commissioning our boat_. _Ceremonies at starting gorges trip_. _Raising
anchor, and our departure_.


Let no one who has been so far as Ichang, a thousand miles from the sea,
imagine that he has been into the interior of China.

It is quite an everyday trip. Modern steamers, with every modern
convenience and luxury, probably as comfortable as any river steamers in
the world, ply regularly in their two services between Shanghai and this
port, at the foot of the Gorges.

The Whang-poo looked like the Thames, and the Shanghai Bund like the
Embankment, when I embarked on board a Jap boat _en route_ for Hankow,
and thence to Ichang by a smaller steamer, on a dark, bitterly cold
Saturday night, March 6th, 1909. I was to travel fifteen hundred miles
up that greatest artery of China. The Yangtze surpasses in importance to
the Celestial Empire what the Mississippi is to America, and yet even
in China there are thousands of resident foreigners who know no more
about this great river than the average Smithfield butcher. Ask ten men
in Fleet Street or in Wall Street where Ichang is, and nine will be
unable to tell you. Yet it is a port of great importance, when one
considers that the handling of China's vast river-borne trade has been
opened to foreign trade and residence since the Chefoo Convention was
signed in 1876, that Ichang is a city of forty thousand souls, and has a
gross total of imports of nearly forty millions of taels.

Of Hankow, however, more is known. Here we landed after a four days'
run, and, owing to the low water, had to wait five days before the
shallower-bottomed steamer for the higher journey had come in. The city