I was to travel fifteen hundred miles
up that greatest artery of China. The Yangtze surpasses in importance to
the Celestial Empire what the Mississippi is to America, and yet even
in China there are thousands of resident foreigners who know no more
about this great river than the average Smithfield butcher. Ask ten men
in Fleet Street or in Wall Street where Ichang is, and nine will be
unable to tell you. Yet it is a port of great importance, when one
considers that the handling of China's vast river-borne trade has been
opened to foreign trade and residence since the Chefoo Convention was
signed in 1876, that Ichang is a city of forty thousand souls, and has a
gross total of imports of nearly forty millions of taels.
Of Hankow, however, more is known. Here we landed after a four days'
run, and, owing to the low water, had to wait five days before the
shallower-bottomed steamer for the higher journey had come in. The city
is made up of foreign concessions, as in other treaty ports, but away in
the native quarter there is the real China, with her selfish rush, her
squalidness and filth among the teeming thousands. There dwell together,
literally side by side, but yet eternally apart, all the conflicting
elements of the East and West which go to make up a city in the Far
East, and particularly the China coast.
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