trade actually carried on by these countries with the British settlements is very limited considering their valuable productions, the great range of seaboard they possess, and their numerous navigable rivers. There is little doubt, however, that this will rapidly increase as piracy declines, which is at present the grand check to commerce in the China Sea. The following will give an idea of the existing amount of trade with Singapore.

The ports in Cochin China and Cambodia, from which vessels arrive, are Kangkao and Loknoi in Cambodia, and Turon and Saigon in Cochin China proper. The average number of vessels arriving from these ports are forty annually, bringing sugar, rice, oil, salt, and some other articles of minor importance. The vessels are usually smaller than the Chinese and Siamese junks. The total imports from Cochin China, during the official year 1842 and 1843, were valued at 254,785 dollars, and consisted of raw silk, 149 piculs; rice, 12,010 piculs; sugar, 27,540 piculs; and salt, 15,120 piculs. The gross exports during this period amounted to 227,848 dollars, consisting chiefly of cotton, 1,084 bales, and 985 piculs; British cotton goods, 3,588 pieces; opium, 263 chests; and woollens to the value of 25,378 dollars. During the same time, eighty-two boats, equal to 4,195 tons, arrived from Cochin China.

The whole line of coast from Cambodia Point to the most northern point of Tonquin, is bounded with islands covered with the richest vegetation, and many of them appearing like the tops of mountains rising suddenly from the sea, sometimes to the height of a thousand feet. The productions of Cambodia are similar to those of Siam and Ava; those of Cochin China, besides the exports mentioned above, are tobacco, coarse tea, cinnamon, cotton, pepper, wax, honey, and ivory; while Tonquin is

rich in large timber, and in gold, silver, iron, and tin. The principal foreign commerce is as yet carried on almost exclusively with China, the trade with Siam being constantly interrupted by war. It is a very remarkable sign of the times, however, that the king of Cochin China has recently purchased a steam vessel at Singapore, which is now actually managed, and her engines worked, by his own subjects. His object was to employ her in hostilities against the Siamese ; but it is to be hoped that the fine rivers which intersect his own coast will give her better employment.

This prince, however, or rather the government of which he is the administrator for the time being, is decidedly anti-commercial, and it is said that he forbids his subjects to carry the produce of the country abroad under pain of death. But the restriction has only the effect of converting commerce into a species of smuggling, and also of detaching from the soil the more ingenious and adventurous spirits. The Cochin Chinese leave their misgoverned country every year in crowds, and never return; but so little trouble do the English take to make themselves acquainted even with the events most important to themselves, that the locality to which these valuable emigrants repair is at this moment a matter of doubt. The probability is that they will by-and-by be found in some of the Philippine Islands, and on the north-east coast of Borneo; and that, relieved from the fetters of an absurd and tyrannical government, they will play a conspicuous part in the growing commerce of the Archipelago.

Emigration received its first impulse from the religion of the Europeans. The Jesuits of the Propaganda were so successful in their missionary efforts that they imagined it was only requisite to raise the standard of the

cross in order to revolutionize the state, and in the result christianize the whole empire. They forgot, however, that there was a strong government opposed to them; and perhaps their flock had not been well enough taught to be able to lay their hands at once upon those passages in the New Testament which command the shedding of blood and the usurpation of thrones. However this may be, the scheme of the Jesuits failed; two of the reverend fathers obtained the crown of martyrdom, and the rest were expelled; and religious persecution drove the people, as it usually does, to emigration.

Cochin China formed in early times a portion of the Chinese Empire, and the manners and character of the people have not diverged so widely from the common type (which we shall speedily be called upon to examine) as to require a separate description. Tonquin is separated from the Celestial Empire by a wall fifteen feet high and twenty feet thick; but the inhabitants are not more different than might be predicated from their distance from the centre of Chinese civilization, and from their being tainted with many of the customs and vices of the neighbouring Malay race.

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THE BRITISH WORLD IN THE EAST. [BOOK VII.

BOOK VII.

THE CHINESE EMPIRE.

CHAPTER I.

HISTORICAL SKETCH.

We have examined at some length, though in miserable proportion to the magnitude of the subject, a vast and populous country which, as may be inferred from the accounts of the wandering Greeks, had long passed its zenith and was already on the decline, three centuries before the Roman arms were first carried among the barbarians of Britain. After leaving the region of India Proper in our progress eastward, we found ourselves among tribes and nations without antiquity, without history, without literature, without refinement; and now again we arrive at the threshold of another empire, occupied by nearly a third part of the human race, where the inhabitants appear to have existed in a state of high

though peculiar civilization long before Europe emerged from barbarism. The mind is confounded as it dwells upon such stupendous facts; and it is not surprising that many of the traversers of those eastern seas should have allowed their perceptions to be not only coloured but controlled by feelings of awe and wonder.

The limits of China Proper are as distinct as those of India, being formed by lofty mountains, inhospitable deserts, and the vast ocean; but the modern empire, overleaping the boundaries of nature, reaches to the frozen wastes of Siberia. Some writers, proceeding on meagre and doubtful etymologies, suppose the Chinese to be a branch of the great Indian family; but, however this may be, their original country was in all probability the elevated tracts on the north-west, whence the stream of population flowed southward and eastward, absorbing the scanty aborigines in its course, till it filled its destined

space.

The Chinese annals begin, like those of various other nations, with the beginning of the human race, and they detail, with more or less absurdity, the reigns of emperors and sages down to the year 2337 before Christ. About this time the Mosaic deluge occurred, and the catastrophe is fondly imagined by Christian writers to be described in Chinese history. But the truth is, the country was from all antiquity subjected to an intermittent flood by the inundations of the two great rivers which intersect it, and the lower parts were probably a succession of marshes and lakes, till they were drained by the genius and munificence of numerous successive kings. Concius, who flourished about the age of Herodotus, and is to the Chinese, as the latter was to the Greeks, the father of history, so far from conveying the idea of a postdiluvial desert, represents the country as an earthly