Читать книгу A Woman In China - Mary Gaunt - Страница 24

Standing on the walls of Peking, a city of the plain, you look down upon twelve square miles of grey-tiled roofs, the roofs of one-storied houses hidden in the summertime by a forest of trees, but in the heart of the city are high buildings that stand out not only by reason of their height but because the roofs of golden-brown tiles, imperial yellow, gleam and glow in the sunlight. This is the Forbidden City where has dwelt for hundreds of years the Emperor of China, often he must have been the only man in it, and always it was closed to all save the immediate following of the Son of Heaven.

I never realised till I came to Peking that this forbidden ground was just as much an object of curiosity to the Chinese as it would have been to any European nation.

“I went in once,” said a Chinese gentleman to me, “when I was a young man.” He was only forty then.

“Were you invited?”

“No, no. I went secretly. I wanted to see what it was like.”

“But how?”

“I got the dress of a eunuch and I slipped in early one morning, and then, when I got in, I hardly dared move or breathe for fear someone should find me out. Then when no one took any notice of me I walked about and saw everything I could, but the last hour was the worst, I was terrified at the thought that I might not be able to get out.”

“And if you had been caught?”

He looked grave even then at the remembrance of that bygone desperate adventure.

“Oh death, certainly.”

“Death?”

“Yes, a long and lingering death,” and the thought of what he had escaped twenty years ago, was on his face.

I looked at him with interest, a tall stout Chinaman with his hair cut short in the modern fashion, a long grey robe of silk reaching to his feet, and a little short black sleeveless jacket over it. He did not look, pleasant as he was, as if he would ever have dared anything, but then I have never thought of any Chinaman as likely to risk his life without hope of gain, and to risk it for mere curiosity as a man of my own people might have done! It was throwing a new light on the Chinese. I rather admired him and then I found he was Eastern after all.

We talked of Yuan Shih K'ai, and he, being of the opposition party, expressed his opinion freely, and, considering all things, very boldly about him.

“He has eighteen wives,” said he shaking his head as if this was the unpardonable sin in a man who desired to imitate the manners and customs of the West.

I repeated this to a friend, and he burst out laughing. “Why the old sinner,” said he, “what's he throwing stones for? He's got seventeen and a half himself!” So it seems it will be some time before forbidden cities on a small scale will be out of fashion in China.

And still, in these days of the Republic, the Forbidden City of the Manchus dominates Peking.

It was thrown open for three days to all who could produce a black paper chrysanthemum with five leaves, red, yellow, blue, black, and white, fastened to a tab of white paper with a mourning edge and an inscription in Chinese characters. The foreigners had theirs from their Legations, and the Chinese from their guilds. And those Chinese—there are many of them—who are so unlucky as to belong to no guild, Chinese of the humbler sort, were shut out, and for them there was erected on the great marble bridge in front of the southern entrance, a pavilion of gorgeous orange silk enclosing an altar with offerings that stood before a picture of the dead Empress, so that all might pay their respects.

I pinned my badge to the front of my fur coat, for it was keen and cold in spite of the brilliant sunshine, and went off to the wrong entrance, the eastern gate, where only princes and notables were admitted. I thought it strange there should be no sign of a foreigner, but foreigners in Peking can be but as one in a hundred or less, so undismayed, I walked straight up to the gate, and immediately a row of palace servants clad in their white robes of mourning, clustered before the sacred place. They talked and explained vehemently, and with perfect courtesy, but they were very agitated, and though I could not understand one word they said, one thing was certain, admitted I could not be there. So I turned to the southern gate and there it seemed all Peking was streaming. It was like China that we might not go in the direct way.

There is a great paved way through the Imperial City alongside a canal that runs between marble-lined banks, but on the principal bridge that crosses it was erected the orange silk pavilion for the poorer classes, and we, the wearers of the black chrysanthemum, hundreds and thousands and ten thousands of us, had to turn off to the right and go along by the tall, pinkish red walls till we came to the great archways in the walls, five great archways filled in with doors studded with great brazen knobs. Usually they were fast shut, but they were open to-day, guarded by soldiers in full-marching order, soldiers of the New Republic in modern khaki looking out of the picture, and there streamed into the tunnellike entrance as curious a crowd as ever I set eyes upon. All must walk, old and young, great and lowly, representatives of the mighty nations of the world and tottering Chinese ladies swaying like “lilies in the wind” upon their maimed feet, only one man, a Mongol Prince, an Incarnation of a Buddha, a living Buddha, was borne in in a sedan chair. But every other mortal had to walk. The tunnels must always be gloomy, and, even on that cold day, they struck chill after the brilliant sunlight, and they are long, for the walls, just here, are about ninety feet through, so might the entrances have been in the palace of Ahasuerus the King. The courtyard we first entered had a causeway running right across it of great hewn stones, hewn and laid by slave labour, when all men bowed before the Son of Heaven, hundreds of years ago. They are worn in many places now, worn by the passing of many feet, and still more worn are the grey Chinese bricks that pave the courtyard on either side. It is a great courtyard of splendid proportions. In front of us frowned more high walls of pinkish red, topped by the buildings that can be seen all over Peking, temples or halls of audience with golden-brown tiled roofs that gleamed in the sunlight, and on either side were low buildings with fronts of lattice-work rather fallen into disrepair. They might have been used as guard-houses or, more probably, were the quarters of the six thousand or so of eunuchs that the dignity of the ruler required to attend upon him. There were a few trees, leafless then in March, but there was nothing to spoil the dignity and repose of every line. A great mind surely conceived this entrance, and great must have been the minds that kept it so severely simple. If it be the heart of a nation then do I understand. The people who streamed along the causeway, who roamed over the worn brick pavement, had, as a rule, delicate, finely formed hands though they were but humble craftsmen. If the hands of the poorest be so fine, is it any wonder that the picked men of such a people, their very heart, conceived such a mighty pile? There were more, longer and gloomier tunnels, admitting to a still greater courtyard, a courtyard that must be at least a quarter of a mile across, with the same causeway of worn stones that cry out the tale of the sufferings of the forgotten slaves, who hewed them and dragged them into place, the same grey pavement of bricks, the same tall smooth red walls, crowned over the gateway with temples, rising one story after another till the tiled roof cuts the sky. And through a third set of tunnels we came into a third courtyard, the courtyard where the obsequies were being held. The third courtyard was spacious as Trafalgar Square, and round three sides was a wide raised platform of stone reached by broad and easy ramps, and all across it ran a canal held in by marble banks, crossed by graceful bridges, and every one of the uprights, made of white marble, was crowned by a figure that I took for the representation of a flame; but those, who know, tell me it is meant to represent a cloud, and is part of the dragon symbolism. When marble is the medium by which so light a thing as a cloud is represented it must be very finely done indeed, when one outside the national thought, such as I, sees in that representation a flame. Two colossal bronze monsters with grinning countenances and curly manes, conventional lions, mounted on dragon-carved pedestals, stand before the entrance to the fourth temple or hall of audience, and here was what the crowd had come to see, the lighthearted, cheerful, merry crowd, that were making high holiday, here was the altar to the dead.

Overhead were the tiled roofs, and of all the colours of the rainbow surely none could have been chosen better than the golden brown of those tiles to harmonise with the clear blue of the glorious sky above it, no line to cut it could have been so appropriate as the gentle sweep of the curve of a Chinese roof. There was a little grass growing on the roofs, sere and withered, but a faint breeze just stirred its tops, and it toned with the prevailing golden brown in one glorious beauty. Where else in the world could one get such an effect? Only in Australia have I seen such a sky, and there it was never wedded to such a glow of colour as that it looks down upon in Peking. The men who built this palace in a bygone age, built broadly, truly, for all time.