194 
JOURNAL OF AN EMBASSY 
The quality of the article is coarse, and it suffers 
some injury from a long land-carriage. The an¬ 
nual importation was stated to me at twenty- 
seven thousand bundles, each worth about thirty 
ticals. This would make the value of the whole, 
in British money, about eighty-one thousand 
pounds sterling. The live animals imported are 
rather objects of curiosity than of trade ; they 
consist of dogs, pheasants, and ducks. 
The articles imported to China consist of raw 
cotton, ornamented feathers, esculent swallows’ 
nests, ivory, rhinoceros and deer’s horns, sapphires 
and noble serpentine, with a small quantity of 
British woollens. Raw cotton is by far the most 
considerable article. The amount was stated to 
me as low as twenty thousand bales of one hun¬ 
dred viss, or three hundred and sixty-five pounds 
each, or 7,300,000 lbs., and as high as fifty-seven 
thousand bales, or 20,805,000 lbs. ; the average 
is in round numbers 14,000,000 lbs. This is of 
three or four different qualities, and all freed 
from the seed. At the medium price of four 
hundred ticals per thousand viss, given to me 
by some Chinese merchants engaged in the trade, 
the value of this property would be 228,000/. 
sterling. The feathers, chiefly those of a blue 
jay, are intended to ornament the dresses of cere¬ 
mony of the Chinese Mandarines. The birds are 
hunted for the purpose of this traffic throughout 
the Burmese dominions; and I am told that the 
