Jehol is a compact, unwalled town lying prettily up the slope of a hollow between two foot-hills, brightened by a few spring-green trees here and there above its low gray roofs and surrounded on all sides by beautiful broken ranges. The region is famous for curious natural features, the most striking of which is the “Clothes’ Beater,” a mammoth rock looking precisely like that aid to the Chinese washerwomen who squat at the edges of streams or mud-holes, or an Irishman’s shillalah, standing bolt upright on its smaller, handle end, and visible more than a day’s travel away in almost any direction. But while the scenery is magnificent and the town busy and prosperous, the fame of Jehol is due to the imperial summer palaces and the lama temples that grew up about them, as did the town itself. This whole territory, originally Mongol, was given as the dowry of a Mongol wife to a Manchu emperor of China. K’ang Hsi, who died just two hundred years ago, was the first of the Ch’ing dynasty to visit the region, of which he grew very fond. He hunted throughout it, riding also on an ass—the cost of keeping which is said to have been paid regularly out of the imperial treasury until the revolution! Yung Cheng, who succeeded him, met here the mother of his own successor, the famous Ch’ien Lung, who was born at Jehol. Perhaps I should say the alleged mother, for there has always been a strong suspicion that the brilliant Ch’ien Lung was really a Chinese boy switched at birth for a girl born to the empress or concubine in question. At any rate the bare, half-ruined cottage in which he is recorded to have been born is still standing in the wooded hills beyond the imperial summer palace.
This is enclosed within a great wall on a minor scale which clambers over the hills as easily as it stalks across broad flatlands, several miles in extent and still in almost perfect repair. The same can by no means be said, however, of the former palaces inside it. Time, the elements, and particularly the wanton hand of man have reduced them to the saddest state among all the decaying remains of imperial China. The simpler structures near the gates, no doubt built for minor retainers and servants, are occupied by the “Tartar General” and his far-famed “I-Chün” troops, semi-autonomous rulers of this “special area,” and have been more or less kept up accordingly. But the erstwhile palaces scattered beyond the immense half-wooded meadows behind these, to which a soldier guide conducts the few “distinguished visitors” who have credentials, influence, or assurance enough to pass the gates, are synonymous with the word “dilapidation.” A single building has remained comparatively intact, because it is made of solid bronze. Structures that must in their heyday have equaled except in size anything in Peking are mere tumbled ruins of rotten timbers, collapsed roofs, and broken tiles still bearing their glorious Chinese colors. Some of the mammoth gods with which the place seems once to have been overpopulated have survived almost intact in more durable shelters, like the remnants of a fallen dynasty that had their refuges carefully chosen long before the catastrophe came. Others were less fortunate, or foresighted, and, left out in the open by fallen roofs, they are gruesome testimonials that the most brilliant and the most terrifying alike of Chinese gods are but statues of mud. A striking pagoda still stands high above all else except the higher hills within the enclosure, but only the foolhardy climb it now, and the great cluster of temples which seem once to have risen among the venerable evergreens about it have corrupted almost beyond the possibility of identification. A carved stone, in the front rank among Chinese tablets, one whole face of it covered with a Tibetan text, is the only thing that stands erect and defiant against the forces of destruction.