— 8 — 



monk, you shall also land me with him; and if not, you had better kil] 

 me : for if you really put this priest on shore, then , when we arrive in China, 

 I will go straight to the king and teil him what you have done. And the 

 king of that country is a firm believer in the law of Buddha, and greatly 

 honours the monks and priests." The merchantmen on this hesitated and 

 did not dare to land him. As the weather continued very dark, the pilots 

 looked at each other without knowing what to do.. More than seventy days 

 had now elapsed , the food and water were nearly all gone ; they had to use 

 salt water for cooking, as they had only two pints of fresh water per head 

 left, so that is was nearly flnished. The merchants now deliberated and said : 

 //The ordinary time for the voyage to Canton is about fifty days, but now 

 we have exceeded that time by many days already, surely we must have gone 

 wrong." On this they put the' ship on a N. W. course to look for land and 

 after twelve days continuous sailing they arrived at the southern coast of 

 Lau Shan in the prefecture of Chang-kwang. (*) They here obtained fresh 

 water and vegetables and from seeing a certain kind of herb, they knew 

 that they were in China, but not seeing men or traces of them, they again 

 scarcely knew what to think. Some said that they had not yet arrived at 

 Canton, others maintained they had passed it. In this uncertainty there- 

 fore, they put off in a little boat and entered a creek, looking for some 

 one to ask what place it was they had arrived at. Just at this moment, two 

 men who had been hunting were returning home , on this the merchants re- 

 quested Fahien to act as interpreter and it was only then they knew what 

 place they had come to. 



From what follows in the original we know that they arrived on the 14th of 

 the 7th month, they had been therefore just three months on their voyage. 



The above extract teaches us more than would appear at first sight : we see 

 under what difficult circumstances the Hindoo colonists in Java kept up the intercourse 

 with their mother country and carried on trade even with China ; we leam that they 

 must have been in considerable numbers already , otherwise Fahien would hardly have 

 said that their religion was nourishing thef e , and lastly , though the author , com- 

 pletely absorbed by his religious zeal , did not think it worth whüe to describe the 

 country be visited , still we are able to construe from his narrative that no Chinese 

 lived or traded there. 



(*) Chang-kwang -M lj§f SR was situatcd on the coast ol' the present province of 

 Shantmig, some thirteen degrees to the north of Canton. 



