Gimerack Building Crowding Out the Good Old Work: Official Theft from Famous Sites From Rodney Gilbert, Peking, Mar. 3
Peking is being slowly but surely robbed of its medieval character through the erection in every. quarter of horrible architectural fantasies which purport to be "foreign style." Not only shops and public offices are being converted into atrocities, but private dwellings in all quarters prove that the native architects of the new gingerbread school have gained a hold even upon conservative middle-class minds.
The woodwork of the conventional massive-roofed Chinese house is gay with primary colours, but the ensemble is both graceful and dignified. The new designing calls for a cheap and flimsy structure, a mere lath and plaster shell, ornamented with thin wooded scroll work at every possible point of display and painted in the most ideans combinations of muddy pinks, sickly lavenders and jaundiced mauves. The completed dwelling looks like a unit in the "Streets of Cairo" concession at an American county fair built to cover temporarily the _contortions of a troupe of Bedouin stomach-dancers recruited along the lower Missippi.
"Perks" ror Orrictan Panaces.
This is not the worst that is happening. (Peking officialdom is not content with allowing the massive monuments of the Ming and Manchu builders to tumble down, but has commenced mining in the edifices which give Peking its distinctive impressiveness for the bricks, timbers and marbles which are either saleable or useful in the erection of establishments for their own use. Last year a portion of the roof of the Hata-men tower fell into the demilune south of the inner gateway. The Hatamén is very conspicuous, especially to foreigners, so th tower was repaired and repainted. But at the same time the outer tower of the Hsun Chih Men, the most westerly of the southern gates to the Tartar City, was torn down and the timbers and -bricks hauled away. The timbers were magnificent and would be difficult to relace.
About the same time a number of new entrances were cut in the Imperial City wall. This was sensible enough and, while the new entrances were finished in a style which scarcely harmonized with native gate architecture, the relief to traffic was appreciated and there was no unfavourable comment. This year, however, the Imperial City wall is being demolished,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.