'A Journey Among the Rare Birds and Beasts and in the Jungle Hills of Fukien By Arthur de Carle Sowerby, F.R.¢.S., F.z.S.
Many years ago, in the days of the old China tea clippers, when the China tea trade was at its height end merchants in the ancient city of Foochow waxed prosperous, the Min River was very much better known to Europeans in China than it is to-day. Draining, as it does, by far the greater part of the province of Fukien, its limpid waters, after running their troublous course through country that is all hilly or mountainous, flow past the grey, fern clad walls of Foochow, finally emptying themselves into the Taiwan Strait, the neck of sea that divides the island of Formosa from the mainland. Steamers may cond the river as far as Pagoda Anchorage, famous as the starting point of the tea clippers on their long race home to London with their precious cargoes of the leaf.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.