街衢冷落 A Town Gone Quiet
不一時至城外，三藏下馬，入到三層門裡，見那民事荒涼，街衢冷落。又到市口之間，見許多穿青衣者左右擺列，有幾個冠帶者立於房簷之下。不一时至城外，三藏下马，入到三层门里，见那民事荒凉，街衢冷落。又到市口之间，见许多穿青衣者左右摆列，有几个冠带者立于房簷之下。
逐句解 Line by line
Before long they arrived outside the city. Tripitaka dismounted, and they passed in through the three gates, and saw that the life of the place had gone to ruin and the streets lay cold and empty.
不 is bú here rather than bù, because the 一 after it has itself shifted tone — the two words lean on each other, and the first one settles only once the second has. 三層門, three layers of gate, tells you this is a substantial walled town, which makes the emptiness inside it worse rather than better. 街衢 is streets and thoroughfares; 冷落, literally cold and fallen, is still the ordinary modern word for somewhere that has gone quiet and neglected.
Coming further on to the market square, they saw a crowd of men in dark blue robes ranged to left and right, with several others in caps and official belts standing under the eaves of a building.
青衣, dark blue clothing, is the uniform worn by runners and clerks at the local government office — the lowest tier of officialdom. 冠帶, cap and belt, marks the men who outrank them. Two sentences, and the novel has sketched an entire bureaucratic hierarchy standing about in a dying town.
The description does something careful. A town with three gates and a market square is not a village; it was built to hold a lot of people doing a lot of business. What the pilgrims walk into is that infrastructure with the people drained out of it.
And the first inhabitants they meet are not merchants or farmers but officials, standing in ranks under an eave. In an empty market that is a strange and slightly ominous sight — the machinery of government still turning up for work in a place with nothing left to govern. The chapter has told you what is wrong before anybody says a word about it.