My wife Eve and I took Viking River Cruises Imperial Jewels of China tour. Eve had never travelled to the Far East. But for me, this was an extraordinary return to several years of my childhood.
My father, an officer in the Regular Army, was transferred from Ft. Sill, OK, to our embassy in Beijing, or Peking as it was then called. He, my mother, baby brother and I arrived there in 1936.
I was five years old. We were assigned a house staffed with Chinese servants, and I played with Chinese children in the neighborhood. I do not remember how long it took me to learn Chinese, but my mother’s tutor said he could not tell me from the other children when he heard us playing outside. The house backed up to the old city wall; I used to climb to the top. Today, the house and city wall have been torn down and high-rise apartments now cover the whole neighborhood.
While my father was busy studying, my mother took me to see the many sights in Beijing. The accompanying pictures show some of the places I remember: the Temple of Heaven, the Forbidden City, the marble boat at the Summer Palace, and the Sacred Way of the Ming Tombs.
The Japanese invaded and took Beijing in 1937. They harassed the westerners who lived in the Chinese community, and at some point we moved into one of the PUMC compounds. (The PUMC hospital, which still exists, was a major teaching facility supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. My brother, just a year old, survived smallpox due to the skill of the doctors there.)
The rickshaws in the photographs were assigned to my family, I suppose by the U.S. embassy. The younger rickshaw coolie was named, or nicknamed, “little horse.” He took me to school, and on the way would race with the other rickshaws taking children to school. The U.S. flag on the rickshaw identified us as Americans to the Japanese. We did not like the Japanese troops, and some of the older kids who taunted them were disciplined.
We returned to the U.S. in August 1939, when the U.S. government began reducing its presence in China.
The pictures are mostly of me and my mother. The pictures of the stone animals show Captain Sutherland’s two daughters and me. Although it is hard to see in the old Sacred Way pictures, I was able to match the current mountainous skyline with the old pictures. Nothing has been moved. I was disappointed to see that the p’ai-lou (the great marble gate-like structure) several hundred yards from the entrance to the Sacred Way is neglected in a field. I have been told that it is, or was, one of the finest in all China.
One of the things I missed in the new Beijing was the street peddlers who used to walk through the neighborhoods selling their wares. Each had a distinctive call, or a bell, cymbal, drum or other noisemaker that identified his specialty. A family story goes that I was caught breaking several rice-china plates so that I could watch the peddler repair them with brass staples cemented into hand-drilled holes. I also missed the bird peddlers, who sold songbirds; no cage, just a string tied to the bird’s leg. And the flocks of pigeons with whistles attached to their bodies; their owners would send them up in the evening and you could hear the whistles in the sky.
Perhaps the biggest change I saw was the absence of rickshaws pulled by men. We went on the hutong tour in a bicycle-propelled rickshaw, but I think these were just for tourists. There are of course many more automobiles now, and so many tall buildings. An era from the past no longer exists, except in my memories.
Article and some photos were sent by Samuel Fisher of San Antonio, Texas, in response to our requests for passengers to share their photos and experiences with us.