This wonderful walled capital of Mongol, Ming and Manchu dynasties, is not so old as the Great Wall of China, for it has been rebuilt several times, the imperial portion being about 1,000 years older than the inferior Chinese section to the south. It was as though the Chinese traders camped before the southern Chien Men gate to supply the Manchu court, and the Emperor Kia Tsing rose up and said: “Let us now take thought, and throw a wide wall around our purveyors’ bazaars also.” There is only one good thing about absolutism; i. e., to say is to do, and it was done. Peking has had many rivals as the capital of China: Nanking, the southern capital of the Mings, in particular; Hangchow, of the Sungs; and Canton, Wuchang, Chingtu and Shanghai have all put in their claims and maintained their flag in the breeze for a regal season. Geographically and strategically, Chingtu would be the proper capital of a united nation, and Wuchang would be almost as central and afford better trading facilities, a London of China, but it would not be so strong a strategic center. From a Chinese republican point of view, Canton, Nanking and Shanghai are foremost in their claims. Peking is weak because it is always within striking distance of Russia’s and Japan’s mighty armies. Almost alone of the world’s capitals, it is not at the water’s edge. There are temples to nearly everything in Peking, a “Brooklyn of Churches”, but most of the altars this time are heathen: temples to Buddhas, sleeping in Nirvana, recumbent in Cingalese style; a splendid Lama Temple with wonderful carvings in wood and stone; God of War; Confucian; Taoist; Catholic Cathedral; Evangelical of every denomination of the three Protestant nations; Mohammedan mosques; God of Literature; God of Fox; Russian Greek Church; Portuguese Church; shrines over Buddha’s skin, teeth and a score of other things; Ancestral temples; Altars of the Sun, Moon, and Gods of Grain and Rain; temples to Buddha’s mother, and Gods of Success, and “World Peace” (not the recent invention of an armed peace!); Gods of Title Deeds, Dragons, Wind and Water, the North Star; Gods of Dead Elephants and Strong Tigers, etc. When the jolly men of Canton and another southern city heard of all this, glorious humorists that they are, they said they could “go it one better”. They erected with a rush a “Temple to Ten Thousand Gods”, all of whom look alike, even the images named for Marco Polo and “Chinese” Gordon. Chided with all this, a humorous Cantonese retorted: “Well, haven’t you Occidentals an Eden Musée and Madame Tussaud’s wax works; don’t take our idols as seriously as you do the Indian ones.” There are superbly carved marble dagobas in the Lama and Pi-Un-Se Temples. The Peking Lama is second in authority in the Buddhist world, and since General Chao Ehr Feng drove the Dalai Lama out of Tibet into India, the Peking Lama has now probably most power in the Buddhist world. The Pali Chuan pagoda outside the west wall is