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