The Coolidge examiner., 1937-04-08

Y name throughout the East is
rich as Troy's. You may ap-
proach it along the imperial high
way, from the southwest, over flag
stones rutted by the cart wheels of
a thousand years. The other end
of that road is in Istanbul; it was
the route Marco Polo followed, visit
ing the Grand Khan in the courts of
the sunrise.
You may come down to the city,
now called Peiping, from the north,
through Kalgan gate in the Wall and
Nankow pass, as the Tatar coun-
querors came, trotting on shaggy
ponies behind their yak-tail stand
ards. Or you may enter by the rail-
road, from the sea, as travellers ar
rive these latter days.
In any case, nothing warns you
of this city; nothing that you have
heard prepares you. You proceed
over fiat country, khaki-colored in
winter, variegated green in sum-
mer, which looks the same in ev-
cry direction. 1t is not that the
view is without incident; every yard
of land is cultivated, and people in
blue coolie cloth, with their small
industrious beasts, move like ants
across it. Roads and footpaths con-
meet group after group of huddled
mud buildings, each unit behind its
wall.
Punctuating the fields are mounds
ranging In size from very small
humps to impressive hillocks
framed in striking architectural
conceptions These are graves, for
the dead are not segregated in
China. Trees stand in thinnish
clumps and struggling lines,
trimmed thriftily of all superfluous
branches, and there are dark clus-
terings of evergreens, planted in
formal groves, to shield important
! ghosts from the rude north winds.
Among the grave mounds and the
villages you see tablets Of remem-
brance, upright plinths of carved
marble set upon immemorial tor
toises, facing south; and shrines to
gods and princes, long forgotten,
standing starkly in the burrows.
But each incident of landscape
repeats itself to monotony, and
there is confusion, rather than
dearth, of landmarks. South and
east the great sky borders the hol-
low land, and north and west the
hills circle, their contours lifting
sharp and brittle through the clear
air, remote and inconsequent as
painted scenery on a screen.
Many Smells and Many Walls.
Ahead, the horizon takes on reg
ularity. A long gray wall, spaced
by unusual towers, rises suddenly
as thunder. Your road enters
malodorous suburb, and crosses a
canal of yellow, viscouS water, bor-
| dered by willow trees and washer
women and populous with squad
| ronS of claimant SnoW-White ducks.
Complicated and violent smells as
! sail the nostrilS. Before you opens
the dark cavern of a gate, where
bored soldiers in gray uniforms, and
police in dingy black, armed with
rifles watch press of man traffic
and animal traffic that flows with
out ceasing, to the accompaniment
of unimaginable noise. You en-
ter Peiping, and at the end of every
! vista stands a wall.
There has been a city hereabouts
for three thousand years. Histori-
ans locate a town of the Yin dynaS-
ty, called Chi, en- site near the
| northwest corner of the present Ia
tar city in the Twelfth century B. c.
The Manchu emperor, Chen Lung,
marked the place where one of its
| gates stood with tablet, which you
may see to this day, on the ram
part called the Mongol Wall, a short
distance north of Peiping, beside
the road to the Bell Temple.
However, the mutations of Peip-
ing's history have been many times
told; volumes have been taken in
the telling.
The Ming, which is to say, the
Bright, dynasty, built Peiping on
grand scale. Yung Lo, third en-
! peror of the line, moved his court
up from Nanking in the early four
| teen-hundreds, and created a cap
ital worthy of his greatness.
The Bell Tower, which was in the
center of Khanbaligh, visited by
Marco Polo in the reign of Kublai
Khan, stands now in the upper third
of Peiping; and the Observatory is
north of the present southeast
angle. You can ride the line of
Kublai's walls to the north, and
they are formidable earthen ram
parts; but goats Craze upon weed
grown mounds that were the guard
towers on the gates.
Big Wall of Yung LO.
Yung Los wall, called the Tatar
Wall for no good reason, is inn
mense. Its circuit is some IA miles,
and its outline is almost square,
rounded slightly at the northwest
angle, where stream enters the