Isfahan too I barely notice, for the best of all reasons, that I have not seen it! Though a fourth part of it is in ruins, and its population is not an eighth of what it was in the days of Shah Abbas, it is a fairly thriving commercial emporium with an increasing British trade. Indeed here Russian commercial influence may be said to cease, and that of England to become paramount. It is the paradise of Manchester and Glasgow cottons: woollen goods come from Austria and Germany, glass from Austria, crockery from England, candles and kerosene represent Russia. Our commercial supremacy in Isfahan cannot be disputed. I am almost tired of hearing of it. Opium, tobacco, carpets from the different provinces, and cotton and rice for native consumption, are the chief exports. Opium is increasingly grown round the city, and up the course of the Zainderud. Of the 4500 cases exported, worth £90 a case, three-fourths go to China. Its cultivation is so profitable and has increased so rapidly to the neglect of food crops that the Prince Governor has issued an order that one part of cereals shall be sown for every four of the opium poppy.
The cotton in the bazars, through which one can walk under cover for between two and three miles, is of the best quality, owing to the successful measures taken by the calico printers to defeat the roguery of the cheating manufacturers. All the European necessaries and many of the luxuries of life are obtainable, and the Isfahan bazars are the busiest in Persia except those of Tabriz.
It is only fair to this southern capital to say that if one can walk over two miles under the roofs of its fine bazars, one can ride for many miles among its ruins, which have desolation without stateliness, and are chiefly known for the production of the excellent wild asparagus which is used lavishly on European tables at this season.
The "Persian Versailles," the Palace of Forty Pillars, each pillar formed of shafts enriched with colour and intricate work, and resting on a marble lion, the shaking Minarets, the Masjid-i-Shah with its fine dome of peacock-blue tiles, all falling into premature decay, remain to attest its former greatness; the other noble palaces, mosques, caravanserais, and Medressehs are ruinous, the superb pleasure gardens are overgrown with weeds or are used for vetches and barley, the tanks are foul or filled up, the splendid plane trees have been cut down for fuel, or are dragging out a hollow existence—every one, as elsewhere in Persia, destroys, no one restores. The armoury is the one exception to the general law of decay.
Yet Isfahan covered an area of twenty-four miles in circumference, and with its population of 650,000 souls was until the seventeenth century one of the most magnificent cities of the East. Its destruction last century by an Afghan conqueror, who perpetrated a fifteen days' massacre, and the removal of the court to Tihran, have reduced it to a mere commercial centre, a "distributing point," and as such, its remains may take a new lease of life. It has a newspaper called the Farhang, which prints little bits of news, chiefly personal. Its editor moves on European lines so far as to have "interviewed" me!
There are manufactures in Isfahan other than the successful printing and dyeing of cottons; viz., earthenware, china, brass-work, velvet, satin, tents, coarse cottons, glass, swords, guns, pistols, jewellery, writing paper and envelopes, silk brocades, satins, gunpowder, bookbinding, gold thread, etc.
The plateau on which Isfahan stands, about seventy miles from east to west and twenty from north to south, and enclosed by high mountains with a striking outline, lies 5400 feet above the sea. The city has a most salubrious climate, and is free from great extremes both of heat and cold. The Zainderud, on whose left bank it is situated, endows much of the plain with fertility on its way to its undeserved doom in a partially-explored swamp.
This Christian town, called a suburb, though it is really two and a half miles from Isfahan, is a well-built and well-peopled nucleus. It is not mixed up with ruins as Isfahan is. They have a region to themselves chiefly in the direction of the Kuh Sufi. My impression of it after a month is that it is clean and comfortable-looking, Mr. Curzon's is that it is "squalid." I prefer mine!
It is a "city of waters." Streams taken from a higher level of the Zainderud glide down nearly all its lanes, shaded by pollard mulberries, ash, elm, and the "sparrow-tongue" willow, which makes the best firewood, and being "planted by the rivers of water," grows so fast that it bears lopping annually, and besides affording fuel supplies the twigs which are used for roofing such rooms as are not arched.
The houses, some of which are more than three centuries old, are built of mud bricks, the roofs are usually arched, and the walls are from three to five feet thick. All possess planted courtyards and vineyards, and gardens into which channels are led from the streams in the streets. These streams serve other purposes: continually a group of Armenian women may be seen washing their clothes in them, while others are drinking or drawing water just below. The lanes are about twenty feet wide and have narrow rough causeways on both sides of the water-channel. It is difficult on horseback to pass a foot passenger without touching him in some of them.