The Last Days of Pekin — Inside the Classic

A Diary of Occupation

The text is structured as dated entries, beginning with Thursday, October 25, where Loti describes working alone in the Rotunda Palace with only his cat for company. This intimate detail grounds the narrative in a specific time and place. The diary format allows Loti to shift between personal reflection and reportage, as when he visits Monsignor Favier, the Bishop of Pekin. The bishop's room, pierced by a cannon-ball, contains Chinese bibelots he is selling to feed refugees. Loti notes that Favier cut off his queue after hostilities against Christians, a detail that underscores the political shifts. The entry conveys the aftermath of siege through concrete objects and conversations.

Voices from the Siege

Loti's account of his visit to Favier includes the bishop's low-toned narrative of the defence: fourteen hundred metres of wall held by a young ensign and thirty sailors against thousands. The story is relayed secondhand, with Loti emphasizing the need to record it in letters of gold. He specifies that the sailors were not picked men but chosen hap-hazard, and that an officer and ten Italian soldiers also fought, leaving six dead. The passage highlights the heroism of Chinese Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, who sought protection. Loti's language grows warmer as he recounts the defence, yet he remains an observer, not a participant.

The Weight of Atmosphere

Throughout the excerpts, Loti pays close attention to sensory details: the red sun setting behind the Lake of the Lotus, the dusty cathedral seen as through a fog, the cold and horrors shut off by panes of glass. These observations create a mood of melancholy and decay. The setting is not merely described but felt—the imperial silks and cushions contrast with the violence outside. Loti's prose often juxtaposes beauty with ruin, as when he notes the cathedral riddled with balls yet newly built. This technique gives the reader a visceral sense of Pekin's transformation under occupation.

Limits of Perspective

Loti is candid about his restricted viewpoint. He writes only of what he observed during missions assigned to him, and he acknowledges that the war was over by the time he arrived. His focus on the French and allied forces leaves Chinese perspectives largely absent, except through the bishop's account of Christian refugees. The dedication admits the book may contain repetition, and the diary form reinforces its fragmentary nature. Readers should approach the text as a personal document shaped by Loti's role as an aide-de-camp, not as a comprehensive history of the siege or of Beijing itself.

Loti's The Last Days of Pekin rewards readers who attend to its diaristic structure and sensory detail. The book's value lies not in grand narrative but in the accumulation of small observations—a cat in a palace, a bishop selling bibelots, sailors chosen hap-hazard. Because the excerpts are incomplete, the full scope of Loti's journey remains unknown, but the available text offers a vivid, if partial, record of a city in transition. Read it as a travelogue shaped by war, not a history of the Boxer Rebellion.

Reading Loti’s ruin-filled diary, I remembered standing in a mountain holler where the past felt equally heavy, yet alive. There is a strange kinship between Pekin’s scorched palaces and those old Carolina ridges—both places where loss lingers like weather. The Heart of the Alleghanies; or, Western North Carolina — Reading Notes once gave me that same ache, of watching silence hold what people left behind.