was always good-humoured and genial, but that day there was a special reason for his cheerfulness; he had just gone through one of those alternate storms and calms, often incident to Oriental life, but specially frequent where the government is conducted with “the suspended curtain”—that is to say by an Empress who may not be seen. To me he was very courteous and kind, and whenever we met afterwards he had always a little friendly greeting for me, never failing to chaff me about my single eyeglass which used to furnish him with an excuse for interrupting an awkward discussion and so give him time for an answer. He was very clever in availing himself of it; perhaps that was the reason why I found grace in his sight.

Hardly more than a stone’s throw from the British Legation are the walls of the Forbidden City. Of what might be taking place inside that sacrosanct enclosure we knew no more than what that most venerable of all publications, the _Peking Gazette_, was allowed to tell us. People used to talk with well-informed superiority of _coups-d’état_ and Palace intrigues, but it was not until the appearance of Messrs. Bland and Backhouse’s book, “China under the Dowager Empress,” that the outside world was made aware of the intimate history of that masterful woman’s reign; for a reign it was throughout. Her co-Empress was a cipher and the Emperors whom for show’s sake she enthroned were mere puppets. The pages of that _roman vécu_ are so fascinating that it is difficult for any reader to put the book down, but to those who have lived under the black pall of ignorance in which the foreign community of Peking was shrouded it is a revelation.

We can now appreciate the heroic courage with which Tsŭ Hsi, then a mere girl of twenty-two, defeated the conspiracies of the princes who, on the death of her husband, the Emperor Hsien Fêng in 1861, took her child, the baby Emperor, from her and tried to usurp the Regency. It was a master-stroke of craft in so young a woman to paralyse the conspirators by purloining the seal without the impression of which no nomination to the throne was legitimate. We know how Prince Kung, the intimate personal enemy of the plotters, and the handsome young guardsman, Jung Lu, her kinsman, her playmate, and through life her more than trusty friend, came to the rescue, and we can understand how it was that the former, her brother-in-law, though he had to go through alternations of favour and disgrace, was always summoned back in moments of storm and stress when she needed his help and advice.

When I was at Peking Tsŭ Hsi was a mystery; no foreigner even knew what was her origin—some went so far as to say that she was a mere slave girl; as a matter of fact her birth is now known[57] to have been of the highest. She was a lady of the Yeho-nala clan, a family descended from Yangkunu, the great Manchu Prince whose daughter married the founder of the Manchu Dynasty in China. She was therefore of right royal descent, and her pedigree was without a stain, though her father had held no higher rank than that of an officer in one of the eight banner corps.

The first wife of the Emperor Hsien Fêng died before he ascended the Dragon throne. When the period of mourning for his father, Tao Kwang, came to an end in 1852, a number of maidens from the chief Manchu families were sent for, out of whom the widow of the dead monarch was to choose a certain number suitable for the harem of the Son of Heaven; among them were the two ladies who as Tsŭ An and Tsŭ Hsi, Dowager Empress and Empress Mother, were to play such conspicuous parts in Chinese history.

Those who are interested in studying the last phase of the great Ching Dynasty must seek its story in Messrs. Bland and Backhouse’s pages. It will repay them. Few princes have left this world in more dramatic fashion than the Empress Tsŭ Hsi—the Old Buddha, as she loved to be called—whose last bequest to her people was the advice never again to allow a woman to exercise the Supreme Power, and not to allow the eunuchs of the Palace to interfere in affairs of State; she who had been ruled by such scoundrels as the two favourite eunuchs, Li Lien Ying and An Tê Hai!—a mass of contradictions to the last. That she was a woman of amazing ability is certain; competent authorities have praised her scholarship and held up her edicts as models of style; she was witty, though her wit sometimes was cruel, as when she told the murderous Governor of Tai Yuan Fu that “the price of coffins was going up”—a hint to commit suicide without delay, lest worse befall him; as, in spite of her protection, it ultimately did.

She was tyrannical and vindictive, yet she contrived to inspire affection and to persuade the people that she was kind-hearted; she was false and treacherous, but her power of attraction was supreme and the love between Jung Lu and herself, dating from boy-and-girl days, long before she entered the Palace, never waned. Unless she has been much maligned she had much the worst side of the character of Catherine the Great; like our own Elizabeth she was terrible in her rage, irresistible in her gentler moments. Altogether a woman of infinite variety, a scholar, a stateswoman, and an artist.

The edict in which she published to the world her degradation of Prince Kung in April, 1865, is like an Æschylean chorus. Success followed by insolence; insolence by Nemesis. I have no doubt that his somewhat abrupt manner might have been very offensive to august ears; but if it be true that he told the two Empresses that if they sat upon their thrones behind the curtain it was because he had so willed it, there is no wonder that an Empress imbued with the spirit of a Tudor queen should have refused to brook such language as that. In a month, however, the necessary man was once more called into favour, and then it was that I first saw him.

I had a great admiration for Prince Kung. It was impossible not to be attracted by his _bonhomie_ and his pleasant manner. To me, as I have said, he was always specially courteous. I do not suppose that he had any greater love of the foreign devils than the rest of his countrymen; but if he hated us he had the wisdom to mask his dislike. The documents which successive crises have brought to light have taught us many a lesson. Your Chinese gentleman is a great scribe, and rather than suffer his pen to be idle he will console himself in difficult moments by writing down voluminous indiscretions; and so it has become pretty evident that even those among the Chinese statesmen who professed the greatest friendship for us in their hearts hated us. The Empress Tsŭ Hsi herself, when she coaxed and talked soft nonsense to the wives of the Foreign Ministers, told Jung Lu that she knew how to win them to her side with rich gifts and honeyed words. How she fooled the dear ladies to their hearts’ content is well told by Messrs. Bland and Backhouse. Nor is this feeling to be wondered at. We were self-invited guests in her country; we needed the trade, export and import, of the Chinese who, until we came, were self-sufficing; opium and grey shirtings notwithstanding, in their view we brought nothing but trouble upon them.

Apart from his undoubted charm of manner, however much or however little it might mean, the Prince was a man of undoubted talent and strength of character. He was a very young man in 1860, not more than twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and utterly inexperienced in affairs, when his brother, the Emperor Hsien Fêng, who was dying by inches, bowed to the storm of foreign invasion and fled to Jêhol, leaving him in Peking as his representative, with full powers to carry on the Government. It was a fateful moment. The Allies were victorious. Yuen Ming Yuen, the summer palace, was in flames; the foreign barbarians were in possession of the Anting Mên, the northern gate of Peking; a number of prisoners, among them Parkes and Loch, were in the hands of the Chinese, by whom they had been shamefully treated; Prince Kung realized the position, and at the risk of his own life handed over the prisoners to their chiefs. He acted in the nick of time. Hardly had he done so than a messenger arrived post haste from Jêhol, ordering the instant execution of the prisoners. Had Prince Kung carried out the Emperor’s edict it is difficult to say what the consequences would have been. Certainly Peking would have been razed to the ground, and the Tartar dynasty would have been exterminated half a century before its knell was finally rung.

Prince Kung died in 1898. Had he lived a few years longer I believe that his sage advice and statesmanship, joined to the persistent warnings of Jung Lu, would have saved the Empress from the fatal step which she took of fostering the Boxer outrages, and the further disgrace of disavowing and executing the very men with whom she had conspired, and whom she had egged on to a doom from which she did not feel herself powerful enough to save them. But she listened to the dupes and ruffians who believed in the magic rites of the Boxers, and in spite of all her blandishments to the easily-gulled Legation ladies before and after, did all in her power to urge on the destruction of the besieged ministers, even when she was sending them presents of fruit and sweetmeats!

In vain did Jung Lu try to impress upon her that the bombardment “was worse than an outrage, it was a piece of stupidity;”[58] had the Prince been alive he no doubt, with forty more years’ experience of affairs to his credit, would have grasped the situation in 1900 as he did in 1860, and her two most trusted advisers would have saved the old Buddha’s face. No woman, empress or peasant, ever had a more devoted friend than she had in Jung Lu—but single-handed he was no match for the army of scoundrels and eunuchs by whom she was gulled.

Prince Kung’s signature was peculiar. I believe that it honestly represented his character. He did not sign his name or his title, but “Wu ssŭ hsin,” “no private heart,” _i.e._ “disinterested.”

Prince Kung’s right-hand man was Wên Hsiang, a Tartar statesman of great ability, whom it was a pleasure to meet. Like his chief, he was always conciliatory and prepossessing; had he had the Prince’s strength and moral courage he might have achieved great things—but there he broke down. The two other ministers whom we met the oftenest were Tung and Hêng Chi—the former a portly, good-humoured gentleman with a great reputation as a man of letters, who had turned into Chinese verse a prose translation by Wade of Longfellow’s Psalm of Life; the latter an old beau, his tail dyed and eked out with false hair as sedulously as the head-dress of an aged Court dame in Europe. He was very carefully attired, generally in a robe of pearl-grey silk turned up with blue. Sir Plume himself was not more justly vain of his amber snuffbox than Hêng Chi was of his tiny snuff bottle with its emerald green jade stopper, and the priceless bead of the same from which his peacock feather hung; his red button was of “baby-face” coral, and as for the pipe, chopsticks all studded with seed pearls, and other small treasures which were hidden in the recesses of his velvet boot and the delicate sugar-plums and restorative drugs which he produced from the same receptacle, they baffled description. A dear little old man withal, merry and well preserved, whom we all treated with great respect in gratitude for his kindness to Parkes and Loch when in their hideous captivity they stood sorely in need of a friend. Was he so very fond of the barbarian? Listen!

M. de Mas was Spanish Minister at Peking. He had negotiated a Treaty which for many months, even two or three years, could not be ratified on account of the many changes of ministry at Madrid. At last the ratification came, and M. de Mas, before going home, went to pay a farewell visit to His Excellency Hêng Chi. Now the said Excellency, being past seventy years of age, had a little boy, some four or five years old, of whom he was inordinately proud—he was the apple of his eye. The polite Spaniard, knowing this, asked to see the wonderful product. Highly flattered, Hêng Chi sent for the child, who arrived with his thumb in his mouth, after the manner of all children, Asiatic as well as European. “Make your bow to His Excellency!” said the proud father. Not a sign. The order was repeated, not once but twice. At last the little creature, taking its thumb out of its mouth, solemnly uttered the street cry, “Kwei tzŭ!” (“Devil!”) The intimate education of the harem was revealed, and poor old Hêng Chi was smothered in confusion. There is a general idea that all high mandarins are great scholars. That is not always the case. Our old dandy friend, for instance, was as little of a grammarian as Mrs. Squeers. Nevertheless he had all the Chinese gentleman’s reverence for letters, and kept a learned secretary to read to him and keep him up to the mark.

* * * * *

The terrible part of winter at Peking is the drought; month after month the Emperor goes to the Temple of Heaven to pray for rain or snow; month after month the god, whoever he may be, shuts his ears as fast as Ulysses’ ship’s crew. The cold is intense, witness the frozen river and sea; the fierce wind, tearing over the desert of Gobi, dries men up till their skins become parched, tight and powdery; their lips are chapped and the black dust, that scourge of Northern China, seems to penetrate the very marrow of their bones. Russia was not colder; but in Russia we had the brightness and the kindly snow, and the tinkling of the sleigh bells gave the winter life and gaiety. In Peking the winter was as gloomy as remorse. All communication with the outer world was cut off. Twice in the course of rather more than three months we received mails brought across Siberia and the frozen Baikal lake. We could not help feeling that we were caught like rats in a trap. Had the people chosen they could have made short work of us, and every now and then, by way of cheering us, our Chinese writers would bring in reports that on such and such a day there would be a rising against us. To these uncomfortable rumours we paid no heed. Indeed, in spite of some discomfort and the absence of “fireside enjoyments, home-born happiness,” I passed the time cheerily enough. I had plenty to do, and was getting on with the language, which I used to practise in fair weather upon the curio dealers of the Chinese city.

There was in especial a delightful little man, a bookseller in the Liu Li Chang—the Paternoster Row of Peking—who was a perfect cyclopædia of knowledge in all that concerned Chinese art; besides his rare books he always had a very small but very choice collection of beautiful objects—pottery, jade, crystal, cloisonné enamel, pietra dura; and at the feet of that Gamaliel, I used to listen to much antiquarian lore from a teacher who loved his subject and revered it. Over a cup of tea, or in summer of an iced decoction of date-plum juice, he would spin stories by the hour. He would tell how the last potter of the Lang family died two hundred and fifty years before, and how his secrets and recipes, inimitable treasures, were buried with him; how the Ming Emperor Ching T’ai (A.D. 1450) would with his own sacred hands work at cloisonné enamel, called after him Ching T’ai Lan—the blue of Ching T’ai; how in the days of Ch’ien Lung (1736-1796), the magnificent, a great patron of art, if a fine piece of crystal or jade were brought in as tribute from the western mountains, a committee of taste would sit to appraise its merits, deciding what shape should be given to it and to what artist it should be entrusted. A wonderful little man with a huge belly, which, as all men know, is the seat of learning, and in his case was choke full of it.

How pleased my small dilettante friend would have been if he could have foreseen that two or three specimens that came from him would find a home in the British Museum![59] Not that he ever heard of such a place, but his ideas were out of all proportion to his stature, and the thought of a national collection of works of art would have appealed to his large and æsthetic soul.

“Que la vie d’un diplomate serait agréable sans les chers collègues!” once exclaimed an eminent ambassador. Peking in 1865-6 would have fitted his Excellency to a nicety. We were a very small body, and other foreigners, save a few missionaries, were there none. General Vlangaly, the Russian Minister, was always very friendly. We used to go prowling in all sorts of out-of-the-way corners of the Chinese city searching out works of art. Were we always quite honest with one another on those excursions? Perhaps we were more so when we were taking a constitutional on the broad tops of the mighty walls which separate the two cities, when the General would expatiate by the hour on the great qualities of the object of his admiration, Sir Frederic Bruce. There I could cry, Amen.

Had there been any of what is called “rank, beauty and fashion” at Peking, its favourite promenade would have been the wall. There we found peace and quiet,—for the public invaded it not,—and comparative immunity from the demon dust. It was wonderful to look over the great city—the two great cities—to gaze upon the roofs of the inviolable Palace Grounds, and wonder what mysteries they were hiding. At the southern corner of the wall were the beautiful astronomical instruments, masterpieces in the interest of which European science entered into a happy alliance with Chinese art—the great Emperor K’ang Hsi with the Jesuit Father Verbiest—in order to furnish after two hundred and fifty years a prey for Prussian burglary. At intervals rose the great fantastic towers, threatening, cruel—suggesting unspeakable horrors; for in one of them, as we were told, dwelt the chief executioner, like Mauger the headsman in George Cruikshank’s etching, watching over the Five Lords—broad choppers like butchers’ instruments, on the handle of each of which is carved a grotesque human head.

Those who have wandered on the walls in the witching hours of night are said to have heard the sound of weird and unearthly strains, songs in which the Five Lords are wont to celebrate the bloody deeds in which for centuries and more they have played their part. Pray that you be not dealt with by the Benjamin of the Five Lords, for he is still young and skittish, not more than two hundred years old, loving to dally and toy with the heads of his victims, unlike his more reverend elders who will strike off your head at one blow, impressed with the serious nature of their duties.

No two countries had during the sixties so living an interest in China as England and Russia; with England it was a question of commerce; with Russia of commerce and frontier combined. Ever since Peter the Great’s time there had been Russian missions, political and religious, in Peking—partly in the interests of the Albazines, a small Russian colony on the Amur transplanted to Peking, who long since adopted the Chinese language, dress and customs, but retained their religion. The northern mission was under the Archimandrite Palladius, the southern under the Minister. That is how it happened that when the Allied Armies were before Peking in 1860 the then Minister, General Ignatieff, admiringly celebrated by the Turks afterwards when he was Ambassador at Constantinople for his talent in concealing the truth, tried to persuade Prince Kung that if only the Prince would yield to Russia’s requests, he would be able to ward off all danger by interceding with Lord Elgin. Prince Kung, young and new to affairs as he was, saw through the trick; “Codlin’s the friend, not Short,” was no use, the fly had no mind to enter the spider’s parlour.

Years after I met General Ignatieff at Contrexéville. How clever he was, and how well he gauged the Chinese! It was at the moment when the great Li Hung Chang was in Europe. Lord Salisbury flirted with him, and in the interest of Krupp and other firms the Kaiser made his children play about the great mandarin’s knee and call him “Uncle Li.” But it was all no use; Li went back to China and not a sixpenny order was given. How General Ignatieff and I laughed over the daily reports of all that sordid, commercial and absolutely barren love-making!

The Archimandrite Palladius, who had been in Peking ever since 1840, told me that he had never had any difficulty in holding intercourse with the people. The intermarriage of the Albazines with the Chinese had led to many conversions, and he, with the help of his three subaltern priests, was always able to keep up his services and schools.

There was no French Minister; M. De Bellonet was _chargé d’affaires_, a clever, very agreeable man who hated China and the Chinese, and cursed the day on which his fate sent him out of Europe. His chief delight was in plaguing the ministers of the Tsung Li Ya-mên. Rarely he left his own house; when he did it was either to “flanquer une pile” at the ministers, or to pay some inevitable visit of ceremony which he loathed. I asked him once why he never went to see any of the beautiful and curious sights in and around Peking. “À quoi bon?” he answered. “Lorsque je rentrerai à Paris je dirai à mes amis que j’ai vu tout cela; ça revient au même.”

One day I went to call upon him and found him with a small gang of coolies making some improvements. I asked him how he managed to give his orders without knowing a word of Chinese. He answered: “Mon cher ami, j’ai ici le meilleur interprète du monde—le Professeur Bambou”—and with that the little man viciously twirled a huge walking-stick. The coolies trembled.

He was very amusing and I liked him much, and was sorry when he made the great mistake of his life through not realizing the farness of the cry to Loch Awe. There was missionary trouble in Corea. De Bellonet felt certain that if he started a punitive expedition he would be supported by the Church and the Empress Eugénie. Promotion a certainty. But Corea is a long way off; it was further off in those days than it is now. My poor friend was disavowed, and after having been _chargé d’affaires_ in China, was sent as second secretary to one of the Scandinavian courts. Humpty Dumpty’s fall was not more terrible. As _attaché_ he had a curious little Flibbertygibbet of a man, very clever but always in hot water, a never-failing source of amusement and study to Wade. The interpreter was M. Fontanier, who was murdered at Tientsing in the massacre of 1870. I shall allude to that story later on.

The Prussian Minister soon went on leave, and the Don had gone home to Spain hugging his precious treaty. At the American Legation we had as _chargé d’affaires_ Dr. Wells Williams. He and his wife were a charming couple; no longer young, but both very handsome, like delightful old family portraits. They might have been members of the pilgrimage of the _Mayflower_. Dr. Wells Williams went out to China originally in some technical capacity in connection with the American missionary press at Canton; soon he drifted into sinological studies and wrote a dictionary and other works; but his _magnum opus_ was “The Middle Kingdom,” a book of great authority upon all Chinese matters up to the date which it reaches—a perfect cyclopædia of antiquarian, historical and political lore, a book of reference without which no man who cares for the Far East is completely furnished.

One evening when I was dining with him the talk turned upon paper currency. I made a note at the time of what he said, and reproduce it now as interesting at a time when we are going back to bank-notes of £1 and 10s. During the reign of the Emperor Shao Hsing of the Sung Dynasty (A.D. 1170) copper was scarce, so the Government issued two classes of Chao (notes), great notes (Ta Chao) of the value of from one thousand to five thousand copper cash, and small notes (Hsiao Chao) worth from one hundred to seven hundred cash. Officers were appointed everywhere to issue and receive these notes. They were renewable within seven years, and fifteen cash in every thousand were deducted for the expense of making them. They were said to be Kung ssŭ pien—convenient for both public and private use—and Marco Polo mentions them with praise. Dr. Wells Williams was always interesting, and his wife had all the charm of beauty, motherly kindness and soft gentleness, illuminated by an intellect of no common order.

Besides General Vlangaly there were at the Russian Legation M. Glinka, second secretary, a great gentleman, and Dr. Pogojeff, a very clever doctor and a good friend of mine, hailing from Odessa. That, in addition to the Russian Archimandrite, was all the foreign community of Peking in 1865. Glancing back over this short sketch of our life in Peking, I am struck by one very sad thought. Of all the men that I have mentioned so far as I know not one is still alive. I alone am left, the last of the Mohicans.

So the year 1865 died, and 1866 reigned in its stead.

It does not often happen to a man to keep three new years’ feasts in one year. This is what befell me at Peking. On the 1st of January at early dawn our Chinese servants came to bend the knee and wish us all happiness and prosperity; twelve days later good manners demanded that I should go and salute General Vlangaly and the good Archimandrite Palladius; and finally on Feb. 14th crackers and squibs announced the approaching birth of the Chinese new year—characters of good omen were pasted on the doorposts of the houses, from which streamers of pierced red paper fluttered like lace.

On this day it is essential that there should be much noise and popping of fireworks, for there are many demons to be exorcized, evil spirits of the past year—especially the spirit of poverty—to be driven away; on the morrow Peking must be in gala trim, and in the din and clatter of drums and tambourines and cymbals and clappers and gongs and other instruments of percussion and aural torture, there will be much joy. Outside the huge main gate there will be a great gathering in front of a small temple roofed with yellow imperial tiles, the shrine of Kwan Ti, the God of War, where the faithful with many genuflexions and reverent bows will receive from the priest, for cash, a slip of bamboo drawn at haphazard to be exchanged for a piece of paper upon which will be inscribed the fate of the votary for the coming year. In the street of bookshops there will be a huge gathering with “all the fun of the fair,” toys, quack doctors, jugglers, beggars, mountebanks, a dentist with a great store of extracted teeth, mostly sound, above all—noise! and there will be a peepshow in which all the famous places of the world will be represented, and St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Bay of Naples will do duty as special features of the Liu Kiu Islands! Not so very different from the Windsor Fair of old Eton days after all! “Homo est animal bipes, implume, et cachinnans”—the same the world over.

By way of varying our amusements we managed with some difficulty to flood a small courtyard for skating. The ice never held good for long, for the dust made it impossible, and then we had to begin all over again. Once we rode out to the Summer Palace to picnic and skate upon the great lake. That was delightful. We were none of us great performers, but such as they were, our twists and turns excited the wonder of the Chinese soldiers. What amazed them above all was going backwards; that they could not understand, for although skating was part of the drill of the braves of the Tartar Banners, it was of a very elementary character: just a bone skate tied on to one foot, the other foot being used to push. I wonder what they would have said if they could have seen Mr. Grenander, or one of the great artists in patinology.

Happy as I was at Peking, and delightful as are my memories of the grim old place, I must admit that the winter was long and dreary enough. But at last one day, as M. Vlangaly and I were wandering up and down on the city wall, we spied a small, half-starved weed trying to poke its nose out of a chink between two stones. The dove was not more welcome to the Ark. It meant spring. Soon the view from the wall would undergo a transformation. First all the courtyards and gardens of the temples and dwellings of the great people would be bright and gay with the blossoms of peaches and apricots and all manner of flowering shrubs, and later on—in summer—the huge city would be like one vast park, with here and there a patch of shabby red wall and a glimmer of yellow tiles—the Imperial colours—peeping through the wealth of greenery.

The coming of spring was all the more looked forward to by me as I had in prospect a trip to Mongolia; as a matter of fact, I made two such journeys, and very delightful they were; but of these I have written an account elsewhere.[60]

I passed the weeks of great heat in a temple even more delightful than that of the Azure Clouds—a monastery some twenty-three miles from Peking, very secluded, hidden among the mountains, in the midst of enchanting scenery. Ta chio ssŭ, the Temple of Great Repose, stands in a perfect nest of trees, junipers, pines, firs and poplars. Out of the living rock behind the Pavilion of the Resting Clouds a delicious fountain plays into a fern-clad pool, from which it finds its way through a succession of courtyards past the “Hall of the Four Proprieties” in which there is an Imperial throne. Could a man wish for a happier spot in which to work and dream?

Meanwhile I was under orders from the Foreign Office to leave Peking and go to Japan. At the end of September I started.

How well—let me say it again—Baroness von Heyking understood the magic of Peking and its power of fascination amid so much that is sordidly repellent! As I sadly rode out of the gate at which I had entered so full of enthusiasm some eighteen months before, I met a miserable beggar, a poor creature so filthy and degraded as to be scarcely human. Ragged and bare almost of everything save sores and clotted dirt as he was, I almost envied that unhappy wretch. He was going in, I was going out—and well I knew that never should I return.