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Fixed Mobile Convergence Handbook 1st Edition Syed A.
Ahson Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Syed A. Ahson, Mohammad Ilyas
ISBN(s): 9781420091748, 1420091743
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 11.05 MB
Year: 2011
Language: english

Fixed Mobile
Convergence
Handbook

CRC Press is an imprint of the
Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Boca Raton London New York
Fixed Mobile
Convergence
Handbook
Edited by
Syed A. Ahson
Mohammad Ilyas

CRC Press
Taylor & Francis Group
6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300
Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742
© 2011 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC
CRC Press is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
No claim to original U.S. Government works
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
International Standard Book Number: 978-1-4200-9170-0 (Hardback)
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v
Contents
Preface
�� vii
Acknowledgments��xi
Editors�� xiii
Contributors��xv
1. Fixed Mobile Convergence: The Quest for Seamless Mobility.............1
Dario Gallucci, Silvia Giordano, Daniele Puccinelli,
N. Sai Krishna Tejawsi, and Salvatore Vanini
2. User-Centric Convergence in Telecom Networks...................................29
Sahin Albayrak, Fikret Sivrikaya, Ahmet Cihat Toker,
and Manzoor Ahmed Khan
3. Femtocell Networks: Technologies and Applications.
...........................51
Eun Cheol Kim and Jin Young Kim
4. Fixed Mobile Convergence Based
on 3G Femtocell Deployments.
.........................................................77
Alfonso Fernández-Durán, Mariano Molina-García, and José I. Alonso
5. Deployment Modes and Interference Avoidance
for Next-Generation Femtocell Networks..............................................121
I
·
smail Güvenç, Mustafa E. Şahin, Hisham A. Mahmoud,
and Hüseyin Arslan
6. Conversational Quality and Wireless Network Planning
in Fixed Mobile Convergence...................................................................151
Mariano Molina-García, Alfonso Fernández-Durán, and José I. Alonso
7. Convergence and Interworking of Heterogeneous Wireless
Access Networks..........................................................................................193
Peyman TalebiFard and Victor C. M. Leung
8. Application-Controlled and Power-Efficient Personal Area
Network Architecture for FMC................................................................207
S. R. Chaudhry and H. S. Al-Raweshidy
9. Mobility Management Protocols Design for IPv6-Based
Wireless and Mobile Networks................................................................237
Li Jun Zhang, Liyan Zhang, Laurent Marchand, and Samuel Pierre

vi Contents
10. SIP-Based Mobility Management and Multihoming
in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks.
....................................................265
Chai Kiat Yeo, Bu Sung Lee, Teck Meng Lim, Dang Duc Nguyen,
and Yang Xia
11. Vertical Handover System in Heterogeneous
Wireless Networks.............................................................................. 305
Yong-Sung Kim, Dong-Hee Kwon, and Young-Joo Suh
12. A Framework for Implementing IEEE 802.21
Media-Independent Handover Services.................................................329
Wan-Seon Lim and Young-Joo Suh
13. Converged NGN-Based IPTV Architecture and Services..................357
Eugen Mikoczy and Pavol Podhradsky
14. Interconnection of NGN-Based IPTV Systems.....................................387
M. Oskar van Deventer, Pieter Nooren, Radovan Kadlic,
and Eugen Mikoczy
15. End-to-End QoS and Policy-Based Resource Management
in Converged NGN.
.....................................................................................413
Dong Sun and Ramesh Nagarajan
16. Presence User Modeling and Performance Study of Single
and Multi-Throttling on Wireless Links................................................431
Victoria Beltran and Josep Paradells
Index��459

vii
Preface
Service providers are in the process of transforming from legacy packet and
circuit-switched networks to converged Internet protocol (IP) networks and
consolidating all network services and business units on a single IP infra-
structure. Future users of communication systems will require the use of
data rates of around 100Mbps at their homes while all services and applica-
tions will require high bandwidths. The next generations of heterogeneous
wireless networks are expected to interact with each other and be capable
of interworking with IP-based infrastructures. As Metcalfe’s law estimates,
“the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square
of the number of connected users of the system.” Although this may be
debatable from a mathematical point of view, it does happen. Scalability and
service accessibility have been the main drivers for the interconnection of
telecommunication networks. The telephony network and the Internet are
two highly interconnected services that achieve their value by connecting
any user to any other user, and by providing access to services and content
worldwide. The wired–wireless integrated network (WWIN) can be catego-
rized as fixed mobile convergence (FMC). FMC means the convergence of
the existing wired and wireless network. Mobile nodes (MNs) are equipped
with multimode radio interfaces so that they can perform roaming among
these different access technologies.
The last few years have seen an exceptional growth in the wireless local
area network industry, with substantial increase in the number of wireless
users and applications. This growth has been mostly due to the availability of
inexpensive and highly interoperable network solutions based on Wi-Fi stan-
dards and to the growing trend of providing built-in wireless network cards
into mobile computing platforms. Advancement in wireless technologies and
mobile computing enables mobile users to benefit from disparate wireless
networks such as wireless personal area networks (WPANs), wireless local
area networks (WLANs), wireless metropolitan area networks (WMANs),
and wireless wide area networks (WWANs) that use mobile telecommunica-
tion cellular network technologies such as Worldwide Interoperability for
Microwave Access (WiMAX), Universal Mobile Telecommunications System
(UMTS), General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), code division multiple access
2000 (CDMA2000), Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM),
Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD), Mobitex, High-Speed Downlink Packet
Access (HSDPA), or third generation (3G) to transfer data.
The requirements for next generation networks (NGNs) lead to an archi-
tectural evolution that requires a converged infrastructure where users
across multiple domains can be served through a single unified domain.
Convergence is at the core of IP-based NGNs. The aim of IP convergence is

viii Preface
to build a single network infrastructure that is cost effective, scalable, reli-
able, and secure. The aim of standardization has been to enable a mix and
match of services bundled to offer innovative services to end users. Service
enabler, in this context, is the approach to eliminate the vertical silo structure
and to transform into a horizontal-layered architecture. The integration of
different communication technologies is one of the key features in NGNs.
In integrated network environments, it is expected that users can access the
Internet on an “anytime, anywhere” basis and with better quality of service
(QoS) by selecting the most appropriate interface according to their needs.
Although network integration enhances user experience, it raises several
challenging issues such as candidate network discovery, call admission
control, secure context transfer, and power management for multimode ter-
minals. There have been several standard group activities to handle those
issues in integrated heterogeneous networks. For example, the integration
of 3GPP and non-3GPP accesses (e.g., CDMA2000, WLAN, and WiMAX) has
actively been studied by the 3GPP consortium.
Such types of interconnections would be beneficial to consumers. The
interconnection would enable consumers access to a wider range of content,
namely, content available in other fixed and/or mobile networks. Roaming
and mobility capabilities supported by the interconnection would also
enable consumers access to contents from a wider range of access points,
namely, from access points belonging to other fixed and/or mobile networks.
In addition, it would provide consumers with a consistent, personalized, rich
content, and service-rich user experience from any place and at any time.
FMC not only transforms technologies for the delivery of digital television
but also helps users from being passive consumers of unidirectional broad-
casted media to being active consumers of interactive, mobile, and personal-
ized bidirectional multimedia communication. Users expect to be enabled
to access any content, anytime, anyhow, anywhere, and on any device that
they wish to be entertained with. The NGN has been considered as a fully
converged architecture that can provide a wide spectrum of multimedia ser-
vices and applications to end users.
Several industrial standard organizations and forums have been tak-
ing the initiative on NGNs in recent years. For instance, the European
Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)—Telecoms and Internet con-
verged Services and Protocols for Advanced Networks (TISPAN) focuses on
an NGN for fixed access network, which has published Release 1 in 2005.
Meanwhile, the International Telecommunication Union’s Telecommuni-
cation Standardization Sector (ITU-T) started the NGN Global Standards
Initiative (NGN-GSI) and has published its first release in 2006. On the other
hand, a similar effort has been made in wireless network domain: UMTS
(i.e., W-CDMA) and CDMA2000 defined in 3GPP and 3GPP2 are categorized
as third-generation mobile network technologies and are now evolving to
fourth-generation mobile network—Evolved Packet System (i.e., Long-Term
Evolution/Evolved Packet Core (LTE/EPC)), which can be regarded as

Preface ix
network generation mobile networks. The common notion of a variety of
NGNs is to transport all information and services (voice, data, video, and all
sorts of multimedia applications) by utilizing packet network IP technology,
that is, an “all-IP” network.
This book provides technical information about all aspects of FMC. The
areas covered range from basic concepts to research grade material, includ-
ing future directions. It captures the current state of FMC and serves as a
comprehensive reference material on this subject. It consists of 16 chapters
authored by 44 experts from around the world. The targeted audience for the
handbook include professionals who are designers and/or planners for FMC
systems, researchers (faculty members and graduate students), and those
who would like to learn about this field.
The book is expected to have the following specific salient features:
• To serve as a single comprehensive source of information and as
reference material on FMC.
• To deal with an important and timely topic of emerging technology
of today, tomorrow, and beyond.
• To present accurate, up-to-date information on a broad range of
topics related to FMC.
• To present material authored by experts in the field.
• To present information in an organized and well-structured manner.
Syed Ahson
Seattle, Washington
Mohammad Ilyas
Boca Raton, Florida

xi
Acknowledgments
Although the book is not technically a textbook, it can certainly be used as a
textbook for graduate courses and research-oriented courses that deal with
FMC. Any comments from the readers will be highly appreciated.
Many people have contributed to this handbook in their unique ways. First
and foremost, we would like to express our immense gratitude to the group
of highly talented and skilled researchers who have contributed 16 chapters
to this handbook. All of them have been extremely cooperative and profes-
sional. Also, it has also been a pleasure to work with Nora Konopka and Jill
Jurgensen of CRC Press; we are extremely grateful to them for their sup-
port and professionalism. Our families have extended their unconditional
love and support throughout this project and they all deserve very special
thanks.

xiii
Editors
Syed Ahson is a senior software design engineer with Microsoft. As part
of the Mobile Voice and Partner Services group, he is currently engaged in
research on new and exciting end-to-end mobile services and applications.
Before joining Microsoft, Syed was a senior staff software engineer with
Motorola, where he contributed significantly in leading roles toward the
creation of several iDEN, CDMA, and GSM cellular phones. He has exten-
sive experience with wireless data protocols, wireless data applications,
and cellular telephony protocols. Before joining Motorola, Syed worked as
a senior software design engineer with NetSpeak Corporation (now part of
Net2Phone), a pioneer in VoIP telephony software.
Syed has published more than 10 books on emerging technologies such
as WiMAX, RFID, mobile broadcasting, and IP multimedia subsystem. His
recent books include IP Multimedia Subsystem Handbook and Handbook of
Mobile Broadcasting: DVB-H, DMB, ISDB-T and MediaFLO. He has authored
several research articles and teaches computer engineering courses as
adjunct faculty at Florida Atlantic University, Florida, where he introduced a
course on Smartphone technology and applications. Syed received his MS in
computer engineering from Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, in July
1998, and his BSc in electrical engineering from Aligarh Muslim University,
India, in 1995.
Dr. Mohammad Ilyas is associate dean for research and industry relations
at the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Florida Atlantic
University, Boca Raton, Florida. Previously, he has served as chair of the
Department of Computer Science and Engineering and interim associ-
ate vice president for research and graduate studies. He received his PhD
degree from Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. His doctoral research
was about switching and flow control techniques in computer communica-
tion networks. He received his BSc degree in electrical engineering from the
University of Engineering and Technology, Pakistan, and his MS degree in
electrical and electronic engineering at Shiraz University, Iran.
Dr. Ilyas has conducted successful research in various areas, including traf-
fic management and congestion control in broadband/high-speed communi-
cation networks, traffic characterization, wireless communication networks,
performance modeling, and simulation. He has published over 25 books
on emerging technologies, and over 150 research articles. His recent books
include Cloud Computing and Software Services: Theory and Techniques (2010)
and Mobile Web 2.0: Developing and Delivering Services to Mobile Phones (2010).

xiv Editors
He has supervised11 PhD dissertations and more than 37 MS theses to
completion. He has been a consultant to several national and international
organizations. Dr. Ilyas is an active participant in several IEEE technical com-
mittees and activities. Dr. Ilyas is a senior member of IEEE and a member of
ASEE.

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I never realised till I came to Peking that this forbidden ground
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young man.” He was only forty then.
“Were you invited?”
“No, no. I went secretly. I wanted to see what it was like.”
“But how?”
“I got the dress of a eunuch and I slipped in early one morning,
and then, when I got in, I hardly dared move or breathe for fear
someone should find me out. Then when no one took any notice of
me I walked about and saw everything I could, but the last hour was
the worst, I was terrified at the thought that I might not be able to
get out.”
“And if you had been caught?”
He looked grave even then at the remembrance of that bygone
desperate adventure.
“Oh death, certainly.”
“Death?”
“Yes, a long and lingering death,” and the thought of what he had
escaped twenty years ago, was on his face.
I looked at him with interest, a tall stout Chinaman with his hair
cut short in the modern fashion, a long grey robe of silk reaching to
his feet, and a little short black sleeveless jacket over it. He did not
look, pleasant as he was, as if he would ever have dared anything,
but then I have never thought of any Chinaman as likely to risk his
life without hope of gain, and to risk it for mere curiosity as a man of
my own people might have done! It was throwing a new light on the
Chinese. I rather admired him and then I found he was Eastern after
all.

We talked of Yuan Shih K'ai, and he, being of the opposition party,
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seventeen and a half himself!” So it seems it will be some time
before forbidden cities on a small scale will be out of fashion in
China.
And still, in these days of the Republic, the Forbidden City of the
Manchus dominates Peking.
It was thrown open for three days to all who could produce a
black paper chrysanthemum with five leaves, red, yellow, blue,
black, and white, fastened to a tab of white paper with a mourning
edge and an inscription in Chinese characters. The foreigners had
theirs from their Legations, and the Chinese from their guilds. And
those Chinese—there are many of them—who are so unlucky as to
belong to no guild, Chinese of the humbler sort, were shut out, and
for them there was erected on the great marble bridge in front of
the southern entrance, a pavilion of gorgeous orange silk enclosing
an altar with offerings that stood before a picture of the dead
Empress, so that all might pay their respects.
I pinned my badge to the front of my fur coat, for it was keen and
cold in spite of the brilliant sunshine, and went off to the wrong
entrance, the eastern gate, where only princes and notables were
admitted. I thought it strange there should be no sign of a foreigner,
but foreigners in Peking can be but as one in a hundred or less, so
undismayed, I walked straight up to the gate, and immediately a
row of palace servants clad in their white robes of mourning,
clustered before the sacred place. They talked and explained
vehemently, and with perfect courtesy, but they were very agitated,

and though I could not understand one word they said, one thing
was certain, admitted I could not be there. So I turned to the
southern gate and there it seemed all Peking was streaming. It was
like China that we might not go in the direct way.
There is a great paved way through the Imperial City alongside a
canal that runs between marble-lined banks, but on the principal
bridge that crosses it was erected the orange silk pavilion for the
poorer classes, and we, the wearers of the black chrysanthemum,
hundreds and thousands and ten thousands of us, had to turn off to
the right and go along by the tall, pinkish red walls till we came to
the great archways in the walls, five great archways filled in with
doors studded with great brazen knobs. Usually they were fast shut,
but they were open to-day, guarded by soldiers in full-marching
order, soldiers of the New Republic in modern khaki looking out of
the picture, and there streamed into the tunnellike entrance as
curious a crowd as ever I set eyes upon. All must walk, old and
young, great and lowly, representatives of the mighty nations of the
world and tottering Chinese ladies swaying like “lilies in the wind”
upon their maimed feet, only one man, a Mongol Prince, an
Incarnation of a Buddha, a living Buddha, was borne in in a sedan
chair. But every other mortal had to walk. The tunnels must always
be gloomy, and, even on that cold day, they struck chill after the
brilliant sunlight, and they are long, for the walls, just here, are
about ninety feet through, so might the entrances have been in the
palace of Ahasuerus the King. The courtyard we first entered had a
causeway running right across it of great hewn stones, hewn and
laid by slave labour, when all men bowed before the Son of Heaven,
hundreds of years ago. They are worn in many places now, worn by
the passing of many feet, and still more worn are the grey Chinese
bricks that pave the courtyard on either side. It is a great courtyard
of splendid proportions. In front of us frowned more high walls of
pinkish red, topped by the buildings that can be seen all over Peking,
temples or halls of audience with golden-brown tiled roofs that
gleamed in the sunlight, and on either side were low buildings with
fronts of lattice-work rather fallen into disrepair. They might have

been used as guard-houses or, more probably, were the quarters of
the six thousand or so of eunuchs that the dignity of the ruler
required to attend upon him. There were a few trees, leafless then
in March, but there was nothing to spoil the dignity and repose of
every line. A great mind surely conceived this entrance, and great
must have been the minds that kept it so severely simple. If it be
the heart of a nation then do I understand. The people who
streamed along the causeway, who roamed over the worn brick
pavement, had, as a rule, delicate, finely formed hands though they
were but humble craftsmen. If the hands of the poorest be so fine,
is it any wonder that the picked men of such a people, their very
heart, conceived such a mighty pile? There were more, longer and
gloomier tunnels, admitting to a still greater courtyard, a courtyard
that must be at least a quarter of a mile across, with the same
causeway of worn stones that cry out the tale of the sufferings of
the forgotten slaves, who hewed them and dragged them into place,
the same grey pavement of bricks, the same tall smooth red walls,
crowned over the gateway with temples, rising one story after
another till the tiled roof cuts the sky. And through a third set of
tunnels we came into a third courtyard, the courtyard where the
obsequies were being held. The third courtyard was spacious as
Trafalgar Square, and round three sides was a wide raised platform
of stone reached by broad and easy ramps, and all across it ran a
canal held in by marble banks, crossed by graceful bridges, and
every one of the uprights, made of white marble, was crowned by a
figure that I took for the representation of a flame; but those, who
know, tell me it is meant to represent a cloud, and is part of the
dragon symbolism. When marble is the medium by which so light a
thing as a cloud is represented it must be very finely done indeed,
when one outside the national thought, such as I, sees in that
representation a flame. Two colossal bronze monsters with grinning
countenances and curly manes, conventional lions, mounted on
dragon-carved pedestals, stand before the entrance to the fourth
temple or hall of audience, and here was what the crowd had come
to see, the lighthearted, cheerful, merry crowd, that were making
high holiday, here was the altar to the dead.

Overhead were the tiled roofs, and of all the colours of the
rainbow surely none could have been chosen better than the golden
brown of those tiles to harmonise with the clear blue of the glorious
sky above it, no line to cut it could have been so appropriate as the
gentle sweep of the curve of a Chinese roof. There was a little grass
growing on the roofs, sere and withered, but a faint breeze just
stirred its tops, and it toned with the prevailing golden brown in one
glorious beauty. Where else in the world could one get such an
effect? Only in Australia have I seen such a sky, and there it was
never wedded to such a glow of colour as that it looks down upon in
Peking. The men who built this palace in a bygone age, built broadly,
truly, for all time.

And then, it was surely as if some envious spirit had entered in
and marred all this loveliness—no, that would be impossible, but
struck a discordant and jarring note that should perhaps emphasise
in our minds the beauty that is eternal—for all the front of that
temple, which as far as I could see was pinkish red, with under the
eaves that beautiful dark blue, light blue, and green, that the
Chinese know so well how to mingle, was covered with the most
garish, commonplace decorations, made for the most part of paper,
red, violent Reckitt's blue, yellow, and white. From every point of
vantage ran strings of flags, cheap common little flags of all nations,

bits of string were tied to the marble clouds, and they fluttered from
them, and the great wonderful bronze lions contrived to look coy in
frills that would not have disgraced a Yorkshire ham. The altar on
the northern platform was hidden behind a trellis-work of gaily
coloured paper, and there were offerings upon it of fruit and cakes in
great profusion, all set out before a portrait of the late Empress. On
either side were two choirs of priests, Buddhists and Taoists in
gorgeous robes of red and orange. What faith the dead Empress
held I do not know, but the average Chinese, while he is the prince
of materialists, believing nothing he cannot see and explain, has also
a keen eye to the main chance, and on his death-bed is apt to
summon priests of all faiths so as to let no chance of a comfortable
future slip; but possibly it was more from motives of policy than
from any idea of aiding the dead woman that these representatives
of the two great faiths of China were summoned. On the rights
behind a trellis-work of bright paper, one choir sat in a circle, beat
gongs, struck their bells and intoned; and on the left, behind a like
trellis-work, the other choir knelt before low desks and also solemnly
intoned. Their Mongolian faces were very impassive, they looked
neither to the right nor the left, but kept time to the ceaseless beat
of their leader's stick upon a globe of wood split across the middle
like a gaping mouth emblematical of a fish and called mu yii—or
wooden fish. What were they repeating? Prayers for the dead?
Eulogies on her who had passed? Or comfort for the living? Not one
of these things. Probably they were intoning Scriptures in Tibetan,
an unknown tongue to them very likely, but come down to them
through the ages and sanctified by thousands of ceaseless
repetitions.
And the people came, passed up the steps, bowed by the direction
of the usher—in European clothes—three times to the dead
Empress's portrait, and the altar, were thanked by General Chang,
the Military Commandant, and passed on by the brightly clad
intoning priests down into the crowd in the great courtyard again. It
was weird to find myself taking part in such a ceremony. Stranger
still to watch the people who went up and down those steps. In all

the world surely never was such an extraordinary funeral gathering.
I am very sure that never shall I attend such another. There was
such a mingling of the ancient and the blatantly modern. To the
sound of weird, archaic, Eastern music the living Buddha, clad all in
yellow, in his yellow sedan chair, borne by four bearers in dark blue
with Tartar caps on their heads, made his reverence, and was
followed by a band of Chinese children from some American mission
school, who, with misguided zeal sang fervently at the top of their
shrill childish voices “Down by the Swanee River” and “Auld Lang
Syne,” and then soldiers in modern uniform of khaki or bright blue
were followed by police officers in black and gold. The wrong note
was struck by the “Swanee River,” the high officials dwelt upon it, for
the Chinese does not look to advantage in these garbs, he looks
what he is makeshift, a bad imitation, and the jarring was only
relieved when the Manchu princes came in white mourning
sheepskins and black Tartar caps. They may be dissolute and
decadent, have all the vices that new China accuses them of, but at
least they looked polished and dignified gentlemen, at their ease and
in their place. It does not matter, possibly. The President once said
that to petition for a monarchy was an act of fanaticism worthy of
being punished by imprisonment, and so the old order must in a
measure pass; even in China, the unchanging, there must come, it is
a law of nature, some little change, and when I looked at the bows
and arrows of the Manchu guard leaning against the wall I realised
that it would be impossible to keep things as they were, however
picturesque. Still khaki uniforms, if utilitarian, are ugly, and American
folk-songs, under such conditions, struck the last note in bathos, or
pathos. It depends on the point of view.
On the white paper tabs, attached to our black chrysanthemums,
was written something about the New Republic, but it might have
been the spirit of the Empress at home, so cheerful and bent on
enjoyment was the crowd which thronged the courtyard. The bands
played, sometimes Eastern music, strange and haunting, sometimes
airs from the European operas, there were various tents erected with
seats and tables, and refreshments were served, oranges, and

ginger, and tea, and cakes of all kinds, both in the tents and at little
altar-like stands dotted about the courtyard even at the very foot of
the pedestals of the great conventional lions. And the people walked
round looking at everything, peeping through every crevice in the
hopes of seeing some part of the palace that was not open to them,
chatting, laughing, greeting each other as they would have done at
a garden-party in Europe. There were all sorts of people, dressed in
all sorts of fashions. New China looked at best common-plage and
ordinary in European clothes; old China was dignified in a queue,
silken jacket and brocaded petticoat, generally of a lighter colour;
Manchu ladies wore high head-dresses and brilliant silken coats, blue
or pink, lavender or grey, and Chinese ladies tottered along on tiny,
bound feet that reminded me of the hoofs of a deer, and the most
fashionable, unmarried girls wore short coats with high collars
covering their chins, and tight-fitting trousers, often of gaily coloured
silk, while the older women added skirts, and the poorer classes just
wore a long coat of cotton, generally blue, with trousers tightly girt
in at the ankles, and their maimed feet in tiny little embroidered
shoes. European dress the Chinese woman very seldom affects yet,
and their jet black hair, plastered together with some sort of
substance that makes it smooth and shiny, is never covered, but
flowers and jewelled pins are stuck in it. Occasionally—I did on this
day—you will see a woman with a black embroidered band round the
front of her head, but this, I think, denotes that she is of the Roman
Catholic faith, for the Roman Catholics have been in China far longer
than any other Christian sect, and they invented this head-dress for
the Chinese woman who for ages has been accustomed to wear
none, because of the Pauline injunction, that it was a shame for a
woman to appear in a church with her head uncovered. Old China
did not approve of a woman going about much at all, and here at
this funeral I heard many old China hands remarking how strange it
was to see so many women mingling with the throng. It marked the
change; but such a very short time back, such a thing would have
been impossible.

There were numbers of palace eunuchs too—keepers of the
women who, apparently, may now show their faces to all men, and
they were clad all in the mourning white, with here and there one,
for some reason or other I cannot fathom, in black. The demand for
eunuchs was great when the Emperor dwelt, the one man, in the
Forbidden City surrounded by his women, and they say that very
often the number employed rose to ten thousand. Constantly, as
some in the ranks grew old, fell sick, or died, they had to be
replaced, and, so conservative is China, the recruits were generally
drawn from certain villages whose business it was to supply the
palace eunuchs. Often, of course, the operation was performed in
their infancy, but often, very often, a man was allowed to grow up,
marry, and have children, before he was made ready for the palace.
“Impossible,” I said, “he would not consent then. Never.” And my
informant laughed pitifully. “Ah,” said she, “you don't know the
struggle in China. Anything for a livelihood.”
Some of the eunuchs wanted their photographs taken, and I was
willing enough if they would only give me room. I wanted one in
white, but they desired one in black, either because he was the most
important or the least important, I know not which, and they sat him
on a stone that had been a seat perhaps when Kublai Khan built the
palace; and the keeper of the women, the representative of the old
cruel past, that pressed men and women alike into the service of the
great, looked in my camera sheepish as a schoolboy kissed in public
by his maiden aunt.
There were coolies, too, in the ordinary blue cotton busy about
the work that the entertaining of such a multitude necessarily
entails, and everyone looked cheerful and happy, as, after all, why
should they not, for death is the common lot, and must come to all
of us, and they had seen and heard of the dead Empress about as
much as the dweller in Chicago had. They were merely taking what
she, or her representatives, gave with frank goodwill, and enjoying
themselves accordingly.

Against the walls they kept putting up long scrolls covered with
Chinese characters, sentences in praise of the virtues of the
Empress, and sent, as we would send funeral wreaths, to honour the
dead, and presently a wind arose and tore at them and they
fluttered out from the walls like long streamers, and as the wind
grew wilder, some were tom down altogether. But that was on the
afternoon of the second day, when worse things happened. I went
down to the Forbidden City after tiffin, and behold, outside the great
gates, looking up longingly and murmuring a little, was a great
crowd that grew momentarily greater. The doors, studded with
brazen nails, were fast closed, and little parties of soldiers with their
knapsacks upon their backs were evidently telling the crowd to keep
back, and very probably, since it was China, the reason why they
should keep back. The reason was, of course, lost upon me, I only
knew that, before I realised what was happening, I was in the centre
of a crushing crowd that was gradually growing more
unmanageable. A Chinese crowd is wonderfully good-natured, far
better-tempered than a European crowd of a like size would be, but
when a crowd grows great, it is hardly responsible for its actions.
Besides, a Chinese crowd has certain little unpleasant habits. The
men picked up the little children, for the tiniest tots came to this
great festival, and held them on their shoulders, but they coughed,
and hawked, and spit, and wiped their noses in the primitive way
Adam probably did before he thought of using a fig-leaf as a pocket
handkerchief, and at last I felt that the only thing to be done was to
edge my way to the fringe of the press, because, even if the doors
were opened, it would have seemed like taking my life in my hands
to go into one of those tunnels with their uneven pavements in such
a crush. Once down it would be hopeless to think of getting up
again.
After a time, however, they did open the doors, and the people
surged in. When all was clear I followed, and once inside heard how
the people in the great courtyard, in spite of police and soldiers, had
swarmed up and threatened by their rush, the good-natured,
purposeless rush of a crowd, to carry away offerings, altar, choirs

and decorations, and, very naturally, those in authority had closed
the doors against all new-comers until the people had been got well
in hand again. It had taken some time. Before the altar was a
regular scrimmage, and after the crowd had passed it left behind it,
shoes, and caps, and portions of its clothing which were thrown
back into the courtyard to be gathered up by those who could
recognise their own property. By the time I arrived things were
settling down. We had to wait in the second courtyard, and the
women, Chinese ladies with their little aching feet, and Manchus in
their high head-dresses sat themselves down on the edge of the
causeway, because standing on pavement is wearisome, and there
waited patiently till the doors were opened, and inside everything
was soon going again as gaily as at an ordinary garden-party in
Somerset.

“Do you like Chinese tea?” asked a Chinese lady of me in slow and
stilted English. I said I did.
“Come,” said she, taking my hand in her cold little one, and hand
in hand we walked, or rather I walked and she tottered, across to
one of the great pavilions that had been erected, and there she sat
me down and a cup of the excellent tea was brought me, and every
one of the Chinese ladies present, out of the kindly hospitality of her
heart towards the lonely foreigner, gave me, with her own fair and
shapely little hands, a cake from the dish that was set before us by a
white-clad servant. Frankly, I wished they wouldn't be so hospitable.

I wanted to say I was quite capable of choosing my own cake, and
that I had a rooted objection to other people pawing the food I
intended to eat, but it seemed it might be rude, and I did not wish
to nip kindly feelings in the bud. And then, as the evening shadows
drew long, I went back to my hotel, sorry to leave the Forbidden
City, glad to have had this one little glimpse of the strange and
wonderful that is bound to pass away.
The Empress died in February, in March they held this, can we call
it lying-in-state, but it was not till the 3rd of April that her funeral
cortÃ¨ge moved from the Forbidden City, and the streets of Peking
were thronged with those who came to pay her respect. Did they
mourn? Well, I don't know. Hardly, I think, was it mourning in the
technical sense. The man in the street in England is far enough away
from the king on the throne, but in China it seems as if he might
inhabit a different sphere.
The sky was a cloudless blue, and the bright golden sunshine
poured down hot as a July day in England, or a March day in
Australia, there was not a wisp of cloud in the sky; in all the five
weeks that I had been in China there had never been the faintest
indication that such a thing was ever expected, ever known, but at
first the brilliancy had been cold, now it was warm, the winter was
past, and from the great Tartar wall, looking over the Tartar City—
the city that the Mings conquered and the Manchus made their own
—the forest of trees that hid the furthest houses was all tinged with
the faintest, daintiest green; and soon to the glory of blue and gold,
the blue of the sky and the gold of the sunshine, would be added
the vivid green that tells of the new-born life. And one woman who
had held high place here, one sad woman, who had missed most
that was good in fife, if rumours be true, was to be carried to her
long home that day.
The funeral procession started from the Eastern Gate of the
Forbidden City, came slowly down the broad street known now as
Morrison Street, turned into the way that passes the Legations and
runs along by the glacis whereon the conquering Western nations

have declared that, for their safety, no Chinese shall build a house,
the Europeans call it the Viale d'ltalia, because it passes by the
Italian Legation, and the Chinese by the more euphonious name of
Chang an Cheeh—the street of Eternal Repose—a curious
commentary on the fighting that went on there in 1900, into the
Chien Men Street, that is the street of the main gate through which
it must go to the railway station.
It seemed to me strange this ruler of an ancient people, buried
with weird and barbaric rites, was to be taken to her last resting-
place by the modern railway, that only a very few years ago her
people, at the height of their anti-foreign feeling, had wished to oust
from the country—root and branch. But since the funeral procession
was going to the railway station it must pass through the Chien Men,
and the curtain wall that ran round the great gate offered an
excellent point of vantage from which I, with the rest of the
European population, might see all there was to be seen. And for
this great occasion, the gate in the south of the curtain wall, the
gate that is always shut because only the highest in the land may
pass through, was open, for the highest in the land, the last of the
Manchu rulers, was dead.
I looked down into the walled-in space between the four gateway
arches, as into an arena, and the whole pageant passed below me.
First of all marching with deliberate slowness, that contrives to be
dignified if they are only carrying coals, came about twenty camels
draped in imperial yellow with tails of sable, also an imperial badge
hanging from their necks. The Manchus were a hunting people, and
though they have been dwellers in towns for the last two hundred
and fifty years the fact was not forgotten now that their last ruler
had died. She was going on a journey, a long, long journey; she
might want to rest by the way, therefore her camels bore tent-poles
and tents of the imperial colour. They held their heads high and
went noiselessly along, pad, pad, pad, as their like have gone to and
fro from Peking for thousands of years. Mongol, or Manchu, or son
of Han, it is all the same to the camel. He ministers to man's needs
because he must, but he himself is unchanging as the ages, fixed in

his way as the sky above, whether he bears grain from the north, or
coal from the Western Hills, or tents and drapery for an imperial
funeral. Then there were about fifty white ponies, without saddle or
trapping of any kind, each led by a mafoo clad in blue like an
ordinary coolie. The Peking carts that followed with wheels and tilts
of yellow were of a past age, but, after all, does not the King of
Great Britain and Ireland on State occasions ride in a most old-world
coach. And then I noticed things came in threes. Three carts, three
yellow palankeens full of artificial flowers, three sedan chairs also
yellow covered, and all around these groups were attendants clad in
shimmering rainbow muslin and thick felt hats, from the pointed
crown of which projected long yellow feathers. Slowly, slowly, the
procession moved on, broken now and again by bands of soldiers in
full marching order. There was a troop of cavalry of the Imperial
Guard they told me, but how could it be imperial when their five-
coloured lance pennons fluttering gaily in the air, clearly denoted the
New Republic? There was a detachment of mounted police in black
and yellow—the most modern of uniforms—there were more
attendants in gaily coloured robes carrying wooden halberds,
embroidered fans, banners, and umbrellas, and the yellow
palankeens with the artificial flowers were escorted by Buddhist
lamas in yellow robes crossed with crimson sashes, each with a stick
of smouldering incense in his hand. In those palankeens were the
dead woman's seals, her power, the power that she must now give
up. I could see the smoke, and the scent of the incense rose to our
nostrils as we stood on the wall forty feet above. Between the
various groups, between the yellow lamas who dated from the days
of the Buddha long before the Christ, between the khaki-clad troops
and the yellow and black police, things of yesterday, came palace
attendants tossing into the air white paper discs. The dead Empress
would want money for her journey, and here it was, distributed with
a lavish hand. It was only white paper, blank and soiled by the dust
of the road, when I picked it up a little later on, but for her it would
serve all purposes.

The approach of the bier itself was heralded by the striking
together of two slabs of wood by a couple of attendants, and before
it came, clad all in the white of mourning, the palace eunuchs who
had guarded her privacy when in life; a few Court attendants in
black, and then between lines of khaki-uniformed modern infantry in
marching order, the bier covered with yellow satin, vivid, brilliant,
embroidered with red phoenixes that marked her high rank—the
dragon for the Emperor, the phoenix for his consort. The two pieces

of wood clacked together harshly and the enormous bier moved on.
It was mounted on immense yellow poles and borne by eighty men
dressed in brilliant robes of variegated muslin, red being the
predominating colour. They wore hats with yellow feathers coming
out of the crown, and they staggered under their burden, as might
the slaves in Nineveh or Babylon have faltered and groaned beneath
their burdens, two thousand years ago.
Out of the northern archway came the camels and the horses, the
soldiers, the lamas, the eunuchs, out came all the quaint gay
paraphernalia—umbrellas, and fans, palankeens, and sedan chairs,
and banners—and slowly crossed the great courtyard, the arena; a
stop, a long pause, then on again, and the southern gate swallowed
them up, again the clack of the strips of wood, and the mighty bier,
borne on the shoulders of the Babylonish slaves. Slowly, slowly, then
it stood still, and we felt as if it must stay there for ever, as if the
eighty men who upheld it must be suffering unspeakable things.
Once more the clack of the strips of wood, and the southern
archway in due course swallowed it up, too, with the few halberdiers
and the detachment of soldiery who completed the procession.
Outside the Chien Men was the railway station, the crowded people
—crowded like Chinese flies in summer, and that is saying a great
deal—were cleared away by the soldiers, the bier was lifted on to a
car, the bands struck up a weird funeral march, the soldiers
presented arms, the lama priests fell on their knees, and then very,
very slowly the train steamed out of the station, and the last of the
Manchu Empresses was borne to her long home.
Was it impressive I asked myself as I went down the ramp? And
the answer was a little difficult to find. Quaint and strange and
Eastern, for the thing that has struck me so markedly in China was
here marked as ever. It was like the paper money that was thrown
with such lavish generosity into the air. Amongst all the magnificence
was the bizarre note—that discordant touch of tawdriness. Beneath
the gorgeous robes of the attendants, plainly to be seen, were
tatters and uncleanliness, the soldiers in their ill-fitting uniforms
looked makeshift, and the police wanted dusting. And yet—and

again I must say and yet, for want of better words—behind it all was
some reality, something that gripped like the haunting sound of the
dirge, or the stately march of the camels that have defied all
change.

T
CHAPTER VI—A TIME OF
REJOICING
The charm of Peking—A Chinese theatre—Electric light—The
custodian of the theatre—Bargaining for a seat—The orchestra—The
scenery of Shakespeare—Realistic gesture—A city wall—A mountain
spirit—Gorgeous dresses—Bundles of towels—Women's gallery—
Armed patrols—Rain in April—The food of the peasant—Famine—The
value of a daughter—God be thanked.
he Legation Quarter in Peking, as I was reminded twenty
times a day, is not China, it is not even Peking, but it is a
pleasant place in which to stay; a place where one may
foregather and exchange ideas with one's kind, and yet whence one
may go forth and see all Peking; more, may see places where still
the foreigner is something to be stared at, and wondered at, and
where the old, unchanging civilisation still goes on. Ordinarily if you
would see something new, something that gives a fresh sensation, it
is necessary to go out from among your kind and brave discomfort,
or spend a small fortune to guard against that discomfort, but here,
in Peking, you who are interested in such things may see an
absolutely new world, and yet have all the comforts, except reading
matter, to which you have been accustomed in London. It was no
wonder I lingered in Peking. Always there was something new to
see, always there was something fresh to learn, and at any moment,
within five minutes, I could step out into another world, the world of
Marco Polo, the world the Jesuit Fathers saw when first the Western
nations were beginning to realise there were any countries besides
their own.

There are people—I have heard them—who complain that Peking
is dull. Do not believe them. But, after all, perhaps I am not the best
judge. As a young girl, trammelled by trying to do the correct thing
and behave as a properly brought up young lady ought, I have
sometimes, say at an afternoon call when I hope I was behaving
prettily, found life dull, but since I have gone my own way I have
been sad sometimes, lonely often, but dull never, and for that God
be thanked. But Peking, I think, would be a very difficult place in
which to be really dull.

It is even possible to go to the theatre every night, but it is a
Chinese theatre and that will go a long way. Nevertheless, I felt it
was a thing I should like to see; so one evening two of my friends
took me to the best theatre that was open. The best was closed for
political reasons they said, because the new Government, not as
sure of itself as it would like to be, did not wish the people to
assemble together. This was a minor theatre, a woman's theatre;
that is one where only women were the actors, quite a new
departure in the Celestial world, for until about a year before the day
of which I write, no woman was ever seen upon the stage, and her
parts, as they were in the old days in Europe, were taken by men
and boys. Even now, men and women never appear on the stage
together, never, never do the sexes mingle in China, and the women
who act take the very lowest place in the social scale.
One cold night in March three rickshaws put us down at an open
doorway in the Chinese City outside the Tartar wall. The Chinese the
greatest connoisseurs of pictures do not as yet think much of
posters, though the British and American Tobacco Company is doing
its best to educate them up to that level, so outside this theatre the
door was not decorated with photographs of the lovely damsels to
be seen within, clad in as few clothes as the censor will allow, but
the intellects of the patrons were appealed to, and all around the
doors were bright red sheets of paper, on which the delights offered
for the evening were inscribed in characters of gold.
We went along a narrow passage with a floor of hard, beaten
earth, and dirty whitewashed walls on either side, along such a
passage I could imagine went those who first listened to the sayings
of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The light was dim, the thrifty
Chinaman was not going to waste the precious and expensive light
of compressed gas where it was not really needed, and from behind
the wall came the weird strains of Chinese music. There appeared to
be only one door, and here sat a fat and smiling Chinese, who
explained to my friends that by the rules of the theatre, the men and
women were divided, and that I must go to the women's gallery.
They demurred. It would be very dull for me, who could not

understand a word of the language, to sit alone. Could no exception
be made in my favour? The doorkeeper was courteous as only a
Chinese can be, and said that for his part, he had no objection; but
the custodian of the theatre, put there by the Government to ensure
law and order, would object.
I wanted badly to stay with these men who could explain to me all
that was going on, so we sent for the custodian, another smiling
gentleman, not quite so fat, in the black and yellow uniform of the
military police. He listened to all we had to say, sympathised, but
declared that the regulations must be carried out. My friends put it
to him that the regulations were archaic, and that it was high time
they were altered. He smilingly agreed. They were archaic, very; but
then you see, they were the regulations. He was here to see that
they were carried out, and he suggested, as an alternative, that we
should take one of the boxes at the side. The question of sitting in
front was dismissed, and we gave ourselves to the consideration of a
box for which six dollars, that is twelve shillings English currency, or
three dollars American, were demanded. We demurred, it seems you
always question prices in China. We told the doorkeeper that the
price was very high, and that as we were sitting where we did not
wish to sit, he ought to come down. He did. Shades of Keith and
Prowse! Two dollars!
We went up some steep and narrow steps of the most primitive
order, were admitted to a large hall lighted by compressed gas—in
Cambulac! here in the heart of an ancient civilisation—surrounded by
galleries with fronts of a dainty lattice-work of polished wood, such
as the Chinese employ for windows, and we took our places in a
box, humbly furnished with bare benches and a wooden table. Just
beneath us was the stage, and the play was in full swing—actors,
property men, and orchestra all on at once. It was large and square,
raised a little above the people in the body of the hall and
surrounded by a little low screen of the same dainty lattice-work. At
the back was the orchestra, composed only of men in ordinary coolie
dress—dark blue cotton—with long queues. There were castanets,
and a drum, cymbals, native fiddle, and various brazen instruments

that looked like brass trays, and they all played untiringly, with an
energy worthy of a better cause, and with the apparent intention—it
couldn't have been so really—of drowning the actors. Yet taken
altogether the result was strangely quaint and Eastern.
The entertainment consisted of a number of little plays lasting
from half an hour to about an hour. There were never more than
half a dozen people on the stage at once, very often only two in the
play altogether, and what it was all about we could only guess after
all, for even my friends, who could speak ordinary Chinese fluently,
could not understand much that was said. Possibly this was because
every actor, instead of using the ordinary conversational tone,
adapted as we adapt it to the stage, used a high, piercing falsetto
that was extremely unnatural, and reminded me of nothing on this
earth that I know of except perhaps a pig-killing. Still even I
gathered something of the story of the play as it progressed, for the
gestures of these women, unlike their voices, were extremely
dramatic, and some of the situations were not to be mistaken.
Scenery was as it was in Shakespeare's day. It was understood. But
for all the bare crudity, the dresses of the actors which belonged to a
previous age, whether they were supposed to represent men or
women, were most rich and beautiful. The general, with his
hideously painted face and his long black beard of thread, wore a
golden embroidered robe that must have been worth a small
fortune; a soldier, apparently a sort of Dugald Dalgety, who pits
himself against a scholar clad in modest dark colours, appeared in a
blue satin of the most delicate shade, beautifully embroidered with
gorgeous lotus flowers and palms; and the principal ladies, who
were really rather pretty in spite of their highly painted faces and
weird head-dresses, wore robes of delicate loveliness that one of my
companions, whose business it was to know about such matters,
told me must have been, like the general's, of great value. The
comic servant or country man wore a short jumper and a piece of
white paper and powder about his nose. It certainly did make him
look funny. The dignified scholar was arrayed all in black, the soldier
wore the gayest of embroidered silks and satins, the landlady of the

inn or boarding-house, a pleasant, smiling woman with roses in her
hair and tiny maimed feet, had a pattern of black lace-work painted
on her forehead, and when the male characters had to be very fierce
indeed, they wore long and flowing beards, beards to which no
Chinaman, I fear me, can ever hope to attain, for the Chinaman is
not a hairy man. When a gallant gentleman with tight sleeves which
proclaimed him a warrior, and a long beard of bright red thread
which made him a very fierce warrior indeed, snapped his fingers
and lifted up his legs, lifted them up vehemently, you knew that he
was getting over a wall or mounting his horse. You could take your
choice. A mountain, the shady side of it, was represented by one
panel of a screen which leaned drunkenly against a very ordinary
chair, giving shelter to a very evil spirit with a dress that represented
a leopard, and a face of the grimmest and most terrifying of those
animals.
This was a play that required much property to be displayed, for a
general with a face painted all black and white and long black beard,
with his army of five, took refuge behind a stout city wall that was
made of thin blue cotton stuff supported on four bamboo poles, and
this convenient wall marched on to the stage in the hands of a
couple of stout coolies. A wicked mountain spirit outside the walls
did terrible things. Ever and again flashes of fire burst out after his
speech, and I presume you were not supposed to see the coolie who
manipulated that fire, though he stood on the stage as large as any
actors in the piece.
It is hard, too, talking in that high falsetto against the shrieking,
strident notes of the music, so naturally the actors constantly
required a little liquid refreshment, and an attendant was prompt in
offering tea in tiny round basins; and nobody saw anything
incongruous in his standing there with the teapot handy, and in slack
moments taking a sip himself.
The fun apparently consisted in repartee, and every now and
then, the audience, who were silent and engrossed, instead of

applauding spontaneously, ejaculated, as if at a word of command,
“Hao!” which means “Good!”
That audience was the best-behaved and most attentive I have
ever seen. It consisted mostly of men, as far as I could see, of the
middle class. They were packed close together, with here and there
a little table or bench among them; and up and down went vendors
of apples, oranges, pieces of sugar-cane, cakes and sweetmeats.
There were also people who supplied hot, damp towels. A man
stood here and there in the audience, and from the outer edge of
the theatre, came hurtling to him, over the heads of the people, a
bundle of these towels. For a cent or so apiece he distributed them,
the members of the audience taking a refreshing wipe of face and
head and hands and handing the towels back. When the purveyor of
the towels had used up all his stock, and got them all back again, he
tied them up into a neat bundle, and threw them back the way they
had come, receiving a fresh stock in return. Never did a bundle of
towels fail in reaching its appointed place, and scores of cents must
the providers have pocketed. For the delight of ventilation is not
appreciated in China, and to say that theatre was stuffy is a mild
way of putting it. The warm wet towel must have given a sort of
refreshment. They offered us some up in the dignified seclusion of
our box, but we felt we could sustain life without washing our faces
with doubtful towels during the progress of the entertainment. Tea
was brought, too, excellent Chinese tea, and I drank it with
pleasure. I drink Chinese tea without either milk or sugar as a
matter of course now; but that night at the Chinese theatre I was
only trying it and wondering could I drink it at all.
Opposite us was the women's gallery, full of Chinese and Manchu
ladies, with high headdresses and highly painted faces. The Chinese
ladies often paint their faces, but their attempts at decoration pale
before that of the Manchus, who put on the colour with such right
goodwill that every woman when she is dressed in her smartest,
looks remarkably like a sign-board. The wonder is that anyone could
possibly be found who could admire the unnatural effect. Someone,

I suppose, there is, or it would not be done, but no men went near
the women's gallery that evening. It would have been the grossest
breach of decorum for a man to do any such thing, and the painted
ladies drank their tea by themselves.
Somewhere about midnight, earlier than usual, consequent, I
imagine, upon the disturbed state of the country, the entertainment
ended with a perfect crash of music, and the most orderly audience
in the world went out into the streets of the Chinese City, into the
clear night. Only in very recent years, they tell me, have the streets
of Peking been lighted. Formerly the people went to bed at dusk, but
they seem to have taken very kindly to the change, for the streets
were thronged. There were people on foot, people in rickshaws,
people in the springless Peking carts, and important personages with
outriders and footmen in the glass broughams beloved by the
Chinese; and there were the military police everywhere, now at
night with rifles across their shoulders. Here, disciplining this most
orderly crowd, they struck me as being strangely incongruous. I
wondered at those police then, and I wonder still. What are they
for? Whatever the reason, there they were at every few yards. Never
have I had such a strange home-coming from a theatre. Down on us
forty feet high frowned the walls built in past ages, we crossed the
Beggars' Bridge of glorious marble, we went under the mighty
archway of the Chien Men, and we entered the Legation Quarter
guarded like a fortress, and I went to bed meditating on the
difference between a Chinese play and a modern musical comedy.
They have, I fancy, one thing in common. They are interesting
enough to see for the first time, but a little of them goes a long way.
I went to bed under a clear and cloudless sky, and the next
morning, to my astonishment, it was raining. I have, of course, seen
rain many, many times, and many, many times have I seen heavier
rain than fell all this April day in Peking, but never before, not even
in my own country where rain is the great desideratum, have I seen
rain better worth recording.
It was indeed this April day rain at last!

“To everything there is a season,” says the preacher, and the
spring is the time for a little rain in Northern China. In England
people suppose it rains three hundred and sixty days out of the
three hundred and sixty-five, except in Leap Year when we manage
to get in another rainy day, but as a matter of fact, I believe the
average is about one hundred and fifty wet days in the year, with a
certain number more in which clouds in the sky blot out the
sunshine. In the north of China, on the other hand, there had been,
to all intents and purposes, no cloud in the sky since the summer
rains of 1912, till this rain in April which I looked out upon. Is not
rain like that worth recording? Still more do I feel it is worth
recording when I think of what that day's rain, that seemed so little
to me, meant to millions of people. All through the bitter cold winter
the country lay in the grip of the frost, but the sun reigned in a
heaven of peerless blue, and the light was brilliant with a brilliancy
that makes the sunshine of a June day in England a poor, pale thing.
The people counted for their crops on the rain that would come in
due season, the rain in the spring. March came with the thaw, and
the winds from the north lifted the loose soil into the air in clouds of
dust. But March passed alternating brilliant sunshine and clouds of
dust, and there was never a cloud in the sky, never a drop of
moisture for the gasping earth. April came—would it go on like this
till June? Rain that comes in due season is necessary to the crops
that are the wealth, nay the very life of Northern China.
From the beams of the peasant's cottage hang the cobs of corn,
each one counted; in jars or boxes is his little store of grain, millet—
just bird-seed in point of fact—he has a few dried persimmons
perhaps and—nothing else. Twice a day the housewife measures out
the grain for the meal—she knows, the tiniest child in the household
knows exactly how long it will last with full measure, how it may be
spun out over a few more dreary, hunger-aching days, how then, if
the rain has not come, if the crops have failed, famine will stalk in
the land, famine, cruel, pitiless, and from his grip there is no
escaping.

Think of it, as I did that April day in Peking, when I watched the
rain pelting down. Think of the dumb, helpless peasant watching the
cloudless blue sky and the steadily diminishing store of grain,
watching, hoping, for the faintest wisp of white cloud that shall give
promise of a little moisture. They tell me, those who know, that the
Chinaman is a fatalist, that he never looks so far ahead, but do they
not judge him with Western eyes? True he seldom complains, but he
tills his fields so carefully that he must see in imagination the crops

they are to produce, he must know, how can he help knowing, that
if there be no harvest, there is an end to his home, his family, his
children; that if perchance his life be spared, it will be grey and
empty, broken, desolate, scarce worth living. Every scanty
possession will have to be sold to buy food in a ruinously high
market, even the loved children, and no one who has seen them
together can doubt that the Chinese deeply love their children, must
go, though for the little daughter whose destination will be a brothel
of one of the great cities, but two dollars, four pitiful shillings, may
be hoped for, and when that is eaten up, the son sold into slavery
will bring very little more. To sell their children sounds terrible, but
what can they do? Some must be sacrificed that the others may
have a chance of life, and even if they are not sacrificed, their fate is
to die slowly under the bright sky, in the relentless sunshine. This is
the spectre that haunts the peasant. This is the thing that has
befallen his fathers, that has befallen him, that may befall him again
any year, that no care on his part can guard him from, that the clear
sky for ever threatens.
“From plague, pestilence and famine, Good Lord deliver us.”
Does ever that Litany to the Most High go up in English cathedral
with such prayerful fervour, such thorough realisation of what is
meant by the supplication, as is in the heart of the peasant mother
in China, carefully measuring out the grain for the meal. Only she
would put it the other way. “F rom famine, and the plague and
pestilence that stalk in the wake of the famine, oh pitiful, merciful
God deliver us!”
And when I took all this in, when I heard men who had seen the
suffering describe it, was it any wonder that I rejoiced at the dull
grey sky, at the sound of the rain on the roof, at the water rushing
down the gutters.
On the gently sloping hill-sides of Manchuria, where they grow the
famous bean, the hill-sides that I had seen in their winter array, on
the wide plains of Mongolia, where only the far horizon bounds the
view, and you march on to a yet farther horizon where the Mongol

tends his flocks and herds, and the industrious Chinaman, pushing
out beyond the protecting wall, has planted beans and sown oats, in
Honan, where the cotton and the maize and the kaoliang grow, all
along the gardens and grain-fields of Northern China, had come the
revivifying rain. The day before, under the blue sky, lay the bare
brown earth, acres and acres, miles and miles of it, carefully tilled,
nowhere in the world have I seen such carefully tilled land, full of
promise, but of promise only, of a rich harvest. Then, not hoped for
so late, a boon hardly to be prayed for, welcome as sunshine never
was welcome, came the rain, six hours steady rain, and the spectre
of famine, ever so close to the Chinese peasant, for a time drifted
into the background with old, unhappy, long-forgotten things. Next
morning on all the khaki-coloured country outside Peking was a tinge
of green, and we knew that a bountiful harvest was ensured, knew
that soon the country would be a beautiful emerald. The house-
mother, the patient, uncomplaining, ignorant, Chinese house-mother,
might fill her pot joyfully, the house-father might look at his little
daughter, with the red thread twisted in her hair, and know, that for
a year at least, she was safe in his sheltering arms, for the blessed
rain had come, God given.
Peking in the rain is an uncomfortable place. It is built for the
sunshine. The streets of the city were knee-deep in mud, the hu
t'ungs were impassable for a man on foot unless he would be mud
up to the knees, for there had been six hours solid downpour, and
every moment it continued was worth pounds to the country. What
was a twenty-five million loan with its heavy interest, against such a
rain as this? More than one hundred thousand people were affected
by the downpour, were glad and rejoicing that day at the good-
fortune that had befallen them. This mass of human beings, at the
very lowest computation had considerably more than twenty-five
million pounds rained down upon it in the course of six hours. There
came with that rain, that blurred the windows of my room,
prosperity for the land, and, for a time at least, peace, for peace and
good harvests in China are sometimes interchangeable terms. What
did it matter to Northern China at that moment that the nations

were bickering over the loan, that America was promising, Britain
hesitating, Russia threatening? What did it matter whether Emperor,
President, or Dictator, was in power? What did it matter that the
national representatives hesitated to come to the capital? What did it
matter what mistakes they made? What does the peasant tilling his
field, the woman filling her cooking-pot know about these things?
What do they care? A mightier factor than these, a greater power
than man's had stepped in. God be thanked, in China that day it
rained.

W
CHAPTER VII—ONE OF THE
WONDERS OF THE WORLD
Courteous Americans—Nankou Pass—Beacon towers—Inaccessible
hills—“Balbus has built a wall”—Tiny towns—“Watchman, what of the
night?”—Deserted watch-towers—-Thoughtful Chinese waiter—Ming
Tombs—Chinese carrying chair—Stony way—Greatest p'ia lou in
China—Amphitheatre among the barren hills—Tomb of Yung Lo—
Trunks of sandal-wood trees—Enterprising Chinese guard.
herever I might wander in China, and with the rumours of
war that were in the air, it looked as if my wanderings were
going to be somewhat restricted, to one place I was bound
to wander, and that was the Great Wall of China. Even in the days of
my grandmother's curios, I had heard about that, one of the
wonders of the world, and I could never have left China without
seeing it.
“You can do it in a couple of days,” said the young man, who had
chastened me gently when first I entered Peking. “I'm going up on
Tuesday, You'd better come along. The poet's coming too,” he
added.
The poet, a real live poet, who thought a deal more about his
binding than his public, was like me I think, he did not like seeing
places in crowds, and at first he did not give us much of his society.
There was also a millionaire, an American millionaire, his little wife,
his big daughter, and his angular maiden sister. They had an
observation-car fixed on to the train, and the guard came along and
said that if we ordinary travellers, who were not millionaires, cared
to come in the car, the millionaire would be very pleased.
I have travelled so much by myself that the chance of congenial
company once in a way was delightful, but I did feel we ought not to

have taken the train to the Nankou Pass. A mule litter, or a Peking
cart would have been so much more suitable. However, it is as well
to be as comfortable as possible.
From the north came China's foes, the sturdy horsemen from
Mongolia, the mountain men from the Manchurian Hills, and because
the peaceful, industrious inhabitants of the rich; alluvial plains feared
greatly the raiders, they, just at the Nankou Pass, where these
inaccessible hills might be passed, built watch-towers and kept ward.
There they stand, even to this day, upon jutting peaks where the
pass opens into the plain, grey stone watch-towers with look-outs
and slits for the archers, and beacon-towers which could flash the
fiery warning that should rouse the country to the south. For
thirteen miles we went up the pass, the cleft that the stream,
babbling cheerfully now in April over its water-worn rocks, has
carved for itself through the stony hills, and its weird beauty never
palls.
Always there were the hills, broken to pieces, tossed together by
the hand of a giant, there were great clefts in them, vistas looking
up stony and inaccessible valleys, gullies that are black as if a
burning fiery furnace had been set in their midst, little pockets
where the stream widened and there was a patch of green pasture,
some goats grazing, a small, neat farm-house and fruit-trees, pink
and white, almond, peach, or pear, a wealth of blossom. On every
patch of those barren hill-sides where a tree might grow, a tree—a
fruit-tree—because the Chinaman is strictly utilitarian, had been
planted; only here and there, over the sacred graves of China, there
was a patch of willow, tender with the delicate dainty green of early
spring.

Always in China there are people; and here there were tiny towns
packed together on ledges of the eternal hills, with the fruit-trees
and the willows that shade the graves, and there were walls—walls
that stretch up to the inaccessible portion of the hills, where only a
goat might climb, and no invading army could possibly pass. So
numerous were these walls that my cheery young friend suggested
that if ever a village head-man had a little spare time on his hands
he remarked: “Oh, I say, here's a fine day and plenty of stones, let's
go out and build a wall.” And then next day the villagers in the next
hamlet looking out said, “By Jove, Balbus, no Wong, has built a wall.

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