centuries, are divided up into Banners, or military divisions, showing
the enormous strength in irregular cavalry they possessed two hundred
and fifty years ago. Round the Forbidden City are the Six Boards and
the Nine Ministries, the outward signs of those bonds of etiquette
and procedure which bind the Manchu Throne to the eighteen provinces.
The walls of the Tartar city heave up fifty feet in the air, and are
forty feet thick. The circumference of the outer ring of
fortifications is over twenty miles. Each gate is surmounted by a
square three-storied tower or pagoda, vast and imposing. Round the
city and through the city run century-old canals and moats with
water-gates shutting down with cruel iron prongs. In the Chinese city
the two Temples of Heaven and Agriculture raise their altars to the
skies, invoking the help of the deities for this decaying but proud
Chinese Empire. Think of the millions of dead hands that fashioned
such enormous strength and old-time magnificence! On the corner of the
Tartar Wall is the old Jesuit Observatory with beautiful
dragon-adorned instruments of bronze given by a Louis of France. There
are temples with yellow-gowned or grey-gowned priests in their
hundreds founded in the times of Kublai Khan. There are Mohammedan
mosques, with Chinese muezzins in blue turbans on feast days; Manchu
palaces with vermillion-red pillars and archways and green and gold
ceilings. There are unending lines of camels plodding slowly in from
the Western deserts laden with all manner of merchandise; there are
curious palanquins slung between two mules and escorted by sword-armed
men that have journeyed all the way from Shansi and Kansu, which are a
thousand miles away; a Mongol market with bare-pated and long-coated
Mongols hawking venison and other products of their chase; comely
Soochow harlots with reeking native scents rising from their hair;
water-carriers and barbers from sturdy Shantung; cooks from epicurean
Canton; bankers from Shansi--the whole Empire of China sending its