Fresh Lamb Dumplings in Peking’s Legation Quarter

A choice memory from the memoirs of the Netherlands Ambassador to China – who first went to Peking in 1894 at just 19 years of age – Willem Jacobus Oudendijk’s Ways and By Ways in Diplomacy (1939).

Here Oudendijk is recalling the Legation Quarter just before the Boxer Uprising raised it mostly to the ground. It was a less protected, less enclosed space then than after 1900. The Spanish Legation was just to the south of the Japanese Embassy on Canal Street (Zhengyi Road) by the corner with Legation Street (Dongjiaomin Xiang). It’s hard to imagine such pratices occuring after the rebuilding of the Legation Quarter, and certainly not now in what is a heavily policed and surveilled, often quite desolate area. But Oudendijk here gives us a nice vignette of an early, more raw, Legation district in the late nineteenth century.