The mud walls of Kublai Khan—Only place for a comfortable promenade—The gardens on the walls—Guarding the city from devils—The dirt of the Chinese—The gates—The camels—In the Chien Men—The patient Chinese women—The joys of living in a walled city—A change in Chinese feeling.

Are they like the walls and gates of Babylon, I wonder, these walls and gates of the capital city of China. I thought so when first I saw them, and the thought remains with me still. Behind such walls as these surely sat Ahasuerus, King of Babylon; behind such walls as these dwelt the thousands of serfs who toiled, and suffered, and died, that he might be a mighty king. They are magnificent, a wonder of the world, and it seemed to me that the men of the nation who built them must glory in them. But all do not. I sat one day at tiffin at a friend's house, and opposite me sat a Chinese doctor, a graduate of Cambridge, who spoke English with the leisurely accent of the cultivated Englishman, and he spoke of these mighty walls.

“If I had my way,” said he, “they should be levelled with the ground. I would not leave one stone upon another.” And I wondered why. They shut out the fresh air, he said, but I wondered, in my own mind, whether he did not feel that they hemmed the people in, caged and held them as it were, in an archaic state of civilisation, that it is best should pass away. They can shut out so little air, and they can only cage and hold those who desire to be so held.

Kublai Khan outlined the greater part of them in mud in the thirteenth century, and then, two hundred years after, came the Ming conquerors who faced the great Tartar's walls with grey Chinese brick, curtailing them a little to the north, and as the Mings left them, so are they to-day when the foreign nations from the West, and that other Asiatic nation from the East, have built their Legations—pledges of peace—beneath them and, armed to the teeth, hold, against the Chinese, the Legation Quarter and a mile of their own wall.

Over fifty feet high are these Tartar walls, at their base they are sixty feet through, at their top they are between forty and fifty feet across, more than a hundred if you measure their breadth at the great buttresses, and they are paved with the grey Chinese bricks that face their sides. As in most Chinese cities, the top of the wall is the only place where a comfortable promenade can be had, and the mile-long strip between the Chien Men, the main gate, and the Ha Ta Men, the south-eastern gate—the strip held by the Legations—is well kept; that is to say, a broad pathway, along which people can walk, is kept smooth and neat and free from the vegetation that flourishes on most of the wall top. This vegetation adds greatly to its charm. The mud of the walls is the rich alluvial deposit of the great plain on which Peking stands, and when it has been well watered by the summer rains, a luxuriant green growth, a regular jungle, forces its way up through the brick pavement. The top of the wall upon a cool autumn day, before the finger of decay has touched this growth, is a truly delightful garden.

“If this goes on,” said he, “I shan't be able to go out to-morrow. I have only one coat.” He had come up from Tientsin for a couple of days. But for me the case was much more serious. I had on a thin white muslin that began to cling round my figure, and I thought anxiously that if it went on much longer I should not be able to go into the hotel that day! However, the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, the sun came out in all his fierceness, and before we reached the hotel I was most unbecomingly rough dried.

Things are ordered on the Legation wall, the pathway between the greenery runs straight as a die, but beyond, on the thirteen miles of wall under Chinese care, the greenery runs riot, and only a narrow pathway meanders between the shrubs and grass, just as a man may walk carelessly from station to station; and sometimes hidden among the greenery, sometimes standing out against it, are here and there great upright slabs of stone, always in pairs, relics of the old fortifications, for surely these are all that remain of the catapults with which of old the Chinese and Tartars defended their mighty city.

The walls stand square, north and south, and east and west, only at the north-west corner does the line slant out of the square a little, for every Chinese knows that is the only sure way to keep devils out of a city, and certainly the capital must be so guarded. Whatever I saw and wondered at, I always came back to the walls, the most wonderful sight of a most wonderful city, and I always found something new to entrance me. The watch-towers, the ramps, the gates, the suggestion of old-world story that met me at every turn. In days not so very long ago these walls were kept by the Manchu bannermen, whose special duty it was to guard them, and no other person was allowed upon them, under pain of death, for exactly the same reason that all the houses in the city are of one story: it was not seemly that any mere commoner should be able to look down upon the Emperor, and no women, even the women of the bannermen, were allowed to set foot there, for it appeared that the God of War, who naturally took an interest in these defences, objected to women.

Now little companies of soldiers take the place of those old-world bannermen. They look out at the life of the city, at their fellows drilling on the great plain beyond, at the muddy canal, that is like a river, making its way across the khaki-coloured plain, that in the summer is one vast crop of kaoliang—one vivid note of green. Wonderful fertility you may see from the walls of the Chinese capital. Looking one feels that the rush of the nations to finance the country is more than justified. Surely here is the truest of wealth. But the soldiers on the walls are children. China does not think much of her soldiers, and the language is full of proverbs about them the reverse of complimentary. “Good iron is not used for nails,” is one of them, “and good men do not become soldiers.” How true that may be I do not know, but these men seemed good enough, only just the babies a fellow-countryman talking of them to me once called them. They know little of their own country, less than nothing of any other. I feel they should not be dressed in shabby khaki like travesties of the men of Western armies, tunics and sandals and bows and arrows would be so much more in keeping with their surroundings. And yet so small are they, like ants at the foot of an oak, that their garb scarcely matters, they but emphasise the vastness of the walls on which they stand; walls builded probably by men differing but little from these soldiers of New China. I photographed a little company one bright day in the early spring—it is hardly necessary to say it was bright, because all days at that season, and indeed at most seasons, are brilliantly, translucently bright. My little company dwelt in a low building made up apparently of lattice-work and paper close to the observatory, and evidently word went round that the wonderful thing had been done, and, for all the charm of the walls, it was not a thing that was often done. I suppose the average tourist does not care to waste his plates on commonplace little soldiers in badly made khaki. When next I appeared with the finished picture all along my route soldiers came and asked courteously, and plainly, for all I knew not one word of their tongue, what the result had been. I showed them, of course, and my following grew as I passed on. They knew those who had been taken, which was lucky, for I certainly could not tell t'other from which' and, when I arrived at their little house, smiling claimants stretched out eager hands. I knew the number I had taken and I had a copy apiece. And very glad I was, too, when they all ranged up and solemnly saluted me, and then they brought me tea in their handleless cups, and I, unwashed though I felt those cups were, drank to our good-fellowship in the excellent Chinese tea that needs neither sugar nor milk to make it palatable.

There were other people, too, on the walls in the early springtime, coolies clearing away the dead growth that had remained over from the past summer. It was so light it seemed hardly worth gathering, and those gleaners first taught me to realise something of the poverty of China, the desperate poverty that dare not waste so much as a handful of dead grass. They gathered the refuse into heaps, tied it to each end of their bamboos, and, slinging it over their shoulders, trudged with it down one of the ramps into the city. Ever and again in my peregrinations, I would come across one of them sitting in the sun, going over his padded coat in the odd moments he could spare from his toil. For the lower-class Chinese understands not the desirability of water, as applied either to himself or his clothes, and, as he certainly never changes those clothes while one shred will hold to another, the moment must arrive, sooner or later, when his discomfort is desperate, and something must be done. He is like the wonks, the great yellow scavenger dogs that haunt the streets of Peking and all Chinese cities, he sits down and scratches himself, and goes through his clothes. At least that was my opinion. A friend of mine who had served for some years in the interior with the great company, the British and American Tobacco Company, that, with the missionaries, shares the honour of doing pioneer work in China, says I am wrong, Chinamen don't mind such a little thing as that.

“Those carters,” said he, “in the interior as it gets colder just pile one garment on over another, and never take anything off, and by February—phew! If you want to smell a tall smell”—I said I didn't, the smells of Peking were quite recondite enough for me—but he paid no attention—“you just go and stand over the k'ang in a room where five or six of them are crowded together.”

And the carters, it seems, are highly respectable, sometimes well-to-do men. I felt I had a lot to learn about the Chinese, these men whose ancestors had built the walls.

Of course there are gates in the walls, nine gates in all in the Tartar City, great archways with iron-studded doors and watch-towers above. I count it one of the assets of my life, that I have stood under those archways, where for centuries has ebbed and flowed the traffic of a Babylonish city, old world still in this twentieth century. They are lighted with electric light now, instead of with pitch-pine torches, but no matter, the grey stones are there.

The gate of a city like Peking is a great affair. Over every archway is a watch-tower, with tiled roofs rising tier above tier, and portholes filled with the painted muzzles of guns. Painted guns in the year of our Lord 1914! So is the past bound up with the present in China! And these are not entirely relics of the past like the catapult stones. In the year 1900, when the Boxers looted the Chinese City, and the Europeans in the Legations north of the Tartar wall trembled for their lives, the looters burned the watch-tower on the Chien Men, all that was burnable of it, and, when peace was restored, the Chinese set to work and built their many-tiered watch-tower, built it in all the glory of red, and green, and blue, and gold, and in the portholes they put the same painted cannon that had been there in past ages, not only to strike terror into the enemy, but also to impress the God of War with an idea of their preparedness. And yet there was hardly any need of sham, for these gateways must have been formidable things to negotiate before the days of heavy artillery, for each is protected by a curtain wall as high and as thick as the main wall, and in them are archways, sometimes one, sometimes two, sometimes three ways out, but always there is a great square walled off in front of the gate so that the traffic must pause, and may be stopped before it passes under the main archway into the city. And these archways look down upon a traffic differing but little from that which has passed down through all the ages.

Here come the camels from Mongolia, ragged and dusty, laden with grain, and wool, and fruit, and the camels from the Western Hills, laden with those “black stones” that Marco Polo noted seven hundred years ago, and told his fellow-countrymen they burned for heating purposes in Cambulac. You may see them down by the Ha Ta Men preparing to start out on their long journey, you may see them in the Imperial City, bringing in their wares, but outside the south-western gate, by the watch-tower that guards the corner of the wall, they are to be seen at their best. Here, where the dust is heaped high under the clear blue sky of Northern China, come slowly, in stately fashion, the camels, as they have come for thousands of years. The man who leads them is ragged in the blue of the peasant, his little eyes are keen, and patient, and cunning, and there is a certain stolidity in his demeanour; life can hold but few pleasures for him, one would think, and yet he is human, he cannot go on superior, regardless of outside things, as does his string of beasts of burden. The crenellated walls rise up behind them, the watch-tower with its painted guns frowns down upon them, and the camels, the cord fastened to the tail of the one in front, passing through the nostrils of the one behind, go steadily on. They are like the walls, they are older than the walls, possibly they may outlive the walls; silently, surely, in the soft, heaped-up dust they move; so they came a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, before the very dawn of history.

These Babylonish gates have for me a never-ending attraction. I look and look at the traffic, and always find something new. One sunny morning I went and sat in the Chien Men, just to watch the never-ending throng that made their way backwards and forwards between the Chinese and the Tartar Cities. I took up my position in the centre of the great square, large as Waterloo Place, enclosed by the curtain wall, and the American Guard looked down upon me and wondered, for they watch the traffic day in and day out, and so long as it is peaceful, they see nothing to remark upon in it. There are three gates in the curtain wall, the one to the south is never opened except for the highest in the land to pass through, but from the east gate the traffic goes from the Tartar to the Chinese City, through the west it comes back again, meeting and passing under the great archway that leads to the Tartar City. And all day long that square is thronged. East and west of the main archway are little temples with the golden-brown roofs of all imperial temples, the Goddess of Mercy is enshrined here, and there are bronze vases and flowering plants, and green trees in artistic pots, all going to make a quiet little resting-place where a man may turn aside for a moment from the rush and roar of the city, burn aromatic incense sticks, and invoke good fortune for the enterprise on which he is engaged. Do the people believe in the Goddess of Mercy, I wonder? About as much as I do, I suspect. The Chinaman, said a Chinese to me once, is the most materialistic of heathens, believing in little that he cannot see, and handle, and explain; but all of us, Eastern or Western, are human, and have the ordinary man's desire for the pitiful, kindly care of some unseen Power. It is only natural. I, too, Westerner as I am, daughter of the newest of nations, burned incense sticks at the shrine of the Goddess of Mercy, and put up a little prayer that the work upon which I was engaged should be successful. Men have prayed here through the centuries. The prayer of so great a multitude must surely reach the Most High, and what matter by what name He is known.

Besides the temples there are little guard-houses for the soldiers in the square; guard-houses with delicate, dainty lattice-work windows, and there are signboards with theatre notices in Chinese on gay red and yellow paper. There are black and yellow uniformed military police, there are grey-coated little soldiers with just a dash of red about their shabby, ill-fitting uniforms, and there are the people passing to and fro intent on their business, the earning of a cash, or of thousands of dollars. The earning of a cash, one would think mostly, looking at many a thing of shreds and patches that passes by. To Western eyes the traffic is archaic, no great motors rush about carrying crowds at once, it consists of rickshaws with one or, at most, a couple of fares, of Peking carts with blue tilts and a sturdy pony or a handsome mule in the shafts, and the driver seated cross-legged in fronts of longer carts with wheels studded, as the Peking carts are, and loaded with timber, with lime, and all manner of merchandise, and drawn sometimes by three or four underfed little horses, but mostly by a horse or mule in the shafts and a mule or a donkey so far in front one wonders he can exert any influence on the traction at all. The rickshaw coolies clang their bells, men on bicycles toot their horns, every donkey, and most horses and mules, have rings of bells round their necks, and everyone shouts at the top of his voice, while forty feet up on the wall, a foreign soldier, one of the Americans who hold the Chien Men, is practising all his bugle calls.

“Turn out, turn out Mess, mess,” proclaims the bugle shrilly above. “Clang, clang, clang,” ring the rickshaw bells. A postman in shabby blue, with bands of dirty white, passes on his bicycle and blows his horn, herald of the ways of the West. A brougham comes along with sides all of glass, such as the Chinaman loves. In it is a man in a modern tall hat, a little out-of-date; on the box, are two men in grey silk, orthodox Chinese costume, queue and all, but alas for picturesqueness they have crowned their heads with hideous tourist caps, the mafoo behind on the step, hanging on to the roof by a strap, has on a very ordinary wideawake, his business it is to jump down and lead the horses round a corner—no self-respecting Chinese horse can negotiate a corner without assistance—and the finishing touch is put by the coachman, also in a tourist cap, who clangs a bell with as much fervour as a rickshaw coolie. Before this carriage trot outriders. “Lend light, lend light,” they cry, which is the Eastern way of saying “By your leave, by your leave. My master a great man comes.” After the coach come more riders. It may be a modern carriage in which lie rides, but the important man in China can no more move without his outriders and his following, than could one of the kings or nobles of Nineveh or Babylon.

More laden carts come in from the west, and the policeman, in dusty black and yellow, directs them, though they really need no directing. The average Chinese mind is essentially orderly, and never dreams of questioning rules. Is there not a stone exactly in the middle of the road under the great archway, and does not every man know that those going east must go one way, and those going west the other? What need for direction? An old-fashioned fat Chinese with shaven head and pigtail and sleeveless black satin waistcoat over his long blue coat comes along. He half-smothers a small donkey with a ring of jingling bells round its neck, a coolie follows him in rags, but that does not matter, spring is in the land, and he is nearly hidden by the lilac bloom he carries, another comes along with a basket strapped on his back and a scoop in his hand, he is collecting the droppings of the animals, either for manure or to make argol for fuel, a stream of rickshaws swerve out of the way of a blind man, ragged, bent, old, who with lute in one hand and staff in the other taps his way along.

“Hsien Sheng, before born,” he is addressed by the coolies directing him, for his affliction brings him outward respect from these courteous people.

In the rickshaws are all manner of people: Manchu women with high head-dresses in the form of a cross, highly painted faces and the gayest of long silk coats, shy Chinese women, who from their earliest childhood have been taught that a woman must efface herself. Their hair is decked with flowers, and dressed low on the nape of their necks, their coats are of soberer colours, and their feet are pitifully maimed. “For every small foot,” says a Chinese proverb, “there is a jar full of tears.” The years of agony every one of those women must have lived through, but their faces are impassive, smiling with a surface smile that gives no indication of the feelings behind.

The Chien Men, because it opens only from the Tartar to the Chinese City, is not closed, but eight o'clock sees all the gates in the twenty-three miles of outer wall closed for the night, and very awkward it sometimes is for the foreigner, who is not used to these restrictions, for neither threats nor bribes will open those gates once they are shut.

I remember on one occasion a young fellow, who had lingered too long among the delights of the city, found himself, one pleasant warm summer evening, just outside the Shun Chih Men as the gates of the Chinese City were closing. He wanted to get back to his cottage at the race-course but the guardians of the gate were obdurate. “It was an order and the gates were closed till daylight next morning.” He could not climb the walls, and even if he could, the two ponies he had with him could not. He probably used up all the bad language at his command, if I know anything about him, and he grew more furious when he recollected he had guests coming to dinner. Then he began to think, and remembered that the railway came through the wall. Inspection showed him that there were gates across it, also fast closed, and here he got his second wind, and quite a fresh assortment of bad language, which was checked by the whistle of an approaching train. Then a bright idea occurred to him. Where a train could go, a pony could go, and he stood close to the line in the darkness, instructed his mafoo to keep close beside him, and the moment the train passed, got on to the line and followed in its wake, regardless of the protests of raging gatekeepers. He got through the gate triumphantly, but then, alas, his troubles began, for the railway line had not been built with a view to taking ponies through the wall. There were rocks and barbed wire, there were fences, and there were mud holes, and his guests are wont to relate how as they were sitting down to table under the hospitable guidance of his No. 1 boy, there arrived on the scene a man, mud to the eyes—it was summertime when there is plenty of mud in the country round Peking—and silent, because no profanity of which he was capable could possibly have done justice to his feelings. Such are some of the joys of living in a Babylonish city.

When I had sat an hour in the gate I rose to go, and the rickshaw coolie and I disagreed as to the fare. A rickshaw coolie and I never did agree as to the fare. Gladly would I pay double to avoid a row, but the coolie, taken from the Legation Quarter of Peking where the tourists spoil him, would complain and try to extort more if you offered him a dollar for a ten-cent ride, therefore the thing was not to be avoided. I did not see my way to getting clear, and a crowd began to gather. Then there came along a Chinese, a well-dressed young man.

His long petticoats of silk were slit at the sides, he had on a silken jacket and a little round cap. He wore no queue, because few of the men of his generation, and of his rank wear a queue, and he spoke English as good as my own.

“What is the matter?” I told him. “How much did you pay him?”

“Forty cents.”

“It is too much,” said he, and he called a policeman, and that coolie was driven off with contumely. But it marked a wonderful stride in Chinese feeling that a Chinese should come to the assistance of a foreigner in distress. Not very long ago he would have passed on the other side, scorning the woman of the outer barbarians, glad in his heart that she should be “done” even by one so low in the social scale as a rickshaw coolie, a serf of the great city these ancient walls enclose.