The Confucian Temple, where there are tablets to Confucius and his four great followers, may be called a satisfactory sight, and has remained open of late years. Viewed as a picnic place, it is delightful. The vast courts, with their old, old fir-trees, gave me far more pleasure even than the marble balustrades, or the ancient granite so-called drums we had gone to see. But even there the behaviour of the people was what anywhere else one would call insolent in the extreme. The importunity, sores, and dirt of the Peking gamins render them also a detestable _entourage_. Things reached their climax, however, at the Hall of the Classics. The open door was as usual banged to in our faces, as we came near; and we were then asked through the closed door how much we would give to get in. Then as soon as we got in, all the detestable rabble following us were let in too, much though I begged they might be kept out. I do not think I had up to that time seen anything so neglected and dilapidated as the Hall of the Classics, the building in all China which one would most expect to see kept in good order, nothing being so much esteemed in China as learning, and especially the learning of the ancients. Some workmen, with almost no clothing, were apparently employed in making it dirtier; but directly we entered they left off doing whatever it was, and devoted themselves to horse-play of the coarsest description, standing upright on their hands, pirouetting their feet over the heads of the crowd who came in with us, knocking some of them down, and rolling them in the dust. They even went so far as to sit down in their more than semi-nude condition on the same bench on which I was sitting, and as near me as possible; whilst all the while there was such a shouting and noise, it was impossible for my husband and me to speak to one another.
It is all very well to remind oneself one is in the presence of a great work, and to try and feast one's soul upon proportions and perspectives in the presence of such lewd behaviour of people of the baser sort. To put it prettily, I was distracted by a great pity for people whose chances in life seemed to have been so small; in plainer English, my temper began to rise. The porcelain arch we had come to see was certainly beautiful, a masterpiece, but not soul-satisfying. We duly noticed the elaborate eaves, protected by netting from the birds. But then came the usual question: How much would we pay to get out? They locked the door in our faces, demanding more money before they would let us out. My husband could stand no more. He was just recovering from a dangerous illness; but he took up a big beam, and smashed open the door. It fell, lintel and all, and the latter so nearly killed a child in its fall the crowd was awed. This just gave us time to get on our donkeys. Then Babel broke loose again, and the storm continued till we had ridden half an hour away, our donkey-men nearly indulging in a stand-up fight in the end, one of them brandishing at the other a very gracefully carved sceptre, that I had just picked up at a fair, to my intense delight. "A nice fellow you are," shouted one to the other. "You ate up all the biscuits, and now you don't know the road. You are worth nothing at all." So that was the way the biscuits had disappeared: the donkey-men had levied toll on our luncheons, and we had suspected the Peking gamins. As there are other porcelain arches in Peking, it might be as well for other visitors to avoid the Hall of the Classics altogether, we thought.