have expressed my surprise at having seen nothing surprising! But, instead of the impressions I might have described, had I penetrated into the Tartar city, I will relate how it happened that I did not go there, and, I will answer for it, the reader will have lost nothing through my not having done so.
After all, the Chinese who have immured the Europeans in a ghetto, have shut themselves up in a similar prison, and the vast enclosure inside which they have retired differs from the other only by the melancholy originality of certain official residences. To speak the truth, there exists only one joyous, poetical, noisy, and laborious Canton; this is the Canton of pleasure, of industry, and of business—that is to say, the suburbs and the floating city. This is not enclosed in gray, creviced walls; it extends freely along the banks of the river; the brick and granite houses follow, to the south and the east, the peaceful circumvolutions of the Tchou-kiang; they line canals more animated than the canals of Venice, and the hundred residences at anchor rock to and fro incessantly on the liquid ground which supports them. This is the Canton we are now about to traverse in palanquin, on foot, and in a boat, beginning at that portion which is established on the main land.
The day after our installation in the street of the Noise-of-the-Tide—Tchao-in-kiaï—Callery entered my room at seven o'clock in the morning.
