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National Geographic : 1920 Nov
Contents
PEKING, THE CITY OF THE UNEXPECTED There, in the central hall of worship, he reclines upon his elbow, a bronze figure twenty feet long, surrounded by pairs of huge cloth slippers, left as votive offerings by pious pilgrims to protect him, presumably, from unhallowed tacks, should he walk in his sleep. It is this temple, or rather the temple inclosure beyond the main building, which the Princeton Center in Peking has leased as a vacation home. There are tennis courts, swimming pools, a modern kitchen and dining-room, and space for several score cot beds in buildings once devoted to monastic uses; but the bronze Buddha sleeps on, unmindful of these innovations, and a few monks still burn incense daily before him. After supper with the Sleeping Buddha, we crawled into our blanket bags and tried to follow his somnolent example. Our bedroom was a sort of little summer building, with the front quite open, perched high upon a rock among the pine tops. It had been the shrine of Kwan Yin, Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, but when the Princetonians moved in, the monks deemed it no fit place for a god dess! She moved out and was buried by her servitors in the hillside, back of the shrine. So we lay in her place, the crisp winter air of the hills in our nostrils, a flood of moonlight in our eyes, making a gilded mystery of temple roofs and pine shadows, and in our ears and dreams the temple bells a-calling, for all night long the little brazen bells, which hang lightly from the overjetting corners of the roof, swayed and tingled drowsily in the wind. Next morning the sun shone as it can only in the cold, dry winter of north China, like a brand-new sun, shining for the first time from a fleckless sky, blue above bright-brown hills. It must have been in such a sun that the Psalmist sang of the little hills that skipped like lambs and the mountains like young sheep. Even the barren hills of Peking are resili ent in such sunshine. Again we set out behind our inde fatigable rickshaw men, first to Pi Yun Ssu, the Temple of the Green Jade Clouds, the loveliest temple in the north, a cube of pure white marble set in a grove of lustrous, white-stemmed pines. Then we turned toward the city again by a route different from that by which we came. It took us past the Old Summer Palace, left a ruin by the Anglo-French punitive expedition of i86o. What was once an imperial residence of unprece *denited extent and magnificence is now a place of heaps, with here and there a broken arch or a shattered pillar still standing, strangely reminiscent of France or Italy; for this palace, built in the eighteenth century, in the style of Ver sailles, was planned by Jesuit fathers, then in high favor at the imperial court. It is one of the most unexpected of the unexpected things in Peking, to come suddenly upon a Renaissance portal or a cluster of Ionic columns among the ruins of a Chinese emperor's pleasure house. HOW AMERICA'S BOXER INDEMNITY FUNDS WERE SPENT Adjacent to these remains there stands, by a kind of historic compensation, Chin Hwa College, with most modern equip ment-library, assembly hall, gymnasium, science buildings-built and maintained with that portion of the Boxer indemnity which the United States gave back to China. When one thinks of the incal culable repayment in international friend liness and the boundless admiration among the Chinese for the United States which has come from that small gift, one wonders why it is that nations have not more frequently dealt with one another in the same generous fashion. A week later I went out again from the city, this time to the Great Wall. Now when I look back it seems like a dream. It is not quite believable that I have really been to the goal of my child hood's imaginings, that last fence of the universe, the Great Wall of China. More improbable still does it seem to have rid den to it and through it in a modern rail road train. The world has surely grown small when travel agencies in Peking can ad vertise a day's excursion to the Great Wall. It is wonder enough for one journey to have walked atop the wall and looked out over the dusty brown plains of the north where Tatar horsemen once swarmed toward the passes, and to have seen trains of pack-mules straggling through the great stone gateways, obliv- 353
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