500. Western the top of one ridge is a stone house. This is the frontier or boundary of China. Six Chinese soldiers, with queer old muskets, examine our baggage, and make us pay a tax, called a duty. We go on to the eastward, across rivers, up mountains, and down mountains. It seems as though we must be crossing all the rivers and all the moun tains of Asia, there is so little level land. The houses are perched on the hillsides like birds' nests on a wall. .Sometimes the children are tied to the doors to keep them from rolling down hill. Stone walls hold up gardens that are no bigger than a room. It is a very poor country. Our mules cannot climb the mountains. We have to leave them and walk for a few days.
As we cross the mountains, we meet a long string of men carrying big packs of tea on their backs. Since the country is too rough for caravans of animals, cara vans of men must carry freight into Tibet.
After we leave the Chinese boundary, three weeks of walking brings us to the top of a mountain range from which we see a wide valley spread out in front of us. It is the valley of the MM River. Here is one of the fine provinces of West China. Now we travel on chairs borne on the shoulders of men. That is a custom in China. .
In a week we come to the capital of the province, Chengtu. The plain around the city has many canals built by a wise emperor twenty-seven hundred years be fore Christ. The people of the province still irrigate their little fields in the way which he showed them. There are mil lions of people here, and everybody seems to be at work. We see donkeys and carts carrying coal from mines in the hill sides. Women are spinning and weaving as we pass through the . busy villages. Even the children are working. China is a very busy place. Some American mis sionaries live in Chengtu, and we are glad to hear our own language.
In two more weeks our chair carriers bring us to the city of Chung King, on the Yangtze, the great river of China. The Yangtze is full of Chinese sailboats called junks. We hire one of these junks to take us down the famous gorge of the Yangtze.
Wang, the man who owns the junk, carries his family with him; the boat is his home.
Before we go aboard we buy some chickens, eggs, and rice in the. market, for Wang's
wife to cook for us as we travel. The current carries the boat rushing along down stream, and Wang must do some very care ful steering to get us past the dangerous rocks. Mountain walls rise on each side of the river. We are in the famous gorge of the Yangtze. Close to the bank a boat is having great difficulty going up stream against the current. A long string of men pull and tug at a rope fastened to the boat, and they slowly pull it up the river against the rushing current.
Along the face of the cliff on the other side of the river, we see American sun veyors laying out a railroad. Some day the Chinese hope to build a road up this gorge, with the help of American and English engineers and machinery.
It does not take us long to whirl down the river the four hundred miles from Chung King, where we started, to Ichang at the foot of the rapids. There we find a steamboat that has come all the way from England. Can you trace its journey? We bid Wang and his wife good bye, and now sit comfortably on the deck of the steamer as it goes down the Yangtze.
In two days we pass the great city. of Hankow (Sec. 465) near the place where Li Yu, the tea grower, lives (Sec. 459). Here big cities are spread along both banks of two rivers, as they are at Pittsburgh (Fig. 193), and there are blast furnaces like those at Pittsburgh. European and Amer ican engineers showed the Chinese work men how to build these big furnaces and how to make iron in them as we do in America.
On down the stream we go, meet ing and passing Chinese junks, little steamboats, and big steamers; looking at Chinese villages and towns along the banks; gazing across the level plain of China. (Sec. 464.) Canals, like roads, go across this plain in all directions. lages and little garden farms stretch away as far as the eye can see across the flat, rich, irrigated land.
For a week our steamer passes down the Yangtze through this plain, stopping from time to time at cities, one of which, Nan king, is as large as Washington, D. C. At the port of Shanghai our journey ends. We have crossed Tibet, the world's highest plateau, and China, the world's most populous country.