The pavilion of the Empress‐Dowager, a much finer abode than that of the reigning monarch, contained a long, glass‐walled room crowded with bizarre ornaments of foreign workmanship. Musical boxes, mechanical toys under glass shades, vases of wax flowers, stood along each side on marble‐topped tables; and all around, of course, clocks. On the walls of her sleeping apartment hung a strange astronomical chart. The bed, an imposing and wide four‐poster, was covered and hung with rich embroideries. And, as tourists should do, we lay down in turn on the old lady’s couch, where I warrant she had tossed in sleepless agitation in those last summer nights when the rattle of musketry around the besieged Legations told that the hated foreigners still resisted China’s might. And little slumber must have visited her there when the booming of guns, during the dark hours when Russian and Japanese flung themselves on the doomed city, disturbed the silence even in the sacrosanct heart of the Forbidden City and told of the vengeance at hand. Having thoroughly inspected the Imperial apartments, we visited a very gaudily decorated temple, crowded with weird gods and hung with embroideries, and then passed on to the small but delightful Emperor’s garden. It was full of quaintly shaped trees and shrubs, bizarre rockeries and curious summer‐houses, gorgeous flowers and plants, and splendid bronze monsters. These last absolutely blazed in the brilliant sunlight as though gilded; for they are made of that costly Chinese bronze which contains a large admixture of gold. The garden closed the catalogue of sights to be seen in the palace; and though we visited a few more of the dingy buildings of the Forbidden City, there was nothing else worthy of being chronicled. We passed out through the northern gateway and climbed up Coal Hill close by for a long, comprehensive look over Pekin from the pavilion on the summit. All around us the capital lay embosomed in trees and bathed in brilliant sunshine, the yellow roofs of the Imperial Palace at our feet flashing like gold. To the right lay the pretty Lotos Lakes of the Empress‐Dowager, the white marble bridge spanning them stretching like a delicate ivory carving over the gleaming water. Through the haze of heat and dust the towers of the walls rose up boldly to the sky. And far away, beyond the crowded city, the country stretched in fertile fields and dense groves of trees to a distant line of hills, where the tall temples of the Summer Palace stood out sharply against a dark background. [Footnote 3: Lord Curzon, in his interesting book, _Problems of the Far East_, refers to this building as “The Temple of Heaven” and calls what I have described as “The Centre of the Universe” “The Altar of Heaven.” He is more likely to be correct than the officers of the armies of occupation, but I give the names which they used.]