comes along with a basket strapped on his back and a scoop in his hand, he is collecting the droppings of the animals, either for manure or to make argol for fuel, a stream of rickshaws swerve out of the way of a blind man, ragged, bent, old, who with lute in one hand and staff in the other taps his way along.
“Hsien Sheng, before born,” he is addressed by the coolies directing him, for his affliction brings him outward respect from these courteous people.
In the rickshaws are all manner of people: Manchu women with high head-dresses in the form of a cross, highly painted faces and the gayest of long silk coats, shy Chinese women, who from their earliest childhood have been taught that a woman must efface herself. Their hair is decked with flowers, and dressed low on the nape of their necks, their coats are of soberer colours, and their feet are pitifully maimed. “For every small foot,” says a Chinese proverb, “there is a jar full of tears.” The years of agony every one of those women must have lived through, but their faces are impassive, smiling with a surface smile that gives no indication of the feelings behind.
The Chien Men, because it opens only from the Tartar to the Chinese City, is not closed, but eight o'clock sees all the gates in the twenty-three miles of outer wall closed for the night, and very awkward it sometimes is for the foreigner, who is not used to these restrictions, for neither threats nor bribes will open those gates once they are shut.
I remember on one occasion a young fellow, who had lingered too long among the delights of the city, found himself, one pleasant warm summer evening, just outside the Shun Chih Men as the gates of the Chinese City were closing. He wanted to get back to his cottage at the race-course but the guardians of the gate were obdurate. “It was an order and the gates were closed till daylight next morning.” He could not climb the walls, and even if he could, the two ponies he had with him could not. He probably used up all the bad language at his command, if I know anything about him, and he grew more furious when he recollected he had guests coming to dinner. Then he began to think, and remembered that the railway came through the wall. Inspection showed him that there were gates across it, also fast closed, and here he got his second wind, and quite a fresh assortment of bad language, which was checked by the whistle of an approaching train. Then a bright idea occurred to him. Where a train could go, a pony could go, and he stood close to the line in the darkness, instructed his mafoo to keep close beside him, and the moment the train passed, got on to the line and followed in its wake, regardless of the protests of raging gatekeepers. He got through the gate triumphantly, but then, alas, his troubles began, for the railway line had not been built with a view to taking ponies through the wall. There were rocks and barbed wire, there were fences, and there were mud holes, and his guests are wont to relate how as they were sitting down to table under the hospitable guidance of his No. 1 boy, there arrived on the scene a man, mud to the eyes—it was summertime when there is plenty of mud in the country round Peking—and silent, because no profanity of which he was capable could possibly have done justice to his feelings. Such are some of the joys of living in a Babylonish city.
When I had sat an hour in the gate I rose to go, and the rickshaw coolie and I disagreed as to the fare. A rickshaw coolie and I never did agree as to the fare. Gladly would I pay double to avoid a row, but the coolie, taken from the Legation Quarter of Peking where the tourists spoil him, would complain and try to extort more if you offered him a dollar for a ten-cent ride, therefore the thing was not to be avoided. I did not see my way to getting clear, and a crowd began to gather. Then there came along a Chinese, a well-dressed young man.
His long petticoats of silk were slit at the sides, he had on a silken jacket and a little round cap. He wore no queue, because few of the men of his generation, and of his rank wear a queue, and he spoke English as good as my own.
“What is the matter?” I told him. “How much did you pay him?”
“Forty cents.”
“It is too much,” said he, and he called a policeman, and that coolie was driven off with contumely. But it marked a wonderful stride in Chinese feeling that a Chinese should come to the assistance of a foreigner in distress. Not very long ago he would have passed on the other side, scorning the woman of the outer barbarians, glad in his heart that she should be “done” even by one so low in the social scale as a rickshaw coolie, a serf of the great city these ancient walls enclose.
CHAPTER IV—THE LEGATION QUARTER OF PEKING
A forgotten tragedy—The troops—“Lest We Forget”—The fortified wall—“No low-class Chinese”—The last thing in the way of insults—A respecter of power—Racing stables—Pekin s'amuse—Chinese gentleman on a waltz—Musical comedy—The French of the Far East—Chances of an outbreak—No wounded.
At Canton a few years since,” wrote Sir George Staunton, recording the visit of the first British Ambassador to the Emperor of China in 1798, “an accident happened which had well-nigh put a stop to our foreign trade. Evils of every kind fraught with this tendency are to be apprehended, and ought to be particularly guarded against, especially by a commercial nation. On some day by rejoicing in firing the guns of one of those vessels which navigates between the British settlements in India and Canton, but not in the employment of the East India Company, two Chinese, in a boat lying near the vessel, were accidentally killed by the gunner. The crime of murder is never pardoned in China. The Viceroy of the Province, fired with indignation at the supposed atrocity, demanded the perpetrator of the deed, or the person of him who ordered it. The event was stated in remonstrance to be purely accidental but the Viceroy, supposing it to have been done from a wicked disposition, still persisted in his demand, and to assure himself of that object, he seized one of the principal supercargoes. The other factories being alarmed, united themselves with the English as in a common cause, and seemed disposed to resist the intentions of the Viceroy who on his part arranged his troops on the banks of the river to force a compliance. It was at last deemed expedient on principles of policy, to give up the gunner with scarce a glimmering of hope that his life would be spared.”
Later on in a casual footnote he records that their worst fears had been realised, and the unfortunate gunner, given up, let us hope, not so much from motives of policy as to save the supercargo, had been done to death.
That incident, to my mind, explains the Legation Quarter of Peking to-day. Of course the Legation, in its present form, dates only from the Boxer rising, but the germ of it was there when the merchants of the assembled nations felt themselves compelled to sacrifice the careless gunner “from motives of policy.” One hundred and twenty years ago the Western nations were only a stage removed from the barbaric civilisation the Chinese had reached two or three thousand years before, but still they were moving onward, and they felt they must combine if they would trade with this rich land, and yet protect their subjects and their goods. And so they did combine, and there arose that curious state of affairs between the foreigners and the people of the land that has held for many years, that holds in no other land, and that has crystallised in the Legation Quarter of Peking.
Suppose in London all the great nations of the earth took a strip of the town, extending say from Marble Arch to Hyde Park Corner, and from Park Lane to Bond Street, held it and fortified it heavily, barring out the inhabitants, not wholly, but by certain regulations that prevented them having the upper hand. The thing is unthinkable, yet that is
