The East India Company's monopoly of the china trade was British subjects were left without control; and the free traders, many of whom were men, carried the increased quantity of opium thus made a fable to China in open defiance of 'Szechuan, unless it be that an off Jeial now' and again brings a ball ]with him from Hankow." In a report on opium in West China, which was submitted in the same year the quantity of Indian opium only Jeonsumed in Szechuan was estimated by Mr. Spence at 70 piculs (about 70 chests). If Indian opium was only consumed to this tufting Jextent in Szechuan, to which provine there is a well-established trade route by the Yangtze river, it is clear that in the other western provinces, where there are no faci-ities for transportation, Indian opium must have been unknown. Even into Shand, the province ad-Jjoining on the west the metropolis tan province of Chihli, Indian opium }does not appear to have ever been imported, The cultivation of the poppy in Yunnan in particular ap-[pears to be of long standing, and as. the cultivation in Szechuan is to be of more recent date, the knowledge of the drug appears to have lbecn brought to the province through, Burma, Dr. Edkins tells us that in a Khinese history of Yunnan, which was published in 1736, opium whois was said to be a common product of Yungehengfu, a district in the west Jof the province; and the extent to Jwhich the poppy was cultivated in ithe Shan States and the tribal eountry on the Yunnan-Burma border supports the view Yunnan jeultivation had a south-western origin. The Chinese delegates to the International Commission men-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.