The Whang Poo Conservancy Board has deepened the river from Wusung up to Shanghai, and larger ocean steamers are now able to ascend to the bund. For a long time the largest vessels must lie at Wusung bar, the “heaven sent barrier” against foreign intrusion, as the Manchus called it years ago. The Tientsin Conservancy is deepening the river up from Taku. Both of these boards are controlled by the foreign settlements, although the Chinese share in the expense. Foreign engineers are hired.
Other trans-oceanic ports planned by China are at Chin Wang Tao in Pechili province; Hunchun, near Vladivostok on the Japan Sea, and Haochow, near the junction of Shangtung and Kiangsu provinces. The British may also develop the port of Wei Hai Wei, now that connection with the trunk railways of China is in sight.
Few of the great Chinese ports look after the foreign seamen, but Hongkong has established a sailors’ club and seamen’s institute on a liberal scale. This idea should be copied along the long yellow coast, for the devil’s whisper is loudest and his traps are most numerous in China.
The Grand Canal as a shipping factor is grand no more, for three reasons: it has silted up; it has been paralleled by the railway from Hangchow to Peking, 1,000 miles; and it has also been paralleled by the China Merchants and other steamship services from Shanghai to Tientsin. This once noble work, with its beautiful bridges, pagodas, embankments, sluices, aqueducts and picturesque junks, passes into history, so far as its transportation feature is concerned. It may be continued in parts as an aqueduct, for conservancy purposes in relieving the water pressure on the flood districts of the Whei and Yangtze valleys, or for water power for a vast scheme of manufacturing, but that is for engineers, and not economists, to decide. Marco Polo first made this famous work known to the western world. The southern section from Hangchow, the bore city and capital of the Sung dynasty, to the Yangtze River at Chingkiang, was dug about 610 A. D. The oldest, and most important section from a conservancy point of view, from Chinkiang to the Whei River, 130 miles, was built about 485 B. C. Kublai Khan is credited with being the dreamer of the idea, the digger of the ditch, the De Lesseps of China, and the fact is that he built the northern section of about 650 miles from the Whei River to Peking in 1289 A. D. in order to bring the tribute rice and copper of the southern provinces to Peking. Those who are interested in the canal in its last days of picturesque use should read the works of Sir John Francis Davis, who was governor of Hongkong, and whose experience in China covered the crowded years from 1820 to 1846. The American general, J. M. Wilson, has also written a book covering his inspection of parts of the canal.
On sections of the Yellow River and on the Kia Ling River in Szechuen province, lumber boats are made up to carry produce to market, the boats being broken up at Chungking. Return freight which can not be tracked through the rapids is portaged. Although the Yellow River is 2,500 miles long, it is only navigable 150 miles from its mouth to Tsinan City, and in short broken sections in Mongolia and Honan. The loess silt which it carries, and the porous loess bed through which it flows, make it only a roaring unmanageable spring and summer drain, China’s sorrow of flood and famine. Its memorable changing of bed to mouths 300 miles apart, from Kiangsu to Shangtung province in 1854, and from banks 100 miles apart in the Gobi Desert, are well known.
Most of the riverine and coast, junk and sanpan sails are square or oblong, but at Ichang there are strange wupan boats which use the towering peaked sails seen on the Arab dahabiyehs of Aden and the Nile, the object being to coax down the high breezes of the difficult gorges of the Yangtze. This is not the only instance in China of Arab influence in crafts, arts and blood.
Chinese riverine shipping is growing heavily. All flags are seen on the Yangtze, and several flags in the lower parts of the Kan and Siang Rivers. The British and Chinese, and some French flags go up the West and Yu Rivers to Nanning. Chinese shipping on the Liao River to Newchwang is heavy in the ice-free season. There are scores of other rivers which will be dredged so that they may feed the steamship and railroad lines.
The Chinese have an amusing word for captain. “Lao ta” is literally “old fellow”; because the captain of the old Yangtze rapids boats was generally the oldest man on board. The captain of the Hakka sanpans of Canton is often a woman, but she is humorously called “lao ta” with the rest! China led in all inventions, including woman’s rights!
In the coming great development of Western China, the one name to inscribe on the tablets is that of the pioneer merchant writer, Archibald Little, who, after twenty years of effort, broke the veil of the Yangtze gorges and took the first steamer to open up the ports of Ichang and Chungking in 1898. This brought him within beckoning distance of British Burma and Archibald Colquhoun’s propaganda, and split China in two with the wedge of commerce, despite the obstructive Tsung Li Yamen at Manchu Peking. Mr. Little’s three books on Western China are: Through the Yangtze Gorges, To Omi Mount in Szechuen, and Across Yunnan; and he wrote, moreover, a very important geological work which places him high as a prospector and explorer.