Chapter XII: Jogging About Peking (2)

The thermos bottle was, of course, unknown to those actors of some generations or centuries back who refused to be deprived even for the length of a scene of the national beverage, and at the same time wished to impress upon the audience, itself engaged in satisfying the inner man quite as freely as if seated at home, that they, for all the low rank of players, were just as important, thereby establishing a custom that is all but universal on the Chinese stage. Old-fashioned actors, or those less generously subsidized by the box-office, also have their tea at the end of every crisis; but it is brought, not in the latest triumph of science and by a personal retainer, but by one of the omnipresent “props,” by a disengaged “super,” or by one of the beggarly loafers that seem always to be hanging about behind the scenes—if they can be called such—of a Chinese theater. They, too, sip the uninebriating cup held up to them while half turning their backs or holding an edge of their always voluminous costumes over a corner of the mouth, a conventional pretense which is supposed to make the act invisible to the audience, and which so far as outward appearances go seems actually to do so. Besides, why should an act as general and almost as continuous among the Chinese as breathing attract the attention of a generation that has probably associated it with every dramatic climax since the oldest man among them first paid an admission fee? If so slight a thing as this brought inattention to the play, what would not the orchestra accomplish in the way of distracting from the plaudits due the actors, scattered as it is about the stage itself, maltreating its strange instruments or refraining therefrom in the most casual manner, to light a cigarette, to scratch itself, to ply a toothpick, or strolling individually on or off, in any garb at any moment of the afternoon or evening that happens to suit the individual fancy.

There is a theater in the heart of the Tartar City completely Westernized in architecture and general arrangements, yet where perfectly Chinese plays are given; but the foreigner who wishes to get the complete atmosphere must go “outside Ch’ien-men” into the Chinese City. For after all it is the audience and what takes place in front of the stage as much as what goes forward upon it that repays the Westerner for visiting a Chinese theater. In this busiest part of Peking, among the blocks where the singsong-girls ply their popular trade, are scattered many genuinely native playhouses, and farther on there are numerous makeshift ones hastily thrown together of boards, mats, and sheet-iron, stretching beyond the _T’ien-ch’iao_, the “Heavenly Bridge” with its swarming outdoor markets, across which emperors were carried for centuries to the near-by Temple of Heaven. Out there one may hear much of the play and more of the “music” than he cares to, while merely riding past in the afternoon—for genuine Peking theaters are in full swing from about noon until long after midnight.

Perhaps on the whole the visitor will get the most for his money at any of those playhouses lost in the maze of narrow streets not far outside Ch’ien-men, without earning the ill will of his rickshaw-man by driving him ’way out to the Heavenly Bridge. Here he will find himself, though perhaps not without Chinese help, entering what looks much like a warehouse or a wholesale establishment, a roofed court overcrowded with crude, narrow, painfully upright benches black with time and the food and drinks that have been spilled upon them for generations from the little shelves protruding along the back of each for the use of the row behind. The foreigner is so far out of the orbit of his kind in one of these establishments that, though the Legation Quarter is barely a hop, skip, and jump away, just beyond the mammoth Tartar wall, and those two of the Peking railway stations out of which emerge almost all foreign visitors to the capital are still nearer, he will probably not be seated before what looks like a coolie comes to ask his name, preferably to get his card, explaining, if there is any common denominator of words in which to do so, that every _wai-guo-ren_ who enters the place must be reported at once, so that a policeman may be sent to protect him. Yet it is years since a foreigner has needed individual police protection anywhere within the Chinese City half as much as the unpaid gendarme who will keep an eye upon him throughout the performance needs the tip which he will not refuse if it is properly forced upon him.

Strictly speaking the foreign visitor does not find himself a seat, any more than he discovers the theater without help. He is, _ipso facto_, a “possessor of money,” and nowhere that he stirs in China, least of all in a theater, are there lacking men eager to take as much of that commodity away as can be bluffed or wheedled out of him. Hence the conspicuous new-comer is beset from the very entrance by a flock of men in the all too familiar garb of unwashed coolies, each eager to lead him to some different section of the house. If he is easily led he will find himself installed before he knows it in a rickety chair in one of the little pretenses of boxes around the narrow balcony, the only part of the house where women spectators may sit. The prices are higher up there, and the inevitable rake-off of his guide correspondingly larger. If he is wise he will insist upon remaining in the pit, not too near the uproarious orchestra and not so close to the back as to interfere with the throwing arms of the towel-men. When at last he has settled down as the protégé of a man who seems suddenly to grow superciliously patronizing toward him the moment he is sure of keeping him in his own section, and has apparently made lifelong enemies of all the others who tried to seat him elsewhere, he becomes at once the prey of the innumerable hawkers of this and that who wallow and shout their way through the audience quite irrespective of a possible interest in the stage. Perhaps it occurs to him that he bought no ticket, and was asked for none at the door. No one does as he enters the purely Chinese theater. By the time each auditor has adjusted himself as well as his bodily bulk will permit to the impossible seats behind the tippy shelves, a man comes to sell him a ticket and to take it up with one and the same motion. Prices are not high, sixty to eighty coppers at most, including the percentage that is almost sure to be added out of respect for his alien condition; even in the Westernized theater within the Tartar City a seat anywhere in the pit or parquet rarely reaches the height of a “Mex” dollar. Then a man who thinks he chose his seat for him must also have his “squeeze,” but this by no means amounts to the sum subtracted by the old ladies who pose as ushers in the theaters of Paris. Long before these formalities are concluded, simultaneously with his sitting down, in fact, the countless dispensers of food and drink are taking his patronage for granted. A tea-cup sadly in need of an hour’s scouring with sand is placed top down on the unwashed seat-back before him, soon to be followed by a tea-pot the spout of which, if he is observant, he has probably seen some unsoaped neighbor sucking a moment before, now refilled with boiling water. Little dishes of shriveled native peanuts, of pumpkin-seeds, of half a dozen similar delicacies which he has often seen along the outdoor markets and in the baskets of street-hawkers without ever having felt a desire to make a closer acquaintance with them, probably also a joint of sugar-cane, will likewise be set in front of him before he can say his Chinese name, unless he waves all these things aside with a very imperative gesture. None of the hawkers catch the meaning of this at once, at least outwardly, and when they finally do their resentment often reaches the point of what sounds unpleasantly like more or less subtle vituperation. Whoever heard of going to a theater without sipping tea and cracking pumpkin-seeds? Why does this wealthy barbarian come and occupy a seat if he is going to cheat the men who supply that part of the house out of their rightful and time-honored selling privileges?

By and by one may be able to turn one’s attention to the stage, though one has certainly not been unconscious of it, auricularly at least, since entering the door. The stage is nothing but a raised platform with a low railing on all four sides, such as might have been the auction-place in the days when the building was perhaps the warehouse it looks as if it must have been. Whatever serve as dressing-rooms at the rear, which according to the space there cannot be much, are separated from the stage by an alleyway across which the exiting and entering players hop. The antics on the stage are in no noticeable way different from those at the Westernized Peking theaters regularly patronized by foreigners. The masks and wigs and terrifying costumes are probably cruder, less splendid, and worse adjusted; the lean and bathless coolies who come on at frequent intervals in orderless groups undisguised as soldiers, courtiers, and who-knows-what are if anything a trifle more abject and bovine; there may not appear a single thermos bottle during the whole evening, though there will be as incessant a consumption of what passes for tea among the great mass of the Chinese. Certainly there will be no scenery in the Western sense, though there may be a few curtains half shutting off the inadequate dressing-room space, and some pretenses of city gates, thrones, and the like improvised on the spur of the moment by the bored property-men out of strips of cloth and half-broken chairs. The conventionalized things which take the place of scenery, the strange whips carried by those who are supposed to be mounted, and the something which tells the audience that the bearer is riding in a boat are somewhat the worse for wear, while the cushions which “Props” disdainfully throws out in front of the stars when it is time for them to kneel are almost slippery with the grease of generations. But the tumbling and the juggling which imply that one of the frequent battles is going on will be quite the same, except that it will not be so well done, as inside the main city, and the uproar will be just as constant and if anything a trifle more deafening.

One theater outside Ch’ien-men has only female players; but they appear in the same rôles, in exactly the same time-honored plays, as the all-men casts in other theaters, and act as nearly as possible in the same way, equally dreadful even in the atrocious falsetto which is the Chinese actor’s specialty, as noises from the pit of the stomach are of those of Japan. There may be many a guttural “Hao!” from the men in the audience for the juggling feats of the stars, winning their battles thus after the time-honored manner of stage generals or emperors; perhaps even greater signs of approval for some fine point skilfully rounded in the old familiar themes, which escapes the foreigner entirely; but there is never a suggestion of the thought of sex, not a hint, except in their general appearance, that the players are women and not men. Some of the unwashed girls who fill out the cast, looking like nothing so much as kitchen wenches in odds and ends of old finery, are quite as clever acrobats, in battle-scene tumbling at least, as the men at other places, though they get less a month than a Broadway chorus-girl spends on chewinggum in a week.

It will be an imperturbable foreign visitor, however, who can keep his attention fixed on the stage long enough to note all this at once. The goings-on in the audience will probably prove more comprehensible, certainly more amusing. Without going into endless detail it may suffice to say that the climax of all those things which a Chinese audience does and a Western one does not is the demand for hot towels during the performance. One or two towel-men stand over a steaming tub in a far corner; as many as a dozen others are scattered about the hall, though their presence may not be suspected by the inexperienced until the bombardment of towels begins, about the end of the first round of pumpkin-seeds. All at once the air overhead is crisscrossed with flying white objects, which on closer attention prove to be bundles of hot, wet towels tightly rolled together. A man near the tub is throwing them to a colleague somewhere out in the house, who relays them on to others dispersed about, these doling them out along the rows of spectators, collecting them again after they have been used—not to give the ears a respite from the ceaseless uproar but to deceive the face and hands with the ghost of a washing—bundling them together once more to start them hurtling back high over head to the point of origin. The most expert venders of double-jointed Philadelphia peanuts at our national games cannot equal Chinese towel-men in the number of throws and the narrow margins of safety without injury to a spectator. Evidently the towel-service is included in the price of admission, unless the hawkers and the section guards band together to supply their clients this apparent necessity. Therefore the foreigner who gracefully declines this gracious attention, after noting that the returned towels are merely immersed and wrung out again as a bundle and once more sent the rounds, does not win the ill will that would accrue to him if there were a copper or two of _cumshaw_ involved, and does no other damage than to block the wheels of progress long enough for information concerning his strange conduct to be relayed back to the tub-men and commented upon at least throughout the section he makes conspicuous by his presence.

The bombardment of towels goes on periodically from early afternoon until early morning, like all the rest of the performance. Where one play ends another begins with barely the interval of a sip of tea, and though some spectators are constantly coming and going, like the casual members of the orchestra and the undisguised “supers,” the endurance of the mass of them is phenomenal. Some time between five and seven o’clock many spectators vary their incessant munching and sipping by ordering a full meal from the runners of the adjoining tea-house, and the click of chop-sticks may now and then be heard above the louder clamor. But the spectacle, both on and off the stage, goes unconcernedly on.

It would require much more Chinese than I can so far understand to catch any of the dialogue—if that is the word for it—of a typical Chinese play. The inexperienced Westerner will seldom have the faintest idea what it is all about, or even who the characters stand for, so unintelligible to him are the signs and symbols by which the native spectator recognizes them and their doings. For that matter the average Chinese would not understand much unless he had imbibed all these old stories almost with his mother’s milk. The old, poetic, and often obsolete words in which the Chinese actor speaks—or rather “sings,” to use the misleading Chinese term—would be obscure enough in a sane and ordinary tone of voice; in his successful imitation of ungreased machinery his actual speech is probably of little more import to the hearers than are the words of an Italian opera to a Chicago audience. Like the Japanese the Chinese prefer to hear the same old historical themes and see the same old pageants over and over again, however, or at most to have new variations upon them, generation after century. Hence even the illiterate can often follow a play word by word without understanding a line of it. We have discovered that by having our teacher tell us the story beforehand we can guess the meaning of a considerable part of the action, thereby finding the Chinese theater much less of a bore than most foreigners report it. To every people its own ways; certainly the attempt to ape Western theatricals which was put on during the winter by a club of native élite, with traveled young Chinese of both sexes prancing about the stage in frock-coats and scanty gowns, not to mention bobbed hair, was more terrible than anything genuine Chinese actors ever perpetrate. Personally I have even become reconciled to Chinese “music”—in the olden days plays were given outdoors, hence the deafening quality of this—and in certain moods even to enjoy it, briefly, as one sometimes enjoys a crush in the subway or a rough-and-tumble mingling with the Broadway throng; and we have both grown very fond of seeing, if not of listening to, Mei Lan-fang.

Mr. Mei—whose family character means “peach blossom” and who is related to us to the extent of including an orchid in his given name—is China’s most famous and most popular actor. Like his father and grandfather before him he plays only female rôles, and while even his falsettos may grate on a Western ear, many is the foreigner who pursues him from theater to theater merely to watch his graceful movements, his inimitable dancing or simply the manipulation of his beautiful hands. Scrawl the three characters by which he is known on the bill-board or the newspaper space of any theater, inside Ch’ien-men or out, anywhere in China for that matter, though he has no need to tour the provinces, and the man in the box-office has only to order any suggestion of vacant space filled with chairs and lean back in perfect contentment. Mei Lan-fang carries his own troupe, like a Spanish _matador_ his _cuadrilla_, even his own orchestra, and the arrangement of Chinese performances is such that he can play in several theaters on the same night, from eleven to midnight inside the Tartar City perhaps, where the doors close ridiculously early, the rest of the night among the better establishments outside the main wall. Seldom does he deign to appear earlier than that, unless at some special matinée in the Forbidden City or at the presidential palace, and he is under no necessity of appearing every night merely to keep the wolf from his door. By Chinese standards his income rivals that of any opera singer.

The Chinese are fond of complications of character in their plays, and some of Mr. Mei’s greatest successes are as a man playing a girl who in turn disguises herself as a man; but there is never a moment in which the basic femininity of the part does not stand clearly forth in the hands of this consummate artist. I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with him once. His house out in the heart of the Chinese City is outwardly commonplace; but the touch of the genuinely artistic temperament is nowhere missing inside the door. The delicate, almost white-faced man still in his twenties, sometimes looking as if he had barely reached them, proved to be one of the most gracious and at the same time most unobtrusive hosts I have ever met. His manner had not a suggestion of the financially successful, the popular idol, as it would manifest itself in the West. He was as simple, as unassuming, as wholly untheatrical as are the objects of Chinese art on which he spends his surplus wealth and time inconspicuous with real distinction. Among his treasures were many thin-paper volumes of classics, of old plays, some of them several centuries old, with annotations in the margins by bygone but not forgotten actors indicating tones, gestures, movements down to the crooking of a little finger. Mr. Mei makes much use of these, though not for slavish imitation. His entourage includes a scholar of standing whose task it is to weave new stories about the old themes, and from them the actor evolves new dances—which is not the word, but let it stand—and new ways of entertaining his crowded audiences without losing touch with the distant centuries to which they prefer to be transported within the theater. Mei Lan-fang does not drink tea on the stage. It is an arrogance of the profession to which his famous family never descended. Nor, one notes, do property-men trip unnecessarily about under his feet when he is performing. I have Mr. Mei’s word for it that the throat does not suffer from the constant unnatural tasks put upon it by his profession; but only from a man of such self-evident truthfulness could I believe it. Certainly there was nothing in his soft home-side speech to belie that surprising statement, as there was nothing in his modest manner to suggest that wherever he plays the streets are filled as far at least as the eye can see by night with waiting rickshaws.

Russians have occupied the extreme northeast corner of the Tartar City for centuries. Away back in the reign of K’ang Hsi, to whom all those of the white race were indeed outside barbarians, an army of the czar was defeated in what is now Siberia, and the captives brought to Peking were made into a defense corps after the style of the Manchu-“bannermen.” Gradually the Manchu warriors disappeared from the enclosure that once housed them only, as they grew weak and flabby and penniless under imperial corruption and sold out family by family to the Chinese, until to-day the Tartar City is that merely in name and in memory. But the Russians remain just where the victorious emperor assigned them. Two garish Greek Orthodox structures thrust their domes and spires aloft from within the large walled area which makes that corner of the city somewhat less of an open space given over to garbage-heaps, rag-pickers, and prowling dogs than are the other three. The Son of Heaven was graciously moved to permit his Russian bannermen to have their own religious teachers, and the Orthodox priests sent from Russia became not only missionaries to the surrounding “heathen” but the unofficial diplomatic agents of the czar. In time, when the powers saw fit to disabuse the occupant of the dragon throne of the impression that all the rest of the earth was tributary to him, the Russians also established their official minister in the Legation Quarter, with pompous buildings and another Orthodox church within a big compound. To-day, by consent of the Chinese, representatives of the old czarist régime still informally occupy this, while the unrecognized envoy of the Soviet finds his own accommodations, like any other tourist. But the establishment in the further corner of the city survives, boasting not merely a bishop but an archbishop, and numbering by the hundred the Chinese converts clustered in that section.

A Russian church service with a mainly Chinese congregation is worth going some distance to see. Nowadays the converts hardly outnumber their fellow-worshipers, so many are the destitute Russian refugees who have drifted to that distant northeast corner of Peking. They live thick as prisoners in the stone-walled cells of the old monastery where once only Orthodox monks recited their prayers,—frail women and underfed children as well as men bearing a whole library of strange stories on their gaunt faces. Groups of refugees who came too late or have not influence enough to find room in the cells live packed together in stone cellars, some still wearing the remnants of czarist uniforms, or of the various “White” armies that have gone to pieces before the advancing “Reds,” some still unrecovered from war-time wounds and sundry hardships.

The orchestra which enlivens the nights of the more fortunate foreigners in the frock-coat section of the city huddle together here on improvised beds that would hardly be recognized as such; in these ill smelling dungeons there are men who have not garments enough, even if they had the spirit left, to go forth and look for some possible way out of their present sad dilemma.

But one’s sympathy for the dispossessed Russians in China always soon comes to a frayed edge. Their scorn of manual labor even as an alternative to starvation, the unregenerate selfishness of their exiled fellow-countrymen in more fortunate circumstances, their lack of practicality, of plain common sense from the Western point of view, in a word their Orientalism, so out of keeping with their Caucasian exterior, tend to turn compassion to mere condolences which in time fade out to indifference. Perhaps any of us suddenly come down as a nation, like a proud sky-scraper unexpectedly collapsing into a chaotic heap of débris, would find ourselves bewildered out of ordinary human intelligence; but it is hard to avoid the impression that these individual weaknesses were there before the debacle, and that they are incurable, at least in the existing generation. A few such enterprises as printing, binding, and leather tanning have been started in the former monastery, but it was noticeable that almost all the actual work was being done by Chinese. Sturdy, even though possibly hungry, young men loafed about their cells and cellars complaining that they could not hire some one to rebuild their simple brick bathing-vat and cooking-stove. Chinese officials, especially of the petty grade, have not been over-kind to the groups of refugees that have fallen into their hands; but they rank at least on a par with the Russian archbishop of Peking, who considers the northeast corner of the city his personal property and demands the abject servility of the Middle Ages toward his exalted person from those of his fellow-countrymen whom he graciously admits to floor-space there in the shadow of his own spacious episcopal residence.

These ostentatious forms of Christianity seem much more in keeping with the Chinese temperament than the austere Protestantism of innumerable sects, which has dotted Peking, as it has all China, with its schools, churches, hospitals, and missions pure and simple. It is not at all hard to find resemblances between the services of the Russians and those in the lama temple a little west of them, in any joss-burning Chinese place of worship, or for that matter between these and high mass at Pei-t’ang to the northwest of the Forbidden City. The Catholics, too, go back for centuries in the life of Peking, to Verbiest and his fellow-Jesuits who served the Sons of Heaven in secular, as well as their subjects in religious, ways.

In the Boxer days Pei-t’ang was scarcely second to the British legation as a place of refuge against the bloodthirsty besiegers; on Easter Sunday, at least, it rivals even in mere picturesqueness any temple in the capital. Red silk interspersed with Maltese crosses in imperial yellow wrapped the pillars; artificial flowers—where real ones are so cheap and so plentiful—added to the Oriental garishness of the interior; the mingled scent of incense and crowded Chinese made the scene impressive not merely to the sight. Mats on the floor held more worshipers than did the benches. The women sat on one side, the flaring white head-dresses of the nuns forming a broad front border to the sea of smooth, oily Chinese coiffures. Near the center hundreds of “orphan” boys in khaki made a great yellow patch. In front, at the foot of the choir-stalls backed by the gorgeous altar, the assemblage was gay with French and Belgian officers in full bemedaled uniform, with a scattering of European women—there are other Catholic churches in Peking that are not so far away for most foreigners—their prie-dieus conspicuous in rich silk covers. Even the raised place at one side, theoretically reserved for Caucasians, was crowded with Chinese, hardly a dozen more of whom could have been driven into the church with knouts or bayonets. Yellow faces, high above any casual glance, peered from behind the pipes of the big organ. Chinese acolytes in red wandered to and fro, swinging censers; the music, while not unendurable, was screechy enough to prove the unseen choir of the same race, boys echoing men, with the organ filling in the interstices. Children ran wild among the rather orderless throng; some of the congregation stood throughout the service; large numbers of Chinese men kept their caps on. But a thousand Chinese fervently crossing themselves at the requisite signals from the altar, where two Chinese priests in colorful robes worthy at least a bishop functioned on either side of the white-haired European in archiepiscopal regalia, had about it something no less striking than anything Buddhism has to offer. On week-days old Chinese women, just such bent, shrouded figures as may be seen in any cathedral of Europe, come from the maze of _hutungs_ about Pei-t’ang to bow their heads in silent prayer in its perpetual twilight, with gaudy saints and images of here and there a somewhat Chinese cast of countenance looking down upon them.

Preparations for the Chinese New Year began on the twenty-third of the twelfth moon with the burning of the kitchen god still to be found in nearly every home. Some of our neighbors, especially those whom lack of a courtyard drove out into the _hutung_ for this ceremony, did it half furtively, as if they were pretending, at least when foreigners looked on, that this was only an ordinary wad of waste-paper. But we knew that before he was torn down incense had been burned before the flimsy, smoke-dulled god, with a little straw or _kaoliang_ for the horse that is shown waiting for him, and even our neighbors admitted that they stuck a bit of something sweet on his lips before sending him to heaven, by the fire route, to report on the actions of the family during the year. A little opium serves this purpose still better, or best of all is to dip the whole half-penny lithograph in native wine just before the burning, that the god may be too drowsy or too drunk to tell the truth when he reaches headquarters.

Mei Lan-fang, most famous of Chinese actors, who, like his father and
grandfather before him, plays only female parts
]

In the vast compound of the Altar of Heaven
]

Over the wall from our house, boats plied on the moat separating us
from the Chinese City
]

Just outside the Tartar Wall of Peking the night-soil of the city,
brought in wheelbarrows, is dried for use as fertilizer
]

It is a seven-day journey to the Chinese heaven and back, so that people have a little respite from the irksome surveillance of the god of the kitchen. During that week there was a furor of house-cleaning, as the Chinese misunderstand the term; the well-to-do renewed their paper windows; those who could afford it went so far as to have the wooden parts freshly painted. Especially on the last day of the year much shaving, washing, and bathing went on; the baths outside the southern gates of the Tartar City were crowded as they never are at ordinary times, when a two-to-ten copper bath once a month is considered ample. All that last day, too, the _chop-a-chop_ of food, especially of meat dumplings, being prepared for the many guests of the following days, when such work would be taboo, sounded from every house that was not a poor man’s home indeed. Faded old scraps of paper came down everywhere and bright new ones went up, particularly those long upright red slips opposite each door, bearing the four familiar characters for _K’ai men chien hsi_—“Open door see happiness.” Some of these were put up by the householders themselves, some by poor neighbors who hoped for a slight remembrance from the inmates. One saw them all over China for months afterward. The most miserable little hovels far outside the walls put up new paper gods that made brilliant splashes on doors and mud façades. Perhaps the saddest thing about the Chinese New Year is that all debts are expected to be paid before it breaks, which was particularly hard on what is still recognized abroad as the Chinese Government, months in arrears with every one except its Tuchuns and high employees of special influence. Two men at least I saw next day wandering about with a lantern, a pretense that it is still night and dunning still permissible.

New Year’s day is everybody’s birthday in China; so there is a double reason for new clothes appearing everywhere. Even beggars and rag-pickers seemed to have them, or at least well washed and mended ones, and the populace presented such a sight of approximate cleanliness as it will not until another year rolls by and compels it to change again. A new kitchen god, gaudy on its thin paper, is put up during the first hours of the new year, with a little shrine, and firecrackers and incense welcome him. Firecrackers, indeed, were the most conspicuous part of the celebration. They boomed all night, close under our back walls and all over the city; even “Ha-li” was restless with the incessant uproar. This was partly in honor of the kitchen gods, but largely to frighten off the evil spirits lurking about to contaminate the new year at the start. Among the Chinese there was no attempt to sleep that night; even our _ama_ asked permission to go home, and said that she would sit up all night, eating meat dumplings from about two in the morning until daybreak—yet she is a woman of unusual common sense for China, with the utmost scorn for those who still bind their feet.

For the first five days of the new year women are supposed not to leave home or to enter that of another, though in Peking many disobey at least the first half of this ancient rule. The men, on the other hand, go out early and often, not only on the first but on the succeeding days, to call upon all their friends, particularly on the mother-in-law who reigns over each household, to give greetings, and incidentally to fill themselves beyond nature’s intention with meat dumplings. Our teacher was still weary from this ordeal when he again reported for duty. Rachel, however, was strictly enjoined by the _ama_ not to call on a neighbor at whose house she had attended a wedding during the winter; it would be even worse form than not to have a mother-in-law present to receive those who called upon us. As in France, New Year’s is the time for giving presents; no sooner had we distributed a dozen silver dollars in red envelopes among the servants than they despatched the _ama_ to get us presents,—food dainties for us adults, toys for “Ha-li.” Of all the celebration, however, perhaps the detail that looked strangest was to see the shops closed, long row after row of them blank-faced with board shutters where we had never seen them before. Drums and firecrackers sounded inside—some say that gambling goes on apace—whether to scare off devils or merely for the joy of making a noise; probably both motives existed, depending on the individual temperament. Foreigners sometimes accuse the Chinese of laziness because they take as much as a week’s rest at New Year’s, as if this were anything compared with our fifty-two and more holidays a year. Besides, even the shops are in few cases really closed; trust any Chinese merchant not to miss a possible stroke of business. There is almost always a peep-hole, if you know where to look for it, and one man inside who will make a special exception in favor of any one who finds it. Merchants can send their goods to the fairs, anyway; these spring up everywhere, especially in temple grounds, in and outside the city, where every one comes to burn joss-sticks by the bundle, until many a huge urn before the gods runs over with ashes. These are the gayest of markets, with peep-shows, acrobats, coolies, posing for the day as sword-swallowers, story-tellers, and musicians, with amateur and professional theatrical performances indoors and out, with every conceivable gambling device, men, women, and children crowded around them, with all manner of playthings for sale,—singing “diavolo” tops reaching almost the size of drums, pink bottles of _chianti_-shape which reward the blower with a peculiar noise, clusters of toy windmills on one handle that spin in chorus as the holder rides homeward in his rickshaw or his Peking cart, kites of every description, some fully man-size, of bird, beetle, airplane shape. There are no age-limits among the Chinese in the use of New Year’s toys; even solemn old men fly kites all over the city at this season, among the swirls of pigeons following their whistle-bearing leader about the cloudless heavens.

All this went on for a week or more, though with diminishing ardor; for some soon tire of so long a holiday, and many would starve if they celebrated it all, so that gradually men went back to work, though not a few stuck it out. We hardly noticed a lack of rickshaws even on the first day, and the calls of street-hawkers never completely died out. If our servants went out more than usual we missed none of their usual services, and certainly the cook must have found the markets open. The real New Year’s duty of every Chinese, of course, is to go home, though it be across ten provinces, to put paper “cash,” such as flutter along the route of every funeral, on the graves of his ancestors, and to prepare them special food, preferably duck or chicken, of which they can eat only the “flavor,” leaving three guesses as to what becomes of the rest. Many do go home, but in modern days it is surprising how many find this imperative journey quite impossible. At length the celebration petered out, though crowded carts of people in their best garments could be seen plodding toward the temples outside our East Wall up to the last, and Peking settled down to its industrious seven days a week again.

With the republic, China officially adopted the Western calendar, as Japan did long ago; but the masses cling to the old one, with its animal names for the twelve years that are constantly recurring. Like Christianity, the new calendar is considered something foreign, which is quite enough, even leaving the tenacity of old custom aside, to condemn it among many Chinese; and even in official circles the lunar New Year is celebrated more thoroughly than the other. The result is that no government employee has to come to office on the foreign New Year, and no one does on the old one, when even cabinet members go to their ancestral homes or on a spree to Tientsin or Shanghai. Nor is the cult of cyclical animals by any means dead among the Chinese. Almost over our head on the East Wall stand the famous astronomical instruments, some of them made by Verbiest himself, which the Germans carried off in 1900 and very recently returned in accordance with a clause in the Treaty of Versailles; and just beyond them is an old temple, the occupants of which include among their duties the annual task of compiling the popular almanac. One may see original or reprinted copies of this everywhere in China, for it is indispensable to the fortuneteller, the geomancer, and all their innumerable ilk, if not to the mass of the people themselves. Here are set forth the lucky and unlucky days for marriages or funerals, for washing the hair, for beginning a new building, for every act of importance in the Chinese daily life. Without it how could match-makers know whether or not the birth-years of possible brides and grooms conflict? Obviously if one was born in the year of the rabbit and the other in that of the dog, or in the years of the tiger and the sheep respectively, the result of an alliance would be a sorry household.

This year the almanac concocted by our priestly neighbors has a pig as “running title” from cover to cover, as well as the frequent recurrence of this motif throughout its pages. For this is the Year of the Pig, which began on our own February 16, and for twelve moons—this year there does not happen to be an intercalary thirteenth—the millions of Mohammedan Chinese must express themselves on that subject by using some such subterfuge as “Black Sheep.” Moreover, it is the end of a cycle of Cathay, the pig being the last of the twelve cyclical animals which pass five times to make such a cycle. This, it seems, presages the worst year of the whole sixty, and the soothsayers enlivened this New Year’s with the most pessimistic predictions. According to the street-side necromancers, who make their livelihood, such as it is, by telling the fortunes of individuals or of nations, much calamity is due China before this Year of the Pig is done. Millions, perhaps, will die of war, pestilence, or famine, or a combination of these—one fellow went so far as to assure his listeners that three fourths of the population of Peking will be wiped out. Great disasters are promised all over the country, particularly in the province of Shensi, which must suffer especially for the privilege of being the birthplace of the next emperor, whom the necromancers assert is already approaching man’s estate there. It is hopeless, therefore, runs the gossip, to expect a settlement of China’s crying difficulties during the twelvemonth of the Pig—some of us wonder if the foreign legations have been imbued with the same spirit. That is the evil of superstitions particularly in a land where the majority is still influenced by them; the mere fact that large numbers of people believe all this market-stall nonsense causes at least a psychological depression, and probably increases the likelihood of the beliefs being realized.

However, these popular oracles go on, after this year conditions will rapidly improve, and it is almost certain that with the new cycle will come a return to order and prosperity. Every friend of China sincerely hopes so, for she certainly needs just that very badly, whether she deserves it or not. No doubt the next cycle of sixty years will bring something of the sort, even though it is difficult to think of China’s calamities abruptly ceasing with this inauspicious porcine year.

There are good as well as unkind things to be said of the Chinese lunar calendar. It is easy, for instance, to tell the time of their month merely by glancing at the sky on any unclouded evening, and no one need ask what day the moon will be full. By the old system of reckoning the Chinese have a whole list of dates fixing changes of weather, and if one year’s experience is a fair test these are more accurate than the prophecies of our highest salaried weather men. Some weeks after the lunar New Year comes the “Stirring of the Insects”; the “Corn Rain” is set for one of the first days of the third moon—that is, late in our April; there are the fixed days of “Sprouting Seeds,” the “Small Heat” and the “Great Heat,” the “Hoar Frost,” the “Cold Dew,” the “Slight Snow” and the “Great Snow”—though the last rarely reaches Peking—and so on around the eternal cycle again. But “Pure Brightness,” otherwise known as Arbor day now, on which the president himself came to plant trees almost next door to us, has come and gone; _pengs_ are springing up everywhere, shading the courtyards, forming whole new roofs and fronts over the better shops, and implying that it is time we were moving on, for the “Great Heat” is no misnomer in Peking.