My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard

My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard by Elizabeth Cooper.
Author of "Sayonara," etc.
With Thirty-One Illustrations In Duotone From Photographs.
Dedicated, To My Husband.
Author's Note.
In these letters I have drawn quite freely and sometimes literally from
the excellent and authoritative translations of Chinese classics by
Professor Giles in his "Chinese Literature" and from "The Lute of
Jude" and "The Mastersingers of Japan," two books in the "Wisdom of
the East" series edited by L. Cranmer-Byng and S. A. Kapadia (E. P.
Dutton and Company). These translators have loved the songs of the
ancient poets of China and Japan and caught with sympathetic
appreciation, in their translations, the spirit of the East.
I wish to thank them for their help in making it possible to render into
English the imagery and poetry used by "My Lady of the Chinese
Courtyard."
Acknowledgment is also made to Mr. Donald Mennie of Shanghai,
China, who took most of the photographs from which the illustrations
have been made.
--Elizabeth Cooper.

Part 1.
-Preface-.
A writer on things Chinese was asked why one found so little writing

upon the subject of the women of China. He stopped, looked puzzled
for a moment, then said, "The woman of China! One never hears about
them. I believe no one ever thinks about them, except perhaps that they
are the mothers of the Chinese men!"
Such is the usual attitude taken in regard to the woman of the flowery
Republic. She is practically unknown, she hides herself behind her
husband and her sons, yet, because of that filial piety, that almost
religious veneration in which all men of Eastern races hold their parents,
she really exerts an untold influence upon the deeds of the men of her
race.
Less is known about Chinese women than about any other women of
Oriental lands. Their home life is a sealed book to the average person
visiting China. Books about China deal mainly with the lower-class
Chinese, as it is chiefly with that class that the average visitor or
missionary comes into contact. The tourists see only the coolie woman
bearing burdens in the street, trotting along with a couple of heavy
baskets swung from her shoulders, or they stop to stare at the neatly
dressed mothers sitting on their low stools in the narrow alleyways,
patching clothing or fondling their children. They see and hear the
boat-women, the women who have the most freedom of any in all
China, as they weave their sampans in and out of the crowded traffic on
the canals. These same tourists visit the tea-houses and see the gaily
dressed "sing-song" girls, or catch a glimpse of a gaudily painted face,
as a lady is hurried along in her sedan-chair, carried on the shoulders of
her chanting bearers. But the real Chinese woman, with her hopes, her
fears, her romances, her children, and her religion, is still undiscovered.
I hope that this book, based on letters shown me many years after they
were written, will give a faint idea of the life of a Chinese lady. The
story is told in two series of letters conceived to be written by Kwei-li,
the wife of a very high Chinese official, to her husband when he
accompanied his master, Prince Chung, on his trip around the world.
She was the daughter of a viceroy of Chih-li, a man most advanced for
his time, who was one of the forerunners of the present educational
movement in China, a movement which has caused her youth to rise

and demand Western methods and Western enterprise in place of the
obsolete traditions and customs of their ancestors. To show his belief in
the new spirit that was breaking over his country, he educated his
daughter along with his sons. She was given as tutor Ling-Wing-pu, a
famous poet of his province, who doubtless taught her the imagery and
beauty of expression which is so truly Eastern.
Within the beautiful ancestral home of her husband, high on the
mountains-side outside of the city of Su-Chau, she lived the quite,
sequestered life of the high-class Chinese woman, attending to the
household duties, which are not light in these patriarchal homes, where
an incredible number of people live under the same rooftree. The sons
bring their wives to their father's house instead of establishing separate
homes for themselves, and they are all under the watchful eye of the
mother, who can make a veritable prison or a palace for her
daughters-in-law. In China the mother reigns supreme.
The mother-in-law of Kwei-li was an old-time conservative Chinese
lady, the woman who cannot adapt herself to the changing conditions,
who resents change of methods, new interpretations and fresh
expressions of life. She sees in the new ideas that her sons bring from
the foreign schools disturbers