“The houses in Shimoda are built merely of pine boards, or of plaster thickly spread over a wattled wall of laths, the interstices of which are filled in with mud. In some cases these modes of construction are combined—the front and rear being of boards, or sliding panels, and the sides of mud. When thoroughly dried, the mud is whitewashed, and the plain surface worked into round ridges, three inches high, crossing each other diagonally from the roof to the ground; the ridges are then washed blue, and give the exterior a checker-board look, which, though singular, is more lively than a blue mud wall. The plaster is excellent, and these walls appear very solid and rather pretty when new; at a distance one would even think them to be stone; but after a few years the ridges loosen, the rain insinuates itself beneath the outer coating, and the whole begins to scale and crack off, disclosing the mud and rushes, and then the tenement soon falls to pieces. Still the progress of decay is not so rapid as one would think, judging only by the nature of the materials, and the walls are well protected by the projecting eaves. No bricks are used in building, nor are square tiles for floors seen; and the manner of making walls common in southern China, by beating sanded clay into wooden moulds, is unknown. “Some of the best houses and temples have stone foundations, a few only of which are made of dressed stone. Half a dozen or more storehouses occur, faced entirely with slabs of stone, and standing detached from other buildings, and are doubtless fire-proof buildings. There are no cellars under the houses; the floors are raised on sleepers only two feet above the beaten ground, and uniformly covered with straw mats stuffed with chaff, or grass an inch thick. The frames are of pine, the joists four or five inches square, and held together by the flooring of the attic, as well as the plates and ridge-pole. The houses and shops join each other on the sides, with few exceptions, leaving the front and rear open. There is no uniformity in the width of the lots, the fronts of some shops extending twenty, thirty, or more feet along the street, while intermediate ones are mere stalls not over ten feet wide.