Those who are wise make the outward journey by way of Tung Ling, the Eastern Tombs, thereby doubling the reward. This means that the first stage is to Tungchow, by train or almost any known form of transportation, twelve miles east of the capital, of which it was for centuries the “port.” For it lies on the river that joins the Grand Canal at Tientsin, and the tribute grain from the south was transferred here to narrower canals that brought it to the imperial granaries now falling into ruin almost within a stone’s throw of our Peking home. I might have been disappointed to find the donkeys that had been engaged for me unavailable until next morning if it had not been my good fortune to spend the intervening time with the venerable author of “Chinese Characteristics” and “Village Life in China.” Tungchow itself has nothing unusual to show the visitor of to-day, unless it is that rounded corner of its half-ruined wall. This is a sign of infamy, for it means that some one within was once guilty of the, particularly in China, unpardonable crime of patricide. The city which merits four such corners was by imperial law razed to the ground.
Long before dawn, early as that is on the first day of May, the three donkeys reported for duty. They were smaller and leaner than I had hoped, of course, but their owner and driver, deeply pock-marked and already showing the cataract that will in time blind his remaining eye, turned out to be all that a much more exacting traveler could have asked, and a real companion to boot. I wish I could say as much for the “boy” I brought with me from Peking; truth must prevail, however, at all costs. My journey to Jehol was made at a later date than those longer ones subsequently to be chronicled; I had already been eight months in China, entertaining a teacher an hour a day during nearly half that period, and it seemed high time to depend on my own meager knowledge of Mandarin, to make this a kind of test for similar, but more extensive, experiences to come. I had deliberately refused those applicants with a smattering of English, therefore, and hired this single servant for his alleged familiarity with foreign ways, particularly of the kitchen. He might have known even less of what we understand by the word “cleanliness,” for the depths of ignorance in that respect are bottomless in China, and his familiarity was rather of the sort which too indulgent missionaries produce among Chinese of his class. Were the trip to be repeated I would depend upon _k’an-lü-di_, my companionable “watch-donkey-er” from Tungchow, to do the swearing and bring me boiled water at the inns, and do the rest myself. But at least the “boy” spoke only the tongue of Peking, and from Tungchow back to the capital I had the advantage of hearing not a word of any other except from the two British families in Jehol itself.