A Woman In China - Mary Gaunt

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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.

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      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.

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