The Last Days of Pekin
Play Sample
Cold, darkness, death, all that oppressed us last night, has disappeared with the morning light.The sun shines warm as a summer sun.The somewhat disordered Chinese magnificence which surrounds us is bright with the light of the East.
It is amusing to go on a voyage of discovery over this almost hidden palace, which lurks in a low spot, behind walls, under trees, looking quite insignificant as you approach it, but is, together with its dependencies, almost as large as a city.
It is made up of long galleries enclosed on all sides in glass; the light framework, the verandahs, the small columns, are painted on the outside a greenish bronze decorated with pink water-lilies.
One has the feeling that it was built according to the fancies of a woman; it even seems as though the splendid old Empress had left in it, along with her bibelots, a touch of her superannuated yet still charming grace.
The galleries cross one another at right angles, forming courts at the junctures, like little cloisters.They are filled with objects of art, which can be equally well seen from without, for the entire palace is transparent from one end to the other.There is nothing to protect all this glass even at night; the place was enclosed by so many walls and seemed so inviolable that no other precaution was deemed necessary.
Within, the architectural elegance consists of arches of rare wood, crossing at frequent intervals; they are made of enormous beams so carved, so leafy, so open, that they seem like lace, or, rather, like bowers of dark leaves that form a perspective comparable to the lanes in old parks.
The wing which we occupy must have been the wing of honor.The farther away from it one goes in the direction of the woods where the palace ends, the more simple does the decoration become.At one end are the lodgings of the mandarins, the stewards, the gardeners, the domestics, all hurriedly abandoned and full of unfamiliar objects, household utensils or those used in worship, ceremonial hats and court liveries.
Then comes an enclosed garden which is entered by an elaborately carved marble gate.Here one finds small fountains, pretentious and curious rockwork, and rows of vases containing plants which have died from lack of water or from cold.Further on there is an orchard where figs, grapes, eggplant, pumpkins, and gourds were cultivated,—gourds especially, for in China they are emblems of happiness, and it was the custom of the Empress to offer one with her own white hands to each of the dignitaries who came to pay his court to her in exchange for the magnificent presents he brought her.There are also small pavilions for the cultivation of silkworms and little kiosks for storing edible grains; each kind was kept in a porcelain jar decorated with imperial dragons, worthy of a place in a museum.
The parks of this artificial little landscape end in the brush, where they lose themselves under the leafless trees of the wood where to-day the crows and the magpies are enjoying the beautiful autumn sun.It seems that when the Empress gave up the regency—and we know by what an audacious manœuvre she so quickly managed to take it up again—it was her caprice to construct a bit of the country here in the heart of Pekin, in the very centre of this immense human ant-hill.
The most surprising thing in all this enclosure is a Gothic church with two granite bell-towers, a parsonage, and a school,—all built in other days by the missionaries and all of enormous size.But in order to create this palace it was necessary to enlarge the limits of the Imperial City and to include in them this Christian territory; so the Empress gave the Lazarist Fathers more land and a more beautiful church, erected at her own expense, where the missionaries and several thousand converts endured all last summer the horrors of a four-months' siege.
Like the systematic woman that she was, her Majesty utilized the church and its dependencies for storing her reserves of all sorts, packed in innumerable boxes.One could not imagine without having seen them what an accumulation there could be of the strange, the marvellous, and the preposterous in the reserve stock of bibelots belonging to an Empress of China.
The Japanese were the first to forage there, then came the Cossacks, and, lastly, the Germans, who left the place to us.At present the church is in indescribable disorder,—boxes opened, their precious contents scattered outside in rubbish heaps; there are streams of broken china, cascades of enamel, ivory, and porcelain.
In the long glass galleries a similar state of things exists.My comrade, who is charged with straightening out the chaos and making an inventory, reminds me of that person who was shut up by an evil spirit in a chamber filled with the feathers of all the birds of the woods and compelled to sort them by species; those of the finch, the linnet, the bullfinch together.However, he has already set about his difficult task, and with Chinese workmen, under the direction of a few marines and some African chasseurs, has already begun to clear things away.
Five metres from here, on the opposite shores of the Lake of the Lotus, as I was retracing my steps last night, I found a second palace which once belonged to the Empress, which is now ours also. In this palace, which no one is occupying at the moment, I am authorized to set up my work-room for a few days, so that I may have quiet and isolation.
It is called the Rotunda Palace.Exactly opposite the Marble Bridge, it resembles a circular fortress, on which have been placed small miradors,—little, fairy-like castles,—and the single low entrance is guarded day and night by soldiers, whose orders are to admit no one.
When you have crossed the threshold of this citadel, and the guards have closed the door after you, you penetrate into the most exquisite solitude.An inclined plane leads you to a vast esplanade about twelve metres above the ground, where the miradors—the little kiosks—seen from below stand; there is a garden with old, old trees, a labyrinth of rocks, and a large pagoda shining with gold and enamel.
From here there is a commanding view of the palace and its park.On one side the Lake of the Lotus is spread out; on the other, one has a bird's-eye view of the Violet City, showing the almost endless succession of high imperial roofs,—a world of roofs, a world of enamel shining in the sunshine, a world of horns, claws, and monsters on gable and tiling.
I walk in the solitude of this high place, in the shade of the old trees, trying to understand the arrangement of the house and to choose a study to my fancy.
In the centre of the esplanade is the magnificent pagoda which was struck by a shell and which is still in battle disarray.Its presiding divinity—a white goddess, who was the Palladium of the Chinese empire, an alabaster goddess with a gold dress embroidered with precious stones—meditates with downcast eyes, sweet, calm, and smiling, in the midst of the destruction of her sacred vases, of her incense-burners and her flowers.
One large gloomy room has kept its furnishings intact,—an admirable ebony throne, some screens, seats of all shapes, and cushions of heavy yellow imperial silk, brocaded with a cloud effect.
Among all the silent kiosks the one which I fix upon as my choice is at the very edge of the esplanade on the crest of the surrounding wall, overlooking the Lake of the Lotus and the Marble Bridge, and commanding a view of the whole factitious landscape,—created out of gold ingots and human lives to please the weary eyes of emperors.
It is hardly larger than a ship's cabin, but its sides are made of glass extending to the roof, so that I shall be kept warm until nightfall by the autumn sun, which here in China is seldom over-clouded. I have a table and two ebony chairs with yellow silk coverings brought in from the adjoining room,—and thus installed, I descend again to the Marble Bridge and return to the Palace of the North, where Captain C. , my companion in this Chinese dream, is waiting breakfast for me.
I arrive in time to see, before they are burned, the curious discoveries of the morning,—the decorations, emblems, and accessories of the Chinese Imperial Theatre.They were cumbersome, frail things, intended to serve but for a night or two, and then forgotten for an indefinite time in a room that was never opened, and which they are now clearing out and cleaning for a hospital for our sick and wounded.Mythological representations were evidently given at this theatre, the scene taking place either in hell or with the gods in the clouds; and such a collection as there was of monsters, chimæras, wild beasts, and devils, in cardboard or paper, mounted on carcasses made of bamboo or whalebone, all devised with a perfect genius for the horrible, with an imagination surpassing the limits of a nightmare!
The rats, the dampness, and the ants have caused irremediable havoc among them, so it has been decided to burn all these figures that have served to amuse or to trouble the dreams of the drowsy, dissipated, feeble young Emperor.
Our soldiers are hurrying amid joy and laughter to carry all these things out of doors.Here in the morning sunlight of the courtyard are apocalyptic beasts and life-sized elephants that weigh nothing at all, and which one man can make walk or run.They kick them, they jump upon them, they jump into them, they walk through them and reduce them to nothing; then at last they light the gay torch, which in the twinkling of an eye consumes them.
Other soldiers have been working all the morning pasting rice-paper into the sashes of our palace so that the wind shall not enter.As for artificial heat, it comes up from below, Chinese fashion, from subterranean furnaces which are arranged under the rooms, and which we shall light this evening as soon as the chill comes on.For the moment the splendid sunshine suffices; so much glass in the galleries, where the silks, enamels, and gold glisten, gives us the heat of a greenhouse, and on this occasion we take our meal, which is always served on the Emperor's china, in an illusion of summer.
The sky of Pekin is subject to excessive and sudden variations of which we with our regular climate can form no conception. Toward the middle of the day, when I find myself out of doors again under the cedars of the Yellow City, the sun has suddenly disappeared behind some leaden clouds which seem heavy with snow; the Mongolian wind begins to blow, bitter cold, as it was yesterday, and again a northern winter follows with no transition stage a few hours of the radiant weather of the Midi
I have an arrangement to meet the members of the French legation in the woods, to explore with them the sepulchral Violet City, which is the centre, the heart, the mystery of China, the veritable abode of the Son of Heaven, the enormous Sardanapalian citadel, in comparison with which all the small modern palaces in the Imperial City where we are living seem but children's playthings.
Even since the flight it has not been easy to enter the Violet City with its yellow enamelled roofs.Behind the double walls, mandarins and eunuchs still dwell in this home of magnificence and oppression, and it is said that a few women, hidden princesses, and treasures still remain.The two gates are guarded by severe sentries,—the north gate by the Japanese, the south by Americans.
It is by the first of these two entrances that we are authorized to pass to-day, and the group of small Japanese soldiers that we find there smile upon us in welcome; but the austere gate—dark red with gilded locks and hinges, representing the heads of monsters—is closed from within and resists their efforts. The use of centuries has warped the enormous doors so that through the crack one can see boards fastened on to the inside to prevent their opening, and persons running about announcing in flute-like voices that they have received no orders.
We threaten to burn the doors, to climb over them, to shoot through the opening; all sorts of things which we have no intention of doing, but which frighten the eunuchs and put them to flight.
No one is left to answer us.What are we to do?We are freezing our feet by this cold wall; the moat, full of dead reeds, exhales dampness, and the wind continues to blow.
The kindly Japanese, however, send some of their strongest men—who depart on a keen run—to the other gate, some four kilometres around.They light a fire for us out of cedar branches and painted woodwork, where we take turns warming our hands while we wait; we amuse ourselves by picking up here and there old feathered arrows thrown by prince or emperor from the top of the walls. After an hour's patient waiting, noise and voices are heard behind the silent gate; it is our envoy inside cuffing the eunuchs.
Suddenly the boards creak and fall and the doors open wide before us.
III
THE ABANDONED ROOM
There is a faint odor of tea in the dark room, an odor of I know not what beside,—of dried flowers and old silks.
There is no way of getting more light in this curious room, which opens into a big gloomy salon, for its windows receive only half-light because of the rice paper in all the panes; they open onto a yard that is no doubt surrounded by triple walls.The alcove-bed, large and low, which seems to be set into an inner wall thick as a rampart, has silk curtains and a cover of dark blue,—the color of the sky at night.There are no seats, indeed there would scarcely be room for any; neither are there any books, nor could one very well see to read.On the dark wooden chests which serve as tables, stand melancholy bibelots in glass cases; small vases of bronze or of jade containing very stiff artificial bouquets, with petals made of mother-of-pearl and ivory.A thick layer of dust over everything shows that the room is not occupied.
Copyright, 1901, by J.C.Hemment
The Big Tower or Wall Entrance of Tartar City
At first sight there is nothing to mark the place or the time,—unless, possibly, the fineness of the ebony carving of the upper part of the bed reveals the patience of the Chinese.Everything is sombre and gloomy, with straight, austere lines.
Where are we, then, in what obscure, closed, clandestine dwelling?
Has some one lived here in our time or was it in the distant past?
How many hours—or how many centuries—has he been gone, and who could he have been, the occupant of the abandoned room?
Some sad dreamer evidently, to have chosen this shadowy retreat; some one very refined, to have left behind him this distinguished fragrance, and very weary, to have been pleased with this dull simplicity and this eternal twilight.
One feels stifled by the smallness of the windows, whose panes are veiled with silky paper, and which never can be opened to admit light or air because they are sealed into the wall.And besides, you recall the weary way you must take to get here, and the obstacles you encounter, and that disturbs you.
First, there is the big black Babylonian wall, the superhuman ramparts of a city more than ten leagues around, which to-day is a mass of ruins, half empty, and strewn with corpses; then a second wall, painted blood-red, which forms a second city enclosed in the first. Then a third wall, more magnificent still, and also the color of blood; this is the wall that surrounds the great mysteries of the place, and before the days of the war and the fall of the city no European had ever gone beyond it; to-day we were detained for more than an hour, in spite of passes, signed and countersigned; through the keyhole of a great gate guarded by soldiers and barricaded from within, we were compelled to threaten and argue at length with the guards inside, who sought to hide and to escape. These gates once opened, another wall appeared, separated from the former one by a road going all the way around the enclosure; here tattered garments were scattered about, and dogs were playing with the bones of the dead. This wall was of the same red, but still more splendid, and was crowned along its entire length by a horned ornamentation and by monsters made of a golden yellow faience. When we had finally passed this third wall, queer old beardless persons came to meet us with distrustful greetings, and guided us through a maze of little courts and small gardens, walled and walled again, in which old trees were growing amongst rockwork and jars. All of it was separate, concealed, distressing; all of it protected and peopled by monsters and chimæras in bronze or marble, by a thousand faces, whose grimaces signified ferocity and hatred, by a thousand unknown symbols. And every time each gate in the red walls with the yellow faience tops closed behind us, as in horrible dreams the doors of a series of passageways close upon one, nevermore to permit one to go out.
Now, after our long journey which seems like a nightmare, we feel, as we look at the anxious group who have conducted us, walking noiselessly on their paper soles, that we have committed some supreme and unheard-of profanation in their eyes, in penetrating to this modest room; they stand there in the doorway, peering obliquely at our every gesture; the crafty eunuchs in silken robes, and the thin mandarins, wearing along with the red button of their headdresses, the melancholy raven's quill.They were compelled to yield, they did not wish to; they tried by every ruse to lead us to some other part of the immense labyrinth of this palace of Heliogabalus; to interest us in the luxurious salons farther on, in the great courts, and in the marble balconies, which we shall see later; in a whole Versailles some distance farther on, now overgrown by weeds, and where no sound is heard but the song of the crows.
They were determined we should not come here, and it was by observing the dilation of the pupils of their frightened eyes that we guessed which way to go.
Who lived here, then, sequestered behind so many walls,—walls more terrible by far than those of our western prisons?Who could he have been, the man who slept in this bed under these silken covers of nocturnal blue, and in his times of revery, at nightfall or at dawn, on glacial winter days, was obliged to contemplate these pensive little bouquets under glass, ranged so symmetrically along the black chests?
It was he, the invisible Emperor, Son of Heaven, childish and feeble; he whose empire is vaster than all Europe, and who reigns like a vague phantom over four or five hundred millions of subjects.
It is the same person in whose veins the vigor of half-deified ancestors is exhausted, who has too long remained inactive, concealed in this palace more sacred than a temple; the same who neglects and envelops in twilight the diminishing place where he is pleased to live.The immense setting in which former emperors lived frightens him and he abandons it all; grass and brushwood grow on the majestic marble railings and in the grand courtyards; crows and pigeons by the hundreds make their nests in the gilded vaults of the throne room, covering with dirt and dung the rich and curious rugs left there to be ruined. This inviolable palace, a league in circumference, which no foreigner has ever seen, of which one can learn nothing, guess nothing, has in store for Europeans who enter it for the first time the surprise of mournful dilapidation and the silence of a tomb.
The pale Emperor never occupied the throne rooms. No, what suited him was the quarter where the small gardens were, and the enclosed yards, the quaint quarter where the eunuchs tried to prevent our going.The alcove-bed in its deep recess, with its curtains like the blue of night, indicates fear.
The small private apartments behind this gloomy chamber extend like subterranean passages into still deeper shadows; ebony is the prevailing wood; everything is intentionally sombre, even the mournful mummified bouquets under their glass cases.There is a soft-toned piano which the young Emperor was learning to play, in spite of his long, brittle nails; a harmonium, and a big music-box that gives Chinese airs with a tone that seems to come from beneath the waters of a lake.
Beyond this comes what was doubtless his most cherished retreat,—it is narrow and low like the cabin of a ship, and exhales the fine odor of tea and dried rose-leaves.
There, in front of a small airhole covered with rice paper, through which filters a little sombre light, lies a mattress, covered with imperial golden-yellow silk, which seems to retain the imprint of a body habitually extended upon it.A few books, a few private papers, are scattered about.Fastened to the wall are two or three unimportant pictures, not even framed, representing colorless roses, and written in Chinese characters underneath are the last orders of the physician for this chronic invalid.
What was the real character of this dreamer, who shall ever say?What distorted views of life had been bequeathed to him of the things of this world and of the world beyond?What do all these gruesome symbols signify to him?The emperors, the demigods, from whom he descends, made old Asia tremble; tributary sovereigns came from great distances to prostrate themselves, filling this place with banners and processions more magnificent than our imaginations can picture; within these same walls, so silent to-day, how and under what passing phantasmagoric aspects did he retain the stamp of the wonderful past?
And what confusion must have entered his unfathomable little brain when the unprecedented act was accomplished, and events occurred which he never in his wildest fears could have anticipated!His palace, with its triple walls, violated to its most secret recesses; he, the Son of Heaven, torn from the dwelling where twenty generations of his ancestors had lived inaccessible; obliged to flee, and in his flight to permit himself to be seen, to act in the light of day like other men, perhaps even to implore and to wait!
Just as we are leaving the abandoned room our orderlies, who purposely remained behind, laughingly throw themselves on the bed with the nocturnal blue curtains, and I hear one of them remark gaily in an aside and with a Gascon accent: "Now, old fellow, we can say that we have lain on the bed of the Emperor of China."
IV
Chinese workmen,—amongst whom we are warned that there are spies and Boxers,—who look after the fires in the two furnaces in our palace, have kept us almost too warm all night.When we get up there is, as there was yesterday, another illusion of summer on our light verandah with the green columns painted with pink lotus flowers. An almost burning sun is rising and shining upon the ghostly pilgrimage which I am about to make on horseback, toward the west, outside the Tartar City, and through the ashy, silent, ruined suburbs.
In this direction there were, scattered through the dusty country, Christian cemeteries which even in 1860 had never been violated by the yellow race.But this time they furiously attacked the dead, and left chaos and abomination behind them.The oldest remains, those of missionaries who had been sleeping there for three centuries, were disinterred, crushed, piled up and set on fire in order to destroy, according to Chinese beliefs, whatever might still be left of their souls.One must be somewhat acquainted with the ideas of the country in order to understand the enormity of this supreme insult to all our Occidental races.
The cemetery of the Jesuit Fathers was singularly splendid.They were formerly very powerful with the Celestial Emperors, and borrowed for their own tombs the funereal emblems of the princes of China.The ground is literally strewn now with big marble dragons and tortoises, and with tall stele with chimæras coiled about them; all these carvings have been thrown down and smashed; the heavy stones of the vaults have been broken also, and the ground thoroughly overturned.
A more modest enclosure, not far away, has for a long time been the burial-place for the European legations.It has undergone the same treatment as the beautiful cemetery of the Jesuits.The Chinese have ransacked the graves, destroyed the bodies, and even violated the coffins of little children.Some few human bones are still lying on the ground, while the crosses that marked the graves are placed upside down.It is one of the most poignantly affecting sights that ever met my eyes.
Some good Sisters who lived near by kept a school for Chinese children; of their houses nothing is left but a pile of bricks and ashes, even the trees have been uprooted and stuck back in the ground head foremost.
This is their story:—
They were alone one night when about a thousand Boxers came along, shouting their death cries and playing gongs.The Sisters began to pray in their chapel as they awaited death.However, the noise died away, and when day broke no one was in sight, so they escaped to Pekin and took shelter with the bishop, taking their frightened little pupils with them.When the Boxers were asked later why they had not entered and killed the Sisters, they replied: "Because we saw soldiers' heads and guns all around the convent walls." So the Sisters owed their lives to this hallucination of their executioners.
The wells in the deserted gardens fill the air to-day with odors of the dead.There were three large cisterns which furnished a water so pure that they sent all the way from the legations to get it.The Boxers filled these wells up to the brim with the mutilated bodies of little boys from the Brothers' school and from Christian families in the neighborhood.Dogs came to eat from the horrible pile which came up to the level of the ground; but they had their fill, and so the bodies were left, and have been so preserved by the cold and dryness that the marks of torture upon them may still be seen.One poor thigh has been slashed in stripes after the manner in which bakers sometimes mark their loaves of bread, another poor hand is without nails.And here is a woman from whom one of the private parts of her body has been cut and placed in her mouth, where it was left by the dogs between her gaping jaws.The bodies are covered with what looks like salt, but which proves to be white frost, which in shady places never melts here.Yet there is enough clear, implacable sunshine to bring out the emaciation and to exaggerate the horrors of the open mouths, their agonized expressions, and the rigidity of the anguished positions of the dead.
There is not a cloud to-day, but a pale sky which reflects a great deal of light.All winter, it seems, it is much the same; even in the coldest weather rains and snows are very exceptional in Pekin.
After our brief soldiers' breakfast, served on rare china in the long gallery, I leave the Palace of the North to install myself in the kiosk on the opposite shore, which I selected yesterday, and to begin my work.It is about two o'clock; a summer's sun shines on my solitary path, on the whiteness of the Marble Bridge, on the mud of the Lake, and on the bodies that sleep amongst the frosted lotus leaves.
The guards at the entrance to the Rotunda Palace open and close behind me the red lacquered doors.I mount the inclined plane leading to the esplanade, and here I am alone, much alone, in the silence of my lofty garden and my strange palace.
In order to reach my work-room, I have to go along narrow passageways between old trees and the most unnatural rockwork.The kiosk is flooded with light, the beautiful sunshine falls on my table and on my black seats with their cushions of golden yellow; the beautiful melancholy October sunshine illumines and warms my chosen retreat, where the Empress, it seems, loved to come and sit and watch from this high point her lake all pink with flowers.
The last butterflies and the last wasps, their lives prolonged by this hot-house warmth, beat their wings against the window-panes.The great imperial lake is spread out before us, spanned by the Marble Bridge; venerable trees form a girdle around shores out of which rise the fanciful roofs of palaces and pagodas,—roofs that are one marvellous mass of faience.As in the landscapes painted on Chinese fans, there are groups of tiny rocks in the foreground, and small enamelled monsters from a neighboring kiosk, while in the middle distance there are knotted branches which have fallen from some old cedar.
I am alone, entirely and deliciously alone, high up in an inaccessible spot whose approaches are guarded by sentinels.There is the occasional cry of a crow or the gallop of a horse down below, at the foot of the rampart whereon my frail habitation rests, or the passing of an occasional messenger.Otherwise nothing; not a single sound near enough to trouble the sunny quiet of my retreat.No surprise is possible, no visitor.
I have been working for an hour, when a light rustling behind me from the direction of the entrance gives me the feeling of some discreet and agreeable presence. I turn round, and there is a cat who has stopped short with one foot in the air, hesitating and looking me straight in the eye, as if to ask: "Who are you, and what are you doing here?"
I call him quietly, he replies with a plaintive miaul; and I, always tactful with cats, go on with my writing, knowing very well that in a first interview one must not be too insistent.
He is a very pretty cat, yellow and white, with the distinguished and elegant air of a grand seignior.A moment later and he is rubbing against my leg; so then I put my hand slowly down on the small, velvety head, which, after a sudden start, permits my caresses and abandons itself to them.It is over; the acquaintance is made.He is evidently a cat accustomed to petting, probably an intimate of the Empress.To-morrow and every day I shall beg my orderly to bring him a cold luncheon from my rations.
The illusion of summer ends with the day.The sun sets big and red behind the Lake of the Lotus, all at once taking on a sad, wintry look; at the same time a chill comes over all things, and the empty palace grows suddenly gloomy.For the first time that day I hear footsteps approaching, resounding in the silence on the pavement of the esplanade. My servants, Osman and Renaud, are coming for me according to instructions; they are the only human beings for whom the gate of the walls below has orders to open.
It is icy cold as we cross the Marble Bridge in the twilight to return to our home, and the moisture is gathering in clouds over the lake, as it does every night.
After supper we go on a man hunt in the dark, through the courts and rooms of the place.On the preceding nights we had observed through the transparent window-panes disturbing little lights which were promptly extinguished if we made any noise.These lights moved up and down the uninhabited galleries, some distance away, like fireflies.To-night's effort brings about the capture of three unknown men who with cutlasses and dark lanterns have climbed over the walls to pilfer in the imperial reserves.There are two Chinese and one European, a soldier of one of the allied nations.Not to make too much ado over it, we content ourselves with putting them out after cudgelling them well and boxing their ears.
V
Last night there was a still harder frost, which covered the ground in the courtyard with small white crystals.This we discover during our regular morning exploration of the galleries and dependencies of the palace.
The former lodgings of the begging missionaries and the schoolrooms are overflowing with packing boxes containing reserve supplies of silk and tea.There is also a heap of old bronzes, vases, and incense-burners piled up to the height of a man.
But the church itself is the most extraordinary mine,—a regular Ali Baba's cave, quite filled.In addition to antiquities brought from the Violet City, the Empress had put there all the presents she received two years ago for her Jubilee.(And the line of mandarins who on that occasion brought presents to their sovereign was a league long and lasted an entire day.)
In the nave and side aisles the boxes and cases are piled to half the height of the columns.In spite of the confusion, in spite of the hasty pillaging of those who have preceded us,—Chinese, Japanese, German, and Russian soldiers,—a marvellous collection remains.The most enormous of the chests,—those beneath,—protected by their weight and by the mass of things on top of them, have not even been opened. The first to go were the innumerable smaller articles on top, most of them enclosed in glass cases or in yellow silk coverings, such as bunches of artificial flowers in agate, jade, coral, or lapis lazuli, pagodas and blue landscapes made of the feathers of the kingfisher marvellously utilized. Works of Chinese patience which have cost years of toil are now broken in bits by the stroke of a bayonet, while the glass which protected them is crackling under one's feet on the floor.
Imperial robes of heavy silk brocaded with gold dragons lie on the ground among cases of every description.We walk over them, we walk over carved ivories, over pearls and embroideries galore.There are bronzes a thousand years old, from the Empress's collection; there are screens which seem to have been carved and embroidered by supernatural beings, there are antique vases, cloisonné, crackle ware, lacquers.Certain of the boxes underneath, bearing the names of emperors who died a century ago, contain presents sent them from distant provinces, which no one has ever taken the trouble to open.The sacristy of this astonishing cathedral contains in a series of pasteboard boxes, all the sumptuous costumes for the actors in the Empress's theatre, with many fashionable headdresses of former times.
This church, so full of pagan riches, has kept its organ intact, although it has been silent for thirty years.My comrade mounts with me to the gallery to try the effect of some hymns of Bach and Händel under these vaultings, while the African chasseurs, up to their knees in ivories, silks, and court costumes, continue their task of clearing things out below.
About ten o'clock this morning I cross over to the opposite side of the Violet City to visit the Palace of Ancestors, which is in charge of our marines.This was the Holy of Holies, the Pantheon of dead emperors, a temple which was never even approached.
It is in a particularly shady spot; in front of the entrance gate are light but ornate triumphal arches of green, red, and gold lacquer, resting on frail supports, and mingling with the sombre branches of the trees.Enormous cedars and cypresses, twisted by age, shelter the marble monsters which crouch at the threshold and have given them a greenish hue.
Passing the first enclosure, we naturally find a second.The courts, always shaded by old trees, succeed one another in solemn magnificence.They are paved with large stones, between which grows a weed common in cemeteries; each one of the cedars and cypresses which cast its shadow here is surrounded by a marble circle and seems to spring from a bed of carving. A thick layer of thousands of pine needles continually falling from the branches, covers everything. Gigantic incense-burners of dull bronze, centuries old, rest on pedestals bearing emblems of death.
Everything here has an unprecedented stamp of antiquity and mystery.It is a unique place, haunted by the ghosts of the Chinese emperors.
On each side are secondary temples, whose walls of lacquer and gold have taken on with time the shades of old Cordova leather.They contain broken catafalques, emblems and objects pertaining to certain funeral rites.
It is all incomprehensible and terrible; one feels profoundly incapable of grasping the meaning of these forms and symbols.
At length, in the last court on a white marble terrace guarded by bronze roes, the Ancestors' Palace lifts its tarnished gold façade, surmounted by a roof of yellow lacquer.
It consists of one immense room, grand and gloomy, all in faded gold turning to coppery red.At the rear is a row of nine mysterious double doors, which are sealed with wax. In the centre are the tables on which the repasts for the ancestral shades were placed, and where, on the day the Yellow City was taken, our hungry soldiers rejoiced to find an unexpected meal set forth. At each extremity of this lofty room chimes and stringed instruments await the hour, which may never come again, when they shall make music for the Shades. There are long, horizontal zithers, grave in tone, which are supported by golden monsters with closed eyes; gigantic chimes, one of bells, the others of marble slabs and jade, suspended by gold chains and surmounted by great fantastic beasts spreading their golden wings toward the dusky gold ceiling.
There are also lacquered cupboards as big as houses, containing collections of old paintings, rolled on ebony or ivory sticks, and wrapped in imperial silks.
Some of these are marvellous, and are a revelation of Chinese art of which we of the Occident have no conception,—an art at least equal to our own, though profoundly unlike it.Portraits of emperors in silent revery, or hunting in the forest, portray wild places which give one a longing for primitive nature, for the unspoiled world of rocks and trees.Portraits of dead empresses painted in water-colors on faded silks recall the candid grace of the Italian Primitives,—portraits so pale, so colorless, as to seem like fleeting reflections of persons, yet showing a perfection of modelling attained with absolute simplicity, and with a look of concentration in the eye that makes you feel the likeness and enables you for one strange moment to live face to face with these princesses of the past who have slept for centuries in this splendid mausoleum. All these paintings were sacred, never seen or even suspected to exist by Europeans.
Other rolls, which when spread out on the pavement are six or eight metres long, represent processions, receptions at court, or lines of ambassadors; cavaliers, armies, banners; men of all kinds by the thousands, whose dress, embroideries, and arms, suggest that one should look at them with a magnifying glass.The whole history of Chinese costume and ceremonial is contained in these precious miniatures.We even find here the reception, by I know not what emperor, of an ambassador from Louis XIV.; small persons with very French faces are represented as though for exhibition at Versailles, with wigs after the fashion of Roi-Soleil.
The nine magnificent sealed doors at the back of the temple, shut off the altars of nine emperors. They were good enough to break the red wax seals for me and to destroy the fastenings at one of the forbidden entrances, so that I might penetrate into one of the sacred sanctuaries,—that of the great Emperor Kouang-Lu, who was in his glory at the beginning of the eighteenth century. A serjeant has orders to accompany me in this profanation, holding in his hand a lighted candle, which seems to burn reluctantly here in the light cold air of the tomb. The temple itself was quite dark, but here it was black night itself, and it seemed as though dirt and cinders had been thrown about; the dust that accumulates so endlessly in Pekin seems a sign of death and decay. Passing from daylight, however dim, to the light of one small candle that is lost in the shadows, one sees confusedly at first, and there is a momentary hesitation, especially if the place is startling in itself. I see before me a staircase rising to a sort of tabernacle, which seems to be full of artistic creations of some unknown kind.
At both right and left, closed by complicated locks, are some severe chests which I am permitted to examine.In their compartments and in their double secret bottoms the sovereign's imperial seals have been concealed by the hundreds,—heavy seals of onyx, jade, or gold struck off for every occasion of his life and in commemoration of all the acts of his reign; priceless relics which no one dared touch after his obsequies, and which have lain there for twice one hundred years.
I go up into the tabernacle and the serjeant holds his candle before the marvels there,—jade sceptres and vases, some of a peculiar and exquisite workmanship in both dark and light jade, in cloisonné on gold, or in plain solid gold.Behind the altar in an obscure position a grand figure which I had not perceived followed me with an oblique look that reached me through two curtains of yellow imperial silk, whose folds were black with dust.It is a pale portrait of the defunct Emperor,—a life-sized portrait, so obscure, as seen by the light of our single wretched candle, as to seem like the reflection of a ghost in a tarnished mirror.What a nameless sacrilege would our opening the chests where his treasures were hidden seem to this dead man, nay, even our presence in this most impenetrable of all places in an impenetrable city!
When everything is carefully closed again, when the red seals have been put back in place and the pale image of the Emperor returned to silence, to its customary shadows, I hasten to get away from the tomblike chill, to breathe the air again, to seek on the terrace some of the autumn sunshine which filters through the cedar branches.
I am going to take breakfast to-day with the French officers at the extreme north end of the imperial wood, at the Temple of the Silkworm.This, too, is an admirable old sanctuary, preceded by sumptuous courts with marble terraces and bronze vases.This Yellow City is a complete world of temples and palaces set in green.Up to last month the travellers who thought they were seeing China, and to whom all this remained closed, forbidden, could have no idea of the marvellous city opened to us by the war.
When I start back to my Palace of the Rotunda, about two o'clock, a burning sun is shining on the dark cedars and willows; one seeks shade as if it were summer, and the willows are losing many of their leaves.At the entrance to the Marble Bridge, not far from my gate, the two bodies in blue gowns which lie among the lotus are bathed in an ironical splendor of light.
After the soldiers on guard have closed the low postern by which one gains access to my high garden, I am again alone in the silence until the sun's rays, falling oblique and red upon my writing-table, announce the coming of the melancholy evening.
I am scarcely seated at my work before a friendly head, discreetly rubbed against my leg to attract my attention, announces the visit of the cat. I am not unprepared for this visit, for I now expect it every day.
An hour of ideal quiet goes by, broken only by two or three ravens' cries.Then I hear the noise of cavalry galloping over the stone pavements at the foot of my wall; it proves to be Field-Marshal von Waldersee, followed by an escort of soldiers with small flags at the tips of their spears.He is returning to the palace where he lives, not far from here, one of the most sumptuous of all the residences of the Empress.My eyes follow the cavalcade as it crosses the Marble Bridge, turns to the left, and is lost behind the trees.Then the silence returns, absolute as before.
From time to time I go out to walk on my high terrace, and always discover there something new.There are enormous tam-tams under my cedars, with which to call upon the gods; there are beds of yellow chrysanthemums and Indian-yellow carnations, upon which the frost has left a few flowers; there is a kind of daïs of marble and faience supporting an object quite indefinite at first sight,—one of the largest blocks of jade in the world, cut in imitation of an ocean wave with monsters struggling in the foam.
I visit some deserted kiosks,—still furnished with ebony thrones, divans, and yellow silk cushions,—which seem like little clandestine love nests. There is no doubt that the beautiful sovereign, passionate still, though aging, used to isolate herself here with her favorites among the imperial silks in these protecting shadows.
My only companion in my palace of dreams to-day is the big alabaster goddess robed in gold, who perpetually smiles upon broken vases and withered flowers; her temple, where the sun never enters, is always cold and grows dark before it should.
But now real night has come, and I begin to feel chilly.The sun, which in France is at its meridional apogee, is sinking; sinking here, a big red ball without light or heat, going down behind the Lake of the Lotus in a wintry mist.
The chill of the night comes on suddenly, giving me the sensation of an abrupt descent into a cave of ice and a furtive little feeling of anguish at being exiled so far from home.
I greet my two servants like friends when they come for me, bringing a cape for me to wear on the way back to the palace.
VI
The same glorious sunshine in gallery, garden, and wood.Each day the work of our soldiers with their gangs of Chinese laborers goes on in the nave of the Cathedral; they carefully separate such treasures as have remained intact, or nearly so, from what is irreparably injured.There is a continual coming and going across our court of furniture and precious bronzes in hand-barrows; all that is taken out of the church is put in places not at present needed for our troops, to await its final transportation to the Ancestors' Palace, where it is to remain under lock and key.
We have seen so many of these magnificent things that we are satiated and worn with them.The most remarkable discoveries made from the depths of the oldest cases have ceased to astonish us; there is nothing now that we want for the decoration—oh, so fleeting—of our apartments; nothing is sufficiently beautiful for our Heliogabalean fancies.There will be no to-morrow, for the inventory must be finished within a few days, and then our long galleries will be parcelled out for officers' rooms and offices.
In the way of discoveries, we came this morning upon a pile of bodies,—the last defenders of the Imperial City, who fell all in a heap and have remained in positions indicative of extreme agony. The crows and the dogs have gone down into the ditch where they lie and have devoured eyes, chests, and intestines; there is no flesh left on their bones, and their red spinal columns show through their ragged raiment. Shoes are left, but no hair; Chinamen have evidently descended into the deep hole with the dogs and the crows, and have scalped the dead in order to make false queues.
To-day I leave the Palace of the North early and for all day, as I must go over to the European quarter to see our Minister at the Spanish legation, where he was taken in; he is still in bed, but convalescing so that at last I can make to him the communications which I undertook on behalf of the admiral.
For four days I have not been outside the red walls of the Imperial City, have not left our superb solitude.So when I find myself once more among the ugly gray ruins of the commonplace streets of the Tartar City, in everybody's Pekin, in the Pekin known to all travellers, I appreciate better the unique peculiarities of our great wood, of our lake, and of all our forbidden glories.
However, this city of the people seems less forlorn than on the day of my arrival in the wind and snow. The people are beginning to return, as I have been told; Pekin is being repopulated, the shops are opening, houses are rebuilding, and already a few humble and entertaining trades have been taken up along the streets, on tables, under tents, and under parasols. The warm sunshine of the Chinese autumn is the friend of many a poor wretch who has no fire.
VII
THE TEMPLE OF THE LAMAS
The Temple of the Lamas, the oldest sanctuary in Pekin, and one of the most curious in the world, contains a profusion of marvellous work of the old Chinese gold and silver smiths, and a library of inestimable value.
This precious temple has seldom been seen, although it has been in existence for centuries.Before this year's European invasion, access to it was strictly forbidden to "outside barbarians," and even since the Allies have had possession of Pekin, very few have ever gone there.It is protected by its location in an angle of the Tartar wall in quite a lifeless part of the city whose different quarters are dying from century to century as old trees lose their branches one by one.
Going there to-day on a pilgrimage with the members of the French legation, we find that we are all there for the first time.
In order to reach it we first cross the eastern market-place, three or four kilometres through a sunless and desolate Pekin,—a Pekin that bears the marks of war and defeat, and where things are spread out for sale on the filth and ashes of the ground.Some matchless objects transmitted by one generation of mandarins to another are to be found among the rags and old iron; ancient palaces, as well as the houses of the poor, have emptied here some of their most astonishing contents; the sordid and the marvellous lie side by side,—here some pestilential rags, there a bibelot three thousand years old.Along the walls of the houses as far as one can see, the cast-off garments of dead men and women are hung.It is a place for the sale of extravagant clothing without end, opulent furs from Mongolia stolen from the rich, gay costumes of a courtesan, or magnificent heavy silk robes which belonged to great ladies who have disappeared.The Chinese populace, who have done a hundred times more than the invaders in the way of pillage, burning, and destruction in Pekin, the uniformly dirty populace, dressed in blue cotton, with squinting, evil eyes, swarm and crawl about, eagerly searching and raising a perfect cloud of microbes and dust. Ignoble scoundrels with long queues circulate amongst the crowd, offering robes of ermine or blue-fox, or admirable sables for a few piasters, in their eagerness to be rid of stolen goods.
As we approach the object of our journey it grows more quiet; the busy, crowded streets are gradually succeeded by streets that have perished of old age, where there are no passers; grass grows on the thresholds and behind abandoned walls; we see trees with branches knotted like the arms of the aged.
We dismount before a crumbling entrance which seems to open into a park which might be a ghosts' walk; and this is the entrance to the temple.
What sort of a reception shall we have in this mysterious enclosure?We do not know; and at first there is no one to receive us.But the chief of the Lamas soon appears, bowing, with his keys, and we follow him across the funereal park.
With a violet dress, a shaven head, and a face like old wax, at once smiling, frightened, and hostile, he conducts us to a second door, opening into an immense court paved with white stones, completely surrounded by the curious walls of the first buildings of the temple. Their foundations are massive, their roofs curved and forked, the walls themselves awe-inspiring on account of their size, and hermetically sealed; and all this is the color of ochre and rust, with golden reflections thrown on the high roofs by the evening sun.
The court is deserted, the grass grows between the paving-stones.On the white marble balustrades in front of the closed doors of these great temples are ranged "prayer-mills," which are conical thrones made of bronze, and engraved with secret symbols, which the priests turn and turn while murmuring words unintelligible to men of our day.
In old Asia, which is our ancestor, I have penetrated to the heart of ancient sanctuaries, trembling meanwhile with indefinable anguish before symbols whose meaning has been lost for centuries.This kind of anguish has never been so tinged with melancholy as to-night, standing before this row of silent "prayer-mills" in the cold, the wind, the solitude, the dilapidation of this court, with its white grass-grown pavement and mysterious yellow walls.
Young Lamas appear one after the other as noiselessly as shadows, and even Lama children, for they begin to instruct them quite young in the old rites no longer understood by any one.
They are young, but they have no appearance of youth; senility is upon them as well as a look of I know not what of mystical dulness; their gaze seems to have come from past centuries and to have lost its clearness on the way.Whether from poverty or renunciation, the yellow gowns that cover their thin bodies are faded and torn.Their faces and their dress, as well as their religion and their sanctuary, are covered, so to speak, with the ashes of time.
They are glad to show us all that we wish to see in their old buildings; and we begin with the study-rooms, where so many generations of obscure and unprogressive priests have been slowly formed.
By looking closely, it is plain that all these walls, now the color of the oxydized metal, were once covered with beautiful designs in lacquer and gilt; to harmonize them all into the present old-bronze shades has required an indefinite succession of burning summers and glacial winters, together with the dust,—the incessant dust blown across Pekin from the deserts of Mongolia.
Their study-rooms are very dark,—anything else would have surprised us; and this explains why their eyes protrude so from their drooping lids.Very dark these rooms are, but immense; sumptuous still, in spite of their neglect, and conceived on a grand scale, as are all the monuments of this city, which was in its day the most magnificent in the world. The high ceilings are supported by lacquered columns. There are small seats for the students, and carved desks by the hundred, all arranged in rows and worn and defaced by long use. Gods in golden robes are seated in the corners. The wall hangings of priceless old work represent the joys of Nirvana. The libraries are overflowing with old manuscripts, some in the form of books, and others in great rolls wrapped up in colored silks.
We are shown into the first temple, which, as soon as the door is opened, shines with a golden glow,—the glow of gold used discreetly, and with the warm, reddish tones which lacquer takes on in the course of centuries.There are three golden altars, on which are enthroned in the midst of a pleiad of small golden gods three great ones, with downcast eyes.The straight stems of the gold flowers standing in gold vases in front of the altars are of archaic stiffness.The repetition, the persistent multiplication of the same objects, attitudes, and faces, is one of the characteristics of the unchanging art of pagodas.As is the case with all the temples of the past, there is here no opening for the light; only the light that comes in through the half-opened doors illumines from below the smile of the great seated idols, and shows dimly the decorations of the ceiling. Nothing has been touched, nothing taken away, not even the admirable cloisonné vases where sticks of incense are burning,—evidently this place has been ignored.
Behind this temple, behind its dusty dependencies, in which the tortures of the Buddhist hell are depicted, the Lamas conduct us to a second court, paved in white stones, similar in every way to the first; the same dilapidation, the same solitude, the same coppery-yellow walls.
After this second court comes another temple, identical with the first, so much so that one wonders if one is not the victim of an illusion; the same figures, the same smiles, the same gold bouquets in vases of gold,—a patient and servile reproduction of the same magnificence.
After this second temple there is a third court, and a third temple exactly like the two others.But the sun is now lower, and lights only the extreme tips of the faience roofs and the thousands of small monsters of yellow enamel which seem to be chasing one another over the tiling.The wind increases, and we shiver with cold.The pigeons in the carved cornice begin to seek their nests, and the silent owls wake up and begin to fly about.
As we expected, this last temple—possibly the oldest, certainly the most dilapidated—is only a repetition of the other two, save for an idol in the centre, which, instead of being seated and life-sized, is colossal and standing.The gold ceiling rises from about half the height of the statue into a cupola, also gilded, which forms a sort of box enclosing the upper part of the figure.To see the face one must go close to the altars and look up between the rigid flowers and the incense-burners.It then looks like a Titanic mummy in its case, with a downcast look that makes one nervous.But on looking steadily, it exercises a sort of spell; one is hypnotized and held by that smile so impartially bestowed upon all this entourage of dying splendor, gold, dust, cold, twilight, ruins, silence.
VIII
CONFUCIUS
There was still a half-hour of sunshine after we left the ghostly Lamas, so we went to pay a call on Confucius, who dwells in the same quarter,—the same necropolis, one might say,—in an abandonment equally depressing.
The big worm-eaten door slips off its hinges and falls down as we attempt to enter, and an owl who was asleep there takes fright and flies away. Behold us in a sort of mortuary wood, walking over the brown autumn grass.
A triumphal arch is the first thing we come across, built to pay homage to some great Chinese thinker.It is of a charming design, although very peculiar, with three little bell-towers of yellow enamel, which crown the whole, their curved roofs decorated with monsters at each one of the corners.
It stands there like some precious bibelot lost among the ruins.Its freshness is surprising where all else is so dilapidated.One realizes its great age from the archaic nature of its details; but it is made of such enduring materials that the wear and tear of centuries in this dry climate has not affected it.The base is white marble, the rest is of faience,—faience both yellow and green, with lotus leaves, clouds, and chimæras in bold relief.
Farther on is a large rotunda which gives evidence of extreme antiquity; this appears to be the color of dirt or ashes, and is surrounded by a moat where the lotus and the reeds are dying.This is a retreat where wise men may come to meditate upon the vanities of life; the object of the moat is to isolate it and make it more quiet.
It is reached by an arched bridge of marble, with railings that vaguely suggest a succession of animals' heads. Inside, it is deserted, abandoned, crumbling away, and the gold ceiling is full of birds' nests. A really magnificent desk is left, with an arm-chair and a table. It seems as though a kind of fine clay had been scattered by handfuls over everything; the ground is covered with it too, so that one's feet sink into it and one's steps are muffled. We soon discover that there is still a carpet underneath, and that it is really nothing but dust which has been accumulating for centuries,—the thick and ever-present dust which the Mongolian winds blow across Pekin.
After a short walk under the old trees we reach the temple itself, which is preceded by a court surrounded by tall marble pillars.This looks exactly like a cemetery, and yet there are no dead lying under these stele, which are there merely to glorify the memory of the departed.Philosophers who in bygone centuries made this region illustrious by their presence and by their dreams, profound thinkers, lost to us forever, have their names as well as some few of their most transcendent utterances, perpetuated on these stele.
On either side of the white steps leading to the sanctuary, blocks of marble are arranged in the form of a tam-tam.These are so old as to make one's head swim; and upon them maxims intelligible only to a few erudite mandarins have been written in primitive Chinese characters, in letters contemporary with and sisters to the hieroglyphs of Egypt.
This is the temple of disinterestedness, of abstract thought, and of cold speculation.One is struck at once by its absolute simplicity, for which, up to this point, nothing in China has prepared us.Very large, very high as to ceilings, very grand and of a uniform blood-red color, it is magnificently empty and supremely quiet.The columns and walls are red, with a few discreet decorations in gold, dimmed by time and dust.In the centre is a bouquet of gigantic lotus in a colossal vase, and that is all.After the profusion, the debauch of monsters and idols, the multiplication of human and animal forms in the usual Chinese pagoda, this absence of figures of any sort is a comfort and a relief.
In the niches all along the wall there are stele, red like the rest of the place, and consecrated to the memory of persons still more eminent than those of the entrance court, with quotations from their writings carved upon them.The stele of Confucius himself, which is larger than the others, and has longer quotations, occupies the position of honor in the centre of this severe Pantheon, and is placed on a kind of altar.
Properly speaking, this is not a temple; it is not a place for prayer or service. It is rather an academy, a meeting-place for calm, philosophic discussion. In spite of its dust and its abandoned air, it seems that newly elected members of the Academy of Pekin (which is even more than our own the conservator of form and ceremony, I am assured) are still bound to give a conference here.
Besides various maxims of renunciation and wisdom written from top to bottom of the stele, Confucius has left to this sanctuary certain thoughts on literature which have been engraved in letters of gold in such a way as to form pictures hung on the walls.
Here is one which I transcribe for young western scholars who are preoccupied with classification and inquiry.They will find in it a reply twice two thousand years old to one of their favorite questions: "The literature of the future will be the literature of compassion."
It is almost five o'clock when the gloomy, red, autumn sun goes down behind great China on Europe's side, and we leave the temples and the grove behind.I separate from my companions, for they live in the legation quarter in the southern part of the Tartar City, while I go to the Imperial City, far from here.
I have no idea how to get out of this dead region, all new to me, where we have spent the day, and through the lonely labyrinthine streets of Pekin. I have as a guide a "mafou," who has been lent to me, and I only know that I have more than a mile to go before reaching my sumptuous, deserted quarters.
My companions gone, I walk for a few moments in the silent old uninhabited streets before reaching one of the long, broad avenues where blue cotton dresses and long-queued yellow faces begin to appear.There is an interminable row of low houses, wretched, gray things, on either side of the street, where the tramp of horses raises the black friable dust in infectious clouds.
The street is so wide and the houses so low that almost the whole of the twilight sky is visible above our heads; and so suddenly does the cold come on after sunset that in a moment we freeze.
The crowds are dense about the food-shops, and the air is fetid in the neighborhood of the butchers, where dog-meat and roasted grasshoppers are sold.But what good nature in all these people of the streets, who on the day after battle and bombardment permit me to pass without so much as an evil look!What could I do, with my borrowed "mafou" and my revolver, if my appearance did not happen to please them?
For a time after this we are alone in desolate, ruined quarters of the town. According to the position of the pale, setting sun, it seems to me that we are on the right track; but if my "mafou," who speaks nothing but Chinese, has not understood me, I shall be in a predicament.
The return journey in the cold seems interminable to me.At last, however, the artificial mountain of the imperial park is silhouetted in gray on the sky ahead of us, with the little faience kiosks and the twisted trees grouping themselves like scenes painted on lacquer.We reach one of the yellow enamelled gates of the blood-red wall surrounding the Imperial City, where two sentinels of the allied armies present arms. From here I know my way, I am at home; so I dismiss my guide and proceed alone to the Yellow City, from which at this hour no one is allowed to depart.
The Imperial, the Yellow, the Forbidden City, encircled by its own terrible walls in the very heart of great Pekin, with its Babylonian environment, is a park rather than a city, a wood of venerable trees,—sombre cypresses and cedars,—several leagues in circumference.Some ancient temples peep through the branches, and several modern palaces built according to the fancies of the Empress regent.This great forest, to which I return to-night as if it were my home, has at no former period of history been known to foreigners; even ambassadors have never passed its gates; until recently it has been absolutely inaccessible and profoundly unknown to Europeans.
This Yellow City surrounds and protects with its tranquil shadows the still more mysterious Violet City, the residence of the Son of Heaven, which occupies a commanding square in the centre of it, protected by moats and double ramparts.
What silence reigns here at this hour!What a lugubrious region it is!Death hovers over these paths where formerly princesses passed in their palanquins and empresses with their silk-robed followers.Now that the usual inhabitants have fled and Occidental barbarians have taken their places, one meets no one in the woods, unless it be an occasional patrol or a few soldiers of one nation or another, and only the sentinels' step is heard before palace or temple, or the cries of the crows and the barking of dogs about the dead.
I have to cross a region filled with trees, nothing but trees,—trees of a truly Chinese contour, whose aspect is in itself quite sufficient to give one the sharp realization of exile; the road goes on under the deep shadow of the branches that turn the twilight into night.Belated magpies are hopping about on the withered grass, and the crows, too, their croakings exaggerated by the cold and the silence.At the end of a quarter of an hour a corner of the Violet City appears, just at a turn of the road.She slowly reveals herself, silent, closed, like a colossal tomb.Her long, straight walls are lost in the confusion and obscurity of the distance.As I draw nearer to her the silence seems to be intensified, as though it grew as she broods over it.
Copyright, 1901, by J.C.Hemment
The Executive Palace of the Emperor in the Forbidden City
One corner of the Lake of the Lotus begins to come out like a bit of mirror placed among the reeds to receive the last reflections of the sky.I must pass along its edges in front of the Island of Jade, which is approached by a marble bridge; and I know in advance, because I have seen it daily, the horrible grimace in store for me from the two monsters who have guarded the bridge for centuries.
At length I emerge from the shadow and oppression of the trees into open space with the clear sky overhead, leaving the lake behind me.The first stars are appearing, indicating another of the nights that pass here in an excess of solitude and silence, with only an occasional gunshot to break the tragic calm of wood and palace.
The Lake of the Lotus, which during the season of flowers must be the marvellous field of pink blossoms described by the poets of China, is now, at the end of October, only a melancholy swamp covered with brown leaves, from which at this hour a wintry mist rises that hangs like a cloud over the dead reeds.
My dwelling is on the other side of the lake; and now I have reached the Marble Bridge which spans it with a beautiful curve,—a curve that stands out white in spite of the darkness.
At this point a corpse-like smell greets my nostrils.For a week I have known whence it comes,—from a person in a blue gown lying with outspread arms, face downward, on the slimy shore; and ten steps farther on his comrade is lying in the grass.
As soon as I cross the beautiful lonely Marble Bridge through the pale cloud that hangs over the water I shall be almost home.At my left is a faience gateway guarded by two German sentinels,—two living beings whom I shall not be sorry to see,—who will salute me in automatic unison; this will be at the entrance to the garden where Field-Marshal von Waldersee resides, in one of the Empress's palaces.
Two hundred metres farther on, after passing more gates and more ruins, I shall come to a fresh opening in an old wall, which will be my entrance, guarded by one of our own men,—an African chasseur.Another of the Empress's palaces is there concealed by its surroundings,—a frail palace, almost wholly enclosed in glass. Once there, I push open a glass door decorated with pink lotus flowers, and find again my nightly fairyland, where priceless porcelains, cloisonné, and lacquer stand about in profusion on the yellow carpets under the wonderfully carved arches of ebony.
IX
It is dark when I reach my dwelling-place.The fires are already lighted in the subterranean furnaces, and a soft heat rises through the thick yellow carpets.We feel much at home and quite comfortable now in this palace, which at first seemed so dreary to us.
I dine, as usual, at a small ebony table, which is lost in the long gallery so dark at either end, in company with my comrade, Captain C., who has discovered new and wonderful treasures during the day, which he has spread out, that we may enjoy them for at least an evening.
First, there is a throne of a style unknown to us; some screens of colossal size that rest in ebony sockets, on which shining birds are battling with monkeys amid the flowers of a dream.Candelabra, which have remained in their silk cases since the seventeenth century, now hang from the arches above our heads,—a shower of pearls and enamel,—and many other indescribable things added to-day to our wealth of articles of antique art.
It is the last time we shall be able to enjoy our gallery in its completeness, for to-morrow most of these objects are to be labelled and sent off with the reserve stock.Retaining one salon for the general, who is to winter here, the rest of this wing of the palace is to be cut up by light partitions into lodgings and offices for the staff.This work will be done under the direction of Captain C., who is chief architect and supervisor, whilst I, a passing guest, will have only a consulting voice.
As this evening marks the last chapter of our imperial phantasmagoria, we sit up later than usual.For this once we are childish enough to array ourselves in sumptuous Asiatic garments, then we throw ourselves down on the cushions and call opium—so favorable to weary and blasé imaginations such as ours have unfortunately begun to be—to our aid.Alas!to be alone in this palace would have seemed magical enough to us a few years ago without the aid of any avatar.
The opium, needless to say, is of exquisite quality; its fumes, rising in rapid little spirals, soon make the air sweet and heavy. It quickly brings to us the ecstasy, the forgetfulness, the relief, the youthful lightness so dear to the Chinese.
There is absolute silence without; absolute silence and deserted courts, where all is cold and black.The gallery grows warm, the heat of the furnace is heavy, for these walls of glass and paper, so frail as a protection against surprises from without, form rooms almost hermetically sealed and propitious to the intoxication that comes from perfumes.
Stretched out upon the silken cushions, we gaze at the receding ceiling, at the row of arches so elaborately carved into lacework, from which the lanterns with the dangling pearls are suspended.Chimæras of gold stand out from the thick folds of the green or yellow silks.High screens of cloisonné, lacquer, or ebony, the great luxury of China, shut off the corners, forming luxurious nooks filled with jars, bronzes, and monsters with eyes of jade,—eyes which squintingly follow you.
Absolute silence, except that from a distance one of those shots is heard which never fails to mark the torpor of the night, or a cry of distress or alarm; skirmishes between Europeans in the posts and thieving Chinamen; sentinels afraid of the dead or of the night shooting at a shadow.
In the foreground, which is lighted by one lamp, the only luminous things whose design and color are engraved upon our already fixed gaze are four gigantic incense-burners—hieratic in form, and made of an adorable blue cloisonné—resting on gold elephants.They stand out against a background of black lacquer traversed by flying birds, whose plumage is made of different kinds of mother-of-pearl.No doubt our lamp is going out, for, with the exception of these nearer things, we scarcely see the magnificence of the place until the outline of some rare vase five hundred years old, the reflection of a piece of inimitable silk, or the brilliancy of some bit of enamel recalls it to our memory.
The fumes of the opium keep us awake until very late, in a state of mind that is both lucid and at the same time confused.We have never until now understood Chinese art; it is revealed to us for the first time to-night.In the beginning we were ignorant, as is all the world, of its almost terrible grandeur until we saw the Imperial City and the walled palace of the Son of Heaven; now at this nocturnal hour, amid the fragrant fumes that rise in clouds in our over-heated gallery, our impressions of the big sombre temples, of the yellow enamelled roofs crowning the Titanic buildings that rise above terraces of marble, are exalted above mere captivated admiration to respect and awe.
In the thousand details of its embroidery and carvings which surround us in such profusion, we learn how skilful and how exact this art is in rendering the grace of flowers, exaggerating their superb and languishing poses and their deep or deliciously pale colorings; then in order to make clear the cruelty of every kind of living thing, down to dragons and butterflies, they place claws, horns, terrible smiles, and leering eyes upon them! They are right; these embroideries on our cushions are roses, lotus flowers, chrysanthemums! As for the insects, the scarabs, the flies, and the moths, they are just like those horrid things painted in gold relief on our court fans.
When we arrive at that special form of physical prostration which sets the mind free (disengages the astral body, they say at Benares), everything in the palace, as well as in the outside world, seems easy and amusing.We congratulate ourselves upon having come to live in the Yellow City at so unique a period in the history of China, at a moment when everything is free, and we are left almost alone to gratify our whims and curiosity. Life seems to hold to-morrows filled with new and interesting circumstances. In our conversation we find words, formulas, images, to express the inexpressible, the things that have never been said. The hopelessness, the misery that one carries about like the weight on a convict's leg, is incontestably lessened; and as to the small annoyances of the moment, the little pin-pricks, they exist no longer. For example, when we see through the glass gallery the pale light of a moving lantern in a distant part of our palace, we say without the slightest feeling of disturbance: "More thieves! They must see us. We'll hunt them down to-morrow!"
And it seems of no consequence, even comfortable to us, that our cushions and our imperial silks are shut off from the cold and the horrors by nothing but panes of glass.
X
I have worked all day, with only my cat for company, in the solitude of the Rotunda Palace that I deserted yesterday.
At the hour when the red sun is setting behind the Lake of the Lotus my two servants come as usual to get me.But this time, after crossing the Marble Bridge, we pass the turn which leads to my palace, for I have to pay a visit to Monsignor Favier, the Bishop of Pekin, who lives in our vicinity, outside yet quite near the Imperial City.
It is twilight by the time we reach the "Catholic Concession," where the missionaries and their little band of yellow followers endured the stress of a long siege.The cathedral, riddled with balls, has a vague look against the dark sky; and it is so dusty that we see as through a fog this newly built cathedral, the one the Empress paid for in place of the one she took for a storehouse.
Monsignor Favier, the head of the French missions, has lived in Pekin for forty years, has enjoyed for a long time the favor of the sovereigns, and was the first to foresee and denounce the Boxer peril.In spite of the temporary blow to his work, he is still a power in China, where the title of Viceroy was at one time conferred upon him.
The white-walled room where he receives me, lately pierced by a cannon-ball, contains some precious Chinese bibelots, whose presence here astonishes every one at first.He collected them in other days, and is selling them now in order to be able to assist several thousand hungry people driven by the war into his church.
The bishop is a tall man, with fine, regular features, and eyes that show shrewdness and energy.He must resemble in looks, as well as in his determined will, those bishops of the Middle Ages who went on Crusades to the Holy Land. It is only since the outbreak of hostilities against the Christians that he has resumed the priests' cloth and cut off his long Chinese queue. Permission to wear the queue and the Mandarins' garb was one of the greatest and most subversive favors accorded the Lazarists by the Celestial emperors.
He was good enough to keep me with him for an hour.A well-dressed Chinese served us with tea while he told me of the recent tragedy; of the defence of fourteen hundred metres of wall, organized out of nothing by a young ensign and thirty sailors, of their holding out for two or three months right in the heart of an enflamed city, against thousands of enemies wild with fury.Although he tells it all in a very low tone, his speech grows warmer, and vibrates with a sort of soldierly ruggedness as some emotion chokes him, especially whenever he mentions Ensign Henry.
Ensign Henry died, pierced by two balls, at the end of the last great fight.Of his thirty sailors many were killed, and almost all were wounded.This story of a summer should be written somewhere in letters of gold, lest it should be too quickly forgotten; it should be attested, lest some day it should no longer be believed.
The sailors under the command of this young officer were not picked men; they were the first that came, selected hap-hazard on board ship.A few noble priests shared their vigils, a few brave seminarists took a turn under their orders, besides a horde of Chinese armed with miserable old guns.But the sailors were the heart and soul of this obstinate defence; there was neither weakening nor complaint in the face of death, which was at all times present in its most atrocious forms.
An officer and ten Italian soldiers brought hither by chance also fought heroically, leaving six of their number among the dead.
Oh, the heroism, the lowly heroism of these poor Chinese Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, who sought protection in the bishop's palace, knowing that one word of abjuration, one reverence to a Buddhist image would ensure their lives, yet who remained there, faithful, in spite of gnawing hunger and almost certain martyrdom!And at the same time, outside of these walls which protected them in a measure, fifteen thousand of their brothers were burned, dismembered, and thrown piecemeal into the river on account of the new faith which they would not renounce.
Unheard-of things happened during this siege: a bishop,[1] followed by an ensign and four marines, went to wrest a cannon from the enemy, balls grazing their heads; theological students manufactured powder from the charred branches of the trees in the close, and from saltpetre, which they scaled the walls to steal at night from a Chinese arsenal.
They lived in a continual tumult under a continual fire of stones and shot; all the marble bell-towers of the cathedral, riddled by shells, tottered and fell piecemeal upon their heads.At all hours, without truce, bullets rained in the court, breaking in the roofs and weakening the walls.At night especially balls fell like hailstones to the sound of the Boxers' trumpets and frightful gongs.And all the while their death-cries, "Cha!Cha!"(Let us kill, let us kill) or "Chao!Chao!"(Let us burn, let us burn) filled the city like the cries of an enormous pack of hounds.
It was in July and August under a burning sky, and they lived surrounded by fire; incendiaries sprinkled their roofs and their entrances with petroleum by means of pumps and threw lighted torches onto them; they were obliged to run from one place to another and to climb up with ladders and wet blankets to put out the flames.They had to run, run all the time, when they were so exhausted and their heads so heavy from having had no food, that they could scarcely stand.
Even the good Sisters had to organize a kind of race for the women and children, who were stupefied from fear and suffering.It was these sublime women who decided when it was necessary to change positions according to the direction from which the shells came and who chose the least dangerous moment to fly, with bowed heads, across a court, and to take refuge elsewhere.A thousand women without wills or ideas of their own, with poor dying babies clinging to their breasts, followed them; a human eddy, advancing, receding, pushing, in order to keep in sight the white caps of their protectors.
They had to run when, from lack of food, they could scarcely stand, and when a supreme lassitude impelled them to lie down on the ground to await death!They had to become accustomed to detonations that never ceased, to perpetual noise, to shot and shell, to the fall of stones, to seeing one of their number fall bathed in his own blood!Hunger was the most intolerable of all.They made soup of the leaves and young branches of the trees, of dahlia roots from the gardens and of lily bulbs.The poor Chinese would say humbly, "We must keep the little grain we have left for the sailors who are protecting us, and whose need of strength is greater than ours."
The bishop told of a poor woman who had been confined the previous night, who dragged herself after him imploring: "Bishop, bishop, give me a handful of grain so that my milk will come and my child may not die!"
All night long the feeble voices of several hundred children were heard in the church moaning for lack of food.To use the expression of Monsignor Favier, it was like "the bleatings of a flock of lambs about to be sacrificed."But their cries diminished, for they were buried at the rate of fifteen in a single day.
They knew that not far away in the European legations a similar drama was being enacted, but, needless to say, there was no communication between them; and if any young Chinese Christian offered to go there with a message from the bishop asking for help, or at least for news, it was not long before they saw his head, with the note pinned to his cheek, reappear above the wall at the end of a rod garnished with his entrails.
Not only did bullets rain by the hundreds every day, but the Boxers put anything that fell into their furious hands into their cannon,—stones, bricks, bits of iron, old kettles.The besieged had no doctors; they hopelessly, and as best they could, bound up great horrible wounds, great holes in the breast. The arms of the voluntary grave-diggers were exhausted with digging places in which to bury the dead, or parts of the dead. And the cry of the infuriated mob went on, "Cha! Cha!" (Let us kill, let us kill!) to the grim sounds of their iron gongs and the blasts of their trumpets.
Mines went off in different localities, swallowing up people and bits of wall.In the gulf made by one of them fifty little babies in their cradles disappeared.Their sufferings at least were over.Each time a new breach was made the Boxers threw themselves upon it, and it became a yawning opportunity for torture and death.
But Ensign Henry was always there; with such of his sailors as had been spared he was seen rushing to the place where he was needed, to the exact spot where the most effective work could be done,—on a roof or on the crest of a wall,—and they killed and they killed, without losing a ball, every shot dealing death.Fifty, a hundred of them, crouched in heaps on the ground; priests and Chinese women, as well as men, brought stones, bricks, marble, no matter what, from the cathedral, and with the mortar they had ready they closed the breach and were saved again until the next mine exploded!
But they came to the end of their strength, the meagre ration of soup grew less and less, and they could do no more.
The bodies of Boxers, piled up along the vast enclosure which they so desperately defended, filled the air with a pestilential odor; dogs were attracted and gathered in moments of calm for a meal.During the latter part of the time they killed these dogs from the tops of the walls and pulled them in by means of a hook at the end of a cord, and their meat was saved for the sick and for nursing mothers.
On the day when our soldiers at last entered the place, guided by the white-haired bishop standing on the wall and waving the French flag, on the day when they threw themselves with tears of joy in one another's arms, there remained just enough food to make, with the addition of many leaves, one last meal.
"It seemed," said Monsignor Favier, "as though Providence had counted the grains of rice."
Then he spoke once more of Ensign Henry."The only time during the entire siege," he said, "the only time we wept was when he died.He remained on his feet giving his orders, although mortally wounded in two places.When the fight was over he came down from the breach and fell exhausted in the arms of two of the priests; then we all wept with the sailors, who had come up and surrounded him. He was so charming, simple, good, and gentle with even the humblest. To be a soldier such as he was, to make yourself loved like a little child, could there be anything more beautiful?" Then after a silence he added, "And he had faith; every morning he used to come with us to prayers and to communion, saying with a smile, 'One must be always ready.' "
It is quite dark before I take leave of the bishop, on whom I had intended to pay a short call.All around him now, of course, everything is desolate and in ruins; there are no houses left, and the streets cannot even be traced.I go away with my two servants, our revolvers and one little lantern; I go thinking of Ensign Henry, of his glory, of his deliverance, of everything rather than the insignificant detail of the road to be followed among the ruins.Besides, it is not far, scarcely a kilometre.
A violent wind extinguishes the candle in its paper sheath, and envelops us in dust so thick that we cannot see two steps in front of us; it is like a thick fog.So, never having been in this quarter before, we are lost, and go stumbling along over stones, over rubbish, over broken pottery, and human bones.
We can scarcely see the stars for the thick cloud of dust, and we don't know which way to go.
Suddenly we get the smell of a dead body and we recognize the ditch we discovered yesterday morning just in time to keep from falling into it.So all is well; only two hundred metres more and we shall be at home in our glass palace.
XI
Leaving my palace a little late, I hasten to keep the appointment made for me by Li-Hung-Chang for nine o'clock in the morning.
An African chasseur accompanies me.Following a Chinese outrider sent to guide us, we start off at a rapid trot through the dust and silence under the sun's white rays, along the great walls and marshy moats of the Emperor's Palace.
When we get outside of the Yellow City noise and life begin again.After the magnificent solitude to which we have become accustomed, whenever we return to everybody's Pekin, we are surprised to find such a roar among these humble crowds; it is hard to realize that the woods, the lakes, the horizons, which play at being the real country, are artificial things surrounded on all sides by the most swarming of cities.
It is incontestable that the people are returning in crowds to Pekin.(According to Monsignor Favier, the Boxers in particular are returning in all kinds of costumes and disguises.)From day to day the number of silk gowns, blue cotton gowns, slanting eyes, and queues increases.
We must move faster in spite of all the people, for it seems it is still some distance, and time is passing.Our outrider appears to be galloping.We cannot see him, for here the streets are even dustier than in the Yellow City; we see only the cloud of dust that envelops his little Mongolian horse, and we follow that.
At the end of half an hour's rapid riding the dust cloud stops in front of a ramshackle old house in a narrow street that leads nowhere.Is it possible that Li-Hung-Chang, rich as Aladdin, the owner of palaces and countless treasures, one of the most enduring favorites of the Empress and one of the glories of China, lives here?
For reasons unknown to me, the entrance is guarded by Cossack soldiers in poor uniforms but with naïve rosy faces.The room into which I am taken is dilapidated and untidy; there is a table in the middle of it and two or three rather well-carved ebony chairs; but that is all.At one end is a chaos of trunks, bags, packages, and bedding, all tied up as though in preparation for flight. The Chinese who comes to the door, in a beautiful gown of plum-colored silk, gives me a seat and offers me tea. He is the interpreter, and speaks French correctly, even elegantly. He tells me that some one has gone to announce me to his Highness.
At a sign from another Chinese he presently conducts me into a second court, and there, at the door leading into a reception-room, a tall old man advances to meet me.At his right and his left are silk-robed servants, both a whole head shorter than he is, on whose shoulders he leans.He is colossal, with very prominent cheek-bones, and small, very small, quick and searching eyes.He is an exaggeration of the Mongolian type, with a certain beauty withal, and the air of a great personage, although his furry gown of an indefinite color is worn and spotted.(I have been forewarned that in these days of abomination his Highness believes that he should affect poverty.)The large shabby room where he receives me is, like the first one, strewn with trunks and packages.We take arm-chairs opposite each other, while servants place cigarettes, tea, and champagne on a table between us.At first we stare at each other like two beings from different worlds.
After inquiring as to my age and the amount of my income (one of the rules of Chinese politeness), he bows again, and conversation begins.
When we have finished discussing the burning questions of the day, Li-Hung-Chang expresses sympathy for China and for ruined Pekin."Having visited the whole of Europe," he says, "I have seen the museums of all your great capitals.Pekin had her own also, for the whole Yellow City was a museum begun centuries ago, and may be compared with the most beautiful of your own.And now it is destroyed."
He questions me as to what we are doing over in the Palace of the North, informs himself by adroit questioning as to whether we are injuring anything there.He knows as well as I do what we are doing, for he has spies everywhere, even among our workmen; yet his enigmatical face shows some satisfaction when I confirm his knowledge of the fact that we are destroying nothing.
When the audience is over, and we have shaken hands, Li-Hung-Chang, still leaning on his two servants, comes with me as far as the centre of the court.As I turn at the threshold to make my final bow, he courteously recalls to my memory my offer to send him my account of my stay in Pekin,—if ever I find time to write it.In spite of the perfect grace of his reception of me, due especially to my title of "Mandarin of Letters," this old prince of the Chinese Arabian Nights' tales, in his threadbare garments and in his wretched surroundings, has not ceased to seem to me disturbing, inscrutable, and possibly secretly disdainful and ironical, all the time disguising his real self.
I now make my way across two kilometres of rubbish to the quarters of the European legations in order to take leave of the French minister, who is still ill in bed, and to get from him his commissions for the admiral, for I must leave Pekin not later than the day after to-morrow, and go back to my ship.
Just as I was mounting my horse again, after this visit, to return to the Yellow City, some one from the legation came out and very kindly gave me some precise and very curious information which will enable me this evening to purloin two tiny shoes that once belonged to the Empress of China, and to take them away as a part of the pillage. On a shady island in the southern part of the Lake of the Lotus is a frail, almost hidden palace, where the sovereign slept that last agonizing night before her frantic flight, disguised as a beggar. The second room to the left, at the back of the second court of this palace, was her room, and there, it seems, under a carved bed, lie two little red silk shoes embroidered with butterflies and flowers, which must have belonged to her.
An Imperial Palace
I return to the Yellow City as fast as I can, breakfast hurriedly in the glass gallery,—whence the wonderful treasures are already being carried to their new quarters to make way for the carpenters, who soon begin their work here,—and straightway depart with my two faithful servants, on foot this time, in search of the island, the palace, and the pair of small shoes.
The one o'clock sun is burning the dry paths, and the cedars overhead are gray with dust.About two kilometres to the south of our residence we find the island without difficulty.It is in a region where the lake divides into various little arms, spanned by marble bridges with marble railings entwined with green.The palace stands there light and charming, half concealed among the trees, on a terrace of white marble.The roofs of green faience touched with gilt and the openwork walls shine forth with new and costly ornamentation from amid the dusty green of the old cedars.It must have been a marvel of grace and daintiness, and it is adorable as it is, deserted and silent.
Through the doors opening onto the white steps that lead up to it, a perfect cascade of débris of all kinds is tumbling,—boxes of imperial porcelains, boxes of gold lacquer, small bronze dragons upside down, bits of rose-colored silk, and bunches of artificial flowers. Barbarians have been this way,—but which? Surely not our soldiers, for this part of the Yellow City was never placed in their hands; they are not familiar with it.
The interior courts, from which at our approach a flock of crows rise, are in the same condition.The pavement is strewn with delicate, rather feminine things, which have been ruthlessly destroyed.And so recent is this destruction that the light stuffs, the silk flowers, the parts of costumes have not even lost their freshness.
"At the back of the second court, the second room to the left!"Here it is!There remains a throne, some arm-chairs, and a big, low bed, carved by the hand of genius.Everything has been ransacked.The window-glass, through which the sovereign could gaze upon the reflections of the lake and the pink blossoms of the lotus, the marble bridges, the islands, the whole landscape devised and realized for her eyes, has been broken; and a fine white silk, with which the walls were hung, and on which some exquisite artist had painted in pale tints, larger than nature, other lotus blossoms, languishing, bent by the autumn wind, and strewing their petals, has been torn in shreds.
Under the bed, where I look immediately, is a pile of manuscript and charming bits of silk. My two servants, foraging with sticks, like rag-pickers, soon succeed in finding what I seek,—the two comical little red shoes, one after the other.
They are not the absurd, doll-like shoes worn by the Chinese women who compress their toes; the Empress, being a Tartar princess, did not deform her feet, which were, however, very small by nature.No, these are embroidered slippers of natural shape, whose extravagance lies in the heels, which are thirty centimetres high and extend over the entire sole, growing larger at the bottom, like the base of a statue, to prevent the wearer from falling; they are little blocks of white leather of the most improbable description.
I had no idea that a woman's shoes could take up so much space.How to get them away without looking like pillagers in the eyes of the servants and guards we meet on the way back is the question?
Osman suggests suspending them by strings to Renaud's belt so that they will hang concealed by his long winter coat.This is an admirable scheme; he can even walk—we make him try it—without giving rise to suspicion.I feel no remorse, and I fancy that if she, from afar, could witness the scene, the still beautiful Empress would be the first to smile.
We now hasten our steps back to the Palace of the Rotunda, where I have scarcely two hours of daylight for my work before the cold and the night come on.
Each time that I return to this palace I am charmed with the sonorous silence of my high esplanade and with the top of the crenellated wall surrounding it,—an artificial spot whence one commands an extended view of artificial landscape, the sight of which has always been forbidden, and which, until lately, no European has ever seen.
Everything about the place is so Chinese that one feels as though it were the heart of the yellow country, the very quintessence of China.These high gardens were a favorite resort for the ultra-Chinese reveries of an uncompromising Empress who possibly dreamed of shutting her country off from the rest of the world, as in olden times, but who to-day sees her empire crumbling at her feet, rotten to the core, like her myriads of temples and gilded wooden gods.
The magical hour here is when the enormous red ball, which the Chinese sun appears to be on autumn evenings, lights up the roofs of the Violet City before it disappears.I never fail to leave my kiosk at this hour to see once more these effects, unique in all the world.
Compared to this, what barbaric ugliness is offered by a bird's-eye view of one of our European cities,—a mass of ugly gables, tiles, and dirty roofs full of chimneys and stove-pipes, and, as a last horror, electric wires forming a black network! In China, where they are all too scornful of pavements and sewers, everything which rises into the air, into the domain of the ever-watchful and protecting spirits, is always impeccable. And this immense Imperial retreat, empty to-day, now displays for me alone the splendor of its enamelled roofs.
In spite of their age, these pyramids of yellow faience, carved with a grace unknown to us, are still brilliant under the red sun.At each of the corners of the topmost one the ornaments simulate great wings; lower down, toward the outside, are rows of monsters in poses which are copied and recopied, century after century, sacred and unchanging.These pyramids of yellow faience are brilliant.From far off, against the ashy blue sky, clouded by the everlasting dust, it looks like a city of gold; then, as the sun sinks, like a city of copper.
First the silence of it all; then the croakings that begin the moment the ravens go to rest; then the death-like cold that wraps this magnificence of enamel as in a winding-sheet as soon as the sun goes down.
To-night again, when we leave the Rotunda Palace, we pass the Palace of the North without stopping, and go on to Monsignor Favier's.
He receives me in the same white room, where valises and travelling-bags are lying about on the furniture.The bishop leaves to-morrow for Europe, which he has not seen for twelve years.He is going to Rome to see the Pope, and then to France, to raise money for his suffering missions.His great work of over forty years is annihilated, fifteen thousand of his Christian converts massacred; his churches, chapels, hospitals, schools, are all destroyed, razed to the ground; his cemeteries have been violated, and yet, discouraged at nothing, he wishes to begin all over again.
As he conducts me across his garden I admire the beautiful energy with which he says, pointing to the damaged cathedral with its broken cross, which is the only building left standing, gloomily outlined against the evening sky: "I will rebuild, larger and higher, all the churches they have thrown down, and I hope that each movement of violence and hatred against us may carry Christianity one step further on in their country.Possibly they will again destroy my churches; who knows?If so, I will build them up again, and we shall see whether they or I will be the first to weary of it."
He seems very great to me in his determination and in his faith, and I understand that China must reckon with this apostle of the vanguard.
XII
I wanted to see the Violet City and its throne rooms once more before going away, and to enter it this time, not by round-about ways and back doors and secret posterns, but by the great avenues and gates that have been for centuries closed, so that I might try to imagine beneath the destruction of to-day what must have been in former times the splendor of the sovereigns' arrival.
No one of our European capitals has been conceived and laid out with such unity and audacity, with the idea of increasing the magnificence of a pageant always dominant, especially that of imparting an imposing effect to the appearance of the Emperor.The throne is here the central idea.This city, as regular as a geometrical figure, seems to have been created solely to enclose and glorify the throne of the Son of Heaven, ruler of four hundred millions of souls; to be its peristyle, to lead up to it by colossal avenues which recall Thebes or Babylon.It is easy to understand why the Chinese ambassadors, who came to visit our kings in the times when their immense country was flourishing, were not particularly dazzled by the sight of the Paris of those days, of the Louvre or of Versailles.
The southern gate of Pekin, by which the processions arrive, lies in the axis of this throne, once so awe-inspiring, and six kilometres of avenues, with gateways and monsters, lead up to it.When one has crossed the wall of the Chinese City by this southern gate, first passing two huge sanctuaries,—the Temple of Agriculture and the Temple of Heaven,—one follows for half an hour the great artery that leads to a second boundary wall, that of the Tartar City, higher and more commanding than the first.An enormous gate looms up, surmounted by a black dungeon, and beyond this the avenue goes on, flawlessly straight and magnificent, to a third gate in a third wall of a blood-red color,—the wall of the Imperial City.
Even after entering the Imperial City it is still some distance to the throne to which one is advancing in a straight line,—to this throne which dominates everything and which formerly could never have been seen; but here its presence is indicated by the surroundings.From this point the number of marble monsters increases; lions of colossal size grin from their pedestals at right and at left; there are marble obelisks—monoliths encircled with dragons—with the same heraldic beast always seated at the summit,—a thin kind of jackal with long ears, which has the appearance of barking or howling in the direction of the extraordinary thing which is on ahead, namely, the throne of the Emperor. Walls are multiplied,—blood-colored walls thirty metres thick,—which cross the road, and are surmounted by queer roofs and pierced by low gates,—narrow ambushes that send a thrill of terror to your heart. The defending moats at the foot of the walls have marble bridges, triple like the gates, and from here on the road is paved with superb big slabs crossing one another at an angle, like the boards of a parquetry floor.
After it reaches the Imperial City, this avenue, already a league in length, is absolutely unfrequented, and goes on even wider than before between long regular buildings intended for soldiers' barracks.No more little gilded houses, no more small shops, no more crowds!At this last imprisoning rampart the life of the people stops, under the oppression of the throne; and at the very end of this solitary roadway, watched over by the slender marble beasts surmounting the obelisks, the forbidden centre of Pekin becomes visible, the retreat of the Son of Heaven.
The last wall which appears ahead of us—that of the Violet City—is, like the preceding ones, the color of dried blood; there are numerous watch-towers upon it, whose roofs of dark enamel curve up at the corners in wicked little points.The triple gates are too small, too low for the height of the wall, too deep and tunnel-like.Oh, the heaviness, the hugeness of it all, and the strangeness of the design of the roofs, so characteristic of the peculiarities of the yellow colossus!
Things must have begun to go to pieces here centuries ago; the red plaster of the walls has fallen in places, or it has become spotted with black; the marble of the obelisks and the great squinting lions could only have grown so yellow under the rains of innumerable seasons, and the green that pushes through wherever the granite is joined, marks with lines of velvet the design of the pavement.
The last triple gates, given over since the defeat to a detachment of American soldiers, will open to-day for any barbarian, such as I, who carries a properly signed permit.
Passing through the tunnels, one enters an immense marble whiteness,—a whiteness that is turning into ivory yellow and is stained by the autumn leaves and the wild growth that has invaded this deserted spot. The place is paved with marble, and straight ahead, rising like a wall, is an extraordinary marble terrace, on which stands the throne room, with its sturdy blood-red columns and its roof of old enamel. This white enclosure is like a cemetery—so much green has pushed its way up between the paving-stones,—where the silence is broken only by the magpies and the crows.
On the ground are ranged blocks of bronze all similar and cone-like in shape; they are simply placed there among the brown leaves and branches, and can be moved about as if they were ninepins.They are used during the formal entry of a procession to mark the line for the flags and the places where even the most magnificent visitors must prostrate themselves when the Son of Heaven deigns to appear, like a god, on top of the marble terrace, surrounded by banners, and in one of those costumes with breastplate of gold, monsters' heads on the shoulders, and gold wings in the headdress, whose superhuman splendor has been transmitted to us by means of the paintings in the Temple of Ancestors.
One mounts to these terraces by staircases of Babylonian proportions and by an "imperial path," reserved for the Emperor alone, that is to say, by an inclined plane made of one block of marble,—one of those untransportable blocks which men in the past possessed the secret of moving. The five-clawed dragon displays his sculptured coils from the top to the bottom of this stone, which cuts the big white staircase into two equal parts, of which it forms the centre, and extends right to the foot of the throne. No Chinese would dare to walk on this "path" by which the emperors descend, pressing the high soles of their shoes on the scales of the heraldic beast, in order not to slip.
The room at the top, open to-day to all the winds that blow and to all the birds of heaven, has, by way of roof, the most prodigious mass of yellow faience that there is in Pekin, and the most bristling with monsters; the ornaments at the corners are shaped like big extended wings.Inside, needless to say, there is that blaze of reddish gold which always pursues one in Chinese palaces.On the ceiling, which is of an intricate design, dragons are everywhere entwined, entangled, interwoven; their claws and their horns appear, mingled with the clouds, and one of them, which is detached from the mass and seems ready to fall, holds in his hanging jaw a gold sphere directly above the throne.The throne, which is of red and gold lacquer, rises in the centre of this shadowy place on a sort of platform; two large screens made of feathers, emblems of sovereignty, stand behind it, and along the steps which lead up to it are incense-burners similar to those placed in pagodas at the feet of the gods.
Like the avenues through which I have come, like the series of bridges and the triple gates, this throne is in the exact centre of Pekin, and represents its soul; were it not for all these walls, all these various enclosures, the Emperor, seated there on this pedestal of lacquer and marble, could see to the farthest extremities of the city, to the farthest openings in the surrounding walls; the tributary sovereigns who come there, the ambassadors, the armies, from the moment of their entrance into Pekin by the southern gate, would be, so to speak, under the inspiration of his invisible eyes.
On the floor a thick carpet of imperial yellow reproduces in a much worn design the battle of the chimæras, the nightmare carved upon the ceiling; it is a carpet made in one piece, an enormous carpet of a wool so thick and close that one's feet sink into it as on a grassy lawn; but it is torn, eaten by moths, with piles of gray dung lying about on it in patches,—for magpies, pigeons, and crows have made their nests in the roof, and on my arrival the place is filled with the whirring of frightened wings up high against the shining beams, amongst the golden dragons and the clouds.
The incomprehensible fact about this palace, to us uninitiated barbarians, is that there are three of these rooms exactly alike, with the same throne, the same carpet, the same ornaments, in the same places; they are preceded by the same great marble courts and are constructed on the same marble terraces; you reach them by the same staircases and by the same imperial paths.
Why should there be three of them?For, of necessity, the first conceals the two others, and in order to pass from the first to the second, or from the second to the third, you must go down each time into a vast gloomy court without any view and then come up again between the piles of ivory-colored marble, so superb, yet so monotonous and oppressive!
There must be some mysterious reason connected with the use of the number three.This repetition produced on our disordered imaginations an effect analogous to that of the three similar sanctuaries and the three similar courts in the great Temple of the Lamas.
Copyright, 1901, by J.C.Hemment
Priceless Porcelains and Bronzes in the Third Palace, Forbidden City
I had already seen the private apartments of the young Emperor.Those of the Empress—for she had apartments here too, in addition to the frail palaces her fancy had scattered over the parks of the Yellow City—those of the Empress are less gloomy and much less dark.Room after room exactly alike, with large windows and superb yellow enamelled roofs.Each one has its marble steps, guarded by two lions all shining with gold, and the little gardens which separate them are filled with bronze ornaments, heraldic beasts, phœnixes, or crouching monsters.
Inside are yellow silks and square arm-chairs of the form consecrated by time, unchanging as China itself.On the chests, on the tables, a quantity of precious articles are placed in small glass cases,—because of the perpetual dust of Pekin,—and this makes them as cheerless as mummies and casts over the apartment the chill of a museum.There are many artificial bouquets of chimerical flowers of neutral shades in amber, jade, agate, and moonstones.
The great and inimitable luxury of these palace rooms consists of the series of ebony arches so carved as to seem a bower of dark leaves.In what far-away forest did the trees grow that permitted such groves to be created out of one single piece?And by means of what implements and what patience are they able to carve each stem and each leaf of light bamboo, or each fine needle of the cedar, out of the very heart of the tree, and to add to them birds and butterflies of the most exquisite workmanship?
Behind the sleeping-room of the Empress a kind of dark oratory is filled with Buddhistic divinities on altars.An exquisite odor still remains, left behind her by the beautiful, passionate, elegant old woman who was queen.Among these gods is a small creature made of very old wood, quite worn and dull from the loss of gilding, who wears about his neck a collar of fine pearls.In front of him is a bunch of dried flowers,—a last offering, one of the guardian eunuchs informs me, made by the Empress to this little old Buddha, who was her favorite fetish, at the supreme moment before her flight from the Violet City.
To-day I have reached this retreat by a very different route from the one I took on my first pilgrimage here, and in going out I must now pass through the quarters where all is walled and rewalled, the gates barricaded and guarded by more and more horrible monsters.Are there hidden princesses and treasures here?There is always the same bloody color on the walls, the same yellow faience on the roofs, and more horns, claws, cruel forms, hyena smiles, projecting teeth, and squinting eyes than ever; the most unimportant things, like bolts and locks, have features that simulate hatred and death.
Everything is perishing from old age; the stones are worn away, the wooden doors are falling into dust.There are some old shadowy courts that are given up to white-bearded octogenarian servants, who have built cabins, where they live like recluses, occupied in training magpies or in cultivating sickly flowers in pots under the eyes of the everlasting grinning old marble and bronze beasts.No cloistered green, no monk's cell, was ever half so gloomy as these little courts, so shut in and so dark, overshadowed for centuries by the uncontrolled caprices of the Chinese emperors.The inexorable sentence, "Leave hope behind, all those who enter here," seems to belong here; as one proceeds, the passages grow narrower and more intricate; it seems as though there were no escape, as though the great locks on the doors would refuse to work, as though the walls would close in upon and crush you.
Yet here I am almost outside, outside the interior wall and through the massive gates that quickly close behind me.Now I am between the second rampart and the first, both equally terrible.I am on the road which makes a circle around this city,—a sort of ominous passageway of great length that runs between two dark red walls and which seems to meet in the distance ahead of me. Human bones and old rags that have been parts of the clothing of soldiers are scattered here and there, and one sees two or three crows and one of the flesh-eating dogs prowling about.
When the boards which barricade the outside gate are let down for me (the gate guarded by the Japanese), I discover, as though on awakening from a dreadful dream, that I am in the park of the Yellow City, in open space under the great cedars.
XIII
The Island of Jade, on the Lake of the Lotus, is a rock, artificial perhaps, in spite of its mountainous proportions.Old trees cling to its sides, and old temples loom up toward the sky, while crowning all is a sort of tower or dungeon of colossal size and of a mysterious Baroque design.It may be seen from all points; its excessively Chinese outlines dominate Pekin, and high up on it stands a terrible idol whose threatening attitude and hideous smile look down upon the city.This idol our soldiers call the "big devil of China."
This morning I am climbing up to visit this "big devil."
A bridge of white marble across the reeds and lotus gives access to the Island of Jade.Both ends of the bridge are guarded, needless to say, by marble monsters who leer and squint at any one who has the audacity to pass.The shores of the island rise abruptly underneath the cedar branches, and one begins immediately to climb by means of steps and rock-cut paths.Among the severe trees is a series of marble terraces with bronze incense-burners and occasional pagodas, out of whose obscurity enormous golden idols shine forth.
This Island of Jade, on account of its position of strategic importance, is under military occupation by a company of our marines.
As there is no shelter other than the pagodas, and no camp beds other than the sacred tables, our soldiers have had to put out of doors the entire population of secondary gods in order to make room to lie down on the beautiful red tables at night, and have left only the big, solemn idols on their thrones.So here they are by the hundreds, by the thousands, lined up on the white terraces like playthings.Inside the temples the guns of our men are lying about, and their blankets and their clothing hang on the walls, all around the big idols who have been left in their places.What a heavy smell of leather they have already introduced into these closed sanctuaries, accustomed only to the odor of sandalwood and incense!
Through the twisted branches of the cedars the horizon, which is occasionally visible, is all green, turning to an autumn brown.It is a wood, an infinite wood, out of which here and there roofs of yellow faience emerge.This wood is Pekin; not at all as one imagines it, but Pekin seen from the top of a very sacred place where no Europeans were ever allowed to come.
The rocky soil grows thinner and thinner as one rises toward the "big devil of China," as one approaches the peak of the isolated cone known as the Island of Jade.
This morning I meet, as I climb, a curious band of pilgrims who are coming down; they are Lazarist missionaries in mandarin costume, wearing long queues.With them are several young Chinese Catholic priests who seem frightened at being there; as though, in spite of the Christianity superimposed upon their hereditary beliefs, they were committing some sacrilege by their very presence in so forbidden a spot.
At the foot of the dungeon which crowns these rocks is the kiosk of faience and marble where the "big devil" dwells.It is high up on a narrow terrace in the pure, clear air, from which one overlooks a mass of trees scarcely veiled to-day by the usual mist of dust and sun.
I enter the kiosk where the "big devil" stands, the sole guest of this aerial region.Oh, horrible creature that he is!He is of superhuman size, cast in bronze.Like Shiva, god of death, he dances on dead bodies; he has five or six atrocious faces whose multiplied grins are almost intolerable; he wears a collar of skulls, and is gesticulating with forty arms that hold instruments of torture or heads severed from their bodies.
Such is the protecting divinity chosen by the Chinese to watch over this city, and placed high above all their pyramidal faience roofs, high above all their pagodas and towers, as we in times of faith would have placed the Christ or the Blessed Virgin.It is a tangible symbol of their profound cruelty, the index of the inexplicable cleft in the brain of these people ordinarily so tractable and gentle, so open to the charm of little children and of flowers, but who are capable all at once of gleefully becoming executioners and torturers of the most horrible description.
At my feet Pekin seems like a wood!I had been told of this incomprehensible effect, but my expectations are surpassed.Outside of the parks in the Imperial City, it has not seemed to me that there were many trees around the houses, that is, in the gardens and in the streets. But from here all is submerged in green. Even beyond the walls whose black outlines may be seen in the distance there are more woods,—endless woods. Toward the east alone lies the gray desert which I came through that snowy morning, and toward the north rise the Mongolian mountains, charming, translucent, and purple against the pale blue sky.
The great straight arteries of the city, drawn according to a singular plan, with a regularity and an amplitude to be found in none of the European capitals, resemble, from the point where I stand, the avenues in a forest,—avenues bordered by various complicated, delicate little fretwork houses of gray pasteboard or of gilt paper.Many of these arteries are dead; in those which are still living, this fact is indicated from my point of view by the constant moving of little brown animals along the earth, recalling the migration of ants; these caravans, which move slowly and quietly away, are scattered to the four corners of China.
A feeling that is akin to regret is mingled with my afternoon's work in the solitude of my lofty palace,—regret for what is about to end, for I am now on the eve of departure.And it will be an end without any possible beginning again, for if I should return to Pekin this palace would be closed to me, or, in any case, I should never again find here such charming solitude.
Yet this distant, inaccessible spot, of which it once would have seemed madness to say that I should ever make it my dwelling-place, has already become very familiar to me, as well as all that belongs here and all that has happened here,—the presence of the great alabaster goddess in the dark temple, the daily visit of the cat, the silence of the surroundings, the mournful light of the October sun, the agonies of the last butterflies as they beat against my window-panes, the manœuvres of the sparrows whose nests are in the enamelled roofs, the blowing of the dead leaves, and the fall of the little balsam needles on the pavement of the esplanade whenever the wind blows.What a strange destiny, when you think of it, has made me master here for a few days!
The splendors of our long gallery in the Palace of the North are a thing of the past.It is already divided by light wooden partitions which may be removed without difficulty if ever the Empress thinks of returning, but which, for the time being, cut it up into rooms and offices.There are still a few magnificent bibelots in the part which is to be the general's salon, but elsewhere it has all been simplified; the silks, the pottery, the screens, the bronzes, duly catalogued, have been removed to a storehouse. Our soldiers have even found European seats among the palace reserves, which they have taken to the future apartments of the staff to make them more habitable. They consist of sofas and arm-chairs, vaguely Henry II. in style, covered with old-gold plush that reminds one of a provincial hotel.
I expect to leave to-morrow morning.When the dinner hour unites us once again, Captain C.and I, seated at our little ebony table, both feel a touch of melancholy at seeing how things have changed about us, and how quickly our dream of being Chinese sovereigns is over.
I have postponed my departure for twenty-four hours in order to meet General Vayron, who returns to Pekin this evening, and undertake his commissions for the admiral.So I have an unexpected half-day to spend in my high mirador, and hope for a last visit from my cat, who will find me no more in my accustomed place, neither to-morrow nor ever again.It is now growing colder each day, so that in any case my work-room would not be possible much longer.
Before the doors of this palace close behind me forever I want to take a last walk into all the windings of the terraces, into all the kiosks, so dainty and so charming, in which the Empress no doubt concealed her reveries and her amours.
As I go to take leave of the great white goddess,—the sun already setting, and the roofs of the Violet City bathed in the red golds of evening,—I find the aspect of things about here changed; the soldiers who were on guard at the gate have climbed to the top and are putting her house in order; they have carried off the thousand and one boxes of porcelains and girandoles, the broken vases and the bouquets, and have carefully swept the place.The alabaster goddess, deliciously pale in her golden robes, still smiles, more than ever solitary in her empty temple.
The sun of this last day sets in little wintry clouds that are cold to look at, and the Mongolian wind makes me shiver in my thick cloak as I cross the Marble Bridge on my return to the Palace of the North, where the general with his escort of cavalry has just arrived.