CHAPTER V.

THE COUP D'ÉTAT.

Kang Yü-wei.--_China Mail's_ Interview.--Beheading of Reformers.--Relatives sentenced to Death.--Kang's Indictment of Empress.--Empress's Reprisals.--Emperor's Attempt at Escape.--Cantonese Gratitude to Great Britain.--List of Emperor's Attempted Reforms.--Men now in Power.--Lord Salisbury's Policy in China 570

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE

The Way in _Frontispiece_

Shanghai from the River 1

Shanghai Creek, with Drawbridge 3

Tea-garden in Shanghai Chinese City 7

Porters waiting for Work 11

The Bubbling Well 15

Soochow Creek, Shanghai 18

Guild Garden at Kiangpei 22

Pavilion in Country Gentleman's Garden 25

Street Scene 29

Wheelbarrow 30

Bow of Travelling-boat 32

Entrance to Yangtse Gorges 33

Trackers 36

Poling a Boat up a Rapid 43

In the Niukan Gorge 48

White Emperor's Temple, looking down the Gorge of the Fearsome Pool, or Bellows Gorge 49

New and Glorious Rapid 53

Tree moved 100 Yards by Landslip that formed New Rapid 54

Iron Cover of Bottomless Well 55

At Fengtu 56

Free School 67

Poppies and Terraced Rice-fields 71

Chungking, Commercial Capital of Western China 75

Dinner Party in the Garden of a Member of the Hanlin College,--White Cloth spread in Compliment to Europeans 78

Morning Toilette 80

Outside Governor's Residence in Chungking 83

Country House near Kiukiang 86

A Chinese Country Club, or Guild Garden 94

A Hot Day 95

Market Street outside City 101

The Oldest Official in the Province of Szechuan 105

Giving Evidence in a Court of Justice 111

Chinese Mode of Salutation 123

Chinese Roman Catholics of Many Generations 135

Woman's Natural Foot, and another Woman's Feet bound to 6 Inches 138

Woman's Natural Foot, and another Woman's Feet bound to 4½ Inches 139

Chinese Roman Catholic Burial-ground 146

Family of Literati, Leaders in the Anti-footbinding Movement in the West of China 157

Bridge near Soochow 163

Memorial Arch leading to Confucius' Grave 165

A Country House Party 174

Foot Shuttlecock 175

Wedding Procession 185

New Kweichow, built by Order 193

Memorial Arch 201

Shoes to mend 206

Ichang from the City Wall, Hall of Literature, and Pyramid Hill 212

Monastery 217

The 564 Images of Hangchow 221

Pavilion of the Moon in Grounds of God of War's Temple 225

Missionary Group at our House-warming 231

Soochow, with Mission Church 243

Temple to God of War, Yünyang 246

Colossal Gilded Buddha 248

Punch and Judy 255

Stone Animals at General's Grave. A Peasant seated on one with Straw Hat 259

Entrance to Fairies' Temple, Chungking 261

Play at a Dinner Party in a Guildhall 262

Audience at a Play in a Guildhall 263

Junk 271

Captain of Chinese Gunboat 276

Soldier 278

Soldier 279

Gunboat Soldiers 284

Soldiers 287

Temple of God of Literature 294

Map of China, showing Chief Examination Centres 297

Outside Confucius' Grave 303

Approach to Confucius' Grave 307

Fortress of Refuge, Country House, and Memorial Arch 319

Near Ningpo 331

Salisburia adiantifolia 335

Entrance to Monastery 343

Buddhist Images cut in Cliffs on the River Ya 347

At Fengtu, Chinese Hades 351

Begging Priest, once a General 359

Jack (Long-haired Shantung Terrier) 365

Sacred Tiger 367

Great Precipice of Mount Omi 369

Priest and Pilgrims on Edge of Omi Precipice 373

Cloud Effects on Mount Omi 377

Guard-house near the Arsenal 384

Roof and Roof-end at Chungking 387

Bridge at Hangchow 389

Bridge and Causeway on West Lake 395

Sacred Sai King Mountain 397

Brick-tea Carriers on the Great Brick-tea Road 403

Caravanserai at Tachienlu 410

In a Chungking Guild-house 431

Packing Tea 435

Chinese Hydraulic Apparatus 439

Peking Pug (Short-haired) 447

Peking Lion-dog (Long-haired) 451

On a Mountain Road 454

A Wheelbarrow Stand 456

Interior of Governor's Official Residence at Hangchow 459

Farmer and Water Buffaloes 466

Paper-burning Temples 468

Approach to Ming Emperors' Tombs, Peking 471

Tomb over Banjin Lama's Clothes, built after Tibetan Model of Marble. Bell-like Cupola and Upper Ornaments of Gold. Inscriptions in Devanagari Character, Sanscrit, and Chinese 477

Lotus Pond and Dagoba in Emperor's Garden 483

Mountain Village, with Sham Beacon Fires to Left, Foochow Sedan-chair in Front 489

Shan Chʽing, Prince Chʽün, and Li Hung-chang 495

Late Viceroy Tso Tsung-tang 505

Emperor Kwang-shü, 1875 516

Prince Kung 523

The Great Wall 528

Incense-burner 531

Country House in Yangtse Gorges 537

Kiangsi Guild-house in Chungking 540

Downward-bound Cargo-boat 548

Bridge at Soochow 549

Mr. King, Manager of the Chinese Telegraph Company and Founder of High Schools for Girls 554

Wên Ting-shih, the Reformer, Late Tutor to the Ladies of the Imperial Household 563

Head Eunuch of the Empress-Dowager 574

Kiaochou, seized by Germany 583

British and Chinese Flags, June 15th, 1898: Town of Wei-hai-wei in Distance 586

Ferry at Ichang 597

Approach to Ming Emperor's Tomb, Nanking 605

DRY STATEMENTS.

(TO BE CARRIED WITH THE READER, IF POSSIBLE.)

The Chinese Empire is rather larger than Europe.

Being on the eastern side of a great continent, it has the same extremes of climate as are to be found in the United States.

Fruits, flowers, and crops vary in like manner.

Peking is on about the same parallel as Madrid, Chungking as Cairo, Shanghai as Madeira.

The population of China is over 385 millions.

That of the British Isles in 1891 not quite 38 "

That of France in 1896 38½ "

One alone of China's eighteen provinces, Kiangsu, has over 39½ "

The Russian nation, already extending over one-sixth of the globe, while China only extends over a little more than one-twelfth, musters little over 129 millions, and thus has about one-third of the Chinese population, with about twice its territory to stretch itself in.

There is no Poor Law in China. There are no Sundays.

It is considered very unwomanly not to wear trousers, and very indelicate for a man not to have skirts to his coat; consequently our European dress is reckoned by Chinese as indecorous.

Chinese begin dinner with dessert or Russian _sakouska_, and finish with hot soup instead of hot coffee.

Their cooks are second only to the French; their serving-men surpass the Germans.

Chinese love children; are ready to work day and night for their masters; and if occasion demand, to be beaten in their place, or even, if needs be, to die for them.

In fine, although in all details unlike ourselves, a great race, with some magnificent qualities.

7, PARK PLACE, ST. JAMES'S, S.W.

PRELUDE.

_FIRST IMPRESSIONS._

Arriving in Shanghai.--My First Tea-season.--Inside a Chinese City.--Shanghai Gardens.--In the Romantic East at last!

I. ARRIVING IN SHANGHAI.

It was in the merry month of May, 1887, that I first landed in China; but from the first there was nothing merry about China. It felt bitterly cold, after passing through the tropics; and in Shanghai one shivered in a warm wrap, as the wind blew direct from the North Pole straight at one's chest, till one day it suddenly turned quite hot, and all clothes felt too heavy. Every one almost knows what Shanghai is like. It has been admirably described over and over again, with its rows of fine European houses fronting the river, the beautiful public gardens and well-trodden grass-plats interposed between the two; with its electric lights and its carriages, and great European stores, at which you can buy everything you could possibly want only a very little dearer than in London. There used to be nothing romantic or Eastern about it. Now, darkened by the smoke of over thirty factories, it is flooded by an ever-increasing Chinese population, who jostle with Europeans in the thoroughfare, till it seems as if the struggle between the two races would be settled in the streets of Shanghai, and the European get driven to the wall. For the Chinaman always goes a steady pace, and in his many garments, one upon the top of the other, presents a solid, impenetrable front to the hurrying European; whilst the wheelbarrows on which his womankind are conveyed rush in and out amongst the carriages, colliding here and there with a coolie-drawn ricksha, and always threatening the toes of the foot-passenger. Too often there are no foot-pavements, and the whole motley crowd at its very varying paces is forced on to the muddy street. Ever and anon even now a closed sedan-chair, with some wealthy Chinaman from the adjacent Chinese city, threads its way in and out among the vehicles, noiseless and stealthy, a reminder of China's past glories. There are also now wholly Chinese streets in the foreign settlement, where all the shop-fronts are gorgeous with gilding and fine decorative Chinese characters, where all the shops have signs which hang perpendicularly across the street-way, instead of horizontally over the shop-front as with us, and where Chinese shopkeepers sit inside, bare to the waist, in summer presenting a most unpleasing picture of too much flesh, and in winter masses of fur and satin.

Shanghai has got a capital racecourse, and theatre, and cricket-ground--grounds for every kind of sport, indeed. It has a first rate club, and an ill-kept museum. Its sights are the bubbling well and the tea-garden in the China town, believed by globe-trotters, but erroneously, to be the original of the willow-pattern plate. Beside this, there is what is called the Stone Garden, full of picturesque bits. A great deal that is interesting is to be seen in the China town by those who can detach their minds from the dirt; in one part all the houses have drawbridges leading to them. But even the Soochow Road in the foreign settlement has never yet been treated pictorially as it deserves. It is the Palais Royal of Chinese Shanghai. At the hour when carriage traffic may only pass one way because of the crowd, it would reward an Alma-Tadema to depict the Chinese dandies filling all its many balconies, pale and silken clad, craning their necks to see, and by the haughtiness of their gaze recalling the decadent Romans of the last days of the empire. Their silken garments, their arched mouths, the coldness of their icy stare, has not yet been duly depicted. _Chun Ti Kung_, by the late Mr. Claude Rees, is so far the only attempt to describe their life. Yet they, too, have souls possibly worth the awakening. With their long nails, their musk-scented garments, their ivory opium-pipes, and delicate arrangements of colours, they cannot be without sensibilities. Do they feel that the Gaul is at the gates, and that the China of their childhood is passing away?

It is this China of their childhood, with here an anecdote and there a descriptive touch, which I hope to make the English reader see dimly as in a glass in the following pages, which are not stored with facts and columns of statistics. People who want more detailed information about China, I would refer to Sir John Davis's always pleasant pages; or to my husband's _Through the Yangtse Gorges_, containing the result of years of observation; or to dear old Marco Polo's account of his travels in the thirteenth century, revivified by the painstaking labours of Colonel Yule, and thereby made into one of the best books on China extant. For my part, I shall endeavour to make the reader see China and the Chinese as I have seen them in their homes and at their dinner parties, and living long, oh! such long summer days among them, and yet wearier dark days of winter. And to make the reader the more feel himself amongst the scenes and sights I describe, I mean to adopt various styles, sometimes giving him the very words in which I at the time dashed off my impressions, all palpitating with the strangeness and incongruity of Chinese life, at others giving him the result of subsequent serious reflections.

But here let me record my first great disappointment, because it may be that of many another. Brown mud is the first thing one sees of China. Brown mud accompanies the traveller for miles along the Yangtse River, all along the Peiho, up to brown and muddy Tientsin, and on up to Peking itself. China generally is not at all like the willow-pattern plate. I do not know if I really had expected it to be blue and white; but it was a disappointment to find it so very brown and muddy.

II. MY FIRST TEA-SEASON.

It was dull and leaden all the six hundred miles up the great river Yangtse; and at first it poured nearly all day and every day at Hankow, and we shivered over fires. Nevertheless, in spite of absolutely leaden skies and never a glimpse of sunshine, the coolies and the twenty-years-in-China-and-don't-speak-a-word-of-the-language men wore sun-hats, and pretended to get ill from the glare, when any one fresh from England would certainly say it was the damp. The floods were all the while advancing on what looked like a beleaguered city, when we went out on the plain outside, and gazed back at the city wall, with its dark water-line clearly marked all round close to the top.

The country round certainly did not tempt one to go out very often on to the rotten flag-stoned way by which one walked three or four miles in order to reach a one-mile distance as the crow flies, feeble-looking corn and marsh at either side, with an occasional tandem of buffaloes groaning not in unison with the discordant creaking of the cart they drew. Yet we plodded past the little homesteads, each planted on its own artificial hill, faced with stones on the side the floods come from. The very friendly people all used to come out of their cottages, and call out, "Do rest with us awhile," "Come in, do, and have some tea"; but till I spoke a little more Chinese, I did not care to repeat this often: though I rather enjoyed the first time going in and having tea, delicious tea, brought us at once--next a pipe, and then a bowl of water. Nothing could be friendlier than the people; and somehow or other I used to fancy from the first I held quite conversations with them. But what we either of us said to each other in words it is impossible to tell; there is so much one understands without knowing the words. So on and on we used to plod, resisting all kindly pressure to turn in, till gradually the reflection of the setting sun gave a red glow to the water in the ruts, and frogs hopped in numbers across the path, and bats whirled after mosquitoes. Then at last by an effort we summoned up will enough to turn, and plod just exactly the same way over the selfsame stones back to Hankow, the beleaguered city, with its avenues of over-arching willows, and beautiful Bund half a mile long--a mile walk up and down, therefore, as every one takes care to tell you the first day you arrive, as if afraid lest, stricken by a sort of midsummer madness, you should actually leave the English settlement, with its willows and its villas, and attempt to penetrate into the Chinese town.

The stories I heard about the Chinese town gave me quite a feeling of excitement the first time I went into it. People threatened me with horrible sights, and still more horrible smells. But I fancy those, who talk in this way, can know very little of the East End of London, and nothing of the South of France or Italian towns. Hankow certainly struck me as very fairly clean, considering how crowded its streets are, and the people at that time for the most part as wonderfully