Harry Alverson Franck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a theater in the heart of the Tartar City completely Westernized in architecture and general arrangements, yet where perfectly Chinese plays are given; but the foreigner who wishes to get the complete atmosphere must go “outside Ch’ien-men” into the Chinese City. For after all it is the audience and what takes place in front of the stage as much as what goes forward upon it that repays the Westerner for visiting a Chinese theater. In this busiest part of Peking, among the blocks where the singsong-girls ply their popular trade, are scattered many genuinely native playhouses, and farther on there are numerous makeshift ones hastily thrown together of boards, mats, and sheet-iron, stretching beyond the T’ien-ch’iao, the “Heavenly Bridge” with its swarming outdoor markets, across which emperors were carried for centuries to the near-by Temple of Heaven. Out there one may hear much of the play and more of the “music” than he cares to, while merely riding past in the afternoon—for genuine Peking theaters are in full swing from about noon until long after midnight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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