European you meet, or the last,--it is always the same,--about the place
and its history, and he says, "Oh, yes, Peking is full of historical
memorials which you must not fail to see"; but they always turn out to
be the spots made famous in the siege of the legations. To the average
European, Peking's history begins in 1900; you cannot get away from that
time, and after a while you tire of it, and you tire, too, of all the
bustle and blaze of colour. And you climb again to the top of the wall
that seems to belong to another world, and you look off toward the great
break in the hills, to Nankow, the Gate of the South. On the other side
the road leads straight away to the Mongolian uplands where the winds
blow, and to the wide, empty spaces of the desert.

So you turn your back upon Peking, and the railway takes you to Kalgan
on the edge of the great plateau. It is only one hundred and twenty-five
miles away, but you spend nearly a whole day in the train, for you are
climbing all the way. And time does not matter, for it is interesting to
see what the Chinese can do in railway building and railway managing,
all by themselves. The Kalgan-Peking railway was the first thing of the
kind constructed by the Chinese, and the engineer in chief,
Chang-Tien-You, did the work so well (he was educated in America, one of
the group that came in the early seventies) that he was later put in
charge of the railway that was to be built from Canton northwards. It
seems to be an honest piece of work; at any rate, the stations had a
substantial look.

At the grand mountain gateway of Nankow you pass under the Great Wall,
which crosses the road at right angles, and as you slowly steam across
the plateau on the outer side, you see it reappearing from time to time
like a huge snake winding along the ridges. Old wall, new railway; which
will serve China best? One sought to keep the world out, the other
should help to create a Chinese nation that will not need to fear the
world.

My first impression of Kalgan was of a modern European station, and many
lines of rails; my last and most enduring, the kindness of the Western
dweller in the East to the stray Westerner of whose doings he probably
disapproves. Between these two impressions I had only time to gain a
passing glimpse of the town itself. It is a busy, dirty place, enclosed
in high walls, and cut in two by the rapid Ta Ho. A huddle of palaces,
temples, banks lies concealed behind the mud wa