But too late—­too late; the Manchu servants who have friends among the guards at the Palace gates have said this all the evening.  For the Chinese Colossus, lumbering and lazy, sluggish and ill-equipped, has raised himself on his elbow, and with sheep-like and calculating eyes is looking down on us—­a pigmy-like collection of foreigners and their guards—­and soon will risk a kick—­perhaps even will trample us quickly to pieces.  How bitterly everyone is regretting our false confidence, and how our chiefs are being cursed!

VII

THE CITY OF PEKING AND ALL ITS GLORIES

11th June, 1900.

* * * * *

You do not know this Capital of Capitals, perhaps—­that is, you do not know it as you should if the scenes which may presently move across the stage, now in shouting crowds of sword-armed men, now in pitiable incidents of small account, are to be properly understood, and their dramatic setting, stirring blood-thrilling, incongruous as they must be and can only be.  I feel that something will come—­I even know it.  I have been talking vaguely about this and about that; have begun preparing colours, as it were, in the usual careless fashion without explanations or digressions—­until you possibly wonder what it is all about.  For you have not yet seen the barbaric frame which will hedge in the whole—­the barbaric frame in all truth, since it is gradually closing in on us on every side until, like some mediaeval torture-room, we may have the very life crushed out of us by a cruel pressure.  But enough of fine phrases; while there is time let me write something.

Peking is at least two thousand years old.  Several hundred years before Christ, they say a Chinese kingdom made the present site the capital, and began building the outer walls; but the Chinese, the gentler Chinese who had all military spirit crushed out of them five thousand years before by having to tramp from Mesopotamia to where they now are in the eighteen provinces, these Chinese, I say, never had in Peking anything but a temporary trysting-place.  For Peking stands for a sort of blatant barbarianism, mounted on sturdy ponies, pouring in from the far North; and the history of Peking can only be said to begin when Mongol-Tartars, who have always been freebooters and robbers, forced their way in and imposed their militarism on a nation of shopkeepers and collectors of taxes.

Even before the Christian era, the Chinese chronicles tell of the pressure of these fierce barbarians from the North being so much felt and their raids so constant, that Chi Huang-ti, the ruler of the powerful Chinese feudatory state which laid the foundations of the present Empire of China, began to build the Great Wall of China and to fortify old Peking as the only means of stopping these living waves.  The Great Wall took ages to build, for the Northern barbarians always kept cunningly slipping round the uncompleted ends, and the Mings, the last purely Chinese sovereigns to reign in Peking, actually added three hundred miles to this colossal structure in the year 1547, or nearly two thousand years after the first bricks had been cemented.  That shows you what people they were, and what the contest was.