"A twilight vision"

Mission on the battleship The fearsome Pierre Loti is part of the French expeditionary force that occupies China after the Boxer War. From September 1900 to May 1901, he describes his entry in diary form in China and his stay in Beijing, in the Legation Quarter in the Imperial City and then deserted.
On gloomy landscape background covered with dust blown continuously by the Mongolian winds, horror scenes follow one another: carnage, looting, desecration, reflect a blitzkrieg of extreme violence.
Unlike its Eastern novels, where Pierre Loti empathy for his subject flush with each page, what stands out in this story is a deep misunderstanding between cultures and almost no contact with the local population, men who fled the desolate places that appear in hollow, through the objects they left behind.
As the weeks emerges a twilight view of China, locked in huge black and red walls, lit by the gold and marble splendor of a fallen and decaying; a change of scenery related to the lack of reference in the time that sums up the surreal story of this discovery in the sacred temple dedicated to the emperors: "Other rolls, all in length, which deployed on the flagstones have six or well eight meters represent processions, parties to the Court, parades embassies, jumpers, armies, banners () even we find the reception, for some unknown emperor, an embassy Louis XIV: the little figures very French figures, dressed like to strut in Versailles, with the wig like the Sun King ".