Though this great porcelain town has traded with the whole world for several centuries, "bringing great profit to the Empire and to itself great fame" (to quote from the _T´ao lu_), it seems to have been rarely visited by Europeans, and first-hand descriptions of it are few. We are fortunate, however, in possessing in the letters[329] of Père d'Entrecolles an intimate account of the place and its manufactures, written by a Jesuit missionary who was stationed in the town in the early years of the eighteenth century. These interesting letters are so well known that I shall not quote them extensively here. The picture they give of the enormous pottery town, with its population of a million souls and the three thousand furnaces which, directly or indirectly, provided a living for this host, and of the arresting spectacle of the town by night like a burning city spouting flames at a thousand points, a description which inspired the oft-quoted lines in Longfellow's "Keramos," shows us the place in the heyday of its prosperity. A more modern but scarcely less interesting account of Ching-tê Chên and the surrounding country appears in a Consular report, made in 1905, of a _Journey in the Interior of Kiangsi_,[330] from which I have taken the following paragraphs: "During the last forty-five years Ching-tê Chên has had time to recover, in a very large measure, from this last calamity, but it is said to be not so busy or so populous as before the T´ai p´ing rebellion. "Everything in Ching-tê Chên either belongs to, or is altogether subordinate to, the porcelain and earthenware industry. The very houses are for the most part built of fragments of fireclay (called '_lo-p´ing-t´u_') that were once part either of old kilns or of the fireclay covers in which porcelain is stacked during firing. The river bank is covered for miles[331] with a deep stratum of broken chinaware and chips of fireclay, and, as far as one could judge, the greater part of the town and several square miles of the surrounding country are built over, or composed of, a similar deposit. A great industry, employing hundreds of thousands of hands, does not remain localised in a single spot for 900 years without giving to that spot a character of its own. "This is perhaps what struck me most forcibly in Ching-tê Chên--that it is unlike anything else in China. The forms, the colour, the materials used in the buildings, the atmosphere, are somewhat reminiscent of the poorer parts of Manchester, but resemble no other large town that I have ever visited.