Chingtu stands in a wide plain in the heart of the vast empire. The walls are fifteen miles around, and the gates of these walls are never opened at night, except to the “chi” (government messengers). Either Chingtu or the Hankau cities will be the capital of the nation eventually. It is an intellectual center, and there are many publishing shops. Two rivers, the Min and To, border the plain, and are broken up into the widest system of irrigation canals that the world shows. No garden of the earth is so rich as this warm moist Eden. Every tree, herb and plant of the tropics and sub-tropics is raised, and more men are supported here to the acre than anywhere else in the world. It is the earth’s model school of intensive farming, and would delight the professors of the specializing University of Wisconsin! In the sandstone and loess hills are the cliff dwellings of prehistoric man. There are hundreds of bridges and ferries, many temples, arches, cemeteries and villages, the latter often populated by one family clan. The great walled city of a million inhabitants has the widest streets of any native city except Peking. There is a Tartar walled city within the Chinese city. The forts over the gates are of three stories. The loyal General Chao Ehr Feng, the hero of the Tibet campaign in 1910, held Chingtu for many months against the republicans in the fall of 1911. The Provincial Assembly proclaimed reform in September, 1911, from a wonderful, circular, double-roofed temple in Chingtu. There is a large Mohammedan population, and mosques are therefore conspicuous. Marco Polo was a traveler here. There are wide Tartar parade grounds and rifle butts. The markets and fairs held in the temple grounds (religion and business being partners in China as in that Boston church that uses its basement for stores!) are the best in the empire. It is the splendid capital of the largest and richest province; a center of independent provincials who are crying “China for the Chinese.” It has a modern union university, which teaches English, science and Chinese; trade, military and girls’ schools; musk, silk, brass, salt, horn-lantern, oil, fur, spice, lace, porcelain, cotton and wool shops; a few iron shops; decorated yamen and guild halls. Its traveling kitchens, its porters and wheelbarrow brotherhoods are unique. One temple, erected to the Sheep-god in particular, is remarkable for two reasons: first, that it is a Taoist and not a Buddhist monastery: and second, that it is one of the finest examples of architecture in the empire. It is the beautiful Ching Yang Kung (Temple of the Golden Sheep) monastery outside the south gate. The Chu Ko Liang monastery, with its circular doors, is another chef-d’œuvre.