While the donkeys drowsed through a well earned but unexpected holiday, I spent half the morning, with the “boy” trailing me, chasing the man who could open the tomb doors for me. Even with two tissue-paper documents daubed with red characters from men of standing in Peking local permission was not easily forthcoming. First there was a hot and dusty ten-_li_ walk to the little garrison town of Malanchen on the very edge of intramural China, where the commander commonly reputed to be stationed in Malanyü read and retained my letters, offered tea, and at length sent a soldier back to the city with us with orders to run to earth the chief keeper of the tombs. He was not easily found and he in turn had to run to earth several subordinates, each of whom lived far up labyrinthian alleyways in the utmost corners of town, and when at length we shook off the throng that kicks up the dust at the heels of any foreigner so bold as to step off the beaten path of his fellows in China, there was still an hour’s tramp back through the thin evergreen forest to the tombs themselves.
Though it should be funereal, Tung Ling is one of the most delightful spots in North China, almost atoning for the wastefulness of its two hundred square miles given over to nine tombs. The soughing of the breeze and the singing of the few birds in the scattered but extensive evergreen forest were joys that one almost forgets in this bare land; for China there were comparatively few people within the enclosure, though trail-roads wandered away in all directions among the trees, with donkey-bells tinkling off into the distance; it was particularly a joy to leave even the trails and walk on grass again, strolling at random on and on, to climb the hills, though this is technically forbidden, since the living commonalty should not look down upon the illustrious dead. Whatever they may not have done for their subjects the Sons of Heaven were experts in choosing their last resting-places.
There was no roaming at will, however, until I had shaken off the procession of keepers and hangers-on whose duty, curiosity, or suspicion did not begin to flag until well on in the afternoon. It is a serious matter to protect an emperor and his consorts even centuries after their death. Every one of the nine tombs of Tung Ling has a walled town in which its guardians and their families, all Manchus, of course, live to the number certainly of several hundred each, if not of more than a thousand. Their support devolves upon the Chinese people, through the Government which guarantees, even though it does not fulfil its promises, the upkeep of the tombs, as well as of the survivors, of the Ch’ing dynasty. Before each tomb, which is no mere mausoleum in the Occidental sense but an enclosure many acres in extent, quite aside from the great wooded tract surrounding it, where half a dozen great buildings and a flock of small ones have ample elbow-room, stands a keepers’ lodge. From this, blackened with the smoke of generations of cooking and tea-brewing, emerge as many as a dozen idlers whose sole duty in life is to see that no unauthorized disturbance troubles the royal dead within. No one of these guards is intrusted with power enough to open the tomb alone; there are things inside that would bring pilferers several Chinese fortunes. When the authorized visitor—or, one very strongly suspects, any other capable of clinking silver—appears, shouts arise in the lodge and its vicinity until at length men enough are awakened from their perpetual siestas to make entrance possible. This requires from four to six, sometimes more, bunches of mammoth keys, each of which is in the personal keeping of a single individual or, since man must sleep, a pair of them. When at length the whole unshaven group is assembled, a pair of ordinary coolies is also needed to bring a step-ladder, since the tomb doors are trebly secured with enormous padlocks at top and bottom in addition to the great bolts operated through the ordinary keyholes. The keys of Chinese tombs, by the way, do not turn; they merely push open the crude yet complicated locks. There are often several such doors to be passed, so that the time required to gain admission is much more than the average visitor cares to spend inside.