AN ANCIENT CHINESE CAPITAL — BISHOP 571 



The present height of the mound we estimated at around 50 feet. 

 That it had once been surmounted by a large building of some sort, 

 presumably a wooden castle, was indicated by the occurrence, both 

 on its sides and in the loose earth at its foot, of large gray unglazed 

 roofing-tiles of the kind used in China during the Han period. Lying 

 all about was much broken pottery, in part likewise of Han date. On 

 top of the mound was a ruinous square beacon-tower of gray burnt 

 brick ; this structure, of a type still to be seen all over northern China 

 and formerly used in the transmission of smoke or fire signals, was 

 probably not over 3 or 4 centuries old. From it we could see, stretch- 

 ing away to north and to west, the remains of the ancient city's 

 great ramparts of earth. These, though in some places still quite well 

 preserved, were for the most part much eroded, terraced for cultiva- 

 tion, and here and there almost completely dug away. 7 Their entire 

 perimeter we could not attempt to trace, for want of time. Old 

 Chinese maps suggest, however, that their circuit is somewhere around 

 15 or 16 miles; they indicate too that the old city was roughly quad- 

 rangular in plan. 



Part at least of the material composing these ramparts was pretty 

 surely taken from what was now a dry moat or ditch which we saw 

 just outside them. This we found, at the point where we measured 

 it, 160 feet wide, with a present average depth, even though now 

 much silted up, of nearly 10 feet. If it had ever served as a wet 

 moat, the water to fill it must have come from a stream, shown on 

 old Chinese maps but now no longer in evidence, which seems to have 

 flowed into it near the southwestern corner of the city. 



Immediately west of the great corner mound just mentioned, there 

 was in the south wall of the ancient city a wide opening through which 

 ascended (see post) the cart road by which we had come out from 

 Hsi-an Fu. This gap provided us with an excellent cross-section of 

 the rampart as well as a convenient opportunity for measuring 

 its profile. 



It proved to have been constructed throughout of layers of terre pise" 

 identical with those already mentioned, and was quite without any- 

 thing in the way of a revetment. Closely similar in their method of 

 construction, except that they are usually provided with outer and 

 sometimes also inner facings of large gray burnt brick laid in lime 

 plaster, are the walls of many existing Chinese cities (pis. 1, 2). 

 Occasionally, as for instance in the "Red Basin" country of the 

 western province of Szechuan, where an easily worked red sandstone 

 is readily procurable, these revetments are of dressed stone laid in 

 regular courses of equal thickness, recalling the opus isodomum of 



' Such accumulations of earth, on account of their high ammonia content, are much used by the northern 

 Chinese peasantry as fertilizer. Analogous practices are found elsewhere, as for example in the terremare 

 of north Italy and the terpen of west Friesland. 



