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 long 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 in a 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 Library, that we 

 would direct the attention of the inquirer. 



Another 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 their purchases 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 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 thing that could 



