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.
CHAPTER IV—THE LEGATION QUARTER OF PEKING
A forgotten tragedy—The troops—“Lest We Forget”—The fortified wall—“No low-class Chinese”—The last thing in the way of insults—A respecter of power—Racing stables—Pekin s'amuse—Chinese gentleman on a waltz—Musical comedy—The French of the Far East—Chances of an outbreak—No wounded.
At Canton a few years since,” wrote Sir George Staunton, recording the visit of the first British Ambassador to the Emperor of China in 1798, “an accident happened which had well-nigh put a stop to our foreign trade. Evils of every kind fraught with this tendency are to be apprehended, and ought to be particularly guarded against, especially by a commercial nation. On some day by rejoicing in firing the guns of one of those vessels which navigates between the British settlements in India and Canton, but not in the employment of the East India Company, two Chinese, in a boat lying near the vessel, were accidentally killed by the gunner. The crime of murder is never pardoned in China. The Viceroy of the Province, fired with indignation at the supposed atrocity, demanded the perpetrator of the deed, or the person of him who ordered it. The event was stated in remonstrance to be purely accidental but the Viceroy, supposing it to have been done from a wicked disposition, still persisted in his demand, and to assure himself of that object, he seized one of the principal supercargoes. The other factories being alarmed, united themselves with the English as in a common cause, and seemed disposed to resist the intentions of the Viceroy who on his part arranged his troops on the banks of the river to force a compliance. It was at last deemed expedient on principles of policy, to give up the gunner with scarce a glimmering of hope that his life would be spared.”
Later on in a casual footnote he records that their worst fears had been realised, and the unfortunate gunner, given up, let us hope, not so much from motives of policy as to save the supercargo, had been done to death.
That incident, to my mind, explains the Legation Quarter of Peking to-day. Of course the Legation, in its present form, dates only from the Boxer rising, but the germ of it was there when the merchants of the assembled nations felt themselves compelled to sacrifice the careless gunner “from motives of policy.” One hundred and twenty years ago the Western nations were only a stage removed from the barbaric civilisation the Chinese had reached two or three thousand years before, but still they were moving onward, and they felt they must combine if they would trade with this rich land, and yet protect their subjects and their goods. And so they did combine, and there arose that curious state of affairs between the foreigners and the people of the land that has held for many years, that holds in no other land, and that has crystallised in the Legation Quarter of Peking.
Suppose in London all the great nations of the earth took a strip of the town, extending say from Marble Arch to Hyde Park Corner, and from Park Lane to Bond Street, held it and fortified it heavily, barring out the inhabitants, not wholly, but by certain regulations that prevented them having the upper hand. The thing is unthinkable, yet that is exactly what has happened in Peking. Against the Tartar wall, from the Chien Men to the Ha Ta Men, the nations have taken a parallelogram of ground all but a mile square, they have heavily fortified it, on three sides they have cleared a broad glacis on which no houses may be built, and they have there a body of troops with which they could overawe if not hold all the town.
No man knows exactly how many men the Japanese have, but supposing they are on a par with the other nations, there are at least two thousand five hundred men armed to the teeth and kept at the highest pitch of perfection in the Legation Quarter. Living there is like living in an armed camp. You cannot go in or out without passing forts or guns, in the streets you meet ammunition wagons, baggage wagons, Red Cross wagons, and at every turn are soldiers, soldiers of all the European nations that have any standing at all, soldiers from America, soldiers from Japan; they are doing sentry-go at the various Legations, they are drilling, they are marching, they are shooting all day long. In one corner of the British Legation they keep untouched a piece of the old shot-torn wall of 1900 and painted on it, in big black letters, is the legend, “Lest We Forget,” a reminder always, if the nations needed a reminder, of the days of 1900, of the terrible days that may be repeated any time this peace-loving nation drifts into an anti-foreign outbreak. I was going to write it is almost insulting; but it is insulting, and this armed Legation Quarter must be in truth cruelly galling to the better-class, educated Chinese. They must long to oust these arrogant men from the West and their neighbour from the East, who thus lord it over them in the very heart of their own city. Even the wall, the great Tartar wall built first by Kublai Khan, and finished by the Ming conquerors, comes under foreign domination from the Ha Ta Men to the Chien Men. The watch-tower over the Ha Ta Men is still in the hands of the Chinese, and like most things Chinese is all out of repair. The red lacquer is cracked, the gold is faded, the grass grows on the tiled roofs, in the winter dried-up and faded, in the summer lush and green, and for all the Chinese soldiers hold it, it is desolate and a thing of the past But a hundred yards or so to the west, is the German post. Always are armed men there with the eagle on their helmets, always an armed sentry marches up and down, keeping watch and ward. No great need for them to hold the Ha Ta Men, their guns dominate it, and below in the town the French hold carefully the fortified eastern side of the Legation Quarter. The centre of that strip of wall, held by the Japanese, is marked by an iron fence called, I am told, a “traverse.” There is a gate in it, and across the path to that gate, so that it may not be so easily got through, is built up a little wall of brick the height of a man. In the summertime the grass grows on it green and fresh, and all the iron bars of that fence and gate are wreathed in morning glory. The Japanese are not so much in evidence as the efficient Germans or the smart Americans, but I am told they are more than keen, and would gladly and effectually hold the whole wall would the other nations allow them. At the Chien Men, the western end of the mile-long strip of wall are the