Greek Kalends. The huge embankments, built to confine it to a given
course, are continually being forced by any unusual press of extra
water, with enormous damage to property and great loss of life, and from
time to time this river has been known to change its route altogether,
suddenly diverging, almost at a right angle. Up to the year 1851 the
mouth of the river was to the south of the Shantung promontory, about
lat. 34 N.; then, with hardly any warning, it began to flow to the
north-east, finding an outlet to the north of the Shantung promontory,
about lat. 38 N.

A certain number of connecting links have been formed between the chief
lines of water communication, in the shape of artificial cuttings; but
there is nothing worthy the name of canal except the rightly named Grand
Canal, called by the Chinese the "river of locks," or alternatively the
"transport river," because once used to convey rice from the south to
Peking. This gigantic work, designed and executed in the thirteenth
century by the Emperor Kublai Khan, extended to about six hundred
and fifty miles in length, and completed an almost unbroken water
communication between Peking and Canton. As a wonderful engineering feat
it is indeed more than matched by the famous Great Wall, which dates
back to a couple of hundred years before Christ, and which has been
glorified as the last trace of man's handiwork on the globe to fade from
the view of an imaginary person receding into space. Recent exploration
shows that this wall is about eighteen hundred miles in length,
stretching from a point on the seashore somewhat east of Peking, to the
northern frontier of Tibet. Roughly speaking, it is twenty-two feet in
height by twenty feet in breadth; at intervals of a hundred yards are
towers forty feet high, the whole being built originally of brick, of
which in some parts but mere traces now remain. Nor is this the only
great wall; ruins of other walls on a considerable scale have lately