I made several shooting trips ashore with our companions, and we always returned well rewarded for our trouble, the place literally swarming with pheasants. The country was mostly of a low hilly formation, and being uncultivated, the hills, full of low shrubs and gorse, made a capital cover. We shot pheasants even in the farm-yards of the few houses about, and the inhabitants told us we might catch them at night roosting all round their dwellings. My companions from the schooner, who had been in California and Australia, declared the hills about Tu-ngliu contained gold; they also stated the whole river was full of it, and showed me some large specimens they had washed at a place named Hen Point, some twenty miles below the city of Ngan-king.
We fully intended to test the Tu-ngliu soil, but the weather clearing rendered necessary our immediate departure.
Some miles before reaching the treaty port of Kew-kiang, we passed a remarkable rock termed the Little Orphan. Several hundred yards in circumference at the base, at the distance of thirty fathoms from the north bank of the river it rises perpendicularly about four or five hundred feet. The summit is crowned by Budhist temples and idols, the only communication being by means of a stair cut in the sides of the rock by the priests. When passing this singular place once afterwards, my Chinese crew informed me no European could ascend the rock and live, it being protected by some Chinese demon, or genii, peculiarly averse to "foreign devils."
A few hours before arriving at Kew-kiang we passed the entrance to the Poyang Lake, a channel considerably broader than the river itself. The clear transparent waters of the lake afforded a pleasing contrast to the thick and muddy current of the river, and we steamed about a mile into it, for the purpose of obtaining a good supply and filling all our available casks. The appearance of this lake is magnificent in the extreme. Lost in the far distance, its limpid surface is surrounded by tall impending cliffs, in some places terminating abruptly at the margin of the water, while in others the intervening space is filled up with a most luxuriant growth of under-wood, overshadowed by the bending branches of gnarled and giant trees. The numerous valleys formed by the hills contain the summer resting-places of many of the Chinese nobility, whose handsome palaces fill every appropriate situation. The cloud-enveloped summits of one high range of mountains on the western shore, are crowned with eternal snow, presenting a most fantastic appearance, and affording many a wild and weird theme to Chinese romancers.
Kew-kiang we found in the direst state of confusion. The Imperialist troops had declared their determination to massacre the hated "Yang-quitzo," or drive him off their soil; and all the European residents were blockaded in their quarter. An English gunboat, and one of the large merchant steamers, were lying off the concession, prepared to render their assistance and protection, and when we arrived, at the request of the consul—who expected his consulate would be attacked again that night,—we moored in a position where our guns would prove effective in case of danger. The night, however, passed off pretty quietly, and the braves only made a further demonstration by smashing the few remaining panes of glass they had left whole upon a former assault. A day or two previously they had made a grand attack upon the settlement, destroyed several new buildings of the merchants, and very nearly demolished the British Consulate; but when the residents, in self-defence, were compelled to shoot a few of them, they retreated for the time. The mandarins, as at all the river ports, pretended they could not control their soldiers; whereas, they deliberately set them on, to try and prevent the settling of the Europeans, and the fulfilment of the treaty.
Some of the river scenery between Kew-kiang and Han-kow is wild, and really sublime in its grandeur. In many places huge masses of mountain rise steeply out of the channel to more than a thousand feet. At one part an immense cliff, named Ke-tow (Cock's Head), overhangs the stream, its base washed by the waves; while, moving under its shadow, innumerable flocks of shag, startled by the passing vessel, rose from their nests in the time-worn crevices, and eddying round and round overhead, produced a loud rushing noise from their myriads of wings, while the shrill discordant cries they uttered, increased by the singular note of the great "Bramley kites," reverberated with a thousand echoes from the perforated and honeycombed face of perpendicular rock. If a musket be fired near Ke-tow, the very air becomes blackened by an immense multitude of birds issuing from the cliff, while the noise of their cries is perfectly deafening. Their number is so prodigious that one might fairly suppose all the birds in China were congregated together at this place.
KE-TOW.
London, Published March 15th 1866 by Day & Son, Limited Lithogrs Gate Str, Lincoln's Inn Fields.
Day & Son, Limited, Lith.
A little further on, another magnificent view of the river is found, where, between high impending mountains, at Pwan-pien-shan (the Split Hill) it is darkly imprisoned. The hills in this neighbourhood are covered with wild tea, and numerous limestone quarries are burrowed along their sides. Wherever the mountains retreat from the river the intervening country is profusely cultivated, and the sloping sides of the hills, covered with a rich and varied semi-tropical foliage, sweep down to the low land. The distant pagodas, marking with their carved and many-storied, time-worn, monumental sculpture, the site of some town or anciently celebrated locality—the occasional village, partly hidden in some half-sequestered spot—the curious but ingenious apparatus of the fisherman on the river's brink, with his reed hut here and there peeping through the rushes of the bank—the peasants toiling and irrigating the paddy-fields—the bright Eastern sun, and clear sapphire sky, above the changeful bosom of the "Son of the Sea," now rushing between massive rocky walls, then bursting into lake-like fulness, studded at intervals with a low and feathery reed-topped or cultivated rice-waving island—and the waters, tipped with the snowy wings of the passing vessels—all these are objects which produce a landscape surpassingly beautiful. China has been termed "a vast and fertile plain;" but, I believe, a trip up the Yang-tze will show as diversified and grand a scenery as almost any part of the world.
But then comes a dark side of nature, for this is truly a land where "all save the spirit of man is divine." Throughout all these beauties of country one must tread with care, for it is a land of enemies; all through the Yang-tze's course we experienced nothing but aggravating annoyance and insult from the Imperialists; wherever they were, landing became not only disagreeable, but dangerous. This was a drawback of serious importance, but one which would have ceased to exist were it not for the policy of the British government, which, by preventing the success of the friendly Ti-pings, and strengthening the Imperialists, has perpetuated the evil.