Great Cities Through Travelers' Eyes Read online

  There were some feasts that lasted ten days, which in regard of the state, pomp and charge thereof, as well in the attendance of servants and waiters, as in the costly fare of all kind of flesh, fowl, fish and all delicacies in music, in sports of hunting and hawking, in plays, comedies, games, tourneys and in shows both of horse and foot, fighting and skirmishing together, do cost above twenty thousand taels. These inns are maintained by companies of very rich merchants, who…employ their money therein, whereby they gain far more than if they should venture it to sea.… Whensoever any one will be at a charge that way, he goes to the superintendent of the house, and declares what his design is; whereupon he shews him a book…which treats of the ordering and bumptiousness of feasts, the rates of them…. This book I have seen, and heard it read; in the three first chapters thereof, it speaks of the feasts whereunto God is to be invited, and of what price they are; and then it descends to the king of China…. After it hath done with the king in China, it speaks of the feasts of the tutons, which are the ten sovereign dignities that command over the 40 ghaems, who are as the viceroys of the state.

  1655 PETER DE GOYER AND JAKOB DE KEYZER

  De Goyer and de Keyzer, merchants from the Dutch trading post of Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), travelled to China as representatives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to seek a trading agreement with the Ming. Their embassy included an artist, and the illustrated account of their journey was widely published and contributed significantly to European perceptions of China in the late 17th century.

  The city is called Peking which signifies the northern chief city, to distinguish it from Nanking, which we interpret the southern city. But the other name Xuntien, wherewith it is so commonly called by the Chinese geographers, signifies Obedient to Heaven; it is called by the Tartars Cambalu, that is the City of the Lord….

  All rarities in China are brought hither so that this city abounds in everything either for pleasure or humane sustenance. Several thousand royal vessels (beside those of private persons) are continually employed to fetch all manner of wares and curiosities for the emperor and his council at Peking.… The Chinese use great endeavours to make all rivers navigable that so they may come with ease by water to the emperor’s court with the products of several provinces.…

  By this importation this place, though in an unfruitful and barren soil possesses everything in great abundance and may be called the granary of the whole empire; for they have a proverb among them that, ‘there grows nothing in Peking, yet there is no want of anything’.…

  The streets are not paved, insomuch that in wet weather (which is seldom) they are hardly passable, but when the northern winds blow, and the weather dry, the soil which is of a light substance makes a dust far more noisome to passengers than the deep and miry streets; for such it is that it blinds a man as he goes along. The inhabitants therefore to prevent this inconvenience are fain to wear silk hoods over their faces; and the extraordinary foulness of the way makes very many to keep horses to carry them after a rainy day; for the infinite number of common people that are continually up and down turns this dusty soil into mire and dirt after a little rain.

  There are also horses and sedans to be hired at any time for the accommodation of passengers; but none make use of sedans or chairs but persons of quality. The sedan is made very artificially of bamboo or rushes in the middle whereof stands a chair which is covered with a tiger’s skin upon which he that is carried seats himself, having behind him a boy with an umbrella in his hand to keep off the sun. His servants likewise attend him, some whereof go before and others follow with ensigns upon their shoulders whereby the quality of the person is known and is respected accordingly as he passes along.

  1721 JOHN BELL

  China has long been renowned for its acrobats, as recalled in this account by the Scottish doctor John Bell (1691–1780) who lived in St Petersburg, where he was appointed medical assistant to Russian embassies to Persia, China (1721–22) and Constantinople. The illustrated account of his travels was published in Britain and France in the 1760s.

  We dined at the French or western convent, where again we found all the missionaries.… The emperor’s band of music played all the time of dinner; after which we had jugglers and tumblers of great activity. Among the many feats and tricks performed by these people I shall mention only two or three which seemed most uncommon. The roof of the room where we sat was supported by wooden pillars. The juggler took a gimlet with which he bored one of the pillars and asked whether we chose red or white wine? The question being answered, he pulled out the gimlet and put a quill in the hole, through which ran, as from a cask, the wine demanded. After the same manner he extracted several sorts of liquors, all of which I had the curiosity to taste and found them good of their kinds.

  Another of these expert youths took three long sharp-pointed knives and, throwing them up by turns, kept one always in each hand and the third in the air. This he continued to perform for a considerable time, catching constantly the falling knife by the handle without ever allowing it to touch the floor. The knives were exceeding sharp so that, had he missed laying hold of the handles, he must infallibly have lost some of his fingers.…

  I shall only mention one instance more. There were placed erect upon the pavement of the room two bamboos, which are a kind of cane. The length of them was about twenty-five feet; at the lower end I reckon them to be near five inches diameter and at the top, about the breadth of a crown piece. They were straight, light and smooth, and each supported by two men. Two boys then climbed up the poles without the least assistance and having reached the top stood upright, sometimes on one foot and sometimes on the other, and then upon their heads. This being done, they laid one hand on the top of the pole and stretched out their bodies almost at right angles to it. In this posture they continued for a considerable time and even shifted hands. I observed that much depended on the men who held the poles; one of the two having it fixed to his girdle; and they kept a steady eye on the motions of the boys. There were about twenty or thirty of these performers who all belong to the emperor and never display their art without his permission. I am fully persuaded that in tricks and feats of dexterity, few nations can equal and none excel the Chinese.

  1887 HARRY DE WINDT

  In the later 19th century China was forcibly opened to Western travellers and traders, who commonly both admired the rich and ancient culture they encountered and despised the people for their supposed servility and ‘inscrutability’. Harry de Windt (1856–1933) was a British soldier and explorer who wrote accounts of several long journeys across Asia, including overland from Paris to New York via Siberia, and Russia to India via Persia. His description of arriving in Beijing in 1887 shows a typical disdain for the people among whom he was travelling.

  A few hundred yards brought us to the gate of the Tartar city, and, ye gods! what a city! Upon first entering, it seemed as if a dense fog had suddenly descended upon one, but a look back at the bright sunshine outside the gate soon dispelled the illusion and explained the mystery: it was nothing but dust, the black, fine and searching dust, for which Pekin is famous. Everything was coated with it. One breathed it in with every inhalation, till eyes, mouth and nose were choked up, and breathing became almost an impossibility. No one seemed to mind it much, though our donkeys laboured through it nearly knee-deep.

  We rode for some distance along the filthy, dusty streets. There is no rule of the road in Pekin, and it took one all one’s time to steer safely through the carts, sedans, mule litters and camel caravans which thronged the streets. At length we turned into the principal thoroughfare, a broad unpaved street, raised in the centre, on either side of which one saw a long vista of low-roofed houses, scrubby trees and gaudy shop signs, lost in the distance in a cloud of dust. We were in Pekin at last.

  In Pekin but apparently a long way yet from our destination, the Hotel de Pekin; and judging from our small guide’s very erratic movements, we were not likely for some time to reach t
hat friendly hostelry…. The disagreeable suspicion that our guide had lost his way became a certainty, when turning down a narrow by-lane, he brought us up at the door of a filthy tea-house. It was not a pleasant predicament. Imagine a Central African suddenly turned loose in the streets of London, and you have our position – with this difference, that the African would have had the advantage over us in the shape of a policeman to befriend him. Here, in this city of nearly two million inhabitants, it seemed unlikely enough that we should come across any of the English-speaking inhabitants, who number fifty to sixty at the most.

  Threats of punishment and vengeance on the small boy were useless. He simply seated himself, and calling for a cup of tea, informed us we must find our way ourselves, he did not know it – at least that is what we inferred from his gestures, which were disrespectful in the extreme. With a lively recollection of our escape of the afternoon, we did not care to risk another disturbance, so, resigning ourselves to circumstances, dismounted and called for tea.

  It was not a pleasant half-hour, for we were surrounded in less than five minutes by a crowd of dirty, villainous-looking ruffians. We had evidently been brought to one of the very lowest quarters of the town, and were not sorry to have left our watches in the carts. With the exception of the revolvers and a few cash [sic] they would not have been much the richer for robbing us. I should be sorry to have much to do with the inhabitants of the Chinese capital. There is no more obliging and hospitable being than the Chinese peasant, no more insolent, arrogant thief than the lower order of Pekinese. The victory of the imperial troops over the French in Tonkin [northern Vietnam; in 1884–85, Chinese forces caused setbacks for France in the Sino-French War] is, in a great measure, responsible for the insolence displayed by the inhabitants of Pekin towards Europeans. Insults are perpetrated almost daily, and in the open streets, for which there is no redress, and it is only necessary to go for a very short walk in the streets of the capital to see that the lesson taught the Celestials by the allied troops in 1860 has long since been forgotten.

  We should probably have had to pass the night in this unsavoury den, had not a European passed and by the greatest luck caught sight of us through the narrow gateway. Our deliverer, Mr P., an American missionary, himself escorted us through a labyrinth of crowded streets and squares to Legation Street. We should certainly never have found our way otherwise, for there were no outward and visible signs even here of European inhabitants, till, just before reaching the hotel, we passed the French Embassy, and saw, through an open gateway, a spacious shady garden with smooth-shaven lawns, cedars and fountains, while over the doorway, in large gold letters on a vermilion ground, were the words ‘Legation de France’. A couple of hundred yards further on we pulled up at the door of our caravanserai. Thanking and taking leave of our friend, we entered the building and were not sorry to find ourselves in the cool, grey-tiled, flower-bordered courtyard of the hotel, where a whisky and soda with plenty of ice washed the dust out of our throats and refreshed us not a little after our long and somewhat eventful ride.

  The baggage arrived an hour after, and after a bath and change we felt well-disposed to do justice to the excellent dinner provided for us.… Sitting out after dinner in the little moonlit courtyard redolent of heliotrope and mignonette, one might have fancied oneself hundreds of miles from the dusty, ill-smelling city, and its barbaric population. The smells did not, thank goodness, penetrate here; and for the first time since leaving Tientsin [Tianjin], we thoroughly enjoyed an after-dinner cigar, not a little relieved that the starting-point, at any rate, of our long land journey had been safely reached.

  1987 COLIN THUBRON

  British travel writer Colin Thubron (b. 1939) travelled thousands of miles across China in the 1980s, often alone and on foot or by public transport, observing the country in the aftermath of Mao’s radical upheavals, and at a time when cautious liberalization was under way.

  Something impersonal and unfinished pervaded the whole metropolis of Beijing. Often I felt as if I was not in a city at all, but on a building site where a city might one day be created. I tramped the streets in disorientation, looking for a core which was not there. Across the tarmac desert of its roads the flat-blocks and Soviet-style institutions rose as featureless as cardboard, and the sycamores and silver poplars planted along them paled beneath too vast an expanse of sky. I was feeling displaced from some other capital, perhaps an imagined city – imperial Peking whose walls and temples had been hacked away.

  Along the quiet streets commuters moved in unisexual flocks, jacketed in olive green and boilersuit blue. The boyish hair and tobacco-stained teeth of a million factory workers bobbed and grimaced from jam-packed trams and buses, while sallow girls, their plaits and pony-tails bound in elastic bands, bicycled solemnly all together down special lanes in regimental shoals. Staring at passing faces I wondered if I would ever come to know them. They conspired to fulfil Western clichés of themselves: inscrutable and all alike. The pavements fell noiseless under the uniform tread of their canvas shoes and black cloth slippers. I smiled at the gentler faces. They looked bemused, smiled slowly back. Nobody approached me.

  Even the city’s plan was vaguely estranging. The medieval Chinese who invented the magnetic compass, laid out their capital according to an intricate geomancy, so that its dead-straight streets and gates inscribed a sacred force-field out from the emperor’s inner palaces to the farthest reaches of the empire.…

  The walls and gates had almost gone now, pulled down in the Revolutionary ferment, but they had left behind them this mystic gridiron fattened to six or eight lanes with scarcely a motor on them. Its roads sliced through the mesh of alleys and courtyards like the imposition of some unrepealable law, a giant idea driven through the throbbing softness of private life.…

  A few trams and Russian-style taxis clatter by, with an occasional Chinese-made ‘Shanghai’ or Japanese saloon (but never privately owned), while here and there a black Mercedes or lumpish ‘Red Flag’ conveys its officials between residence and ministry, concealed by curtains. For the rest, the roads are given up to a drifting river of five million bicyclists.

  But as I approached the city’s centre, I noticed differences. They came in apparent trivia – girls wearing skirts and tentative lipstick, markets spilling over the pavements with sacks of bananas, improvised stalls piled with cheap clothes. Arguments flared, and reticent tenderness: women walking arm in arm, a man’s hand drifting to his workmate’s shoulder. Compared to the Beijing of ten years ago – a city still frozen in the puritanism of Mao’s Revolution – all this was unimaginable. But the changes now were everywhere. Window-dressing had appeared, with hairstyles, fashion, advertisements – all the messengers of a gentler, more self-centred, more humanely varied life.…

  I abandoned the avenues and slipped down side streets into a maze-world of alleys and courtyards. These hutongs are still the living flesh of Beijing, and once you are inside them it shrinks to a sprawling hamlet. The lanes are a motley of blank walls and doorways, interspersed by miniature factories and restaurants. Each street is a decrepit improvisation on the last. Tiled roofs curve under rotting eaves. The centuries shore each other up. Modern brick walls, already crumbling, enclose ancient porches whose doors of beaten tin or lacerated pinewood swing in carved stone frames. Underfoot the tarmac peels away from the huge, worn paving-slabs of another age, and the traffic thins to a tinkling slipstream of pedicabs and bicycles.…

  In these lanes, too, the inhabitants drifted into solitude and became individual. As they gossiped or bartered at little stalls of private enterprise, they looked mysteriously cleaner and trimmer than the houses from which they came. And they no longer seemed alike. Already I was mentally separating the dark southern immigrant from the taller Beijingnese, and identifying the deep chestnut hair of northern girls. People detached themselves into portraits – a bright-cheeked tomboy skipping with a frayed strand of rope; a man pulling his wife on a handcart, to work; while beside me an
old woman hobbled on feet crippled by binding – they were less than six inches long, and their broken bones rose in a pained hillock close to the ankle. She smiled weakly at nothing.

  BERLIN

  Berlin was founded in the 1230s and came to dominate first Brandenburg and then Prussia, becoming the residence of the king of Prussia in 1701; the palace of Charlottenburg was built around this time.

  The city was embellished throughout the 18th century, the most commonly noted feature being the Brandenburg Gate, built in 1788–91 by Frederick William II to symbolize peace. As capital of the most powerful state of early 19th-century Germany, and from 1871, capital of the German Empire, Berlin exerted an increasing cultural sway, while the reactionary Prussian monarchy dominated the political life of the city.