RISING in the eternal ice-fields of the Tibetan plateau, draining, but little lower in its course, a considerable portion of the Kuenlun range of mountains,-for from these distant peaks the three rivers of Nameitu, Toktani, and Ketsi flow into the main stream, augmented by the many torrents and rivers of Se-chuen, and in its lower course the recipient of hundreds of tributaries, one of which alone, the Han river, though it mixes its waters with the Yangtze at a spot six hundred miles from the sea, is itself navigable in summer for six hundred miles, the YangtzeKiang, or, as it is often called by the Chinese, the Ta-Kiang, or great river, holds a place second to none in the rivers of Asia. In length three other Asian rivers surpass it, the three so little known, the Yenesei, the Lena, and the Obi. Yet, in spite that it ranks only fourth of the rivers of its continent in size, the area drained by it is so large and of such vast population, while the traffic upon its waters, in a country where there are no railways, and where roads are but few, owing to the enormous number of canals and streams that have to be crossed, is so important, that it may be stated without exaggeration that regarding its utility to the natives of China, and the facility rendered by it to trade and travel, it can compare with any other river in the world.

The recent outbreak against Europeans has turned Western attention prominently towards the towns on the Yangtze; and very soon after the voyage up its course,

VOL. CL.-NO. DCCCCXIV.

which I am now going to describe, several of the towns which I visited were invested with a painful interest through the ill-treatment inflicted upon European residents by the Chinese mobs; and among the victims of their atrocity were some who were my fellow-passengers on the cruise.

The clock in the great club, at Shanghai told us it was time to embark; for although our steamer was not to leave the landingstage on the bund before the early morning tide, yet we had made up our minds on the recommendation of friends to sleep on board, rather than have to leave our comfortable beds and embark at the unearthly hour of between two and three o'clock in the morning.

The club porter hailed two jinrikshas, for our luggage had been already sent on board. A dozen long and lanky betailed Chinamen galloped up to the door, rattling their jinrikshas behind them. Longer and lankier than ever appeared the sober Celestial under the white glare of the electric light. The bund was deserted, except for the little group round the club door, and here and there a native policeman or a European hurrying home from a dinner at a smart walk, for the night was cold. A jinriksha rattles down the street, otherwise Shanghai has gone to bed and to sleep. We settle ourselves in our hand-carriages, the coolies raise the shafts, the porter tells them where to go to, and we are off, breaking the silence of the still autumn night with the rattle

3 E

of the wheels. What a scurry down the bund, with its merchants' palaces and banks on one side, and its wide walk, shaded by trees and the river, on the other, and with the electric light throwing its unnatural glare over all!

The jetty! Our coolies stop with a jerk; we alight. There is no difficulty to be experienced in finding our steamer. From the landingstage we step straight on board. On the

gangway we are met by a most respectable creature, a wizened Chinaman, who might, judging from his appearance, be any age from fifty to a hundred, with a small round black cap on his head, and tortoise-shell spectacles, large enough, one would suppose, to see all the world through, on his nose. On the crown of his black cap he wears a red button. He is therefore ennobled. My companion, A., with that delightful gift of casual indifference to everything which he possesses to perfection, not being read in the mysteries of the ratios of Chinese rank to coloured buttons, accosted this lofty Celestial with an insurpassable sang froid

"Boy! where are our cabins ? My one hope was that he did not understand English. He, the lofty mandarin, to be addressed as "boy." I trembled! A.'s familiarity, not to say almost vulgar way of addressing the potentate, took my breath away. He had got us into the scrape, and no doubt it would fall to me to drag us both out again. Imagine my relief when I discovered that, probably following the old adage that the exception proves the rule, A. had made no mistake, and that this was the steward. His being ennobled was later explained to me. He had passed the lowest of the literary examinations, had been presented with the rank represented by a red button, and

made a contract with the steamship owner to run the catering department at so much per head for each

passenger. Whether owing to his literary attainments, or to the fact that the stewards under him whom he had to provide by his contract were as near perfection as one could imagine servants to be, I know not; but certain it is that a most excellent steward he was, and his whole department on board was managed with extraordinary success.

The Yangtze steamers leave nothing to be desired, unless it is longer passages in them. They steam fast, almost too fast; the cabins are light and airy, and all on deck; the food is of the very best, and above one's bunk are hung innumerable arms, rifles, cutlasses, &c., in case of an attack by pirates,-a precaution about as useful as the fastening of cork belts to the roof in the cabins of some of the large mail-steamers. These boats are for the most part three-deckers, and many are built with the old-fashioned beam-engine, which takes the form of a gigantic see-saw, protruding from the uppermost deck.

So quietly we left the jetty at Shanghai that neither A. nor myself woke, and when we rose the following morning the sun was shining brightly, and we had left the Hoang-pu river and the Woosung forts at its junction with the Yangtze far behind, and were steaming at the rate of some fourteen knots an hour, in spite of the strong tides and current, through the muddiest water I think it has ever been my lot in life to look upon. So thick did the concoction appear that it seemed almost a possibility to get out and walk on its surface. Before the days of my initiation into the regions of Chinese rivers I

had been wont to think the Thames dirty in London; but now I can lean over the bridges and almost imagine I can see the dead cats and empty tins at the bottom, in comparison to the Yangtze.

We were a hundred miles from the sea, and yet all the view to be obtained of the river-banks was a far-away bank of mud that had got too thick to run. But a change came during the morning, the banks began to close in as we proceeded on our way, but offered no attractive scene, consisting for the most part of dense reedy swamps, beyond which one could now and again with difficulty descry cultivated land and villages.

No places of importance were passed until the evening, although once or twice during the afternoon we stopped off some village to pick up a boat-load of passengers who had been waiting in mid-stream for the steamer's arrival. The reedy shore had given place now and again to steep mud - banks fringed with green grass, and it was generally opposite a collection of huts upon the summit of the stiff clay that these stray passengers were picked up.

Toward evening, however, we arrived at Chin-Kiang, the first of the larger towns, and although it was already sunset by the time we had made fast, A. and I were not to be deterred from going ashore, and under the guidance of her Britannic Majesty's consul we visited the British Consulate, which in 1888 was destroyed in the riots that took place in this town, when also the houses of the European missionaries were burned. The riots were said to have been occasioned by an Indian policeman in the service of the British Government having, in arresting a scoundrel, been obliged to use force, upon which the native population, as

ready as gunpowder to burst into flame, rose en masse. Fortunately no lives were lost, but the European residents had to fly by night from the town and seek a place of hiding and safety in the open country. But of Chin-Kiang there is a far more tragic story to be told. When in 1842, after the quelling of the Tai-ping rebellion, the allied troops retiring from Nanking entered Chin-Kiang, they discovered the place to be in very truth a city of the dead, for, rather than fall into the hands of the soldiers of the "foreign devils," the men of the city had murdered their wives and children and then committed suicide a most unnecessary precaution, for no attack was intended upon their town. It was a pity they did not live long enough to regret their hastiness.

As at most of the Yangtze ports, the steamers at Chin-Kiang are moored alongside a hulk, floating a little way out in the river, and connected by the mainland with large gangways. The hulks answer their purpose exceedingly well; for not only do they render unnecessary any deepening of the river, but also in the case of riots, which are so common unfortunately all along the river's course, they afford a more secure retreat than many of the houses ashore, as by raising the gangways the hulks can be entirely cut off from any direct communication with the land; while, being very high out of the water, any successful attempt, skilful as are the Chinese in any work of the kind, to gain an entrance from the boats would be almost impracticable. It is almost sad to recognise in these old hulks the remains of the once famous clipper-ships, whose races to land the first cargoes of tea in England once caused so much ex

citement. Even now with the steamers much competition still exists, and many means are resorted to by ships' captains and agents to make the voyages successful. The captain of one rather old and slow steamer, finding that he would have to be a long time in China before he received a full cargo of tea, and would have probably to return largely in ballast, began, to every one's astonishment, to say that, owing to the repairs that had been done to his engines, he hoped to make a racing passage. Then, still more to the astonishment of the captains of the fast steamers and the world at large, he commenced to back himself to make the fastest passage home. In such very considerable sums of money did he wager that people began to think there was something in it, and the merchants sent their tea almost entirely to his ship, arguing that, as the captain stood to lose £500, the repairs to his steamer's engines. had probably put him in a position to bet almost on a certainty. Of course the steamer, whose greatest speed was eight knots an hour, arrived in England weeks after the others, and the captain lost his £500; but instead of having to lie in China waiting his chance of cargo coming in from the interior-a probable delay of weeks he had cleared in a few days, after his bets became known to the public, with a full ship, thus recouping to his owners, who of course paid his betting losses, a considerable number of thousands of pounds profit.

Chin-Kiang owes its importance more to the reason that it is the principal port of the province of Kiang-su than to any other fact, and the shipments of rice and tea made yearly are very considerable. The town much resembles any

other Chinese city, being full of gilt sign-boards, pigs, and dirt, with a prevalence of a variety of unpleasant smells in every street. The European quarter is, as is the case in almost all Chinese cities, separate from the native city, and is pleasantly situated on the banks of the river, with a shady bund stretching its whole length, many of the houses possessing pretty gardens. Near Chin-Kiang is the one terminus of the Great Canal, by which the Yangtze is connected with the Ho-hang-ho, one terminus of the second largest river of China. During the night we passed Nanking, but on our way down a few weeks later were able to see a little more of this historical old city, in associations second to none in China. The town itself is situated a little way back from the river, but a port has grown up on the very banks of the Yangtze, enclosed itself within the long walls of the capital further inland.

For a long time Nanking was the largest city in the world, when the seat of the emperors of the Ming dynasty, the last before the accession of the present Manchu reigning house. At the fall of the Chinese emperors and the succession of the Tartar rule, Nanking lost much of its importance, though still a flourishing centre, until the leader of the Tai-ping rebellion, in the flush of success, made it his capital, with the intention of once more raising it to the position of the most important city in China. At his overthrow the city fell into the hands of the Government, and is now the residence of the Viceroy of Kiang-nan, and is celebrated chiefly for its manufacture of satins, which has taken the place to a large extent of its famous pottery works, though the Yangtze can still boast of the largest pottery manufacturing cities of China,

-one, Kiu-kiang, situated on the river itself; the other two, Namchang and King-ho-chew, lying some little way back, the former being in direct communication with the river by means of the Poyang lake, to the east of which it is situated. The most beautiful monument of China once stood within Nanking—namely, the celebrated porcelain pagoda, destroyed at the time of the Tai-ping revolt; but still it can make some boast of antiquities, curious if not beautiful, in the tombs of the Ming emperors, standing without the city walls, and carved into the strange forms of elephants, camels, tortoises bearing columns on their backs, and many other varieties of shape.

In the morning we tied up alongside the hulk at Wuhu, where there is not very much to see, though the place is important, owing to the exceedingly large amount of tea and rice shipped from there. There are but few European inhabitants, and those there are for the most part missionaries, who possess the largest house and garden in the place, and one of the smallest churches, probably, in the world. Any comparison between the house of God and the residential buildings is very largely in favour of the latter. Near Wu-hu the Yangtze formerly turned in a more southerly direction, and it is only in geologically recent times that it has followed its present course. A huge river winding through level plains is always liable to eccentric deviations, and one city formerly on the Yangtze, between Hankow and I-chang, and doing a most flourish ing river trade, suddenly found itself with nothing before it but a muddy empty channel. The superstitious inhabitants, believing that offence had been given to the

waters, spent a fortune in flags and crackers of propitiation, and held a great festival to the honour of all the local deities, but in vain, for the Yangtze, having found a shorter passage to the sea, utterly refused to approach within fourteen miles of the town in question.

The pleasure of travelling on the great water-way of China does not altogether centre in the towns on its banks. The river teems with life, both animal and celestial, the former principally wild-fowl, the latter of the human kind, though in this case the term Celestial is applied in its more generally understood sense in regard to China than with any attempt at using it literally. It is not, I believe, generally known that the name Celestial is not applied by the Chinese to themselves.

Strange junks float down or sail up the river, sometimes mere planks nailed together in an uncouth manner, sometimes built in the regular river-junk fashion, and well built too, of varnished wood, with raised deck-houses high above the stern, and sails of matting; and not seldom some bepainted and bespangled mandarin boat is passed, covered with gold dragons in contortions, and resembling more the advertisement van of some secondrate circus than anything else. Yet they are most picturesque : the grotesque animals, whose protruding necks form the bow, and whose open jaws are filled with scarlet teeth, are a marvel; but they are not alone in their glory, for the whole ship is a mass of tangled reptiles and beautiful but mythical birds and beasts. The cabin, with its gay awning and brilliantly painted walls, stands on the deck like a Paris bonbonnière, while from above fly a multitude of flags, long narrow pennants bearing the mandarin owner's name and titles, flags