5
!
4
throughout the entire city. The governor of the city is obliged occasionally to go round in person during the night, and the officers commanding in the towers and on the walls send parties to patrol through the quarter of the town that is assigned to them.
Climate of Pekin
From Timbowski's China 18.20.
The air of Pekin is salubrious and agrees even with strangers. Epidemic disorders are very rare and the ravages of the plague entirely unknown! The water is frozen every year from the middle of December to March; but sometimes for a shorter period. There are however no severe frosts. When the thermometer is at 10° or 12° (54½ to 59 °Fahrenheit) the heat is less oppressive than at the same temperature at St Petersburgh.
In the spring there are violent storms and whirlwinds. The heat is very great in summer, especially in June and July, accompanied however by abundant rains which moisten the soil, composed of clay and sand - sometimes the torrents pouring down from the mountains destroy villages and do great damage.
The autumn is the most pleasant part of the year; particularly September, October, and November, the air is then mild, the sky serene and the weather calm.
From an Article by Sir J. Herschel in the Times of 14th Dec. 1860.
As regards the climate of Pekin it results from these observations, (those made by M. Scatchhoff for the Russian Government from 1850 to 1855) that the mean or average temperature of the whole year is 52 degrees of Fahrenheit's thermometer, that of the hottest month (July), 82, and of the coldest (January) 24 each to the nearest whole degree! The corresponding temperatures for Greenwich respectively are 49, 63, and 34; so that the winters there are, on an average, 10 degrees colder and the summers 19 degrees warmer than in London. Of course individual days occur much hotter.
The highest and lowest temperatures in the shade recorded in each of the six years (1850-1855) to the nearest degree above zero of Fahrenheit's thermometer are as follows:-
Highest Lowest 1850 96 7 1851 96 1852 100 2 1853 98 1854 101 Luf 1855 99The thermometer in a London winter seldom descends to 9 degrees and very rarely indeed to 2.
Generally speaking, the degree of moisture of the atmosphere varies between somewhat wider limits than at Greenwich, and the annual amount of rain and snow is somewhat greater, about one-twelfth.
The temperature of solar exposure is, of course, very great in summer. A blackened thermometer exposed to the sun is observed to rise, on some one day of every year, to a maximum height of from 130 to 138 degrees Fahrenheit.
Topographical Dept:
War Office. Dec: 1860.