Trip up the Shu-Kiang river--My fellow-passengers and their costumes--A damaged bell--Female peasants on the river-banks--I am caught up and carried off by a laughing virago--Arrival at Canton--Early trading between China and Ceylon and Africa, etc.--The Empress Lui-Tseu teaching the people to rear silk-worms--The treaties of Nanking and Tien-tsin--Bombardment of Canton--Murder of a French sailor and terrible revenge--M. Vaucher and I explore Canton--The _fétes_ in honour of the Divinity of the North and of the Queen of Heaven--General appearance of Canton--An emperor's recipe for making tea--How tea is grown in China--The Fatim garden--A dutiful son--Scene of the murder of the Tai-Ping rebels--The Temple of the five hundred Genii--Suicide of a young engineer--Return of his spirit in the form of a snake. Well-built, comfortable steamers leave Hong-Kong daily for Canton. I embarked in one of them one fine spring morning, when a fresh sea-breeze was blowing, such as gives new life to those enervated by too long a residence in the tropics. I did not see a single white face amongst the passengers, for European trade is all transferred to Hong-Kong, now driven away from Canton by the burning by the Celestials of the fine factories built outside the gates of the city by European contractors. [Illustration: FIG. 14.--A PAGODA.] My fellow-passengers, all Chinese, wore loose garments of blue cotton, thick-soled shoes, and a skull-cap, from which a long pig-tail, in many cases of false hair, hung down the back, reaching to the heels. The crew of American sailors as they navigated the vessel kept a watchful eye upon the passengers, for though the latter looked peaceable enough, there had been more than one instance of the sudden transformation of inoffensive travellers into daring pirates, who, after pillaging and burning the ship, had made for the nearest shore and escaped the vengeance of those they had robbed. Before entering the great Shu-Kiang river, on the north bank of which Canton is built, we passed the ruins of a fort dating from the time of the Dutch supremacy. Beyond it the stream is bordered by green rice plantations with little hills rising up here and there surmounted by isolated pagodas of several storeys high. On one of them I noticed standing out against the sky from the fifth storey the fragment of a bell, one-half of which had been shot away by a ball from a French cannon. Great indeed must have been the astonishment of the Chinese, posted on this particular pagoda to watch the movements of the enemies' troops, when the projectile struck the sonorous mass of bronze and shivered it to splinters. The catastrophe must have been to them a warning full of sinister yet salutary meaning. [Sidenote: THE PEARL OF THE EAST]