Mei Lan-fang, most famous of Chinese actors, who, like his father and grandfather before him, plays only female parts
Mei Lan-fang, most famous of Chinese actors, who, like his father and grandfather before him, plays only female parts
Mei Lan-fang, most famous of Chinese actors, who, like his father and grandfather before him, plays only female parts
In the vast compound of the Altar of Heaven
In the vast compound of the Altar of Heaven
In the vast compound of the Altar of Heaven
Over the wall from our house, boats plied on the moat separating us from the Chinese City
Over the wall from our house, boats plied on the moat separating us from the Chinese City
Over the wall from our house, boats plied on the moat separating us from the Chinese City
Just outside the Tartar Wall of Peking the night-soil of the city, brought in wheelbarrows, is dried for use as fertilizer
Just outside the Tartar Wall of Peking the night-soil of the city, brought in wheelbarrows, is dried for use as fertilizer
Just outside the Tartar Wall of Peking the night-soil of the city, brought in wheelbarrows, is dried for use as fertilizer
It is a seven-day journey to the Chinese heaven and back, so that people have a little respite from the irksome surveillance of the god of the kitchen. During that week there was a furor of house-cleaning, as the Chinese misunderstand the term; the well-to-do renewed their paper windows; those who could afford it went so far as to have the wooden parts freshly painted. Especially on the last day of the year much shaving, washing, and bathing went on; the baths outside the southern gates of the Tartar City were crowded as they never are at ordinary times, when a two-to-ten copper bath once a month is considered ample. All that last day, too, thechop-a-chopof food, especially of meat dumplings, being prepared for the many guests of the following days, when such work would be taboo, sounded from every house that was not a poor man’s home indeed. Faded old scraps of paper came down everywhere and bright new ones went up, particularly those long upright red slips opposite each door, bearing the four familiar characters forK’ai men chien hsi—“Open door see happiness.” Some of these were put up by the householders themselves, some by poor neighbors who hoped for a slight remembrance from the inmates. One saw them all over China for months afterward. The most miserable little hovels far outside the walls put up new paper gods that made brilliant splashes on doors and mud façades. Perhaps the saddest thing about the Chinese New Year is that all debts are expected to be paid before it breaks, which was particularly hard on what is still recognized abroad as the Chinese Government, months in arrears with every one except its Tuchuns and high employees of special influence. Two men at least I saw next day wandering about with a lantern, a pretense that it is still night and dunning still permissible.
New Year’s day is everybody’s birthday in China; so there is a double reason for new clothes appearing everywhere. Even beggars and rag-pickers seemed to have them, or at least well washed and mended ones, and the populace presented such a sight of approximate cleanliness as it will not until another year rolls by and compels it to change again. A new kitchen god, gaudy on its thin paper, is put up during the first hours of the new year, with a little shrine, and firecrackers and incense welcome him. Firecrackers, indeed, were the most conspicuous part of the celebration. They boomed all night, close under our back walls and all over the city; even “Ha-li” was restless with the incessant uproar. This was partly in honor of the kitchen gods, but largely to frighten off the evil spirits lurking about to contaminate the new year at the start. Among the Chinese therewas no attempt to sleep that night; even ouramaasked permission to go home, and said that she would sit up all night, eating meat dumplings from about two in the morning until daybreak—yet she is a woman of unusual common sense for China, with the utmost scorn for those who still bind their feet.
For the first five days of the new year women are supposed not to leave home or to enter that of another, though in Peking many disobey at least the first half of this ancient rule. The men, on the other hand, go out early and often, not only on the first but on the succeeding days, to call upon all their friends, particularly on the mother-in-law who reigns over each household, to give greetings, and incidentally to fill themselves beyond nature’s intention with meat dumplings. Our teacher was still weary from this ordeal when he again reported for duty. Rachel, however, was strictly enjoined by theamanot to call on a neighbor at whose house she had attended a wedding during the winter; it would be even worse form than not to have a mother-in-law present to receive those who called upon us. As in France, New Year’s is the time for giving presents; no sooner had we distributed a dozen silver dollars in red envelopes among the servants than they despatched theamato get us presents,—food dainties for us adults, toys for “Ha-li.” Of all the celebration, however, perhaps the detail that looked strangest was to see the shops closed, long row after row of them blank-faced with board shutters where we had never seen them before. Drums and firecrackers sounded inside—some say that gambling goes on apace—whether to scare off devils or merely for the joy of making a noise; probably both motives existed, depending on the individual temperament. Foreigners sometimes accuse the Chinese of laziness because they take as much as a week’s rest at New Year’s, as if this were anything compared with our fifty-two and more holidays a year. Besides, even the shops are in few cases really closed; trust any Chinese merchant not to miss a possible stroke of business. There is almost always a peep-hole, if you know where to look for it, and one man inside who will make a special exception in favor of any one who finds it. Merchants can send their goods to the fairs, anyway; these spring up everywhere, especially in temple grounds, in and outside the city, where every one comes to burn joss-sticks by the bundle, until many a huge urn before the gods runs over with ashes. These are the gayest of markets, with peep-shows, acrobats, coolies, posing for the day as sword-swallowers, story-tellers, and musicians, with amateur and professional theatrical performances indoors and out, with everyconceivable gambling device, men, women, and children crowded around them, with all manner of playthings for sale,—singing “diavolo” tops reaching almost the size of drums, pink bottles ofchianti-shape which reward the blower with a peculiar noise, clusters of toy windmills on one handle that spin in chorus as the holder rides homeward in his rickshaw or his Peking cart, kites of every description, some fully man-size, of bird, beetle, airplane shape. There are no age-limits among the Chinese in the use of New Year’s toys; even solemn old men fly kites all over the city at this season, among the swirls of pigeons following their whistle-bearing leader about the cloudless heavens.
All this went on for a week or more, though with diminishing ardor; for some soon tire of so long a holiday, and many would starve if they celebrated it all, so that gradually men went back to work, though not a few stuck it out. We hardly noticed a lack of rickshaws even on the first day, and the calls of street-hawkers never completely died out. If our servants went out more than usual we missed none of their usual services, and certainly the cook must have found the markets open. The real New Year’s duty of every Chinese, of course, is to go home, though it be across ten provinces, to put paper “cash,” such as flutter along the route of every funeral, on the graves of his ancestors, and to prepare them special food, preferably duck or chicken, of which they can eat only the “flavor,” leaving three guesses as to what becomes of the rest. Many do go home, but in modern days it is surprising how many find this imperative journey quite impossible. At length the celebration petered out, though crowded carts of people in their best garments could be seen plodding toward the temples outside our East Wall up to the last, and Peking settled down to its industrious seven days a week again.
With the republic, China officially adopted the Western calendar, as Japan did long ago; but the masses cling to the old one, with its animal names for the twelve years that are constantly recurring. Like Christianity, the new calendar is considered something foreign, which is quite enough, even leaving the tenacity of old custom aside, to condemn it among many Chinese; and even in official circles the lunar New Year is celebrated more thoroughly than the other. The result is that no government employee has to come to office on the foreign New Year, and no one does on the old one, when even cabinet members go to their ancestral homes or on a spree to Tientsin or Shanghai. Nor is the cult of cyclical animals by any means dead among the Chinese. Almost over our head on the East Wall stand the famous astronomical instruments,some of them made by Verbiest himself, which the Germans carried off in 1900 and very recently returned in accordance with a clause in the Treaty of Versailles; and just beyond them is an old temple, the occupants of which include among their duties the annual task of compiling the popular almanac. One may see original or reprinted copies of this everywhere in China, for it is indispensable to the fortuneteller, the geomancer, and all their innumerable ilk, if not to the mass of the people themselves. Here are set forth the lucky and unlucky days for marriages or funerals, for washing the hair, for beginning a new building, for every act of importance in the Chinese daily life. Without it how could match-makers know whether or not the birth-years of possible brides and grooms conflict? Obviously if one was born in the year of the rabbit and the other in that of the dog, or in the years of the tiger and the sheep respectively, the result of an alliance would be a sorry household.
This year the almanac concocted by our priestly neighbors has a pig as “running title” from cover to cover, as well as the frequent recurrence of this motif throughout its pages. For this is the Year of the Pig, which began on our own February 16, and for twelve moons—this year there does not happen to be an intercalary thirteenth—the millions of Mohammedan Chinese must express themselves on that subject by using some such subterfuge as “Black Sheep.” Moreover, it is the end of a cycle of Cathay, the pig being the last of the twelve cyclical animals which pass five times to make such a cycle. This, it seems, presages the worst year of the whole sixty, and the soothsayers enlivened this New Year’s with the most pessimistic predictions. According to the street-side necromancers, who make their livelihood, such as it is, by telling the fortunes of individuals or of nations, much calamity is due China before this Year of the Pig is done. Millions, perhaps, will die of war, pestilence, or famine, or a combination of these—one fellow went so far as to assure his listeners that three fourths of the population of Peking will be wiped out. Great disasters are promised all over the country, particularly in the province of Shensi, which must suffer especially for the privilege of being the birthplace of the next emperor, whom the necromancers assert is already approaching man’s estate there. It is hopeless, therefore, runs the gossip, to expect a settlement of China’s crying difficulties during the twelvemonth of the Pig—some of us wonder if the foreign legations have been imbued with the same spirit. That is the evil of superstitions particularly in a land where the majority is still influenced bythem; the mere fact that large numbers of people believe all this market-stall nonsense causes at least a psychological depression, and probably increases the likelihood of the beliefs being realized.
However, these popular oracles go on, after this year conditions will rapidly improve, and it is almost certain that with the new cycle will come a return to order and prosperity. Every friend of China sincerely hopes so, for she certainly needs just that very badly, whether she deserves it or not. No doubt the next cycle of sixty years will bring something of the sort, even though it is difficult to think of China’s calamities abruptly ceasing with this inauspicious porcine year.
There are good as well as unkind things to be said of the Chinese lunar calendar. It is easy, for instance, to tell the time of their month merely by glancing at the sky on any unclouded evening, and no one need ask what day the moon will be full. By the old system of reckoning the Chinese have a whole list of dates fixing changes of weather, and if one year’s experience is a fair test these are more accurate than the prophecies of our highest salaried weather men. Some weeks after the lunar New Year comes the “Stirring of the Insects”; the “Corn Rain” is set for one of the first days of the third moon—that is, late in our April; there are the fixed days of “Sprouting Seeds,” the “Small Heat” and the “Great Heat,” the “Hoar Frost,” the “Cold Dew,” the “Slight Snow” and the “Great Snow”—though the last rarely reaches Peking—and so on around the eternal cycle again. But “Pure Brightness,” otherwise known as Arbor day now, on which the president himself came to plant trees almost next door to us, has come and gone;pengsare springing up everywhere, shading the courtyards, forming whole new roofs and fronts over the better shops, and implying that it is time we were moving on, for the “Great Heat” is no misnomer in Peking.