CHAP. XVII - TRAVELLING AND PORTERAGE IN CHINA

Summary

Scarcely one Englishman in a thousand, doubtless, puts himself to the trouble of considering what means the Chinese have of travelling in their native country, or perhaps cares whether they move about at all. Yet it cannot but be an interesting question how so vast a territory is traversed by its teeming population, and in what way the merchandise of so active and commercial a people is conveyed to and fro. The true state of the case may be told in a few words. There is perhaps no spot on the face of the globe in which locomotion is so general and traffic so large, and yet where such clumsy and imperfect means of conveyance are provided, either for men or for goods.

Communication is carried on in China, as in most partially civilized countries, by means of roads and rivers or canals. But of roads, there is nothing at this moment that deserves the name. Traces are everywhere to be seen upon the great thoroughfares of the elaborately constructed highways of better days, but these are now mere broken tracks, obstructed throughout much of their course by the very stones which once constituted their source of utility and beauty. Bridges too, many of them admirable as works of art, and others curious from their rough and massive character, span wide and rapid streams, but like everything else in China, they tell the same sad story of past energy and present decay.