It is a steamboat journey of but ninety miles up the estuary of the Pearl River from Hong Kong to wonderful Canton, and a traveler in Asia who fails to see the city that is the commercial capital of China misses something that he may think and talk of the remainder of his life. Historians profess to trace the origin of Canton to a period antedating the Christian era, when, it is somewhere recorded, the thirty-fourth sovereign of the Chan dynasty, by name Nan Wong, who ruled for nearly sixty years, was on the Chinese throne. In those days the city bore the name of Nan-Woo-Ching, meaning "The Martial City of the South," and was encircled by a stockade formed of bamboos and river mud, tradition has it. Tradition additionally tells us that in the shadowy past Canton used to be known as the "City of the Rams," inasmuch as once upon a time five genii, each mounted on a ram carrying ears of grain in the mouth, rode into the market-place and said to the wondering people, "May famine and dearth never visit your city." This benevolent sentiment uttered, the genii are said to have instantly vanished, leaving their steeds in the market-place, and forthwith these were turned into stone. There is to-day a Temple of the Five Genii, where five clumsily sculptured rams are pointed out as the identical animals that once were flesh and blood. Passing over twenty centuries we find the metropolis of the present time, with its two million people, the most satisfying, fascinating, and puzzling city in the Orient, if not in the whole world. Canton with its agglomeration of a primitive existence, is surely distinct and different from any other city. Its dazzling color effect, its pile of massive gilding in grotesque ornamentation, its wonderful sign-boards in bewildering hieroglyphics, and its host of odd-looking humanity--all is at variance with anything the traveler has before seen. To successfully view Canton requires some urbanity, a wealth of patience, and a stomach not readily overthrown by gruesome and unusual sights. And, further, the visitor must never forget that his vision is looking back from one to two thousand years, and that the hordes of human beings congesting the labyrinth of streets not seven feet wide, speak of a great nation as it was, which to-day is the oldest living nation on earth. You, of the fast-marching West, are viewing at its fountainhead a race for which the word "conservative" was most likely first called into use. It was the great Li Hung Chang who stingingly rebuked some patronizing Englishmen who were urging the astute old statesman to advocate certain social reforms in China, by saying: "Why, we Chinese look upon England merely as an interesting experiment in civilization, wondering where you'll be five hundred years hence."