s; and a people so
gay, so friendly, so well-mannered and self-respecting I have found
nowhere else in the world.

The country round Pekin has the beauty we associate with Italy. First
the plain, with its fresh spring green, its dusty paths, its grey and
orange villages, its cypress groves, its pagodas, its memorial slabs.
Then the hills, swimming in amethyst, bare as those of Umbria, fine and
clean in colour and form. For this beauty I was unprepared. I have even
read that there is no natural beauty in China. And I was unprepared for
Pekin too. How can I describe it? At this time of year, seen from above,
it is like an immense green park. You mount the tremendous wall, 40 feet
high, 14 miles round, as broad at the top as a London street, and you
look over a sea of spring-green tree-tops, from which emerge the
orange-gold roofs of palaces and temples. You descend, and find the
great roads laid out by Kubla Khan, running north and south, east and
west, and thick, as the case may be, with dust or mud; and opening out
of them a maze of streets and lanes, one-storeyed houses, grey walls and
roofs, shop fronts all ablaze with gilt carving, all trades plying, all
goods selling, rickshaws, mule-carts canopied with blue, swarming
pedestrians, eight hundred thousand people scurrying like ants in this
gigantic framework of Cyclopean walls and gates. Never was a medley of
greatness and squalor more strange and impressive. One quarter only is
commonplace, that of the Legations. There is the Wagon-lits Hotel, with
its cosmopolitan stream of Chinese politicians, European tourists,
concession-hunters, and the like. There are the Americans, occupying
and guarding the great north gate, and playing baseball in its
precincts. There are the Germans, the Dutch, the French, the Italians,
the Russians, the Japanese; and there, in a magnificent Chinese palace,
are the British, girt by that famous wall of the siege on which they
have characteristically written "Lest we forget!" Forget what? The one
or two children who died in the Legation, and the one or two men who
were killed? Or the wholesale massacre, robbery, and devastation which
followed when the siege was relieved? This latter, I fear, the Chinese
are not likely to forget soon. Yet it would be better if they could. And
better if the Europeans could remember much that they forget--could
remember that they forced their presence and their trade on China
against her will; that their treatie