The Los Angeles Times, October 7, 1894, p.13:
MIGHTY PEKING,The Capital of One-third of the World.
(From Our Own Correspondent.)
The destruction of the Chinese army at Ping Yang [Pyongyang] in Korea, and the crippling of their fleet at the mouth of the Yalu River, indicates that the threat of the Japanese that they will march their soldiers into Peking before winter is by no means an idle one.
The Yalu River is the boundary between Korea and China, and as it is now the Japanese practically control the country...
Peking is by no means hard to reach. The ground between it and the sea is as flat as a floor, and if the Japanese can be landed on the east coast of the Gulf of Pechili, they will be within a few days march of the great Chinese capital. The only thing that prevents them from getting near it by water is the big forts at the mouth of the Peiho River [Hai River]. These are manned with Krupp and Armstrong guns, and Li-Hung-Chang's army is behind them. Wherever they land, they will have to fight what remains of this army, but a victory would mean the capture of Peking, and the practical subjugation of China.
Peking is perhaps one of the least known cities of the world... It is an immense city. It contains about fifteen hundred thousand, but these are scattered over an area of twenty-five square miles, and the people, as a rule, live in one-story houses.
The city is surrounded by walls which were built hundreds of years ago, and which must have cost many millions of dollars. These walls are in good condition with the exception of one or two places, where the floods of last winter undermined them, and carried parts of their facings away.
It is hard to give an American an idea of the walled cities of China. The walls of Peking are sixty feet thick at the bottom. They would fill the average country road or city street, and they are as tall as a four-story house. They are so wide that you could run three railroad trains side by side around them. They are so solid that the cars would move more smoothly over these tracks than they do on the trunk lines between New York and Chicago.
These walls are faced inside and out with bricks, each as large as a four-dollar Bible, and the space between is filled with earth and stones so rammed down that the ages have made the whole one solid mass. They are built, in fact, much like the Great Wall of China, and the bricks of the two are almost exactly the same. I have before me a brick which I brought from the Great Wall. It weighs about twenty pounds... It is blue-gray in color, and it is covered with patches of white lime mortar, just like those I saw in the broken places of the walls of Peking.
In approaching Peking, long before you get to the city, you see the immense towers which stand on the top of this wall over the gates which enter the city. These towers are tall as a big New York flat. They rise nine stories above the wall, and they have roofs of blue tiles. They were used in the past as watch towers, and they have many portholes for cannon.
There are thirteen gates which lead into this city, and the towers and the walls near these are plastered over with proclamations and bills much like a theater billboard. The gates of Peking are merely holes through this wall, and they are about as wide as the ordinary street, and perhaps twenty feet high. They are lined with stone and are beautifully arched. They are closed at night with great doors sheathed with iron, and they are paved with heavy slabs of stone.
The walls of Peking are twenty-seven miles long, and the area which they inclose is irregular in shape, and it consists of two big parallelograms. The one at the north is the real capital of China, for it contains the Tartar city, the great government departments, the foreign legations, and the imperial city, in which, surrounded by from five to ten thousand eunuchs, the Emperor lives.
The lower parallelogram [the Chinese city] joins the Tartar city. It has a half dozen temples, including the Temple of Heaven, which was burned down not long ago, and which is now being rebuilt of Oregon pine.
The Chinese city is where all the mercantile business of this great capital is done. It is cut up into narrow streets, and it is filled with all sorts of stores... You can buy sables for about $3 a skin, and tiger skins for $75, which would be worth twice that amount anywhere else in the world...
This Chinese city is a city of banks and stock exchanges... It is a city of book stores, and there are some streets that contain no other shops. We have the idea that the Chinese merely live on rice and rats, and that their chief industries are the making of matting, of fans and of silks. The truth is that China does a vast business, and she produces all sorts of commodities... The nobles dress in the finest of silks, and there are hundreds of stores which sell nothing but pictures...
I wish I could show you the markets of Peking. You can get as good meat there as you can in New York, and there is no finer mutton in the world than that of China... They have no slaughter-houses, and the sheep is often butchered in front of the shop and the blood lies on the ground while you buy.
There are all sorts of fish, and they are always sold alive. No Chinaman would buy a dead fish, and in case you want to buy less than a whole fish at a time, the Chinese peddler will pull the fish out of the water, lay him squirming on the block, and cut a piece of flesh out of his side for you while you wait. He does not kill the fish, and after you are through he throws it back into a separate tank of water and waits for another customer to take the rest.
One of the chief meats sold is pork, and you see hogs trotting about through the streets of Peking. They wallow in the puddles right under the shadows of the Emperor's palaces... There are are all sorts of game for sale in the markets, and you can get snipe and quail and squirrels of all kinds.
The Chinese are the best raisers of poultry in the world. They have duck farms and goose farms, and they know all about artificial incubation. They sell great quantities of dried geese and dried ducks, and they carry bushel baskets of dried ducks about the city for sale.
They sell all kinds of fruit, and are adept in the raising of the choicest of vegetables. They bury their grape vines in the north in the winter, and you can buy your nuts by the bushel...
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