BOOKS.

THREE YEARS IN WESTERN CHINA.*

IT is a pity that Mr. Hosie has not a more lively and picturesque pen, for he is made of the stuff of which great travellers are made, and in his jOurneys had ample opportunities of observa- tion. He is very modest about himself and his hardships, though this volume shows that he possessed a patience, a perseverance, and an endurance truly admirable. The story of his wanderings, making all allowance for the depressing circumstances of continuous fatigue and a trying climate, is little more than a mere record of the road and its difficulties, and an uninteresting account of the physical features of the country. Occasionally a stretch of prosperous plain, or an unusually wild and stern mountain landscape, of which we will allow he had enough to satisfy the most enthusiastic lover of mountains, extorts a word of admiration from him ; and once, indeed, he compares a distant snowy range seen over a less bright mountainous country, to a huge foam-crested billow on a dark, rolling sea. Once, and once only, does he let himself " go," and then not till he has threatened to throw down his pen ; it is a description of the view seen from the wall of the celebrated city of Ta-li-Fu. It must have been indeed a glorious moment when, a few days before, the weary travellers first saw the plain of Ta-li-Fu.

We will now proceed to indicate the nature and extent of Mr. Hosie's journeys. He was deputed to reside at Chung- king, " to watch the conditions of British trade in Ssu-chuan," according to the Convention of Chefoo. Chung-king is situated on the Yang-tze, about 1,500 miles from the sea, and from that city Mr. Rosie made three journeys into South- Western China during the years (1882-1884) he acted as Consul. The first was through the province of Kuei-chou, the Chinese "Switzerland," and home of the Miao-tzu, and back by the north-eastern strip of Yunnan to Sui-Fu on the Great River ; the second, and most important, was taken through the rich province of Ssu-chuan, calling at Cheng-tu- Fu, the Sindafu of Marco Polo, to Ta-li-Fu, the capital of Western Yunnan, and back some way to the east of his first return journey; and the third, undertaken for the purposes of investigating the white-wax industry, was entirely in Ssu- chuan, was the shortest of the three, and ended at the highest navigable point on the Yang-tze, within a few miles of longitude 104°, the return journey being by water.

Mr. Hosie started on April 19th, 1882, for his first tour, which had for its objects Knei-chow and Eastern Yunnan. It was early spring, and the rice-fields, at that time sub- merged, are turned into fish-ponds. They are stocked by bundles of grass laid down in the shallow water of the Yang- tze, into which the fish spawn. The mode of fishing will seem primitive and childish to Western ears, but, like other crude methods of the Chinese, centuries of practice and ex- perience have contributed to make it effective. The fisherman, armed with a long bamboo, wades knee-deep into the mud and water, and mows the water in front of him with a semi-circular sweep. The silvery fish dashes into the mud, and the fisher- man pounces on the spot with a round wicker-basket, open at the bottom, with a hole at the top ; through this he gropes for the fish, "and is," Mr. Hosie says, "rarely at fault." The manufacture of the coarse Chinese paper, which our traveller saw on this journey, was such as the first man might have contrived, and may easily be imitated by immersing a chair- screen in a bath of pulp and taking it out again. We do not deny to this process the rank of an invention ; we are only saying that it is an ancient one; for it was probably worked by the Chinese when the British Isles were only known to produce tin of good quality and delicious oysters. The Chinese are great devourers of salt, and Kuei-chow having no brine-wells of its own, is supplied by river from the Tzu- liu-ehinp, wells in North-Western Ssu-chuan. The salt-cakes • Three Years in Western China : a Narrative of Three Journey's in San-Anon Kuei-thou, and Yunnan. By Alexander Rosie, F.R.G.S., 11.13.M. Consular Service, China. With an Introduction by Archibald Little, F.R.G.B. London: George Philip and bon.

are carried, the writer tells us, by " bipeds " from the port to the nearest district city in the Kuei-ohow border, a distance of one hundred miles. It was here that Mr. Hosie met the somewhat startling apparition of a pith-carrier on his way to Chung-king. On his return to that city, he went to see the pith cut into sheets of rice-paper. The opera- tion is one of those cunning feats of manipulative skill peculiar to the Oriental, and even he can only do it at night,

when all is quiet. The writer tells us how best to imitate the feat:—" Roll up a sheet of paper, lay it on the table,

place the left hand on top, and gently unroll it to the left." The paring into a thin sheet has been done by the appli- cation of a keen-bladed knife to the receding edge of the pith. Mr. Hosie tried to perform the operation—and survived it. Two contrivances, one for irrigating, the other for hulling rice, which the traveller saw in a valley, struck him as " in- genious." The device for irrigation consisted of a water- wheel with short bamboos fixed on it at an angle, which filled, and then emptied themselves into a trough. The other consisted of boards fixed to the axle of the water-wheels, which alternately depressed and released a lever. The regular descent of a large flat stone attached to this lever, constituted the hulling-machine.

Kuei-yang-Fu, the capital of Kuei-chow, did not interest Mr. Hosie, and he continued his journey to Yunnan-Fu, being probably anxious to reach the plateau of Yunnan. He complains somewhat bitterly of the mountainous nature of Kuei-chow, and declares that there is no level ground in the province. The first thing which the party met on entering the next province was a bullock-cart, and they were all (excepting, of course, Mr. Hosie) struck dumb at this unusual spectacle. A few more days and they reached Yunnan-Fu, which from the brief description given of it, has much the same accessories as Ta-li-Fu. This city, in common with the whole of Yunnan, suffered much from the Mahommedan rebellion; it is the trade-centre of the famous Pu-erh brick-tea, which, we are sorry to say, is excluded from foreign transport by the cost of overland carriage. The return journey was through North-Eastern Yunnan, striking the Yang-tze at Sui-Fu, some four hundred miles west of Chung- king, following in the main the route of the Grosvenor Mission when on its way to inquire into the death of Mr. Margery. An amusing incident happened soon after the start homewards, in which one of the travellers' chair-bearers, an opium-smoker, figured. Chinese etiquette, we may say, de- mands that an official should travel in a chair. The man's bundle containing his smoking materials had grown noticeably larger since the sojourn in the provincial capital. At a road- side halt, the opium-smoker sat apart whilst the others in- dulged in cakes. To his question, "Why he could not enjoy himself also ?" one of the others, by dumb show and the word " opium," hinted the probable reason. Now for the rest of the story as told by the traveller :- " Neat day we were suddenly overtaken by a sharp rainstorm, and, when the other bearers were searching for shelter, the smoker solemnly produced his bundle, and, gently undoing the cover, unfolded and donned a first-class waterproof. The astonish- ment visible on their faces, and the look of triumph in which the smoker indulged, were a study."

Those who have seen a Chinaman's face when he has been well " done," will envy Mr. Hosie. They were now passing through a rich, prosperous plain stretching up to Tung- chuan, itself close to the most celebrated copper-mines in the Empire." Before and after reaching another rich plain, that of Chao-tung, mountainous and broken country was encountered, climbing on all-fours becoming some- times a necessity, which makes Mr. Hosie exclaim, at the

suggestion of railways " Talk of railways by this route ; as well talk of railways to the moon;" and this, by-the-way, is the trade-route from Ta-li-Fu and Yunnan generally, to Sui-Fu,

skirting also the country of the Lobos, of whom the inhabi- tants have a wholesome dread. Their troubles of climbing were over at the banks of the Nan-knang, and dropping down the tributary to Sui-Fu, the remainder of the journey was doubtless a pleasant relief.

The second journey, by way of Cheng-to-Fu, the Sindafu of Marco Polo, to Ta-li-Fu, the capital or " Western Carajan," was the longest of the three, and for the greater part in Ssu- chuan, the richest and most populous province of the Chinese Empire. Passing through an extensively worked coal-country, Mr. Hosie turned aside from the main route to visit the great salt-wells of Tzu-lin-thing, the working of which it would be foolish to omit, as it furnishes another striking example of the quaintness and conservatism of Chinese mechanical ingenuity. A staging some 60 ft. high is erected over a hole a few inches in diameter. A rope, wound round a drum by oxen, draws to the top of this staging an enormous tube consisting of bamboos, the bottom of which is provided with a leather valve. When the entire length of the tube is above ground, a workman draws it aside over a reservoir, pushes up the valve with a rod, and the brine is released. Surely of all the grotesque and absurd modes of raising liquid, this " takes the cake." The fate that overtakes most Chinese miners, and which, on the other hand, is a continual necessity of Chinese agriculture, has, in spite of the proverb, not yet spurred the businesslike intellect of the Chinaman to invent that necessary appliance called a pump. The village pump, which in our youth we regarded as a harmless and refrigerating toy, and in our wiser days call the " cow with the iron tail," and which over and above the inn is the centre of gossip in every English village, is denied to the Chinese, though the necessity of food, the ever-recurring experience of human life, is felt by them as it is by us. A clever writer has told us that we never learn by the experience of others, and but seldom by our own. The Chinaman has reversed this saying with a vengeance, for he never learns by his own experience, but invariably profits by that of others. Truly, the mind becomes lost in the contemplation of the early stages and first developments of Chinese con- structive skill. All things must have a beginning ; but one cannot conceive the brine-lifting arrangement of Tzu- liu-ching to have had a definite beginning. Petroleum- wells, which occur with the salt, conveniently provide gas for evaporating the brine. A few days further along the To River brought the traveller to the Chien-Chou plain, famous for its opium. Here a foreign industry has changed the crops and probably the complexion of the plain. The saf-flower, for which it was once noted, has been supplanted by the introduction of aniline dyes, or, as Mr. Hosie suc- cinctly expresses it, " ' Pure Soluble Scarlet' in bottle; and the plain of Chien-Chou has been converted into a poppy- garden."

The plateau of Cheng-tu is renowned for its fertility, and Cheng-tu-Fu, as befits its position, is a splendid city sur- rounded by a wall twelve miles long, and is the residence of a Viceroy, whose jurisdiction extends only over Ssu-chuan, Chihli being the only other province of the eighteen similarly honoured. Mr. Hosie was much struck with Cheng-to-Fa, as, indeed, his predecessors, from Polo downwards, have been :—

" It is without exception the finest city I have seen in China; Peking and Canton will not bear comparison with it. The streets in the Chinese quarter are fairly broad, paved with stone, and

slope gently to either side But the prettiest sight of all was the sign-boards. These are not placed horizontally over the shop-doors as in Europe; they hang vertically from iron bars projecting from the walls. In Cheng-tu they are one mass of gold and colour, decorating the streets, and proclaiming, at the same time, the names of the shops and the wares on sale."

The traveller had now entered the country of Marco Polo, whose route, however, has not been followed with any great certainty, owing to the discrepancy between the length of his stages and those of modern travellers. How much, indeed, of what the Venetian describes, he really saw, or was only hear- say, we shall never know. Not far from the capital the traveller met a strange procession. We shall be forgiven the quotation :—

" To the south of the small district city of Shuang-liu, we met a party of Tibetans clad in their long, reddish, woollen gowns. They were on foot, but each was leading his pony by the bridle. A few hundred yards behind them was a large, wooden, barred cage, slung on a couple of carrying-poles supported by a pair of bearers. In the chair sat an individual heavily chained, and clothed in even a more pronounced red than his guards. Although I was unable to get at the details of the case, beyond the apparent fact that the gentleman in irons was being escorted to Cheng-tu, yet the method of conveyance told me that he was a criminal of no ordinary type."

At Chiung-Chou, whose inhabitants have improved since Von Richthofen's visit, the Nan-Ho is crossed by a fine stone bridge of fifteen arches, 250 yards long and 24 ft. broad. From the pavilion in the middle the traveller " caught a glimpse of snow-clad mountains to the West."

The Ming-shan district, reached a few days later, sup- plies a tea exclusively for the Imperial palace. At Ya- chou-Fu, the centre of the brick-tea trade to Tibet, Mr. Hosie describes an interesting floating-bridge, to which, however, we can only refer. The Sifans next attracted his attention, and the stories of their immorality were repeated to him, as they had been to former travellers. Of the veracity of the Chinese, however, our author has a poor opinion, expressed else- where : " The problem as to how far a Chinese believes his most intimate friend, has been present with me for many years, and still remains unsolved." He speaks favourably of the Sifans, and also of the Lobos, doubtless the Koloman of Marco Polo, whom that traveller described as a " handsome race," as does our traveller. It seems, indeed, to have been the fate of the Chinese in dispossessing the aboriginal inhabitants of the country, whether Miao-tzu, Sifans, or Lobos, to have ousted a handsomer race than themselves. The route skirted the western boundary of the independent Lolo district, and the state of the country, bristling with forts and guard-houses, was simply one of siege ; even these defences do not prevent whole caravans being carried off into captivity. The country next traversed by the traveller was the famous and fertile plain of Chien-Chang, the " Caindu " of the Venetian, renowned then as now, through all China, though the white-wax insect, its chief product, is not mentioned in Chinese books till the sixteenth century, and was apparently not known ; and, if our memory serves us, not mentioned by Polo. Mr. Baber's derivation of Chantu, the Chinese name for the valley, from " Caindu," seems to us a plausible one. On one point, indeed, the testimony of the great Venetian is decidedly at variance with Chinese tradition. He mentions a lake with pearls in it, and the same story was told to the traveller of to-day (though not to Mr. Baber), and specimens were brought to him; but the lake is said by the Chinese to have only come into existence by a catastrophe like that which overtook the " Cities of the Plain," years after Polo's visit to " Caindu." Our traveller's arrival at Ning-yuan, which stands on the " pearl" lake, was contemporaneous with a long-wished-for shower of rain, and a deputation accordingly went to thank him. At Hang-chou, for the first and last time, Mr. Hosie found it necessary to produce a revolver to quell a riot between the townspeople and his followers. Once more the traveller came upon the " Great River," here the " Golden River," the "Brims" of Polo, near its head-waters, and a clear and un- navigable stream. Of his arrival. at Ta-li-Fu we have already spoken, and it only remains to mention that many folk-tales of the " Gold Teeth" were told to him while resting there. The third journey is chiefly devoted to the white-wax insect ; a valuable chapter discusses the life-history and uses of this unique and probably decaying industry. This remarkable insect is carried from its breeding-grounds in the Chien- Chang valley to mature in the Prefecture of Chia-ting, and its carriers haste the whole way and race for the river fords.

Mr. Hosie's Three Years in Western China will interest many from a commercial point of view ; but he allows the reader few glimpses of the people and the scenery, which obviously must have been magnificent. South-Western China, the nearest point to our Indian Empire, has suffered wofully, he tells us, from the Mahommedan rebellion. Immigration is necessary, but the probability of it doubtful, as the Chinaman, though a great thief, dislikes settling on land which may belong to other people ; the European, indeed, does not thieve, but has no hesitation in settling on land which he knows does not belong to him. As for the Burmah route, Bhamo to Ta-li-Fu, diamonds perhaps might pay the carriage, nothing else. It might with justice be called the " South-West Passage."