'GAZETTEER OF PERSIA. VOLUME II' [‎314r] (632/706)

TEHRAN
615
TEHRAN (Town)—Lat. 35° 40' 30" ; Long. 51° 27' 24" ; Elev. 3,800'.
A large town, capital of the province of Tehran and of the Empire of
Persia j it is situated 270 miles south-west of Astrabad, 471 miles west-south
west of Meshed, 672 miles west-north-west of Herat, 677 miles north of
Bushire, 510 miles north-west of Sh'raz, 224 miles north of Isfahan, 500
miles north-west of Baghdad, and 290 miles north-west of Kirmanshah.
Description. —The city, as it existed in the time of Nasir-ud-Dm, was
planted in the very lowest part of a desert plain with few or no suburbs,
and consisted of a fortified polygon of four or five miles exterior circuit,
surrounded by an embattled mud wall twenty feet high, flanked with cir
cular towers and defended by a moat forty feet wide and twenty to thirty
feet deep. This wall was in parts ruinous and the ditch clumsy and broken
down. There were six gates admitting into the city where the streets
were narrow and filthy, and where the only building of any pretensions
was the citadel. This contained the Divan Khaneh-i-Shah, the royal palace.
Beyond the city walls the country palace of Path ’AH Shah, Qasr-i-Qajar,
was the sole object that relieved the monotony of the plain, the one noble
feature in the landscape being the snow-clad heights of Damavand soaring
loftily over all. The British Mission was situated in the southern part of
the city; the Russians at first occupied a house in a different quarter, but
when their Minister was assassinated in 1828, they moved for greater security
into the precincts of the citadel. In 1870 Nasir-ud-Din started the renovation
of his capital. The old walls and towers were for the most part pulled down,
the ditch was filled up, a large slice of the surrounding plain was taken in,
and at a distance of a full mile from the old enclosure a new rampart was
constructed copied from the fortifications of Paris before the German war.
There is no masonry in this rampart, and not a single gun is mounted ; its
principal service consists in facilitating collection of octroi duty. Tehran
has now an enceinte, on a European plan, of 11 miles, with 12 gates con
sisting of lofty archways adorned with pinnacles and towers and present-
in 0- a showy appearance from a distance. Inside the walls the city is
a curious mixture of Oriental and Western ideas ; there are metalled and
watered roads, tramways (of which there are 6 | miles of the same gauges
as the Shah ’Abdul ’Azlm railway, and railway trucks run on it from the
station), and gasworks, and alongside these are to be seen the usual Persian
mud hovels ; to use Lord Curzou’s expressive words —Tehran is becom
ing “ Europeanised upon Asiatic lines.”
In the northern part of the new town outside the line of the old walls
is situated the Tup Maidan, the principal public place of Tehran, so-called
because it is surrounded by the artillery barracks and contains a park of
obsolete guns. Its most distinctive features are the gateways by which
the square is entered or left; the two principal ones are the Nasirieh Gate
at the south-east corner and the Daulat Gate at the south-west corner,
over which the imperial standard floats when the Shah is in Tehran. Two
other maiddns are worthy of notice, the Maidan-i-Mashq or parade, and
the Maidan-i-Shah outside the Ministry of War which contains a large tank,
and a colossal brass gun, known as the cannon of pearls, of a semi-sacred
character.