Summer in Shanghai is a season that all Europeans would wish to avoid. From May to September, the depressing nature of the climate by day, and the hot, muggy, motionless atmosphere of the night, drive away all hopes of sleep or rest. You lie hour after hour rolling in a perfect bath of perspiration on your bed, impatiently waiting for daylight to appear and bring some little relief from this nightly infliction. And, when at last the smallest glimmer of dawn comes in the East, after a sleepless night, you drop off into a quiet doze, no sooner are your eyes closed, than a cloud of mosquitoes, and other nearly invisible flying pests that will not and can not be caught, and who appear to have no purpose in their short lives but that of torturing, worrying, and extracting profanity from their weary victims, settle upon your face, and all exposed parts, entirely driving away further hope of sleep. It is not surprising that all who can do so endeavour to escape this discomfort, though few succeed.

Five or six of such successive summers thin the blood, weaken the constitution, and bring on a chronic state of depression and unfitness for any kind of exertion. Thus, we and our troubles would soon be at an end, if no change of air and scene were possible.

I shall be told this is a pessimist view of our torrid season. Of course it is, yet unfortunately it is drawn from personal experience.

Sir Roderick put up at the British Consulate; there was not a spare room for me, and, as such a convenience as an hotel is not to be found outside of Shanghai, a good Samaritan, H. F. R——, took compassion on me, when I met him on the race-course, invited me to make his house my house, and for the remainder of the time we stayed in Hankow generously provided for all my wants.

The second day of our visit Her Britannic Majesty's Consul gave a dinner-party to as many of his friends as he could muster on so short a notice.

Among his guests were the Russian and American Consuls, several merchants and their wives, and others. Altogether we sat down twenty to a remarkably good dinner, with pleasant and cheerful companions.

Shortly after we had finished consuming all the good things that had been provided for our entertainment, and the ladies had withdrawn, one of the house coolies, in a half-frantic state, rushed into the room, with the information that the house was on fire.

It was true enough, for as soon as he opened the door, the smoke poured in; the staircase was in flames, caused by the bursting of a very large kerosine oil lamp hung at the junction of the dividing staircase, and intended to light two sets of stairs. The blazing oil was running in a broad stream of fire down the stairs, looking very effective and extremely pretty, a cascade of fire, if such a thing could be.

Within a distance of more than one hundred miles round Shanghai, it was not an unusual thing a few years ago, when out in the more remote districts on a shooting excursion, to come across an American or a European in Chinese attire, marrying, and speaking the language of the Chinese, to the almost utter forgetfulness of his own mother tongue. I have met with one or two of these men myself. They are mostly, if not all of them, waifs and strays who served, some in the rebel, some in the Imperial Army, during the fifteen years of the rebellion. Those that I have seen are comfortably settled, with Chinese wives and families, living in Chinese communities exactly as though they were natives of the land. Indeed, I have often fancied that the marked character of the Caucasian features have partly changed into the almond, cat-like eyes and the stumpy nose of the Chinese.

These men were adventurers, like the free lances of the middle ages. If they were well paid, they would hesitate at nothing; they were as willing to lead a forlorn hope as to burn a city, if it would only swell their treasury, which they all carefully looked after at the storming and sacking of the various towns in which they took part. There are still some of them left in Shanghai, who in this way made enough money to keep them for the remainder of their lives, but it was spent with the recklessness with which it was gained, and their cash account is light enough now.

The next morning we were up and dressed by five o'clock. The boats had already started on their upward course, and, after a few hours yulowing and sailing, we came to the first rapid. Here the mountains open out from the sides of the river, leaving some fine grassy slopes which run down to the water's edge. In many places these slopes have been taken advantage of by the mountaineers, and are cultivated with various kinds of grain and vegetables. This is the first of some eight or ten rapids between Ichang and Chunking. At the lower end of each rapid there is a village, as it is called, which consists only of some forty or fifty stone and mud huts. The people in these places earn their livelihood chiefly by assisting to haul boats through the rapids, which vary in length at different times, according to the quantity of water in the river, from a quarter of a mile to a mile-and-a-half. Running at a speed of from seven to nine miles an hour, it can easily be supposed that no boats could ascend these places without much additional help being given to the ordinary crews. So these villagers became a necessity, and grew into existence many centuries ago.

Our loudah went ashore, carrying with him one or two strings of cash, and, for a mere trifle, hired some sixty or seventy men to help on the tow-rope, and bring us beyond the head of the rapid.

About the middle of April, in the year of grace one thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven, I was asked by Sir Roderick Runnimede to make one in a party of two, on a proposed journey to the rapids, gorges, and glens of the upper waters of the Yangtze. It was not a scientific excursion, there were no new countries to discover, no new people to trot out before the world, no new trade routes to open up; it was simply an excursion for health and pleasure combined, to wander anywhere and everywhere our fancy should lead or our caprice should guide, to explore some small portion of this wild romantic country, and in short to have a good and pleasant time generally.

It is seldom more than once in a lifetime that any ordinary mortal who has drifted on to the eastern coast of China has an opportunity of visiting the recesses of the vast Chinese empire; so, without the slightest hesitation, I at once accepted the offer. In three minutes the whole matter was settled, and in less than a week we were off.

Late one Saturday evening, at the time abovementioned, I followed my baggage up the ‘bund,’ bound for the steamer that was to take us over the first part of our trip, and which was lying securely moored off the Taku jetty. She was a fine boat, and coolies were busily engaged ‘Ahhoing!’ and carrying bales and packages to stow away in her capacious hold.

What advantages, if any, does China obtain by the relaxing of her exclusiveness?

Judged from our standpoint, it must be assumed at once that they are manifold.

First and foremost is the expansion of her ideas concerning the world. That which the discovery of America was to Europe will the widening of her narrow horizon become to China. Think for a moment what the voyage of Columbus into the great unknown revealed to the peoples of Europe so recently—not yet four centuries ago: it proved that the earth is a sphere; that on its other side the sun, moon, and stars give their light in the same proportion as where we dwell; that rain, wind, dews, and clouds belong also to the further hemisphere, where rivers and mountains, forests and lakes, greater than they had ever seen are to be found! And the inhabitants—what of them? The Spaniards discovered people simple enough to worship them, coming, as it seemed, on winged canoes over the big water from the sunrise. We have read our Prescott, and know what the invaders proved to the natives of New Spain; and Sebastian Cabot, Jean Cartier, and others tell us of a different race—men of the forests and prairies, who had neither city nor wealth of any kind; nomad hunters and warriors, living like Bedouin Arabs, and equally independent and proud.

The question is, after sixteen years' residence in Shanghai, what report can we give of the country and of the people among whom we have sojourned? The answer, whether spoken or written, may be summed up as follows:

‘The country is well enough if one could get at it; but as there are no roads, no horses, no hotels, one is arrested at the very threshold; and as to the people, they are cheating, lying, dirty, and ugly,—and they do not understand us, whatever trouble we take to improve their intelligence. Why do not our men-of-war that are cruising hither and thither uselessly in the China Sea again carry their guns to the gates of the great cities, and from the mouth of the cannon insist on the country being opened up to foreigners and free trade everywhere, and roads and railways being made without delay? Then, indeed, the congested state of our manufactures would be relieved, and China's millions become clothed from western looms.’

This is our common talk, and nobody seems conscious of the inhumanity of the question, the onesidedness of the argument, and the presumption of the conclusion. We are a restless and unthinking race, active and energetic, like young people waltzing in a small room; we are content to enunciate one idea at all seasons, and we rotate in our narrow sphere with our narrow thoughts, till—we drop into silence.

Reading through the foregoing jottings, it occurs to me that, to anyone who has not lived in China, it may appear strange that you can go nowhere or do anything without a boat.

To a very great extent this is true. Round Shanghai foreigners have, with much difficulty, obtained from the Chinese authorities permission to make a very few miles of roads outside the boundary of the foreign concession. Five miles east, and five miles west is the limit. You must go and return by the same road. Day after day the same weary drive is all the carriage exercise to be had, which in a very short time becomes monotonous in the extreme.

Two or three years ago the municipal council endeavoured to buy from some of the natives a narrow strip of their land, at an absurdly high value, so as to make a new road, and vary a little the sameness of the present drive. But the Taotai stepped in and, under threats of some most awful punishment if his orders were disregarded, prohibited the Chinese from selling their land to foreigners for making new roads. His argument was that we had roads enough, and even more than we ought to have; that, whatever price we offered, the Chinese soil should not be further invaded; and that, so long as he could prevent it, we should not get any more ground.

It would be a most interesting pursuit to trace to its commencement the practice of opium-smoking in China and India. Whence its origin, and how long has the practice existed? We do know how and when tobacco was introduced into England and the countries of Europe. But Turkey? When the Turks over-ran and possessed themselves of Syria, Egypt, North Africa and, with the Arabs, penetrated into Spain and Hungary, and at last, in 1453, sat down in Constantinople, was the pipe unknown amongst them? Are they indebted to our enterprise for the introduction of the soothing weed which we still take in the unsophisticated state of the rolled leaf, whilst they have developed the sublime medium of the hookah and the hubble-bubble?

Amongst the utensils unearthed at Mycenæ and Naucratis, is there no smoking-tube? Is nothing of the kind in the sarcophagi of the Pharaohs? It is impossible to believe that there never was smoking till the other day, when our Elizabethan sea-captains brought the curious plants from the New World.

And again, in America how long had the practice reigned? Are there no traces of pipes among the sculptured ruins of the Astecs? Did neither Cortez nor Pizzaro bring any gold or jewelled examples into Spain? There must be some record of their antiquity in a direction east or west. One cannot sit content with the belief that the manhood of the whole world has been conquered by a habit invented and propagated by the Red Indian of the American forests!

A couple of years or more before my visit to the gorges, Mr. Archibald Little, a merchant of Shanghai, had, in one of the ordinary boats of the country, sailed through upwards of four hundred miles of a continued succession of gorges, and reached as far as Chunking.

This journey was made with the intention of studying and learning all that could be learnt from the natives of the nature and particulars of the rapids, swirls, currents, depth, and other intricacies of the navigation of the upper waters of the river. So well did he complete his work that, as soon as he returned to Shanghai, he left for England, with the intention of getting a company together to build a couple of steamers after his own designs, which he had carefully planned from the knowledge he had gained during his six months' voyage in a small and confined boat.

The steamers were intended to trade between Ichang and Chunking, about four hundred and twenty miles apart—which they had a perfect right to do, according to the terms of the Chefoo Convention of 1876—and to open up to foreign trade the vast and fertile province of Szechuen.

Mr. Little's mission to London was eminently successful. He soon formed his company, and a steamer of five hundred tons burden was put on the stocks at Glasgow from the designs of Mr. J. McGregor, the chairman of the company, which carried out the requirements furnished by Mr. Little.

The following pages comprise nothing more nor less than a transcript of the journal kept by me during a two months' journey from Shanghai, the metropolis of the Coast, to Chung-king, the commercial metropolis of Western China. This journal was written up each night, as I travelled along in the native boat, and was despatched home by successive mails for the amusement of my friends in England. I have been induced to publish it in the belief that impressions formed and recorded day by day on the spot give a better idea of the actual state of things in China, than many of the elaborate and carefully compiled books which, attempt a more exhaustive description of the country.

So much interest is now felt at home in the “Flowery Land,” and such very erroneous conceptions appear to be entertained in regard to China, her wealth, her strength and prowess, and her value as an ally—qualities of which, in my opinion, only the remote potentiality exists at present—that no apology is needed for presenting a literal picture of the country I traversed.

With the exception of the ubiquitous missionary, the travellers who have ascended the “Great (and sole) Highway” of China to its highest navigable point may be counted on the fingers of one hand. So tedious are the antiquated modes of travel, that of the thousands of European residents at the treaty ports, few have the leisure or inclination to journey outside of the routes covered by our “barbarian” steamers.

The foreign community of Ichang comprises a Commissioner of Customs with an indoor assistant, who combines medical with clerical duties, and two outdoor examiners. These, with the missionaries—one Scotch Presbyterian and his wife, and two Roman Catholics—form the whole resident foreign population. The British Consul appointed to the port resided, at the time of my visit, at Hankow. I was much pleased at finding a medico here, as, shortly before landing, while walking along the river-bank, following the boat, a dog had rushed out of the wheat, and bitten me in the calf of the leg through my knickerbocker stocking, and I now let myself be thoroughly cauterized. These dogs in China are the bane of one's existence; they seem to have a mad antipathy to the barbarian, that the longest acquaintance fails to modify; the scent, appearance, or sound of his movements seems to infuriate them to madness; they rush out violently barking, and as a rule stop short of biting, but to any one with sensitive nerves there is no enjoyment in a walk outside the police-guarded roads of the larger “settlements.” In the present instance I was attacked by a dog who did not bark, and I had no stick ready for him; but such instances are rare.

I met with that cordial reception which Englishmen always extend to each other in these distant parts, and took up my quarters for the time, ashore.

Tuesday, April 17th.—A quiet day indoors, receiving calls and writing mail for to-morrow's post, preparatory to setting out to visit the coalmine belonging to my friend Tung.

Wednesday, April 18th.—At eight o'clock friend Tung and his nephew arrived with three small shaggy ponies, one of which, a well-conditioned little animal standing about twelve hands, and a native of the neighbouring province of Kwei-chow, was destined for myself. My hosts had put a Miao-tse saddle on him. This, like all saddles in China, was made of wood, but it was covered with heavy carved lacquer, precisely like the celebrated Soochow ware. A wadded quilt, topped with a foreign blanket, succeeded however in shielding this showy but uncomfortable piece of furniture from the public gaze, as well as from the rider's posterior. A crowd assembled to see us off; we were soon mounted and trotted off gaily down the slippery street. My little animal being the best goer, I was requested to take the lead. My natural inclination to walk through the narrow crowded streets was overcome by my companions urging me to hurry on, as we were due at Shih ma Tsao, my host's home, where breakfast was awaiting us, at nine o'clock. The collar of bells, with which all Chinese riders surround their ponies' necks, warns the foot-passengers to stand aside, while their merry jingle gives a sense of speed and adds to the festive air of the cavalcade.