Across China on Foot

o. Start from Shanghai, and the city's appearance. At Hankow. Meaning

of the name. Trio of strategic and military points of the empire. Han-yang

and Wu-ch'ang. Commercial and industrial future of Hankow. Getting our

passports. Britishers in the city. The commercial Chinaman. The native city:

some impressions. Clothing of the people. Cotton and wool. Indifference to

comfort. Surprise at our daring project. At Ichang. British gunboat and

early morning routine. Our vain quest for aid. Laying in stores and commis-

sioning our boat. Ceremonies at starting gorges trip. Raising anchor, and our

departure.

Let no one who has been so far as Ichang, a thousand miles from the sea,

imagine that he has been into the interior of China.

It is quite an everyday trip. Modern steamers, with every modern conve-

nience and luxury, probably as comfortable as any river steamers in theworld,

ply regularly in their two services between Shanghai and this port, at the foot

of the Gorges.

The Whang-poo looked like the Thames, and the Shanghai Bund like the

Embankment, when I embarked on board a Jap boat en route for Hankow,and thence to Ichang by a smaller steamer, on a dark, bitterly cold Saturday

night, March 6th, 1909. I was to travel fifteen hundred miles up that great-

est 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 thou-

sand 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.

Hankow means literally Han Mouth, being situated at the juncture of the

Han River and the Yangtze. Across the way, as I write, I can see Han-yang,

with its iron works belching out black curls of smoke, where the arsenal

turns out one hundred Mauser rifles daily. (This is but a fraction of the

total work done.) It is, I believe, the only steel-rolling mill in China. Long

before the foreigner set foot so far up the Yangtze, Hankow was a city of great

importance-the Chinese used to call it the centre of the world. Ten years ago

I should have been thirty days' hard travel from Peking; at the present mo-

ment I might pack my bag and be in Peking within thirty-six hours. Han-

kow, with Tientsin and Nanking, makes up the trio of principal strategic