Outside the west gate, the Dai- Lama's Temple, Quan-si-howlo, in which I lived for a time after coming to Mukden, has greatly changed. It has lost its pristine calm, and is full of Russian officers and soldiers. The young Lamas are rapidly acquiring Russian, but losing, I am afraid, their vocation. Luckily, however, monastic life in Lama monasteries is not too strict.
Members of the Caucasian brigade are strolling down the street with their hands on the hilts of their swords and their brains — such as they are — busy with the solution of the perplexing problem, " Why is this place not delivered over to loot? "
These bold Mohammedan mountaineers have stout hearts and fine swords, and horses and a picturesque costume, but as soldiers they have, as I tell elsewhere, their shortcomings. Their discipline is anything but perfect, and no two of them speak the same language, so that when their colonel gives the order to charge, hours elapse before the numerous translators have made a fair proportion of them understand what is required of them.
It is surprising how well the Russian privates and the Chinese fraternise. They shake hands, they play with one another like children. They are on terms of perfect equality. I have seen officers shake hands with Chinese interpreters. Just imagine what would happen if a choleric old Indian colonel stepped out on to the verandah of his bungalow one morning, and observed any of his men making as free with Ramasamy, as the Russian soldier does with " John Chinaman." He would immediately conclude that the man was intoxicated. But whatever trouble he may give his superiors in other directions, Tommy Atkins is not likely to distress them by over-familiarity with the natives. Drunk or sober, he will stroll about in gloomy and magnificent isolation, so far as his dusky Aryan brothers are concerned, and be more likely to kill one of them with a kick than with kindness.
At every step you see soldiers bargaining with inflexible Chinese for a bottle of vodka or a handful of nuts or a pair of socks. Sometimes you see a soldier eating an apple at a fruitseller's stall. This soldier is supposed to discharge the duties of a policeman, and the apple represents bribery and corruption.
A Manchu woman walks down the street with a free stride, which contrasts with the mincing gait of the small-footed Chinese woman. This and the arrangement of the hair are the only tokens by which you can distinguish the Manchu woman from the Chinese woman. As for the men, the Manchu is practically undistinguishable from the Chinese. Yet, once upon a time, the Manchu came down on the Celestial Empire like a wolf on the fold, even as the Russians have done. He has given a dynasty to China, but that dynasty is now more Chinese than the Chinese dynasties that preceded it. The Manchu bannermen have become more cowardly and worthless than the Chinese soldiers whom they conquered; and Manchuria, the mother country of the Manchu, is now overrun by Chinese. Has not Japan, therefore, been too hasty? Whether Russia remains master of Manchuria or not, the Chinese will, in a few thousand years, be all over the Primosk, Ussouri, Transbaikal. A few thousand years are nothing to the Empire which has seen Assyria, Egypt and Rome flourish and decay.
A Chinese "iperevodcheek," or regimental translator, rides by in all the glory of high boots, spurs, striped trousers, a fur cloak, a sword, a revolver and a busby. Beneath his gaudy headgear there is no pigtail; he has cut it off, or some soldier has done so for him. He is a handsome boy of some sixteen summers, and I happen to know something of his history. He went originally from Chefoo to Port Arthur, where he learned Russian in a small Chinese shop, over the counter of which he many a time and oft handed me boxes of cigarettes and parcels of humble groceries in exchange for Russian roubles. On the outbreak of the war he first returned to Chefoo, then went to Yinkow, and was finally engaged as interpreter by a Russian colonel of Cossacks, then stationed in Liaoyang. He stops his pony in the street in order to question an old Chinaman who happens to be passing by, and a curious crowd quickly collects around him. The old man gazes sadly at the well-favoured youth, and answers his questions with the same melancholy sarcasm as an aged Tipperary man would employ in answering the questions of a fellow Irishman wh:> had forsworn the wearing of the green and was bursting with importance in a suit of " England's cruel red."