Court Life in China: The Capital, Its Officials and People

"In the early morning, before any one was astir we were let out of a back gate. It was the first time I had ever walked on the street. I had always been accustomed to going in m...

After her meal she lingers for a few minutes over her cup of tea and her pipe. In the meantime her cart or sedan chair is prepared. Her outriders are ready with their horses; th...

She took the elder of these, a not very sturdy boy of three years and more, from his comfortable bed to make him emperor, and one can imagine they hear him whining with a half-s...

When Prince Ching and his progressive associates in Peking discovered that they could not vote down the Boxer princes, they dared not openly oppose them, but they secretly decid...

Whether this confinement interfered with the health of the Emperor or not it is impossible to say, but from the first he was made to pose as an invalid. As his failing health wa...

"She fasted more than usual during the early summer, but she bathed daily and changed her clothes, dressing herself in her most beautiful garments. She had not been sleeping wel...

If Shakespeare could say with an English monarch in his mind, "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown," we might repeat it with added emphasis of Tze Hsi. For forty years she h...

One day during the early spring a young Chinese reformer came to me to get a list of the best newspapers and periodicals published in both England and America. I inquired the re...

"No," she answered, "we do not think that best. It is not very convenient, and so we have them dress it in the small coil on top of the head as you see. Neither do we allow them...

She had, however, what was better than education--a disposition to learn. And so when she had the good fortune,--or shall we say misfortune,--for as we have seen it is variously...

Until within the past ten years a study of Chinese court life would have been an impossibility. The Emperor, the Empress Dowager, and the court ladies were shut up within the Fo...

The presiding officer had been longest in Peking, and as doyen of these diplomatic ladies, she acted as chairman of the meeting. The first question to be decided was the mode of...

While this was going on, fire was applied to various parts of the paper pile, and in a moment a great flame sprang up into the air--a flame that could be seen from miles around,...

All this conversation I soon discovered was only a diplomatic preliminary to what he had really come to tell me, which was that he had been eating fish in the palace a few days...

Who knows whether the Dowager Empress will ever repose in the magnificent tomb she has built for herself at such a cost, or whether a new dynasty may not rifle its riches to emb...

We talked, of course, in Chinese only, of the improvements and advantages that railroads bring to a country, for Governor Hu, among other things, was the superintendent of the I...

All the great officials thus far mentioned have belonged to the progressive rather than the conservative party, all of them the favourites of the Empress Dowager, placed in posi...

The Imperial College in Shansi was opened with 300 students all of whom had already taken the Chinese degree of Bachelor of Arts. It had both Chinese and foreign departments, an...