Part 21

Farquhar joined me on the 20th July, bringing with him Dr. Pogojeff from the Russian summer quarters at Pa Ta Chu—a group of temples nearer Peking, where most of the Legations spend the hot season. They are delighted with the beauty of this place. Farquhar, who is a very clever artist, has made some lovely sketches. July the 25th was the fifteenth day of the Chinese moon, a high day with our Buddhist friends. On ordinary days the novices do the drum and gong beating, and intone the prayers (which indeed never seem to cease), but on the 1st and 15th of each moon the higher priests—whose everyday duties seem to be confined to smoking infinite and infinitesimal pipes of tobacco, and sipping cup after cup of amber tea—buckle to the work themselves, leaving their ease and dignity to don their black and yellow robes, and perform service with the rest.

One day out walking we were accosted by a man who told us that he was out for a holiday, and insisted on taking us with him to a village where there was “Jo nao” (fun) going on. We could not resist, so we went with him, and in a by-lane of the said village, on one of the threshing-floors, we found a small raised stage. After we had waited some time, during which the whole village had time to turn out for a good stare at us, a man made his appearance with a very small drum, three pairs of castanets, and three gongs. He was followed by three ladies—one old and two young, and all hideous—and then the performance began with an instrumental overture by the whole strength of the company, a rattling and jangling which lasted five minutes, and sent us off with our fingers in our ears. We gave the poor people a dollar and were glad to escape; but the villagers were highly delighted, for were not these real actors come all the way from Peking, and, therefore, of course eminent? Mario and Grisi, starring in the provinces, never gave more pleasure to a country audience.

Frightfully hot weather. Do you remember the old quatrain written with a diamond on a pane of glass in the old Foreign Office in Downing Street:—

Je suis copiste, Affreux métier, Joyeux ou triste, Toujours copier!

Copying despatches with the thermometer at 100° in the shade, with a basin of water and a towel at one’s side for very necessary hand-wiping, and a pad of blotting-paper over the blank part of one’s paper, is indeed an _affreux métier_.

I find that Englishmen who can’t speak the language are a little capricious as to exchanging courtesies which the Chinese press upon them. Sometimes it amuses them immensely to stop and talk twaddle with the natives through an interpreter, while at others, especially if there is just a touch of headache in the case, the Chinamen get short answers. To-day as we were walking we passed a group of peasants, one of whom as usual called out civilly, “Hsie yi hsie pa?” (Won’t you sit down a bit?)

_F._—“What the devil’s he saying?”

_Chinaman_ (thinking to be intelligible by being still louder)—“Hsie yi hsie pa!”

_F._—“Don’t make that damned noise!”

_I._—“He’s only asking you to sit down.”

_F._ (savagely)—“Well, he needn’t make such a confounded row about it!”

_Chinaman_ (to his friends)—“The gentleman is not very quiet,” as if he were speaking of a restive horse.

_Friends_ (assenting)—“Ah! these foreigners! they are indeed terrible people. Unsurpassable! unsurpassable!”

The poor villagers would have been too civil to utter their opinion if they had thought they were understood, but I had held my tongue to hear what they would say.

On the 16th of August we had a delightful addition to our family party in the shape of my old friend Dick Conolly, who has come out as second secretary—the cheeriest of companions.[17]

Next day he and I rode over to see a very famous temple, Hei Lung Tan, a shrine dedicated to the Black Dragon, which was built in the Ming dynasty and repaired in Ka̔ng Hsi’s reign. It is an imposing edifice built in three tiers with roofs of the imperial yellow tiles. Here the Black Dragon Prince rests in great dignity. He is surrounded by six satellites—a monster who presides over the thunder, a woman who rules the lightning, a clerk with pen and book who writes down orders for the rainfall, and three others whose functions are not so clear. Of human attendants there was visible but one priest, very dirty and saturated with garlic. The Black Dragon being, like all dragons in this country, a water deity or spirit, there is of course a pond in which he may disport himself. If his priest would only do the same!

The country people are really very civil and kind. The other day we were wandering through a village nestled away among the hills, when several of the peasants came out and brought us delicious pears. One old gentleman, a personage evidently, was just preparing a great sacrifice outside his house to ward off the devil. He had erected an altar on which were placed various fruits and grapes, and in front of it was a great paper boat with dolls in it. This was to be burnt, and with the letting off of many crackers would complete the sacrifice. This, it appears, being the 15th day of the 7th moon, is the feast of departed spirits—a sort of All Souls’ Day. It is the anniversary on which the pious Chinaman worships and burns incense at the tombs of his ancestors—the custom over which the Dominicans and Franciscans on the one side, and the Jesuits on the other, started their great feud in the days of the Emperor Ka̔ng Hsi.[18] There are also on this day great ceremonies in honour of the tutelary saints of towns, some deceased minister or warrior appointed by the Emperor as guardian over each town or part of a town. Great honour is paid to one of these patron saints, and men will flock to his shrine to dedicate themselves to his service, so that a man, for instance, who is a groom in this life, will go and offer himself to be the saint’s groom in the next world. The effigy of this “Lord of the Walls,” as he is called, is paraded through the town where he is supposed to search out evil-doers. There is also a Prince of departed spirits whose shrine is largely attended on this day. A stage is raised and priests are engaged to read prayers and distribute food for the spirits, that those who have died a violent death may be released from Purgatory. At midnight huge paper images, placed in a boat in order that the spirits may pass the river Nai-ho, a sort of Styx, are solemnly burnt, and the feast is over. The feast is called Yu Lang Hai, “The assembly of the Bowl and Flower.” My teacher explains this, saying that on board the boat there is a Buddhist god called Ti Tsang Wang, who gives the ghosts of the departed a bowl and flower as a token of release from their sins, so that they may cross the river which is a gulf between them and Paradise.

LETTER XXIX

PEKING, _7th September 1866_.

Some time ago I was invited to go to the play by the great curio merchant here—Han Chang-kwei-ti. As the Pekingese theatres have a great celebrity, I ought to give you some account of them.

There are a great many theatres in the Chinese city, their situation being marked by a few masks, lay figures, images of tortoises or dragons, or other queer beasts; though indeed no sign is necessary to indicate their whereabouts, for the infernal din which comes from them the whole day long would guide any one to them. The theatres are the property of restaurateurs, who engage a company of actors to come and play for so many days, so that the troupes are constantly changing quarters. You go in by a long passage, which leads into a lofty and spacious hall, lighted from the top, and surrounded by a gallery. In the pit, or body of the hall, are tables at which the people sit drinking tea, eating sweetmeats, or with papers of fried melon and gourd seeds before them. This is the place of the poorer people; the rank and fashion go to the gallery, part of which is divided into private boxes. At one end of the hall is a raised platform, without scenes or appliances of any kind, open at the sides, and separated from the dressing-room by two doors with curtains; at the back of the stage sit the orchestra, five or six performers, all of whom play upon several instruments, which they take up in turn, according to the character of the music. The chief instruments are fiddles, lutes, clarionets, flutes, a sort of mouth organ, and any number of variety of gongs, drums, and cymbals. I talk of fiddles, etc., for simplicity’s sake, but you know a Chinese fiddle is no more like a European fiddle than a Chinaman with his pig-tail is like a European in a chimney-pot hat.

Nothing could be more rude or primitive than the state of the drama. The tragedies are all strutting and mouthing; roaring in a bass voice that seems to come out of the actor’s boots, or squeaking in a falsetto shrill enough to set your teeth on edge. The whole of the words are declaimed in a sort of recitative, which is more than half drowned by the drums and gongs. The language of tragedies is the old literary style and very obscure, and as if to make it still more difficult to the Pekingese, the actors all affect the Soochow dialect as the mother-tongue of the stage. The consequence of this is that even a well-educated Chinaman will make a very poor guess at the plot unless he has read the tragedy beforehand. Not understanding what is going on does not, however, seem to affect the enjoyment of the audience, nine-tenths of whom could no more tell you what the play is all about than I could.

As there is no scenery or stage appliances a great deal must be supplied by the imagination. A lady coming in with an attendant in the plain clothes of a Pekingese coolie, holding horizontally on each side of her two flags on which are painted wheels and clouds, is a fairy entering in her chariot of clouds. A warrior brandishes a whip to show that he is on horseback; to dismount, he makes a pirouette on one leg and throws down his whip; to remount, he makes a pirouette on the other leg and picks it up again. But let me tell you the plot of the tragedy I saw, as Han Chang-kwei-ti explained it to me.

A warrior in white has an everlasting feud with a rebel in red, who always gets the better of him, and performs the most astounding _pas seuls_, making quite appalling faces (heightened by streaks of red, blue, and white paint) to the terror of the whole empire, as represented by five old men and two little boys in white. The warrior in white, after a series of stage combats with the rebel in red, which it would break the heart of our best pantomimists to imitate, sits down in an arm-chair and tucks up one leg under him, by which the audience are to understand that he has gone to sleep in a lonely forest. He then dreams that the ghost of his father appears to him to teach him a trick and give him a sword, by the aid of which he may circumvent the rebel in red. The dream is represented by his getting up from his chair and acting through the scene with his father’s ghost, after which he sits down in the same posture as before. During one of his dead father’s speeches, which may have struck him, as they did me, as rather tedious, the actor felt a little thirsty, so he called for a cup of tea, which a coolie brought to him, and he drank it with his face to the audience, gargling his throat and spitting out the last mouthful without the smallest regard for the situation. Well, the father having stalked out, the warrior tucked up his leg again and then awoke. A final combat of many rounds then terminates in the victory of the warrior, obtained by the grace of his father’s sword. The rebel is slain and walks out, and the victorious army, consisting of four wheezy old men, make a triumphal entry into the gates of the capital, which are signified by two coolies holding up two poles with a blue cotton curtain in which a hole has been cut.

The dresses of the tragedians are magnificent. They are stiff with gold and embroidery, and immensely valuable. The masks and painting of the faces are to the last degree grotesque and hideous. The beards and wigs are coarse and clumsily contrived.

After two or three historical pieces have been played a farce follows, and indeed it is time that the proceedings should be enlivened a little. The farces are not difficult to follow (though I cannot say that I understand writers whom I know to be ignorant of Chinese, and who say that the acting of the Pekingese comedians is so good that the whole play is quite intelligible; I know I was out of my depth often enough, in spite of the admirable acting, and of my being able to understand a great deal of the dialogue). The dialect is the pure Pekingese vernacular, and the dialogue is spoken with the exception of a few songs. The women’s parts are played by boys, who imitate to perfection the mincing gait and affectations of the Chinese women—“the carriage as graceful as the weeping willow”—sham small feet are attached to their own boots in order to carry out the illusion, which is quite perfect. These boys are bought in the south and trained up as apprentices. They receive no pay from the head of their troupe, but they earn largish sums by attending the banquets of the Chinese men about town; when they are not actually playing, they go up into the private boxes to the richer visitors, whom they amuse with the last gossip of the green-room.

The farces are too indecent for me to do more than give you a mere sketch of one. Medea does not stop short of doing anything _coram populo_, so I give you a sort of Bowdler’s family edition of the plot of one that I saw.

A young gentleman of great wealth of the name of Wang has been ruined by a mistress named Yu Tang Chun, who, strange to say, although his money is all spent, still preserves a hankering for him. He, on the other hand, finding himself without a penny, is ashamed to go near her, so he retires to a temple to live by his wits. The scene opens with Yu Tang Chun bewailing his absence and her solitude in a long recitative and song (rather pretty for Chinese music). To her enters the low comedy man—such a good actor, and so full of fun!—who tells her where her lover is, and all about his deplorable state. She determines to go and see him, and take him a present of 300 taels (£100) to enable him to go to Peking and pass his examination. Accordingly, she sets out, and a table with the five offerings is placed upon the stage to represent a temple, to which she goes under the pretence of burning joss stick. As soon as she sees her lover the two set up a wild shriek, and rush into one another’s arms. Over what follows it is absolutely necessary to draw a curtain. The play ends by her giving Wang the money. He starts for Peking, and returns in a second or two, having passed a brilliant examination and obtained high office. Sometimes, but rarely, girls are present among the audience, and when this is the case, it is only fair to say that these pieces—the grossness of which passes all belief—are not given. On those occasions the playbill is made up of military and historic dramas, the propriety of which is as undeniable as their dulness.

The price of admission to the best theatres at Peking is one tiao (about 8d.) to the pit, something more to the gallery, and a private box costs twelve tiaos. As the whole thing is, as I said before, a speculation of the _restaurateur’s_, refreshments are hawked about during the whole performance. There is a man who carries about a long pipe (like Herr von Joel with his cigars at Evans’s), who is very persistent in seeking custom. If it is hot weather the people in the pit take off their coats and lounge naked to the waist, sitting out the whole performance from noon till seven P.M., after which they pack up what remains to them of their fruit and melon seeds, and go off home, not having had near enough of it.

I have been three or four times, and find that a couple of hours of the din and smoke are as much as I can stand, besides which I find that eating po-po out of politeness interferes with one’s dinner.

My time here is drawing very short. When I told my teacher that I was going away he hummed and hawed, and shifted about uneasily. At last he summoned up courage and said, “Sir, I have one last favour to ask of you. The teachers of the West are very cunning in medicine; they possess many secrets. I have no child, and it is a great sorrow! Bitter is the life of the man who is childless! In vain have we addressed our prayers to the goddess Kwan Yin, my wife remains barren. Sir, if you could give me some drug or some charm to remove this evil, for small favours one can find thanks, but for so great a favour none!”

Dear to man is the fame for abstruse learning! But I was obliged to confess myself at fault.

I start for Japan on Monday week, and then good-bye to Peking!

APPENDIX

HOW MANDARINS ARE MADE

The literature of no country is so abundant in noble sentiments as that of China. Happy, indeed, would be the people who should be governed according to the precepts of Confucius, of Mencius, and of Lao Tsŭ! The highest moral and political principles are in every mouth, at the tip of every pen. From the first day of his entering school the Chinese boy learns unctuously to recite the most virtuous precepts of the sages, yet learning is the one road to fortune through robbery, peculation, and extortion in their most refined shapes. With every rise in rank the opportunities of robbing the “Hundred Names” and defrauding the state are multiplied in a ratio increasing like the value of carats in diamonds: the wealth amassed by some of the great mandarins must be something fabulous. Take as an instance the war with Japan. The Chinese soldier, when properly led and fairly treated is an excellent fighting man. It is difficult to believe that the sons of the braves who under Tsêng Kwo Fan and San Ko Lin Sin, so stubbornly defended the bridge against the French and English in 1860, could have been driven from an impregnable position like Fort Arthur by the Japanese some thirty years later. But what troops could fight without food, arms, ammunition? Food, arms, ammunition, and pay had all found their way into the pockets of the mandarins. Would the brigade of Guards itself have stood to be mown down without being able to fire an effective shot in return? I was told on high authority that at the famous naval battle of the Yalu, which some experts have quoted as an object lesson in the naval warfare of the future, on the Chinese side only three live shells were fired, one of which disabled the Japanese flagship, and sent her steaming away into space. The comparison of the bankers’ books of some of the great mandarins before and after the war would be an interesting study.

The mandarins—one is compelled to use the old Portuguese word for want of a better—are recruited from two classes: the hereditary nobility, and those who obtain office nominally by examination, but often by purchase.

The hereditary nobility is composed of the members of the Imperial family with the five ranks, Kung, Hou, Po, Tsŭ, Nan,—which it has been the fashion to translate by duke, marquis, earl, viscount, baron.

The highest rank in the Imperial family is that of Chin Wang—“related prince,” or as we should say “Prince of the Blood.” In some cases this title is continued from generation to generation; in others there is a sliding scale downward through the ranks of Pei Lo and Pei Tsŭ to that of Kung or duke, below which members of the Imperial family do not descend.

In the same way with subjects, the rank of Kung is sometimes transmitted; in others the son of a Kung becomes a Hou, the son of a Hou a Po, and so on. The inheritor of a title must be the eldest son of the one legitimate wife, and not of a secondary wife, for although polygamy exists in China, there is, except in the case of the Emperor’s family, only one legitimately married wife, nor in her lifetime can there be another. The younger sons of nobles, even of the Imperial family, have no rank either by right or by courtesy; but the latter are generally raised to rank by being appointed general officers. Patents of nobility cannot be bought, at any rate not in theory.

The representative of the eldest branch of a family can, in the event of his being childless, adopt the child of a younger branch, and the child so adopted inherits the title. It sometimes happens that a younger brother who has become rich will bribe his eldest brother to adopt his child to the exclusion of the lawful heir and his issue.

The sovereign is, as with us, the fountain of honour, and it is he who confers these titles of nobility, which are accompanied by grants of land. As a general rule the land assigned to a Kung or a Hou would not exceed a circumference of 100 li = 33 miles, to a Po 70 li, and to the two lesser ranks 50 li.

Conspicuous among the nobles of China are the Pa Ta Chia, “the Eight great Families.” These are the descendants of the eight Princes who, waiving any claim to the throne, followed the reigning dynasty from Manchuria. Their rank remains unchanged for all generations. The representative of one of these, the Prince of I, was famous in the war of 1860. A year later, at the time of the Prince of Kung’s _coup d’état_, he fell into disgrace, and was “presented with the white kerchief” (made to commit suicide).