'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎304] (345/714)

PERSIA
nearly identical estimate was made by the English travellers
Morier and Ouseley, who were at Teheran within the next few
years. The former said it contained 12,000 houses, the latter a
population of from 40,000 to GO,000, figures which practically
coincide. As such, or, at any rate, not very much larger, it re
mained during the first seventy years of this century, before it
experienced the entire renovation at the hands of Nasr-ed-Din Shah,
which I shall presently describe.
What, however, was the appearance of the city in this first
epoch of modified rejuvenescence ? The narratives and the illustra-
Its tions of a long series of minute and accomplished writers
appearance ei ^ a ble us to ascertain with absolute certainty. Planted
in the hollow of the plain, and surrounded only by the stark desert,
with few or no suburbs, and with clearly-defined outline, stood the
c ity a fortified polygon, between four and five miles in exterior
circuit, surrounded by an embattled mud wall twenty feet high,
flanked with circular towers, and defended by a moat forty feet in
width and from twenty to thirty feet in depth. The wall was
mean and in parts ruinous, the ditch was clumsy and broken down
in both respects, that is to say, profoundly Persian. Six gates
of somewhat gaudy construction, adorned with glazed tiles, ad
mitted to the interior, where ' the streets were narrow and filthy,
with uncovered drains in the middle, and where the only building
of any pretentiousness was the citadel, or ark, in the northern part
of the town. This contained the Diwan -khaneh -i -Shah, or Dar-i-
khaneh (i.e. the Royal Palace). Beyond the city walls the country
palace of Kasr-i-Kajar, built by Fath Ali Shah, upon an eminence
to the north, was the sole object that relieved the brown monotony
of the surrounding plain. Demavend soared loftily over all—the
one noble feature in the landscape. Such was the Teheran that
met the eyes of Malcolm and Harford Jones and Ouseley, and the
long train of soldiers, diplomatists, and writers, who, escorted by
brilliant cavalcades and equipped with costly presents, marched up
hither from the Gulf in the first decade of the present century, to
court the superb graces of Fath Ali Shah.
Up till the year 1870 this, with few alterations, remained the
Teheran with which a wealth of writers has made us familiar. In
Old British this circumscribed city the British Legation, or Mission,
Mission as it was called, was situated in the southern part. -T e
grounds originally belonged to one Mohammed Khan, the &iu