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149

2 January 1925


Before starting for the museum I should mention our excellent dinner of last night, which included pheasant, salad and ice cream.

Yesterday the central part of the palace was open; today the western section claimed the attention of the crowds.  Here were a few shrines and beautiful courtyards, and here was the three-storied pavilion with the gold dragons on the corners.  But the most interesting thing of this section was that it was the real living section of the palace.  Here were the rooms and studies of the Empress, the girl Elizabeth whom Isabel Ingram tutored.  Here was the court where she rode her bicycle, here was her desk, her books, even dolls.  Here were rooms furnished with ugly modern furniture, tables covered with linoleum, bathrooms that were^[[\]]rare luxuries once but seemed so un-palatial now.  Here were rooms with celluloid animals scattered among rare jades on the window sills, antiquated dressers against fine old carved screens, and clocks, everywhere clocks of the most strange and wonderful kinds.  Someone had a passion for clocks once; I have forgotten whether is was Ch'ien Lung or some subsequent incumbent.  And in one room where there were a score of gold and jeweled models was one humble little alarm clock in the place of honor, - the only clock in the room, apparently, now fit for its real purpose.  These apartments were typical Chinese houses, but much larger.  They were one room deep and three, or four^[[/]]rooms long, and all the rooms had plate glass southern walls, and most of them plate glass northern walls as well.  The bathrooms were the most notable exceptions to the northern window custom.  Were it not that the quarters of the court were completely guarded the lives of the imperial family, with such windows both back and front, opening on two courts and with clear views through from one court to the other, must have resembled the lives of gold fish.  The foreign dining room was a pitiable thing, European of a past generation, with huge chandeliers of colored glass I have never seem equalled; and at thenother end of this same large hall was a brass bed with cloth of gold canopy.

The commission had done its work well in preserving the places as left, even to the confusion in the servant rooms.  How the republic did lap it up, and how the old Manchus gazed on the scenes of