Abstract
THE great development of the facilities for travel in the interior of China that has taken place in recent years is strikingly brought home to us by the narrative of Mr. Johnston, the magistrate of our little port of Weihaiwei, in North China. Since the days of Marco Polo, who himself travelled from the old capital of China to that of Burma, many European travellers, for instance, Baber, Colquhoun, Gill, and Morrison, have passed through much the same localities and mainly by the same route, but none, perhaps, have traversed the greater part of the ground more swiftly than Mr. Johnston. Leaving Peking on January 13, 1906, by the great new inland railway, built by French and Belgian engineers since the Boxer occupation of Peking in 1900–1, he reached Hankow, on the Yangtse, on January 16, a distance of 759 miles, and the journey could have been done in half the time but for the train running only in the daytime, halting overnight and resuming its journey in the morning. From Hankow, shallow-draught steamers owned by British, Chinese, and Japanese companies proceed up the Yangtse thrice weekly to Ichang, at the entrance to the great gorges of the Upper Yangtse, described by Little and others, a thousand miles from the mouth of that river and in the very heart of China. In one of the Japanese steamers our author made this journey in three or four days from Hankow; and ten days more by “red boat” took him 200 miles through the gorges and up the rapids to Wan-hsien, in the rich province of Ssuch'uan beyond the gorges. Here Mr. Johnston proceeded inland to Tachien-lu, visiting by the way the sacred Mount Omei, to the previous descriptions of which by Baber,1 Little,2 and others he adds something, though unfortunately he gives no photographs or sketches of the contour of the mountain.
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References
"Supplementary Papers," Roy. Geog. Soc., vol. i.
"Mount Omi and Beyond". By A. Little .
Bulletin de la Soc. de Géog., 1898, pp. 389 et seq.
Geog. Jour., June and November, 1900
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W., L. Peking to Mandalay 1 . Nature 79, 193–194 (1908). https://doi.org/10.1038/079193a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/079193a0