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We spent the first night at an inn on the outskirts of a tiny village. It was a clean inn, too very different from those in south China. The great courtyard was crowded with arriving carts. In the kitchen dozens of tired mafus were noisily gulping huge bowls of macaroni, and others, stretched upon the kang, had already become mere, shapeless bundles of dirty rags.
The unpopularity caused by his proposed innovations proved fatal to Kwangsu; for the party at court, headed by the Empress-dowager Tsi An, took advantage of it to arrest and imprison him. Kang Yu Wei, having received warning of the conspiracy, had fled, and succeeded in gaining an asylum under the British flag, but many of the emperor's personal followers were put to death.
Each day when the guard was changed, the drawbridge connecting the island with the mainland was removed, leaving the Emperor to wander about in the court of his palace-prison, or sit on the southern terrace where it overlooked the lotus lake, waiting, hoping and perhaps expecting that his last appeal to Kang Yu-wei in which he said: "My heart is filled with a great sorrow which pen and ink cannot describe; you must go abroad at once and without a moment's delay devise some means to save me," might bring forth some fruit.
A soldier named Owen from the Legation guard in Peking was to drive the Delco car, and I had two Chinese taxidermists, Chen and Kang, besides Lu, our cook and camp boy. Chen had been loaned to me by Dr. J. G. Andersson, Mining Adviser to the Chinese Republic, and proved to be one of the best native collectors whom I have ever employed.
An inspection of the remaining houses in the village disclosed no better quarters, so our boys ousted the sow and her family, swept the house, spread the kang and floor with clean straw, and pasted fresh paper over the windows. We longed to use our tents, but there was nothing except straw or grass to burn, and cooking would be impossible.
Numbers of Chinese were devoured by the dragon and still possession was not obtained of the stone. "The name of one of the Chinese Ministers was Ong Kang and of another ONG SUM PING, and the latter had recourse to a stratagem.
A well-intentioned but weak man, he had surrounded himself with advanced scholars, led by the celebrated Kang Yu Wei, who daily studied with him and filled him with new doctrines, teaching him to believe that if he would only exert his power he might rescue the nation from international ignominy and make for himself an imperishable name. The sequel was inevitable.
And if Kang Yu-wei had been as great a statesman as he was reformer, Kuang Hsu might never have been deposed. The crisis came during the summer of 1898. I had taken my family to the seashore to spend our summer vacation. A young Chinese scholar a Hanlin who had been studying in the university for some years, and with whom I was translating a work on psychology, had gone with me.
In eight days' time there would be sufficient moonlight. The children were to wait until they were sure that Ku Nai-nai was asleep, and then squeeze themselves through the window over their kang and come out into the court. Chang would be on his side with Chi Fu, and they would let down a large round basket, into which the children must get, one at a time, and be hauled over the wall.
When all the walnuts were eaten, the children amused themselves by wandering round the room and examining everything in it. It was not at all like any room in an English house. The floor was stone, and part of it, called a kang, was raised like a platform. Every house in North China has one of these kangs, with a little fireplace underneath.
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