a break-neck sort of architecture, and yet the great market of the town is held on this bridge, and there we find the dwell- ing-houses and shops of the merchants. There they trade and there they sleep, calmly awaiting the hour which shall drop them and their frail tenements into a muddy grave. But they had other means still to ensure safety both for property and life. Suspended between each archway hang two slender wooden frames, and these barriers the householders piously let down at night to deter malignant spirits from passing beneath their dwellings — a device, I need hardly say, universally successful. Chao-chow-fu is open to foreign trade, and on one or two occasions the attempt has been made to establish a British Consulate in the town ; but it has always been a failure. Tur- bulent mobs continually stone foreigners, and during the time of my visit the Vice-consul was the only European in the place. He, when I told him how I had been attacked by the rabble, said quietly, " You are no worse off than your neighbours ; it is just what every white man must expect at the hands of the lawless ruffians of the town." So I was not sorry when I turned my back upon this part of Kwang-tung, and descended once more to Swatow. Every year sees an increase in the number of emigrants who leave this part of China to work on the plantations in Siam, Cochin China, or the Straits, and we may be sure that the price of labour in China is at a very low ebb, when we find that wages, running from two to four dollars a month, are all the inducement held out to allure the coolies from their homes ; and that such a sum as this even is, by the toiling poor, esteemed sufficient to enable them to save money to invest in a farm on their return to their native land. It was up into this region that Juilin sent a military mandarin with a force of 2,000 men. This officer, at the time of my
