BOOKS.

LETTERS FROM PEKIN.*

WE are glad to welcome Mr. Freeman-Mitford's well-known hand once more. His Tales of Old Japan are classical to students of the Far East; and although it is long since he won his experience in the Legations of Pekin and Yokohama, such experience is practically modern, so far as China is con- cerned, and what he saw in 1865-66 is exactly what any one might have seen in the spring of 1900. We do not understand why these lively letters have been reserved all these years, but that is their writer's and their receiver's affair. They appear, at all events, at an apposite juncture of events, and those who know the author's skilful pen will be prepared for a vivid and amusing picture of Chinese manners. The letters are quite unpretentious, and make no attempt to rival the standard authorities. All they do is to present in a singularly clear and natural manner the first impressions of a young diplomatist attached to the Pekin Legation. A peculiar interest belongs to the date of their writing. Mr. Freeman- Mitford arrived in China but five years after the memorable * The Attache at Peking. By A. B. BraemaniEltArd, O.B. London Macmillan and Co. [GA]

campaign of 1860. Chinese treachery had been brought to book, the Anglo-French Army had entered Pekin, and for the first time European representatives had been established in the capital of China directly accredited to the Emperor him- self. The Europeans of the Treaty Ports—largely extended under the Treaty of Tientsin—were almost unanimous in their optimistic views of the future. China was to be opened up ; the presence of the Legations at Pekin was to civilise the Court and Administration; it was to be a new era in the hoary age of the Middle Kingdom. Even that shrewd judge of Chinese character, Sir Harry Parkes, was awhile deceived by appearances. Mr. Freeman-Mitford writes from Shanghai:

"I have had a good deal of conversation with Sir Harry Parkes, our Consul here. You will recollect him as famous for the pluck he showed when he and Loch were taken prisoners in Peking. He is one of the great authorities in China and one of our ablest officers in the East. He tells me that he considers the state of feeling between the Chinese and Europeans in this part as on the whole satisfactory; that the natives have begun to ac- cept us and our trade as a necessity ; to use his own expression, it is a sort of husband and wife arrangement, with slight incom- patibilities of temper on both sides. Sir Harry Parkes is a man of extraordinary determination and energy; his knowledge of the Chinese language, customs, and character have [sic] given him an immense influence over the natives. He is in every way a re. markable man, and great things are expected of him, even by those who differ from him in opinion. It is only fair to say that there are many men of judgment and experience out here who do not agree with him in thinking that our trade with China stands on a solid footing. They consider that the unwilling spirit with which the natives first received us has by no means died out, and that little by little, always by fair means and without violence— for they know our strength—the Chinese will endeavour to oust us from our position and return to their traditional conservatism."

This was considered a very desponding view in 1865, yet the prediction of "fair means without violence" reads oddly when we recall the events of the past few months. Mr. Freeman-Mitford found the people much less civil at Pekin than at Shanghai. The opprobrious term Kwei-tza, "foreign devil," was commonly cast at members of the Legation, and Sir Rutherford Alcock and his suite were even insulted with stones. A delightful instance "out of the mouths of babes and sucklings" occurred to the Spanish Minister. He was taking formal leave of the Tsung-li Yamen before quitting Pekin, and among the Foreign Board noae was more compli- mentary or empress6 than Heng-Chi, a Mandarin who prided himself upon his friendly relations with Europeans, and indeed was the very official who had contrived the release of Parkes and Loch in 1860 just a quarter of an hour before the Imperial order for their execution arrived. In return for his civilities, M. de Man went to call and thank him, and-

" After the two old gentlemen had exchanged banalities to their hearts' content, the Spaniard, knowing that tang-Chi had a little son, the child of his old age, of whom he was inordinately proud, thought it would be a very pretty compliment if he asked to see the little boy, who was accordingly produced, sucking his thumb after the manner of his years. Him his father ordered to pay his respects to M. de Mas—that is to say, shake his united fists at him in token of salutation—instead of which the child, after long silence and ranch urging, taking his thumb deliberately

out of his mouth, roared out ' at the top of his voice, and fled. Imagine the consternation of the two old twaddles !"

Life in the Legation was much the same in 1865 as in 1900, minus the Boxers, and even then the scanty Europeans knew for certain that, "if a rising should take place, we were in a

death-trap from which there could be no escape. Those grim and frowning gates once shut, rescue was impossible ; for what could a mere handful of men—in those days there were but some seventy or eighty Europeans, all told, in Peking—avail against the seething mob of enraged devils ? " The Legation itself was in much worse order than when Sir Claude Mac- donald entered it. "The gardens are a wilderness, the paving of the courts is broken, the walls are tumbling down, and the beautiful place is going to ruin. Fancy a residence in the heart of a great and populous city where foxes, scorpions, polecats, weasels, abound! We have more than an hour's ride before we can escape from the city and its stinks to breathe a breath of fresh air." Riding out often, as he did, in the country, however, there was no sign of hostility among the villagers, only the usual pestering curiosity which is the bane of Chinese travel. "The people are beginning to get rid of their prejudices against us," writes Mr. Freeman- Mitford, "and to see that we mean them no injury ; at any rate they are quite friendly, and seem to look upon us as harmless eccentric creatures, but very ugly. As for personal

safety, no one ever dreams of carrying arms, either by day or by night, and nobody is ever insulted or attacked." The chief annoyance in the country was the inquisitive criticism of the inhabitants. The idle vagabonds who loaf about every village and make remarks about foreigners generally have a fugleman or choragus, who leads the criticism, in this way :— "Pugisman. Those boots ! They are made of scented cow's leather.

Chorus. Those boots! They are made of scented cow's leather.

F. Those boots ! He that wears them need not fear water. Ch. Those boots ! He that wears them, &c.

F. (to one of us). Those boots! How much did they cost Englishman. They cost 14 tads.

F. Those boots ! They cost 14 taels, and he speaks the mandarin language.

Ch. They cost 14 taels, and he speaks the mandarin langurge.

And so it goes on ad infinitum. If we are in a good humour we give the fugleman a cigar, which he puffs at vigorously, and swears 'it is both strong and fragrant ' ; but it makes him cough violently, and he passes it on to the next in the crowd, until the whole of them retire, coughing and declaring that it is 'both strong and fragrant,' into a corner, from which every now and then we hear those boots' all over again."

The afflicting urbanity, the complicated and tedious polite. ness of the Chinese, evidently worried Mr. Freeman-Mitford, and one must sympathise with him in his dislike of the in- corrigible intrusiveness of the Celestial :—

"As I was lathering my face before dinner "—this is a typical instance—" trying to got rid of the deposit of two or three sand- storms, the curse of travellers in North China, a carter walked coolly into my bedroom smoking his pipe, and went into fits of laughter at the sight. I, irritated by the intrusion, flung the contents of my soapy sponge into his face—which must have very much astonished it, for it was much in the same state as the fists of the Irish boatman two years after he had shaken hands with the Lord Lieutenant; and my enemy fled howling. Presently another gentleman appeared, who addressed me as Venerable teacher —a high compliment—and informed me that his name was Ma, and that he was a merchant of caps, travelling from west to east; after which he retired, but shortly put his head in again to ask my honourable name and nation, and I heard him afterwards in the yard explaining to a knot of carters, muleteers, and loungers that I was the English teacher Mi, that I understood good manners, that my body was all over pockets, and that my years were not few ; which statements the auditors received with many grunts and eructations and re- peated several times, afterwards one by one sauntering up to Judge for themselves."

This, of course, was at an inn, and the intrusions of the day were excelled by the noises of the night. One old carter in particular, wrapped in sheepskin, sat on the shaft of his cart "beating a sort of death-watch with a stick on a piece of hollow bamboo, like a ghoulish old woodpecker. I went out and tried to chaff him out of his performance, but he took my irony for high praise, which so delighted him that he every now and then burst into snatches of song in a high, squeaky falsetto, never stopping his eternal devil's tattoo. Mules, asses, horses, and quarrelling Chinamen made up a fitting chorus." Mrs. Bishop found this want of privacy one of the most irritating conditions of travel in Korea and China, and it certainly taxes the smoothest of tempers.

There are worse things, however, just now in the Flowery Land than intrusive curiosity, and one is eager to hear the views of so thoughtful and well equipped an authority as Mr. Freeman-Mitford on the present situation. In a preface, written since the relief of the Legations, he expresses the decided opinion that the hostility of the Chinese towards Europeans is not due to missionary enterprise, and he fortifies this opinion by a singularly interesting sketch of the relations of the early Jesuit missionaries, such as Ricci, Schall, and Verbiest, with the Court of China. Father Ricci's treatise on "The True Doctrine of God," written in admirable Chinese, and revised, oddly enough, "by a Minister of State called Sin," was included in an Imperial list of the best Chinese books. The daughter of one of his converts, baptised Candida, built thirty-nine churches, and the Emperor gave her the title of "the Virtuous Woman." This, it is true, was early in the seventeenth century. Fifty years later Father Schall was actually tutor to the young Emperor, Kang Hsi, afterwards one of the greatest of Chinese rulers, under whom Father Verbiest became Court astronomer and constructed those beautiful bronze instruments which are still among the wonders of the Observatory at the southern corner of the Tartar City. Mr. Freeman-Mitford argues from these and similar facts that religious intolerance is not a characteristic of the Chinese. Nor is a dislike to foreign trade at the root of this antagonism. The Chinaman is a born trader, and does not care with whom he haggles. As to the opium legend, of course our author, knowing China, knows the absurdity of the charge. Opium has nothing to say to the anti-foreign feeling "My conclusion," he says, "is that neither the religion of the missionaries, nor the trade of the merchants, nor even the much-abused drug, can honestly be counted as the cause of the anti-foreign movement in China, though one and all have been used as levers to envenom it [sic]. Foreign intercourse in any shape is the bugbear of the mandarin, as being the one standing danger threatening abolition of himself and his privileges, of which the two most dearly prized are robbery and cruelty." Every step taken towards introducing European methods into China means necessarily a decrease in the Mandarins' power and profits. So long as these officials can control the Court, an anti-foreign policy is their natural means of self-defence : hence their curious "envenoming levers." The root of the difficulty lies at Pekin. Every one thought that when once we had Legations there, close to the Emperor, all would be changed. As a matter of fact, nothing has been changed, and the Legations are, and have always been, treated with contempt as mere " tribute-bearers " to the Son of Heaven. So long as the Mandarins can keep the Court and Central Government ignorant and pr3judiced in distant Pekin there is no chance of improvement. Mr. Freeman- Mitforcl's remedy is bold but practical. Remove the capital to the old seat at Nankin, he says, and bring the Emperor, or at least his immediate circle of advisers, into intimate touch with the civilisation of the ports, and the anti-foreign policy will fall, along with the power of the Empress-Dowager and of the conservative Mandarins. Nan- kin was the capital of the Ming dynasty, why not of the Ching ? It is near Shanghai, the centre of European com- merce in China, and it would be open to influences which can never be adequately felt in remote Pekin. The removal would probably necessitate the levelling of the "Imperial Forbidden City " ; it would certainly imply the deposition of the Empress-Dowager and her agents, and the substitution of more liberal and open-minded Chinamen, of whom there are probably a few ; and it must be emphasised by the execution of the authors and ringleaders of the recent attacks on Europeans.

This might prove the best remedy for the present ills of China ; but whether even then the Chinese would consent to modify their ancient civilisation into some degree of harmony with European ideas may be doubted. Europe instructing China is rather like teaching one's grandmother to suck eggs. Japan, as Mr. Freeman-Mitford justly points out, is not a parallel case : the Japanese had no civilisation of their own, it was all adopted from China, and all they had to do was to jump from the thirteenth into the nineteenth century, and throw off a Chinese dress in favour of the European mode. They did it boldly, almost without a regret, but it is another matter when a system is so old, so innate, and so revered as that of China is to its people. At all events, it may be hoped, with Mr. Freeman-Mitford, that the barren conquest of 1860, which begat the horrors of 1900, may not be repeated in an equally hollow evasion of the present crisis. The experiment of 1860 failed. The solution of 1900 must be more permanent.