Altogether apart from the great walled royal city, now Fort Dufferin, was the still greater town of Mandalay. It is now constituted a municipality; but in Burmese times, when the city was all in all, it was merely in Burmese phrase the Anouk-pyin, _i.e._, the western suburbs. The town of Mandalay lies, more or less, on all the four sides of the city, but mostly on the west, filling on that side all the space between the city and the river, and from north to south extending five or six miles. The Mandalay municipality covers, more or less densely, an area of eighteen square miles. Some portions of that space are thinly populated, and a very little of it is under cultivation as fields and gardens; but most part of it is pretty well studded with houses, and some of it densely populated, so that it is a very large city. It is uncommonly well laid out. The streets are straight, very wide, run at right angles to each other, and many of them are planted with shady tamarind trees. Some of the streets are now metalled and made serviceable for traffic, but five years ago, though so well planned and broad, they were in a most deplorable state; and those of us who look back to that time have amusing recollections of the straits we were put to in order to get about in the rainy season. The southern end of Mandalay touches the northern limit of Amarapoora, which was the capital up to 1860. Here are to be seen the remains of a great royal city nearly as large as that at Mandalay, and after the same model exactly,—square; set so as to face the four cardinal points; the ruins of a great wall around; a deep moat outside, now dry; the palace in the centre; pagodas and other sacred buildings here and there, scattered over the place; and everywhere broken bricks strewn about; some of the ground now cultivated, and the rest covered with dense tangled jungle; but not a single inhabitant. [Illustration: PART OF THE PALACE OF MANDALAY (SOUTH SIDE).] This changing of the capital from place to place, once in a while, seems a strange, extravagant freak on the part of the Burmese kings, especially in such a case as this, where it involved the founding and building of a new city only four or five miles from the existing one, and all the people had to transfer themselves and their houses and property as best they could at the king’s command. Superstitious fear was probably the chief if not the sole reason for all this useless waste. There are, within a circle of a dozen miles, four places that claim the honour of having been sometime capitals of Burma, viz., Mandalay, Amarapoora, Ava and Sagaing, all within little more than a century, and the three latter all show the crumbling remnants of their former glory. There are, besides these, other towns scattered up and down the country that have formerly been capitals.