Yet, though the barren hillsides are covered with houses, though a large population of white men and yellow inhabit it, and its harbour is crowded with shipping, the island itself is still as unproductive as ever. Not merely is mineral wealth unknown and manufactures practically _nil_, but Hong Kong cannot provide enough of foodstuffs to support its inhabitants for half a day. From Canton, almost a hundred miles away up the Pearl River, comes everything required to feed both Europeans and Chinese. Each morning the large, flat‐bottomed steamers that ply between the two cities carry down meat or cattle, fish, rice, vegetables of all kinds, fruit, even flowers; and were communications interrupted by storm or war for a few days, Hong Kong would starve. For neither the island nor the couple of hundred square miles of adjacent mainland, the Kowloon Hinterland, which we took over in 1898, could produce enough to feed one regiment; and although two months’ supply of provisions for the whole population, white and yellow, is supposed to be stored, it is never done. Therein lies Hong Kong’s great danger. Let Canton refuse or be prevented from feeding her, and she must starve. The secret of her rapid rise and present greatness lies in the fact that she is the great mart, the distributing centre, whence European or American goods, arriving in large bottoms, are sent out again in small coasting steamers or junks to reach the smallest markets for Western commerce. And her prosperity will continue and be vastly increased if the long‐projected railway to Canton, to meet another tapping the great inland resources of China, is ever built; although the Americans fondly hope that Manilla under their energetic rule will one day rival and even excel her. Hong Kong is an island of irregular shape, about nine miles in length and six miles broad in its widest portion, and consists of one long chain of hills, that rise almost perpendicularly from the sea. Scarcely the smallest spot of naturally level ground is to be found. Around are countless other islands, large and small, all equally mountainous. It lies close to the Chinese mainland, the Kau‐lung, or Kowloon Peninsula; and the portion of sea enclosed between them forms the harbour. At one extremity of the island this is a mile across; and at the other it narrows down to a strait known as the Lyeemoon Pass, only a quarter of a mile broad. In the centre the harbour is about two miles in width. The high hills of island and mainland—for the latter is but a series of broken, mountainous masses rising two or three thousand feet—shelter it from the awful typhoons that ravage the coast.