"The architecture of the Chinese," says one of their encomiasts, "though it bears no relation to that of Europe; though it has borrowed nothing from that of the Greeks, has a certain beauty peculiar to itself." It is indeed peculiar to itself, and the missionaries may be assured they are the only persons who will ever discover "real palaces in the mansions of the Emperor," or to whom, "their immensity, symmetry, and magnificence, will announce the grandeur of the master who inhabits them."
The house of a prince, or a great officer of state, in the capital, is not much distinguished from that of a tradesman, except by the greater space of ground on which it stands, and by being surrounded by a high wall. Our lodgings in Pekin were in a house of this description. The ground plot was four hundred by three hundred feet, and it was laid out into ten or twelve courts, some having two, some three, and others four, tent-shaped houses, standing on stone terraces raised about three feet above the court, which was paved with tiles. Galleries of communication, forming colonnades of red wooden pillars, were carried from each building and from one court to another, so that every part of the house might be visited without exposure to the sun or the rain. The number of wooden pillars of which the colonnades were formed was about 900. Most of the rooms were open to the rafters of the roof; but some had a slight ceiling of bamboo laths covered with plaster; and the ladies apartments consisted of two stories; the upper however had no light, and was not so good as our common attics. The floors were laid with bricks or clay. The windows had no glass; oiled paper, or silk gauze, or pearl shell, or horn, were used as substitutes for this article. In the corners of some of the rooms were holes in the ground, covered over with stones or wood, intended for fire-places, from whence the heat is conveyed, as in the houses of ancient Rome, through flues in the floor, or in the walls, the latter of which are generally whitened with lime made from shells and imported from the sea coast. One room was pointed out to us as the theatre. The stage was in the middle, and a sort of gallery was erected in front of it. A stone room was built in the midst of a piece of water, in imitation of a passage yacht, and one of the courts was roughened with rocks, with points and precipices and excavations, as a representation of nature in miniature. On the ledges of these were meant to be placed their favourite flowers and stunted trees, for which they are famous.