s, with excellent
mutton from a fat-tailed breed of sheep, chiefly for the largely
Mohammedan population; but the sheep will not live in southern China,
where the goat takes its place. The pig is found everywhere, and
represents beef in our market, the latter being extremely unpalatable to
the ordinary Chinaman, partly perhaps because Confucius forbade men to
slaughter the animal which draws the plough and contributes so much to
the welfare of mankind. The staple food, the "bread" of the people in
the Chinese Empire, is nominally rice; but this is too costly for the
peasant of northern China to import, and he falls back on millet as its
substitute. Apples, pears, grapes, melons, and walnuts grow abundantly
in the north; the southern fruits are the banana, the orange, the
pineapple, the mango, the pomelo, the lichee, and similar fruits of a
more tropical character.

Cold storage has been practised by the Chinese for centuries. Blocks of
ice are cut from the river for that purpose; and on a hot summer's day a
Peking coolie can obtain an iced drink at an almost infinitesimal cost.
Grapes are preserved from autumn until the following May and June by
the simple process of sticking the stalk of the bunch into a large hard
pear, and putting it away carefully in the ice-house. Even at Ningpo,
close to our central point on the eastern coast of China, thin layers
of ice are collected from pools and ditches, and successfully stored for
use in the following summer.

The inhabitants of the coast provinces are distinguished from the
dwellers in the north and in the far interior by a marked alertness of
mind and general temperament. The Chinese themselves declare that virtue
is associated with mountains, wisdom with water, cynically implying that
no one is both virtuous and wise. Between the inhabitants of the
various provinces there is little love lost. Northerners fear and
hate southerners, and the latter hold the former in infinite scorn and
contempt. Thus, when in 1860 the Franco-British force made for Peking,
it was easy enough to secure the services of any number of Cantonese,
who remained as faithful as though the attack had been directed against
some third nationality.

The population of China has never been exactly ascertained. It has been
variously estimated by foreign travellers, Sacharoff, in 1842, placing
the figure at over four hundred millions. The latest census, taken in
1902, is said to yield a total of four hundre