Salt and Seaweed 235 



to smuggling, the price at onct,- increases enormously. In 

 Hwui-chow foo, the centre of the celebrated Fu-chow tea 

 districts, I found the price, when travelling there in 1864, to 

 be 180 cash the catty, equal to ninepence the pound. Four 

 years previously in Yen-chow foo, 100 miles to the south-west, 

 the exigencies of the then raging rebellion had so advanced 

 the likin or transit and octroi dues, that this high price was 

 again doubled. How far this artificially high price of salt 

 is responsible for the repulsive prevalence of skin disease, 

 I leave it to be imagined. One effect it has, and that is to 

 cause a large import of seaweed from the Japan Islands. Sea- 

 weed prepared in one of many fashions is eaten at almost every 

 dinner-table in China ; certainly I was present at no meal in 

 Chung-king at which this condiment was not served. The 

 salt gabelle is, however, one of the few important sources of 

 revenue in the empire, and the salt commissioner in each 

 province takes rank after the governor. A junk found 

 smuggling salt is confiscated on the spot, and the unfortunate 

 hulk of such an offender may occasionally be seen exposed 

 on the bank, alongside a custom-house station, its body sawn 

 completely in two, a witness of the inexorability of the 

 Chinese " dazio." 



Fu-chow, though an important centre of junk navigation, is 

 of comparatively small extent, and it did not take us long to 

 find our way through the dirty suburb to the city gate. The 

 walls are thick and low, not over twenty feet high including 

 the battlements ; the archway of the gate would not admit a 

 mounted horseman. The main street contains some good 

 shops, and is thronged with traffic, through which women, 

 bearing loads of dust-coal on their backs packed in the 

 picturesque pei-lo of the country, jostle their way. I tried 

 here again to purchase one of these " back baskets " peculiar 

 to the gorge country, and which afford such a pleasing change 



