It is always a pleasure to cover new ground in one's travels, and the novelty Fepays one for the many discomforts cidental to band jour this medieval country. Hence it was with pleasurable expectation that Eset out from Want whence T had come on f the rapids by boat, on the ov Chéngiu, the provincial expital—a road that, in its entire length, has not, I believe, been described in any of the numerous Duoks of travel written about the province of Szeciwan, These pleasurable antici. tion were not disappointed, although the sudden plunge from the luxury of a house-Dont into the dark, diet and discomfort of Chinese inns, the exespera ingly bad roads and the insufficient protection from cold and wet, is shock from which one's self-complacency only emerges after a few day: of habitude, which happily ceconciles mar to almost every change in hi destiny, and leads one, nuconscivusly, to accept the inevitable without " murmur and at last even to rejoice in it.
Feb. 14, Ichang to Wanhien, 'Yangtze rive seseeeee 250 miles Feb. 28, Wanhien to Chengtu, nnd, W., - 409 cag aay Chengtu' to Suit",
April 2, Saifu to Chungking, Min River SSW.: 230 Yangize tiver, ENB. wee 240
1,170 miles 'A few years back Iliad the pleasure of presenting your readers with an xcconnt of the new great highway through the Gorges, then being constructed by the joint effuris of the two Viceroys concerned,—thove of Hupeh and Szechuan—intended ty connect Chungking with Ichang. a dis tance of 540 miles, of which, so far, the!
ly direct connection has been ever the troublous waters of the Great River—a much-called-for innovation which surprising should never have been attempted before during the two willennia that Szechuan has formed an integral portion of the vast Chinexe empire.
Thus at last, in 1890, a meritorious attempt was made which, if completed, would have rendered possible the making of the journey from chang to Chungking xlong a'level road, in twelve days, instead of, as now, by junk, in winter in 25, and in summer in GO days, There exists, it is true, a trail over the mountains on the south, bank, crossing several passes of 4,000 and 5,000 feet altitude by which, in good weather, the couriers bring our mails to Chungking in 15 days and travellers exn proceed by chair in 22 days, but few risk the many discomforts of 4 land journey through an impoverished mountain ce try, and hence the more tedious but less trying route by water is almost universally employed. The new great road by the remains to this day an attempt and more. Tt begins accurately at the frontier of Hupeh and Szechuan; here is a wide cleft in the vertical walls of the Great Wushan Gorge, 200 feet above the water level; and is eat ried on through the Bellows Gorge or Gorge of the Fear: some Pool, to within some three miles of the city of Kueifa, the first large town met in the ascent to Szechuan, altogether distance of about 50 miles." 'The road is cut out of the cliffs and, where these are vertical, a gallery has been excavated in the' hard limestone, -ten feet wide and about eight feet high,—gunpowder having been. feely used to remove the refractory ruck. The road would not be Chinese if it ran straight and on a level; it ascends and descends hundreds of feet by flights of broad steps, winds in aul out-of Jateral ravines ssu as to avoid wide bridge and is generally more picturesque than practical, Still it is a great improvement and was welcomed as a genuine advance and earnest of better things at the time of its construction ten years ago, and it is said to have cost the provincial trewury a sun of over one million taels. But the Hupei Viceroy, spending millions on unprofitable diticubiies of remove schemes nearer home, never approached his share of the work, and so the great Ichang-Chungking highway was stopped after 50 miles had been built and to-day may truly be said to begin and end nowhere.
Coming up through the Wushan gorge, our boat' reached the frontier ae ahunt sunset, an hour's walk below the town of Preishih "Restored stony" (referring to an ancient dispute when Hupeh authorities queried a Szech rock ami had to make the damage good), where we were to moor for the night. Anticipating " broad smooth road, such as Thad traversed in the same spot ten years before, I landed from the boat which, favoured by a fair wind and in the still, fathomless waters of the gorge, sailed out of sight before I had climbed up the 200 feet of broken ruck debris above which the path is carried. Scrambling up! on to the stone bund built to support the road, I found on its summit narrow) bean field, a precipice above and a presi~®® below," Enterprising agricalursts eras, for their scanty crops with rg atid]
ded the road as" heavens" had carried up earth avy SPoeM on the flagued rondo rin OF devel land enjoying the, val. pug? devel, land rent free. Thafter another, tie culverts one side, r52}, ied away and their places by piles of louse rocks which had to be carefully scrambled over in order to avoid a fall into the depths below. Darkness now came on, but satd in the trust that my men, after reaching Preishih, would send lanterns to relic me, I took my tine, was eventually met with the welcome light, reached my temporary boat in safety after a three hours strngzle, not unattended with danger,—in the place of the placid evening saunter along a god road which I set out to enjoy. 'Thus the great Szechuan highway, opened with such a flourish of trumpets and innumerable deeply-engraved rock inscriptions in the highest literary Wénli, is to-day dead, after " short ten years' life and is now literally buried. Such is Chin:
Thave ventured on this digression as. homily on ronds in general before setting out te describe the great Wan" road in particular, Thereare tio celebrated highways leading to the Szechuan capital. The chief, and that until lately the most fre-ented, is known as the Tapehlu or Great northern road, and leads through Shansi to Peking. Marco Polo travelled west by this road and mentions the splendid trees planted on either side, of which now, alas, only a few isolated specimens survive. Over this load the ollicials were wont, until quite recently, to travel on their way to take up office in Szechuan after their audience the me trope Now, since the building of the Peking-Tientsin railway, they mostly come round by sen to Shanghai, and thence up the Yangtze to Wanhien, and continue their journey by the land road to Chénata, which is in contradistinetion, called the Sinopehlu, or Small North road, although in fact its course is Aue east and west, This is now by far the most travelled road of the two and has the reputation of being one of the best roads in the Empire. It is paved throughout and has good inns of their kind in all the resting places. The distance comprises 15 stages of 90 Li each, in all i 495 miles, but this distance m shortened by one-third were the road scientifically laid out. But the Chinese seem never to have reached the first elementary principles of road-making. Their work in constructing these so-called great highways appears to have been confined to the improvement of the pre-existing; trails, uniting the towns and villages the country to each other. These trails naturally wound through the land, avoiding hero swamps, there rocks, by the easiest way available, with no attempt to surmount structions, With the view apparently of saving initial labour, the road ascends mountains by the steepest of staircases and in the valleys, where a straight road would be the natural course, it i it on top of the low dykes which divide the paddy fields, often winding round three sides of " field rather than cut across it. In such cases the distance actually increased threefold. Among the mountains the pavement is siz and often eight feet wide: it was constructed of the same width in the valleys, but hero the farmers have devoted themselves to steadily undermining the paved way on both sides so as to reicroscopically add to the area of rheic Selds, until the stones break off, leaving in many places nothing to walk ov oUt a narrow ridge of soft earth.
"Aiwough the Chinese do not possess the
struct a roadway, even if they did not elementary knowledge needful to con grudge the labour and expense, yet they exhibit infinite patience in conveying a huge traffic over such roads as they have. That hardest driven of all beasts of burden, the Chinese carrying coolie, shrinks at obstacle and never shirks his work. The rich Chinese, who should show him how to sedan chair wrapped up in furs, while the half naked coolly struyles in the mire or over tough cobble stones from dawn,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.