BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 24 DEC. 1920
BRACERS 19721. AL. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

Peking,
Xmas Eve, 1920.1

You say you find it difficult to imagine me here, so I will try to describe the world in which I am living. I have a Chinese house, built round a courtyard, with only the ground-floor. The front door opens into a small street; as one walks along the street, one sees only one continuous wall with an occasional door, because the houses are hidden. Ten minutes’ walk from my house are the City Walls, which go all round the City (14 miles). They are high and broad, and the best place for an afternoon walk, because one sees the whole of Peking and the Western Hills beyond. The region between Hankow and Peking, when I came through it in the train, seemed to me very like Southern Russia: vastness, unbounded plains, and primaeval peasants. Southern China, from the Yangtse to Hongkong, is utterly different — tropical or sub-tropical, very beautiful in a straightforward fashion, fertile, populous, and gay. But this northern land is tragic. The sand blows over from the desert of Gobi in great yellow storms, and makes moving sand-hills which engulf whole villages. The rivers are cruel, always either dried up or in flood. Owing to drought last summer, 20 million peasants are starving; they offer their little girls for sale as slaves at 3 dollars, and if they don’t get that price they bury them alive. The Chinese don’t care; whatever is being done for relief is European or American. There are many rich Chinese, but they won’t lend to their government, because they know the money would be spent in corruption. The Chinese politicians take Japanese money, while Japan steals Shantung2 and behaves in Korea even worse than we are behaving in Ireland. Japan and England smuggle opium into the country by corrupting the customs officials. The provincial governors have each his own army, usually unpaid, but making money by looting unoffending towns, bayonetting shopkeepers who try to keep something back. Meanwhile the intellectuals prate of socialism or communism, pretend to be very advanced, and sit with folded hands enjoying inherited wealth, while the Japs, the Russians, the English and the Americans are all trying to get pickings off the corpse. There was until lately a native art which was very beautiful, and a native poetry of exquisite delicacy. But the palseying touch of industrialism has killed all that. The common people are the best; they are good-natured children, full of laughter, physically tough, and mentally less effete than the people of inherited culture. I feel as if they would be quite good material for education, whereas the pupils I get are incurably lazy and soft. Peking is very beautiful, full of broad open spaces, trees, palaces, sheets of water, and temples. The climate is delicious, bright and dry, always freezing in winter, but with almost no snow. Europeans dash about in motor-cars, Chinese men make a more stately progress in carriages with footmen standing behind, humbler folk go in rickshaws, and your correspondent on his feet for the sake of exercise. Walking here has the drawback of the beggars: shivering men and women and children in rags which scarcely secure decency, who run after one for long distances repeating “da la yeh” (great old sire!). Some are fat and evidently make a good living; others look terribly poor and hungry and cold. There are many dogs in the streets, but they are despised; some are covered with sores, others one sees dying in the ditch.

• 1

  [document] Document200722.  Written as what BR called the next day “the first ‘Chinese letter’”, for BR and Colette’s literary letters book, which was never published. Intended to be impersonal, the letter lacks both salutation and validiction with signature.

• 2

  Japan steals Shantung Japan was authorized under the Treaty of Versailles (1919) to assume control over the province of Shandong previously held by Germany.