PREFACE. 
I have laboured under great difficulties and many discouragements 
in preparing the following pages for the press. A narrative, 
having for its principal subject a journey through the interior of 
China, must derive its interest either from the novelty and im- 
portance of the incidents which it relates, or from the quantity 
of original information which it contains respecting that singular 
country. In both these respects I am in a great degree antici- 
pated. The tale of the Transactions of Lord Amherst’s Embassy 
has been too well and too circumstantially told by an official 
pen to leave me much expectation of finding public curiosity 
unsatisfied respecting them. The close delineation of that part of 
the country equally visited by Lord Macartney’s and Lord Amherst’s 
Embassy, contained in the accurate and laboured work of the late 
Sir George Staunton, has left very little to tell respecting it, and the 
production just alluded to has in a great measure described what 
was exclusively seen by the latter. The work that had for its object 
the establishing “ the point of rank 'which China may he considered 
to hold in the scale of nations has so exhausted the topics which 
in this view might be dwelt upon, and has so illustrated them by 
the writings of the Missionaries, as almost to preclude the hope of 
a further elucidation of the same subjects from similar sources of 
information. 
