Pierre Loti

“ Poor Yellow City, where we walk this morning, meeting so many people, so many armed detachments, so many uniforms; poor Yellow City, closed to the world for so many centuries, an inviolable refuge for the rites and mysteries of the past; city of splendor, oppression, and silence! When I saw it in the autumn it had an air of desertion which suited it; but now I find it overrun by the soldiers of all Europe. In all the palaces and golden pagodas "barbarian" troopers drag their swords or groom their horses under the very noses of the great dreamy Buddhas. ”

“ The European streets along which they are running (here called "concessions") , seen through a cloud of blinding dust, have the look of a big city, but the almost luxurious houses are riddled with shells, literally ripped open and without roofs or windows. The shores of the rivers, here as at Taku, are like a fevered babel; thousands of junks lie there, unloading troops, horses, guns. In the streets where Chinese workmen are carrying enormous loads of war supplies, one meets soldiers of all the nations of Europe, officers in every sort of uniform, on horseback, in chairs, or on foot. ”

“ Passing through the tunnels, one enters an immense marble whiteness,—a whiteness that is turning into ivory yellow and is stained by the autumn leaves and the wild growth that has invaded [177] this deserted spot. The place is paved with marble, and straight ahead, rising like a wall, is an extraordinary marble terrace, on which stands the throne room, with its sturdy blood-red columns and its roof of old enamel. This white enclosure is like a cemetery—so much green has pushed its way up between the paving-stones,—where the silence is broken only by the magpies and the crows. ”

“ At first it was only gray earth as at Taku; then there were reeds and herbage touched with frost. On all sides are immense splashes of red, like blood stains, due to the autumn flowering of a kind of marsh plant. On the horizon of this desert myriads of migratory birds may be seen, rising like clouds, eddying and then falling. The north wind blows and it is very cold.
Soon the plain is peopled with tombs,—tombs without number, all of the same shape,—each one a kind of cone of earth piled up and surmounted by a ball of faience,—some small, like little huts, others as large as camping tents. ”

“ Cavalry, infantry, and music, all seem to be rolling on in our direction, with enough noise from the brasses and the tambourines to make the sepulchral walls of the Violet City tremble, while above the heads of the thousands of soldiers groups and rows of extravagantly Chinese colored lanterns are swinging to the movement of the horses' hoofs or to the rhythm of human shoulders.
The troops have passed, but the procession is not nearly over. A sharp, delirious noise that gets on one's nerves follows the marches played by our musicians,—the noise of gongs, zithers, cymbals, bells. ”

“ I mount the inclined plane leading to the esplanade, and here I am alone, much alone, in the silence of my lofty garden and my strange palace.
In order to reach my work-room, I have to go along narrow passageways between old trees and the most unnatural rockwork. The kiosk is flooded with light, the beautiful sunshine falls on my table and on my black seats with their cushions of golden yellow; the beautiful melancholy October sunshine illumines and warms my chosen [114] retreat, where the Empress, it seems, loved to come and sit and watch from this high point her lake all pink with flowers. ”

“ The gold ceiling rises from about half the height of the statue into a cupola, also gilded, which forms a sort of box enclosing the upper part of the figure. To see the face one must go close to the altars and look up between the rigid flowers and the incense-burners. It then looks like a Titanic mummy in its case, with a downcast look that makes one nervous. But on looking steadily, it exercises a sort of spell; one is hypnotized and held by that smile so impartially bestowed upon all this entourage of dying splendor, gold, dust, cold, twilight, ruins, silence. ”

“ Behold us in a sort of mortuary wood, walking over the brown autumn grass.
A triumphal arch is the first thing we come across, built to pay homage to some great Chinese thinker. It is of a charming design, although very peculiar, with three little bell-towers of yellow enamel, which crown the whole, their curved roofs decorated with monsters at each one of the corners.
It stands there like some precious bibelot lost among the ruins. Its freshness is surprising where all else is so dilapidated. One realizes its great age from the archaic nature of its details ”

“ Before the ruins of a quarter where the flag of France is floating, the Bengali approaches the lugubrious shore, and our Zouaves disembark rather discountenanced by the sombre reception given them by China. While waiting for some sort of a shelter to be provided, they light fires on the shore which the wind fans into flame, and there they heat their evening meal in darkness and silence and in the midst of clouds of infected dust.
On the deserted plain from which the dust, the cold, and the squalls come, the black devastated town, overrun with soldiers, extends, breathing pestilence and death. ”

“ A feeble little Chinese candle of red wax, stuck in a bottle,—a candle picked up in the débris from some ancestral altar,—sheds a dim light, blown as it is by the wind. Our plates, in fact all the dishes, are of porcelain of inestimable value,—imperial yellow, marked with the cipher of a fastidious emperor, who was a contemporary of Louis XV. But our wine and our muddy water—boiled and reboiled for fear of poison in the wells—are in horrible old bottles with bits of potato, cut into shape by the soldiers, for corks. ”

“ Everything is perishing from old age; the stones are worn away, the wooden doors are falling into dust. There are some old shadowy courts that are given up to white-bearded octogenarian servants, who have built cabins, where they live like recluses, occupied in training magpies or in cultivating sickly flowers in pots under the eyes of the everlasting grinning old marble and bronze beasts. No cloistered green, no monk's cell, was ever half so gloomy as these little courts, so shut in and so dark, overshadowed for centuries by the uncontrolled caprices of the Chinese emperors. ”

“ And when, after the jolting, the noise, and the crowds, our carriage glides at last over the large paving-stones of the Yellow City, all this magnificence seems to me, on second sight, more than ever condemned,—a thing which has had its day. Imperial Pekin, in its everlasting dust, is now warmed by the rays of the April sun, yet it does not waken, does not return to life after its long, cold winter. Not a drop of rain has fallen yet, the ground is dust, the parks are dust. ”

“ After it reaches the Imperial City, this avenue, already a league in length, is absolutely unfrequented, and goes on even wider than before between long regular buildings intended for soldiers' barracks. No more little gilded houses, no more small shops, no more crowds! At this last imprisoning rampart the life of the people stops, under the oppression of the throne; and at the very end of this solitary roadway, watched over by the slender marble beasts surmounting the obelisks, the forbidden centre of Pekin becomes visible, the retreat of the Son of Heaven. ”

“ A dull light falls from the wintry sky through opaque clouds that are filled with snow.
In the centre of a gray wall there is a breach where an African chasseur is on guard; on one side lies a dead dog, on the other a pile of rags and filth breathing a corpse-like odor. This, it appears, is the entrance to my palace.
We are black with dust, powdered with snow, and our teeth are chattering with cold, when we finally get down from our chariot in a court encumbered with débris, where my comrade, Captain C., the aide-de-camp, comes to meet me. ”

“ A Mongolian caravan begins to pass us, always in the same silence, broken only by the croakings of the ravens. These enormous Mongolian camels, with their furry coats, muffs on their legs, and manes [59] like lions, file in an endless procession past our frightened horses. They wear neither bells nor rattles, like the thin beasts of the Arabian deserts; their feet sink deep into the sand, which muffles their footsteps so the silence is not broken by their march.
Perceived through a veil of fine snow and black dust, the caravan has passed us, and moves on without a sound, like a phantom thing. ”

“ Above the dust the sun shines clear and white, making resplendent the cold, penetrating light in which things stand out incisively. Objects that are high up above the ground stand out with absolute clearness. The smallest of small monsters on the top of the triumphal arches may be clearly seen, as well as the most delicate carving on the summits of the stele; one can even count the teeth, the forked tongues, the squinting eyes of the hundreds of gold chimæras which jut from the roofs.
Pekin, the city of carvings and gildings, the city of claws and horns, is still capable of creating illusions ”

“ There is nothing sumptuous, nothing great in this dusty, decrepit palace which we have traversed unheeding, but it speaks of real China, of old China, grimacing and hostile. There is a profusion of monsters in marble, in broken faience, and in worm-eaten wood, falling to pieces from sheer old age or threatening from the edges of roofs to do so; frightful forms half buried in sand and ashes, with horns, claws, forked tongues, and big squinting eyes. ”

“ These Chinese chariots cannot be closed; they are like a simple sentry box mounted on wheels,—so to-day we are lashed by the wind, cut by the snow, blinded by the dust.
First come the ruins of the legation district, full of soldiers. Then more lonely, almost deserted and entirely Chinese ruins—one gray, dusty devastation, seen vaguely through clouds of black and clouds of white. At the gates and on the bridges are European or Japanese sentinels, for the whole city is under military rule. From time to time we meet soldiers and ambulances carrying the flag of the Red-Cross Society. ”

“ The two great creatures content themselves with dancing before me, to the sound of flutes and gongs, in the centre of the circle of Chinese, which is extended in order to make room for them. At length the struggle becomes quite terrible, while the gongs and cymbals rage. They become entangled, they roll on top of one another, they drag their long rings in the dust, and then, all at once, with a bound they get up, as though in a passion, and stand shaking their enormous heads at one another, trembling with rage. ”

“ This first nightfall on our junk is full of gloom in the strange solitude into which hour by hour we penetrate still further. The shadows are deep about us and there are many dead along the ground. In the confused and infinite darkness, all about us seems hostile or gloomy, and the cold increases with the silence and obscurity.
The impression of melancholy disappears at supper when our Chinese lantern is lighted, illuminating the sarcophagus, which we have closed as tightly as possible to shut out the wind. ”

“ Confusion reigns about us, but it is the confusion of a fête instead of that incidental to battle and death, as I had known it here last autumn. Zouaves and African chasseurs are running about, carrying ladders, draperies, and armfuls of branches and flowers. The old cedars in the vicinity of the beautiful pagoda shining with enamel, lacquer, and gold, are disguised until they look like fruit-trees; upon their almost sacred branches are thousands of yellow balls that look like big oranges. Chains supporting garlands of Chinese lanterns go from one to the other. ”

“ The great imperial lake is spread out before us, spanned by the Marble Bridge; venerable trees form a girdle around shores out of which rise the fanciful roofs of palaces and pagodas,—roofs that are one marvellous mass of faience. As in the landscapes painted on Chinese fans, there are groups of tiny rocks in the foreground, and small enamelled monsters from a neighboring kiosk, while in the middle distance there are knotted branches which have fallen from some old cedar. ”

“ Indefatigable artists, with the Chinese patience and skill which confound us, have carved crowds of little figures, monsters, and birds in the midst of flowers, and trees on which you can count the leaves.
Last summer, while the Boxers were burning so continually, these astonishing façades, representing an incalculable amount of human labor, were consumed by the hundreds; they made Pekin a veritable museum of carving and gold, the like of which men of to-day will never again have the time to construct. ”

“ The stupendous Mongolian camels, brown and woolly, attached to one another in long endless files, pass slowly and solemnly along, unceasingly like the waters of a river, raising as they walk the powdery bed which stifles the sounds of this entire city. They are going, who knows where, into the depths of the Thibetan or Mongolian deserts, carrying in the same indefatigable and unconscious way thousands of bales of merchandise; taking the place of canals and rivers which convey barges and junks over immense distances. So heavy is the dust raised by their feet that they can scarcely lift them ”

“ When I arrive the church is already packed with Chinese, both men and women, kneeling close together, and humming in an undertone a sort of uninterrupted chant that resembles the buzzing of an immense hive. There is a strong smell of musk, for both cotton and silk robes are saturated with it; and besides that there is the intolerable odor that belongs to the yellow race, and which is something indescribable. In front of me, to the farthest ends of the church, men with bowed heads are kneeling. ”