392 | Miscellanies. 
English embassies added something to our knowledge of the heretofore 
little explored interior of the country, and some light was diffused re- 
specting the condition of agriculture, the habits, and the manufactures 
of. the country. The works of the missionaries have also tended to 
make us more familiar with some of their peculiarities; the best book, 
however, which has ever been written respecting China, is the recent 
work of Mr. J. F. Davis, who had Jong been a resident in China, and 
who accompanied the embassy of Lord Amherst to the capital city of 
Pekin. Mr. Davis has concentrated much real information ina small 
space, and has, with singular ability, developed the characteristics 
of the three hundred millions of people of this region; his volumes 
have been republished in Harper’s Family Library, and it is to them, 
and to the recent Fan-Qui in China, in Waldie’s singly that we 
would direct the attention of the inquirer. - 
nother new effort to open a fruitful source of information to the 
student is about to be made public, and on this occasion it is our own 
country which is to be gratified by the industry; zeal, and discrimina- 
ting judgment, of one of her native merchants. Europeans have never 
succeeded in transporting a perfect’or even a very respectable collec- 
tion of Chinese curiosities. Those impressions which would be re- 
ceived by a resident who had enjoyed the rare privilege of unrestrained 
intercourse with the better classes.of Chinamen, have been denied to 
foreigners. It has been too much the custom of the natives and their 
visitors, mutually to despise each other, and for both to seek for little 
further communication than that which the nature of their commercial 
transactions demands. The consequence has been, that the articles 
exported have continued to be principally those only which European 
and American every-day life have required; while strangers have 
limited th eir purchases to to the common articles made to suit a foreign 
demand and taste, and their intercourse to the classes of natives who 
are appointed by government to serve or to watch over them. A few 
streets of the “ outside” city of Canton are generally visited, and the 
stores in the vicinity of “ Hog-lane,” a place frequented by foreign 
sailors, are ransacked for the well known manufactures of gew-gaws, 
successively carried off by every new comer, but possessing little no- 
velty i in any sea port. The interior of the city of Canton even is a 
sealed book ; how much more then the interior of China itself. This 
being the case, it became an interesting problem, as the Chinamen re- 
fuse to admit us in, how it would be possible to bring out what it was 
so difficult to get a sight of; in other words, as foreigners were not per- 
mitted to inspect the workshops, the houses, private apartments, and 
manufactories of the empire, what was the next best phing that could 
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