Chapter VII: Marooned in Hué

The river at Hué runs parallel to the sea, some twenty miles inland, and there is a screen of mountains to the south, the direction from which evil spirits come in Annam—just as the north, the reservoir of bitter cold and conquering Tartar tribes, is the quarter from which they are to be guarded against at Peking. There are also two islands near-by, known respectively as the White Tiger and the Blue Dragon. Hence it is not strange that the royal geomancers of several generations ago considered this the proper place to establish a new capital.

It is a very roomy town, like all those of any size and importance in Annam, probably not so much from Annamese custom as from French influence. On the foreign side of the river, where the traveler is set down, are all those things properly pertaining to the French superlords. From the railway station a wide grass-sided boulevard along the river-bank passes in its mile or more of existence a rather imposing school, hospital, barracks, and government buildings, many comfortable French residences, the _cercle_ where the ruling race gathers of an otherwise empty evening over its coffee and wine, its dominoes and cards, and brings the traveler at length to another grocery-hotel named for the tropically energetic Morin brothers. Just beyond, only across the street from the French windows of the room assigned me, stands the palatial residence and offices of the _résident supérieur_, real ruler of Annam.

The whole machinery of the actual government of the “protected” kingdom is confined to this side of the river, the south side, direction of evil influences. Probably the river was kept between the real and the puppet rulers purposely; the French have as good reason as the emperor of Annam to keep up the fiction of his sacredness and unapproachability. Yet space is still so plentiful in this French section of Hué that almost any official—and there are virtually no other European residents—has his own garden and greensward among trees, large enough to be called, with a little stretching of the southern Gallic imagination, a private park. In any habitable direction these shade away into thatched huts that may be tailor-shops and the like as well as native residences. Up a creek tributary of the river bulks forth on its knoll the tropical-weather-worn old cathedral, under a nap of fine vegetation, a contrast to the low insignificant buildings of the missionaries of Tourane. Not the least conspicuous thing on the French side of the river is the Monument aux Morts, in Annamese style, the names of the French heroes who went home from Annam to die in the World War facing the boulevard, where the passer-by can scarcely overlook them, those of the Annamese who made the great sacrifice for the “mother-land” around on the side facing the river. Of course he who takes the trouble to go behind the monument can read those also; possibly the emperor can even make them out with a powerful field-glass from the flagpole of his citadel, if he ever climbs so high; or it may be that the placid river is more in keeping with their memory than the road with its broken stream of Oriental and Western traffic.

I found the weather in Hué quite different from that of Saïgon. When rain falls in Cochinchina it is dry in Annam, and vice versa, thanks to a high range between them. Ever since I had left Canton the weather had been bright and equatorial in temperature, but as I came northward the humidity had steadily increased in density, and now the rainy season this so plainly augured overtook me in earnest. For the first time since leaving Hong Kong I was comfortably cool, though white was still my favorite garb. It did not seem to be so with the French of Hué, however, perhaps because of some connection between that color and the sacredness of the emperor. There was an attention to dress worthy of descendants of Beau Brummel and his spouse, if he had one; but white suits for men were rather looked down upon, and of course to so much as step out of a bedroom without a coat on was almost as incredible a breach of civilization as in Brazil itself. A thick Scotch mist reigned all my first, and what I had planned to be my only, day in the capital; and that evening at the very height of the motion-picture tale on the wall of the outdoor covered sitting-space in the grocery-hotel courtyard tropical rains began to fall in earnest. Hardly did it let up again as long as I remained in Hué—except for the all-important day that justified my stay, during which the weather behaved _à merveille_. It poured without cessation, confining me to my hotel room, making even a dash across the courtyard to the other parts of the establishment a shower-bath with mud foundation, forcing me to put off my visit to the real Hué across the river, the “citadel” with its palaces, bringing forth again the cloth suit for which I had so roundly berated myself at Saïgon, and leaving me none too warm at that. Everything took quickly to mildewing, and in less than forty-eight hours pocketbooks and the extra shoes of those who owned them were covered with a delicate vegetation. Soon stories began to come in of dikes giving way, of thousands of coolies being rushed to save this or that town, built several meters below the river, so that a broken embankment would mean disaster.

Nowhere could the rainy season have overtaken me with less cause for resentment, however, for I had to tarry several days in Hué rain or shine. I did not know this when I arrived, but found it out next morning, when I went to present to the “résuper” the letter of introduction I had won from some other official along the line. The real ruler of Annam, less telegraphically known as the _résident supérieur_, received me in his palatial dwelling and bureau a few steps beyond the grocery-hotel with a perfect Gallic mixture of courtesy and that something which leaves one no chance to presume upon one’s fancied importance. Yet the writer of that letter must have been either an important personage or the “résuper’s” boon companion in school-boy days, for it certainly could not have been my own virtues that won me the precious privilege the superior resident of Annam offered.

In the course of our official platitudes he mentioned that the ceremony of the lunar New Year greeting of his loyal subjects to the emperor of Annam across the river would take place the following Tuesday morning. It was then Friday, and by Tuesday I had hoped to be leaving Hanoï for the Chinese border. But the most important personage of Annam went on to mention that, while only French officials were ordinarily admitted—which I found later not to be sternly true—he thereby invited me to remain for this crowning feature of the Annamese _Têt_. This very special favor, I gathered from his meticulous deportment, was not so much in my own honor as to that of the then still gratefully remembered country to which I belong.

Expert as I was in my academic days at ministering to the gastronomic demands of my fellow-students, I have never been a good waiter. For some inexplicable reason the loss of time brings me more bitterness than the loss of money, though of the first I have habitually far more to spare than of the second. Certainly I did not care to squander wantonly in Hué the better part of a week that I had planned to spend in hurrying back to my family in Canton, with whom communication had been rare and precarious. Yet I felt it a duty to my curiosity, if not to my country, to attend one royal levee before the time comes to settle down to a respectable life of immobility. There are few such ceremonies left in the world, and still fewer of them are open to Europeans—as the East insists on considering Americans. I murmured a polite acceptance.

But life is an incessant series of ups and downs in this vale of tears. The next words of the ruler of Annam turned my satisfaction into disappointment. When I—or it may have been the “résuper” himself—brought up the obviously important question of court costume, he remarked, “Of course you have with you your frock-coat and _chapeau de forme_?”—in other words the ceremonial head-gear of politicians and other successful exploiters of the general public. Or if not, it seemed, I could get along with _le smoking_—which as a Frenchman he of course pronounced “smocking.” Now _le smoking_ ordinarily means our more modest form of dinner garb, disrespectfully known as “soup and fish,” and not only that part of my wardrobe, but the even more absurd long-tailed livery of night life, I had left at Canton. The motive for this dreadful oversight had seemed sufficient in the days when it occurred. I did not care to have the Chinese bandits I was almost sure to meet on my way home have just cause for wreaking Bolshevik vengeance upon me by catching me in possession of such unsightly things, or give them the false impression that I was worth holding for ransom, or, more likely still, endure the painful experience of seeing one of them bedeck himself in that unseemly garb. I could of course not weep openly in so official a predicament, but it looked indeed as if for my carelessness in packing, my failure to remember the oft-learned lesson that the equatorial regions of the earth by no means forgo the perspiring amenities of social intercourse, I was to miss something which very few of my countrymen have seen. True, the “résuper” murmured something to the effect that some way would be found to _me tirer d’affaire_, but I took this to be merely a kind way of softening my unavoidable disappointment, and having received official permission to visit the palaces across the river under less interesting circumstances I took my leave.

I had barely broken my first French roll and tasted my wine at the eleven o’clock _déjeuner_ when one of the black-turbaned “boys” in snowy white laid before me the card of the “Chef de Sûreté d’Annam.” Misfortunes certainly come in clusters. The chief of the security of Annam, police-head extraordinary of the land, suggested trouble, with emphasis on such persons as spies and unwanted visitors; hence it was with something akin to trepidation that I hurried out to the grocery division of the hotel and presented myself before him. Perhaps I had somewhere neglected to have something done again to my passport, and was to be ordered out of the country, which would not greatly matter, now that I had lost the privilege of hobnobbing with the emperor, except that they might send me back the way I had come, or perhaps from Tourane as the most convenient port, and spoil my plan of going all the way from Angkor to Canton by land.

I found the bearer of the dreaded title an upstanding, soldierly, yet genial fellow, in the act of sampling a newly opened keg of olives. The _résident supérieur_, he remarked, after the customary words of greeting, had sent him to see me. So I was in for it, even as I had feared! But to my astonishment and growing relief the chief of Annam’s security showed no signs of official wrath. Conversation ran along in a perfectly neutral manner until my fellow-guests in the dining-room must have been nearing the sad French substitutes for apple-pie. Then at length, in a very tactful way—which was fortunate, since I am nothing if not sensitive—the guardian of the security of Annam introduced the apparently irrelevant and immaterial theme that he and I were of about the same build; to which, so long as he did not also charge me with rivaling him in manly beauty, I acquiesced. In short, he interrupted himself in the midst of some genial story based on the natural spiritual affinity between republican France and my own Republican land to say that he had come at the suggestion of his superior to offer me clothing for the coming ceremony. He would be glad to assemble the requisite outfit from his own wardrobe; he had already done as much, some years before, for another _journaliste_ from my country—what a barbarian and unprovided nation he must have thought us!

We began forthwith to take stock. For a moment it seemed that I would after all need only to wear his trousers, for the conference disclosed that in Annam _le smoking_ means black pantaloons topped by a white tuxedo coat giving up its duties abruptly at the waist, what is quite fittingly known in the dancing circles of the Far East as a “monkey jacket.” Nay, even a full-length white coat would do, and that I had. I was even the possessor of black trousers—if ever the baggage I had checked at Saïgon should catch up with me. But further discussion brought to light the annoying fact that those straying trousers had a faint stripe in them, and that would never do; it would be almost equivalent to _lèse-majesté_. Then that white coat—did it have one button or two? Two, as far as I recalled. “Sapristi!” The chief of the security of Annam threw up his arms in a gesture of dismay. A coat with two buttons would be worse than no coat at all in Annamese court circles, I gathered from his excited demeanor. Also I should have to have a vest,—beg pardon, purists of the editorial function, I mean a w’s’c’t—and that curse in any climate, let alone in the tropics, a stiff collar. All these things the chief expressed his delight to be able to furnish, and the day seemed to have been saved—until he glanced down at my feet. They were incased in brown shoes. Moreover, though I am not perpetually conscious of that fact, they must be large feet, compared at least with those even of athletic Frenchmen of my own build, for the chief not only disclaimed any ability to provide me with shoes of such a size from his own wardrobe, but doubted the possibility of finding a pair as large as that in all Hué. Plainly I have overlooked the opportunity of becoming a great popular comedian and riding in my own limousine. But surely Buddha would provide, in so small, or even large, a matter as that, and I planned to settle down in Hué for five days rather than wend my way homeward bitter with disappointment.

Once I had reconciled myself to losing several days, Hué was by no means the worst place on earth in which to pass the time. My hotel room was more home-like than those for which we pay several times as much in our own beloved land; food, wine, and ice were in keeping with French standards, and if the evening movies in the hotel courtyard were not worth going to the Orient to see, the types of French colonials and the natives they attracted were, not to mention the numerous crosses between those two races. Then too the rain did now and then slacken, though so weary did the senses become of hearing it pour on the graveled road outside that it never seemed to do so. One briefly clear evening I took a walk in Hué itself, the walled but very much Frenchified imperial residence across the river from the newer foreign section. The river is so wide that seven big incongruous steel arches are needed to lift the modern bridge over it, and the town beyond proved to be extensive, though from the farther bank it looked merely like a façade of shops backed by forest. A whole village of queer boats, most of which spend their lives in bringing produce to the big half-covered market-place on the northern bank, were anchored about that end of the bridge. At first there seemed to be no great population. But gradually this impression gave way, as the town, orderly with wide right-angled streets, stretched leisurely on and on out various directions, long after one expected it to succumb to jungle or fields, until I began to wonder if there could be as much city scattered among the trees here as in the forest of Angkor-Thom.

Whatever the French have left of shops and native handicrafts is outside the wall and moat of the imperial residence. Once, they say, these were labyrinths of narrow dirty streets; now they are neither labyrinthine nor unclean, and much of the picturesqueness one expects is lacking. In the wide-open shops that lined the principal extramural streets one saw Madrasis in little red fezzes, most of them with black-toothed Annamese wives, and children with the luminous eyes of the Hindu. But there seemed to be few Chinese merchants. The Annamese themselves evidently kept shop here more than is normal, perhaps because the capital with its swarms of loafing functionaries had impressed them with the ease of this sedentary occupation. Between the river and the mountains that shield the capital from evil southern influences there are many waterways, and sampans and humped bridges were frequent. But on the whole the charm of the Orient had been cleaned and modernized away.

Much of the old atmosphere remained, however, within the _citadelle_ which the native city partly surrounded. In Annam towns of any importance are encircled by ramparts and are known as citadels. Once, and in some cases still, the rather roomy residences of native officials, the citadels of Annam have little in common with the walled cities of China, teeming with jostling humanity. The crenelated walls of Hué inclose a space a mile or more square, but it is a newer, lower, much less imposing wall than the ancient ones surrounding Peking and most Chinese cities. A moat stagnant with water-lilies and other broad-leafed vegetation protects the wall, and short stone bridges older in appearance than they probably are in years give entrance to it in three or four places through Chinese-style gates. Inside is an astonishing spaciousness, trees and greensward and shaded boulevard-wide streets, a veritable park scattered with dwellings, as if nothing were so plentiful as space. With overcrowded China always in mind, I was constantly astonished at the roominess of Annamese cities. Within the citadel, Hué is a city of gardens, less a capital than a great inhabited park, more an Oriental Versailles than a Paris, not so much a center of hard official duties as a perpetual summer residence of Eastern potentates. As those on this side of the river really have very little to do with governing, the atmosphere is in keeping with the facts, and the ostensible rulers of Annam can spend their time growing flowers and parading their singing-birds.

Never, surely, was another walled city so bucolic as this residence of the sacred emperor of Annam. Quiet and calm reigned everywhere along its wide roadway under trees that joined together overhead into an almost concealing forest. Lotus ponds, as covered as the moat with flowers and big green leaves, lay here and there through the half-forest; many of the houses—most of them, I was to learn later, the homes of mandarins—were set in roomy gardens surrounded by low walls with imposing gateways. With its broad river and its canals, bordered with water-palms, its flower-decked bungalows, its wide silent roadways, the chimeric roofs of its palaces, the splendid circle of its forest, its quiet and cleanliness, Hué was indeed a great contrast to China. One day when for a little while the weather was clear—no, not that, for the humidity was thick as cream, but at least the sun was doing its best to shine through it—I evaded the royal guards and mounted the iron ladder of the Eiffel Tower of a flagpole, which stands at the front of the citadel. From it the royal palaces stretched away among the trees one after another in a straight line, impressive by their colors, perhaps by their architecture, but never by their height, as if their builders scorned to take advantage of that cheapest means of exciting admiration. From this elevation little else than the palaces and the tree-tops are visible, but down beneath the foliage the stroller will find many humble huts made of poles and thatch, not only within the citadel but only a short walk from the palaces of the sacred Annamese emperor. Yet about some of these simple, but probably on the whole as comfortable, homes of the ordinary mass of his loyal subjects, there were some fine clipped hedges, as if these faded-thatch hovels were merely a means of disguising wealth still naturally modest from centuries of envious mandarins. Rich and poor have the same little squared garden, the same dwarf trees growing in pots of baked earth, the same water-jars sweating in the sun.

He who is privileged to visit the home of a mandarin enters the principal room directly from the garden, without steps, and finds it furnished with a big bed of naked wood, with no other bed-furnishings than a porcelain pillow and a reed mat. Besides that there is a round table with stools, and the altar of the ancestors. This now sometimes bears a photograph of the deceased in the place of the ancient tablet—the one evidence of progress, and an unpleasant one, for it is far more agreeable to picture a bygone member of the human race from no other data than his posthumous name in Chinese characters on an upright stick than to behold him photographically in all the moles and wrinkles he left behind him in the grave.

All this I did not of course see in one day; the rain was too incessant for that. Long as I remained I could not have seen it all if I had not defied the rain, helped thereto by the attitude of the natives toward it. A rainy day does not keep the Annamese indoors; like the inhabitants of most southern countries where deluges fall for days at a time, they make the most of it. I had only to glance out my hotel window to see scores of both sexes, bare to the knees, even to the loins, all ages wearing their mushroom hats and the palm-leaf rain-coats that turn so easily this way or that, according to the slant of the storm. On they went, carrying their shoulder-pole loads or doing whatever else the pursuit of their rice required of them, quite as if the sun were shining. It is so hot when it does that in some ways a rainy day is a more pleasant time to work; and what is mud when you can wash one foot with the other at any water-hole? Thus Hué on those wet days was a vista of broad graveled streets, lined by trees and grass and spaciousness, and dotted with human figures dressed only in palm-leaves, so far as the eye could see, like some strange Eden that defied any but the most practised eye to tell the sexes apart.

As there seemed to be no prospect of the rain halting, I dived into a rickshaw one afternoon and went to visit the palaces across the river. It was as well that I had brought along my special permit from the “résuper,” for soldiers in the now familiar Annamese uniform of khaki rompers and blouse below a mushroom, brass-topped hat and above bare feet—here however with imperial yellow rather than the ordinary red wrap-leggings—expect a permit from Europeans, though coolies of both sexes were going freely in and out. A fine pretense this that the French are merely protectors; and incidentally it keeps other Western nations from finding out too much of what goes on in the privacy of the emperor’s own department of the governing of Annam. There is nothing very exciting about his palaces. So low that they are not seen at any distance, they are few and unimposing compared to the Forbidden City of Peking. Yet small as they are beside their Chinese counterparts, like the same thing not too exactly done in miniature, they are in general artistic and in some ways perhaps superior to their more pretentious Chinese models. One’s impression of them and of the dynasty they represent improved with seeing.

Workmen on a bamboo scaffolding were repainting the exterior of the main audience-chamber, and Saturday afternoon being pay-day, even as in other lands, a group of mandarins with ladylike hands, on some of which cat-claw finger-nails still remained, sat at a table keeping books in French style and paying out French paper piastres to the men and women as they filed past. Building after building, Chinese wood-and-paper buildings under top-heavy tile roofs, all of imperial yellow, stretched lengthwise one behind another, like squads of soldiers with a passageway through the middle of them, as do those of a Chinese yamen, back to the main and finally the more private edifices. All these were inclosed within a walled compound. Under the incessant rain the polished tiles of the courtyards between them resembled great lakes of uncertain depth, in which all the surroundings were mirrored as in a broad horizontal pier-glass. The old bronze lanterns before the palace verandas, exactly full of rain-water, were as beautiful, as graceful, as any I had seen in China; and being carefully preserved in this still imperial land, they showed their fine points to better advantage. They are hardly the favorite lanterns of his Majesty, however, who is more French than Chinese in his tastes and thirsts.

The gaudy audience-chamber was on the whole more conspicuous than lovely. The real throne-room, on the other hand, was a gorgeous place well worth seeing, in spite of a goodly supply of those chandeliers which seem to be Europe’s chief contribution to the splendor of Oriental kings. From a vast expanse of varicolored tiles gleaming as if they were made of glass, rose a forest of red pillars with imperial yellow five-clawed dragons climbing them. Decorations of every conceivable Chinese form and color, but with red in the ascendancy, added to the rich yet not chaotic ensemble. There were many fine vases, quite evidently Chinese, though the “guide” who saw to it that I chipped off no souvenirs and slipped nothing into my pockets called some of them French and contended that many of the others were made by the Annamese themselves, in earlier days, before those of his countrymen capable of such things had all died off. But they looked to me so much like Kingtehchen ware, the best of Kingtehchen at that, that for once I might have been tempted into a wager if one had been offered.

Naturally there was the throne, and all the other things that go with emperors’ throne-rooms, but all those I was to see better during the ceremony that was keeping me in Hué. Suffice it to say that the throne-room of Annam was the most gorgeous place I had seen in many a moon, on the whole artistically pleasing, and—that the rank and file of Americans may understand just what I am trying to say—worth several million piastres, or about half as many dollars.

Beyond came more long tile-covered rooms, shed-like in shape, in which were many spirit-tablets and tables covered with porcelain fruits. There were even some small baskets of real fruit, perhaps because it was now New Year time, when the spirits of the departed cannot be deceived with pretended food, and when their descendants are surest to remember them. All these things and many more stood in imposing array before the six shrines of the present dynasty. I fear, however, that with my incorrigibly plebeian mind and tastes I found most interesting of all the flocks of ordinary coolies with dusters and brooms, who roamed about all the buildings among these king’s playthings and slept on mat-covered boards beside them.

The story of the emperors of Annam, since Gia-long asked through the bishop of Adran for the assistance of the French against his dynastic rivals at the end of the eighteenth century, is not an entirely happy one. Some of them have even lost their jobs entirely for not behaving themselves, or for disobeying the French. There was Thanh-thai, for instance, deposed in 1907. He had been cutting up—among other things one of his concubines, merely to try his hand at surgery. So the French, not realizing perhaps that such things happen even in Philadelphia, nay, in Paris itself, sent him into exile and called in a doctor to help pick out one of his many sons to take his place. The eldest they passed over as a plain idiot, and chose a boy in prison, who howled because he thought he was being led forth to have his head lopped off. By the time they had washed and dressed him in the imperial robes, however, and seated him on the throne with the jade scepter in his childish hand, he had reverted to type and was an emperor both in appearance and demeanor, scorning already the common people among his kowtowing subjects. But in 1916, coincident with a certain busyness of the French at home, an independence movement broke out under this youthful king, which the French naturally insist was engineered by the Germans. The scheme was to have servants poison all the foreigners in the colony some evening, but some one “squealed.” So Jy-su, born in 1902, was also exiled to Réunion, a French island off the east coast of Africa, which he still graces with his surgical father and one favorite wife. There they are both very happy, according to the French colonials, who regard Réunion as a second Garden of Eden, and where the ex-Sons of Heaven “have all the women they want”—a French as well as a Mohammedan notion of paradise.

All this gave the then reigning emperor, Khai-dinh, his chance. This French-ruled king of Annam, a rather distant relative of the man and boy he succeeded, came to the throne in 1916, when he was nearly thirty-five. He must have been troubled with something akin to vertigo by his accession, for until then, though he had been a kind of prince, he had enjoyed by no means the income or the importance of a railway station-master. If I have inadvertently called him king I apologize; his official title is Koang-de, Son of Heaven, written with the same characters as those for the Chinese Hoang-ti, son of a similar celestial realm. In fact the emperors of Annam claim descent from an imperial family of China, which had descendants to spare. Khai-dinh visited France in state in 1922, influenced perhaps by an American president, for that was the first case of an emperor of Annam leaving Annamese soil. It was even more important for him to go, however, for in the Indo-Chinese pagoda on the outskirts of the Bois de Vincennes he performed a ceremony to release from the necessity of wandering perpetually through eternity the shades of thousands of Annamese who had fallen in the World War, unsaved either because they had not been able to comply with the final rites of their religion or because their bodies had not been recovered. He also placed in a French school his son and heir—the only one, I believe, for all the wives Khai-dinh maintained.

Khai-dinh was nearing forty when I graced Hué with my impatient presence, and was already anemic with tuberculosis. The other day he died, and twelve-year-old Vinh-thuy, the crown prince, ascended the throne under the name of Bao-dai (Greatness Sustained). But he returned at once to France to continue his studies, and Frenchmen will tell you that Annam is now governed by a Conseil de Régence, presided over by the mandarin Ton-that-tan. For in theory the emperor governs. In Cochinchina, which is admittedly a colony, a French lieutenant governor is the supreme functionary, but in the four protectorates the native sovereigns are still nominally the heads of the governments. Annam and Tonkin are under the Annamese emperor; Cambodia and a part of Laos still have kings. The native laws apply, unless a foreigner is involved, when the Code Napoléon is used. The protectorates maintain almost intact the laws and administrative machinery of the days when they were independent of French authority. The native sovereign appoints all officials, but the French _résident supérieur_ can reject any candidate; the native rulers dare not ignore his smallest suggestion, and the lesser _résidents_ keep a sharp eye on native functionaries in the provinces. New laws may be of either French or native initiative, but both sides must agree, which of course means that the French have the final word. All royal ordinances are drawn up, not only the French but the native texts, in the _Résidences Supérieures_. In Annam the old Chinese system of choosing officials and mandarins from among those who have shown the greatest proficiency in scholarship still more or less prevails, rather than the Irish system of our Western world.

One wonders what the thoughts of Bao-dai will be when he comes back really to take his father’s place. Educated in French schools, Parisian during all his formative years, he will suddenly be plunged into this old-world atmosphere, to the customs, the ideas, the ideals, even the spirit of which he will surely have become a stranger. Will he regret the ardent life of the Occident he will have left behind, or will the old soul of the palace of his ancestors penetrate and possess him, and insensibly make him an Oriental potentate?

I softened my enforced stay in Hué by also three times visiting the imperial burial-places some ten miles from the citadel, on the French side of the river. The low rolling hillocks close about the Annamese capital are covered with graves of the rank and file by the many thousands. Nearly all these mere mounds of earth were cleared and rounded off now for the New Year, the few still covered with grass and weeds suggesting very unfilial descendants or, more likely still, a line died out. As many Annamese as possible have themselves buried near the tombs of their sacred emperors, as the Hindu who can manage it has his body burned on the bank of the Ganges at Benares. The French are gradually restricting the grave-lands, but they must move slowly in a matter so important to an ancestor-worshiping race.

All important Annamese make preparation during their lifetime for their burial, some building their own tombs, where they often come to sit in meditation. While he is still on the throne each emperor has a geomancer, or a consultation of geomancers no doubt, choose the site for his last resting-place, always in the shelter of a natural screen, a butte or hillock that will protect the dead from the evil spirits that are forever flying about through the air. In such a garden several buildings are constructed, their number and arrangement fixed by ancient custom, superstition, and rites. There is an inclosure for the material remains, a pavilion for the memory, a temple for the soul; our miserable way of putting all these together, so that we cannot commune with the memory of the deceased without seeming to smell his bones, is not the Annamese way. Thus things were conceived by the sages who erected beyond the gates of Peking the mausoleums of the Ming, and the Annamese sovereigns have since changed nothing of what they got from their Chinese masters.

The royal tomb is the last residence of the sovereign, and in some ways the most sumptuous, as befits a palace of eternal repose. He may come back in spirit at any moment; therefore his loyal people are always prepared to receive him. Here is his great wooden bed, with its mat and cushions and porcelain pillow, not only for himself but for his favorite wife. Here is the tea, the rice, the _nhoc-nam_, or salty sauce in which the Annamese dip their food on the way to the mouth, cups of _chumchum_, or rice whisky, the arec-nuts, betel-leaves, and the little pot of lime that goes with them for his favorite minor vice, even cigarettes, everything he will need when he arrives. All these provisions are renewed every morning of the year, generation after generation, so that he will find nothing stale on the day when he finally comes. He will find again, arranged under glass, his royal playthings, the trinkets and gew-gaws, the jade shrubs, the precious crystals, the coffers inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the weapons he loved, even those great Sèvres vases which the ambassadors of a more respectful France sent him as New Year’s presents; more things perhaps than the living emperor has now in his living palace. Perhaps the worst punishment of Thanh-thai and his son, deposed in 1907 and 1916, respectively, is that they cannot have their tombs here among those of their ancestors—unless the French relent after they are dead, which for politic reasons of influence on imperial conduct in the future they probably will not do. That Khai-dinh succeeded in dying on the job was probably the most successful accomplishment of his life.

Nothing in Indo-China has the charm of these old royal tombs; in them lives intact the melancholy beauty of old Annam. One can walk or rickshaw all afternoon about them, and never tire of seeing them. Perhaps the tomb of Tu-duc is the most striking; another can be reached only by boat. That of Gia-long, epic sovereign of Annam, founder of this dynasty and of Annam’s present subordination to the French, is not the most elaborate. He was so very busy getting back his kingdom that perhaps he did not have time to prepare properly his last place of repose, for with the aid of the French he chased out his usurpers and grouped under the rule of his jade scepter all the land of Annam, being the first native son to govern as master from the frontiers of China to the banks of the Mekong. Even the tomb of Tu-duc is unimposing compared to those of the Ming emperors of China. But they all have a setting in solitude among unexploited forests, and are kept in a state of cleanliness and repair rare in the great land to the north. Weather-blackened structures in a hot, rainy, and often humid climate, though originally reddish, blue, green, multicolored, some overgrown with a fine vegetation, these Annamese temples of the dead do not impose upon the heavens like those of China. They blend themselves harmoniously into their densely green surroundings, the fleeing lines of their low walls barely cut out against the sky. As in the palaces of the living, it is not in the elevation of verticals that their builders looked for beauty, but in the prolonging of unreflected lines, in the grace of colonnades, terraces, superimposed roofs nonchalantly stretching to the horizon. Nothing dominates except two slender grayish pillars lost in the verdure before each tomb, the symbolic camel’s-hair brushes of the man of letters. In the large court of honor stone mandarins mount perpetual guard, in a row on each side of the entranceway, their saddled horses and their little elephants beside them, all dull and weather-tarnished and sometimes crumbling away.

But the stone mandarins, the horses, elephants, and mythological monsters guarding the royal tombs of Annam are only pathetic little things compared to those of China. Once I stood a living caretaker in the place of a missing stone one, and only by looking closely at the picture can one distinguish him from those of stone or plaster, whereas in China my head hardly reached to the knees of many an imperial guardian, and the horses, elephants, and camels of the Ming tombs are fully life-size. Nor are the materials so rich in these tombs. The dragons that unroll their coils on the roofs of glazed sun-polished tiles show signs of crumbling away; the bricks tend to disintegrate into the earth from which they came. Some of the most effective of these royal Annamese tombs are covered with pictures of scenes and people made entirely of broken crockery, pieces of porcelain cups, plates, bowls of Chinese design, and of many colors set in cement, much as the Annamese inlay their furniture with mother-of-pearl. Even fragments of broken bottles—nothing is so plentiful as bottles in French-ruled Indo-China—have been used in this way. These monuments recall the rags torn up and sewed together into the saffron robe of the Buddhist priest, because poverty is blessed. Yet even in this decoration the resting-places of the royal Annamese dead are beautiful.

In the woods, as we were driving homeward from the tombs—my first visit having been by automobile—we met a boy carrying on his head bananas and some other fruit, his grandfather kneeling beside him at the edge of the road and burning incense in a bush. The chief of Annam’s security stopped his car. He was, I may have neglected to mention, in some ways an unusual Frenchman. Big and handsome, a soldier at Peking in the Boxer days, he spoke excellent Annamese and still knew some Chinese, and his interest in the natives was more than official and perfunctory—so much so in fact that one got a hint now and then that he sometimes felt the recent loss of his bachelor privileges, for all his enthusiasm as a new benedict. He spoke to the pair, and in the tone of an interested friend rather than of a martinet official. The result was a naïve frankness instead of a taciturn imitation of stupidity. It seemed that the son of the one and father of the other had “taken the sickness” while gathering wood, and they had come to implore the spirits of the forest to pardon him any harm he may have done them. They had come twice before, and now the father and son so much better that they were sure their amends had been accepted, but they were performing the effective rites once more, in order to be on the safe side.

Though it is getting ahead of my story, such as it is, I came out to the tombs again on the afternoon of _Têt_ and found every one very busy about the royal mausoleums. The soldier-like caretakers whose permanent duties are there had freshly washed the very red coats they wear over the usual black Annamese garments. Men in these bright red tunics, some holding imperial yellow umbrellas over the trays covered with red cloth borne by others, were bringing the dead kings their New Year’s food. Mandarins, some of them evidently descendants of the emperors, came and donned transparent deep-blue cloaks over their black gowns, much decorated with French orders and the ivory plaques that denote the mandarin’s estate, and kowtowed inside and outside the tombs. Some of these ceremonies were elaborate, that at the tomb of Thieu-tri, which I chanced upon at the right moment, including a procession and incense-burning rites in the courtyard, with yellow and faded white parasols very much in evidence. Old women in purple, green, and other conspicuous head-bands and cloaks crowded the interior, where a high mandarin was master of ceremonies. There seemed to be no great objection to the presence of a European inside, except during the actual interior ceremony of greeting to the royal spirits, when the mandarin opposed my entrance in a resolute manner rare, especially toward the ruling race, among this easy-going people. Though I was the only foreigner nearer the tombs than the capital itself, I was no doubt perfectly safe from physical interference even had I persisted in entering, and perfect Oriental courtesy was shown me; but once again I sensed the probability that the Annamese do not love the French, from whom of course few of them distinguish the rest of us of the white race.