The perfection to which the Chinese of those days had carried the elegant and useful arts appeared extraordinary to our traveller, who dwells with vast complacency upon the beauty of their paintings and the peculiar delicacy of their porcelain. One example of their ingenuity amused him exceedingly. Returning after a short absence to one of their cities, through which he had just passed, he found the walls and houses ornamented with portraits of himself and his companions. This, however, was a mere police regulation, intended to familiarize the people with the forms and features of strangers, that should they commit any crime they might be easily recognised. Ships found to contain any article not regularly entered in the custom-house register were confiscated; “a species of oppression,” says our traveller, “which I witnessed nowhere else.” Strangers, on their first arrival, placed themselves and their property in the keeping of some merchant or innkeeper, who was answerable for the safety of both. The Chinese, regarding their children as property, sell them whenever they can get a purchaser, which renders slaves both male and female extremely cheap among them; and as chastity appears to possess little or no merit in their eyes, travellers are in the habit of purchasing, on their arrival in any city, a slave girl, who resides with them while they remain, and at their departure is either sold again, like an ordinary piece of furniture, or taken away along with them to be disposed of elsewhere. The severity of their police regulations proves that their manners had even then arrived at that pitch of corruption in which little or no reliance is to be placed on moral influence, the place of which is supplied by caution, vigilance, and excessive terror. Strangers moved about in the midst of innumerable guards, who might, perhaps, be considered as much in the light of spies as defenders. Fear predominated everywhere; the traveller feared his host, and the host the traveller. Religion, honour, morals had no power, or rather no existence. Hence the low pitch beyond which the civilization of China has never been able to soar, and that retrogradation towards barbarism which has long commenced in that country, and is rapidly urging the population towards the miserable condition in which they were plunged before the times of Yaon and Shan, who drew them out of their forests and caverns.