Her Lotus Year – Horse Mounting Steps in Peking

The other week I got to wander the hutongs around Shijia Hutong (where Wallis lived in 1925) with the amazingly knowledgeable Matthew Hu Xinyi, director of the Shijia Hutong Museum and a dedicated architectural preservationist in Beijing. He pointed out one particular facet of hutong life I was not aware of and that perhaps links to Wallis – horse mounting stones.

Wallis loved to ride, and would regularly take a pony, with her host on Shijia Hutong Herman Rogers, to the Tartar Wall beside the Legation Quarter for a morning ride. Herman had a small stables with several Mongolian ponies at his courtyard home. And there, as Matthew pointed out to me, by the front entrance to several hutongs on Shijia are the horse mounting stones, literally large stones that allow you a little extra height to mount the pony. Most have disappeared over the years, probably becoming an inconvenience to parked cars, but a few remain, such as the one below…

Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson is available everywhere in hardback, e-book and audiobook now…