The peony gardens are notable, and the courts and gardens of the many temples, inside and outside of the walls, exhibit many horticultural treasures, but Northern China in general is more notable for wild flowers than hothouse products. There are Manchu tombs, and the Manchu palaces and gardens of Yuan Ming, Wan Shou and Ih Ho to the northwest to visit, and temples in the western hills, where the foreigners resort during the blazing summer of the plains, if they do not care to take the railway down to the bathing resort of Pei Tai Ho, or Chifu. The scenic railway running north takes one to the glorious Nankou pass in the Great Wall and to the Ming tombs. The station is at Liu Tsin outside the walls. To the northwest are the villages where the Manchu pensioners or bannermen were kept in idleness, which was one cause of the 1911 rebellion. As in many of the Chinese cities, there is a clepsydra water clock to be seen. Mints, banks, engraving plants, printing presses, electricity, modern water-works; primary, intermediate, trade and high schools, have all come to the reforming capital. There have been large hoards of bullion in the imperial city. The empress dowager, Tse Hsi, left many millions of silver, which were used to run the government for weeks during the rebellion in 1911–12. This money was collected by the eunuchs, compelling every official to pay for his daylight audience and honors, and crimes were “planted” on officials so as to have the excuse of fining them and thus adding to the Manchus’ imperial reserve. Great granaries exist where the tribute rice from the southern provinces was stored for a million or more subsidized Manchu soldiers and hangers-on. This rice formerly came to Tientsin and Peking by the Grand Canal and Pei Ho River. It was later brought north, through Li Hung Chang’s intervention, by the China Merchants’ Steamship Company, in which the government held the majority of the shares. The history of spying, intriguing, concession-hunting and diplomatic contests swells its largest at Peking, and old Legation Street and the Wai Wu Pu have heard perhaps more secret stories than any other diplomatic quarter of the world. Men of all nations, Manchus and Chinese, eunuchs, women, human parrots, dictographs secretly placed, waste-paper baskets, keys to private codes, the kitchen cabinet, keyhole sentinels, tapped telephone wires, field-glasses masked behind curtains, letter sweaters and those adders in the bosom, society detectives, have all had their part in the old Peking game of intrigue. Foreign trusts have come over the water to battle with local distrusts! Understanding has not always honestly wooed misunderstanding. Evasion has alternately successfully and unsuccessfully battled with invasion. “When is a promise not a promise” has been answered by, “At Peking, on both sides of the ethnological pale”.