428 Mr. J. D. D. La Touclie— Field-Notes 



on 



about half that distance to the east of Chinkiang. On the 

 sou tli bank, at the back of the city, a rough plateau of loess or 

 yellow earth-hills, greatly cut up by cultivated valleys, extends 

 for a few miles behind the suburbs. This loess country is 

 bounded on the east and about seven miles to the south of the 

 city by ranges of steep hills, some of which continue along the 

 south bank of the river to Nanking, while other shorter ranges 

 run in a southerly direction nearly to the boundary of the 

 province of Chekiang, according to the latest map of Kiangsu 

 Province issued at Sikawei by the Jesuits. The loess hills 

 are hare save for grass or brushwood and a few plantations 

 of scrub-oaks and pines. The hills proper, on the contrary, 

 are well-timbered, and are in places covered with good-sized 

 woods of oaks, chestnuts, and pines, generally with a thick 

 undergrowth of bracken, scrub-oak, and various shrubs, 

 which is, however, cut for fuel during the winter months. 



The plain, when viewed in summer from the heights or 

 from the river-banks, has the appearance of being thickly 

 wooded. This is due to the rows of pollard-willows which 

 everywhere border the fields, to the clumps of high trees and 

 bamboo-shrubberies planted along the ponds at the backs of 

 the villages, and to the rows of tall elms, willows, Fortunea, 

 and other large trees lining the high embankments which 

 traverse the lowlands in every direction. Changes of 

 currents have within the last fifty years caused great altera- 

 tions about Chinkiaug, the river having eaten its way along 

 the northern bank, and having receded so far from its original 

 course on the south just above Chinkiaug, that cultivated 

 fields and dry reed-beds are now found where thirty years ago 

 there existed a good anchorage for ships. The appearance of 

 the country is also very different from what it was in the early 

 sixties of the nineteenth century, when Captain Blakiston 

 made his celebrated journey to Pingshan on the Upper River. 

 At that time Chinkiang and the surrounding country had 

 been utterly devastated by the Taiping rebels, and the 

 wonderful fertility of this part of China is demonstrated by 

 the fact that, when Blakiston first passed Chinkiang, what 

 struck him most was "the entire absence of trees/' and 



