Part 8

It is only fair to say, on the other hand, that the residence of foreign representatives at Peking during the last four years has certainly been productive of some good. As an evidence of this, Dr. Martin, an American missionary, has produced, at the expense of the Board of Foreign Affairs and with the co-operation of a commission specially appointed by the Prince of Kung, a translation into the Chinese language of Wheaton’s _International Law_. To this Tung-ta-jên, whom I mentioned in my last letter to you as the translator of Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” has added a preface. This preface, coming as it does from the vice-president of the College of Historians, one of the chiefs of the lettered class in China, adds great authority to the work, the publication of which is certainly an event of importance in the history of the country.

LETTER VII

PI YÜN SSŬ, _7th July 1865_.

You will see by the date of this that we have beaten a retreat from the dust, heat, and filth of the city, and that our “villegiatura” has begun. Indeed, Peking was becoming insupportable. The thermometer when we left was standing at 108° in the shade, the highest degree which it has reached for these three years, and I was heartily glad to turn my back upon the Legation gates.

The plain between these hills and the town is very beautiful. It is thickly studded with farmsteads, knolls of trees, and tombs, which are always the prettiest spots in China, for as a balance against the dirt and squalor in which they pass their lives, the Chinese choose the most romantic and delightful places for their final habitations. The soil is wonderfully fertile, and yields two crops in the year, so that usually the plain bears every appearance of prosperity; but this year, owing to the excessive heat and drought, the first crop has failed, and the fields are parched and burnt up. In vain the Emperor prays for rain; it only comes in rare and scanty showers, and the fierce sun bakes the ground harder than ever. The country folk are in great distress, and food is at famine prices. Yet they seem happy and contented, and when we asked one of the priests here whether there was no danger of a famine riot, he answered, “Oh, no! the people about here are too great fools to get up a disturbance.” Those that are hardest up will sell their daughters into bondage, and there will be an end of the matter.

The hills west of Peking are the Switzerland of Northern China. They are not very high nor extraordinarily beautiful, but there are some very pretty gorges and valleys, richly wooded, and at any rate the air is fresh and pure. Every gorge has a perfect nest of temples, built by the pious emperors of the Ming dynasty and the earlier Tartars, for which good deeds the _Corps diplomatique_ at Peking cannot be too grateful. Properly speaking, according to the rules of their order, the Buddhist monks are forbidden to receive any money for the hospitality which they offer to strangers, so when the Chinese go to stay at a temple they restore or beautify some part of it as a return; but we prefer paying a few dollars, and in spite of their statutes the arrangement seems to suit the monks as well as it does us.

Our temple is called “Pi Yün Ssŭ,” “the temple of the azure clouds,” a romantic name, and certainly the place is worthy of it. It is built on terraces ascending the hill to a length of about half a mile, and on every terrace is a shrine, each more beautiful (if that is the proper word to apply to the grotesque buildings of this country) than the last; black and white marble statues and vases, bronze dragons, alto-relievos and basso-relievos representing kings and warriors, gods and goddesses, and fabulous monsters, all of rare workmanship,—inscriptions graven on marble and stone, and bronze or gilt upon wood, meet one at every step; and the whole is set in a nest of rock-work, fountains, woods, and gardens. At the top is a small temple more in the Indian than the Chinese style, and here there is a very curious idol with ten heads, three large ones at the bottom, from which three smaller ones spring, in their turn carrying three lesser ones surmounted by a single very small head. The hands are in proportion. This little place commands a panoramic view over the plain, with the walls and towers of Peking in the distance.

Our habitation consists of several little houses on one side of the temple; we dine in an open pavilion, surrounded by a pond and artificial rockery, with ferns and mosses in profusion; high trees shade it from the sun, and close by us a cold fountain pours out of the rock into the pond, in which we can ice our wine to perfection. The pond was dried up, and the fountain had been turned from its channel, when we arrived; but we got together a few coolies, and soon set that right. Fancy our feelings on coming here, when we were told that if there came no rain we could have no bath! This too in a climate where the hot nights make a morning wash doubly necessary. The priest had hardly said the word, when a tremendous thunderstorm broke over the mountain and set our minds at rest, and next morning we discovered that we could have the most delicious natural bath. Our life here is very simple and very, very dull. We are only two—Saurin and myself. We rise at any hour after daybreak, breakfast at eight, dine at three; after dinner we go for a ride, or a scramble over the mountain, and come home to tea at about eight or nine. We sit smoking our cheroots for perhaps an hour, talking always about home and watching the fire-flies, that, according to Chinese tradition, served as lamps to Confucius and his disciples. A visit from or to the Russian Legation, who have got a temple at about an hour and a half’s ride from here, is the only break to the monotony of our daily life. I have my teacher with me here, and work with him at the language from breakfast to dinner; that is my serious occupation, and about as hard a task as one could wish for. I carry about my lessons for the rest of the day written on paper fans—a capital dodge for keeping one’s work before one. We are rather bothered by mosquitoes, and a most venomous little insect called the sand-fly, yellow in colour, and smaller than a midge, which is lucky, for if he were of the size of a blue-bottle I should think his bite would be fatal. There are quantities of scorpions too; one of our men was stung the other day. We heard a great wailing and crying one night, for all the world like an Irish wake; next morning our servants told us that the cook’s assistant had been stung in the hand, and that he had died in an hour, but that he had come to rights again, and was getting well. This sounded something like being “kilt entirely.” The man’s presence at the temple illustrates a custom of the country; of course, as is the way of the East, no one can move without a large retinue. There must be a valet for each man, and a groom for each horse, and a man or two to do nothing, and two or three more to look on and see them do it. But besides this, like Thackeray’s description of Irishmen and their poor relations, no Chinaman is so poor or mean but what he can find a poorer and a meaner to do part of his work. A coolie earning three dollars a month will pay another one dollar a month to help him, and he in his turn will give a boy a few cash, that he may enjoy his ease and his opium. The man who was stung was the cook’s poor relation. Although his brother and the other men supposed him to be dying, and finally to have actually died, they never came and told us, nor did they get any assistance for him. We heard the noise, but one of our servants has a very pretty little talent for tickling a lute, and there was so little difference between the sounds of the wake and those of the concerts he gets up, that we thought the hullabaloo was only a melancholy variety of the latter, so we took no notice of it. As far as Chinese remedies are concerned, better be without them. It is almost impossible to believe the amount of ignorance which exists in China about medicine and surgery. Native doctors, who never dissect, are utterly ignorant for the most part of the position of the heart, the lungs, and the other principal organs. They are ignorant of the difference between arteries and veins, nor do they understand the circulation, looking upon the several pulses of the body as the effects of separate causes. All diseases are attributed by them to their favourite doctrine, “hot and cold influences.” They have a certain knowledge of the use of drugs, and of mercury in particular, but their remedy above all others is acupuncture. Some days ago my groom had an attack of diarrhœa, and his medical man pricked him underneath the tongue for it! Sir John Davis tells a story of a doctor who wanted to prick a man for hernia. If in these prickings they cut into an artery, and the man dies, why, so much the worse for him! it is fate. Astrology plays a great part in their medical art, certain planets being supposed to influence certain parts of the body. It is one among many instances in which one sees the analogy between the present condition of China and Europe in the Middle Ages.

LETTER VIII

PEKING, _8th July 1865_.

We have ridden in to spend three days, copying despatches and sighing for our “cool grot.” The town seemed too beastly as we came in. Peking, as Southey said of Exeter, “is ancient and stinks.” The “Beggar’s Bridge,” which we have to pass every time we go into the Chinese city, and nearly every time we go out, is the most loathsome and stinking exhibition that it ever was my fate to come across. Here every day a hundred or two of the most degraded specimens of humanity congregate and beg. By far the greater majority of them are clothed only in dirt, and all sorts of repulsive cutaneous complaints; some have a linen rag, but it is worn over the shoulders, and in no way serves as a decent covering. Lice, mange, scrofula, leprosy, and filth are allowed to remain undisturbed by water or drugs. They are a stock-in-trade, and as such rather encouraged than not. It is a sickening sight when these creatures come and perform the ko̔to̔u to us, prostrating themselves in the dust or mud, which is scarcely as dirty as themselves. I spare you a description of the food I have seen them eating. If ever I get back to Europe, I feel that the Beggar’s Bridge will be a nightmare to me for the rest of my life. All this strikes one with double force after spending a fortnight in the country among the healthy, sunburnt natives of the hills. I assure you that they look quite handsome after the yellow townsfolk. It would amuse our friends at home, if they could see us the centre of a group of thirty or forty of these brown villagers, in some out-of-the-way valley where Englishmen are about as often seen as Chinamen in Yorkshire. They ask us all the most absurd questions about ourselves, our clothes, and our dogs, who are quite as great objects of wonder as ourselves. They never will believe that Nou-nou is not some variety of sheep, and Saurin’s pointer, a very handsome young dog of French royal breed, comes in for much admiration. The women are all frightened at us, and keep well out of the way; we see them timidly peering out of their doors at the foreign barbarians who kill little children, and use their eyes for photography, but it is seldom that anything but a stout old matron of great courage will venture to come near us. The people are beginning to get rid of their prejudices against us, and to see that we mean them no injury; at any rate they are quite friendly, and seem to look upon us as harmless eccentric creatures, but very ugly. As for personal safety, no one ever dreams of carrying arms, either by day or by night, and nobody is ever insulted or attacked.

We hear bad news of mercantile prospects in the south. Notwithstanding their having been hit so hard last season, the merchants have been speculating again more rashly than ever, and vying with each other in buying up tea. The Chinese are quite up to this, and have leagued together to raise prices. The nearer our merchants have got to the tea-growing districts by means of the opening of new ports, the dearer tea has become. Tea was never so cheap as when Canton was the only outlet to the market. This seems a paradox, but it is easily explained. The merchants competing to buy on the spot have caused the Chinese growers to send up their prices to any height, and the foreigner cannot transport the tea south so cheaply as the native, so that both the original price paid to the farmers, and the cost of transport, have been raised, and the merchants are paying the penalty of their own hunger for new markets.

As a set-off against this bad news, we have good tidings with regard to the rebels, who were in Shantung; they appear to be dispersed, some south and some west, and the capital is safe. For once the Chinese can lay the praise to themselves, they having acted without foreign aid.

LETTER IX

PI YÜN SSŬ, _21st July 1865_.

I daresay you will be curious to hear something more of our temple life than I have been able to tell you hitherto. We have been exploring the neighbourhood in all directions, and certainly there is plenty to be seen, although all the points of interest are temples, either Buddhist or Taoist, and the description of one might hold good for all. The most curious of these is at a distance from us of about a mile and a half; it is called Wo-Fo-Ssŭ, “the temple of the Sleeping Buddha,” from a huge sleeping idol which it contains, about 20 feet in length. At first I thought the figure was meant for a female, a sort of Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, but the attendant priest assured me that it was meant for Buddha himself. The idol lies sleeping in a huge shrine, surrounded by a number of lesser saints. His slippers, made of softest velvet and satin, are lying at his feet ready for him to put on whenever it shall suit his Holiness to get up; each of his attendants is likewise provided with slippers. He has been sleeping now for more than 700 years, so he brings no great profit to the shoemaking trade. The shrine is held in great reverence, and is decorated with an inscription by the Emperor Chien-Lung himself, who seems never to have lost an opportunity of writing and building; of both these favourite pastimes of his, Wo-Fo-Ssŭ bears examples, for leading out of one of the courts of the temple is a most beautiful little Imperial abode, now falling into decay, like everything else here, but which once must have been perfectly lovely. Of all the pavilions, courts, rockeries, and shrines, the Lotus Pond alone remains in all its glory. Equally in ruins is an Imperial hunting lodge, close by our temple, standing in the middle of a deer-park which reaches up to the top of the mountain, fenced in by a high wall. This, too, was a favourite resort of Chien-Lung, and he must have spent a king’s ransom in decorating it; a gate or two, here and there a summer-house, and one pagoda of yellow and green tiles, show what it must once have been. But the whole place has crumbled to pieces, and the deer and game stray at pleasure through what were once the gorgeous apartments of the Emperor. The yellow tiles here, worked in the highest relief with dragons, griffins, lions, and other emblems, are marvellous specimens of potter’s work. Whole pediments are made in small pieces and so cunningly joined together that they look like one block. A very small annual expense would have kept the place in perfect repair; but to keep in repair is not an Asiatic attribute. Alongside one of the paths of the park, which is full of the most delightful resting-places, I noticed the remains of what looked like a number of stalls at a fancy-fair, and on inquiring I found that they were little shops at which it was the privilege of the eunuchs of the palace to sell trinkets and other trifles to the Emperor as he passed with his wives.

Among other things that Chien-Lung did for these temples, he imported from the palace of Jo Hol in Manchuria a quantity of a kind of tree cigala, by Europeans called wee-wees from the noise they make, by the Chinese called Tatsŭ-chi-liao. They are the most curious insects, and make a clatter which is as if it were produced by the metal tongues of an accordion. They go on all day and drive one nearly distracted. Sometimes one can hardly hear oneself speak, but the Chinese delight in them, and my teacher told me the story of their introduction as if he had been speaking of an importation of nightingales. Happily at Peking they declined to flourish; there we have only a lesser and more piano sort, which it is an Imperial amusement at certain times of the year to catch off the trees with long bamboo rods tipped with bird-lime. The Chinese certainly find pleasure in what are to us very disagreeable noises. Fancy a flight of pigeons with Eolian harps tied to their tails! The first time I heard it above my head I thought something dreadful must be going to happen. However, that fancy has a practical side to it, for it keeps off the hawks which abound at Peking.

We have been revelling for two days in the very rare luxury of wet weather. What a pleasure a real rainy day is in this burnt-up climate! a day when the hills look as if they might be Scotch moors, and the temples and pavilions as if they ought to melt away and be replaced by the clubs in Pall Mall. On these wet days we wander about our own place, of the size of which you may judge from the fact that one building alone contains Buddha and his five hundred Lo-hans, or saints of the third class, larger than life, just like the temple of which I told you at Canton, where, however, they are smaller; then whole courtyards are surrounded by buildings, in which heaven and hell are represented by hundreds upon hundreds of wooden dolls. The Buddhist heaven is a very queer place according to this view of it, where the height of happiness seems to consist in riding a tiger or griffin, or some equally uncomfortable mount; but hell is really too grotesque, especially the ladies’ department, where the unfortunate women who have sinned in this world are to be seen experiencing what is, to say the very least of it, very inconsiderate treatment at the hands of a number of lavender-kid-glove-coloured fiends. In the gentlemen’s department a favourite punishment is for sinners to have their heads cut off, and be compelled to walk about with them under their arms like a crush hat at a ball. No description of mine could give you any idea of the absurdity and ugliness of the idols and dolls. I can’t say that, so far as I can judge, any real respect is paid to them. The people seem to make sort of picnic parties here, quite as a matter of sightseeing, rather than of religion, just as some tourists visit cathedrals for their beauty and for the art treasures which they contain, and not as an act of worship. However, they call visiting a temple “Kwang Miao,” which means to do an act of respect and worship, so perhaps some may attach a religious importance to it. The priests at our temple are a lazy, brutish lot, and rather inclined to be insolent. At Wo-Fo-Ssŭ they are far more respectable, and a man who was staying there told me that they had constantly choral service in the temple, especially at night; here I very rarely hear the bell and drum beat for prayers. I must do our priests the justice to say that one day I offered one of them a glass of wine, which their laws forbid, but their stomachs crave for, and he refused, although there was no one by to have told the tale, so I suppose they have a conscience somewhere and that they regard its pricks.

I am sorry to say that by being out here we missed seeing the state funeral of the famous general San-Ko-Lin-Sin. He was carried all the way to Peking from Shantung, where he was killed, every mandarin on the road being bound to furnish men to bear his body. The Emperor pays the expense of his funeral and of his lying in state at Peking, and went himself to pour a libation before the coffin. San-Ko-Lin-Sin was a feudal Mongol prince, and his son has now been created a Wang, or prince. There are many people who say that the general was not killed by the rebels, but by his own troops. The account of his death, however, was given with great details, and he was probably killed fighting. “A corner of the Great Wall has gone,” say the Chinese, in their picturesque way, when a great general is killed in battle.

LETTER X

PEKING, _24th July_.

No mail in—we are expecting it any minute, but have begun to fear that we must send off our bag before its arrival. I never saw anything so curious as the change which the last few wet days have caused in all the face of the country—its whole appearance is altered. What were before arid and desert patches of sand are now turned into green and luxuriant corn-fields—roads that were like dried water-courses, with six inches of dust lying on them and banks of sand on each side, are fresh English-looking lanes. The crops have sprung up to be so tall, that we could not see our usual landmarks, and lost our way; for the plain between Peking and the hills is so scarred and intersected by roads and paths, that one has to make straight for some point in the distance, or one is thrown out—all the houses and groups of cottages are exactly like one another and afford no assistance in steering; it is a regular Chinese puzzle. The thermometer has fallen from 108° in the shade to 75°. Such a relief!—I hope that we have now got quit of the very great heat.