Chapter IV: Our Home in Peking

For nine months we lived in the Chinese capital, and found it a delightful home. Our house was out on the eastern edge of the Tartar City, so close under the great Tartar Wall that the sun was late in reaching us every morning. It was a Chinese house. That is, it had no cellar and no upstairs, not even a garret. Really it was four houses, one on each side of a brick-paved court about thirty feet square, each house having two rooms. Whenever we went from the bedrooms to the dining room, or from the living room to the nursery, we had to go outdoors. But as the sun is almost always bright in Peking, even on the coldest winter day, we did not mind doing that. The courtyard of a Chinese house insures plenty of light and air and makes up for the lack of certain conveniences that Westerners are used to.

Outside the Tartar Wall at Peking, showing the watch towers at its
corners. We lived on the eastern edge of the Tartar City, just
inside this wall, and we found that its height made a difference in
the time the sun rose for us. The top of the wall is a promenade
where foreigners and wealthy Chinese often go for an airing.
]

We had five servants, all of whom cost less than one servant does in most parts of the United States. Four of them were men and one was a woman, and none of them knew a word of English. So of course we had to learn Chinese. By his third birthday my son spoke Chinese better than he did English. One servant, called “boy,” though he was forty years old, was a kind of butler and chambermaid. He made the beds, waited on table, answered the doorbell, and bossed the other servants. The cook was also a man, and he was an excellent cook, for he had once worked in the kitchens of the Manchu court. The coolie was a tall, strong young man who swept the floors and the court, kept the coal stoves burning, washed the dishes, and did all the laundry. The rickshaw-man had nothing to do but draw us about town in his shining rickshaw on its pneumatic-tired wire wheels. This was kept just inside the street door which opened into the court. Sometimes he ran five miles with me, as fast as a cross-country runner, although I weigh about 170 pounds and might have with me my son or some baggage. The woman servant was called the _ama_. She took care of the children, besides doing all the sewing and other work of that kind.

Peking servants do not get Thursday and Sunday afternoons off. They work all day long, seven days a week, unless you tell them to go out and enjoy themselves. Yet they are very cheerful and respectful and kind-hearted. Some Americans and other foreigners living in Peking have a dozen servants, and a whole collection of houses, one back of the other, inside a great wall. China, you know, is the land of walls, though it has no fences. There is a wall around the country, at least on the north and northwest; almost every city is surrounded by a wall, and most Chinese live inside a walled “compound.” Ours shut us off completely from the sight of our neighbors, though not from the sound of their voices or the noises of the streets. All day long and even late at night peddlers selling food and all sorts of things wandered through our street, each one making some peculiar sound to show what he was selling. The man who sharpened knives and scissors blew a horn or clashed a dozen pieces of iron fastened together with a cord. The barber twanged what looked like a huge pair of tweezers. The china-riveter, who mends broken dishes, carried bells. Blind beggars, tapping along the street with a long cane, struck a little hammer on a big brass disk like a musician’s cymbal.

Our Chinese neighbors seemed to eat frequently between meals. When a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, felt hungry he stood in the doorway of his house or compound with a few big copper pennies in his hand until the cabbage man or the rice man or some other food seller came along. A few of these peddlers had little carts on wheels, but nearly all of them carried their wares at the ends of a springy pole balanced on one shoulder. Even the barber carried his shop with him on a pole, and when our “boy” or our coolie wanted his hair cut, or rather, his head shaved—for that is the Chinese style now—he squatted out in the street while the barber did the job.

Peking Streets and Alleys

The _hutung_, as the narrow side streets of Peking are called, are not paved but are covered with black earth pounded hard by many feet. During the rainy season, which usually comes in the summer, they are likely to be deep in mud. But the most unpleasant feature about Peking is its dust storms. Sometimes immense clouds of dust sweep through the city until everything—even one’s eyes—is filled with it. One hot night, when we had left all our windows open, such a storm blew up, and in the morning our faces and our bedclothes were covered with yellowish brown dust. Some people think this dust comes from the Gobi Desert, outside the Great Wall, but actually it consists of particles of dry dirt from the streets and from the cultivated fields all about Peking.

This was one of the comparatively few peddlers in our Peking
neighborhood who owned a cart. Plenty of men with things to sell
went through the narrow street outside our house, but most of them
carried their wares on a shoulder pole.
]

Besides its many _hutung_ Peking now has some wide streets on which run electric street cars. Until recently, however, there was not a street car in China, except in the foreign concessions in some of the big ports. The great majority of the Pekingese ride in rickshaws. The police said that they had registered more than forty thousand of these grown-up baby-carriages. Not only men but (in spite of a law forbidding it) young boys draw them. It was a sad sight to see two small boys, who should have been in school, running along the streets with a big fat man in their carriage, one boy pulling and the other pushing. Sometimes rickshaw boys are sent home, but the law is not always enforced. It is interesting to remember that the rickshaw was brought over to China from Japan. It is said to have been invented by an American missionary for the comfort of his invalid wife.

It is said that rickshaw-pullers do not live long, because the running gives them heart disease. Once during our nine months in Peking I saw a rickshaw-man who had dropped dead between the shafts, letting the carriage fall over backward with his passenger. But our own rickshaw-man was more than forty years old, and he had been running ever since he was a boy. Life is very hard for most of the poor rickshaw-runners of China, especially those who do not have regular jobs with a foreigner or a wealthy Chinese. They have to wander the streets or sit in their carriages in all kinds of weather, and in the winter some of them freeze and even starve to death.

Besides its more than forty thousand rickshaws Peking has queer horse carriages, that look like piano boxes on four wheels; there are quite a number of bicycles, and of course many automobiles. Some people come in from the country on horseback, others ride in mule litters, which look like little prairie schooners without wheels, slung on two poles that are fastened at each end to a mule. Formerly many people rode in sedan chairs, carried by men. But now such vehicles are seldom used except to carry a bride to her wedding or mourners in a funeral procession. Then they are covered with red cloth and are very gay looking affairs. Foreigners usually ride in rickshaws, for it is easier to talk to your “horse” and tell him where to go than to try to guide an automobile through the narrow and often crowded _hutung_.

One of the styles of mule-litter in northern China. In such a
conveyance rich men and officials come to Peking from the northeast
or from any region where there are no railroads.
]

Strange Sights in Peking

Peking is so filled with interesting things and places that we did not see all even in nine months. First there are the shops, selling everything you can imagine. Some are filled with canned and other goods from our own land and from Europe. But most of them have only Chinese wares. Here, for instance, is a toyshop, with all manner of playthings to amuse the children. The Chinese, who are very fond of children, make the most amusing toys you have ever seen, though often so flimsy that they break easily. In some streets there are long lines of silk shops. The Chinese produce great quantities of silk, and shops selling the same article are more likely to be grouped than to be scattered about town. This is so not only in China but almost everywhere in Asia. The clerks in these shops often wear long silk gowns, like most of the wealthy men. Perhaps the queerest shops in Peking are the drug stores. Some now have the same wares as American drug stores, but the old-fashioned ones display ground tiger bones, which the Chinese think will give a man a brave heart, rat meat that is supposed to make the hair grow, and snake-skins that are used for some malady or other.

Then there are the coffin shops. The Chinese who can afford it always have themselves buried in great wooden coffins that look like big hollow trees, with tops so heavy that a man cannot lift one of them. Rows of these are kept in plain sight in the open shops along the streets, for the Chinese think a coffin is a very pleasant piece of furniture. Sometimes a Chinese son gives his father a beautiful coffin as a New Year’s present, and the father keeps it in his parlor and brings in his neighbors to see it. The Chinese have used so much wood in their coffins that most of the country has no trees left, except about temples and imperial tombs.

A Chinese gentleman taking his pet birds out for a walk.
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The Chinese are very fond of birds, and there are many bird stores in Peking and all the other large cities. We often saw an old man walking down our _hutung_ with two or three birds sitting on a stick, each with a string tied about one leg. Now and then they flew out as far as the string would let them, and then came back and perched on the stick again. Even bankers and rich merchants take their birds out for an airing in China. Sometimes we would see a man carrying a cage in either hand, and if he could find a park he would go and hang the cages in a tree and let the birds sing, while he sat underneath smoking his long pipe. Another curious Chinese custom is to fasten a whistle to a pigeon in such a way that when the bird flies the air rushes through the whistle and blows it. Some of these whistling pigeons are always flying about over Peking and other large Chinese cities, making a weird music and surrounded by flocks of other pigeons just as the sheep or cow with a bell is followed by the others of the flock or herd.

The buildings inside the formerly “Forbidden City” of Peking contain
great art treasures, and people are now allowed to see these—but
they are not supposed to take pictures. Down near the big bronze
turtle is a policeman who is on his way to tell me that my camera
must not be used.
]

In Peking there are wonderful old palaces and temples such as the temples of Confucius and the lamas from Mongolia. In the center of the Tartar City are dozens of palaces with golden-yellow roofs, all surrounded by an imperial-yellow wall. Once the emperors lived there, and it was called the Forbidden City. But now travelers can visit it by paying a small fee, and find inside museums of old Chinese things, wonderful vases and paintings and lacquered screens. Around this old home of the emperors is the Imperial City, once filled with Manchu courtiers and surrounded by a great wall roofed with blue tiles. Then outside that is the Tartar City, in which we lived, though formerly only the soldiers of the Manchu rulers with their families could live there. South of this is what foreigners call the Chinese City, bigger than all the Tartar City and also surrounded by a great wall.

Walking on the City Wall

As the streets are not always pleasant, most foreigners and the richer Chinese take their promenades on top of the Tartar Wall. Just outside our house was a gate that opened on a ramp or inclined walk leading to the top of this wall, and every afternoon our little boy would go up there to play. It is even larger than the Great Wall of China, being as high as a three-story house and so wide that four automobiles might run abreast on it. It is made of great dull-blue bricks, filled in between with earth and stones, and paved over with other bricks. A parapet on either side, so high that only a grown person can see over it, keeps one from falling off the wall. At each corner of the city, and over the two gates in each side of the wall, are great roofed structures that look like apartment houses, though only birds and bats live in them.

It is thirteen miles around the top of the Tartar Wall. One day I started out after breakfast and walked the entire distance, returning just in time for one o’clock dinner. As most of the wall is made of earth, grass and shrubs grow on its top and sometimes on its sides. In some places I had to make my way through what looked like a jungle. But the Chinese find use for everything, and in the autumn men come and cut the high grass for hay and the brush for firewood, and sometimes soldiers who guard the gates make little gardens on top of the wall. In one place, behind the home of the American Minister to China, our Marines patrol the wall day and night and do not let anyone who might make trouble pass. That is because in 1900 the Chinese rose against the foreigners in their Legation Quarter at the foot of the southern wall and tried to kill them all.

A queer thing about the Tartar Wall of Peking is that only foreigners and the better class of Chinese are allowed on it. Even those of our servants who had been born in Peking and had always lived there had never been on top of the wall, until they worked for us. The Chinese say that if the poor people were allowed on the wall they would crowd it and make it very filthy; the foreigners say it is too easy a place to attack them from, if the people get angry again as they were in 1900. So our little boy was a kind of passport for our servants. If the _ama_ had him with her, the Chinese soldiers at the ramp-gate let her go up and stay without question. But if she tried to go up alone they would not open for her. So our “boy” and our coolie and even our cook used to ask permission to take our small son up on the wall, in order that they might enjoy the wonderful view of Peking, green with tree-tops, and of the Western Hills far off on the horizon where the sun sets.

The Temple of Heaven at Peking is out in the Chinese City. Here the
Emperor formerly came once a year to worship. Now the place is a
tourist picnic ground. In the foreground are the chairs of an
open-air restaurant.
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