'I, Reza, Place This Crown Upon My Head'

I

IT is like bygone days to have a great national event and so little of the modern inartistic accompaniments. In Teheran, on April 25, at Reza Shah’s coronation, no movie cameras purred at street corners, newspaper correspondents were conspicuous by their absence, and the legations, I venture to wager, were pestered by no society writers, plaintive or domineering, who wanted permits and interviews. You did not feel the thing was being staged for publicity or propaganda. In fact, it did not occur to those in charge to take a ‘portrait photo’ of the Shah in his state regalia till one of the foreigners — who perhaps wanted to take home such a memento — started the suggestion. There were very few foreigners besides those who naturally belong here, and no rich and idle curiosity seekers pressing to see and to be seen.

The chief reason for this absence of a grandstand crowd is the fact that Teheran is probably the most inaccessible capital of any pretensions in the world to-day. Even with the motor it is far, far away. The journey is long and expensive. Connections are not always certain, as a writer from home found out who arrived ten days after the show was over. If you don’t come in one of the slow boats through Suez or from Bombay up through the Persian Gulf to Bagdad, you leave Beirut with a motor convoy — and at times, during the last year, with a life-insurance policy if you are wise. You cross the Syrian desert to Bagdad and proceed again by motor from the Iraq frontier over the remaining four hundred and fifty miles to Teheran.

The day was clear and the air fragrant with the Judas trees and locusts which fringe the little watercourses on the outskirts of the city. In Persia, Nature comes nearer being expansive in April than at any other time, but even then she seems friendly largely because of her aloofness during so much of the year. At best she gives the impression of inhospitality. The far expanses devoid of tree or bush, only limited by mountain chains and succeeded only by more expanse and mountain, recall in their simplicity and nakedness the relief maps we used to have at school. Well do the words of Stevenson fit the great Persian plateau: ’There is a certain tawny nudity of the south, bare sunburnt plains, colored like a lion, and hills clothed only in the blue transparent air.’ But to my mind one can hardly call the mountains, for instance, which rise like a wall to the sky behind Teheran and shield it from the north, desolate. Their lights and shades, whether in stormy or in fair weather, when the day is breaking or is at its height; the perfection of their ruggedness; the crispness with which they bite the atmosphere, unless indeed the mists of a storm envelop their tops; their winter cloak of snow, which at sunset often turns a pink pure as the throat of a Ross’s gull, make you draw a deeper breath and feel glad to be in Persia.

South of this city of one quarter of a million souls, of gardens and open spaces, of mansions and mud huts, the silence and solitude of the vast plain lose themselves in the dim cloud mountains that fringe it. The eternity of nature here! Across this plain, beside these mountains, marched and countermarched the troops of Darius and Alexander, the hordes of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, An heroic setting for a history of six thousand years.

To reach the Golistan or Garden Palace we drove through crowded streets bedecked with the Persian red, white, and green. Countless streamers of this bunting flickered from lines that stretched at all angles across the streets. The principal thoroughfares had each its triumphal arch, a towering scaffolding of poles covered from top to bottom with the chief form of domestic wealth here, the rug, and ornamented profusely with mirrors and glass lustres and candelabra, and always the picture of Reza Shah. You often speculated whether one of these suspended masses of glass would drop, and whether you or your neighbor would be its victim. Rugs and mirrors and heavy old-fashioned glass candelabra that in most countries have been put away in the attic or transferred to the secondhand dealer are the universal articles for public decoration here. The rugs hang from the wall or window and often hide the entire side of a building. In the evening doorways and balconies and windows are a mass of glass and twinkling candles.

The broad sidewalks of the great Meidan Sepah were thronged. Lines of soldiers kept a way open for the carriages and automobiles of the coronation guests. Here and there, in the more quiet and spacious corners, the eye met with a mass of black. These were Persian women, each a jet-black figure in the enveloping chadar, from which only the eyes peep out.

The Square of the Portuguese Gun in front of the Palace entrance was filled with vehicles. Farrashes awaited us. We passed first by the long water basin, with its spouting jets that run up to the open throneroom from which the Kajars, and latterly Reza Shah, have presented themselves before their subjects at the traditional salaams. This open chamber, the three walls of which are paneled with mirrors and glass facets of varying shapes and sizes, contains the famous balustraded marble platform from which the monarch graciously allows himself to be gazed upon. That at least was the traditional theory, taken more seriously, perhaps, in days gone by than now.

We passed into a second court and by the spot where the Kajar monarchs buried the ashes of their immediate predecessor in order to have the satisfaction of treading upon his dust whenever they entered or left their abode. Kerim Khan Zand happens to be one of the most popular of Persian rulers, and the promptness with which Reza Shah had his remains removed to a more friendly resting place met with public acclaim.

II

Reza Shah was crowned in the Hall of the Museum, a huge room, arched and vaulted, with immense alcoves running down both its longer sides, and its enormous plate-glass windows — what a job it must have been to transport them by camel! — facing the pines and cypresses and plane trees in the gardens, which shade the raised basins over whose brims the water laps into blue-tiled troughs. I had seen this great hall earlier in the winter, when it was still the repository of a hundred years’ accumulation of presents and purchases of the Kajar monarchs: a curious cross section of the attempt and inability of nineteenth-century Persia to assimilate European culture. Here were two priceless Gobelins with which Napoleon is said to have planned to buy his way to India, and an assortment of fantastic clocks gathered by Nasr-ed-Din Shah when he visited his fellow sovereigns in the West. In one case I remember a monkey playing a guitar in the garden of a Swiss chalet beside gold and enamel work of Isfahan. Alabaster vases flirted with gold snuff boxes. Musical boxes jostled Sèvres china. On the walls hunting trophies leered at bad copies of French paintings. To my regret I failed to find the sixpenny toothbrushes which one traveler has chronicled. Now, however, treasures and rubbish were all gone; the floor was cleared; the walls were nearly bare.

At the far end, like an animal’s eye in the night, blazed the Peacock Throne, hidden away so long that many said it was only a myth. Even now, as is the case when so many mysteries meet the light of day, there are unbelievers.

For many a long year this treasure of the Great Moguls has been wrapped and swathed like a mummy, stored in a palace vault far from the view and knowledge of all but a chosen few. The Kajar monarchs seem to have guarded it with as zealous secrecy as if it had been a family skeleton. Its very existence was denied. Curzon, when he was gathering material for his monumental book on Persia, as inveterate a seeker after Persian facts and fancies as has ever come to Teheran, left with the conviction that the Peacock Throne of history had long since been broken up and its stones and its charms dispersed to the four winds. It was a natural conclusion for anyone to draw who had seen only the platform structure made in Isfahan a hundred years ago for Fath Ali Shah. For the Persians call this the Takt-i-Taous, or Peacock Throne. It was made at the behest of the Taous Khanum, or Peacock Lady, by which name the favorite wife of Fath Ali was known to her husband’s subjects. This throne, upon which the Persian ruler of the early nineteenth century is so often depicted, squatting on knees and heels, has a beautiful covering of gold plating and enamel work, but with its seven legs and balustrading looks more like a dais than a throne. Now it was placed in a recess behind the one which Nadir Shah brought from Delhi two hundred years ago, as if it had gracefully withdrawn in favor of a finer, newly found sister. Cobwebs were brushed from many places when the Kajar dynasty was swept away last winter, and the reappearance of this historic relic but accompanies new and hopeful signs for a rehabilitated Persia.

It stood there arching its disdainful back, its gold skin on sides and arms and legs and back pocked with stones that glittered with all the colors of the rainbow. From the ends of the arms hung tassels, not of brocade or silk, but of emeralds, clear and cloudy and voluptuous in their irregular, curving contours.

The diplomatic corps was grouped on the left. At one end was the ranking ambassador, its dean. Then came the ambassador from another neighboring country, a healthy, hearty-mannered ex-professor in whose classes you would have liked to have sat. Both represented Governments whose foundations were laid during the Great War. The senior minister came next, in gold braid and ribbons and orders, for he speaks for a Government that has talked for a thousand years. All were ranked according to the length of their stay in the Persian capital, some in uniforms that Talleyrand and Castlereagh might, have worn, and others in the plain black clothes proper to those whose age and traditions are newer and simpler.

Opposite, at the right of the throne, were crowded many mullahs, bearded, beturbaned, imperturbable, who squatted on the floor until the Shah appeared. Even had there been room, custom would have prohibited the use of chairs. Next to them came the ’notables and grandees of the empire,’ of varying ages and degree, many representing a day long since past, all wearing various kinds and shades of cashmere robes cut in the manner of a Japanese kimono. We asked each other who they were. That gaunt, bent old man is Sepah Salar Aazam, active in public affairs for sixty years. Near him, leaning on his stick, is the Farman Farma, one of the most charming and picturesque personages in Teheran to-day, a relic of the old order, whose villages number in the hundreds, whose memories go back to feudal levies and warfare. That cleareyed, wizened little man came to Washington as first Persian minister in the days of President Arthur. Across the way is the Mostowfi-ol-Mamelek, an ex-prime minister, son and grandson of grand viziers, a famous hunter and one of the few remaining who go to the chase with a falcon on the wrist. In green satin stood a tall black-bearded man, a khan of Bokhara driven from his lands by the Bolsheviki. Near by was a group of Kajar princes, uncles and cousins of the late deposed Shah, who had accepted the invitation to appear and show respect to the new ruler. There, too, were many veteran ex-ministers of state, some of whom had wielded power under Nazr-ed-Din Shah, the picturesque potentate who introduced Persia to Europe and who, at a state banquet in Berlin, as a mark of extreme favor once transferred a drumstick with his royal fingers from his own plate to that of his hostess, the Empress Augusta. And there, in black satin and Arab headdress, was the old and stately Sheikh of Mohammerah, last of the independent chieftains to be broken by Reza Shah. He was brought eighteen months ago, a political prisoner, to Teheran from his palaces and date groves on the Persian Gulf. Chieftains, too, were there of the great tribes of the Bakhtiari and the Kashgai, who migrate by the tens of thousands with their flocks to the uplands in the spring, and over snow-covered mountains down to southern lowlands in the autumn; chiefs of the Baluchis from the south and of the Turkomans eight hundred miles away in the north.

Each of the great alcoves of the hall was filled with the representatives of guilds, of business and commercial interests, the military, the judiciary, and the ministries of government. Among these last, in kollah and cashmere abba, as befitted officials of the Persian Government, were the members of the American Financial Mission, whose contribution to the new Persia has coincided with the political leadership of Reza Shah. Under the able leadership of Arthur C. Millspaugh these fifteen Americans are not only showing the way in the building up of the Persian financial structure, but are also showing an ancient community the methods and outlook of American citizenship.

III

A broad lane down the centre was kept open by cadets, who held at intervals regimental colors.

From the Palace entrance came the strains of the Shah’s anthem, and then at the far end of the hall appeared a diminutive child, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Crown Prince, solemn, erect, in military uniform. He stands about on a level with his father’s knee. Solemnly and alone the little chap strutted down the long aisle and took his place at the right of the step to the throne. Later during the ceremony, when the mullahs were pressing forward and over him and, quite outside of the programme, mumbling blessings (or were they curses?) into Reza’s ear, he thought he was quite forgotten. I got a glimpse of him intently toying with the pearls sewed into the hem of his father’s robe.

After the Crown Prince came adjutants and chamberlains and the ministers of government: Mohammed Ali Khan Foroughi, Prime Minister, lawyer, scholar, and patriot, bearing on a red velvet cushion the Kianian Crown; the Minister of the Court, young, hardworking and hard-playing, bearing the new Pahlavi Crown made in Teheran for this occasion; the Minister of War, who goes himself disguised into a hostile camp if there is need for information or quiet negotiation, with the scimitar of Nadir Shah in a scabbard barnacled with diamonds; and sixteen more ministers and functionaries, — some quite old and breathing hard, — with sword or mace or shield or bow or axe. One bore a jeweled quiver, another the shirt of mail of the Great Abbas. Up the aisle they came, two by two. Then, parting, they turned back, making a semicircle, and took their places along the edge of the aisle. No file of waiters appearing with a new course at a hotel banquet balanced their trays with more dexterity.

The audience waited — you could hear a pin drop. An order was given, and the colors along the side of the aisle were dipped. Preceded by six adjutants appeared Reza Shah, taller than any other man, I believe, in that vast hall, erect and powerful, with a dark complexion and a profile that might have been chiseled from the rock — a man of action and not of words. Here it is not so easy to rise above the station to which one is born, but there is a certain type of man who in all ages and in all communities comes forward. Such a one is Reza Shah. By rare native shrewdness, energy, imagination, and magnetism has this private in the army risen to be sovereign of his country. At five he is at his desk; at seventhirty he receives the chief of staff. Or he may appear at sunrise in the poorer quarters of the city, or at hospital or barracks, and woe betide those in charge if the inspection does not bring satisfaction. Not infrequently he appears walking on the street alone. On a winter’s morning some weeks ago, when dawn was breaking, the guard on duty at the military hospital three miles outside the city was accosted by the new Shah. Reza is said to have informed the astonished hospital staff that they must not think he was no longer interested in the efficiency of public organizations because he had become their sovereign. He still lives simply in the comfortable but by no means palatial house that he occupied before he became Persia’s executive, and goes to the Palace only at stated times for the transaction of business and to appear at official functions.

In his military cap he wore the aigrette plume of Nadir Shah, from the base of which shone the Daria-i-nur (Ocean of Light), which legend connects with Tamerlane, that stone of blood from which the Koh-i-nur is said to have been cut. At the buckle of his belt was a cloudy, sullen emerald as large as a woman’s fist. The diamonds of his coat, on the epaulettes and on its face, were hidden by a cloak of heavy cashmere sewed with pearls.

He mounted and took his seat on the ancient Delhi throne.

The ministers bearing the historic appurtenances of the Persian crown formed a semicircle in front like vassals presenting tribute. Into their centre marched the green-turbaned Imam Juma, elder of the Shiite Church and chief priest in Teheran. ‘Oh, praise be to Allah,’he orated, ‘who created the universe, who gives kingdoms to him whom He chooses, who is the author of goodness, who is omnipotent, who gave light to the sun and the moon, who made the earth the representation of His heavenly and godly graciousness and loveliness, who makes the prophets and the kings the protectors of the rights of His slaves, who orders them to act with justice and kindness. . . . ’

The Shah sat meantime with the uncanny immobility of a statue. When the Imam finished his petition that royal favor might smile upon the Church, Reza leaned forward, gave his military cap to a chamberlain, took the Pahlavi Crown from its cushion, and placed it on his head. Then advanced the Minister of War and fastened to his belt the diamond scabbard and scimitar of Nadir Shah, and this act was heralded to the crowd outside by a salvo of guns.

Reza Shah read a speech from the throne, short and terse, like most of his public pronouncements, outlining his hope for the future of Persia and the chief reforms and measures he considered vital to her progress. ‘Energetic action,’he declared, ‘must be taken to develop the forces of security, education, public sanitation, and agriculture, to improve economic conditions, means of transportation, commerce, and the judiciary. . . .’ He spoke in a quiet, modulated tone so low that it sounded almost as if he were talking to himself, but while straining to catch the words you somehow knew that a thousand troops could hear that voice if occasion required. Perhaps he had in mind a favorite axiom that it is action and not words that count.

Then there came forward the Prime Minister, whom some like to call a dreamer and a man of books. But it has been remarked that as chief minister he has contributed a saneness and a wisdom to the decisions and actions of government that have been responsible in no small measure for the confidence which the new régime of Reza Shah enjoys. ‘The people of Persia,’he said, facing the Shah, ‘are celebrating, not because a new Shah has come to the throne, but because that event has created the impression that Persia is resuming her historic glory and prosperity. . . .’

Addresses were read on behalf of the Persian people and on behalf of the provincial communities welcoming Reza as Shahinshah of Persia.

It was a picture to remember — this gathering from all the empire of those who had inspired the old order as well as those who were taking their places as makers of the new. How easily the Kajars had slipped away, how easily the page of history had turned upon them! After all, what a shadow in recent years they had become! And in their place stood this man who a few short months ago had led a bloodless revolution and who had largely been successful because of a realization that a patriot gives and does not take. To him ancient Iran is now turning, with the hope that the torch of progress and enlightenment may lead it into paths of awakening vigor and prosperity.