sumptuous though faded colouring of the pillars and walls, and the deep gloom in which the hall is plunged, compel a reverence which is almost without alloy. In a neighbouring court is the dagoba, or white marble tomb, erected by the Emperor Kien Lung to the Teshu Lama of Tibet, who, while on a visit to Peking, died there of smallpox in 1780. The shape of the monument is ugly, but the sculptures on its eight sides, which represent scenes in the history of the deceased Lama, are fine and humorous in their fidelity to life. The Great At a short distance to the north-west, the largest of the five bells of Yung-Lo, which was cast about the year 1406, is suspended in a temple that was erected 170 years later. The dimensions ordinarily given are 14 feet in height, 34 feet in circumference at the brim, 9 inches in thickness, 120,000 lbs. in weight. More remarkable is the fact that the surface of the monster, both inside and outside, is covered with thousands of Chinese characters, representing extracts from two of the Buddhist classics. The Palace. One of the bitterest of the many disappointments of modern Peking is the inability, also of recent origin, to see the grounds or ruins of the celebrated Summer Palace that was demolished by the Allies in 1860. Summer Of this act I observe that it has become in recent years the fashion among travellers, who have probably never read a line of the history of the war itself, to say that it was a thoughtless or intemperate act of vandalism appropriately committed by the son of that Lord Elgin who had perpetrated a corresponding deed of violence by wresting from the rock of the Acropolis the marble treasures of Athens. Both criticisms are equally ignorant and empty. For though 1 The Teshu Lama, or Banjin Prembutcha, is the second dignitary in the Buddhist hierarchy of Tibet, and resides at Shigatze. we may regret that the modern Acropolis, now for the first time tended and cared for, does not contain the sculptures that once formed its chief glory, and though we may deplore the loss to the world of architecture and art of the splendid fabrics and the priceless treasures of the Chinese Versailles ; yet in the one case it must be remembered that, but for the first Lord Elgin's intervention, the marbles which bear his name would probably not now be existing at all; and in the other, that the second Lord Elgin's act was a deliberate and righteous measure of retribution for the barbarous cruelties and torture that had been practised for days and nights in the courts of that very Palace upon British prisoners of war; that more than any other possible step, short of the sack of the Imperial Palace at Peking, it signified the humiliation and discomfiture of a throne claiming a prerogative almost divine; and that the reason for which the suburban instead of the urban residence of the Emperor Iwas selected for destruction was the merciful desire to save the inhabitants of the capital from a retribution which was felt to have been specially, if not solely, provoked by the insolency and treachery of the Court. Twenty-seven years later the Marquis Tseng, writing in the pages of an English magazine,1 admitted that it was this step, or 'singeing of the eyebrows of China,' as he called it, that first caused her to awake from her long sleep, and to realise that she was not invulnerable. far from cherishing an undying grudge against the French or English for the act, as is also commonly represented by travellers, the Chinese themselves, who have a wonderful faculty for oblivion, have invented the fiction that the Summer Palace was looted by robbers; and this is now the popular belief. 1 Asiatic Quarterly Review, January 1887. So Yuanming-yuan. The term Summer Palace is strictly applied to the Yuanming-yuan, i.e. Garden of Perfect Clearness, a large enclosure surrounded by a high wall four and a half miles in circuit, about seven miles to the north-west of Peking. Here the Emperor Yung Ching in the first half of the eighteenth century first built a palace and laid out the grounds-a work of twenty years; and here it was that a series of magnificent buildings, designed upon the model of Versailles, and framed in a landscape gardening that was a similar reminiscence of France, were raised for the Emperor Kien Lung by the Jesuit missionaries in his service. Of these, Père Benoist undertook the hydraulics in 1747-50; and the descriptions by Père Attiret, who was the Emperor's Court Painter, and by Père Bourgeois, which are to be found in the Lettres Edifiantes, give a most interesting account of the manner and success of their undertaking. To the average European sitting at home it is probably news to learn that the Summer Palace, of which he has heard so much, was a series not of fantastic porcelain pagodas or Chinese pavilions, but of semi-European halls and palaces adorned with the florid splendour of the Court of the Grand Monarque. The greater part of these were wrecked in 1860, but for the last twenty years the work of restoration has been slowly proceeded with, and no foreigner can now gain access to the interior. Till lately this prohibition did not apply to the Wan-shoushan, i.e. Hill of Ten Thousand Ages, a similar Imperial Pleasaunce about three-quarters of a mile to the south-east; and many are the Europeans who shan. Wan-shou have visited and described its beautiful lake and island connected with the shore by a white marble balustraded bridge with sixty marble lions on the parapet; the marble boat that lies in the water; the bronze cow reposing on a stone pedestal; and the great hill rising from the lake's edge, ascended by a lofty staircase upon both sides of a colossal terrace of stone, and crowned by elegant temples and pavilions. The bulk of these too succumbed to the bayonet and the torch; but on attempting to enter the great gates, where are the bronze lions, I found the whole place alive with movement. Thousands of masons and coolies were at work, rebuilding the ruins as a palace for the Empress Dowager. Entrance was strictly prohibited, and only from one of the neighbouring mounds was it possible to obtain a view of the interior. The work of reparation has been suspended since the war. No visit to Peking is accounted complete without an expedition to the Great Wall and the Tombs of the Ming Emperors; and though I shall refrain from describing an excursion that is so well known, I may remark that neither section of it should be omitted The Great Wall. by the traveller. The Wall is most easily and commonly visited at one of two places, either at Pataling, the far exit of the Nankow Pass, forty miles from Peking, or at Ku-peikow, nearly double that distance on the road to the Emperor's Mongolian hunting-lodge at Jehol. The firstnamed point is in the Inner Wall, the second in the Outer.1 1 As most persons know, there are two Great Walls of China, the main or Outer Wall, called Wan-li-chang-cheng, i.c. the Ten Thousand Li Wall, which runs from Shan-hai-kuan on the Gulf of Pechili, in a westerly direc tion along the northern frontier of China Proper for 1500 miles; and the Inner Wall, which branches off from the first, to the west of Ku-pei-kow, and describes the arc of a circle round the north-west extremity of the province of Chihli, dividing it from Shansi, for a total distance of 500 miles. The Outer Wall is attributed to the Emperor Tsin-shi-huang-ti in 214-204 B.C.; but of the original structure it is supposed that very little now remains. Near the sea it is made of unhewn stones; in the greater part of its course it is faced with large bricks resting upon a stone foundation, and is from 15 to 30 feet in height and 15 to 25 feet in thickness; in its western part it is commonly only a mud or gravel mound, over which horsemen can ride without dismounting. In parts it has entirely disappeared. The Inner Wall is |