Legend of the birth of Ch\'ien Lung—A valley of temples—Wells—A temple fair—Hawking—Suicide\'s rock—Five hundred and eight Buddhas—The Po-Ta-La—Supercilious elephants—Steep steps—Airless temple—The persevering frog—Bright-roofed Temple—Tea at the Temple of the great Buddha—The Yuan T\'iing—Ming Temple outside Peking.
As we walked in the Manchu Park the amah told us a story, a legend, and the missionary translated it to me. It took a long while to tell, first she slipped on the rocky steps and we had to wait till she recovered, then the General\'s secretary joined us, and finally, when we were safe back at the missionary compound, she had to wait till we got by ourselves, because she thought it was improper!
And this was the story the amah told as we walked beneath the fir-trees.
Once upon a time in the valley of Jehol there was born a little girl who did not speak till she was three years old, then she opened her lips, looked at her grandfather, and called him by name. And her grandfather died. She did not speak again for a long time, but the next person she called by name also died and consternation reigned in the family. Her father and mother died, whether because she spoke to them the amah did not know, but she was left penniless and at last a farmer took compassion 301upon the girl, now just growing into womanhood, and told her she might have charge of the ducks, on condition she did not speak. So for her began a lonely, silent life among the mountains, herding the ducks.
One night as the dusk was falling and the duck pond and the hills beyond were wrapped in a mysterious haze that hid and glorified everything, there came along an old man riding a donkey and asked her the way to the Hunting Palace of the Manchus that was somewhere among these hills and valleys. He had lost his way, he said, and wanted to get back there. The girl looked at him with mournful eyes and shook her head without saying a word.
“What is your name?” cried the old man.
She turned away silently.
“I must find my way,” he added, and she took up a stick and gathered her ducks together.
“But I am the Emperor,” said he, “and I must get back. What manner of girl are you who will not speak to the Emperor?”
And she looked at him more gravely than ever out of her dark eyes, and drove off her ducks, taking no more notice of the greatest ruler in the world than if he had been a common coolie. So the Emperor found his own way to his Hunting Palace, and that night he dreamed a dream, a vivid dream, that an ancestor had come to him and told him he must marry a strange and mysterious woman.
But the women who came to the ruler of the earth were not strange and mysterious, they were ordinary and commonplace even though he had his choice of the women of his Empire. He brooded over the matter and came to the conclusion that the strange 302and mysterious woman must be the girl he had met herding ducks in the dusk of the evening. Then he sent out to the part of the country where he had wandered that night and demanded the daughters of the farmer.
The good man was highly honoured and dressed his girls in their finest clothes to appear before their Emperor, but, and they must have been bitterly disappointed, though they were pretty girls, there was nothing strange about them, they were as ordinary as all the other women who occupied, the women\'s quarters. He had seen many, many, like them. Again he sent back to the farm and they said there were no other women there but the girl who herded the ducks, and it could not be she because she spoke to no one.
“That,” said the Emperor, “is the girl,” and he ordered her to be properly arrayed and brought before him at once.
Alas for the glamour that comes with the dusk of the evening. The girl had grown up without any comeliness and when she was brought before the Emperor he turned away disgusted. Nevertheless, for his dream\'s sake, he married her and gave her a fine house to live in, but he had nothing to do with her, she was his wife only in name.
And the duck-herd girl, come to high estate, pined because she did not find favour in the sight of her lord, she never ceased to pray for his smiles, and at last she so worked upon him that one night he did send for her. She was his wife, her shame had gone from her. And presently, it was rumoured that the duck-herd girl was to become a mother. But the Emperor was angry, he could not believe the child was his, and he turned Her out to wander, desolate and forlorn, upon the hills. At first she despaired, but presently she took courage, had she not been raised from a duck-herd to an Emperor\'s wife, and was she not to bear his son, and by her faith in herself she persuaded some shepherds who tended their sheep upon the other side of the valley from the wall that surrounded the Emperor\'s pleasure-grounds to take her in, and here her son was born.
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And that night the Emperor dreamed another dream. He dreamed that a most illustrious son had been born to him that very night. He sent to make inquiries and the only one of his wives or concubines who had borne a son that night, was the woman he had driven from him with contumely. So he took her back with honour, and his dream—both his dreams were fulfilled, for the son that was born to him that night among the hills was the illustrious Ch\'ien Lung, the man who at eighty-three still sat upon the Dragon Throne when George III. of England sent Lord Macartney on an embassy to China in 1793.
And Ch\'ien Lung was a good son to his mother at least, and because she was a pious woman, and he was born amidst those sheltering hills, he built there a series of temples to the glory of God and for her pleasure.
I was bound to go and see those temples, indeed I think the man or woman who went to Jehol and did not make a point of going up that valley must lack something.
The drawback for me was that I had to go in a Peking cart, and even though those temples were 304built by an Emperor I had no reason to suppose that the road that led to them was any better than the ordinary Chinese roads. It wasn\'t, but I don\'t know that it was worse. Tuan engaged the old white mule of venerable years, and I think that was an advantage, he went so slowly that often I was able to walk. I did not propose to visit all of them, there is a family likeness between all Chinese temples, whatever be the name of the deity to whom they are dedicated, and seeing too many I should miss the beauty of all.
It was a gorgeous June morning the day I set out, sitting as far forward as I could in the cart with Tuan on the tail of the shaft and the carter walking at the mule\'s head. All round one side of Cheng Teh Fu is built up a high wall that the Chinese call a breakwater, and a breakwater I believe it is indeed after the summer rains, though then, the Jehol River ran just a shallow trickle at its foot. There were many little vegetable gardens along here, the ground most carefully cultivated and showing not a weed, not a stray blade of grass. “The garden of every peasant contained a well for watering it,” writes Sir George Staunton in 1793, “and the buckets for drawing up the water were made of ozier twigs wattled or plaited, of so close a texture as to hold any fluid.” He might have been writing of the peasants of today. As I passed, with those selfsame buckets were they watering their gardens.
The people were streaming out of the town, most of them on foot, but there were a few fat men and small-footed women on donkeys, and one or two of the richer people, I noticed by the women\'s dresses they were mostly Manchus, had blossomed out into 305Peking carts. For there was a fair at one of the temples, a very minor temple; and a fair in China seems to be much what it used to be in England, say one hundred, or one hundred and fifty years ago. It attracts all the country people for miles round. Here they were all clad in blue, save the lamas, who were in bright yellow and dingy red. There were the people who came to worship, followed by the people who came to trade, who must make money out of them, men buying, selling, begging, men and women clad in neat blue cotton, and in the dingiest, dirtiest rags, men gathering the droppings of the mules and donkeys, and—how it made me think of the historical novels I used to love to read in the days when novels fascinated me—gentlemen with hooded hawks upon their wrists. All of them wended their way along this road, this beautiful road, this very, very bad road, and I went along with them, the woman who was not a missionary, who was travelling by herself, and who, consequently, was an object of interest to all, far outrivalling the fair, in attraction. It was a scene peculiarly Chinese, and it will be many a long year before I forget it.
On the left-hand side rose a steep ridge well wooded for China, and on the very top of the ridge ran the encircling wall that shut out all but the favoured few from the pleasure-grounds of the Manchu Sovereigns. Six weeks before, up among these mountains of Inner Mongolia, all the trees were leafless, and on this day in June the leaves of the poplars and aspens, acacias and oaks still retained the delicate, dainty green of early spring, and on the right were the steep, precipitous cliffs over306looking the town. One of these cliffs goes by the sinister name of the “Suicide\'s Rock.” The Chinese, though we Westerners are accustomed to regard them as impassive, are at bottom an emotional people. They quarrel violently at times, and one way of getting even with an enemy or a man who has wronged them is to dare him to go over the “Suicide\'s Rock.” To my Western notions it is not quite clear how the offender is scored off, for the challenger must be prepared to accompany the challenged on his dreadful leap. Yet they do it. Three times in the six years the missionaries have been here have a couple gone over the cliff, to be dashed to pieces on the rocks below.
But that sinister cliff was soon passed, and turning a little with the wall we went up a valley, and up that valley for perhaps eight miles, embosomed among the folds of the hills, hills for the most part steep, rounded, and treeless, are the temples, red, and gold, and white, against the green or brown of the hills.
To the glory of God! Surely. Surely. An ideal place for temples whoever placed them there, artist or Emperor, holy man, or grateful son.
“Idols. Idols,” say the missionaries at Jehol sadly, those good, kindly folk, whose life seemed to me an apology for living, a dedication of their whole existence to the austere Deity they have set up. But here I was among other gods.
“We go last first,” said Tuan, and I approved. There would be no fear of my missing something I particularly wanted to see if they were all on my homeward path.
“B-rrr! B-rrr! B-rrr!” cried my “cartee man” encouraging his old mule, and as we went along the road, up the valley, and everywhere in this treeless land, the temples were embowered in groves of trees, sometimes fir-trees, sometimes acacia or white poplar, and always on the road we passed the blue-clad people, and out of the carts peeped the Manchu ladies with highly painted faces and flower-decked hair, till at last we came to a halt under a couple of leafy acacia-trees, by a bridge that had once been planned on noble lines. And bridges are needed here, for the missionaries told me that a very little rain will put this road, that is axle-deep in dust, five feet under water. But the bridge was broken, the stones of the parapet were lying flat on one side; the stones that led up to it were gone altogether. And as the bridge that led up to it so was the temple.
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Tuan, with some difficulty, made me understand it was the Temple of the five hundred and eight Buddhas, and as I went in, attended by a priest in the last stages of dirt and shabbiness, I saw rows upon rows of seated Buddhas greater than life-size, covered with gold leaf that shone out bright in the semi-darkness, with shaven heads and faces, sad and impassive, gay, and laughing, and frowning. Dead gods surely, for the roof is falling in, the hangings are tatters, and the dust of years lies thick on floor, on walls, on the Buddhas themselves. There was a pot of sand before one golden figure rather larger than the rest, and I burned incense there, bowing myself in the House of Rimmon, because I do not think that incense is often burned now before the dead god.
They are all dead these gods in the temples 308builded by a pious Emperor for his pious mother. The next I visited was a lamaserie, built in imitation of the Po-Ta-La in Lhasa. It climbs up the steep hill-side, story after story, with here and there on the various stages a pine-tree, and the wind whispers among its boughs that the Emperor who built and adorned it is long since dead, the very dynasty has passed away, and the gods are forgotten. Forgotten indeed. I got out of my cart at the bottom of the hill, and the gate opened to me, because the General had sent to say that one day that week a foreign woman was coming and she must have all attention, else I judge I might have waited in vain outside those doors. Inside is rather a gorgeous p\'ia lou, flanked on either side by a couple of elephants. I cannot think the man who sculptured them could ever have seen an elephant, he must have done it from description, but he has contrived to put on those beasts such a very supercilious expression it made me smile just to look at them.
From that p\'ia lou the monastery rises. Never in my life before have I seen such an effect of sheer steep high walls. I suppose it must be Tibetan, for it is not Chinese as I know the Chinese. Stage after stage it rose up, showing blank walls that once were pinkish red, with square places like windows, but they were not windows, they were evidently put there to catch the eye and deepen the effect of steepness. Stage after stage I climbed up steep and narrow steps that were closed alongside the wall, and Tuan, according to Chinese custom, supported my elbow, as if it were hardly likely I should be capable of taking another step. Also, according to his custom, he had engaged a ragged follower to 309carry my camera, and a half-naked little boy to bear the burden of the umbrella. I don\'t suppose I should have said anything under any circumstances, China had taught me my limitations where my servants were concerned, but that day I was glad of his aid, for this Tibetan temple meant to me steep climbing. I have no use for stairs. Stage after stage we went, and on each platform the view became wider, far down the valley I could see, and the hills rose range after range, softly rounded, rugged, fantastic, till they faded away in the far blue distance. I had thought the Nine Dragon Temple wonderful, but now I knew that those men of the Ming era who had built it had never dreamed of the glories of these mountains of Inner Mongolia. I was weary before I came to the last pine-tree, but still there was a great walled, flat-topped building towering far above me, its walls the faded pinkish red, on the edge of its far-away roof a gleam of gold.
The steps were so narrow, so steep, and so rugged, that if I had not been sure that never in my life should I come there again I should have declined to go up them, but I did go up, and at the top we came to a door, a door in the high blind wall that admitted us to a great courtyard with high walls towering all round it and a temple, one of the many temples in this building, in the centre. The temple was crowded with all manner of beautiful things, vases of cloisonn??, figures overlaid with gold leaf, hangings of cut silk, the chair of the Dalai Lama in gold and carved lacquer-work, the mule-saddle used by the Emperor Ch\'ien Lung, lanterns, incense burners, shrines, all heaped together in what seemed to me the wildest confusion, and everything was 310more than touched with the finger of decay. All the rich, red lacquer was perished, much of the china and earthenware was broken, the hangings were rotted and torn and ragged, the paint was peeling from stonework and wood, the copper and brass was green with rust. Ichabod! Ichabod! The gods are dead, the great Emperor is but a name.
It was oppressive in there too, for the blank walls towered up four sides square, the bright blue sky was above and the sun was sh............