Most of these changes are gradual, but one innovation that made even the old time resident take notice of the new Peking was the construction of the tramway system. Before the capital could be accommodated with this new method of transportation, gates had to be widened, streets torn up, and pailous removed, 'Then it was that the quick-moving West was brought with a bound to the marvellous city of cambulae.' Its coming is not very pleasing to the devotees of the sanctuary-like atmosphere of Peking. Clanging bells and the rumbling and grating contact of wheels against rails now overlay the Oriental tinkle of the busy marts. The motor car and the railway engine, of course, were the forerunners of this Occidental cacophony, but they did not bring such sweeping changes with them as the tramear, nor did they throw themselves so blatantly across the cityscape.
Amid all these innovations, you will find the medievalist contemplating mournfully the new inappropriate bustle, saying that dignity itself has been dethroned with the destruction of arches whose massive and curiously-wrought timbers have shed their reds and greens and golds over Peking's street life for centuries, Other architectural glories are going, too. The curved yellow tiles, Peking's dominant characteristic, and the constituent of its brilliant tone', are doomed to gradual supersession by colourless and monotony ous Western residential headpieces. According to the "Yih Shih Pao" of December 5, 47 former Chinese tile workers are organizing three machine-made brick and tile kilns to meet the new demand for modern styles in bricks and tiles. Nothing wants rounding off any more, says our medirvalist, Peking will be a drab Eu-rassian city within ten years, In truth, the spell of the East is slowly ceted from Peking. Its me val character is being winnowed out. The old bricks, bearing such inscriptions as 'Made by the potter, Liang Vu-chen', are Iving in the roadways, broken, piled in heaps of debris. Only'a little while ago they helped to form majestic enclosures, Lut they took up too much for the moderns; they retarded movement and hampered development, It is the same th the palaces, The little kingdom in the heart of the capital is now thrown open to sightseers, exposing all the treasures of the Ming and Ching dynasties to Passing tourists. Muscums have been created out of the forbidden palaces, a last sacrifice of the unknown and the unknowable on the altar of inguisitiveness. And this means the sacrifice of much allurement, for Peking is in the process of a disrobing, a divestment of its erstwhile reticence. Cinema photographers are now engaged in recording the treasures of the revelation, The Twilight of Glamour of the old Examination to bear a block of model dwelling houses. No part of the city is safe from the inroads of modern making-over, In place of the conventional Chinese roofs, modern lath and plaster shells are rearing their heads over the 36 square-mile ox-panse of the city limits, causing one writer recently to remark that the Chinese metropolis would soon become a gaudy, flimsy bazaar, set in a dead level of dusty wasteland. Even if we do not go as far as this, it is obvious that Peking's state-Tines is in considerable danger at the hands of the jerry-builders, specialising style. in stucco contraptions on the baroque
Yet there is charm in this period of transition, the charm of contrast, Pe-
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Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.