Chapter 13
The Pe-che-lee, the most western of the eighteen provinces of China, is divided into nine departments, and one of them has for its capital Chun-Kin-Fo; that is, the City of the First Order Submissive to Heaven, which city is Pekin.
Let the reader imagine a Chinese tomahawk, with a surface of six thousand hectares, a circumference of eight leagues, whose irregular parts would exactly fill a rectangle, and he will have an idea of this mysterious Kambalu, which Marco Polo, towards the close of the thirteenth century, so curiously describes; for such is the capital of the Celestial Empire.
In fact, Pekin comprises two distinct cities, which are separated by a large boulevard and fortified wall. One of them, the Chinese city, is a rectangular parallelogram; the other, the Tartar c
