ministrations than the most willing and efficient of “hired girls” can
make it. Whether it is their natural temperament or merely a pride of
their calling, a surly face or manner, the faintest breath of impudence
or “back talk,” even when the lady of the house has been alone with them
for weeks at a time, have been as unknown in our circle as has a protest
against any task assigned them. They have their own ways of doing
things, but even these we have succeeded in changing where it was
essential to do so. The division of work is left to them, for this is a
matter in which one quickly finds it wise not to attempt to interfere.
If any of them has ever felt that he was being imposed upon by the
others, it was settled among themselves, and the matter never came to
our ears. There are no such things as afternoons off among Peking
servants; like their fellows, ours work, or at least are on call,
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Once in a while the “boy” or
the coolie interrupts our evening reading for an instant by asking
permission to go out, but we have never known them to be missing when
next they are wanted. The rickshaw-man asked perhaps three or four times
during the winter to go and have something done to his vehicle, but only
in a few cases of misunderstanding was he not on hand when we wished him
to trot away with us, until with the coming of the Chinese New Year he
decided that he had held a steady job long enough. The _ama_ has two
small daughters, not to mention a husband and the inevitable
mother-in-law, at her home not half an hour away, yet though she has
never been discouraged in doing so I doubt whether she has gone to see
them a dozen times during the winter, and whenever she does she brings
back some gay and not always inexpensive Chinese toy to her appreciative
charge, as if to make up for the presumption of leaving him. It is
really more than that, of course, like the constant kindnesses of all
the servants toward him, for nowhere could a small boy be more royally
treated than among the child-loving Chinese.

Though we have never gone deeply into the matter, the work of each
servant seems to be definitely fixed by custom. The rickshaw-man sweeps
the court in the morning, unless he is busy with his chief duty, and
keeps an ear on the door-knocker. The “boy” combines the lighter tasks
of butler and chambermaid, and in general acts as a buffer between us
and the outside world. The coolie does most of the rough labor,
including the floors, the stoves, the washing, both of dishes and
clothing, and the ironing, producing dress-shirts that would make the
best steam-laundries in the United States blush with shame, if they were
capable of any such display of emotion, and pressing even feminine
evening frills with the deft hand of a French maid. In the time left
over from her chief duty the _ama_ does much of the sewing and many of
those little odds and ends which in other lands make up the drudgery of
a housewife. Since a daughter joined us in the spring she has performed
her augmented task with the same ever cheerful efficiency.

The cook is more of a free lance, with very definite duties, including a
daily trip to market. In China as a whole the _tsoa-fan-ti_ and the
mistress have a frequent meeting over his account-book, but in Peking
there is a wide-spread custom euphonistically known as “boarding with
the cook.” It simplifies the task of keeping him in hand, especially for
a _tai-tai_ speaking a very limited amount of Chinese, to set a fixed
price for the day’s food and leave the rest to the Celestial kitchen. We
adopted this custom, and have found it not only satisfactory but as
economical as our friends report the other method to be. For Rachel and
myself we dole out a dollar a day each, and half as much for the
youngster. This includes everything that comes to the table except the
morning bottle of milk and those nefarious products of France and Italy
in similar containers with which I or our guests choose to flout our
constitutions and that of our native land. The spenders among the
foreign colony of Peking will undoubtedly, if it ever comes to their
attention, sneer at the paucity of this sum; perhaps those who have
deigned to accept our hospitality will say, “I thought so.” But I have
promised to be frank. We are simple people, with tastes which do not
daily require such viands as are commonly symbolized as quail on toast.
As a matter of fact we often do have just that, for there is probably no
capital in the world where game is more plentiful and cheaper than in
the Peking markets. Certainly we never go hungry, and what that cook can
do for a whole day with a sum that would not leave enough for a tip
after a single luncheon in a very modest New York restaurant would give
an American the false impression that the high cost of living has never
come to China.

We live mainly on Chinese products, augmented by such foreign delicacies
as cocoa, coffee, canned milk, imported butter, spices, jam, bacon, and
the like, all furnished out of the cook’s stipend. Eggs, I believe,
reached the height of an American cent each during midwinter; a chicken
of moderate size costs from fifty to sixty coppers, which is not more
than sixteen cents in real money. The far-famed Peking duck, which dot
with white the moat just over the wall from us, would be a more serious
acquisition, being in great demand among Chinese epicures; but squab,
plump and tender, sells for the equivalent of a nickel each, and the
succession of snipe, pigeons, partridge, pheasants, and wild duck that
have graced our board would be luxuries to a war profiteer at home.
Vegetables are plentiful in Peking, but the choice of meat is limited.
Pork, beloved by all Chinese, foreigners eschew as a matter of course;
if they have not seen what Chinese pigs feed on they are sure to have
heard. Peking beef has the reputation of being the flesh of animals that
have outlived their usefulness as beasts of burden rather than of those
raised for food. Now and again, as the hungry militarists have boosted
octroi duties at the city gates, the sheep butchers have gone on strike,
which is particularly a hardship to Peking’s large Mohammedan
population. But fowl, wild and tame, is always on hand to make up for
any such catastrophe. We found Chinese corn meal and millet and a native
brown but excellent cream of wheat preferable to the breakfast cereals
from across the Pacific. Chinese pears, and especially the big golden
persimmons which last almost all winter, are no poor substitutes for the
California oranges sold in at least one foreign-goods grocery at three
for a dollar. Now and then “Ta-shih-fu” takes a flier in desserts. Like
all Peking chefs he prefers to make a thing which is fearful and
wonderful to behold but which is a trial of temper and skill to the
guest who has first to cut into it. There is that infamous “Peking
dust,” a wall of glacéd fruits enclosing a mound of grated chestnuts of
exactly the consistency, though by no means the splendid taste, of
sawdust, and doted on, unfortunately, by that member of the family with
most influence in the kitchen. Sometimes dinner is topped off with a
pastry-and-cake basket, handle and all, full of custard and nuts. But
all such weaknesses are amply made up for by the fact that pies worthy
of the proudest New England housewife often come from the kitchen,
usually labeled in the white of an egg with poetic Chinese characters.
These literary effusions are seldom missing on any formal dessert, if
there is space to get them in; when our first national holiday came
there appeared a brave pink and green iced cake with the greeting
“Thanksgiver Day” written boldly across it.

Our cook is noteworthy among his tribe in that he can prepare a Chinese
as well as a foreign meal, and two or three times a week this wholly
different but no less enjoyable repast adorns our table, chop-sticks and
all. In general he is given a free rein in selection, so long as he has
a certain balance in menu, and using his excellent Chinese judgment he
dines us almost too well, and no doubt, in the time-honored Chinese way,
pockets the coppers left over. We do not know that our cook “squeezes” a
cent, but if he does not he should be drummed out of the Chinese cooks’
union, if there is such a thing. For it is taken for granted by all
foreigners in China that their cooks believe a certain legitimate
“squeeze” is attached to the job, and though it takes an American
housewife some time to reconcile herself to it, old foreign residents
would be much put out to find that the rule is not general. Popular
tradition has it that all cooks put into their own pockets a certain
percentage of all money given them to spend; 5 per cent seems to be the
accepted amount among foreigners in Peking, except in the Legation
Quarter, where there are no definite limits. There are innumerable
anecdotes illustrating this custom. Missionary cooks, boasting
themselves Christians, have laid up small fortunes on their eight or ten
“Mex” dollars a month. I know of one who, from the day his service
began, made it an invariable rule to take six coppers for every person
he cooked for during the day, and he now owns two modern houses which he
rents to foreigners.

We have often wondered just how much our cook manages to lay aside.
There is no way of finding out, for the Chinese market-man is ever
faithful to his own people in any controversy with the “outside
barbarian,” and the custom is so perfectly legitimate in the cookly mind
that no pricking of conscience ever sullies the frank and smiling face
of the king of our kitchen. In overcrowded China it has been the
practice for centuries to fee any one who brings a job or a client, and
even if the foreigner went to market himself he would not save the
“rake-off”; in fact he would probably lose money. For the market-man
does not quote a foreigner the price to which a Chinese cook will
finally bring him down, and no grocer is going to tell his client when
he pays his monthly bill that 5 per cent of it will go to his cook as
soon as he comes in when there are no telltale foreigners looking on.
Yet supernatural as the Chinese are in slicing off a “cash” or a copper
where even a French eye could not possibly detect any such protuberance,
we do not see how our cook can have made a fortune on the leavings.
Including his six dollars for kitchen fuel he has eighty-one dollars a
month to feed us on when I am at home. When we go out to dinner of
course he is not the loser; extra money for invited guests gives him a
trifle more leeway; possibly he sells a tin can or a bottle now and then
to the constantly passing peddlers, though we have never seen any
evidence of stooping to such methods. Yet his wages have never been
higher than with us, at least since his youthful days as a retainer in
the Manchu court, and, for all that, he has educated two of his four
boys into fine, upstanding, well dressed young men with enough English
to take important positions with foreign firms; the third is already
well along the same road, and no doubt the youngest, who romps about all
day in a neighboring _hutung_, will be similarly provided. We have never
quite reconciled those grown sons to our little cook, still well on the
sunny side of middle age; but in China, of course, the generations
succeed themselves swiftly. We may be wronging him in assuming that he
does not spend on us all we give him for that purpose, and if so I
apologize. If we are not, he certainly is welcome to all he has kept,
for he has served us for eight months in an unobtrusive, efficient, and
most agreeable manner.

Chinese of standing have let us into a few of the secrets of life among
house servants. Most cooks, at least for foreigners, are not Peking men,
it seems, but come in from the country. Having no family to support in
the capital, those earning ten dollars a month, eating leftovers—though
few Chinese servants care for foreign food—and spending perhaps two
dollars a month of their own, can send home about a hundred dollars a
year. Those with families in Peking have to devise methods for
augmenting their wages; therefore they do not consider those methods
dishonest. One might ask, why not pay the man a living wage to begin
with and then expect him to be honest? Alas, centuries of the other plan
have made that contrary to the Chinese way of thinking. The moment you
pay a servant more than the market price he takes you for a gullible
victim or a millionaire and “squeezes” all the more. It is the Chinese
system, and many a foreigner has broken his head against it in vain.

A genuine cook to foreigners owes it to his dignity to have an
apprentice assistant, just as he must ride to and from market in a
rickshaw. Not long after we settled down, “Ta-shih-fu” asked permission
to bring into the kitchen his younger brother, whose profession of
torturing a Chinese violin seemed to be in ever decreasing demand. There
he has remained month after month, learning the rudiments of foreign
cooking, until he has gathered sufficient audacity to go and cook for
foreigners himself, thereby making his future secure. But never has it
been so much as hinted that we should pay him anything; his wageless
standing is perfectly in keeping with the Chinese scheme of things, and
no one would be more surprised than he or his brother if we offered him
money.

Whatever we can say for our cook we can testify that the “boy” who has
been with us since the second month is honest even in the Western sense.
He is, we hasten to admit, different from the rank and file of “boys” to
foreigners in Peking; no doubt they would dub him “queer.” He comes from
somewhere ’way down the province, well off the railroad, and seems
deliberately to refuse to learn the tricks of the capital. Down there he
has a wife of seventeen, perhaps forced upon him by his parents in the
customary Chinese manner; at least he has never shown any desire to go
home, not even at New Year’s. But then, he is past forty. His service is
so constant that we have sometimes urged him to go out more often, but
he replies with a smile that he has few friends in Peking and nowhere to
go. Once or twice a month he calls in a passing barber, and perhaps he
has stepped out half a dozen times during the winter on a brief personal
errand—except that, as regularly as fortnightly pay-day comes round, he
goes to send a letter home. The extent to which Chinese families pool
their incomes, with some grandfather or mother-in-law as treasurer,
would take almost any American’s breath away. We have many a time caught
this extraordinary “boy” carefully avoiding chances to “squeeze,”
passing on to the other servants buying errands assigned him, lest we
suspect him of taking a commission. Once a tourist couple dropped in for
tea, and having traveled too fast to orientalize the point of view of
their native Chicago, surreptitiously slipped a silver dollar into the
“boy’s” palm as he opened the door at their departure. He did not faint;
hence we might never have known of that social blunder if the “boy” had
not rushed back as soon as the door was closed, his outstretched hand
offering us the coin. I warned you he was queer; I am not sure but that
the normal “boy” of Peking would not consider him downright crazy. But
honesty and diligence, alas, are not always sufficient in this miserable
world. When we move on we despair of finding this “boy” another place
more than any of the others, for his stock of self-confidence is as
scanty as his integrity is unusual.

The normal Peking “boy,” particularly if he knows some English, is
usually the general factotum of a foreign household. Many foreigners
never speak to their other servants but transmit all orders through the
“boy,” or, if the staff is large, through “number one boy.” Some of the
older and more experienced of these take on the efficiency and the
manner of old English butlers; they can arrange anything, from a
dinner-party on Christmas to a picnic out at the Temple of Heaven by
moonlight, at a mere hint from their socially busy mistresses. But we
much prefer our type of “boy.” Though they may succeed in keeping their
own employers in ignorance of that fact, the observant guest can hardly
fail to see that these efficient head servants grow scornful toward
their subordinates and often despise foreigners in general and the
family they serve in particular. Obviously their “squeeze” increases
with their importance and their opportunities. Some of them make
fortunes out of the peddlers and shopkeepers whose patronage they
recommend, and positions under them are not had for the mere asking. The
“boy” of an American official in Peking came to his mistress one day and
insisted on giving her a present worth easily his year’s salary, saying
he had become a Christian and hence was “ashamed for the much money” he
had been given by those who sold things to the family and to their many
tourist guests—and begged her to accept this customary percentage on his
winnings. How the _t’ing-ch’ai_, or topmost “boy” in a foreign legation,
makes use of his opportunities is a story worth telling, but that would
be trespassing into the realms of high finance.

The long, handsome Shantung coolie, who laundered dress-shirts and
pressed georgette evening-gowns with such amazing skill, turned out to
be a contrast to the “boy,” and was destined to depart suddenly about
the middle of January. At first the _tai-tai_ used to “call the coal,”
but Wang had gradually taken over the task and was getting it for as low
a price as she—I am sure I am not doing Wang an injury by mentioning his
name, any more than I should by specifying an American called Smith. The
coal, however, seemed to burn up faster and faster, and each alleged ton
piled against the wall of the little back court at the front of our
compound looked smaller. One day we questioned its size, and Wang
promptly guaranteed to make it last the month out. That would have been
physically impossible, yet last it did. Other suspicious little things
began to gather about the tall handsome coolie. None of them were
definite, however, and Wang might be with us yet but for the other
servants, though I fancy he would have hanged himself alone in time. A
whisper from the _ama_ caused Rachel to “call” the next ton herself, and
to borrow scales from an American friend down the _hutung_. It was a
cold evening when the ton arrived, but we persisted in watching it
unloaded, weighed, and carried in. But why were there not sixteen sacks,
as the silky Chinese dealer just outside Hata-men had promised, and why
did twelve sacks total five hundred _chin_ more than a ton? It took us
until next day to find out.

The scales, of course, being Chinese, consisted of a mere stick with
marks on it; but for the same reason it would have been impossible for
them to be as simple and straightforward as they looked. All such scales
have _two_ loops by which to suspend them, and Wang assured us that both
of these were used at once. That was all. Even the lady down the street
who had been using them all winter did not know the difference. When at
last we learned the Chinese trick of the scales the missing four bags
were easily accounted for; and a little more trouble, mainly for the
benefit of foreign residents in general, brought the blackened
cart-driver over to confess that Wang had intercepted him just around
the corner from us and sold the four bags to a little coal-yard almost
behind our bedrooms—the same one, of course, from which he had bought
back enough to fulfil his guarantee. The night before, Wang having asked
permission to go out and get his hair cut, or something of the sort, we
had been startled to have all the other servants irrupt upon us over our
evening lamp, smiling nervously, but saying through the cook as
spokesman that they could not endure our being misled about the missing
man any longer. He was keeping bad company nights, they announced with
visible unwillingness; he often brought in friends to sleep on their
already crowded _k’ang_; coppers were sticking to his fingers in a way
which apparently even a cooks’ union could not approve.

Chinese servants are not in the habit of tattling against one another to
their masters, and things must have come to a pretty pass to bring about
this unusual scene. But we waited until we had other proof that it was
not merely a case of spite; then we spoke gently to Wang as he was
stirring the fire in my office next afternoon. There were four bags of
coal missing from the ton of the night before, we confided to him, and
as we did not wish to have the police mixed up in so small a matter we
wondered if perhaps he could trace them. Then we went out to tea. That
evening found us without a coolie; he had folded up his bed and
departed, and he has never been back to claim the three or four days’
wages due him.

Wang is a handsome youth, to Chinese eyes, and naturally he needed more
money than his older stick-at-home colleagues. Besides, he did more hard
work than all the others. If he had come to me privately and whispered
his troubles, I think I should have been tempted to give him a monthly
bonus, if he could have convinced me that the other servants would not
hear of it, rather than see him depart; for never again in this
imperfect world do I hope to display such gleaming shirt-bosoms as Wang
furnished me. The _ama_ promptly introduced her husband as coolie, and
he has proved satisfactory, besides being under a watchful eye that
completely belies the accepted notions of the position of wives in the
Chinese scheme of things. But stiff shirts go to a professional laundry
now, and though a new front costs there just one-tenth what it would in
New York, they have lost that final touch of perfection, of youth and
genius, which Wang put upon them.

But on the whole our Peking servants are good, as human beings the world
over go, for all the Wangs among them. I shall have forgotten their
faults long before I forget the motherly care they have taken of my
family during my long absences, the tasteful little presents they gave
my wife on her birthday when I was not there to give her any myself, and
the grandfatherly way they have with our small son.

I should be sorry, however, if I have given the false impression that
living is on the whole much cheaper for the foreigner in Peking than at
home, thereby causing our no doubt overworked State Department to be
bombarded with ten-dollar bills and demands for passports. Whether it is
because low prices tempt one to spend more than one could if they were
high, or that the absurd cost of certain necessary things physically or
mentally imported from the Western world mount up faster than seems
possible, we find that we are spending quite as much in Peking as we did
in New York, and we do not play bridge or the races.

The Chinese way of housekeeping, as we have pieced it together from bits
of information picked up among our native acquaintances, is quite
different from that of foreign residents. According to them,
middle-class Chinese families usually have two servants—an _ama_ and a
cook. The _ama_ does the washing and all the general housework, at least
in the women’s apartments. Obviously the Chinese would be horrified
beyond speech at the goings-on in foreigners’ houses; the “boy” of our
white-haired compatriot down the _hutung_, for instance, lays out her
most intimate garments when he judges it is time for her to change! Such
an _ama_ receives from one to two dollars a month, and a “present” of
two or three dollars at each of the four principal Chinese holidays.
Servants in native families are also given their rice, the monthly rice
allowance for the whole household being fixed and the domestics eating
the poorest quality. But they must have more income, and that is where
gambling comes in. Much of this goes on in the average Chinese home,
even among the women and their feminine guests in the afternoons. For
every dollar staked ten cents is set aside by custom as _cumshaw_ for
the servants. Cigarettes sold at eight coppers a package around the
corner cost the family and its guests ten, and so on. But gambling is
the important thing. Servants in wealthy or political families, where
high stakes are the rule, may get as much as a hundred dollars a month.
A trustworthy Chinese informant told us that the one question always
asked him by a prospective servant is some form of, “Is there gambling?”
Where there is not, it is hard to get and keep good servants. In these
days of comparative poverty in Peking those who cannot find places with
foreigners, or have not the courage and adaptability such positions
require, often have a hard time of it.

It would not be just, as well as being a sad blow to his pride, to
mention Li _Hsien-sheng_ among our servants. Mr. Li is our Chinese
teacher. By our own choice he, too, speaks no English, so that our
introduction to the language is by the method by which children learn
one. He comes for an hour every afternoon, and carries away a ten-dollar
bill at the end of each month. Yet he is something of a scholar, even
if, like all his colleagues we have so far tried, not much of a teacher.
However, I must not be too severe toward those numerous men of Peking
who eke out a livelihood by guiding the barbarian within its gates into
the mysteries of their strange tongue. At least they earn all they are
paid, and if one learns to use them mainly as a dictionary, the result
may be more worth while than at first seems possible. Nor is this the
place to express my opinions, harsh or genial, on the incredible Chinese
language. Suffice it for the moment to say that we both soon found
ourselves able to express our simple desires to the servants without
calling in some more experienced friend, and by midwinter could make
ourselves understood to merchants keenly eager to understand us. The
more diligent, stay-at-home, and mentally alert member of the family
quickly left me in the linguistic background, but even she cannot keep
pace with “Ha-li,” as the Chinese call my son and namesake. Though his
third birthday is still ahead of him, he is already the family authority
on tones and similar bugbears of the adult student of the Celestial
vernacular, and I should hesitate to pit myself against him even in a
test of vocabulary. I can only plead that it is an unfair advantage in
acquiring a new language not to be able to speak any other when the
acquisition begins.

Besides, what chance does an overworked father have compared to the
opportunities of childhood? When “Ha-li” is not up on the wall
discussing with the guardians who live there whatever he and they have
in common, or chatting in Chinese with playmates whose mother-tongue may
be that of anywhere from Brittany to Odessa, he is listening to the
voices of the world outside our compound as they drift over to us. He
has already picked up more hawkers’ cries than an adult ear can
distinguish, and totes his basket about the courtyard shouting his
wares, hand to ear in the Peking venders’ fashion, in tones so exactly
those of the original outside that we often wonder what that original
thinks of his echo. Daylight brings a never ending succession of these
hawkers, from the cereal-man so early in the morning that surely no one
could have the appetite to call him in, to the seller of sweetmeats so
late at night that none but habitually hungry people could still be
thinking of food. Our neighbors probably do some cooking of their own,
but they save much fuel by patronizing these itinerant restaurants, the
more sumptuous of them push-carts of a very Chinese type, most of them
mere baskets oscillating from shoulder-poles. The people about us seem
to have no fixed meal-hours, if indeed they keep any track of time at
all. They eat one by one as appetite moves them or as coppers are
available, and as surely as we leave home we will see a child or two, a
woman, or some other solitary member of a large family squatted in the
dirty little _hutung_ beside their door engrossed in the contents of a
bowl that has been rented, chop-sticks and all, from the vender who
waits so patiently for the transaction to be completed that he does not
seem to realize he is waiting.

Some of the street cries are almost musical, even to our Western ears;
some hawkers use instruments to spare their voices. The barber twangs
what looks like a gigantic pair of tweezers; the knife- and
scissor-sharpener blows a long horn or clashes together half a dozen
heavy steel pieces carried only for that purpose; the toy-and-candy man
has his gong, the china-riveter his swinging bells, the blind man his
reed pipe, or his big brass disk, and his long tapping cane, and the
water-seller has, of course, his squeaking wheelbarrow. The croak of the
oil-man suggests some superannuated frog; the jolly old fellow who
peddles Chinese wine from a beautiful copper urn has a succession of
hoarse shouts that never vary; the cabbage-man, the peanut-man, the
delicatessen wagon, so to speak, even the rag-picking women, all have
their own cries, distinctive, yet unintelligible until one has learned
them by rote rather than by meaning, as Peking did generations ago. Even
we dull-eared adults know nearly all of them now, and are conscious of
something missing if they fail to come at the usual hour, which is a
rare lapse indeed. One fellow sings what might almost be a bar from some
Italian opera. He is the gramophone-man, carrying his box and his big
tin horn, and offering to play his well worn Chinese records for those
families that have the coppers to spend on mere entertainment. The
seller of fritters also comes near being a singer, with a lilting
refrain that stays with one long after he has passed. But all in all the
cries are disappointing. Though some start off as music, even though it
be of the falsetto kind beloved of the Chinese, they almost invariably
bring up somewhere in a sudden raucous shout that spoils them. Perhaps,
as even some foreign enthusiasts insist, our Western ears are tuned only
to the simplicity of Western music; our scale of eight tones may be
crude as compared with the twenty-five gradations of the Chinese. But I
doubt it. I have tried to imagine that haunting street-cry which trills
through the opera “Louise” ending in a shrill shout. Surely its lyric
quality would not thus be improved. Yet all this does not mean that our
Peking cries are displeasing. Their fascination is something subtle, and
we shall be sorry to move on again out of their orbit.

  At Chinese New Year the streets of Peking were gay with all manner of
    things for sale, such as these brilliantly colored paintings of
    native artists
]

  A rich man died in our street; and among other things burned at his
    grave, so that he would have them in after life, were this
    “automobile” and two “chauffeurs”
]

  A neighbor who gave his birds a daily airing
]

  Just above us on the Tartar Wall were the ancient astronomical
    instruments looted by the Germans in 1900 and recently returned, in
    accordance with a clause in the Treaty of Versailles
]

There may be a gauntlet a block long of merry but habitually unwashed
children, chanting their incessant “Ee mao ch’ien! Ee mao ch’ien!” (“One
dime money!”) as often as they catch sight of us, and the daily beggar
of our section, with his “Lao yea tai-tai! Lao yea tai-tai!” (“Old
gentleman lady!”) that wheezes down the scale in so persuasive a manner,
is frequently out-shouted by his poaching rivals; but once the gate of
the nearest wall-ramp is locked behind us by the keeper who jogs down at
the tinkling of his little bell we are as free from such annoyances as
from the dust and the forgotten garbage along the _hutungs_. For the
Chinese are not allowed on the wall. That is, the great rank and file
are not, and those of the better class who care that much for physical
exercise are few, so that the top of the great Tartar Wall is almost a
foreigners’ private promenade. None of our servants, not even those born
in Peking, had ever been admitted to it until they appeared at the foot
of our ramp with “Ha-li” as a passport. For that matter nearly all those
wonderful monuments which even the three-day tourist has visited are
closed to them, either by rule or by the high cost of admission.
Scandalous, no doubt, from the Western democratic point of view;
pathetic when we imbue our servants with our own feelings. But it never
seems to have occurred to them that it is unjust—if it is. For to throw
open the wall to the general public of Peking for a single week would
make it an impassable stretch of filth, sleeping beggars, and jostling
coolies; and in a month even what is left of its parapets would have
been thrown down for the building of new hovels inside it or out.

When we came at the end of summer the top of the wall was a jungle, in
places almost impassable, gay with morning-glories and other flowers, a
broad hayfield even in its least fertile portions. By December
hay-makers and fuel-gatherers had made it a wind-swept concourse almost
fit for an automobile race, half a dozen cars abreast, except for that
short piece of it between Hata-men and the gate by which the emperor
once came and went, where it is in the hands of the foreign legations
below. On the brilliant spring Sunday not long ago that I made the
circuit of the wall this autumn’s harvest was already promised in the
delicate green that was spreading along it, as it was across the great
tree-topped city it encloses. That stroll of twelve or thirteen miles is
almost a complete course in Chinese life and history, at least of recent
centuries; but what lies outside our immediate neighborhood is another
story. From that bit of the wall just above us which is our principal
playground there is enough of interest within plain view, from the
courtyards of our neighbors below to the distant range of the Western
Hills half enclosing the plain of Peking, to make it a loafer’s
paradise. The streets down below may seem mere miserable lanes to those
of us from the West, and the dwelling-places drab and uninspiring; but
inside the compounds trees are general, so that Peking from aloft is
pleasantly, almost thickly, wooded. Every city, from incessantly
grumbling New York to the hillside town with its church- and cow-bells,
has a voice of its own, and that of Peking resembles no other I have
ever heard. It is made up mainly of street-cries, from venders,
rickshaw-men asking right of way, from shouting carriage out-runners,
never completely blending together but still retaining a certain
individuality, so that from the top of her wall Peking sounds like the
tail-end of some great football game, with the victorious rooters still
sporadically shouting their pæans of glee as they disperse to the four
points of the compass.

                              CHAPTER XII
                          JOGGING ABOUT PEKING

There are various ways of getting about Peking, even though it lacks the
principal one of most large cities in other lands; but of them all I
like best riding “Hwei-Hwei.” He is the robust, shaggy-red little
Chinese pony I brought back from one of my trips into the interior, and
if he has not yet learned to look with equanimity upon a scrap of paper
or a wheedling beggar that suddenly springs up at him, at least he can
pass an automobile now without filling the timid hearts of all Chinese
within gunshot with speechless panic. “Hwei-Hwei” and I have jogged
together all over Peking and its surroundings, nosing our way through
the _hutungs_ and prancing down the broad streets of the Chinese as well
as the Tartar City, exploring every sunken road and meandering path
within reasonable distance outside the walls. I am under the impression
that this is improper. Though the élite among the foreign residents play
polo on the French drill-field and scamper over the broken landscape
about the capital on Sunday afternoon paper-chases, even canter solemnly
up and down the new cinder track at the edge of the Legation Quarter,
each followed at a respectful distance by the _mafu_ who will presently
walk the blanketed and almost shaven native imitations of thoroughbreds
slowly up and down before some improvised stable, I gather from the
glances that are thrown sharply upon us that mere sight-seeing on
horseback is not in accordance with the Peking social code. I am
heartbroken, naturally, at the thought of infringing that vital
document; but the opportunity of indulging in a luxury I have never
before dared even to consider has outweighed even that consideration.

The truth of the matter is that keeping a riding-horse is a luxury even
in Peking. “Hwei-Hwei’s” complete care and nourishment cost just twice
what one human servant does; yet the reflection that this is, after all,
only “Mex” and only relative has so far been sufficient to stifle the
grumblings of a troublesome conscience. I suppose, too, there is a
certain subconscious complacency in looking down, even from
“Hwei-Hwei’s” height, upon the throngs with which we mingle in places
where perhaps no other foreigner, and surely no Chinese, has ever before
intruded on horseback. Certainly I must confess that I find pleasure in
watching the continuous succession of acrobatic feats with which
Pekingese of all ages and degrees remove themselves from the immediate
vicinity the instant it is borne in upon them that they are mingling
with an animal that I can guarantee not to hurt an infant thrown under
his very hoofs.

Outdoor fairs, seasonal markets, temples without number, corners unknown
even to our Chinese teacher, have “Hwei-Hwei” and I explored together.
But there is a line beyond which his advantages over Peking’s more
common means of transportation cease. Even if it is possible to park him
outside those ugly buildings in which China’s Parliament flings
ink-wells at itself and refuses to draft a constitution even after it
has voted itself a daily bonus for attending the sessions, he can
scarcely expect admittance to the Forbidden City, or ask an evening
hostess to find accommodations for him. When “Hwei-Hwei” must remain at
home there are various substitutes, but only one of them is really
feasible. Sedan-chairs, in these modern days, are only for brides and
mourners, or the emperor himself; there are jolting Peking-carts which
it would be infantile yet exactly descriptive to dub “peek-out” carts;
mule-litters like gaily decorated cupboards on shafts come in at least
from the northeast; on the moats outside the walls there are boats in
summer and sleds in winter—except when the men laying up ice in mat- and
mud-covered mounds along them deprive their fellow-coolies of this
simple source of income; bicycles are not unknown; curious little
one-horse carriages with shutters, and an outrunner who clings on behind
whenever a corner or a crowd does not bring him running ahead to lead
the horse or to shout the road clear, are still the favorite equipage of
old-fashioned families of means. But none of these things ply the
streets for hire; if they did they would be beneath the dignity of
foreigners, and probably of many Chinese unconsciously under their
influence. Ordinary mortals cannot call an automobile every time they
wish to go around the corner, even if their nerves are proof against the
madness of Chinese chauffeurs. Promoted only yesterday from the abject
position of coolies, these conceive that they always have the right of
way over anything they could best in a collision—an impression in which
they are abetted by the police who, with outstretched hand, gaze only at
the machine, like men fascinated, as it dashes drunkenly past through
the maelstrom of pedestrians and other helpless forms of traffic—and,
evidently gaining “face” thereby, they delight to make life a constant
misery to the passenger by the incessant use of those atrocious horns
that seem especially to be exported to China. So it boils down to the
omnipresent rickshaw.

We often wondered how many rickshaws there are in Peking, until at
length the metropolitan police reported that they had registered 41,553
such vehicles, of which 4,788 are private. Even if this really includes
all those within the gates, there are thousands more in the dozen
villages clustered close outside them, whence men run to places many
miles distant. We still wonder how Peking got about in the imperial days
before an American missionary in Japan, wishing to give his invalid wife
a daily airing, invented the rickshaw. As late as the beginning of the
present century, old residents tell us, this vehicle was unknown in the
capital. To-day it is the most numerous, or at least the most
conspicuous, thing in Peking.

Who but a man gone mad on the matter of speed would not prefer the
rickshaw to the automobile after all? Silent on its pneumatic tires and
the soft-shod feet of the runner, it is the most nearly like sitting at
home in an arm-chair of any form of transportation. There is no
formality about it; even the man who does not keep one for his exclusive
use scarcely needs to call one, for it is a strange corner of Peking
where a rickshaw is not already waiting whenever he steps out. Once in a
rickshaw one can leave it to the runner to arrive at the right place,
and turn the mind to the streets and their doings. It is not merely
“Ha-li” who is so fond of “widin’ man,” though he is the only one of us
who shouts aloud at each donkey and big stone “pup dog” we pass,
especially at the camels as they stride noiselessly by along the wall or
through a city gate, whenever we ride hither and yon about busy yet
good-natured Peking.

The police go on to say that from sixty to seventy thousand rickshaw
coolies earn an average of a hundred coppers a day, of which about
seventy are for themselves and their families after deducting the rent
of the vehicle. That means a daily income of nearly twenty cents in real
money, which is high in Peking. An official inquiry, by the way,
reported during the winter that the minimum on which a Chinese adult
could support life in the capital is $1.87 “Mex” a month! One
particularly cold winter, foreigners, especially women, almost ceased to
patronize rickshaws, not so much for their own sake as for that of the
poor fellows who sat outside waiting for them, and sometimes froze to
death. It devolved upon the police to call their attention to the fact
that death by starvation is even more painful, and is likely to include
the dependents also. I suppose that same omniscient body could say how
many persons starve to death in Peking each winter; at any rate they
once announced how many hundreds of free coffins they had been called
upon to provide since cold weather set in.

Perhaps the constant sight of starvation more or less close upon their
heels is the reason that Peking rickshaw-men are such excellent runners.
They never slow down to a walk, as the much better paid ones of Japan,
for instance, do on the slightest provocation. If the trot from our
corner to Hsi-Chi-men station, diagonally across the Tartar City, is too
much for one of them he turns his fare over to an unoccupied colleague
when he is exhausted rather than disgrace himself by walking. Yet I have
almost never seen a well built rickshaw-man in Peking. Their ribs show
plainly through their leathery skins, and they are conspicuously
flat-chested, in contrast to the men all about China who carry burdens
over their shoulders. The belief that rickshaw-runners die young and
often is wide-spread, especially in lands that have never seen one. The
only personal testimony I can offer on the subject is that during this
year in the Orient I have never seen, or heard of, a man dying in the
shafts, and that there are many jobs in China that I would quickly
refuse in favor of drawing a rickshaw. Certainly many runners, not to
mention the vehicles themselves, reach a ripe old age in Peking; and
there is evidence that they do not take up the profession late in life.

Some one once wrote asking us to send a copy of the child labor laws of
China. When we had recovered from the resultant hysterics I went out to
photograph some of the smallest specimens of rickshaw-runners along
Great Hata-men Street for the benefit of the inquirer. Unfortunately a
good example and photographic conditions never have coincided. I do not
wish to be charged with exaggeration, and hence I will not assert that I
have seen two boys of six or a single one of eight trotting about town
with a big fat sample of the Chinese race lolling at his ease behind
them; but I have no hesitancy in reporting that male children of eight
and ten respectively may often be seen thus engaged. Perhaps these are
house-servants or their offspring, or even members of the family itself,
forced into service; more than once I have been sure of a facial
resemblance between the perspiring youngsters and the unsoaped old lady
who was urging them on. Often a small boy runs behind, pushing, who is
hardly as tall as the hub of the wheel, but perhaps that is a form of
apprenticeship. Recently there has been some agitation against employing
rickshaw pullers under eighteen, though apparently only among
foreigners. The Chinese of the rank and file bargain for their rides as
they stump along, pretending they will walk rather than pay more than
they are offering, and naturally they wish to be surrounded by as many
clamoring competitors as possible. If the lowest bidder chances to be a
child just heavy enough to keep the passenger from toppling over
backward, or an old man who looks as if he had been unwisely rescued
from the potter’s field, _bu yao gin_—it does not matter, for the
average Chinese hardly distinguishes between real speed and a steady
jogging up and down almost in the same spot.

In contrast to these sorry dregs of the profession are the haughty men
in the prime of life who run on a monthly wage for foreigners, or for
Chinese of wealth and official position, some of them in livery and with
clanging bells and blazing lamps that attest their importance. The tall
youth who runs with a physically light-weight young lady of our
acquaintance always calls a rickshaw when he wishes to go out on a
personal errand. Well fed and not overworked, these private human
trotters are often marvels of speed and endurance. I would like nothing
better than to enter our wrinkled old _la-che-ti_ in an Olympic
marathon—though foreigners who have tried that sort of test find that
the men cannot run without their vehicle, which is so balanced as to
help lift them off the ground. Like the runners, the rickshaws of Peking
range all the way from filthy half-wrecks to rickshaw-limousines. The
former are due both to the Chinese blindness to uncleanliness and to the
fact that, human fares lacking, they are ready to accept any form of
freight, be it even the bleeding carcass of a hog. The vehicle looking
tolerable, however, most of us pick our rickshaw-men exactly as we would
a horse, except that age is fairly apparent without examining the teeth.

Slavery is a dreadful institution, but if millions of the human
draft-animals of China were slaves they would at least be sure of a
place to sleep and something fit to eat. Yet they are a cheerful,
good-hearted, likable lot of fellows, these swarming rickshaw-runners of
Peking, amusing in their primitive ways. However much they may arouse
sympathy, for instance, there is no surer means of being involved in a
noisy dispute than by overpaying them. Find out the legal fare and pay
it, and the chances are that your runner will accept it without a word
and rate you a person of experience and understanding, for all your
strange race. The louder and longer you wish him to dance and shout
about you, the more you should overpay him. A soft-hearted old lady
arriving in Peking almost directly from America and wishing to be just
toward the man who drew her from Ch’ien-men Station to the principal
hotel handed him a silver dollar. It took three men from the hotel to
rescue her from the frenzied runner and kick him dollarless outside the
grounds.

The fact is that rickshaws are too numerous in Peking and their fares
too low. Even foreign residents grow flabby from so habitually jumping
into one rather than walking a block or two, though I confess it is
easier to do so than to endure the endless gauntlet of persistent
shouting, and even subtle ridicule in the case of “foreign devils”
supposedly ignorant of the language, which every well dressed pedestrian
must run. Hard-hearted men assert that the oversupply is due to the
laziness of the runners also, that coolies would rather wander about
with a rickshaw than work all day at some steady labor. What will become
of them when the street-cars arrive, for which the French were long ago
granted a much-opposed franchise, is a question which men of higher
intelligence than the runners themselves cannot answer. Yet they are
coming; cement poles are already creeping into the Tartar City from the
northwest, and rails are being piled up before the Forbidden City;
unless Mukden outstrips her, Peking will be the first to follow
foreign-influenced Tientsin and Shanghai by desecrating her streets with
the ugliness and clamor of electric tramways. We are glad to have known
the inimitable Chinese capital before they came.

The slowness of her man-drawn carriages and the dead flatness of Peking
give an exaggerated impression of its size; everything seems farther
away than it really is. In my school-days we used to hear wild tales
about this being the largest city in the world. Perhaps it has a million
inhabitants, though eight hundred and fifty thousand seems nearer the
mark. There is no “squeeze” to be had out of a census, however, and
guesses will probably continue to be the only available information on
that point for years to come. A one-story city with the courtyard habit,
to say nothing of enormous palaces and monuments that scarcely shelter a
human being each, and of big vacant spaces even inside its principal
wall, can hardly vie with New York and London, however like rats many of
its people may live. In what we foreigners call the Chinese City there
is a maze of shops and dwellings outside the three south gates of the
capital proper, human warrens here and there, swarming sidewalk markets
by night as well as crowded rows of booths by day; but vast graveyards,
cultivated fields, even great unoccupied areas take up much of this
secondary enclosure, not to mention the huge domains of the Temples of
Heaven and of Agriculture, playgrounds now of those with the price of
admission, with tea and soda-water and pumpkin seeds served almost on
the very spot where the Son of Heaven so long held his annual vigil.

Distressing are many of the noble monuments that make Peking justly
famed the world over, not merely because of the ruins they are becoming
under an anarchistic republican régime, but by reason of the rabble that
is permitted to overrun and defile so many of them. Ragged beggars
masquerading as caretakers beset the visitor in almost all of them;
foreigners, or Chinese with money but without influence, may still be
required to pay their way into Pei-Hai and the Summer Palace, but once
inside they find themselves jostled and gaped upon by loafing soldiers
and ill-mannered roustabouts whom the gate-keepers have not the power or
the moral courage to exclude. How long before imperial Peking will be
but another Baalbek or Nineveh, for all the busy streets that surround
it, is another subject for guessing.

We found few soldiers in Peking, however, compared with such places as
Mukden, and those are still curbed in a way that would bring gasps of
astonishment from their fellows in the provinces. Before the Boxer days
Peking had no police force in the Western sense; to-day the little
stations are as numerous as in Japan, while the white-legginged
gendarmes under a Norwegian general stroll the principal streets in
pairs, with drawn bayonets and an eye especially to the protection of
foreigners. We have tried in vain to impress upon our friends at home
that Peking is safer than any city we know of in our own land. A lone
woman not even speaking the language, and bespangled with jewels if you
like, can go anywhere in Peking, whether on foot or with a rickshaw
coolie picked up at random, at any hour of the day or night, without the
ghost of a chance of being molested, to say nothing of running any real
danger. They are a curious people, the Chinese. They will often starve
with riches within easy grasp rather than screw up their courage to an
act of violence, as they will display the cheerfulness of contentment
far beyond the point where Westerners would have even a transparent mask
of it left. There is something uncanny, if we ever paused to think of
it, in being so well protected by a police force whose meager wages are
many months in arrears; and the petty graft they inflict upon foreign
residents may almost be justified. Their task is greatly lightened, of
course, by the pacifist temperament of the Chinese; but criminal, even
violent, characters cannot be lacking even in Peking. Punishments are
still drastic, after the Chinese custom. Out toward Tungchow and over
beside the outer wall of the Temple of Heaven groups of men are
frequently shot, and they are by no means all assassins. When the
invasion from beyond the Great Wall was being repelled last spring and
bullets were singing across our corner of the city, the police were
instructed to punish with summary execution anything suggestive of
looting. A Chinese of some standing, friendly with several foreigners of
our acquaintance, went up broad Hata-men Street to borrow a few dollars
from an exchange-shop that had often favored him with small loans. The
proprietor happened to be out, and the youth in charge did not know the
client. “Oh, that’s all right,” the borrower assured him; “your master
always lets me have small sums when I need them, and I am in a hurry.”
He picked up a few dollars, jotted the amount down on a slip of paper,
and started away. The youth shouted, the police came running up, and
although the proprietor appeared at that moment and identified the
prisoner as an old friend who had acted in no way improperly, a headless
corpse was left lying in the dust before the shop.

There are incredible contrasts, too, among the scenes past which the
pony and I jog on our afternoon jaunts. Legation guards of half a dozen
nationalities play their boyish games almost across the street from
rag-pickers who are scarcely distinguishable from the garbage-heaps out
of which they somehow claw a livelihood. Along “Piccadilly,” as
foreigners call what is “Square Handkerchief Alley” to the Chinese, we
can easily imagine ourselves in the days of Kublai Khan; and around the
corner from it the Wai-chiao-pu is a more modern foreign office,
outwardly at least, than London, Washington, or Paris can muster.
Beneath the “Four P’ai-lous” motor-cars speed north and south while
barbaric funeral processions crawl under them from the west between two
long rows of squealing pigs, resenting the cords that bind their four
legs together and the discourtesy with which they are tumbled about by
sellers and purchasers. City gates like mammoth office buildings tower
above long vistas of lowly human dwellings; lotuses bloom on the lake of
the Winter Palace, and the visitor thither is pursued by all but naked
mendicants—_yao-fan-ti_ (want-rice-ers) the Chinese call them in their
kinder language. Sumptuous private cars stand before most modern
buildings, and Peking street-sprinklers, consisting of two men and a
bucket, with a long-handled wooden dipper, attempt to lay the dust about
them. We remember these sprinklers only too well, “Hwei-Hwei” and I, for
during the winter the sprinkling turned to ice almost as it fell, and
our progress was a kind of equestrian fox-trot. But for them, and the
water-carriers whose screeching wheelbarrows drip so incessantly, Peking
streets would be easy going the year round, for the whole winter’s snow
has been but a napkin or two that faded away almost as it fell. Nor have
I ever known a genuine Peking dust-storm, though I have seen the air and
the heavens, the inmost recesses of my garments and my food, even the
contents of locked trunks, filled with those flying particles of her own
filth and her surrounding semi-desert which the capital of Kublai Khan
has always charged against the distant Gobi. Old residents tell us that
this season’s dust-storms have been unusually rare, but my family was
vouchsafed one of the first magnitude during my absence. A welcome wind
blew all one hot spring night, and only in the morning was it discovered
that it had carried volumes of dust with it, so that the sleepers looked
as if they had been traveling across Nevada for a week without so much
as a wet cloth available, and everything from hair to mattress-covers
had to be washed at once, which was particularly difficult with the
blowing dust obscuring the sun for several days to come.

Often our way through a city gate or along a narrow street is made
disagreeable by passing wheelbarrows filled to over-slopping with the
night-soil of the city—sewers being as great a luxury as running water
in most Peking households. This is dried along the outside of the city
walls and distributed among the vegetable-gardens which, protected from
the north by rows of tall reed wind-breaks, take up much of the land
immediately outside the city. It goes without saying that the use of
chloride of lime is as fixed a habit in the kitchens of foreign
residents as boiling our drinking-water. The Chinese cannot understand
why Westerners persist in wasting the richest substitute for potash,
spending money to have it destroyed instead of gaining money by selling
it. Sometimes the foreigners are converted to the Chinese point of view;
I know at least one American mission school which supports two of its
girls on what it contributes to the fertility of the neighboring fields.

But it is not difficult to forget all such drawbacks when one looks down
upon Peking from her mammoth wall or the lonely eminence called Coal
Hill. Obviously “Hwei-Hwei” cannot climb Mei-shan; it is bad enough to
have outside barbarians of the human kind looking down upon the
golden-yellow roofs of the Forbidden City. This is not especially
forbidden now, with more than half of it open to the ticket-buyer, and
the rest hardly free from intruding politicians and their protégés. But
there still hovers an atmosphere of mystery, of something mildly akin to
the Arabian Nights or the Middle Ages, about the northern end of the
enclosure, within the moat in which coolies gather submerged hay and set
up fish-traps, and above which tourists shriek their delights from
Peking’s lone hill, even from airplanes. For, sadly shrunken as it is,
the imperial Manchu dynasty still holds forth within.

China is, I believe, the only republic on earth with an emperor. It was
stipulated in the agreement of 1912 between the imperial court and the
republican party that the emperor should keep his title, his imperial
abode, and certain other privileges, should receive a large annual
allowance from the Government for the upkeep of his court and household,
and should “always be treated by the Republican Government with the
courtesy and respect which would be accorded to a _foreign_ sovereign on
Chinese soil.” Thus the young man who, as a child, abdicated the dragon
throne can still go and sit on it any afternoon that it pleases his
fancy to do so. Perhaps no such caprices come into his head, for if we
are to believe his English tutor he is wise, as well as regally
polished, beyond his years, and does not really consider himself
emperor. He has lived in the imperial palace of the Forbidden City ever
since he was actually Manchu sovereign of China, however, and is still
accorded imperial honors there. Any one who rises early enough may meet
Manchu courtiers in ceremonial dress, a trifle shabby, their
red-tassel-covered hats still not entirely out of place in modern
Peking, jogging homeward on their lean ponies from an imperial audience
at the unearthly hour at which these have been held in China for
centuries.

Most Chinese have several different names, and emperors are no exception
to this rule. There is a “milk name” during infancy, a _hao_, or
familiar name by which one is afterward known to one’s intimates, a
school name, a business name, finally, but not lastly, in the case of an
emperor, a throne name or dynastic title. But though the present
occupant of the Forbidden City has such a name, to wit: Hsuan T’ung,
even this cannot be freely used; you cannot call a man to the
billiard-table by his dynastic title. The names by which we know former
emperors of China are really their “reign titles” and not personal
patronymics. This left the present head of the Ch’ing dynasty
handicapped, for, not being a real sovereign in spite of his legally
imperial title, and unable to have a reign title at least until he is
dead, there was no name by which he could be properly and generally
called, whether to dinner or to an audience. Being a sensible young man,
of modern rather than reactionary tendencies and by no means hostile to
foreign influence, noting moreover that not only do foreigners who
remain long in China have a Chinese name but that Western sovereigns
have personal appellations, he decided to take a foreign name. The fact
that his foreign tutor is an Englishman may or may not account for the
fact that he has chosen to be called “Henry.”

Those who have seen him describe “Emperor Henry” as a tall, slender
young man who is still growing, with the Chinese calligraphy of an
artist and some of the poetic gifts of his imperial ancestor known as
Ch’ien Lung. Not merely does he wield a wicked brush in both the classic
and the modern colloquial Chinese, now and then having a poem published
under an assumed name in a Peking paper, but he writes a very legible
English with pen or pencil. His English speech is described as slow but
correct, with a strong British accent. He reads newspapers voraciously
and is said to be unusually well abreast of the times, both at home and
abroad, for his years. His greatest single blow to date against
tyrannical conservatism, however, and the mightiest example of his
progressive tendencies occurred last spring at one fell swoop—he had his
cue cut off. The three imperial dowagers and his two distinguished old
Chinese or Manchu tutors tore what was left of their own hair in vain.
“Henry” was determined to be up-to-date even if he is confined in one
end of the once Forbidden City. The result is that for the first time in
nearly three hundred years there is hardly a pigtail left within the
Purple Wall, though the two old tutors, as a silent protest against what
they consider an act of disloyalty to the traditions of “his Majesty’s”
house, still wear their cues.

During last winter “Henry” turned sixteen, and it was high time he took
unto himself a wife—two of them, in fact. He is reputed not to have
wanted two—possibly he is not so ultra-modern as we have been led to
suppose—but his retinue insisted. Number one wife would have too many
duties to be able to perform them all alone; besides, what would the
neighbors say? So they chose him two pretty Manchu girls several months
his junior and set the date for the wedding. But “Henry” has a mind of
his own, and if he could not go out and pick a bride on his own
initiative he could at least exercise the sovereign rights of any
citizen of a republic and choose between the two candidates allowed him.
Thus it came about that the girl named by the high Manchu officials to
be “empress” became merely the first concubine, and vice versa. Some
time during the seven weeks of ceremonies between the betrothal rites
and the actual marriage “Henry” conferred upon the lady of his choice
the name of “Elizabeth.”

The wedding itself took place between the end of November and the dawn
of December, according to our Western calendar. By republican permission
the streets between the lady’s home, out near the Anting-men, and the
East Gate of the Forbidden City were covered from curb to curb with
“golden sands”—which in Peking means merely the earth we use in a
child’s sand-box. At three in the morning the principal bride set out
along this in a chair covered with imperial yellow brocade and carried
by sixteen bearers, with a body-guard of eunuchs from the palace. The
procession was no longer and hardly more elaborate than those that may
be seen along Peking streets on any day auspicious for weddings; some of
the impoverished Manchu and Mongol nobles, members of the imperial clan,
and former officials of the old empire looked, in fact, a trifle more
shabby under the specially erected bright lights along the route than do
the wedding guests of a wealthy Chinese merchant. But there were some
unusual features. The sedan-chair had a golden roof, on each corner of
which was a phenix, a design that predominated in all the flags,
banners, and mammoth “umbrellas” carried by the hired attendants.
Instead of the familiar Chinese wedding “music” produced by long,
harsh-voiced trumpets, there were two foreign-style bands, one of them
lent by the President of the republic. These played over and over, not
in concord one with the other, “Marching through Georgia,” “Suwanee
River,” and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” It was a memorable night
for Peking.

The chief escorts sent by the emperor to receive his favorite bride rode
horses and wore mandarin costume, including the official cap with a
peacock plume and buttons of every former rank. Promptly at four in the
morning the Phenix Chair, followed by a series of yellow-covered litters
containing the ceremonial robes of its occupant, passed through the Gate
of Propitious Destiny into the central and most sacred portion of the
imperial precincts. Foreign as well as Chinese guests had been admitted
as far as the large open space before this, which is used as a
parade-ground for the imperial guard and as a place of reception for the
camel caravans which still, even in these republican days, bring
“tribute” from beyond the Great Wall to the Manchu emperor. With the
moon just dropping out of sight in the west the scene was of a pageantry
which has almost disappeared from our modern commonplace world.

What took place beyond the gate that swallowed up the “empress” ordinary
people know only by hearsay. This has it that the bride, having been
carried over fire—pans filled with glowing coals—as old Chinese custom
decrees, was set down at the foot of the throne and greeted by the
emperor and his first concubine, after which he and all those of the
male gender except the eunuchs immediately retired. The concubine had
merely walked in without ceremony twenty-four hours before, one of her
first duties being to welcome the real bride at her arrival. Gossip has
it that she did not make the requisite number of kowtows to her more
fortunate rival and that “Elizabeth” took this so to heart that she shut
herself up from the emperor for some time. No sane person will vouch for
the truth of Peking rumors, however, imperial or otherwise. The fact
remains that “Henry” and “Elizabeth” were duly married, the clinching
rite being the ceremonial drinking together of the nuptial cup, and the
latest report is that they are all three living moderately happily, at
least, this long afterward.

An American girl is tutoring the “empress” in English and Western ways,
as she did before her marriage, and the emperor continues to grow,
mentally if not physically, under his cued and uncued tutelage. Even the
first concubine is said to be fond of learning, and the two no doubt
comment on their similarity of tastes with “our” husband. There is
probably less friction between the two young ladies than their Western
sisters may fancy, now that relative grades are inevitably fixed—with
reservations depending on the birth of a son; the most powerful woman in
Chinese history, the dowager who long ruled the country under the
puppets Tung Chih and Kuang Hsii, was, it is well for the two young
ladies to remember, only a concubine. Court etiquette prevents conflicts
in their demands upon the husband. By a rule said to be centuries old
the emperor is entitled to the company of his empress six times a month,
of the first concubine ten, and of the second concubine fifteen, in
reverse ratio, of course, to the social demands upon them. “Henry”
should by the rules of the game have chosen his second concubine before
this, but like all those to whom the Chinese owe money he has not been
paid his allowance for years, and there may be excellent reason for
putting off this addition to his cozy little household. It is what
school-girls call “thrilling” to think of him toasting his toes
alternately with his two brides, perhaps of dissimilar temperaments as
well as mental and physical charms, and still having every other evening
left free for the pursuit of his studies.

Misfortune, of course, does not spare even throneless sovereigns. Fire
has just destroyed much of that portion of the Forbidden City which the
head of the abdicated Manchu dynasty had left him, and has given a hint
of life within those mysterious precincts. Though the conflagration
broke out before midnight nothing worth while was done to curb it until
two in the morning. Most of the courtiers have always lived within the
Purple Wall and had never seen a disaster of such magnitude, so that
when they saw the palace buildings in flames the whole court, including
“Henry” and “Elizabeth,” some stories have it, were seized with nothing
more effective than frenzied excitement. Partly for fear of looting,
partly because no orders were given by their superior officers to break
an ancient rule, the guards refused to open the gates to the two Chinese
and one foreign fire brigades that offered their assistance. After a
lengthy conference these were admitted, but by this time the fire was so
far advanced that only by cutting down many old trees and leveling some
of the smaller buildings was it finally brought under control at seven
in the morning. Even the Chinese admit that almost all the effective
work was done by the foreigners; whatever their excellencies the
Celestials do not shine during emergencies.

Many priceless treasures, and the portraits of many former emperors,
were destroyed. The official report had it first that the fire was
caused by the bursting of a boiler in the palace electric-light plant,
but the more probable truth has since leaked out. The latest assertion
is that it was deliberately set by palace eunuchs, disgruntled over the
failure to receive their allowances, or to cover up their thefts of
imperial treasures. The time was close drawing near for the annual
inspection of these when the conflagration occurred. Looking about the
next day “Henry” found many precious things gone even from places which
the fire did not reach, and incidentally, the story runs, he discovered
a plot against his own life. Cynics wonder that the new régime has not
hired some one to do away with him long before this. Various eunuchs
were handed over to the police, some with bits of loot upon them, but
“unfortunately,” to quote one Chinese paper, “the emperor no longer has
the power to order their heads off.” When he demanded the arrest of some
of the chief eunuchs, however, he found they were under the protection
of two old imperial concubines—of Hsien Feng, consort of the famous
dowager, and of Tung Chih, her son, respectively, who have been dead
sixty-three and forty-eight years! So “Henry” and his two brides ran
away to his father, who has a “palace” outside the west wall of the
city, and refused to come back until all the eunuchs were discharged.
This may have alarmed the old concubines, as the newspapers put it;
certainly it frightened the republicans, with no president in office and
the country threshing about for want of a head; pressure came from
somewhere, the eunuchs went, and “Henry” came back.

  Preparing for a devil-dance at the lama temple in Peking
]

  The devil-dancers are usually Chinese street-urchins hired for the
    occasion by the languid Mongol lamas of Peking
]

  The street-sprinklers of Peking work in pairs, with a bucket and a
    wooden dipper. This is the principal street of the Chinese City
    “outside Ch’ien-men”
]

  The Forbidden City is for the most part no longer that, but open in
    more than half its extent to the ticket-buying public
]

The palace eunuch system has always been pernicious and one of the main
causes of the fall of the many imperial houses that have ruled China.
These have been served by eunuchs ever since the Chou dynasty, more than
three thousand years ago. The dynasty might change, but the eunuchs, who
were the palace servants and often the confidants of the other inmates,
mainly women, stayed on and carried all the vices of the old court over
into the new. Each new dynasty began with a hardy, outdoor ruler, but as
his successors, thanks to the silly “Son of Heaven” idea, were
practically imprisoned for life within the palace among women and
eunuchs, they were bound to become weeds in the enervating atmosphere.
Thus almost all dynasties petered out within two or three centuries, and
in the closing years the eunuchs often became masters; it is well known
that Tzu Hsi, the notorious old “Empress” Dowager, who governed China
for forty years, was herself ruled by a favorite eunuch, who started
life as a shoemaker’s apprentice—though some doubt has always been
expressed about his real eunuchhood. He is believed to be more
responsible than any other single person for the Boxer uprising, but the
only punishment meted out to him was that his wealth, in gold bars said
to be worth several millions, was discovered by the French troops upon
the occupation of Peking and—no one has ever heard of it since.

Avarice is the chief weakness of the eunuch tribe; and the official who
could afford to get a powerful palace servant on his side was sure of
preferment, and in time this system made China officially rotten to the
core. Masters of intrigue and selfishness, they had to be “greased” from
the outer gate to the throne-room even by those who wished to give the
emperor himself a “present.” Each palace occupant was allowed the number
of eunuchs which suited his rank, the total number being three thousand.
They came mainly from Hokienfu, a small city about two hundred miles due
south of Peking, where it was the custom for parents to make eunuchs of
many of their boys, just as they bound the feet of their girls, for they
could place them to still better advantage than a mere girl and thereby
improve their own incomes. When “Henry” made this new break with
antiquity, however, it was found that there were but 1430 palace eunuchs
left, all, it is said, over thirty years old. Orders were also issued to
all Mongol and Manchu nobles and princes forbidding the employment of
eunuchs, and it is hoped that hereafter no native of Hokienfu will get
himself mutilated for the sake of a palace job. Unlike bound feet, the
system was, of course, by no means confined to China. The papal choir
was made up of eunuchs, long since driven by public opinion from the
Italian stage, at least as late as the beginning of the present century,
and they are still employed as the keepers of harems in Mohammedan
countries, being part and parcel of polygamy. Transportation to their
homes, temporary lodgings, and a bit of money was allowed those whom
this lad of sixteen at last cleared out of the Forbidden City, and it
was a picturesque sight to see them leaving the palace with their tawdry
belongings, quarreling to the last with the men sent to pay them off.
Perhaps that is the end of them in China; but it is the land of
compromise, and already the old and crippled eunuchs have been taken
back into the palace until they die.

There are people who believe that “Henry” may again be a real emperor of
China, that he has proved himself so strong by some of his recent
actions as to suggest that had he been born twenty years earlier China
would not now be trying to pose as a republic. Even as modern a young
man as our Chinese teacher thinks that a constitutional monarchy is the
only feasible relief from the present anarchistic chaos of theoretical
republicanism. He puts at ten years, others at from a generation to a
century, the time required under such a restraining form of government
to prepare for a real republic. Who knows? Perhaps even if the monarchy
returns it will not be “Henry” who will head it; soothsayers have been
making strange prophecies recently about an entirely new emperor to come
out of the provinces. Besides, “Henry” is a Manchu, and China has
reverted after nearly three centuries to the misrule of her own people.
But he is already on the spot, sitting on the vacant throne as it were,
and that is seldom a disadvantage.

One of the first obligations of the foreigner coming to China for any
length of time is to get a Chinese name. In other countries the people
do the best they can, vocally and stelographically, to reproduce the
names we already possess; even Japan, by using one of her modern
scripts, can write all the but the more L-ish Western patronymics so
that they read noticeably like the original. But the Chinese have always
insisted that the outside barbarian adapt himself to Chinese ways,
rather than the topsyturvy reverse. Besides, Chinese is a monosyllabic
language, and naturally any stranger who comes to the country must be
translated into words of one syllable. Unfortunately, even syllables are
limited among the ideographs available to the Celestial brush-wielder,
and names which to our notion are obviously of one become polysyllabic,
to say the least, before the Chinese translator gets through with them.
The result is that they seldom bear even a family resemblance to the
original, and the foreigner who can recognize his own Chinese name,
whether written or spoken, is already in a fair way to become an
accomplished Oriental philologist.

Let me take my own name as an example. Except that it may be racially
misleading, I have always considered it quite a tolerable name, not
particularly difficult to pronounce, or to remember, by those who choose
to do so, and unquestionably monosyllabic. Yet the Chinese scholar to
whom it was submitted divided it at once into three syllables, like an
expert taking apart an instrument one had always believed to be of one
piece and returned it as “Feh Lan-kuh.” The first character stands for
“extravagance,” but all the sting is taken out of that false and unjust
start by the other two, which mean “orchid” and “self-control”
respectively. Only three names are allowed in Chinese; therefore my
given names in my own language were crowded into the discard. To the
Chinese I am “Feh _Hsien-sheng_”—Mr. Extravagance; if they wish to go
further and find out what particular form my wastefulness takes they
respectfully inquire my honorable _ming-tze_, and are informed that my
unworthy personal names are “Lan-kuh,” the Orchid with Self-control. The
trouble is that almost any foreigner whose name begins with an F, or
even with a Ph, is also Mr. Feh. There are a dozen of them within
gunshot of us, surely a thousand in China, most of whose English names
are not in the least like our own.

A few lucky mortals have names that can be put into Chinese just as they
stand, not only leaving them audibly recognizable to their compatriots
but saving their given names from the scrap-heap. There is Mr. Fay, of
course, Mr. Howe and Mr. May, and obviously Mr. Lee is orally at home
anywhere in China, whether the scholarly see him as a “pear” or “clear
dawn.” On the other hand there are names that cannot possibly be put
into Chinese even faintly resembling themselves,—Messrs. Smith and
Jones, for instance. It is quite as necessary to know the Chinese name
of the friend you wish to find in China as to be able to speak Chinese;
more so, in fact, for while the Celestials are the antithesis of their
island neighbors in the rapidity with which they grasp an idea from
signs and motions, it is difficult, unless some outstanding personal
characteristic is involved, to express a proper name by a gesture. You
may go up and down a Chinese city in which he has lived for twenty years
shouting for your dear old schoolmate Kelly, shepherding a flock of
Chinese in the general direction of heaven now, and never find a trace
of him unless chance puts you on the track of his new appellation.
Luckily there are but a hundred or so family names in all China, and as
many characters fit to be used as such, so that one may soon become
fairly expert at guessing.

One must have a Chinese name, not only because one would otherwise be
unmentionable, on respectful occasions, even to one’s own servants, but
because a plentiful supply of visiting-cards is absolutely
indispensable. Fortunately these can be had in China at a fraction of
what they cost at home; because not only are cards exchanged on the
slightest provocation, but one of those hastily printed scraps of paper
is just as important and just as final anywhere within the once
Celestial Empire as in South America. Without a card a millionaire in
evening-dress is a mere coolie; with one the most disreputable foreign
tramp who ever seeped back into the interior from the treaty-ports is a
gentleman fit to dine with a Tuchun.

In the olden days of not so long ago Chinese name-cards were red, the
color for happiness. To have a white card meant that one’s father or
mother had died within the past three years; those mourning the recent
loss of a grandparent had yellow or blue ones. The size of the card
determined the importance of the one whose name it bore, or vice versa,
so that the card of a viceroy or a generalissimo was of the size of a
sheet of foolscap, a blood-red splash that could be seen half a mile
away. Colors and size both cost money, however; moreover China has
become, in name at least, a republic. White cards are now in quite
general use, therefore, and though they still vary in size, I have never
been handed one larger than a coat-pocket. Some remain red on one side
and white on the other, especially among the formal and the wealthy; the
ultra-modern have their English name on one side and Chinese on the
other, like foreign residents. The custom of using both sides seems to
be an old one. Often the formal or “business” name appears on the front,
sometimes with the rank or calling, while on the back, in much smaller
characters, are the _hao_ and the _yuan-ch’i_, the name used only by
intimates, and the ancestral birthplace—which even the father of the man
represented may never have seen. Not a few Chinese use two different
cards. One of them bears the characters meaning, “This is only a
friendly exchange-card”; in other words, it has no import in serious or
business matters. If a Tuchun graciously gives you his “exchange-card”
that does not mean that you can use it to give orders to his soldiers or
borrow money in his name at a bank, though his official card may still
have almost the potency of the signet-ring of a king in the days of
ruffles and feathers.

A play modeled more or less on Chinese lines which went the round of the
English-speaking world some years ago has familiarized us with some of
the peculiarities of the Chinese theater—or, from their point of view,
with those of our own. At least those of us who had the pleasure of
attending that performance know that on the Chinese stage a banner held
aloft by two coolies at opposite ends of it stands for a city gate, and
that when a man has been histrionically killed he gets up, wipes his
nose, and saunters off the stage, quite as invisible to the audience as
are the property-men incessantly wandering about among the actors with
the ultra-bored expression of men more completely surfeited with things
theatrical than all the first-nighters and dramatic critics of
Christendom rolled into one. But the Chinese stage has other points
which were not included in that delightful effigy of it, partly because
to make it too Chinese would have been the surest way to drive away any
Western audience, partly because invention advances day by day. I enjoy
the casual, lackadaisical, “invisible” property-men of the Chinese
theater, but I find the man with the thermos bottle still more
beguiling. For “props,” dressed not in black, as the imported version of
Celestial theatrical life would have us believe, but in the hit-or-miss
costume of the Chinese laboring-class, with blue denims very much the
favorite, is after all at home in the theater and soon becomes even to
the foreign eye as natural a part of the decorations as does the
omnipresent coolie in or out of doors. I wonder if their property-men
are not really invisible to the Chinese, for do they not always have
servants and attendants flocking incessantly about them anywhere,
everywhere, on the most solemn as well as the most trivial occasions?
But I have never quite gotten used to the thermos-bottle man and able to
look upon him with complete equanimity. He is no theater employee, but
the personal servant of this or that important actor, which actor often
does not remain more than an hour or two at a time in one theater;
hence, at least in Peking in the winter season, the man who brings his
master his indispensable tea at the climax of every histrionic flight
wears overcoat, fur or knitted cap, and all the rest of the midwinter
equipment, so that, bursting suddenly but casually in upon a court
ceremony or a battle scene set in the color-splashed days to which
Chinese dramas hark back, he suggests an experienced and unexcitable
arctic explorer come to succor with the latest contrivance a group of
Martians enjoying an equatorial holiday.

The thermos bottle was, of course, unknown to those actors of some
generations or centuries back who refused to be deprived even for the
length of a scene of the national beverage, and at the same time wished
to impress upon the audience, itself engaged in satisfying the inner man
quite as freely as if seated at home, that they, for all the low rank of
players, were just as important, thereby establishing a custom that is
all but universal on the Chinese stage. Old-fashioned actors, or those
less generously subsidized by the box-office, also have their tea at the
end of every crisis; but it is brought, not in the latest triumph of
science and by a personal retainer, but by one of the omnipresent
“props,” by a disengaged “super,” or by one of the beggarly loafers that
seem always to be hanging about behind the scenes—if they can be called
such—of a Chinese theater. They, too, sip the uninebriating cup held up
to them while half turning their backs or holding an edge of their
always voluminous costumes over a corner of the mouth, a conventional
pretense which is supposed to make the act invisible to the audience,
and which so far as outward appearances go seems actually to do so.
Besides, why should an act as general and almost as continuous among the
Chinese as breathing attract the attention of a generation that has
probably associated it with every dramatic climax since the oldest man
among them first paid an admission fee? If so slight a thing as this
brought inattention to the play, what would not the orchestra accomplish
in the way of distracting from the plaudits due the actors, scattered as
it is about the stage itself, maltreating its strange instruments or
refraining therefrom in the most casual manner, to light a cigarette, to
scratch itself, to ply a toothpick, or strolling individually on or off,
in any garb at any moment of the afternoon or evening that happens to
suit the individual fancy.

There is a theater in the heart of the Tartar City completely
Westernized in architecture and general arrangements, yet where
perfectly Chinese plays are given; but the foreigner who wishes to get
the complete atmosphere must go “outside Ch’ien-men” into the Chinese
City. For after all it is the audience and what takes place in front of
the stage as much as what goes forward upon it that repays the Westerner
for visiting a Chinese theater. In this busiest part of Peking, among
the blocks where the singsong-girls ply their popular trade, are
scattered many genuinely native playhouses, and farther on there are
numerous makeshift ones hastily thrown together of boards, mats, and
sheet-iron, stretching beyond the _T’ien-ch’iao_, the “Heavenly Bridge”
with its swarming outdoor markets, across which emperors were carried
for centuries to the near-by Temple of Heaven. Out there one may hear
much of the play and more of the “music” than he cares to, while merely
riding past in the afternoon—for genuine Peking theaters are in full
swing from about noon until long after midnight.

Perhaps on the whole the visitor will get the most for his money at any
of those playhouses lost in the maze of narrow streets not far outside
Ch’ien-men, without earning the ill will of his rickshaw-man by driving
him ’way out to the Heavenly Bridge. Here he will find himself, though
perhaps not without Chinese help, entering what looks much like a
warehouse or a wholesale establishment, a roofed court overcrowded with
crude, narrow, painfully upright benches black with time and the food
and drinks that have been spilled upon them for generations from the
little shelves protruding along the back of each for the use of the row
behind. The foreigner is so far out of the orbit of his kind in one of
these establishments that, though the Legation Quarter is barely a hop,
skip, and jump away, just beyond the mammoth Tartar wall, and those two
of the Peking railway stations out of which emerge almost all foreign
visitors to the capital are still nearer, he will probably not be seated
before what looks like a coolie comes to ask his name, preferably to get
his card, explaining, if there is any common denominator of words in
which to do so, that every _wai-guo-ren_ who enters the place must be
reported at once, so that a policeman may be sent to protect him. Yet it
is years since a foreigner has needed individual police protection
anywhere within the Chinese City half as much as the unpaid gendarme who
will keep an eye upon him throughout the performance needs the tip which
he will not refuse if it is properly forced upon him.

Strictly speaking the foreign visitor does not find himself a seat, any
more than he discovers the theater without help. He is, _ipso facto_, a
“possessor of money,” and nowhere that he stirs in China, least of all
in a theater, are there lacking men eager to take as much of that
commodity away as can be bluffed or wheedled out of him. Hence the
conspicuous new-comer is beset from the very entrance by a flock of men
in the all too familiar garb of unwashed coolies, each eager to lead him
to some different section of the house. If he is easily led he will find
himself installed before he knows it in a rickety chair in one of the
little pretenses of boxes around the narrow balcony, the only part of
the house where women spectators may sit. The prices are higher up
there, and the inevitable rake-off of his guide correspondingly larger.
If he is wise he will insist upon remaining in the pit, not too near the
uproarious orchestra and not so close to the back as to interfere with
the throwing arms of the towel-men. When at last he has settled down as
the protégé of a man who seems suddenly to grow superciliously
patronizing toward him the moment he is sure of keeping him in his own
section, and has apparently made lifelong enemies of all the others who
tried to seat him elsewhere, he becomes at once the prey of the
innumerable hawkers of this and that who wallow and shout their way
through the audience quite irrespective of a possible interest in the
stage. Perhaps it occurs to him that he bought no ticket, and was asked
for none at the door. No one does as he enters the purely Chinese
theater. By the time each auditor has adjusted himself as well as his
bodily bulk will permit to the impossible seats behind the tippy
shelves, a man comes to sell him a ticket and to take it up with one and
the same motion. Prices are not high, sixty to eighty coppers at most,
including the percentage that is almost sure to be added out of respect
for his alien condition; even in the Westernized theater within the
Tartar City a seat anywhere in the pit or parquet rarely reaches the
height of a “Mex” dollar. Then a man who thinks he chose his seat for
him must also have his “squeeze,” but this by no means amounts to the
sum subtracted by the old ladies who pose as ushers in the theaters of
Paris. Long before these formalities are concluded, simultaneously with
his sitting down, in fact, the countless dispensers of food and drink
are taking his patronage for granted. A tea-cup sadly in need of an
hour’s scouring with sand is placed top down on the unwashed seat-back
before him, soon to be followed by a tea-pot the spout of which, if he
is observant, he has probably seen some unsoaped neighbor sucking a
moment before, now refilled with boiling water. Little dishes of
shriveled native peanuts, of pumpkin-seeds, of half a dozen similar
delicacies which he has often seen along the outdoor markets and in the
baskets of street-hawkers without ever having felt a desire to make a
closer acquaintance with them, probably also a joint of sugar-cane, will
likewise be set in front of him before he can say his Chinese name,
unless he waves all these things aside with a very imperative gesture.
None of the hawkers catch the meaning of this at once, at least
outwardly, and when they finally do their resentment often reaches the
point of what sounds unpleasantly like more or less subtle vituperation.
Whoever heard of going to a theater without sipping tea and cracking
pumpkin-seeds? Why does this wealthy barbarian come and occupy a seat if
he is going to cheat the men who supply that part of the house out of
their rightful and time-honored selling privileges?

By and by one may be able to turn one’s attention to the stage, though
one has certainly not been unconscious of it, auricularly at least,
since entering the door. The stage is nothing but a raised platform with
a low railing on all four sides, such as might have been the
auction-place in the days when the building was perhaps the warehouse it
looks as if it must have been. Whatever serve as dressing-rooms at the
rear, which according to the space there cannot be much, are separated
from the stage by an alleyway across which the exiting and entering
players hop. The antics on the stage are in no noticeable way different
from those at the Westernized Peking theaters regularly patronized by
foreigners. The masks and wigs and terrifying costumes are probably
cruder, less splendid, and worse adjusted; the lean and bathless coolies
who come on at frequent intervals in orderless groups undisguised as
soldiers, courtiers, and who-knows-what are if anything a trifle more
abject and bovine; there may not appear a single thermos bottle during
the whole evening, though there will be as incessant a consumption of
what passes for tea among the great mass of the Chinese. Certainly there
will be no scenery in the Western sense, though there may be a few
curtains half shutting off the inadequate dressing-room space, and some
pretenses of city gates, thrones, and the like improvised on the spur of
the moment by the bored property-men out of strips of cloth and
half-broken chairs. The conventionalized things which take the place of
scenery, the strange whips carried by those who are supposed to be
mounted, and the something which tells the audience that the bearer is
riding in a boat are somewhat the worse for wear, while the cushions
which “Props” disdainfully throws out in front of the stars when it is
time for them to kneel are almost slippery with the grease of
generations. But the tumbling and the juggling which imply that one of
the frequent battles is going on will be quite the same, except that it
will not be so well done, as inside the main city, and the uproar will
be just as constant and if anything a trifle more deafening.

One theater outside Ch’ien-men has only female players; but they appear
in the same rôles, in exactly the same time-honored plays, as the
all-men casts in other theaters, and act as nearly as possible in the
same way, equally dreadful even in the atrocious falsetto which is the
Chinese actor’s specialty, as noises from the pit of the stomach are of
those of Japan. There may be many a guttural “Hao!” from the men in the
audience for the juggling feats of the stars, winning their battles thus
after the time-honored manner of stage generals or emperors; perhaps
even greater signs of approval for some fine point skilfully rounded in
the old familiar themes, which escapes the foreigner entirely; but there
is never a suggestion of the thought of sex, not a hint, except in their
general appearance, that the players are women and not men. Some of the
unwashed girls who fill out the cast, looking like nothing so much as
kitchen wenches in odds and ends of old finery, are quite as clever
acrobats, in battle-scene tumbling at least, as the men at other places,
though they get less a month than a Broadway chorus-girl spends on
chewinggum in a week.

It will be an imperturbable foreign visitor, however, who can keep his
attention fixed on the stage long enough to note all this at once. The
goings-on in the audience will probably prove more comprehensible,
certainly more amusing. Without going into endless detail it may suffice
to say that the climax of all those things which a Chinese audience does
and a Western one does not is the demand for hot towels during the
performance. One or two towel-men stand over a steaming tub in a far
corner; as many as a dozen others are scattered about the hall, though
their presence may not be suspected by the inexperienced until the
bombardment of towels begins, about the end of the first round of
pumpkin-seeds. All at once the air overhead is crisscrossed with flying
white objects, which on closer attention prove to be bundles of hot, wet
towels tightly rolled together. A man near the tub is throwing them to a
colleague somewhere out in the house, who relays them on to others
dispersed about, these doling them out along the rows of spectators,
collecting them again after they have been used—not to give the ears a
respite from the ceaseless uproar but to deceive the face and hands with
the ghost of a washing—bundling them together once more to start them
hurtling back high over head to the point of origin. The most expert
venders of double-jointed Philadelphia peanuts at our national games
cannot equal Chinese towel-men in the number of throws and the narrow
margins of safety without injury to a spectator. Evidently the
towel-service is included in the price of admission, unless the hawkers
and the section guards band together to supply their clients this
apparent necessity. Therefore the foreigner who gracefully declines this
gracious attention, after noting that the returned towels are merely
immersed and wrung out again as a bundle and once more sent the rounds,
does not win the ill will that would accrue to him if there were a
copper or two of _cumshaw_ involved, and does no other damage than to
block the wheels of progress long enough for information concerning his
strange conduct to be relayed back to the tub-men and commented upon at
least throughout the section he makes conspicuous by his presence.

The bombardment of towels goes on periodically from early afternoon
until early morning, like all the rest of the performance. Where one
play ends another begins with barely the interval of a sip of tea, and
though some spectators are constantly coming and going, like the casual
members of the orchestra and the undisguised “supers,” the endurance of
the mass of them is phenomenal. Some time between five and seven o’clock
many spectators vary their incessant munching and sipping by ordering a
full meal from the runners of the adjoining tea-house, and the click of
chop-sticks may now and then be heard above the louder clamor. But the
spectacle, both on and off the stage, goes unconcernedly on.

It would require much more Chinese than I can so far understand to catch
any of the dialogue—if that is the word for it—of a typical Chinese
play. The inexperienced Westerner will seldom have the faintest idea
what it is all about, or even who the characters stand for, so
unintelligible to him are the signs and symbols by which the native
spectator recognizes them and their doings. For that matter the average
Chinese would not understand much unless he had imbibed all these old
stories almost with his mother’s milk. The old, poetic, and often
obsolete words in which the Chinese actor speaks—or rather “sings,” to
use the misleading Chinese term—would be obscure enough in a sane and
ordinary tone of voice; in his successful imitation of ungreased
machinery his actual speech is probably of little more import to the
hearers than are the words of an Italian opera to a Chicago audience.
Like the Japanese the Chinese prefer to hear the same old historical
themes and see the same old pageants over and over again, however, or at
most to have new variations upon them, generation after century. Hence
even the illiterate can often follow a play word by word without
understanding a line of it. We have discovered that by having our
teacher tell us the story beforehand we can guess the meaning of a
considerable part of the action, thereby finding the Chinese theater
much less of a bore than most foreigners report it. To every people its
own ways; certainly the attempt to ape Western theatricals which was put
on during the winter by a club of native élite, with traveled young
Chinese of both sexes prancing about the stage in frock-coats and scanty
gowns, not to mention bobbed hair, was more terrible than anything
genuine Chinese actors ever perpetrate. Personally I have even become
reconciled to Chinese “music”—in the olden days plays were given
outdoors, hence the deafening quality of this—and in certain moods even
to enjoy it, briefly, as one sometimes enjoys a crush in the subway or a
rough-and-tumble mingling with the Broadway throng; and we have both
grown very fond of seeing, if not of listening to, Mei Lan-fang.

Mr. Mei—whose family character means “peach blossom” and who is related
to us to the extent of including an orchid in his given name—is China’s
most famous and most popular actor. Like his father and grandfather
before him he plays only female rôles, and while even his falsettos may
grate on a Western ear, many is the foreigner who pursues him from
theater to theater merely to watch his graceful movements, his
inimitable dancing or simply the manipulation of his beautiful hands.
Scrawl the three characters by which he is known on the bill-board or
the newspaper space of any theater, inside Ch’ien-men or out, anywhere
in China for that matter, though he has no need to tour the provinces,
and the man in the box-office has only to order any suggestion of vacant
space filled with chairs and lean back in perfect contentment. Mei
Lan-fang carries his own troupe, like a Spanish _matador_ his
_cuadrilla_, even his own orchestra, and the arrangement of Chinese
performances is such that he can play in several theaters on the same
night, from eleven to midnight inside the Tartar City perhaps, where the
doors close ridiculously early, the rest of the night among the better
establishments outside the main wall. Seldom does he deign to appear
earlier than that, unless at some special matinée in the Forbidden City
or at the presidential palace, and he is under no necessity of appearing
every night merely to keep the wolf from his door. By Chinese standards
his income rivals that of any opera singer.

The Chinese are fond of complications of character in their plays, and
some of Mr. Mei’s greatest successes are as a man playing a girl who in
turn disguises herself as a man; but there is never a moment in which
the basic femininity of the part does not stand clearly forth in the
hands of this consummate artist. I had the pleasure of spending an
afternoon with him once. His house out in the heart of the Chinese City
is outwardly commonplace; but the touch of the genuinely artistic
temperament is nowhere missing inside the door. The delicate, almost
white-faced man still in his twenties, sometimes looking as if he had
barely reached them, proved to be one of the most gracious and at the
same time most unobtrusive hosts I have ever met. His manner had not a
suggestion of the financially successful, the popular idol, as it would
manifest itself in the West. He was as simple, as unassuming, as wholly
untheatrical as are the objects of Chinese art on which he spends his
surplus wealth and time inconspicuous with real distinction. Among his
treasures were many thin-paper volumes of classics, of old plays, some
of them several centuries old, with annotations in the margins by bygone
but not forgotten actors indicating tones, gestures, movements down to
the crooking of a little finger. Mr. Mei makes much use of these, though
not for slavish imitation. His entourage includes a scholar of standing
whose task it is to weave new stories about the old themes, and from
them the actor evolves new dances—which is not the word, but let it
stand—and new ways of entertaining his crowded audiences without losing
touch with the distant centuries to which they prefer to be transported
within the theater. Mei Lan-fang does not drink tea on the stage. It is
an arrogance of the profession to which his famous family never
descended. Nor, one notes, do property-men trip unnecessarily about
under his feet when he is performing. I have Mr. Mei’s word for it that
the throat does not suffer from the constant unnatural tasks put upon it
by his profession; but only from a man of such self-evident truthfulness
could I believe it. Certainly there was nothing in his soft home-side
speech to belie that surprising statement, as there was nothing in his
modest manner to suggest that wherever he plays the streets are filled
as far at least as the eye can see by night with waiting rickshaws.

Russians have occupied the extreme northeast corner of the Tartar City
for centuries. Away back in the reign of K’ang Hsi, to whom all those of
the white race were indeed outside barbarians, an army of the czar was
defeated in what is now Siberia, and the captives brought to Peking were
made into a defense corps after the style of the Manchu-“bannermen.”
Gradually the Manchu warriors disappeared from the enclosure that once
housed them only, as they grew weak and flabby and penniless under
imperial corruption and sold out family by family to the Chinese, until
to-day the Tartar City is that merely in name and in memory. But the
Russians remain just where the victorious emperor assigned them. Two
garish Greek Orthodox structures thrust their domes and spires aloft
from within the large walled area which makes that corner of the city
somewhat less of an open space given over to garbage-heaps, rag-pickers,
and prowling dogs than are the other three. The Son of Heaven was
graciously moved to permit his Russian bannermen to have their own
religious teachers, and the Orthodox priests sent from Russia became not
only missionaries to the surrounding “heathen” but the unofficial
diplomatic agents of the czar. In time, when the powers saw fit to
disabuse the occupant of the dragon throne of the impression that all
the rest of the earth was tributary to him, the Russians also
established their official minister in the Legation Quarter, with
pompous buildings and another Orthodox church within a big compound.
To-day, by consent of the Chinese, representatives of the old czarist
régime still informally occupy this, while the unrecognized envoy of the
Soviet finds his own accommodations, like any other tourist. But the
establishment in the further corner of the city survives, boasting not
merely a bishop but an archbishop, and numbering by the hundred the
Chinese converts clustered in that section.

A Russian church service with a mainly Chinese congregation is worth
going some distance to see. Nowadays the converts hardly outnumber their
fellow-worshipers, so many are the destitute Russian refugees who have
drifted to that distant northeast corner of Peking. They live thick as
prisoners in the stone-walled cells of the old monastery where once only
Orthodox monks recited their prayers,—frail women and underfed children
as well as men bearing a whole library of strange stories on their gaunt
faces. Groups of refugees who came too late or have not influence enough
to find room in the cells live packed together in stone cellars, some
still wearing the remnants of czarist uniforms, or of the various
“White” armies that have gone to pieces before the advancing “Reds,”
some still unrecovered from war-time wounds and sundry hardships.

The orchestra which enlivens the nights of the more fortunate foreigners
in the frock-coat section of the city huddle together here on improvised
beds that would hardly be recognized as such; in these ill smelling
dungeons there are men who have not garments enough, even if they had
the spirit left, to go forth and look for some possible way out of their
present sad dilemma.

But one’s sympathy for the dispossessed Russians in China always soon
comes to a frayed edge. Their scorn of manual labor even as an
alternative to starvation, the unregenerate selfishness of their exiled
fellow-countrymen in more fortunate circumstances, their lack of
practicality, of plain common sense from the Western point of view, in a
word their Orientalism, so out of keeping with their Caucasian exterior,
tend to turn compassion to mere condolences which in time fade out to
indifference. Perhaps any of us suddenly come down as a nation, like a
proud sky-scraper unexpectedly collapsing into a chaotic heap of débris,
would find ourselves bewildered out of ordinary human intelligence; but
it is hard to avoid the impression that these individual weaknesses were
there before the debacle, and that they are incurable, at least in the
existing generation. A few such enterprises as printing, binding, and
leather tanning have been started in the former monastery, but it was
noticeable that almost all the actual work was being done by Chinese.
Sturdy, even though possibly hungry, young men loafed about their cells
and cellars complaining that they could not hire some one to rebuild
their simple brick bathing-vat and cooking-stove. Chinese officials,
especially of the petty grade, have not been over-kind to the groups of
refugees that have fallen into their hands; but they rank at least on a
par with the Russian archbishop of Peking, who considers the northeast
corner of the city his personal property and demands the abject
servility of the Middle Ages toward his exalted person from those of his
fellow-countrymen whom he graciously admits to floor-space there in the
shadow of his own spacious episcopal residence.

These ostentatious forms of Christianity seem much more in keeping with
the Chinese temperament than the austere Protestantism of innumerable
sects, which has dotted Peking, as it has all China, with its schools,
churches, hospitals, and missions pure and simple. It is not at all hard
to find resemblances between the services of the Russians and those in
the lama temple a little west of them, in any joss-burning Chinese place
of worship, or for that matter between these and high mass at Pei-t’ang
to the northwest of the Forbidden City. The Catholics, too, go back for
centuries in the life of Peking, to Verbiest and his fellow-Jesuits who
served the Sons of Heaven in secular, as well as their subjects in
religious, ways.

In the Boxer days Pei-t’ang was scarcely second to the British legation
as a place of refuge against the bloodthirsty besiegers; on Easter
Sunday, at least, it rivals even in mere picturesqueness any temple in
the capital. Red silk interspersed with Maltese crosses in imperial
yellow wrapped the pillars; artificial flowers—where real ones are so
cheap and so plentiful—added to the Oriental garishness of the interior;
the mingled scent of incense and crowded Chinese made the scene
impressive not merely to the sight. Mats on the floor held more
worshipers than did the benches. The women sat on one side, the flaring
white head-dresses of the nuns forming a broad front border to the sea
of smooth, oily Chinese coiffures. Near the center hundreds of “orphan”
boys in khaki made a great yellow patch. In front, at the foot of the
choir-stalls backed by the gorgeous altar, the assemblage was gay with
French and Belgian officers in full bemedaled uniform, with a scattering
of European women—there are other Catholic churches in Peking that are
not so far away for most foreigners—their prie-dieus conspicuous in rich
silk covers. Even the raised place at one side, theoretically reserved
for Caucasians, was crowded with Chinese, hardly a dozen more of whom
could have been driven into the church with knouts or bayonets. Yellow
faces, high above any casual glance, peered from behind the pipes of the
big organ. Chinese acolytes in red wandered to and fro, swinging
censers; the music, while not unendurable, was screechy enough to prove
the unseen choir of the same race, boys echoing men, with the organ
filling in the interstices. Children ran wild among the rather orderless
throng; some of the congregation stood throughout the service; large
numbers of Chinese men kept their caps on. But a thousand Chinese
fervently crossing themselves at the requisite signals from the altar,
where two Chinese priests in colorful robes worthy at least a bishop
functioned on either side of the white-haired European in archiepiscopal
regalia, had about it something no less striking than anything Buddhism
has to offer. On week-days old Chinese women, just such bent, shrouded
figures as may be seen in any cathedral of Europe, come from the maze of
_hutungs_ about Pei-t’ang to bow their heads in silent prayer in its
perpetual twilight, with gaudy saints and images of here and there a
somewhat Chinese cast of countenance looking down upon them.

Preparations for the Chinese New Year began on the twenty-third of the
twelfth moon with the burning of the kitchen god still to be found in
nearly every home. Some of our neighbors, especially those whom lack of
a courtyard drove out into the _hutung_ for this ceremony, did it half
furtively, as if they were pretending, at least when foreigners looked
on, that this was only an ordinary wad of waste-paper. But we knew that
before he was torn down incense had been burned before the flimsy,
smoke-dulled god, with a little straw or _kaoliang_ for the horse that
is shown waiting for him, and even our neighbors admitted that they
stuck a bit of something sweet on his lips before sending him to heaven,
by the fire route, to report on the actions of the family during the
year. A little opium serves this purpose still better, or best of all is
to dip the whole half-penny lithograph in native wine just before the
burning, that the god may be too drowsy or too drunk to tell the truth
when he reaches headquarters.

  Mei Lan-fang, most famous of Chinese actors, who, like his father and
    grandfather before him, plays only female parts
]

  In the vast compound of the Altar of Heaven
]

  Over the wall from our house, boats plied on the moat separating us
    from the Chinese City
]

  Just outside the Tartar Wall of Peking the night-soil of the city,
    brought in wheelbarrows, is dried for use as fertilizer
]

It is a seven-day journey to the Chinese heaven and back, so that people
have a little respite from the irksome surveillance of the god of the
kitchen. During that week there was a furor of house-cleaning, as the
Chinese misunderstand the term; the well-to-do renewed their paper
windows; those who could afford it went so far as to have the wooden
parts freshly painted. Especially on the last day of the year much
shaving, washing, and bathing went on; the baths outside the southern
gates of the Tartar City were crowded as they never are at ordinary
times, when a two-to-ten copper bath once a month is considered ample.
All that last day, too, the _chop-a-chop_ of food, especially of meat
dumplings, being prepared for the many guests of the following days,
when such work would be taboo, sounded from every house that was not a
poor man’s home indeed. Faded old scraps of paper came down everywhere
and bright new ones went up, particularly those long upright red slips
opposite each door, bearing the four familiar characters for _K’ai men
chien hsi_—“Open door see happiness.” Some of these were put up by the
householders themselves, some by poor neighbors who hoped for a slight
remembrance from the inmates. One saw them all over China for months
afterward. The most miserable little hovels far outside the walls put up
new paper gods that made brilliant splashes on doors and mud façades.
Perhaps the saddest thing about the Chinese New Year is that all debts
are expected to be paid before it breaks, which was particularly hard on
what is still recognized abroad as the Chinese Government, months in
arrears with every one except its Tuchuns and high employees of special
influence. Two men at least I saw next day wandering about with a
lantern, a pretense that it is still night and dunning still
permissible.

New Year’s day is everybody’s birthday in China; so there is a double
reason for new clothes appearing everywhere. Even beggars and
rag-pickers seemed to have them, or at least well washed and mended
ones, and the populace presented such a sight of approximate cleanliness
as it will not until another year rolls by and compels it to change
again. A new kitchen god, gaudy on its thin paper, is put up during the
first hours of the new year, with a little shrine, and firecrackers and
incense welcome him. Firecrackers, indeed, were the most conspicuous
part of the celebration. They boomed all night, close under our back
walls and all over the city; even “Ha-li” was restless with the
incessant uproar. This was partly in honor of the kitchen gods, but
largely to frighten off the evil spirits lurking about to contaminate
the new year at the start. Among the Chinese there was no attempt to
sleep that night; even our _ama_ asked permission to go home, and said
that she would sit up all night, eating meat dumplings from about two in
the morning until daybreak—yet she is a woman of unusual common sense
for China, with the utmost scorn for those who still bind their feet.

For the first five days of the new year women are supposed not to leave
home or to enter that of another, though in Peking many disobey at least
the first half of this ancient rule. The men, on the other hand, go out
early and often, not only on the first but on the succeeding days, to
call upon all their friends, particularly on the mother-in-law who
reigns over each household, to give greetings, and incidentally to fill
themselves beyond nature’s intention with meat dumplings. Our teacher
was still weary from this ordeal when he again reported for duty.
Rachel, however, was strictly enjoined by the _ama_ not to call on a
neighbor at whose house she had attended a wedding during the winter; it
would be even worse form than not to have a mother-in-law present to
receive those who called upon us. As in France, New Year’s is the time
for giving presents; no sooner had we distributed a dozen silver dollars
in red envelopes among the servants than they despatched the _ama_ to
get us presents,—food dainties for us adults, toys for “Ha-li.” Of all
the celebration, however, perhaps the detail that looked strangest was
to see the shops closed, long row after row of them blank-faced with
board shutters where we had never seen them before. Drums and
firecrackers sounded inside—some say that gambling goes on apace—whether
to scare off devils or merely for the joy of making a noise; probably
both motives existed, depending on the individual temperament.
Foreigners sometimes accuse the Chinese of laziness because they take as
much as a week’s rest at New Year’s, as if this were anything compared
with our fifty-two and more holidays a year. Besides, even the shops are
in few cases really closed; trust any Chinese merchant not to miss a
possible stroke of business. There is almost always a peep-hole, if you
know where to look for it, and one man inside who will make a special
exception in favor of any one who finds it. Merchants can send their
goods to the fairs, anyway; these spring up everywhere, especially in
temple grounds, in and outside the city, where every one comes to burn
joss-sticks by the bundle, until many a huge urn before the gods runs
over with ashes. These are the gayest of markets, with peep-shows,
acrobats, coolies, posing for the day as sword-swallowers,
story-tellers, and musicians, with amateur and professional theatrical
performances indoors and out, with every conceivable gambling device,
men, women, and children crowded around them, with all manner of
playthings for sale,—singing “diavolo” tops reaching almost the size of
drums, pink bottles of _chianti_-shape which reward the blower with a
peculiar noise, clusters of toy windmills on one handle that spin in
chorus as the holder rides homeward in his rickshaw or his Peking cart,
kites of every description, some fully man-size, of bird, beetle,
airplane shape. There are no age-limits among the Chinese in the use of
New Year’s toys; even solemn old men fly kites all over the city at this
season, among the swirls of pigeons following their whistle-bearing
leader about the cloudless heavens.

All this went on for a week or more, though with diminishing ardor; for
some soon tire of so long a holiday, and many would starve if they
celebrated it all, so that gradually men went back to work, though not a
few stuck it out. We hardly noticed a lack of rickshaws even on the
first day, and the calls of street-hawkers never completely died out. If
our servants went out more than usual we missed none of their usual
services, and certainly the cook must have found the markets open. The
real New Year’s duty of every Chinese, of course, is to go home, though
it be across ten provinces, to put paper “cash,” such as flutter along
the route of every funeral, on the graves of his ancestors, and to
prepare them special food, preferably duck or chicken, of which they can
eat only the “flavor,” leaving three guesses as to what becomes of the
rest. Many do go home, but in modern days it is surprising how many find
this imperative journey quite impossible. At length the celebration
petered out, though crowded carts of people in their best garments could
be seen plodding toward the temples outside our East Wall up to the
last, and Peking settled down to its industrious seven days a week
again.

With the republic, China officially adopted the Western calendar, as
Japan did long ago; but the masses cling to the old one, with its animal
names for the twelve years that are constantly recurring. Like
Christianity, the new calendar is considered something foreign, which is
quite enough, even leaving the tenacity of old custom aside, to condemn
it among many Chinese; and even in official circles the lunar New Year
is celebrated more thoroughly than the other. The result is that no
government employee has to come to office on the foreign New Year, and
no one does on the old one, when even cabinet members go to their
ancestral homes or on a spree to Tientsin or Shanghai. Nor is the cult
of cyclical animals by any means dead among the Chinese. Almost over our
head on the East Wall stand the famous astronomical instruments, some of
them made by Verbiest himself, which the Germans carried off in 1900 and
very recently returned in accordance with a clause in the Treaty of
Versailles; and just beyond them is an old temple, the occupants of
which include among their duties the annual task of compiling the
popular almanac. One may see original or reprinted copies of this
everywhere in China, for it is indispensable to the fortuneteller, the
geomancer, and all their innumerable ilk, if not to the mass of the
people themselves. Here are set forth the lucky and unlucky days for
marriages or funerals, for washing the hair, for beginning a new
building, for every act of importance in the Chinese daily life. Without
it how could match-makers know whether or not the birth-years of
possible brides and grooms conflict? Obviously if one was born in the
year of the rabbit and the other in that of the dog, or in the years of
the tiger and the sheep respectively, the result of an alliance would be
a sorry household.

This year the almanac concocted by our priestly neighbors has a pig as
“running title” from cover to cover, as well as the frequent recurrence
of this motif throughout its pages. For this is the Year of the Pig,
which began on our own February 16, and for twelve moons—this year there
does not happen to be an intercalary thirteenth—the millions of
Mohammedan Chinese must express themselves on that subject by using some
such subterfuge as “Black Sheep.” Moreover, it is the end of a cycle of
Cathay, the pig being the last of the twelve cyclical animals which pass
five times to make such a cycle. This, it seems, presages the worst year
of the whole sixty, and the soothsayers enlivened this New Year’s with
the most pessimistic predictions. According to the street-side
necromancers, who make their livelihood, such as it is, by telling the
fortunes of individuals or of nations, much calamity is due China before
this Year of the Pig is done. Millions, perhaps, will die of war,
pestilence, or famine, or a combination of these—one fellow went so far
as to assure his listeners that three fourths of the population of
Peking will be wiped out. Great disasters are promised all over the
country, particularly in the province of Shensi, which must suffer
especially for the privilege of being the birthplace of the next
emperor, whom the necromancers assert is already approaching man’s
estate there. It is hopeless, therefore, runs the gossip, to expect a
settlement of China’s crying difficulties during the twelvemonth of the
Pig—some of us wonder if the foreign legations have been imbued with the
same spirit. That is the evil of superstitions particularly in a land
where the majority is still influenced by them; the mere fact that large
numbers of people believe all this market-stall nonsense causes at least
a psychological depression, and probably increases the likelihood of the
beliefs being realized.

However, these popular oracles go on, after this year conditions will
rapidly improve, and it is almost certain that with the new cycle will
come a return to order and prosperity. Every friend of China sincerely
hopes so, for she certainly needs just that very badly, whether she
deserves it or not. No doubt the next cycle of sixty years will bring
something of the sort, even though it is difficult to think of China’s
calamities abruptly ceasing with this inauspicious porcine year.

There are good as well as unkind things to be said of the Chinese lunar
calendar. It is easy, for instance, to tell the time of their month
merely by glancing at the sky on any unclouded evening, and no one need