Pekin is divided into two separate and distinct cities, the Tartar and the Chinese. The latter, adjoining the southern wall of the former, is in shape a parallelogram, its longer sides running east and west. It grew as an excrescence to the capital of the victorious Manchus, and was in ancient times inhabited by the conquered Chinese as the Tartar City was by the superior race, though now this line of demarcation is lost in the practical merging of the two nationalities as regards the lower orders. The wall of the Chinese city is thirty feet high and twenty feet thick. [Illustration: A STREET IN THE CHINESE CITY, PEKIN] The Tartar city, in shape also a parallelogram, with the longer sides north and south, is surrounded by a much more imposing wall, which if vigorously defended would prove a truly formidable obstacle to any army unprovided with a powerful siege train. It is forty feet high, fifty feet broad at the top, and sixty‐four feet thick at the base, and consists of two masonry walls, made of enormous bricks as solid as stone, that on the external face being twelve feet thick, the interior one eight feet, the space between them filled with clay, rammed in layers of from six to nine inches.[4] A practicable breach might be effected by the concentrated fire of heavy siege guns, for shells planted near the top of the wall would probably bring down bricks and earth enough to form a ramp. From the outside seven gateways lead into the Chinese city, six into the Tartar, while communication between the two is maintained by three more. They can be closed by enormously thick, iron‐studded wooden gates, which in ordinary times are shut at night. The Japanese effected an entrance into the Tartar city by blowing in one of these. At the corners of the walls and over each gateway are lofty brick towers several stories high, the intervals between them being divided by buttresses. These towers are comparatively fragile, and at the taking of Pekin those attacked suffered considerably from the shell fire of the field guns of the Allies. Outwards from the base of the walls a broad open space is left. The Tartar City is by far the more important. It holds most of the temples, the residences of the upper and wealthier classes, the important buildings and larger shops. In the centre of it is the Imperial city, in shape an irregular square, enclosed by a high wall seven miles in circumference, the top of which is covered with yellow tiles. Here are found the public buildings and the houses of the official mandarins; and in its heart lies the Purple or Forbidden City, the residence of the Emperor and his Court. All the buildings inside the limits of the Imperial city are roofed with gleaming yellow tiles, that being the sacred colour. To the south‐east, near the wall of the Chinese city, lies the Legation quarter, where most of the European residents live.