China by Harry Alverson Franck — Read

Looking down from the great Tartar Wall of Peking we saw Chinese ways quite different from our own. The great flat, tree-topped capital with only artificial Mei-shan, or Coal Hill, rising above it, does not look at all like an American city. The highest structures are the empty defense towers over the city gates. The only buildings reminding one of our own large cities are those built by foreigners-hotels, mission schools, and American hospitals. The city stretches so far that schoolbooks used to call Peking the largest city in the world. Now we know that it has hardly a million inhabitants, and we realize that a very extensive city with mostly one-story houses inside compounds (walled enclosures) may have fewer people than a city smaller in area but with buildings of many stories.

There are few sewers in Peking, and in most parts of it there is no running water. Just outside our compound wall was a big well with a windlass and some ancient buckets. All day long, men with loudly squeaking wheelbarrows wheeled water in tall wooden tubs from this and the many other public wells all about town, and sold it at the poorer houses. The street sprinklers of Peking consist of two buckets of water on the end of a pole, and a long-handled wooden dipper. A soldier or a coolie moves slowly along the principal streets throwing water with this dipper. As it is often bitterly cold in Peking (though a clear, dry cold that is rather enjoyable) ice forms quickly, and sometimes even the man with the dipper has hard work standing up. In midwinter I used to ride about the city on a little red horse that I had brought from far western China, and in some of the streets made icy by the dripping of water-wheelbarrows or by the street-sprinkler, my mount acted as if he were on skates.