Between the wall of the latter and the south wall of
the Tartar city are the Wai Wu (Foreign Office), legations, hotels,
railway station, banks, churches, missions, universities, hospitals,
clubs, newspaper offices, shops, etc., all saying, according to the
conservative Hanlin Chinese, in the words of our _Belle of New York_,
“Of course you can never be like me, but be as like me as you’re able
to be”. The union of Protestant medical missions at Peking, so as to
form a hospital, medical college and nurses’ school of wide scope, has
attracted nation-wide and world-wide attention. The beginning of the
unifying of Protestants thus takes place effectively in the capital of
oldest China, instead of at Geneva, Berlin, London or New York.
How much of the modern and the old, the Oriental and the Occidental,
are mixed up in this wonderful city? There are modern steam rollers;
donkey and camel trains, blue-turbaned couriers on Mongol ponies;
springless, hooded Peking carts, the mule wearing a velvet cloth;
bouncing mule litters; camel trains swaying up and down like the
billows of the Yellow Sea; modern water tanks borne by steel towers;
a modern zoo with a dragon-carved gate; automobiles; victorias drawn
by swift Mongol or black Szechuen ponies; Russian droshkes drawn by
three ponies going different paces; men tugging single-axle carts by
long ropes and harness; coolies with baskets and boxes balanced from
the bamboos on their sweating shoulders; wheelbarrow men transporting
huge bags of millet or salt; men throwing water on the streets with
big wooden spoons; rickshaws, and passenger chairs with ventilators
and windows. There is a great military camp outside the walls. In the
Portuguese cemetery outside of the west gate lie the famous Jesuits
who nearly made the Manchu dynasty Catholic in Kang Hi’s day. In the
revered British cemetery lie the bodies of the famous pioneers of
our race, who, during the centuries, have fought forward the most
advanced line of our civilization. Many of the graves and memorials,
the trees and walls were desecrated in the “Boxer” outrages of 1900.
There is a cemetery for that notorious tribe of palace eunuchs in the
northwest of the Tartar city, and sons had to be bought, or “forged”
for them so as to pay the necessary grave worship of Confucianism.
There is the new Peking Club, the second in cost in the Far East; the
Tsung Hua College, which trains students who are to go to America and
England; and where the old examination stalls and the Hanlin College
stood under the ancient “literati” system, are the modern parliament
buildings (Tzu Cheng Yuan); also National University, and the Wai Wu
Pu (Foreign Office) halls, where Yuan Shih Kai had his headquarters in
the exciting days of 1911–12. Towering over the Tartar city are the
Gothic towers of the French Pe Tang Cathedral, which was successfully
defended by Bishop Favier during the 1900 siege. The white marble
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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