best to its old-world barbaric capital, which has now no strength.

And right in the centre of it all is the Forbidden City, enclosing
with its high pink walls the palaces which are full of warm-blooded
Manchu concubines, sleek eunuchs who speak in wheedling tones, and is
always hot with intrigue. At the gates of the Palace lounge bow and
jingal-armed Imperial guards. Inside is the Son of Heaven himself, the
Emperor imprisoned in his own Palace by the Empress Mother, who is as
masterful as any man who ever lived....

I beg you, do you begin to see something of Peking and to understand
the eleven miserable little Legations, each with its own particular
ideas and intrigues, but crouching all together under the Tarter Wall
and tremblingly awaiting with mock assurance the bursting of this
storm? If you are so good as to see this you will realise the
wonderful stage effects, the fierce Mediaevalism in senile decay, the
superb distances, the red dust from the Gobi that has choked up all
the drains and tarnished all the magnificence until it is no more
magnificence at all--this dust which is such a herald of the coming
storm--the new guns and pistols of Herr Krupp and the camels of the
deserts and all the other things all mixed up together....

Oh, I see that we are absurd and can only be made more ridiculous by
coming events. Of course the Boxers coming in openly through the gates
cannot be true, and yet--shades of Genghis Khan and all his Tartars,
what is that? When I had got as far as this from all sides came a
tremendous blaring of barbaric trumpets--those long brass trumpets
that can make one's blood curdle horribly, a blaring which has now
upset everything I was about to write and also my inkpot. I rushed
out to inquire; it was only a portion of the Manchu Peking Field Force