The first time that I saw Prince Rung was in the month of May, a few days after my arrival at Peking. He came to the Legation to discuss business with Wade, accompanied by two other ministers of the Tsung Li Ya-mên. The Prince was in high spirits, laughing and joking merrily; he was always good-humoured and genial, but that day there was a special reason for his cheerfulness; he had just gone through one of those alternate storms and calms, often incident to Oriental life, but specially frequent where the government is conducted with “the suspended curtain”—that is to say by an Empress who may not be seen. To me he was very courteous and kind, and whenever we met afterwards he had always a little friendly greeting for me, never failing to chaff me about my single eyeglass which used to furnish him with an excuse for interrupting an awkward discussion and so give him time for an answer. He was very clever in availing himself of it; perhaps that was the reason why I found grace in his sight. Hardly more than a stone’s throw from the British Legation are the walls of the Forbidden City. Of what might be taking place inside that sacrosanct enclosure we knew no more than what that most venerable of all publications, the _Peking Gazette_, was allowed to tell us. People used to talk with well-informed superiority of _coups-d’état_ and Palace intrigues, but it was not until the appearance of Messrs. Bland and Backhouse’s book, “China under the Dowager Empress,” that the outside world was made aware of the intimate history of that masterful woman’s reign; for a reign it was throughout. Her co-Empress was a cipher and the Emperors whom for show’s sake she enthroned were mere puppets. The pages of that _roman vécu_ are so fascinating that it is difficult for any reader to put the book down, but to those who have lived under the black pall of ignorance in which the foreign community of Peking was shrouded it is a revelation. We can now appreciate the heroic courage with which Tsŭ Hsi, then a mere girl of twenty-two, defeated the conspiracies of the princes who, on the death of her husband, the Emperor Hsien Fêng in 1861, took her child, the baby Emperor, from her and tried to usurp the Regency. It was a master-stroke of craft in so young a woman to paralyse the conspirators by purloining the seal without the impression of which no nomination to the throne was legitimate. We know how Prince Kung, the intimate personal enemy of the plotters, and the handsome young guardsman, Jung Lu, her kinsman, her playmate, and through life her more than trusty friend, came to the rescue, and we can understand how it was that the former, her brother-in-law, though he had to go through alternations of favour and disgrace, was always summoned back in moments of storm and stress when she needed his help and advice.