Show written for this thi paper RUINS OF copyrighted by frank G carpenter 1894 china may 16 1894 is the biggest walled city of the world and it is one of the most wonderful cities of history I 1 it t w was a s more than years old when christ was a baby and its municipal hair was gray with the age of 1200 odd years when mohammed first saw the light of day the present wall which surrounds it was built about one hundred years before columbus sailed out from SP spain am to 10 find a passage to trade with its people and it has several times been the capital of the great chinese empire it lies in the interior not far from the yingtse kiang river about two hundred miles away from the sea coast and the viceroy who now makes it hi his c capital ital has more power than president C cleveland eve fand and he governs nearly twice as many people as there are in the whole united states he has under him cities of vast extent stent the names of which are unknown to the average american and his income amounts to millions he spends vast sums in his arsenals powder works and naval schools and he directs from this point a machinery of government which though by no means so pure has as many ramifications and offices as that of our capital of washington he has here the big examinations which test the learning of tens of thousands of chinese students every three years and his people are so noted for their ability and culture that has been ailed called the athens of china how shall I 1 describe it these chinese cities are so dif different terent from anything in america that I 1 almost despair espair 1 of giving a good idea of them in the first place is a walled city all of the big cities of china ate are surrounded by walls ranging in size from forty to seventy feet high and so thick that ahat two two horse wagons could be driven side by side upon the paved roads which form their to tops and the wheels of the wagons would d not touch ea each other oiher here and there upon the walls valls are guard houses and barracks which rise one and two stories above the ahe walls and in which soldiers are placed replaced to keep a lookout over the city and its approaches the walls are entered by great gates with arched roofs and the doors to these are of heavy planks and timbers bound with sheets of iron riv riveted on with bolts these are closed during curing the night and the man who arrives after dark has to wait till morning among the beggar huts of the outside it was late in the afternoon when I 1 found myself with about a hundred chinese passengers in the rude ferry boat which takes the freight from the river steamers to the shore at the landing for and I 1 narrowly escaped spending a night out of doors I 1 was held for some time by a big chinese official because I 1 had nota not a passport from peking and when my servant had gotten our donkeys and had loaded up two chinese coolies with our bagga baggage e the sun was low in the horizon and ang I 1 saw a blind mohammedan beggar kneeling by the roadside and saying his prayers as it went down we had yet five miles to go 0 before reaching the city but we mage made the gates and got in before dark during the journey with the prospect of a lodging in a vile chinese inn before me I 1 thou thought t of the possibility of climbing the wall but as I 1 came closer to it I 1 realized the futility of such an attempt it would be almost as easy to crawl up the sides of the washington monument the walls rose straight upward from a wide moat to the height of an eight story house and the only broken spaces were the cuts formed by their crenellated crenel tops had one of the soldiers on guard thrown me down a rope ladder I 1 would have feared to risk the climb and as I 1 examined it I 1 wondered at the expense of its building we often hear of the vast sums spent upon the great chinese wall it was about fifteen hundred miles long and it is larger than that about these city walls of china have eaten up a vast deal more money there are in the empire more than four thousand walled cities and every place I 1 have stopped in my tour up the yingtse has these massive battlements about it they are made just the same as this wall of the materials used are stone and large burnt bricks of a bluish gray color these bricks are each about 15 inches long 5 inches wide and 3 inches thick they are put to together ether in a solid masonry in the shape of two walls running parallel with each other and the space between them is filled in with with earth and stones this is stamped down and upon its top a paved road roadway is made upon which the guards W walk and upon which in many places are old cannons and near them piles of stones ready to be thrown down upon the enemy the length of these walls is much greater than is necessary to the cities I 1 have seen none less than ten miles long and this wall of is thirty two miles in length the city of which is bigger than st louis occupies only a small part of the ea enclosure closure and the road runs up and down over a rolling country taking in small farms and market gardens many of which stand upon the site ot of the great of the past the distance across the inclosure from one wall to the other is more than eight miles and during any other time than an exposition or convention period you could crowd all of the people of chicago inside these walls and have room to spare A mile of such wall must cost consider considerably ally more than a mile of railroad and in these walled cities it is safe to say there is something like miles of fortifications or enough to have covered china with railroads many of these walls are poorly kept but if a 9 big city should spring up in china today it would have a wall built about it and this wall was thoroughly repaired three years ago it cost the viceroy to idamc patch ago it up and you see the fresh mortar of today running in and out of the gray lines of years ago the moat outside the wall is fully as interesting as the wall itself this runs about the entire structure save at the end where it cuts into the mountain and at the opposite side of the city aroi from the gate at which I 1 entered it expands into a very pretty lake the earth used for the filling of the walls is generally taken from the moat and the excavation is so great that the moat ranges from seventy to one hundred feet in width it is connected by a canal with the yingtse river and it forms the highway from it to the cit city although it is about two hundred mil cifes from the sea it is affected by bv the tide and only small boats can sail through it these bring however passengers and freight and the moat swarms with craft which sail about it from one gate of the city to the other offering their wares for sale there are hucksters of all kinds upon it and fuel peddlers push or scull great rafts of reeds about through it selling as much as one man can carry for or about twenty cents the moat is crossed by bridges at the gates ates which like tunnels enter the w wall ar I 1 and some of these bridges remind you of the noted bridges of italy there is one at the south gate which is walled with stores like the ponte across the arno amo at florence or rather more like the rialto in venice some of the canals run into the city and the moat and canals in many ways remind you of the tamed famed water city on the adriatic it is to me a far more interesting city than venice and the wonders of its ruins are greater than those of old rome the of today is built upon the foundation of the of the past and outside of the present city there is is a vast area which was once covered with buildt buildings n the tartar fity city where emperors 1 lived igsa ve has dwindled into dust and the marble and golden tiled palaces of the past have been supplanted by the farms and gardens of the present fifteen generations ago there was here one of the most progressive monarchs of history was then the center of asiatic trade and culture foreigners from all parts came here to study and the persians and arabians crowded each other upon the streets today you see jewish types among the faces you meet and this the city has a large population of edans many of these are the defendants of the strangers who came here in the days of the famed chinese ruler chu hung wo this man started life as a begger but he organized a rebellion which enabled him to conquer china and to establish his descendants on the throne he was the founder of the ming dynasty the one which ruled china before the family of thee the present emperor came into power and under which were accomplished complis hed the greatest things that the chinese have ever done in architecture and public improvements it was this man who built the wall about nankin and established the capital here the dragon you know is the imperial ani mal of china you see it on every nag flag and it is supposed to bring luck or the reverse to every ruler according to them a dragon can do anything it can make itself as big as an elephant or as small as a gnat it can build up empires and throw down kings and when there was an eclipse of the moon here about a month ago I 1 saw it soberly announced in the peking gazette that the people should turn out and make a great noise on the night of the eclipse ec liose linse as it was said that the dragon would then try to swallow the moon and he should be scared away well the country here at is shaped just like a great dragon and the emperor said if I 1 can build my capital on the dragons back it will last forever the result was that he moved to and made it for a time the greatest city of china he planned to build a wall outside of the present one which should be ninety miles long but he got no further than the first pillars of this before he died it was this man mans s son who built the famed porcelain tower of putting hitup it up in honor of his wife this tower cost more than three millions of dollars it was built of the finest of glazed porcelain slabs and it blazed out under the sun of the valley of the yingtse kiana kiang rising rising to a height nearly half that 0 of the washington monument it was octagonal inform in form with a base about halt hall the size of that of the monument and this base res rested tedon on a foundation of brickwork ten feet feel high chaa it had niue nine stories and a spiral staircase within the tower led the visitor to the summit the top of it was a great basin of iron and the colors of its bricks and white at were green red yellow every one of the nine stories a roof of veba tiles jutted butted out and to the corners of these se roofs were hung bells which tinkled when swayed by the wind tt rt took nineteen nen eteen years to build this tower and it was kept in good condition till about forty odd years ago when another beggar got up a rebellion and took he had the idea that the tower was ho hurting biting his luck and had it brick has since dis blown up its every appeared and when I 1 visited its site yesterday the only vestige of it remaining was t the g great eat iron basin like dome crowned its i top this has been on a foundation of marble marb le it is a k hollow mass of iron irod big enough to cover the thi top too of the largest haystack you havi have ver ever seen jt it would make a bath tub alor for an elephant and it would today be called a fine specimen ot artistic casting when it covered the tower it was plated with could be seen for miles up and down the atre ya yingtse aag 2 valley it must weigh several tab tons andhor the chinese with their rude modes of labor were able tp to poise ifon it on the top of the tower feet above tire them baith e arth is a marvel it lies today in frolik drori of the viceroys vice roys arsenal where the finest gunsard guns are being turned out for the chinese tro the steam whistle which calls the men to work in ate morning makes its hoary particles vibrate and it wonders I 1 doubt not with the ghosts of its builders who are supposed to hang about it what sort of devil sare working at their heir magic with iff woude i rs ol of andina chinese art and engineering YOU see scattered throughout the ruins of the tartar city where the monarchs held their court therease there Ther eare are wide streets made of great flags of granite as big as the top of a dining table worn by the feet ot of generations into the smooth polish of marble there are are five large bridges of heavy stones put together in beautiful arches without a keystone and the fences which line this highway are made up ot of stones mixed with broken tile ot the imperial yellow glaze and pieces of dragon discs of the green and red por celian which once adorned the palaces of the city and of the shattered marble which formed the artistic walls of the past the walls of the tartar city which separated it from the common herd still stand in picturesque ruin ruin grass grown and crumbling and beside a pillar of what was once in all probability the palace of a prince I 1 saw lying the plastered coffin of a coolie whose poverty pre prevented vented his putt putting ing a moun mound d above it close by it in the fields worked other blue gowned men and women digging in the soil once sacred to royalty alone and my boy led me into a tumble down palace and showed me two marble stones streaked with reddish veins these said he were a part of the floor of the emperors palace one of his nobles had abused his confidence by saying that which he should not and he straightway hway had his tongue cut out then and there the brood from his mouth dropped upon the white marble and stained it as you see I 1 took donkeys and rode out into the country yesterday to see the tomb of this famous beggar king he was buried under purple mountain about five miles away irom here and his mausoleum must have fiade been one of the most magnificent ever made by man it comprised in its burial let an avenue through the country overlooking his city more than a mile in length and this avenue was lined with gigantic elephants camels lions and tigers of marble which still stand in solemn grandeur grandeur facing each other in the open fields elds there are in in addition to these giant warriors carved artistically from solid blocks of marble and each of there warriors is I 1 judge twelve feet in height I 1 stood beside one and reached upward my finger nails just touched the elbow of the stone warriors folded arms the elephants are as big as was Barn tims jumbo and they are cut from solid blocks of marble there broad backs are covered with bushels of stones and the people have a superstition that the he man who can throw a stone and have it remain there will have luck from that time forth at the beginning of this avenue there is a great tower with four arched gateways and iff the center of the interior of this sits a turtle of black marble it i is so large that it would fill the average american parlor and it is made from a single block of stone it is the chinese emblem of longevity and from its back springs a marble tablet twelve or fifteen feet in height upon which are inscribed the Chin chinese jese characters commemorating the greatness of the emperor who lies buried at the other end of the funeral highway I 1 did not count these immense animals and warriors but they stand at short intervals along the avenue leading to the tomb inclosure they must each way many tons and must have been brought from far in the interior of some of the carvings upon them is beautifully done and the figures of the elephants and men are well executed one of the stone horses have been thrown over and it lies half sunken in a ditch them the figures of others are somewhat broken but the most of them are as perfect today as when they were first erected four or five hundred years ago them the tomb however is in ruins ruins it covered several acres and at its end there are the remains of a great tower of solid maso nary pierced in the center by a tunnel walled with marble which |