Court Life in China, Isaac Taylor Headland [an ebook reader .txt] 📗

who had been in the family for many years, and whom I knew well, came upon the street. I followed him begging until we were out of earshot of others, and then told him in a singsong, whining tone, such as beggars use, who I was and why I was there, and asked him to let my uncle know, and said that if they would open the small gate in the evening we would be near and could enter unobserved.

“At first he could not believe it was I, for by this time we indeed looked like veritable beggars, but he was finally convinced and promised to tell my uncle. After nightfall he opened the gate and led us in by a back passage to my aunt’s apartments where she and my uncle were waiting for me. They both burst into tears as they beheld my plight. Two old serving women, who had been many years in the family, helped us to change our clothes and gave us a bath and food. My feet had suffered the most. They were swollen and ulcerated and the dirty rags and dust adhering to the sores had left them in a wretched condition. It took many baths before we were clean, and weeks before my feet were healed.

“We remained with my uncle until the close of the Boxer trouble, and until my grandfather’s return from Hsian where he had gone with the Empress Dowager and the court, and then I came back to Peking.”

“Your grandmother must have felt ashamed when she heard how hard it had gone with you,” I remarked.

“We never mentioned the matter when talking together. That was a time when every one was for himself. Death stared us all in the face.”

“Where is your slave girl now? I should like to see her,” I remarked.

“After the troubles were over I married her to a young man of my uncle’s household. I will send for her and bring her to see you.”

She did so. I found she had forgotten much of what she had learned of Christianity, but she remembered that there was but one God and that Jesus Christ was His Son to whom alone she should pray. She also remembered that as a small child she had been baptized, and that in school she had been taught that “we should love one another”; this was about the extent of her Gospel, but it had touched the heart of her charming little mistress and had saved her life.

There were sometimes amusing things happened when these Chinese ladies called. My husband among other things taught astronomy in the university. He had a small telescope with which he and the students often examined the planets, and they were especially interested in Jupiter and his moons. One evening, contrary to her custom, this same friend was calling after dark, and when the students had finished with Jupiter and his moons, my husband invited us to view them, as they were especially clear on that particular evening.

After she had looked at them for a while, and as my husband was closing up the telescope, she exclaimed: “That is the kind of an instrument that some foreigners sent as a present to my grandfather while he was viceroy, but it was larger than this one.”

“And did he use it?” asked my husband.

“No, we did not know what it was for. Besides my grandfather was too busy with the affairs of the government to try to understand it.”

“And where is it now?” asked Mr. Headland, thinking that the viceroy might be willing to donate it to the college.

“I do not know,” she answered. “The servants thought it was a pump and tried to pump water with it, but it would not work. It is probably among the junk in some of the back rooms.”

“I wonder if we could not find it and fix it up,” my husband persisted.

“I am afraid not,” she answered. “The last I saw of it, the servants had taken the glass out of the small end and were using it to look at insects on the bed.”

One day when one of my friends came to call I said to her: “It is a long time since I have seen you. Have you been out of the city?”

“Yes, I have been spending some months with my father-in-law, the viceroy of the Canton provinces. His wife has died, and I have returned to Peking to get him a concubine.”

“How old is he?” I inquired.

“Seventy-two years,” she replied.

“And how will you undertake to secure a concubine for such an old man?”

“I shall probably buy one.”

A few weeks afterwards she called again having with her a good-looking young woman of about seventeen, her hair beautifully combed, her face powdered and painted, and clothed in rich silk and satin garments, whom she introduced as the young lady procured for her father-in-law. She explained that she had bought her from a poor country family for three hundred and fifty ounces of silver.

“Don’t you think it is cruel for parents to sell their daughters in this way?” I asked.

“Perhaps,” she answered. “But with the money they received for her, they can buy land enough to furnish them a good support all their life. She will always have rich food, fine clothing and an easy time, with nothing to do but enjoy herself, while if she had remained at home she must have married some poor man who might or might not have treated her well, and for whom she would have to work like a slave. Now she is nominally a slave with nothing to do and with every comfort, in addition to what she has done for her family.”

While we were having tea she asked to see Mr. Headland, as many of the older of my friends did. I invited him in, and as he entered the dining-room the young woman stepped out into the hall.

My friend greeted my husband, and with a mysterious nod of her head in the direction of the young woman she said: “Chiu shih na ke,—that’s it.”

XVI

The Social Life of the Chinese Woman

The manners and customs of the Chinese, and their social characteristics, have employed many pens and many tongues, and will continue to furnish all inexhaustible field for students of sociology, of religion, of philosophy, of civilization, for centuries to come. Such studies, however, scarcely touch the province of the practical, at least as yet, for one principal reason—that the subject is so vast, the data are so infinite, as to overwhelm the student rather than assist him in sound generalizations. —A. R. Colquhoun in “China in Transformation.”

XVI

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE CHINESE WOMAN

The home life of a people is too sacred to be touched except by the hand of friendship. Our doors are closed to strangers, locked to enemies, and opened only to those of our own race who are in harmony and sympathy with us. What then shall we say when people of an alien race come seeking admission? They must bring some social distinction,—letters of introduction, or an ability to help us in ways in which we cannot help ourselves.

In the case of a people as exclusive as the Chinese this is especially true, so that with the exception of one or two women physicians and the wife of one of our diplomats no one has ever been admitted in a social as well as professional way to the women’s apartments of the homes of the better class of the Chinese people.

A Chinese home is different from our own. It is composed of many one-story buildings, around open courts, one behind the other, and sometimes covers several acres of ground. Then it is divided into men’s and women’s apartments, the men receiving their friends in theirs and the women likewise receiving their friends by a side gate in their own apartments, which are at the rear of the dwelling. A wealthy man usually, in addition to his wife, has one or more concubines, and each of these ladies has an apartment of her own for herself and her children,—though all the children of all the concubines reckon as belonging to the first wife.

I have heard Sir Robert Hart tell an amusing incident which occurred in Peking. He said that the Chinese minister appointed to the court of Saint James came to call on him before setting out upon his journey. After conversing for some time he said:

“I should be glad to see Lady Hart. I believe it is customary in calling on a foreign gentleman to see his lady, is it not?”

“It is,” said Sir Robert, “and I should be delighted to have you see her, but Lady Hart is in England with our children, and has not been here for twenty years.”

“Ah, indeed, then perhaps I might see your second wife.”

“That you might, if I had one. But the customs of our country do not allow us to have a second wife. Indeed they would imprison us if we were to have two wives.”

“How singular,” said the official with a nod of his head. “You do not appreciate the advantages of this custom of ours.”

That there are advantages in this custom from the Chinese point of view, I have no doubt. But from certain things I have heard I fear there are disadvantages as well. One day the head eunuch from the palace of one of the leading princes in Peking came to ask my wife, who was their physician, to go to see some of the women or children who were ill. It was drawing near to the New Year festival and, of course, they had their own absorbing topics of conversation in the servants’ courts. I said to him:

“The Prince has a good many children, has he not?”

“Twenty-three,” he answered.

“How many concubines has he?” I inquired.

“Three,” he replied, “but he expects to take on two more after the holidays.”

“Doesn’t it cause trouble in a family for a man to have so many women about? I should think they would be jealous of each other.”

“Ah,” said he, with a wave of his hand and a shake of his head, “that is a topic that is difficult to discuss. Naturally if this woman sees him taking to that woman, this one is going to eat vinegar.”

They do “eat vinegar,” but perhaps as little of it as any people who live in the way in which they live, for the Chinese have organized their home life as nearly on a governmental basis as any people in the world.

In addition to the wife and concubines, each son when he marries brings his wife home to a parental court, and all these sisters-in-law, or daughters-in-law add so much to the complications of living, for each must have her own retinue of servants.

Young people in China are all engaged by their parents without their knowledge or consent. This was very unsatisfactory to the young people of the old regime, and it is being modified in the new. One day one of my students in discussing this matter said to me:

“Our method of getting a wife is very much better than either the old Chinese method or your foreign method.”

“How is that?” I asked.

“Well,” said he, “according to the old Chinese custom a man could never see his wife until she was brought to his house. But we can see the girls in public meetings, we have sisters in the girls’ school, they have brothers in the college, and when we go home during vacation we can learn all about each other.”

“But how do you consider it better than our method?” I persisted.

“Why, you see, when you