Great Flood ^1870 63 



facing the doorway, and that the energetic youngster who 

 accompanied me should try for employment on one of the 

 big trading junks — and so satisfied everybody. But shipping 

 here, as at home, is temporarily much depressed, junks 

 having been largely overbuilt in the late good times, and 

 in every quiet anchorage along our route we find big junks 

 laid up, generally opposite the homes of their owners, who 

 often possess nice terraced gardens and diminutive farms, 

 carefully laid out, up the steep ravine in which the river flows. 



My little boat occupied just six hours making her way 

 inch by inch through the foaming water. Meanwhile 

 we had walked on through the long terraced town to 

 a tea-house picturesquely built on a chff above the upper- 

 most rapid, whence I looked down on the fleet of junks 

 painfully toiling upwards. At this rapid the junks are 

 stripped of their cargoes, and crowds of men and boys, from 

 the mountain country round, are glad to toil as porters over 

 the boulders for a few cash. Local pilots, too, are always 

 taken on here, a big junk paying as much as one dollar for 

 the five minutes occupied in the descent. These pilots are 

 swells in their way, being well-dressed, and their comfortable 

 homes adorn the surrounding slopes. 



This tea-house, from which I looked down on the smooth 

 basin above the natural weir of the uppermost rapid, and in 

 which the junks that had successfully passed up were noisily 

 re-stowing their cargoes, is situated nearly 200 feet above the 

 present level of the water, but yet not high enough to save it 

 from the disastrous floods of 1870 (9th year of Tung chih). 

 Traces of that famous flood, which swept away whole cities, 

 as far down even as the plain of Hankow, are seen in the 

 fact of nearly all the houses forming the long straggling main 

 street of Ching-tan being of recent construction. This street 

 goes up and down long flights of stone steps at intervals. 



