Volume 1
Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846 / translated by William Hazlitt; now edited with an introduction by Professor Paul Pelliot.
- Évariste Régis Huc
- Date:
- [1928]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846 / translated by William Hazlitt; now edited with an introduction by Professor Paul Pelliot. Source: Wellcome Collection.
417/446 page 363
![but the innkeeper informed us that there were none, for that all exiles on account of the religion of the Lord of Heaven went on to Ili. After what the innkeeper had told us, we con¬ ceived that we might, without risk, take a brief repose ; we accordingly threw ourselves on our goat-skins, and slept soundly till daybreak, the favour of God preserving us from any visit on the part of the brigands. During the greater part of the day, we proceeded along the road to Ili, traversing with respeft, with a degree of religious veneration, that path of exile so often sandfified by the footsteps of the confessors of the faith, and conversing, as we went, about those courageous Christians, those strong souls, who, rather than renounce their religion, had abandoned their families and their country, and gone to end their days in unknown lands. Let us fervently pray that Providence may send missionaries, full of devotion, to bear the consolations of the faith amongst these our exiled brethren. The road to Ili brought us to the Great Wall, which we passed over without dismounting. This work of the Chinese nation, of which so much is said and so little known, merits brief mention here. It is known that the idea of raising walls as a fortification again ft the incursions of enemies was not peculiar in old times to China : antiquity presents us with several examples of these labours elsewhere. Besides the works of this kind executed in Syria, Egypt, Media, and on the conti¬ nent of Europe, there was, by order of the Emperor Septimus Severus, a great wall con^Iru&ed in the northern part of Britain. No other nation, however, ever effected anything of the sort on so grand a scale as the Great Wall, commenced by Tsin-Chi-Hoang-Ti [Ch’in Shih-Huang-ti], a.d. 214. The Chinese call it Wan-li-Tchang-Tching [Wan-li-ch’ang-ch’eng] “the Great Wall of ten thousand lis ”. A prodigious number](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b3135953x_0001_0417.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
