Viewing page 263 of 469

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[underlined]] Chapter XI. [[/underlined]]   23^[[3]].

vigor regarding the habit, so general among the older Chinese historic and antiquarian authors, of merely copying the statements of earlier writers without troubling to verify them or bring them up-to-date.
    At length Mr. Tung was able to learn of an old Buddhist temple called the Chin Shan Ssŭ [[3 Chinese characters]], said to be situated some 50 [[underlined]] li [[/underlined]] (16 or 17 miles) east of Ta T'ung and a couple of miles south of the railway. So in order to save time, I asked him to take the early morning train thither next day---April 16th--- and see if he could learn of any sculptured grottoes. The rest of our party again crossed the Yu Ho for further examination of the site where once had stood the old North Wei capital.
    Early in our investigations we found, just at the river-bank, what we thought might be remains of the ancient city's water-gate. These consisted of two parallel fragments of massive walls of [[underlined]] terre pisé^[[e,]] [[/underlined]] now badly eroded and partly masked by deposits of silt. About 100 feet apart, they formed right angles with the course of the river. Between them the bank, instead of being a steep gravel bluff as elsewhere here-about, sloped gently down to the water's edge, suggesting an old ramp. That the whole structure was at least approximately coeval with the long wall that we had seen two days before (see page 227), the fact that both of them contained fragments of the same types of unglazed pottery (but no later shards) appeared to indicate. Our "water-gate" lay, moreover, directly opposite the gap already mentioned [[strikethrough]] (page 227) [[/strikethrough]] in the same wall---a point which likewise seemed to suggest a connection between the two.
    Next we turned our attention to the old earthen wall itself. We traced it for some hundreds of yards both north and south of the ga^[[p]] just mentioned, and which we had taken as indicating the former presence of a

Transcription Notes:
Chinese characters needed