Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/238

 *ferences from other Chinese rooms. For this man dared to tamper with custom when it suited his convenience, and to modify an architecture that had been unaltered almost since Kublai Khan ordered every grave in China to be plowed up remorselessly, and so made room for homes and crops for the living, till then out-crowded by the honorable dead.

This was a very beautiful room, and so richly furnished that its opulence must have been oppressive had it been less beautiful, its taste less distinguished.

Essentially and strikingly like Nang Ping's room, unlike hers it was not so exclusively Chinese, and it was more nearly crowded. The Chinese—like all Orientals—are fantastic collectors, even of European flotsam and jetsam, though more discriminatingly so than the Turk, the Indian, or the Japanese. In the remotest yamên in Honan or Kwei Chau you may find a Dresden vase, a music-box from Geneva, a silver dish from Regent Street, and—most probably of all—half a dozen clocks, made anywhere from Newhaven, Connecticut to Novgorod, and all ticking away together, but quite independently, and all giving a different lie to the old dial in the sunny Chinese garden. (There were eighty-five clocks—and all "going"—in one of the Pekin throne-rooms.) But you are not apt to find, except in the poorer quarters of the treaty ports, the gimcrack chandeliers and tawdry vases, Europe-made, which will astonish and shame you in a palace in Patialla or Kashmere.

Wu had collected in princely fashion during his years in Europe. There was a Venetian harp, a German grand piano, and an English organ in an adjacent music-*room. And in this, the smaller of his own reception rooms, there were several European treasures. Unlike most Chinese rooms, this was carpeted, not with one of