King of the Medes, or Ahasuerus, King of Babylon. Here there are spacious courtyards and ancient temples and palaces, and audience halls with yellowish-brown tiled roofs, extensive lakes, where multitudes of wild duck, flying north for the summer, or south for the winter, find a resting-place, watch-towers and walls, and tunnelled gateways through those walls. When through the ages the greatest artists of a nation have been giving their minds to the beautifying of a city, the things of beauty in that city are so numerous that it seems impossible for one mind to grasp them, to realise the wonder and the charm, especially when that charm is exotic and evasive.
The Imperial City, all round the Forbidden City, consists of a network of narrow streets and alleys lined with low buildings with windows of delicate lattice-work, and curved tiled roofs. Here, hidden away in silent peaceful courtyards shaded by gnarled old trees, are temples guarded by shaven priests in faded red robes. Their hangings are torn and faded, the dust lies on their altars, and the scent of the incense is stale in their courts, for the gods are dead; and yet because the dead are never forgotten in China—China that clings to her past—they linger on. Here are shops, low one-storied shops, with fronts richly carved and gilded, streets deep in mud or dust, narrow alley-ways and high walls with mysterious little doors in them leading into secluded houses, and all the clatter and clamour of a Chinese city, laden donkeys, mules and horses, rickshaws from Japan, glass broughams weirdly reflecting the glory of modern London, and blue, tilted Peking carts with studded wheels, such as have been part and parcel of the Imperial City for thousands of years, all the life of the city much as it is outside the pinkish red walls, only here and there are carved pillars and broad causeways that, if the stones could speak, might tell a tale of human woe and Human weariness, of joy and magnificence, that would surpass any told of any city in the world.
And outside the Imperial City, hemming it in, in a great square fourteen miles round, is the Tartar City with splendid walls. Outside that again, forming a sort of suburb, lies to the south the Chinese City with thirteen miles of wall enclosing not only its teeming population, but the great open spaces and parks of the Temple of Heaven and the Temple of Agriculture. But though the Tartar City and the Chinese City are distinct divisions of Peking, walled off from each other, all difference between the people has long ago disappeared. The Tartars conquered the Chinese, and the Chinese, patient, industrious, persistent, drew the Tartars to themselves. But still the walls that divided them endure.
The Tartar City is crossed by broad highways cutting each other at right angles, three run north and south, and three run east and west, they are broad and are usually divided into three parts, the centre part being a good, hard, well-tended roadway, while on either side the soil is loose, and since the streets are thronged, the side ways are churned up in the summer into a slough that requires some daring to cross, and in the winter—the dry, cold rainless winter, the soil is ground into a powdery dust that the faintest breeze raises into the air, and many of the breezes of Northern China are by no means faint. The authorities try to grapple with the evil—at regular intervals are stationed a couple of men with a pail of muddy water, which with a basket-work scoop they distribute lavishly in order to try and keep down the rising dust. But the dust of Peking is a problem beyond a mere pail and scoop. This spattering of water has about as much effect upon it as a thimbleful of water flung on a raging fiery furnace.
Still, in spite of the mud and the dust, the streets are not without charm. They are lined with trees; indeed I think no city of its size was ever better planted. When once one has realised how treeless is the greater part of China, this is rather surprising. For look which way you will from the wall in the summer and autumn, you feel you might be looking down upon a wood instead of a city; the roofs of the single-storied houses are hidden by the greenery, and only here and there peeps out the tiled roof of a temple or hall of audience with the eaves curving upwards, things of beauty against the background of green branches. Curiously enough it is only from the walls that Peking has this aspect. Once in the network of alley-ways it seems as if a wilderness of houses and shops were crowding one on top of the other, as if humanity were crushing out every sign of green life. This is because there is to all things Chinese two sides. There is the life of the streets, mud-begrimed, dusty, seething with humanity, odoriferous, ragged, dirty, patient, hardworking; and there is a hidden life shut away in those networks of narrow alley-ways.
There is many a gateway between two gilded shop fronts, some black Chinese characters on a red background set out the owner's name and titles, and, passing through, you are straightway admitted into courtyard after courtyard, some planted with trees, some with flowering plants in pots—because of the cruel winter all Chinese gardens in the north here are in pots, sometimes with fruit-trees thick with blossom or heavy with fruit, and in the paved courtyards, secluded, retired as a convent, you find the various apartments of a well-arranged Chinese house; there are shady verandas, and dainty lattice-work windows looking out upon miniature landscapes with little hills and streams and graceful bridges crossing the streams. But only a favoured few may see these oases. For the majority Peking must be the wide-open boulevards and narrow hu t'ungs, fronted by low and highly ornamental houses, and shops so close together that there is no more room for a garden or growing green life than there is in Piccadilly. True there are trees in these boulevards, in Morrison Street, in Ha Ta Men Street, in the street of Eternal Repose that cuts them at right angles, but they would be but small things in the mass of buildings were it not for the courtyards of the private houses and temples that are hidden behind.
There are, too, in the streets p'ia lous or memorial arches, generally of three archways with tiled roofs of blue or green or yellow rising in tiers one above the other, put up in memory of some deed the Chinese delight to honour. And what the Chinese think worthy of honour, and what the Westerner delights to honour are generally as far apart, I find, as the Poles. In Ha Ta Men Street, however, there is a p'ia lou all of white marble, put up by the last Manchu Emperor in memory of gallant Baron von Kettler, done to death in the Boxer rising, but there, I am afraid, Chinese appreciation was quickened by European force.
We are apt to think that European influence in China is quite a thing of yesterday, that Baron von Kettler was the first man of note who perished in the inevitable conflict, and yet, when I looked at the eastern wall of the city, I was reminded, with a start, that European influence dates long before the Boxer time, long before the days of the Honourable East India Company, and many must have been the martyrs. There on the eastern wall stands the observatory, and clear-cut against the bright blue sky are astronomical instruments with dragons and strange beasts upon them. They were placed there by the Jesuits in the middle of the seventeenth century, and I know that those priests could not have attained so much influence without a bitter baptism of blood. They stand out as landmarks, those orbs and astrolabes, up and down the wall, even as they have come down through the centuries; monuments, as enduring as any Chinese p'ia lou, of faith and suffering; but the Jesuits were not the first to place astronomical instruments there. The Chinese were not barbarians by any means, though by some curious freak we Westerners have passed them in the race for civilisation, and, as long ago as the days of Kublai Khan, they had an observatory here by the wall. On the ground below, in a tree-shaded courtyard, there is an astrolabe with a beautiful bronze dragon for a stand, the dust-laden air of Peking has polished and preserved it, so that I can see but little difference between it and the newer instruments on the platform above—newer and yet two hundred and fifty years old.
And beyond the observatory in the north-east corner of the city is the Lama Temple, a temple with picturesque, yellowish-brown tiled roofs and spacious courtyards, in which are quaint old gnarled trees, and building after building in that curious state that is part beautiful, part slovenly decay, ruled over by hundreds of shaven, yellow-robed monks among whom, they say, it is not safe for a woman to go by herself. There is the Temple of Confucius, with surely the most peaceful courtyard in the world, and there are other temples, temples with courtyards and weird, twisted coniferous trees in them that are hundreds of years old, pagodas, and bells, and towers, and to each and all is attached many a story.