_December_ 19, 1849.--Shahgunge, distance twelve miles. This town is
surrounded by a mud wall, forty feet thick, and a ditch three miles
round, built thirty years ago, and now much out of repair. It belongs
to the family of Rajah Bukhtawar Sing. The wall, thirty feet high,
was built of the mud taken from the ditch, in which there is now some
six or seven feet of water. The wall has twenty-four bastions for
guns, but there is no platform, or road for guns, round it on the
inside. A number of respectable merchants and tradesmen reside in
this town, where they are better protected than in any other town in
Oude. It contains a population of between twenty and thirty thousand
persons. They put thatch over the mud walls during the rains to
preserve them. The fortifications and dwelling-houses together are
said to have cost the family above ten lacs of rupees. There are some
fourteen old guns in the fort. Though it would be difficult to shell
a garrison out of a fort of this extent, it would not be difficult to
take it. No garrison, sufficient to defend all parts of so extended a
wall, could be maintained by the holder; and it would be easy to fill
the ditch and scale the walls. Besides, the family is so very
unpopular among the military classes around, whose lands they have
seized upon, that thousands would come to the aid of any government
force brought to crush them, and overwhelm the garrison. They keep
their position only by the purchase of Court favour, and have the
respect and attachment of only the better sort of cultivators, who
are not of the military classes, and could be of little use to them
in a collision with their sovereign. The family by which it is held
has long been very influential at Court, where it has been
represented by Bukhtawar Sing, whose brother, Dursun Sing, was the
most powerful subject that Oude has had since the time of Almas Allee
Khan. They live, however, in the midst of hundreds of sturdy