in command of any section of the Allies
who personally exerted himself to a greater degree for the
preservation, or at least to prevent the destruction, of the art
heirlooms of the country than did General Sir Alfred Gaselee.

Some curious things happened in his efforts in this direction. On the
Paoting-fu expedition, for instance, when the troops were to pass in
the neighbourhood of the Imperial Tombs, a few British soldiers were
sent on in advance, and quietly informed the custodians that the
Germans were coming. Readily acting on the information, they removed
all the jewels and easily portable valuables from the tombs, and they
were kept concealed in a village on the other side of the hill under
the guard of a few Bengal Lancers until the Germans had passed. In
recognition of this friendly message the Chinese wanted to make a
present of some magnificent strings of pearls to Captain Maxwell, a
nephew of Lord Roberts.

In civilised warfare there is generally some little respect shown for
the priests and places of worship of the conquered people, but here
there was none whatever. Horses were stabled in the temples, and the
art heirlooms of thousands of years of the nation's life to be found
therein were frequently mutilated and destroyed when they were not
stolen. In the street where I lived in Pekin for a whole week were to
be seen, day by day, carts passing backwards and forwards laden with
books which were being brought to be consumed in a huge fire kept
burning in a yard outside the palace wall. Thousands of books were
thus treated, so that the whole street was littered with their
fluttering leaves to such an extent that I could not get my little
Chinese pony to pass there without getting off and leading him, for he
shied continually at the fluttering papers. Day after day this
literary holocaust continued. When the wind was in the direction of my
house a fine black snow kept perpetually falling, and covered the
roofs and courtyards with these ashes of dead thoughts. Hundreds of
the books were written in the quaint characters which showed that they
belonged to, and were written by, Lama priests; many of them had
probably found their way there from the bleak steppes of far Tibet.

They were printed with those wooden blocks by which these barbarians
practised the art of printing for centuries before the time of
Caxton. Many of them also were in manuscript, which must have meant
years of labour, and hand-painted pic