Alice in Asia: The 1905 Taft Mission to Asia, Beijing 北京

Beijing 北京

September 6 – 11: Voyage to Tianjin

September 11: Anchor at Dagu

September 12: Arrival at Tianjin, train to Beijing

“Mr. Taft and the majority of the party sailed for home from Hong Kong. Those who stayed behind including among others the Newlands, Nick, Mabel, Amy, Gillet, Bourke Cockran, General and Mrs. Corbin, and myself, continued up the coast on the transport, sailing through the Yellow Sea, on our way to Tientsin where we landed and went directly to Pekin.”

“In Peking I stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Rockhill in the Chinese house that was then the American Legation. Mr. Rockhill was a great Chinese student and lover of China. In the past he had gone far into Tibet disguised as a Chinese. Though he was very tall and of an almost washed-out fairness, he had somehow grown to look curiously Chinese; one felt that China had gotten into his blood; that if he let his mustache grow and pulled it down at the corners in a long thin twist, and wore Chinese clothes, he could have passed for a serene expounder, whether of the precepts of Lao-Tze or Confucius, I do not know. The Legation building was just inside the high thick walls of the city, its rooms opening upon a courtyard where we dined the night that we arrived, and after dinner watched a Chinese magician do remarkable tricks by the light of the lanterns that hung from the trees.”

September 13: Beijing

“The next morning we drove out in rickshas to the Temple of Heaven. I had been reading Marco Polo, and his description of the road between the Temple of Heaven and Pekin might have been written the day that we were there; the same shifting, hurrying crowd, the same street sounds, the same beggars, the same smells.”

“That afternoon we left for the summer palace, some fourteen miles outside the walls of Pekin at the foot of the western hills, I in a chair carried by four bearers.”

“The Rockhills, Newlands, Mabel, Amy, and I spent the night in Prince Ching’s palace. The Chinese palaces are like all other Chinese houses, a series of one-storied halls built around a courtyard, each hall divided by partitions into three rooms. I was given a whole hall; my bed in one of the side rooms, smaller and lower ceilinged than the centre room. Dinner in the courtyard was alternate courses of European and Chinese food. I ate only the Chinese which I liked enormously, particularly the sharks fins, and washed it down with rose wine. The rose wine was delicious, something like sake or a very smooth liqueur, and very strong. How strong it was I had no idea until dinner was nearly over. We had had a long day sightseeing and meeting people and getting out to the summer palace and had decided that it would be a good plan to go to bed directly after dinner in order to be rested for the ceremonies the following morning which were to begin at an early hour.”

“As we sat at the table talking, I began to realize that rose wine was indeed powerful and that to walk a straight line across that courtyard to my rooms was going to be difficult. The faces of the others swayed in the light of the lanterns and when I spoke I could hear my own voice very far away and was very careful to enunciate very, very distinctly. Then I wanted to laugh at the thought of my father’s daughter, spending the night in the summer palace of the Empress Dowager and completely uncertain of being able to navigate accurately. I recollect the feeling of pleased surprise that I was actually able to stand up, the meticulously said “good nights,” the determined concentration on the point that I had to make—the door of my hall that seemed a world’s length away. But I got there, and I don’t believe anyone but I was aware that I was literally intoxicated by rose wine. Before dinner I had looked at the hard Chinese pillow with distaste, the long, solid apology for a pillow that felt more like a log of wood. That didn’t bother me now. I fell onto that bed and there I slept without moving until seven o’clock the next morning when we had to get ready for our audience; and, of course, I never felt better.”

September 14: Beijing, audience with the imperial court

“The audience with the Dowager Empress took place at eight o’clock. The other members of the party had to drive out from Pekin, all dressed in their best clothes, soon after dawn. We were led to a room where everyone was provided with a cake of scented soap, a bottle of perfume, and a basin, but no water, with which to make ourselves pristine for the ceremony, while a number of officials, amahs, and eunuchs hovered solicitously around us. Finally we were escorted to the hall where the audience was to take place.”

“The Empress Tsz’e Hsi ranks with Catherine of Russia and Elizabeth of England, with the Egyptian Queens Hatshepsut and Cleopatra, as one of the great women rulers in history. She came of a Manchu family and was brought in her early youth to the court of Hien-feng, and soon became his favorite concubine. She was promoted from that position to be secondary wife to the Emperor. The principal Empress was childless, and when Hien-feng died, he left the throne to T’ung-chi, his son by Tsz’e Hsi. T’ung-chi died in boyhood, and the Dowager Empress selected, as his successor, Kwang-su, a nephew of Hien-feng, whose mother was her sister. While Emperors came and went, regardless of who was on the throne, Tsz’e Hsi ruled.”

“The character and power of the Empress were palpable, and though at the time we met her she was over seventy, one felt her charm. She by no means looked her age; her small, brilliant, black eyes were alert and piercing; they and her rather cruel, thin mouth, turned up at one corner, drooping a little at the other, made her face vivid and memorable.”

“Our first sight of her was through the doorway of the Hall of Audience. She was seated on a throne several steps higher than the floor, very erect, one slim hand with its golden nail sheathes on the chair arm, the other in her lap. She wore a long loose Chinese coat covered with embroidery, strings of pearls and jade around her neck, her smooth black hair arranged in a high Manchu head-dress decorated with pearls and jade and artificial flowers. There were great pyramids of fruit on either side of her chair. Mrs. Rockhill presented me first; I curtsied, advanced a few steps, curtsied again, advanced a few more steps, and then curtsied for the third time in front of the throne. Then I stepped to one side and looked on while the rest of the party went through the same performance.”

“On the lowest step of the throne sat the Emperor, a man in his early thirties; limp and huddled, his mouth a little open, his eyes dull and wandering, no expression in his face. We were not presented to him. No attention was paid to him. He just sat there, looking vacantly about.”

“After the presentations were over, the ladies of the party were taken to lunch with the Empress of the East and the Empress of the West, the two principal wives of the Emperor, and a most delightful old Chinese princess. There was no interpreter, but our hostesses and their ladies kept up a continuous chatter, we talking busily in English with one another and at them. After lunch, when we wandered about the gardens, the Empress Dowager joined us. She gave us all presents, heavy gold bracelets and rings that were carried by an attendant who followed her around and handed us each particular gifts. “The old Buddha” talked to all of us in turn through an interpreter. Her conversation with me was the usual perfunctory formalities of such an occasion: the high esteem in which China held the United States, inquiries as to the health of my father, the hope that I was enjoying my visit.”

“The interpreter was Wu Ting Fang who had been Minister in Washington. He stood between us, a little to the side, but suddenly, as the conversation was going on, the Empress said something in a small savage voice, whereat he turned quite gray, and got down on all fours, his forehead touching the ground.”

“The Empress would speak; he would lift his head and say it in English to me; back would go his forehead to the ground while I spoke; up would come his head again while he said it in Chinese to the Empress; then back to the ground would go his forehead again. There was no clue to her reason for humiliating him before us.”

“When I told Father about it he thought it might have been to show us that this man whom we accepted as an equal was to her no more than something to put her foot on—that is was a way of indicating that none of us either amounted to much more than that in her opinion. It was a curious experience to see the same man who enjoyed making blandly insolent remarks at the dinner parties in Washington and invidious comments on America in press interviews, kowtowing at one’s feet. One literally had the feeling that she might at any moment say, “Off with his head,” and that off the head would go.”

“She and her suite finally withdrew, and we wandered on through the gardens. The others were on foot, but I was given a chair, a yellow chair tasseled cushioned, in which I led the party, high on the shoulders of eight bearers and surrounded by chattering court officials and eunuchs through the lovely grounds of the summer palace, along garden walks, past ponds and pavilions, the yellow or green tiled roofs of the palace buildings and temples showing through the trees. There are few things lovelier than the sweep of a Chinese roof, the eaves painted in brilliant greens, blues, and vermillion, and often the eaves and roof ridge decorated with grotesque figures of dragons, phoenixes, and lion dogs.”

“My bearers made a better pace than the rest of the party, and for a wile I was alone in the gardens of the summer palace, none but Chinese faces in sight. It was fantastic, incredible, Cathy of the old tales. I joined the others at the edge of the lake, at the big white marble summer house built in imitation of a Chinese junk, where we had tea and sweetmeats and an assortment of the very oldest eggs of all. I liked all the Chinese things that we were given to eat, even the antique eggs. Then, in little boats, we went down the canal towards Pekin.”

September 15-17: Winter Palace and Forbidden City

“The next morning two court officials came to the Legation and presented me with a little black dog sent by the Empress, and in the afternoon her photograph arrived. It is an excellent photograph, really like the “old Buddha.” I thought so at the time when her face was fresh in my mind, and to look at it now, recalls vividly that day at the summer palace. A troop of cavalry clattered down the street to the Legation, surrounding an imperial yellow chair in which, by itself, was the photograph. It was in an ordinary occidental gilt frame, but the box that held it was lined and wrapped in imperial yellow brocades and the two officials were of much higher rank than those who brought the Pekinese.”

“We dined at the German Legation and met, I should think, most of the foreigners in Pekin. Indeed, we saw so many people that there was little time during our brief visit for sightseeing, though I did get to the yellow Lama Temple beyond the walls, and we were also taken to the Forbidden City.”

“As the court was not there, it amounted to much more than going through a museum. I would have given a great deal to have stayed longer in Pekin. I wanted to go to the Great Wall and the Ming tombs. I wanted to take a temple for the summer in the western hills. I made a vow to go back every two years—and I have never been back. If I should go, I know that it would be unbelievably changed.”

September 18: Tianjin Dinner with Yuan Shi-kai

“We left Pekin to spend a night at Tientsin and dine with Yuan Shi-Kai, Viceroy of Chi-li, in the Viceroy’s yamen. I sat between him and his wife, and we were told that it was the first time that she had been allowed to meet foreigners. Yuan Shi-kai had less poise than other Chinese dignitaries that we had met; he seemed almost fidgety. Perhaps it was because his wife’s notion of being a “perfect hostess” was to take the food on her plate, taste it, and then put it on my, a performance that the Viceroy put an end to in a rather menacing voice. An old family friend, Baron Speck Sternberg, who was German Ambassador in Washington while Father was President, had been in China during the Chinese-Japanese War and knew Yuan Shi-kai at that time. I recollect hearing him say that Yuan Shi-kai was almost the only Chinese that he had never encountered who lacked physical courage, or the indifference to personal fate that amounts to the same thing. Whether that was so or not, he was an agreeable dinner companion. Though conversation was again through an interpreter, it was easy and interesting, on all sorts of topics. He was a modern, interested in civil service reform, education, and particularly in bringing the army to a higher degree of efficiency.”

“His own command, the fifty or sixty thousand troops of the Chi-li Province, was trained by foreign officers and was a well set up competent force.”