Held by Chinese Brigands

We have heard it said, by those who are widely travelled, that there are three beautiful harbours in the world: Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil; Sydney Harbour, and--most beautiful of all--the harbour of Hong-Kong.

The famous Peak rises above the town of Victoria and, at a height of about two thousand feet, buries its crest in the clouds. The harbour itself is in the shape of a crescent, enclosing the red, bare hills of Kow-lung. By day, from Lyemun to Stonecutter's Island, ferry-boats, sampans, wupans and launches scurry here and there, in and out among the great anchored men-of-war, like so many mice romping in a cage of sleeping tigers.

The slopes of the mountain are green with palm-trees, mango, orange and lichen, in the midst of which can be seen innumerable white, flat-roofed villas, each with its upper-story verandah and green-latticed windows. To the east the hills are more rugged; streams, traced through the glens by straggling brushwood, descend in a succession of waterfalls to the level of the sea. In the Pass of Lyemun the traveller finds himself in the midst of an inhospitable grandeur, similar to that of the western Scottish isles.

It is, however, by night that Hong-Kong Harbour is at its best. With a sky of a million stars, and the pale, round China moon hanging like a lantern in the midst of the heavens, reflecting its light upon the surface of the dark, tranquil water, the moving lights upon the sampans and the countless lanterns in the streets of China town, this place is surely one of the most romantic in the world. Here the Far East and the West touch; it is the one place in all China where the foothold of the European is secure.

Upon this beautiful island, with its rugged hills and feathery palms, the white man stands, under his own flag--as it were, upon the very threshold of the mysterious, eternal "Middle Kingdom." Over the way, to the north-west, is the great estuary of the Canton river, the Chau-kiang--the main trade highway of the south. Canton itself, a city of two and a half million inhabitants, lies at the junction of three rivers, which meet almost at right angles: the first flowing from the east, the second from the north, and the third--and greatest---from the west. Canton is a city of mysteries and marvels; it is a city of many industries, insufferable heat, intolerable smells, and almost unbelievable devilry and crime.

The whole of the great province of Kwangsi and the eastern portion of Yunnan is drained by the West River and its hundreds of tributaries. These tributaries for the most part find their sources upon the watershed of the Nan-ling Mountains, which extend from the Tung-ting Lake to the city of Kin-yuen, a distance of over five hundred miles.

Of that great stretch of country little or nothing is known. Thanks to the early Jesuit explorers, we are provided with excellent maps. But a map is no more than a coloured piece of paper which--at the best--is backed with linen. Names in themselves convey nothing. Though you study the map of China for a fortnight you will know less of the Si-kiang, or West River, than the naval lieutenant who ran his gunboat past Wu-chau, and blew the mud huts of a pirate village into a dust-heap with the pound-and-a-half shells of his Maxim-Nordenfeldt. For, if to this day there are wild men anywhere upon the face of the earth, who know neither mercy nor pity nor the laws of God or man, they are to be found in the tract of country that lies between the West River and the Nan-ling Mountains to the north. And thither we are about to journey, into the midst of a land that is by no means a wilderness, but which is populated for the most part by peaceable, hard-working peasants.