a sumptuous entertainment, consisting of excellent mutton, pork,
venison, and poultry of all kinds, a great variety of confectionary, of
fruits then in season, peaches, plumbs, grapes, chesnuts, walnuts, and
water-caltrops. We very soon found indeed that we were treated with more
studied attention, with a more marked distinction, and with less
constraint, than when we ascended the river. Our dignified conductor
made no difficulty in allowing us to walk on shore as much as we
pleased; but recommended us not to quit the banks of the river for fear
of retarding the yachts or of being left behind. He hinted to us, at the
same time, that the officers _Van_ and _Chou_ would be responsible at
court for any accident that might happen to us, so long as we were under
the protection of the Emperor.
In passing _Tien-sing_ we found considerable difficulty in getting our
fleet through the immense crowds of shipping of every description that
were collected there to remain for the winter; among which were about
five hundred of the Emperor's revenue vessels with grain for the
capital. The _Eu-ho_, or precious river, called also the _Yun-leang-ho_,
or river upon which grain is transported, falling from the westward,
forms, at the head of this city, a confluence with the _Pei-ho_. Our
barges were at least four hours in getting through the multitude of
vessels that were moored, for their winter-quarters, in this small
river; which, however, is rendered important by its communication with
the grand artificial canal.
Having passed the fleet of shipping and the suburbs, a plain extending
beyond the reach of sight opened out on the left of the river, upon
which were observed many thousands of small sandy tumuli, of a conical
form, resembling those hillocks which in myriads are thrown up on the
continent of Africa by the _Termites_, or white ants. In several parts
of this plain were small buildings, in the form of dwelling-houses, but
not exceeding four or five feet in height; in other places were
circular, semicircular, and square enclosures of stonework, and here and
there were interspersed small pillars of stone or brick and other
erections of every variety of form. This was the first common
burying-ground that we had observed, except a very small one at
_Tong-tchoo_; and the tumuli and the different erections marked out the
mansions of the dead. In many parts of this extensive enclosure we met
with massy coffins lying upon the surface, some new, others newly
painted, but none in a mouldering state. It was explained to us, by our
interpreter, that some of these coffins had been deposited there, until
the proper advice should be obtained from the priest or the oracle
consulted, or from casting lots, as to the most propitious place of
interment, and the most favourable day for performing the obsequies;
some were placed there till the pecuniary circumstances of the surviving
relatives would enable them to bestow a suitable interment, and others
were left to dry and moulder, to a certain degree, in order to be burnt
and the ashes collected and put into stone jaw or other receptacles[53].
On no occasion do the Chinese bury their dead within the precincts of a
city or town, much less within the walls of their temples; but always
deposit them at a proper distance from the dwellings of the living, in
which respect they have more discretion than the Europeans; who not only
allow the interment of dead bodies in the midst of their populous
cities, but have thrust them also into places of public worship, where
crowded congregations are constantly exposed to the nauseous effluvia,
and perhaps infection, arising from putrid carcases. Yet so tenacious
are the people of the privilege of interment within the walls of the
church, in some countries of Europe, that any attempt to discontinue the
imprudent custom would be attended with some degree of danger, as
happened to the late Grand Duke of Tuscany who, having built a
commodious and spacious cemetery without the city of Florence, to which
it was intended to remove the coffins out of the vaults of the church,
had nearly raised a rebellion among his subjects. In _Render's_ tour
through Germany, an instance is given of the fatal effects of burying in
churches, the relation of which makes one shudder with horror.
[53] From a passage in the manuscript journal of a Chinese who
accompanied the Dutch embassy it would appear, that the art of embalming
the dead was once known and practiced in this country. He observes, that
at _Ou tebé_ there is a temple or pagoda inhabited by a number of
priests, who shew the body of a very ancient bonze, prepared in such a
manner, and filled with such ingredients, that it does not decay, but
remains perfectly entire. He is dressed in his robes of ceremony, and in
his hand he holds a machine which was invented by him for cleaning rice.
The bank of the river, being one of the enclosing fences to the
burying-ground, was ornamented with beautiful weeping willows which,
with a few solitary cypresses interspersed among the tombs, were the
only trees that appeared in this part of the country.
In a corner of the cemetery was a temple, built after the usual plan,
with an altar in the center; and a number of deities moulded in clay
were ranged on each side on stone pedestals. We observed no priests; but
an elderly lady was very busily employed in throwing the sticks of fate,
in order to obtain a lucky number in which, however, she failed. During
the operation of shaking the cup, her countenance betrayed a greater
degree of eagerness and anxiety than usually appears on the face of a
Chinese; and she left the temple in a peevish and muttering tone,
sufficiently expressive of the greatness of her disappointment which, it
seemed, was no less than a refusal, on the part of the oracle, to hold
out the hope of her being blessed with a second husband. Till this
circumstance had been explained to us by the keeper of the temple, it
was concluded that the old lady had been muttering imprecations against
us for disturbing her in the midst of her devotions.
After two days' sail from _Tien-sing_ we arrived at a city of the third
order[54] called _Tchien-shien_. The surface of the interjacent country
had continued the same uniform plain, without a pebble in the soil: the
extent of cultivation by no means extraordinary; and the few scattered
villages of mean houses indicated no great degree of population; the
dwellings that floated on the water were numerous and crowded with
inhabitants. We observed several plots of young wheat rising in drills a
few inches above the ground. Buck-wheat was in full flower and several
plantations of the cotton plant, _gossypium herbaceum_, were in pod,
some of them perfectly ripe. Fahrenheit's thermometer on the 14th, 15th,
and 16th of this month stood at 52° and 53° in the morning, and about
70° in the middle of the day.
[54] For the convenience of collecting and distributing the taxes raised
in kind, the districts, and cities within them, are divided into three
classes, distinguished by the adjuncts _foo_, _tchoo_, _shien_. The
_shien_ is answerable to the _tchoo_; the _tchoo_ to the _foo_; and the
_foo_ to the board of revenue in the capital.
On the 17th, beside a great number of towns, villages and military
posts, which are regularly placed at intervals of about three miles, we
passed two cities of the third order, one of which, from the length of
its walls, appeared to be of very considerable importance. No true idea,
however, can be formed of the population and magnitude of a Chinese city
by the extent of its enclosing walls. Few are without large patches of
unoccupied ground within them which, in many instances, far exceeds the
quantity of land that is built upon. Even in that part of the capital
called the Chinese city, several hundred acres are under cultivation.
The Imperial city, containing the palace and buildings for the officers
of state, the eunuchs and artificers, occupies very nearly a square
mile, more than two-thirds of which is a kind of park and pleasure
grounds; and under the north wall of the Tartar city there is a pond or
swamp covered almost with the Nelumbium, which appeared to be fully
twice the dimensions of Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, or four times their space,
namely near fifty acres. Such spaces of unoccupied ground might perhaps
have been reserved for the use of the inhabitants in case of siege, as
the means of supplying a few vegetables of the pungent kind, as onions
and garlic, for the besieged, which are the more necessary for a people
who use so small a portion of animal food, and little or no milk. Thus
the cities of Babylon and Nineveh, which were so frequently exposed to
the calamities of war and siege, had gardens and corn-lands within their
walls.
On the 18th we passed two cities and a great number of towns and
villages. The face of the country still level and entirely open; not a
hedge-row appearing on any side and very few trees. Almost all the
vessels that we met in the course of the day were laden with sacks of
cotton wool. This being the night of full moon, we were allowed to enjoy
very little rest. The observance of the usual ceremonies, which consist
of firing their small petards, beating at intervals the noisy gong,
harsh squalling music and fire-works, required that our vessels should
remain stationary, and these nocturnal orgies ceased only with the
appearance of the sun. There was, however, another cause of detention at
this place. In sailing against the stream of the _Eu-ho_, it was
necessary the barges should be tracked by men and these men were to be
pressed or forced into this laborious service from the villages
bordering upon the river. The usual way of doing this was to send out
the soldiers or attendants of the officers before the vessels, in the
dusk of the evening, to take the poor wretches by surprize in their
beds. But the ceremony of the full moon, by retarding their usual hour
of retiring to rest, had put them on their guard; and, on the approach
of the emissaries of government, all that were liable to be pressed into
this service had absconded, so that, in addition to the noise of the
gongs and the trumpets and crackers, our ears were frequently assailed
by the cries and lamentations of persons under the punishment of the
bamboo or the whip, for claiming their exemption from joining the yachts
and acting as trackers. When the groupe that had been collected for this
purpose was brought together in the morning, it was impossible not to
regard it with an eye of pity. Most of them consisted of infirm and
decrepit old men, and the rest were such lank, sickly-looking,
ill-clothed creatures, that the whole groupe appeared to be much fitter
for an hospital than for performing any kind of labour. Our companions
pretended to say that every farmer, who rented lands upon the public
rivers or canals, was obliged, by the tenure on which he held his lease,
to furnish such a number of men to track the vessels in the service of
government whenever it might be required; but that, on the present being
an extraordinary occasion, they had resolved to pay them, as they called
it, in a handsome manner, which was at the rate of something less than
seven-pence a day, without any allowance for returning to their homes; a
price for labour which bore no sort of proportion to that of the
necessaries of life; and it was even doubtful if this pittance was ever
paid to them.
Having cleared the fleet of shipping that was assembled at this place, a
favourable breeze relieved our invalids and rendered their slender
exertions unnecessary for the greater part of the day, in the course of
which we entered the province of _Shan-tung_. In this province nothing
worthy of notice occurred until the 22d, when we quitted the _Eu-ho_ and
turning towards the south entered the grand canal, out of which we
observed a gentle current flowing into the river. At this point of
junction the pagoda of _Lin-tsin_, an octagonal pyramid, was erected,
perhaps as a monument of this great and useful undertaking, which,
however, in its present state, apparently had not stood many ages. In
the hope of finding within it some inscription, that might point out its
designation, we mounted with some difficulty upon the first of its nine
stages or roofs (for the little door on a level with the ground was
walled up with bricks) but it contained only the bare walls, not even a
stair-case remained nor any possible means of ascending to the top, and
the lower part was choaked up with rubbish. These pagodas (or as the
Chinese name them _Ta_) that so frequently occur in the country, seem to
be intended only as embellishments to particular grounds, or objects to
terminate villas or prospects. Sometimes, it is true, they appear as
appendages to temples, but are never appropriated for the purposes of
sacred worship. Whatever their intention might have been, it would seem
the rage of building them no longer exists, not one of a late erection
having appeared in the whole country, and more than two-thirds of those
we saw being in ruins.
At the junction of the canal with the _Eu-ho_ there was no lock nor
flood-gate; the gentle current of the former was interrupted only from
place to place, by loose planks let down in grooves cut in stone piers.
These dams seldom occasioned the difference of a foot in the level of
the water; and at each was a guard-house with double the usual number of
soldiers stationed, to assist in drawing up or letting down the planks,
as occasion might require. The canal, which at the commencement was from
sixty to one hundred feet in width, was contracted at such places by the
stone piers of the flood-gates to about thirty feet.
Towards the evening of the 23d, as we approached the city
_Tong-tchang-foo_, we were much amused with a military manoeuvre,
which was evidently intended to astonish us. Under the walls of this
city about three hundred soldiers were drawn out in a line, which,
however, the darkness of the night had rendered invisible. But just as
we were coming to anchor, each soldier, at the sound of the gong,
produced from under his cloak a splendid lantern with which he went
through a regular manual exercise. The following morning we observed,
for the first time, a few hillocks breaking the line of the horizon to
the eastward. The country appeared to be in a tolerable state of
cultivation; but the mode of tillage exhibited no extraordinary degree
of skill or of labour. Villages of considerable extent were erected
along the banks of the canal, at intervals of about three miles from
each other; and, in the gardens contiguous to these, grew in abundance
the tobacco plant whose leaves were small, hairy, and viscous, and the
flowers of which were of a greenish yellow passing into a faint rose
colour at the edges of the petals. We observed also small patches of
hemp. A greater use is made of the seeds and leaflets of this plant, as
a substitute for or to mix with tobacco, than of its fibres for cloth, a
purpose to which it is as rarely converted by the Chinese as by the
Hindoos, being little esteemed for those valuable uses to which, since
its introduction into Europe, it has been applied. The number of
lateral branches, which in a warm climate each stem throws out close
above the surface of the ground, breaks the length of fibre and renders
it unfit for those purposes for which, in the northern regions of
Europe, its tall branchless stem is so well adapted. The sow thistle, a
plant that occurs in almost every part of the world, was nothing
different here from its usual habit in Europe. We observed also a
species of _Chenopodium_ and of _Artemisia_ or wormwood; abundance of
the _Pe-tsai_, and other common culinary vegetables. In the small flower
gardens, without which we scarcely observed a single cottage, were
balsams, several kinds of beautiful asters, holy-hocks, two species of
_Malva_, an _Amaranthus_, and the showy and handsome shrub the _Nerium
Oleander_.
Having passed on the 26th October the walls of the city _Tsie-ning_,
where a multitude of small craft were lying at anchor, we came to an
extensive lake of the same name, navigated by a great number of sailing
boats. From the east side of this lake the canal was separated only by
an immense mound of earth. To the westward the whole country, beyond the
reach of sight, was one continued swamp or morass, upon which were
interspersed pools or ponds of water abounding with the Nelumbium, at
this time in full flower. The morass being several feet below the
surface of the water in the canal afforded the means of regulating the
quantity; and, accordingly, at certain distances, we observed stone
arches turned in the earthen embankment to let off the superfluous water
that might be occasioned by the swelling of the feeding rivers. About
this place also, it was remarked, that the bed of the canal was carried
in a line so nearly horizontal, that the water had a gentle current
either to the northward or the southward, according as these sluices
were kept shut or thrown open; this line being ascertained, perhaps,
rather by the surface of the lake than by the assistance of instruments;
for it was sufficiently remarkable, that no opportunity had been omitted
in carrying this great work along the side, or through the middle, of
lakes or other pools of water wherever it could be done.
The nature of the country admitted of such management for three days'
journey, or about eighty miles from _Tsie-ning_. The whole of this
extensive plain consisted in lakes or swampy ground half covered with
water. On the former were constantly seen moving about vessels with
sails and boats of every description, conveying an animated picture of
activity, industry, and commerce. Almost all the lakes were studded with
islands and these were covered with villages, that were chiefly
inhabited by fishermen. Here, for the first time, we observed the
_Leu-tzé_ or fishing corvorant, the _Pelicanus Sinensis_, diving after
the finny tribe and seemingly no less anxious than its master to take
them. This bird is so like another species of the pelican, called the
_Carbo_ or common corvorant which in England, as naturalists inform us,
was formerly trained for fishing, that it has usually been considered
the same, but from several specimens brought home with us it appears to
be a different species. The usual practice is to take ten or twelve of
these birds, in the morning when fasting, upon a raft of bamboo poles
lashed together, and to let one or two at most at a time dive for fish,
which are taken from them the moment they bring them to the surface.
These birds, not much larger than the common duck, will seize and gripe
fast fishes that are not less than their own weight. When the proprietor
judges the first pair to be pretty well fatigued, they are suffered to
feed by way of encouragement on some of the fish they have taken, and a
second pair are dispatched upon the water. The fish we observed them to
take was a species of perch. In the course of three days' navigation, we
saw several thousand boats and rafts employed in this kind of fishing.
Except on the water and the islands, the whole of the swampy country
might be said to be uninhabited and totally void of any kind of
cultivation. Sometimes, indeed, a few miserable mud huts appeared on the
small hillocks that here and there raised their heads out of the dreary
waste of morass; but the chief inhabitants were cranes, herons,
guillemots and a vast variety of other kinds of birds that frequent the
waters and swamps. Here too are great numbers of that singular and
beautiful bird, the _Anas Galericulata_, usually known by the name of
the _Mandarin duck_ which, like the gold and silver fishes, is caught
and reared as an article of sale to the opulent and curious. The great
extent of water had a sensible effect on the temperature of the air,
especially in the mornings and evenings, when Fahrenheit's thermometer
was sometimes below 40°.
Having passed the lakes and swamps, we entered suddenly, on the 31st,
upon a most delightful part of the country, crowded with temples and
villages and towns and cities, near all of which, and on every part of
the canal, were vast numbers of the revenue vessels, collecting the
surplus taxes paid in kind, in order to transport them to the capital.
Wheat and cotton appeared to be the two principal articles of culture.
The surface of the country was now broken into hill and dale, every inch
appeared to be under tillage, except the summit of the knolls, which
were generally crowned with forest trees, and few of the detached houses
or temples were without extensive gardens and orchards. Apples, pears,
plums, peaches, apricots and pomgranates, were the common kinds of
fruit, and the culinary vegetables were the same as those of
_Pe-tche-lee_. The canal at this place is, perhaps, the grandest inland
navigation in the whole world, being nearly a thousand feet in width and
bordered on each side by stone quays, built with massy blocks of grey
marble mixed with others of granite; and this immense aqueduct, although
forced up several feet above the surface of the country by embankments
thrown up by the labour of man, flowed with a current of three miles an
hour nearly towards the Yellow River, to which we perceived we were fast
approaching, by the bustle and activity both on shore and on the
numberless canals that branched out in every direction from the main
trunk; on whose banks, for several miles on either side, one continued
town extended to the point of junction with this large river, celebrated
in every period of the Chinese history. A village was particularly
pointed out by the bargemen, whose name was derived from a miracle,
which is most sacredly believed by the Chinese. Tradition says, that the
famous astronomer _Heu_ was carried up to Heaven in his house, which
stood at this place, leaving behind him an old faithful servant who,
being thus deprived of his master and his habitation, was reduced to
beggary; but happening by accident to throw a little prepared rice into
the ground, it immediately grew and produced grain without chaff for his
sustenance; from whence the place is called _Sen-mee_, _rice growing
ready dressed_, to this day.
Before our barges launched into the stream of the Yellow River, which
rolled in a very rapid torrent, certain ceremonies were conceived to be
indispensably necessary. In the practical part of religion (which indeed
may be considered as nearly the whole) a Chinese is not less solicitous
to avert a possible evil, than to procure an eventual good; and of all
evils personal danger is most apprehended. It was therefore deemed
expedient, that an oblation should be made in every vessel of the fleet
to the genius of the river. The animals that were sacrificed, on this
occasion, were different in different yachts, but they generally
consisted of a fowl or a pig, two animals that were very common in
Grecian sacrifices. The blood, with the feathers and the hair, was
daubed upon the principal parts of the vessel. On the forecastle of some
were placed cups of wine, oil and salt; in others, tea, flour and salt;
and in others, oil, rice and salt. The last article appears to be
thought by the Chinese, as well as by the Hebrews, a necessary
accompaniment to every sacrifice. "Every oblation of thy meat-offering
shalt thou season with salt: neither shalt thou suffer the salt of the
Covenant of thy God to be lacking from thy _meat_-offering." As,
however, the high priest and his friends were to feast on those parts
of the meat-offering, which were considered as unworthy the acceptance
of heaven, which parts, by the way, were always the best of the victim,
one might, perhaps, assign a reason for the strong injunction of
offering salt, this being a scarce article in many countries of the East
and the best preservative of meat against putrefaction[55].