These journeys in China [concluding in 1897], of which the following pages are the record, were undertaken for recreation and interest solely, after some months of severe travelling in Korea. I had no intention of writing a book, and it was not till I came home, and China came very markedly to the front, and friends urged upon me that my impressions of the Yangtze Valley might be a useful contribution to popular knowledge of that much-discussed region, that I began to arrange my materials in their present form. They consist of journal letters, photographs, and notes from a brief diary.

In correcting them, and in the identification of places, not an easy matter, I have been much indebted to the late Captain Gill's River of Golden Sand, The Gorges of the Yangtze, by Mr. A. Little, three papers on “Exploration in Western China,” by Mr. Colborne Baber, in the Geographical Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, and very specially to the official reports of H.B.M.'s Consuls at the Yangtze ports. I have denied myself the pleasure of reading any of the recent literature on China, and it was only when my task was done that I glanced over some of the later chapters in The Break Up of China, and China in Transformation. For a great part of my inland journey I have been unable to find any authorities to refer to, and as regards personal observation I agree sadly with the dictum of Socrates— “The body is a hindrance to acquiring knowledge, and sight and hearing are not to be trusted.”