That portion of China which lies more immediately to the west of the estuary of the Canton river, comprising the Sun-on, Toong-koon, Kinei-shin, and Tai-phoong districts, is exceedingly mountainous, and inhabited by a turbulent people, constantly fighting among themselves, and but little subject to mandarin rule. Even still foreigners scarcely ever visit it; and when, during the war, I first commenced to wander there, the field was entirely my own; and many were the prophecies that, if I returned at all, it would be in at least a headless, if not in a completely disjointed, condition. The torture and murder, a few years before, of six young Englishmen at Hwang-chu-ku, near Canton, when they were only taking an afternoon stroll, had rendered our countrymen particularly chary of trusting their persons in the hands of the Chinese; and at the time my excursions commenced, there was additional danger, arising from the fact that, though Canton was in the hands of the Allied troops, the gentry of the provinces still kept up a species of warfare, and offered rewards for our heads: so, while a few well-armed sportsmen from Hong-Kong might occasionally pass over to the mainland immediately opposite, it was deemed madness to think of spending a night there, or to go any distance into the country beyond. But though the island of “Fragrant Streams,” as the words Hong-Kong signify, has some curious caves and wild lonely spots, its limits are so circumscribed that a residence in it became extremely irksome. To be sure, the quiet old Portuguese city of Macao, with its grotto of Camoens, could be reached in four or five hours by steamer, with the refreshing possibility, as one or two cases proved, of being pirated and murdered on the way by the Chinese passengers; a gunboat, too, would take us up to Canton in about a day: but these places, however interesting, soon became insufficient; they began to present themselves in the disagreeable light of being only suburbs of Hong-Kong, and I resolved to seek entertainment elsewhere.