It is a matter of individual taste, but few cities in the East interest me in which national characteristics in architecture, costume, customs, and ways generally are either being obliterated or are undergoing a partial remodelling on Western lines. An Eastern city pure and simple, such as Canton, Niigata, or Baghdad, even with certain drawbacks, forms a harmonious whole gratifying to the eye and to a certain sense of fitness; while Cairo, Tokio, Lahore, and I will now add Tihran, produce the effect of a series of concussions.
Tihran—set down on a plain, a scorched desert, the sublimity of which is interfered with by kanaats or underground watercourses with their gravel mounds and ruinous shafts—has few elements of beauty or grandeur in its situation, even though "the triumphant barbarism of the desert" sweeps up to its gates, and the scored and channelled Shimran range, backed by the magnificent peak, or rather cone, of Demavend, runs to the north-east of the city within only ten miles of its walls.
The winter with its snow and slush disappeared abruptly two days after I reached Tihran, and as abruptly came the spring—a too transient enjoyment—and in a few days to brownness and barrenness succeeded a tender mist of green over the trees in the watered gardens, rapidly thickening into dark leafage in which the bulbul sang, and nature helped by art spread a carpet of violets and irises over the brown earth. But all of verdure and greenery that there is lies within the city walls. Outside is the unconquerable desert, rolling in endless shades of buff and brown up to the Elburz range, and elsewhere to the far horizon.
Situated in the most depressed part of an uninteresting waste in Lat. 35° 40′ N. and Long. 51° 25′ E., and at an altitude of 3800 feet, the climate is one of extremes, the summer extreme being the most severe. For some weeks the heat is nearly insupportable, and the Legations, and all of the four hundred Europeans who are not bound to the city by a fate which they execrate, betake themselves to "yailaks," or summer quarters on the slopes of the adjacent mountains.
Entering Tihran in the darkness, it was not till I saw it coming back from Gulahek, the "yailak" of the British Legation, when the mud was drying up and the willows were in their first young green, that I formed any definite idea of its aspect, which is undeniably mean, and presents no evidences of antiquity; indeed, it has no right to present any, for as a capital it only came into existence a century ago, with the first king of the present Kajar dynasty. The walls are said to be eleven miles in circuit, and give the impression of being much too large, so many are the vacant spaces within them. They consist chiefly of a broad ditch, and a high sloping rampart without guns. Twelve well-built domed gateways give access to the city. These are decorated with glazed tiles of bright colours and somewhat gaudy patterns and designs, representing genii, lions, and combats of mythical heroes.
Above the wall are seen tree-tops, some tile-covered minarets, the domes of two mosques, and the iron ribs of a roofless theatre in the Shah's garden, in which under a temporary awning the Tazieh or Passion Play (elsewhere referred to) is acted once a year in presence of the Shah and several thousand spectators.
Entering by a gateway over which is depicted a scene in the life of Rustem, the Achilles of Persia, or by the Sheikh Abdul Azim gate, where the custom-house is established and through which all caravans of goods must reach Tihran, the magnitude of the untidy vacant spaces, and the shabby mud hovels which fringe them, create an unfavourable impression. Then there are the inevitable ruinousness, the alleys with broken gutters in the centre, the pools of slime or the heaps of dust according to the weather, and the general shabbiness of blank walls of sun-dried bricks which give one the impression, I believe an unjust one, of decay and retrogression. I never went through those mean outskirts of Tihran which are within the city walls without being reminded of a man in shabby clothes preposterously too big for him.
The population is variously estimated at from 60,000 to 160,000 souls. It varies considerably with the presence or absence of the Court. The streets and bazars are usually well filled with people, and I did not see many beggars or evidences of extreme poverty, even in the Jewish quarter. On the whole it impressed me as a bustling place, but the bustle is not picturesque. It is framed in mean surroundings, and there is little variety in costume, and much sober if not sad colouring.
In "old" Tihran the alleys are crooked, dirty, and narrow, and the bazars chiefly frequented by the poor are very mean and untidy; but the better bazars, whether built as some are, round small domed open spaces, or in alleys roofed with low brick domes, are decidedly handsome, and are light, wide, clean, and in every way adapted for the purposes of buying and selling. European women, even though unattended, can walk through them quite freely without being mobbed or stared at.