“But it is time at last to send our ships on their return. To make up their cargoes we buy from twelve thousand to twenty thousand piculs of refined copper, cast in small cylinders, a span long and an inch thick, each picul packed in a fir box. We buy, likewise a small quantity of coarse copper, delivered to us in broad flattish round cakes, and sometimes we take in some hundred piculs or chests of copper kasies or farthings, but not unless they be asked for at Tonquin and other places. All the copper is sold to us by a company of united merchants, who, by virtue of a privilege from the emperor, have the sole refining and selling of it to foreigners. “The other part of our cargo is made up of Japanese camphor, from six thousand to twelve thousand, and sometimes more, pounds a year, packed up in wooden barrels; of some hundred bales of china ware packed up in straw; of a box or two of gold thread, of an hundred rolls to the box; of all sorts of japanned cabinet-boxes, chests of drawers, and the like, all of the very best workmanship we can meet with; of umbrellas, screens, and several other manufactures, made of canes, wood, buffalo and other horns, hard skins of fishes, which they work with uncommon neatness and dexterity, stone, copper, gold and _Sowas_ (?), which is an artificial metal, composed of copper, silver and gold, and esteemed at least equal in value to silver. To these may be added paper made transparent with oil and varnish; paper printed and colored with false gold and silver for hanging of rooms; rice, the best to be had in Asia; sake, a strong liquor brewed from rice; soy, a sort of pickle, fit to be eat at table with roasted meat; pickled fruits packed in barrels; indented tobacco; tea and marmalades; besides some thousand kobans of gold in specie. The exportation of the following articles is strictly forbidden. All prints, pictures, goods or stuffs, bearing the emperor’s coat of arms. Pictures and representations, printed and others, of soldiers and military people, of any person belonging to the court of the Dairi, or of Japanese ships; maps of the empire or any part of it; plans of towns, castles, temples, and the like; all sorts of silk, cotton, and hempen stuffs; all sorts of arms, including those made in Japan after European patterns; carpenters’ knives; silver.