Fifty miles beyond the Corean frontier is the “Border Gate” (Pien-mun), at which there was a fair held three or four times a year, the chief markets being at the exit and return of the Corean embassy to China. The value of the products here sold annually averaged over five hundred thousand dollars. In the central apartment of a building inhabited at either end by Chinese and Corean mandarins respectively, the customs-officers sat to collect taxes on the things bartered. The Corean merchants were obliged to pay “bonus” or tribute of about four hundred dollars to the mandarin of Fung-wang Chang, the nearest Chinese town, who came in person to open the gates of the building for the spring fair. For the privilege of the two autumn fairs, the Coreans were mulcted but half the sum, as the gates were then opened by an underling Manchiu official. The winter fair was but of slight importance. For the various Chinese goods, and European cottons, the Coreans bartered their furs, hides, gold dust, ginseng, and the mulberry paper used by Chinese tailors for linings, and for windows. Ping-an has the reputation of being very rich in mineral and metallic wealth. Gold and silver by report abound, but the natives are prohibited by the government from working the mines. The neutrality of the strip of territory, sixty miles wide and about three hundred miles long, and drained by the Tong-kia River, between Chō-sen and Chin, was respected by the Chinese government until 1875, when Li Hung Chung, on complaint of the king of Corea, made a descent on the Manchiu outlaws and squatters settled on the strip. Having despatched a force of troops, with gunboats up the Yalu, to co-operate with them, he found the region overspread with cultivators. The eyes of the viceroy being opened to the fertility of this land, and the navigability of the river, he proposed, in a memorial to Peking, that the land be incorporated in the Chinese domain, but that a wall and ditch be built to isolate Corea, and that all Chinese trespassers on Corean ground be handed over to the mandarins to be sent prisoners to Mukden, and to be there beheaded, while Chinese resisting capture should be lawfully slain by Coreans. To this the Seoul government agreed. By this clever diplomacy the Chinese gained back a huge slice of valuable land, probably without the labor of digging ditches or building palisades. The old wall of stakes still remains, in an extremely dilapidated condition. Off the coast are a few islands, and a number of shallow banks, around which shell- and scale-fish abound. Chinese junks come in fleets every year in the fishing season, but their presence is permitted only on condition of their never setting foot on shore. In reality much contraband trade is done by the smugglers along the coast. A group of islands near the mouth was long the nest of Chinese pirates, but these have been broken up by Li Hung Chang’s gunboats. Next to the