Cuar. XIIL.] SHANGHAE. 2438 
stipulating, however, that the plants should this 
time have blooms upon them. One morning, how- 
ever, as I was going out into the country, a short 
distance from Shanghae, I was surprised at meeting 
a garden labourer with a load of Moutans all in full 
flower, which he was taking towards the city for 
sale. The flowers were very large and fine, and the 
colours were dark purples, lilacs, and deep reds, 
kinds of which the very existence had been always 
doubted in England, and which are never seen 
even at Canton. Two English gentlemen who 
were excellent Chinese scholars, being with me at 
the time, we soon found: out the name of the 
Moutan district; and from the state of the roots in 
the man’s basket, I was quite certain that the plants 
had not been more than an hour or two out of the 
ground, and that consequently the place where they 
were grown could not be more than six or eight 
miles from Shanghae, a surmise which I afterwards 
found to be perfectly correct. This was doubtless 
the place where my nursery friend had procured his 
plants in the previous autumn, and where he would 
have gone again had I not been lucky enough to 
find that I could easily go there myself, Indeed, I 
afterwards discovered that there was no Moutan 
country in the vicinity of Soo-chow, having met a 
man from that place in the Shanghae district, 
where he had come for the express purpose of 
buying Tree Ponies. I now went into the Moutan 
district daily during the time the different plants 
were coming into bloom, and secured some most 
R 2 
