By Christmas 1852 they had reached the commercial heart of the Empire in the great emporiums which lie about the confluence of the rivers Han and Yang-tsze. Two centuries of peaceful industry, of buying and selling, giving and taking in marriage, without one thought of a sudden and bloody awakening from a dream of luxury, were here ready for the strong-handed. The writer met a man who witnessed the destruction of the three great cities of Wuchang, Hankow, and Han-yang, the slaughter of the ill-starred inhabitants, and the conflagration of the vast fleets of junks and trading-boats there assembled. For eight days and nights the place was, he said, wrapt in flames—a perfect hell upon earth. The horrors of this scene were sufficient to frighten all the inhabitants of the lower valley of the Yang-tsze into subjection, but it did not save them from pillage and rapine. The officials were everywhere slaughtered when they dared to remain at their posts, and the Manchou garrisons, with their children and women, perished to a soul. Wherever the current of the river would float these Taepings, they conquered, unopposed. Nankin in its turn fell into their hands with frightful slaughter, and Chin-Keang, at the entrance of the Grand Canal, shared the same fate. Still aided by the water-communication, they aimed a blow at Pekin, and actually advanced to the head of the canal. Directly, however, the water-communication failed them, their progress was arrested, and they sustained a defeat that deterred them from a second attempt on the capital. There can be no greater fallacy than the notion that the stability of the dynasty has been really jeopardised, or that the raid of the Taepings towards Pekin was the result of organisation or military skill, instead of being entirely due, as we have said, to the immense water facilities at their command, from the very mountains of Kwang-si to the Tung-ting Lake, and from the lake to the Yang-tsze, and from it to Tien-tsin by the Grand Canal. Siu-tsuen, _alias_ Tien-wang, or King of Heaven, now sat (in 1853) in Nankin, and Taepingism was thoroughly established as an evil which it would require years to extirpate; and what was worse, damage had been done to the extension of Protestant Christianity in the minds of the better classes in China, from the artful manner in which Siu-tsuen had succeeded in dragging us in as his allies against the Government and peaceable classes of China. That he and his emissaries did not confine themselves to converting sanguine and anxious missionaries, is well attested in the Blue-Book of 1853. There we find one of our consular body officially reporting:—