On getting outside the gate, we found an immense crowd assembled; they did not molest us in the least, but we passed on very quietly. We were taken through a different quarter of the town to any I had been in before, but the streets were built and ornamented in the same manner; they were lined, on both sides, with such a number of people, that where they could all have come from I could not imagine. We went on thus till we came to the gates of the city, where the mandarins were assembled to see us pass out. The walls were about eighteen feet thick, and twentyfive feet high; but the materials (stones and bricks) seemed so loosely put together, that a swivel might very soon have made a breach in them.

We were now in the suburbs, and close to the river, to which we were taken; and each sedan being placed in a separate boat, we were soon ferried across. The river here was divided into two branches, across one of which we had just been carried; and we went down the left bank of the other; it was about the breadth of the Thames at Westminster. As they conveyed me over, I got out of the sedan, and looked back at the place of my imprisonment. It seemed a large town, walled all round; but in some places the walls were n a very ruinous condition.