204 
POPULATION. 
I often noticed portions of land even in the vicinity of cottages and 
villages, remaining waste for no other conceivable reason than be- 
cause its culture was unnecessary to the support of the neighbouring 
inhabitants. These facts, which might be deemed of too little im- 
portance for insertion in an account of any other country, are of 
consequence as they regard China, a country of which it has been 
asserted that “ not an inch of ground is left uncultivated.” 
With respect to the numerical amount of the population of China, 
we obtained no new data by which to judge of the relative degrees of 
probability due to the discordant and irreconcileable accounts of dif- 
ferent writers.* The apparent population, however, was not such as 
those statements had led me to expect. The cities, indeed, were well 
peopled, and under the circumstances in which we saw them, some- 
times over-peopled, but the intermediate land seldom appeared fully 
stocked with inhabitants. But the multitudes who crowded around 
us in some of the larger towns and cities were so undoubtedly swelled 
from sources not contained within themselves, that any calculation 
which might have been attempted respecting them would have been 
liable to egregious error. De Guignes asserts that many of the 
cities which poured forth such astonishing multitudes when visited 
by Lord Macartney’s Embassy, exhibited to the Dutch Mission, in 
the following year, no evidences of excessive population. The dif- 
ferent circumstances attending the two embassies were the probable 
causes of this contrariety of experience. Lord Macartney’s Embassy 
was, perhaps, the most splendid that had ever appeared in China 
from a European state : it was from a nation whom the Chinese 
government especially wished to impress with an exalted notion of 
* In the year 1743 the population of China, according to the Missionaries, amounted 
to 150,265,475; in 1761, according to Father Allerstan, to 198,214,552; in 1794, ac- 
cording to the statement given to Lord Macartney, to 330,000,000; in 1817, when Lord 
Amherst’s Embassy was at Canton, the most generally received calculation as applicable 
to the present state of China, was that of Father Amiot, taken in 177 7, which gave the 
population at 197,000,000. A gentleman highly competent to form an opinion on this 
subject estimated it much lower. 
