Show i CHINAS GREAT WALL I i I i What it Looks Like and I Where it is 1I 1Z 1 I j LIFE AMONG THE MONGOLIANS I I Crt Goaslp NatlTC Ado I A-do ok at an Inn Tho Army and Nary Etc I I PItKNG DaoombarSl 1838Special Correspondence of TUB HEKALD Tht s seventh prince or the father of the Emperor Em-peror of Caina has had to move out of his ancestral mansion and it was today sold to the government for a little over 109000 It will be usad as a temple and the reason for the selling Is that no Chinese subject can live in a house in which an emperor was born The boy j emperor now outranks his father and the relations between the two are very curious The empress regent and this seventh prince still hold great influence Ii in the cover jment and the empress ragout ra-gout will probably still have her place behind a gauze screen whenever the emperor em-peror gives an audience The present imperial family of China is stronger than usual The prince Kung who was regent in connection with the last boy emperor is living at Peking and tae I fifth prince Kungs brother is said to I be H mau of weight The fifth prlnc is I the haroun cf alrachid of the family He delights in going about incognito and man funny stones are told of hie practical jokes One is as to a cart driver dri-ver The prince met the driver when he was in disguise and asked for a ride The man looked at his poor clothes and asked him to jump in He did so and directed the driver to take him to Prince Kungs residence The driver stopped when heoame into the street of the great prince and said he feared too to-o farther as the great Kung was not a kindhoar e 1 man and if he trespassed on his territory he would certainly get the bamboo across his bare legs and he might lose his head The ragged noble urged him onward and to his surprise stopped him at Kungs door Here a great retinue came out to meet him and the man learned that he had been entertaining the imperial prince He hid been talking vary freely during the ride as to what the people thought of the emperor Prince Kung and the fifth prince and he feared that his tongue would lose him his head The fifth prince dismissed him and the next day I sent him a lot of money and a new I horse and cart This seventh prince as the father of the emperor is now the mightiest man in China and all the celestial cel-estial world goesdown on its knees to to him He rides about Peking occasionally occas-ionally and is by no means a badlook ing Chinaman He is well made and inclined in-clined to fatness wears the brightest of imperial silks and sports at times a hat for all the world like an inverted dishpan His pony is a fine white Mongolian Mon-golian griffin and he goes about the city with a retinue of servants and soldiers I j Peking is like no other city in the mod It is essentially different from fur der cities of China and is the most Ampolitan city of Asia It is more like a great camp than a city and its walls fifty fet high and thirty and more feet thick make one think of soldiers sol-diers and sieges of rising and falling empires Thi thousands of douothing nobles in gorgeous gowns who gallop I Ilhrou h the vile filthy streets on pontes I po-ntes with hundreds of soldiers and sorv anta dressed in the raggedest of gaudy liveries carry out the illusion and when you ask the reason of the rags you are rtcM it is not pcrertr but that the no Nilas dare not appear rich for fear the government would levy a contribution upon them The cheif of these nobles are Tartars and they are taller and better bet-ter looking than the Chinese who come io America They form the greater part of the soldiers of the Capital of China Chi-na and it is said that there are 50000 of them in the city They are poorly armed with the oldest of muskets all patterns and would avail little before onefourth as many Americana armed with Winchester rifles China all told has an army of threeonarters of a million mil-lion and some of the troops of the provinces are well armed and are being trained by Europeon officers The country now has eight arsenals and our naval officers tell me these are turning oat some guns which are equal to those of Krupp and also that the rifles made at the Shanghai arsenal are on the Spencer Spen-cer and Winchester pattern The Chinese Chi-nese navy has wonderfully improved ainoa the late war with France Their northern tquadron is commanded by an J English naval officer and their ships built in England and Germany are among the best of the small min of war afloat They carry the latest improvements improve-ments in the way of guns and the hulls of soraqof their boats are of steel They arc I am told now making gnnboats of their own and they have a cruiser of I I 2LOO tons and of 2400 horse power which they built not long ago The country has but a small national debt amounting amount-ing cay the statistics to not over 25 000000 and by a judicious taxation it could establish a navy and army which might make the rest of Asia tremble I have just returned from a trip to the Chinese wall and I have seen enough to say that there is no doubt of its existence ex-istence and its greatness Built 17CO years before America was discovered when our ancestors halfnaked and altogether al-together savage wandered throughout Ifcance Germany and England when Rome was in the height of her republican I republic-an form of government and when tuc Roman empire had not yet begun to bar these massive towers stilt crown the parapets and the 1600 miles of wall still stand It is two days ride by donkey from Peking and one goes through tbo northern edge of the great plain of Chiaa and meets it in the great chain of mountains which separates China from Mongolia and Manchuria Manchuria and Mongolia directly north of China They are both subject to and governec 1 by China and they equal in size about one half the whole territory of the I United States Above them lies Siberia and south of their western pdee is Thi bet and Hi which are also Chinese onn tries as to government All art rae ly settled and Mongolia has less than two people to the square mile while its whole population is not greater than the city of New York Manchuria has twelve millions of people but both coun tries are far more savage than the Chinese Chi-nese and the Mongolians live largely intents in-tents The trade of all these people however comes north from Peking and passes over the mountains and through the great wall at the gate which I visited visit-ed The wall was built originally to keep them out but they have swarmed through in hordes again and again and it is a Manchurian emperor that now sits upon the Chinese throne What a wonderful structure it is It would extend more than half across America and it must have consumed years in building As I stood upon its ramparts I could see it climbing the mountains and going down the valleys as far as my eyes could reach It did not diminish in strength nor size at the various points I visited and its masonry would have been good work for the American builders of today It is about twentyfive feet high and at the top it is so wide that two carraiges oould drive abreast along it and the hubs of one would not touch those of the other Its exterior walls are of blue brick of such a BZS that they look like massive stones and these are filled in with earth and paved with brick at the top The grass and the moss has now grown over the top of this great wall No archers now nard it and it stands amid the snowy mountains a monument of the almond eyed men who thus two thousand thous-and years ago sought to protect their homes and those of their decendants for all time to come No one can stand upon the ramparts of this great structure struct-ure and not be impressed with the greatness great-ness of the Chinese nation It is a greater monument than the pyramids ef Egypt built by selfish kings for royal I roy-al tombs and its purpose was nobler It is a monument also of the great truth that while man dies his work remains and that the lives botte i up here twenty centuries ago exist to day as does the hand that carved the Venus di Medica the pen that wrote Shakespeare and the Aeneid and in a humbler though no less effective way the muscle that dugout dug-out the marble from the mmes of which the builders and architects constructed the mighty cathedral of Milan This wall is right in the mountains There are no village to speak of near il and the surroundings are the picture of desolation The road to it which was once a paved highway is now a mountain mount-ain path filled with boulders and puddles pud-dles and it is impossible to get tnrough with anything else than mule litters camels or donkeys We passed camels by the hundreds and our mule litter and two donkeys which made up the outfit of the party had often to stand aside for herds of black Chinese hogs and droves of fattailed sheep which were being driven from the wild pasture lands of Mongolia down to Peking Ponies and horses can no more travel this road than they can the passes of the Andes and the mule litter in which my wife rode is a fair sample of Chinese interior travel It was a clothcovered box about five feet long and four high swung between two of the rawest mangiest man-giest mules I have ever seen It was hung upon shafts and these mules one in front and two behind carried it in single file up the hills and through the mud In passing through jne of the villages they slipped and tne whole outfit out-fit came to the ground The muleteer was a Mohammedan as are many of these lurtn Chinamen He was as stubooru as his mules and he decidedly objected when I proposed putting two people into the litter during a rain We carried our own cook and bedding with us and slept at Chinese inn on dirty ledges of brick heated from beneath by fines These ledges are about two feet high and they constitute half of the bed room of a Chinese hotel The inns were much the same I judge as those of Palestine in the days of the Saviour Low one story brick buildings ran I around an open court in which droves of hogs and camels slept The doors of the building all opened into the court and half of them were open at the froat and were assigned to the donkeys and mules of the travelers These brayed the livelong night and their munching of straw could be distinctly heard through the walls separating them from us I paid some calls yesterday in company com-pany with Colonel Denby our minister to Peking We went in the ministers Chinese cart preceded by his mafoo or groom on horseback The Chinese cart is the only carriage known in Peking outside of the elephant carts on which the emperor goes out to sacrifice at the temple of heaven It is the rudest cru diet and most unbending vehicle I have ever met with It has no springs and its heavy wheels bump and jolt on a level road to say nothing of the torture they produce on these streets of Peking which are a continuous series of juts holes and mud ponds There is no window win-dow to the cart save a piece of glass about one foot square set into its side and its covering is made of blue cloth stretched over a frame making it as close as a cab The bed of this cart is level with the shafts and the rich Chinaman or the noble Chinawoman sits in it with crossed legs fiat on the floor There is not loom for more than one person in a cart and if the grand Pekingese Pek-ingese dame has maid with her the servant ser-vant must sit on the shafts beside the driver It was on suon carts that the hundreds of Manchu maidens who were brought to the palace from all parts of North China that they might be looked over as prospective inmates of the emperors harem were carried and it is in such carts that all of the travel ing of North China outside of donkey poney and camelback and mulelitter is done It is the oily vehicle that will stand the ruts anl ditches of Cineee public roads These are everywhere bad and the si lenient in the geographies geograph-ies that China has more than 20 000 imperial im-perial roads conveys no idea to the American mind of highways of this great empire Many of the streets of the Chinese part of the city of Peking are too narrow for these carts and there are manv cities in the empire rhe e neither fourfooted beasts nor carts are to be found Here in Peking the easiest method of moving from one I part of the city to the other is by means of lonKeya which not larger than good sized Newfoundland dogs can go anywhere any-where The great part of the carting of the city and all of the drayage is done by men Wheelbarrows are the drays and these are pushed and pulled by stalwart halfnaked men They carry sometimes as much as a ton and I have seen three men and one donkey harnessed har-nessed to one of them One man naked na-ked to the waist held the shafts of the barrow aided by a wide band of camels wool rope which stretched from them across his shoulders and two others walked in front harnessed to the barrow by like bands across the chests and stooping over and straining every muscle mus-cle as they pulled at the load The donkey was also harnessed to the front of the barrow and he walked between the men The load they carried was made up of a large number of boxes la belled with the name of one of the leading lead-ing agents of the Standard Oil Company of the United States China uses a great deal of American kerosene and I see this coal oil everywhere throughout through-out North China These Chinese wheelbarrows are entirely en-tirely different from ours The wheel Is as big around as the front wheel of a buggy and it comes up tgrough the center I cen-ter of the bed of the barrow instead ofI being in front of it as in America The load is put on each side of the wheel and there is a sort of a frame work which runs up from the bed and keeps the load off the wheel The handles of the barrow are very long and the front part of the bed ends in two sharp points In some parts of China such as Shanghai Shang-hai the wheelbarrow is the cab and street car of the Chinese and each barrow bar-row is expected to carry two passengers I have seen two pretty Chinese maidens being pushed along the road in this way and at Tientsin you find the streets often blocked with these wheelbarrows loaded with coal stone wool cloth and a thousand and one things which are used in one form or another by the Chinese Chi-nese In the great plain where the winds are very strong the wheelbarrow carrier often hoists a sail to help him along and the wind pushes with him as he goes In Shanghai these wheelbarrow wheel-barrow men pay a license and not long ago there was an attempt mado to raise this from fifty cents to one dollar per year The men olubbed together and struck to thenumber of some hundreds and the result was that the increase had to be materially lessened Our Asaiatio squadron is now scattered scat-tered along the coast of China The little palos is roofed with matting and is frozen in just opposite the big city of Tientsin This matting has windows in it and the marines have their drill under cover It takes about two months to get a letter to them from New Yorkand there is no possibility of their being moved before spring The Omaha the Essex and the Marlon are at this writing in the harbor at Shanghai Shang-hai with Admiral Chandler commanding command-ing They have periodical drills which I am told send terror into the hearts of the celestials and it is said that the seventy sev-enty thousand drilled soldiers under Li Hung Chang actually tremble when they think of Captain Craig and his less than fifty of the Palos crew The reason for the bringing of the fleet to China was the apprehension that the expulsion act might cause the Chinese to retaliate upon our American residence resi-dence here So far however the only outburst has been at Canon and I doubt very much if one man in ten thousand in North China knows that any of the Chinese have ever gone to America and fewer still know that they have beeu warned to keep away aad some of them sent back There are 350 Americans in Shanghai about thirty at Hong Kong a small number at Peking and a few hundreds of missionaries mis-sionaries scattered throughout the interior in-terior The Chinaman however knows not the differences between the Ameri ican and the Englishman the Frenchman French-man and the German He classes them all as white foreign devils and cannot discriminate The only ugly people in China seem to be those of the south and the literati of Peking The Cantonese mob burned the residence of the Chinese minister to America when the news of the expulsion law was received and travelers tell me they have an unpleasant unpleas-ant way of throwing bricks foreigners and of spitting in their faces when they happen to travel along the streets of their city They made some kind of an offensive demonstration the other day in front of our consuls residence and it is said that they are very angry over the new law I will visit Canton within a week or so and will then report things as they are FRANK G JABlENTER |