With the Empress Dowager of China

I

My Presentation and First Day at the Chinese Court

The day of my first Audience at the Chinese Court, August 5th, we were up betimes at the American Legation, for it takes full three hours to drive out to the Summer Palace from Peking; and punctuality is the etiquette of Oriental as well as of Occidental potentates. Our audience was for half-past ten o’clock, and the portrait of the Empress Dowager was to be begun at eleven; that hour, as well as the day and the month, having been chosen, after much deliberation and many consultations of the almanac, as the most auspicious for beginning work on the first likeness ever made of Her Majesty.

We left the Legation at seven a.m. in the trap of the United States Legation Guard, that being the only vehicle available large enough to carry the party, Mrs. Conger and her interpreter and myself and my painting materials, which included a large canvas and a folding easel. After leaving the City, the drive out to the Summer Palace is through fertile fields and a fair, smiling landscape. It had rained the night before and everything was beautifully fresh. The wet, stone-paved road stretched ahead like a shining stream; the wheat and corn fields along the road were of a brilliant green, with here and there the somber note of a clump of arborvitae, out of which rose the walls of a temple! The distant hills, where lay the Summer Palace, were delicately limned against a soft blue-gray sky, and the whole made an entrancing picture.

Soon after leaving Peking the mounted official Legation servants that followed Mrs. Conger’s carriage were joined by a Chinese Guard of Honor sent by the Wai-Wu-Pu (Foreign Office) to escort us to the Palace. After an hour and a half’s drive we rattled through a busy village, past the yellow ruins of a great lama temple, and along the park walls of the summer homes of several Princes of the Imperial Family, and soon came within sight of the beautiful grounds of the Summer Palace with its hills, valleys, canals, and lakes; the hills crowned with teahouses and temples, the waters of the canals lapping the marble terraces of the Palaces. The red walls and glazed tiles of the yellow and green roofs, the brilliant foliage, freshened by the rain, made a gay picture; and the temples, arches, pagodas, and the many buildings that constitute a Chinese palace gave it the appearance of a whole town rather than of a single palace.