M hey de 
INTRODUCTION. 
Position and size of area.—K wangtung is the southernmost pro- 
vince of China and occupies the whole of the southern coast line of 
t 
fora few miles the French Indo-Chinese colony of Tongking. Its 
length amounts to 600 miles lying nearly east and west, but it 
nowhere recedes more than 250 miles from the open sea. Its area 
about 68,000 square miles, is rather less than that of Great Britain. 
Some 300 small islands lie off the coast, among which is Hongkong. 
Climate.—The province is more than half within the tropics and 
is characterised for the greater part of the year by hot damp 
weather, during which periods of strong sunshine alternate with 
downpours of warm torrential rain amounting to some 70 inches in 
all. The south-west monsoon, in which these conditions prevail, 
breaks upon the coast rather suddenly about April and continues to 
Though the winters are pleasantly cool, frosts are of very rare 
occurrence, except on the highest ground. Even there they are 
infrequent and of short duration. 
he succession of extremes of wet and dry weather naturally 
exerts a profound influence on the vegetation, but quite as important 
in this respect are doubtless the periodical visits of typhoons to 
which the coastal regions are liable at all times, but especially during 
the late summer. ese brief but extraordinarily violent storms 
play great havoc with all kinds of vegetation and their occurrence 
explains some of the peculiar characters of the flora of the coast of 
Kwangtung. . 
Geology.— The greater part of'the surface of the coastal region 
consists of various igneous rocks, but chiefly of a kind of granite, 
which readily disintegrates under the action of the atmosphere. 
This granite is intermixed with harder and more resistant rock masses, 
which remain as gigantie boulders all over the granite mountains as 
the softer parts are washed away. In the interior and to a less 
extent on the coast, limestone formations, coal measures and tertiary 
sandstones occupy large areas. Alluvial deposits attain considerable 
dimensions only in the deltas of the East, West and North Rivers 
which coalesce to form the * Canton Delta" occupying approxi- 
mately a triangle having three equal sides of about 100 miles each. 
| a 
ranges of Kwangtung, which can be seen from the sea, are 
(21515—6a.) Wt. 19085—411 (73). 500. 312. D&S, 
