Wherever available, in the grounds of the Summer Palace, flowers are planted, and they succeed each other almost the whole year round, for the Chinese are wonderful gardeners. The extensive grounds are, however, not given up entirely to flowers and beautiful constructions; there are great fields of grain. Wheat and millet, and even vegetables, are raised in these pleasure grounds. It was curious to me to see how picturesque so prosaic a thing as a field of turnips might become, when properly placed in a large pleasure domain. By the planting of these useful crops, a great deal of fertile land is utilized, without any detriment to the landscape, and the utilitarian spirit, so strong in the Chinese, is satisfied. There is one terraced hillside in the grounds of the Summer Palace, called the “Flowery Mountain.” In the season of the peonies, which the Chinese call “The King of Flowers,” this is really a flowery mountain--one mass of blooms of exquisitely blended colors and faint evanescent perfume. The China Aster is also brought to great perfection by the Chinese gardeners, and in the time of the chrysanthemum the grounds fairly blaze with this autumnal glory. The Chinese do not go in for the cultivation of the chrysanthemum of extraordinary size. Her Majesty does not care much for these; but her gardeners arrive at some wonderful combinations of colors and some most curious shapes. The year I was in the Palace, Her Majesty was delighted with a beautiful green variety, that the gardeners had succeeded in getting, and that year there was also a new variety whose petals were like threads, they were so thin and hair-like. [Illustration: OLD RUINS IN THE SUMMER PALACE] The Temple of the Ten Thousand Buddhas is so-called from its being built in glazed yellow tiles, each representing a niche, in which is seated a Buddha, of which there are many more than ten thousand. The interior is composed of three chapels. In the central one thrones the Great Buddha. There was another famous Buddha in this temple, which was invested with peculiarly sacred qualities, but it was hurled into the lake below and broken into a thousand pieces when the foreign troops were in possession in 1900. Her Majesty seemed to feel the depredations to the temples, by the foreigners, more keenly than anything else. The Chinese are so perfectly tolerant in matters of religion, they cannot understand our attitude toward any other religion but our own, and our contempt for any other kind of worship except that in which we ourselves indulge. The Chinese are said to hate the foreigner. They certainly have not much reason to like him; nor to admire our much vaunted civilization. The European Christian soldier in China has burned, destroyed, and killed with as much barbarity as the heathen, and in many instances has given the latter points in cruelty.