Ruin's End

When Japan added Jehol Province to its Manchurian grab in 1932, it got one splendid old ruin with its haul--the 17th Century hunting lodge of the old Manchu Emperors of China, spread over the hills outside Jehol City. By last week it was still overgrown with weeds but Japan planned to make it fresh and new to remind Manchukuans of the ancestral glories of their puppet Emperor Kang Teh (Pu Yi).

Like all Chinese "palaces," it was a maze of sprawling, verandahed, one-story buildings built around open courtyards and roofed with tile of imperial yellow. The entrance was two great sheets of plate glass blazing in red with the character "Sho" (Longevity). The floors were marble, the movable partitions elaborately carved open woodwork, broken with old paintings on silk, panels and mirrors. Known as Pi-shu-shan-chwang (mountain lodge for avoiding the heat), it was famed for The Garden of Ten Thousand Trees and a waterfall that gave the illusion of flowing over jade and breaking into a spray of pearls. The Emperor and his court hunted deer and boar in the rolling hills of its great park while the imperial ladies went boating on its lotus-covered lakes in barges. When the great Kang Hsi, sometimes rated above his contemporaries Louis XIV and Peter the Great, built it and moved in for the summer, the road from Peking was crowded. Wagons bringing supplies to the Palace flew little yellow flags. Only the Emperor and his No. 1 wife traveled in yellow chairs or carts. The secondary wives used orange chairs, princesses red, mandarins of the first and second degrees green, of the third and fourth degrees blue.

Pu Yi did not remember the hunting lodge. His benefactress, the great Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, had fled there as a young mother with her cowardly, dying Emperor, in 1860, when British and French troops marched on Peking. When Revolution blew Pu Yi, a six-year-old boy, off the throne of the Manchus in 1912, he was locked in the Winter Palace at Peiping. He did not enjoy Manchu pomp, preferred his tennis court and bicycle.

Last week the Japanese were planning to turn the magnificent hunting lodge into a museum, when fire broke out in one of the wings. With extraordinary haste it raged around the open courts, wolfed palace after palace, cleaned up the ruins. Fearful Chinese who watched whispered: "It is the spirit of Kang Hsi."

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