ory with beautiful
dragon-adorned instruments of bronze given by a Louis of France. There
are temples with yellow-gowned or grey-gowned priests in their
hundreds founded in the times of Kublai Khan. There are Mohammedan
mosques, with Chinese muezzins in blue turbans on feast days; Manchu
palaces with vermillion-red pillars and archways and green and gold
ceilings. There are unending lines of camels plodding slowly in from
the Western deserts laden with all manner of merchandise; there are
curious palanquins slung between two mules and escorted by sword-armed
men that have journeyed all the way from Shansi and Kansu, which are a
thousand miles away; a Mongol market with bare-pated and long-coated
Mongols hawking venison and other products of their chase; comely
Soochow harlots with reeking native scents rising from their hair;
water-carriers and barbers from sturdy Shantung; cooks from epicurean
Canton; bankers from Shansi--the whole Empire of China sending its
best to its old-world barbaric capital, which has now no strength.

And right in the centre of it all is the Forbidden City, enclosing
with its high pink walls the palaces which are full of warm-blooded
Manchu concubines, sleek eunuchs who speak in wheedling tones, and is
always hot with intrigue. At the gates of the Palace lounge bow and
jingal-armed Imperial guards. Inside is the Son of Heaven himself, the
Emperor imprisoned in his own Palace by the Empress Mother, who is as
masterful as any man who ever lived....

I beg you, do you begin to see something of Peking and to understand
the eleven miserable little Legations, each with its own particular
ideas and intrigues, but crouching all together under the Tarter Wall
and tremblingly awaiting with mock assurance the bursting of this
storm? If you are so good as to see this you will realise the
wonderful stage effects, the fierce Mediaevalism in senile decay, the
superb distances, the red dust from the Gobi that has choked up all
the drains and tarnished all the magnificence until it is no more
magnificence at all--this dust which is such a herald of the coming
storm--the new guns and pistols of Herr Krupp and the camels of the
deserts and all the other things all mixed up together....

Oh, I see that we are absurd and can only be made more ridiculous by
coming events. Of course the Boxers coming in openly through the gates
cannot be true, and yet--shades of Genghis Khan and all his Tartars,
what is that? When