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Updated: May 27, 2025
This is a distance of eight miles, or sixteen there and back to Nankow. The cavalcade left in the same fashion as on the day previous. Our way led us over the hills, an irregular roadway, first through a field and past two little villages. We then came to a magnificently carved pailow of white marble, fifty feet high, eighty feet wide, and divided into five openings by square pillars.
Yung-lohi is considered the finest of the group, and this was now to be our objective point. Half a mile beyond the pailow already alluded to is the Red Gate. Next is the Holy Way.
Here there is a richly decorated pailow, with encaustic tiles, chiefly green and yellow; the three archways are lined with white marble. This hall was designed by the Emperor, Chien Lung, to complete the Confucius Temple, in which till then the classics had been expounded.
Well, there is one pailow or memorial arch that is not of red lacquer but of white marble, erected not in honor of a Chinese but in honor of a foreigner, the imposing von Kettler Memorial which spans Ha-Ta-Men Street, far out. It is a Lest-We-Forget memorial placed in honor of Baron von Kettler, the German minister who was killed in the Boxer uprising.
There are many such streets in Peking, and a few shady residence thoroughfares, but our way usually led through the congested sections. Pailows, where streets are crossed at right angles, are interesting, and they have usually commemorative arches; and sometimes the business houses of the locality bear their name, as the Four Pailow Shop.
To create the war spirit it may be necessary to dedicate the von Kettler pailow to this purpose, but as a precedent it seems rather unwise, leads one into sweeping vistas of all the pailows of China, all the thousands innumerable of red lacquered pailows, all insufficient in their thousands to contain the names of the still greater thousands of Chinese slain by their European conquerors.
A little farther to the west is found the finest pailow in Peking, made of very beautiful encaustic tiles; and behind a neighboring hillock rests the celebrated dragon screen, sixty feet long and twenty feet high; it was built to protect the library, which was unfortunately burned during the occupation of the allied forces in 1900.
A three-arched pailow had a very massive carved cornice and entablature; on the cornice and on each division of the arch were seated immense carved lions; similar ones were also on the reverse side of the arch and on the ends, making ten in all, and adding to the impressiveness of the whole. We now entered the sacred avenue, lined on each side with ten large stone animals.
And here were we listening to a suggestion to erase the inscription on the von Kettler arch, and substitute a new one dedicating the pailow to the five hundred "Chinese" troops torpedoed by the Germans. It seems to me rather late in the day to begin inscribing pailows to Chinese killed by the conquering foreigner.
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