Whether Chung-king (altitude 1050 ft.) is approached from above or below, it is a most striking city. It is surprising to find, 1500 miles inland, a town of from 400,000 to 500,000 people, including 2500 Mohammedans, as the commercial capital of Western China, one of the busiest cities of the empire. Its founders chose a site on which there is no room for expansion, and its warehouses, guildhalls, hongs, shops, and the dwellings of rich and poor, are packed upon a steep sandstone reef or peninsula lying between the Yangtze and its great northern tributary, the Chia-ling, and rising from 100 to 400 feet above the winter level of these rivers. As I descended upon it down a somewhat turbulent rapid, which half filled the boat and drowned a fowl, it reminded me of Quebec, and made me think of the packed condition of Edinburgh when it was yet a walled city.

A noble-looking, grey city it is, with towers, pavilions, and temples rising above its massive, irregular, crenelated grey wall, with broad, steep, and crowded flights of stone stairs, twenty feet broad, leading up from the river to the gates, with an amphitheatre of wooded and richly cultivated hills rising steeply 1600 feet from the water for its background; the fleets of big junks, and craft of all descriptions, which lie crowded along its shores and in every adjacent bay and reach, and the life and movement on land and water, combining to form a noble and most striking spectacle.