Empire."

I

THE EMPRESS DOWAGER--HER EARLY LIFE

One day when one of the princesses was calling at our home in Peking, I
inquired of her where the Empress Dowager was born. She gazed at me for
a moment with a queer expression wreathing her features, as she finally
said with just the faintest shadow of a smile: "We never talk about the
early history of Her Majesty." I smiled in return and continued: "I
have been told that she was born in a small house, in a narrow street
inside of the east gate of the Tartar city--the gate blown up by the
Japanese when they entered Peking in 1900." The princess nodded. "I
have also heard that her father's name was Chao, and that he was a
small military official (she nodded again) who was afterwards beheaded
for some neglect of duty." To this the visitor also nodded assent.

A few days later several well-educated young Chinese ladies, daughters
of one of the most distinguished scholars in Peking, were calling on my
wife, and again I pursued my inquiries. "Do you know anything about the
early life of the Empress Dowager?" I asked of the eldest. She
hesitated a moment, with that same blank expression I had seen on the
face of the princess, and then answered very deliberately,--"Yes,
everybody knows, but nobody talks about it." And this is, no doubt, the
reason why the early life of the greatest woman of the Mongol race,
and, as some who knew her best think, the most remarkable woman of the
nineteenth century, has ever been shrouded in mystery. Whether the
Empress desired thus to efface all knowledge of her childhood by
refusing to allow it to be talked about, I do not know, but I said to
myself: "What everybody knows, I can know," and I proceeded to find out.

I discovered that she was one of a family of several brothers and
sisters and born about 1834; that the financial condition of her
parents was such that when a child she had to help in caring for the
younger children, carrying them on her back, as girls do in China, and
amusing them with such simple toys as are hawked about the streets or
sold in the shops for a cash or two apiece; that she and her brothers
and little sisters amused themselves with such games as blind man's
buff, prisoner's base, kicking marbles and flying kites in company with
the other children of their neighbourhood. During these early years she
was as fond of the puppet plays, trained mice shows, bear shows, and
"Punch and Judy" as she was in later years