A Peking cart as a cure for influenza—Difficulties of a narrow road—The dead have right of way—The unlucky women—Foot binding—“Beat you, beat you”—Lost luggage—“You must send your husband”—Letter-writing under difficulties—A masterless woman—Malanyu—Most perfect place of tombs in the world.

But I wasn't. As a rule I find I worry myself unnecessarily in life. Either a thing can be altered, or it can't. If it can't there's an end to the matter, worrying doesn't mend it. I had come here of my own free will—it wasn't nice, but there was nothing to do but make the best of it. In the morning if I wasn't very happy I was no worse, and to go back that weary journey to Peking would only be to make myself ridiculous. Therefore I arose with the sun, and a nice, bright cheerful sun he was, looked at my breakfast, drank the tea and was ready to start. All the hamlet watched me climb into my cart. I felt I couldn't have walked a step to save my life, and we rumbled over that steep step, and were out in the roadway again.

It is not the best way to view a country from a Peking cart, for the tossing from side to side is apt to engender a distaste for life and to encourage a feeling that nothing would really matter if only the cart would come to a standstill for a moment. Add to that the aching head of influenza and that morning I began to pity not only myself but my publisher, for I began to fear he was going to lose money on me. It was Byron, I think, who considered that Providence or somebody else who shall be nameless always took care of publishers, and that is the reason perhaps why I have come to the opinion that a trip in a Peking cart is really the best cure for influenza. Had I gone to bed and had someone kind and nice to wait upon me and bring me the milk and soda and offer the sympathy my soul desired, I should probably have taken a fortnight to get well; as it was, out in the open air from dawn to dark, three days saw the end of my woes, and even at the worst I was able to sit up and take a certain amount of interest in passing events.

Gradually, gradually, as we went on we seemed to forget the great city that absorbed all things, and the surroundings became more truly countrified. The road, when it was not stones, was deep sand with deep, deep ruts worn by the passing of many carts, and it stretched over just as great a portion of the country as the people would allow. Flat it was, flat, and all along the way were little villages and hamlets. There was no temptation to walk, for it was very rough indeed, just the worn road and the edge of the tilled fields, tilled as surely never before in the world were fields tilled, and they stretched away to the far distant blue hills. Occasionally the road sank deep between them, and as it was very narrow the traffic question was sometimes troublesome. On this day we met a country cart, a longer cart than the Peking cart, covered in with matting and drawn by a mule and a couple of donkeys. Manifestly there was not room for the carts to pass and I wondered what would happen for, for either of us, laden as we were, to go backwards would have been difficult. I was requested to get out, which I did reluctantly, my carts were drawn so close against the bank that the right wheels were raised against it, and then they tried to get the other cart past. No good, it would not go. About a dozen men all in dirty, very dirty blue, with pointed hats of grass matting, looking as if they had stepped off old-fashioned tea caddies, came and took an intelligent interest, even as they might have done in Staffordshire, but that didn't make the carts any smaller, and then they decided to drive the country cart up the bank into the field above. They tried and tried, they lashed that unfortunate mule and the donkeys, but with all their pulling it was too heavy, up the bank it would not go. Chinese patience was exemplified. But it was the mule and the donkeys that really displayed the patience. I climbed the bank, sat on a stone and watched them, and did not like to give my valuable advice, because these men must have been driving carts along these roads all their lives, and presumably must know something about it, while never in my life had I handled a team consisting of two donkeys and a mule. At last when they got an extra hard lashing and fell back, conquered once more, poor brutes, by the weight, I rose up and interfered. I did not request—I ordered. They were to take the two foremost mules from my carts and hitch them on to the other cart. My foremost mule protested, he evidently said he had never been associated with donkeys before; but in two minutes they had got that cart to the higher level, and we were free to go on our way. Why they did not do it without my ordering I am sure I do not know, for as a rule I had no authority over the carts, they went their own way—I was merely a passenger.

Once more that day the narrow way was blocked, this time by a funeral. The huge coffin was borne by ten straining men, and there was no parleying with it, the dead have right of way in China, and out of the way we had to get. We backed with difficulty till the bank on one side was a little lower, and then up we went till we were on the cultivated land, drove on till we were ahead of the corpse, and then down again into the roadway once more.

In China, as far as I have been, you never get away from the people, this country was far more thickly populated than the country round London, for I have walked in Surrey lanes and found no one of whom to ask a question, while here there were always people in sight. True, here were no leafy lanes such as we find in Surrey and Kent, but the whole country lay flat and outstretched till it seemed as if nothing were hidden right up to the base of the far away hills. The days were getting hot and the men were working in the fields stripped to the waist, while most of the little boys were stark naked, pretty little lissom things they were, too, if they had only been washed; and the little girls, for all clothing, wore a square blue pocket-handkerchief put on corner-wise in front, slung round the neck and tied round the waist with a bit of string; but farther on, in the mountain villages, I have seen the little girls like the little boys, stark naked. Only the women are clothed to the neck, whatever the state of the thermometer. Always there were houses by the wayside, and many villages and hamlets, and the women sat on the doorsteps sewing, generally it seemed to me at the sole of a shoe, or two of them laboured at the little stone corn mills, that were in every village, grinding the corn, the millet, or the maize, for household use. Sometimes a donkey, and a donkey can be bought for a very small sum, turned the stone, but usually it seemed that it was the women of the household who, on their tiny feet, painfully hobbled round, turning the heavy stone and smoothing out the flour with their hands, so that it might be smoothly and evenly ground.

Poor women! They have a saying in China to the effect that a woman eats bitterness, and she surely does, if the little I have seen of her life is any criterion. As I went through the villages, in the morning and evening, I could hear the crying of children. Chinese children are proverbially naughty, no one ever checks them, and I could not know why these children were crying, some probably from the pure contrariness of human nature, but a missionary woman, and a man who scorned missionaries and all their works both told me that, morning and evening, the little girls cried because the bandages on their feet were being drawn more tightly. Always it is a gnawing pain, and the only relief the little girl can get is by pressing the calf of her leg tightly against the edge of the k'ang. The pressure stops the flow of blood and numbs the feet as long as it is kept up, but it cannot be kept up long, and with the rush of blood comes the increase of pain—a pain that the tightening of the bandages deepens.

“Beat you, beat you,” cries the mother taking a stick to the little suffering thing, “you cry when I bind your feet.” For a Chinese woman must show no emotion, above all she must never complain. This, of course, is a characteristic of the nation. The men will bear much without complaining.

I never grew accustomed to it. The pity and the horror of it never failed to strike me, and if the missionaries do but one good work, they do it in prevailing on the women to unbind their feet, in preventing unlucky little girls from going through years of agony.

There is no mistaking the gait of a woman with bound feet. She walks as if her legs were made of wood, unbending from the hip downwards to the heels. The feet are tiny, shaped like small hoofs about four inches long, encased in embroidered slippers, and to walk at all she must hold out her arms to balance herself. When I was laughed at for my “pathetic note,” and was told I exaggerated the sufferings of the women, I took the trouble to inquire of four doctors, three men and one woman, people who came daily in contact with these women, and they were all of one opinion, the sufferings of the women were very great. The binding in girlhood was not only terribly painful but even after the process was finished the feet were often diseased, often sore and ulcerated, and at the very best the least exertion, as is only natural, makes them ache.

“Try,” said one doctor, “walking with your toes crushed under your sole, the arch of your foot pressed up till the whole foot is barely four inches long, and you can only walk on your heel, and see if you do not suffer—suffer in all parts of your body. They say,” he went on, “that while there are many peaceful, kindly old men among the Chinese, every woman is a shrew. And I can well believe it. What else could you expect? Oh women have a mighty thin time in China. I don't believe there is any place in the world where they have a worse.”

If anyone doubts that this custom presses heavily on the women, let him ask any doctor who has practised much among the Chinese how many legs he has taken off because the neglected sores of ulcerated, bound feet have become gangrenous and a danger to life.

“It really doesn't matter,” said another doctor I knew well, “a Chinese woman is just as well with a pair of wooden legs as with the stumps the binding has left her!”

As a rule I did not see the beginnings, for though the women go about a little, the small girls are kept at home. But once on this journey, at a poor little inn in the mountains, among the crowd gathered to see the foreign woman were two little girls about eight or nine, evidently the innkeeper's daughters. They were well-dressed among a ragged crew. Their smocks were of bright blue cotton, their neat little red cotton trousers were drawn in at their ankles, and their feet, in tiny embroidered shoes, were about big enough for a child of three. There was paint on their cheeks to hide their piteous whiteness, and their faces were drawn with that haunting look which long-continued pain gives. As they stood they rested their hands on their companions' shoulders, and, when they moved, it was with extreme difficulty. No one took any notice of them. They were simply little girls suffering the usual agonies that custom has ordained a woman shall suffer before she is considered a meet plaything and slave for a man. A woman who would be of any standing at all must so suffer. Poor little uncomplaining mites, they laughed and talked, but their faces, white and strained under the paint, haunted me the livelong night, and I felt that I who stood by and suffered this thing was guilty of a wicked wrong to my fellows.

And foot binding may result in death. There was a child whose father, a widower, not knowing what to do with his little girl, an asset of small value, sold her to a woman of ill repute. The little slave was five years old, but as yet, her feet had not been bound. Her mistress of course took her in hand and bound her feet, so that she might be married some day. But her feet being bound did not exempt small Wong Lan from her household duties. Every morning, baby as she was, she had to get up, kindle the fire, and take hot water to her mistress, who, in her turn, did not give the attention they required to the poor little feet. With feet sore, ulcerated and dirty, she went about such household duties as a little child could do, till they grew so bad she could only lie about and moan, and was a nuisance to the woman who had taken her. At last a man living in the same courtyard had pity on her. He was a mason and had worked at the great hospital the foreigners had set up just outside the walls of the city where they lived, and he took her in his arms, a baby not yet seven, and brought her to the doctor. She had cried and cried, he said, and he thought she would die if she were left. The doctor when he took her thought she was going to die whether she were left or not. There and then he took a pair of scissors, snapped two threads and one foot was off, still in its filthy little slipper. The whole leg was gangrenous and they nursed the baby up for a week till she was strong enough to have the leg amputated at the hip. She grew better, though the doctor shook his head over her. The missionaries decided they had better keep her, and as she recovered, they set about getting her crutches. A Chinese woman evidently begins to be self-conscious very soon, for the mite cried bitterly when they wanted to measure her. The Chinese have a great horror of any deformity, and she thought she would be an object of scorn if she went about on crutches, and everyone could see she had only one leg. Her idea was that she should sit all day long on the k'ang, and then it would be hidden. However, her guardians prevailed, and presently she was hopping about the missionary compound, and being a pretty, taking little girl soon found friends who forgot, or what was more important, taught Her to forget, that she was crippled. Someone gave her a doll, and with this treasure tucked under her arm, she paid visits from one house to the other, happy as the day was long, petted by Chinese and foreigners alike. But the doctor who had shaken his head over her at first was right. The poison was in her system, and in a little over six months from the day she was brought in to the hospital she died. Poor little mite! For six months she had been perfectly happy. The man who had brought her in made her a coffin, the aliens who had succoured and cared for her laid her there with the doll she had been so proud of in her arms, and told all the Chinese who had known her they might come and say a last farewell. They came, and then—oh curious human nature!—someone stole the poor little makeshift doll from the dead baby's arms!

Of course cruelty to children is a sin that is met with in countries nearer home, is, in fact, more common in Christian England than in heathen China. This was a death that was attributable to the low value that is set on the girl child and to the cruel custom of binding the feet.

And not hundreds and thousands but millions of women so suffer. The practice, they say, is dying out among the more enlightened in the towns, but in the country, within fifteen miles of Peking, it is in full swing. Not only are these “golden lilies” considered beautiful, but the woman with bound feet is popularly supposed to care more for the caresses of her lord, than she with natural feet. Of course, a man may not choose his wife, his mother does that for him, he may not even see her, but he can, and very naturally often does, ask questions about her. The question he generally asks is not: “Has she a pretty face?” but: “Has she small feet?” But if he did not think about it, the women of his family would consider it for him.

A woman told me, how, in the north of Chihli, the custom was for the women of the bridegroom's family to gather round the newly arrived bride who sat there, silent and submissive, while they made comments upon her appearance.

“Hoo! she's ugly!” Or worst taunt of all, “Hoo! What big feet she's got!”

Many will tell you it is not the men who insist upon bound feet, but the women. And, if that is so, to me it only deepens the tragedy. Imagine how apart the women must be from the men, when they think, without a shadow of truth, that to be pleasing to a man, a woman must be crippled. The women are hardly to be blamed. If they are so ignorant as to believe that no woman with large feet can hope to become a wife and mother, what else can they do but bind the little girls' feet? Would any woman dare deprive her daughter of all chance of wifehood and motherhood by leaving her feet unbound? Oh the lot of a woman in China is a cruel one, civilised into a man's toy and slave. I had a thousand times rather be a negress, one of those business-like trading women of Tarquah, or one of the capable, independent housewives of Keta. But to be a Chinese woman! God forbid!

It seems very difficult to make a Chinaman understand that a woman has any rights, even a foreign woman, apart from a man. I remember being particularly struck with this once at Pao Ting Fu, the capital of Chihli, a walled town about three hours by rail from Peking. I lost a third of my luggage by the way, because the powers that be, having charged me a dollar and a half for its carriage, divided it into three parts, and by the time I had discovered in what corner the last lot was stowed, the train was moving on, and I could only be comfortably sure it was being taken away from me at the rate of twenty miles an hour. However, the stationmaster assured Dr Lewis, the missionary doctor with whom I was living, that it should be brought back by the next day.

Accordingly, next day, accompanied by a coolie who spoke no English, I wended my way to the railway station and inquired for that luggage. The coolie had been instructed what to say, and I thought they would simply bring me into contact with my lost property. I would pay any money that was due, and the thing would be finished. But I had not reckoned on my standing, or want of standing, as a woman.

He shook his head. As a matter of fact English, pidgin-English, is the language of China, when another tongue is wanted, and my new friend's English was not at all bad—what there was of it. Though why I should go to their country and expect these people to understand me I'm sure I do not know.

“Your luggage is here,” said he very slowly, emphasising every word by a tap.

“Thank Heaven,” I sighed, “take me to it,” but he paid no heed.

“You”—and he tapped on solemnly—“must—send—your—husband.”

This was a puzzler. “My husband,” I said meekly, “is dead.”

It looked like a deadlock. It was apparently impossible to deliver up her luggage to a woman whose husband was dead. Everybody on the platform, including the idlers, made some suggestion to relieve the strain, and feeling that it might help matters, I said he had been dead a very long time, I was a lonely orphan and I had no brothers. They probably discussed the likelihood of my having any other responsible male belongings and dismissed it, and the man, who knew English, returned to the charge.

“Where—do—you—stay?” and he tapped his way through the sentence.

“At Dr Lewis's.” I felt like doing it singsong fashion myself.

“You—must—tell—Lu Tai Fu—to—come.”

“But,” I remonstrated, “Dr Lewis is busy, and he does not know the luggage.”

There was another long confabulation, then a brilliant idea flashed like a meteor across the crowd. "You—must—go—back—and—write—a— letter,” and with a decisive tap my linguist friend stood back, and the whole crowd looked at me as much as to say that settled it most satisfactorily.

I argued the matter. I wanted to see the luggage.

“The—luggage—is—here”—tapped my friend, reproachfully, as if regretting I should be so foolish—“you—must—go—back—write—one— piecey—letter.”

“I'll write it here,” said I, and after about a quarter of an hour taken up in tapping, I was conducted round to the back of the station, an elderly inkpot and a very, very elderly pen with a point like a very rusty pin were produced, but there was no paper. Everyone looked about, under the benches, up at the ceiling, and at last one really resourceful person produced a luggage label of a violent yellow hue, and on the back of that, with some difficulty, for as well as the bad pen, there was a suspicion of gum on the paper, I wrote a letter to “Dear Sir” requesting that responsible individual to hand over my luggage to my servant, I signed my name with as big a flourish as the size of the label would allow, and then I stood back and awaited developments.

Everybody in the room looked at that valuable document. They tried it sideways, they tried it upside down, but no light came. At last the linguist remarked with his usual tap:

“No—can—read.”

Well, I could read English, so with great empressement and as if I were conferring a great favour, I read that erudite document aloud to the admiring crowd, even to my own name, and such was the magic of the written word, that in about two minutes the lost luggage appeared, and was handed over to my waiting coolie! Only when I was gone doubt fell once more upon the company. Could a woman, a masterless woman, be trusted? they questioned. And the stationmaster sent word to Lu Tai Fu that he must have his card to show that it was all right!

If a woman counted for so little in a town where the foreigner was well known, could I expect much in out-of-the-way parts. I didn't expect much, luckily. The people came and looked at me, and they were invariably courteous and polite, with an old-world courtesy that must have come down to them through the ages, but they did not envy, I felt it very strongly—at bottom they were contemptuous. As I have seen the lower classes in an Australian mining town, as I myself have looked upon a stranger in an outlandish dress in the streets of London, so these country people looked upon me. It was just as well to make the most of a show, because their lives were uneventful, that was all.

It began to get on my nerves before I had done, this contemptuous curiosity. I don't know that I was exactly afraid, but I grew to understand why missionaries perish when the people have all apparently been well-disposed. These people would not have robbed me themselves, but had I met any of the robbers I had been threatened with in Peking, I am sure not one of them would have raised even a finger to help me, they would not even have protested. I was outside their lives.

And at last, at Malanyu, the hills that at first had loomed purple on the horizon, fairly overshadowed us, and I had arrived at the first stage of my journey, the Tungling, or Eastern Tombs. We did forty miles that day over the roughest road I had gone yet, and thankful was I when we rumbled through the gates of the dirty, crowded, little town.

We put up at the smallest and filthiest inn I had yet met. Chinese towns, even the smallest country hamlet, are always suggestive of slums, and Malanyu was worse than usual, but I slept the sleep of the utterly weary, and next morning at sunrise I had breakfast and went to see the tombs. I went in state, in my own cart with an extra mule on in front, I seated under the tilt a little back, and my servant and the head “cartee man” on the shafts; and then I discovered that if a loaded cart is an abomination before the Lord, a light cart is something unspeakable. But we had seen the wall that went round the tombs the night Before, just the other side of the town, so I consoled myself with the reflection that my sufferings would not be for long.

When the Imperial Manchus sought a last resting-place for themselves they had the whole of China to choose from, and they took with Oriental disregard for humbler people; but—saving grace—they chose wisely though they chose cruelly. They have taken for their own a place just where the mountains begin, a place that must be miles in extent. It is of rich alluvial soil swept down by the rains from the hills, and all China, with her teeming population, cannot afford to waste one inch of soil. The tiniest bit of arable land, as I had been seeing for the last three days, is put to some use, it is tilled and planted and carefully tended, though it bear only a single fruit-tree, only a handful of grain, but here we entered a park, waste land covering many miles, wasted with a royal disregard for the people's needs. It lay in a great bay of the hills, sterile, stony, rugged hills with no trace of green upon them, hills that stand up a perfect background to a most perfect place of tombs. I had thought the resting-place of the Mings wonderful, but surely there is no such place for the honoured dead as that the Manchus have set up at the Eastern Tombs.

Immediately we entered the gateway, the cart jolting wickedly along a hardly defined track, I found myself in a forest of firs and pines that grew denser as we advanced. Here and there was a poplar or other deciduous tree, green with the greenness of May time, but the touch of lighter colour only emphasised the sombreness of the pines and firs that, with their dark foliage, deepened the solemnity of the scene. Through their branches peeped the deep blue sky, and every now and again they opened out a little, and beyond I could see the bare hills, brown, and orange, and purple, but always beautiful, with the shadows chasing each other over them, and losing themselves in their folds. Spacious, grand, silent, truly an ideal place for the burial of Emperors and their consorts is hidden here in the heart of mysterious, matter-of-fact China, and once again I was shown, as I was being shown every day, another side of China from the toiling thousands I saw in the great city and on the country roads.

Dotted about in this great park, with long vistas in between are the tombs. They are enclosed in walls, walls of the pinkish red that encloses all imperial grounds, generally there is a caretaker, and they look for all the world like comfortable houses, picturesque and artistic, nestling secluded and away from the rush and roar of cities, homes where a man may take his well-earned rest. The filthy inn at which I stayed, the reeking little town of Malanyu, though it is at the very gates, is as far-removed from all contact with the tombs as are the slums of Notting Dale from the mansions in Park Lane, or the sordid, mean streets of Paddington from the home of the King in Buckingham Palace. The birds, the innumerable, much-loved birds of China sang in the trees their welcome to the glorious May morning, and the only thing out of keeping was my groaning, jolting, complaining Peking cart and the shouts of the “cartee man” assuring the mules, so I have been told, that the morals of their female relatives were certainly not above suspicion.

Here and there, among the trees, rose up marble pillars tall and stately, carved with dragons and winged at the top, such as one sees in representations of Babylon and Nineveh, there was a marble bridge, magnificent, with the grass growing up between the great paving-stones that here, as everywhere in China, seem to mark the small value that has been put on human flesh and blood, for by human hands have they been placed here, and the uprights are crowned by the symbolic cloud form, caught in the marble. This bridge crosses no stream. It is evidently just a manifestation of power, the power that crushes, and beyond it is an avenue of marble animals. There they stand on the green sward, the green sward stolen from the hungry, curving away towards the p'ia lou stand, as they have stood for many a long year, horses, elephants, fabulous beasts that might have come out of the Book of Revelations, guarding the entrance to the place of rest. They are not nearly so magnificent as the avenue at the Ming Tombs, they are only quaintly Chinese, it is the winged pillars, the silence, the sombre pine and fir-trees, and the everlasting hills behind that give them dignity.

And now Tuan became very important. I began to feel that he had arranged the whole for my benefit, and was keeping the best piece back to crown it all. We came to a piece of wild country and I was requested to get out of the cart. Getting out of the cart where there was no place to step was always a business. I was stiff from the jolting, felt disinclined to be very acrobatic, and Tuan always felt it his bounden duty to stretch out his arms to catch me, or break my fall. He was so small, though he was round and fat, that he always complicated matters by making me feel that if I did fall I should certainly materially damage him, but it was no good protesting, it was the correct thing for him to help his Missie out of her cart, and he was prepared to perish in the attempt. However, here was a soft cushion of fragrant pine needles, so I scrambled down without any of the qualms from which I usually suffered. We had come to a halt for a moment by the steep side of a little wooded hill where a narrow footpath wound round it. Just such a modest little path between steep rising ground one might see in the Surrey Hills. It invites to a secluded glen, but no cart could possibly go along it, it is necessary to walk. I turned the corner of the hill and lo! there was a paved way, a newly paved way, such as I have seldom seen in China. The faint morning breeze stirred among the pine needles, making a low, mysterious whispering, and out against the back ground stood, a splash of brilliant, glowing colour, the many roofs of golden-brown tiles that cover the mausoleum of the great woman who once ruled over China, the last who made a stand, a futile stand, against foreign aggression, and now a foreigner and a woman, unarmed and alone, might come safely and stand beside her tomb.