described in both
ancient and modern works as 'the unchanging country,' and it is a common
fallacy that the China of to-day is exactly what it was a thousand years
ago; that foreign trade and intercourse have had and can have no effect
upon the manners or ideas of the people, and that the descriptions we
read of Chinese towns and their inhabitants, written twenty years ago,
would answer for the same places to-day. In a measure this is true, but
it is not true of the cities which have been opened to foreign trade, or
in fact of any of the Chinese cities where foreigners have been settled
since the war of 1857 and treaties of 1858.

Since that time the progress of Shanghai, Foo-Chow, Amoy, and Hong-Kong
(which last, however, is purely a British colony) has been amazing, and
men who visited China ten years ago would not recognize these places.
Indeed, it is not unlikely, with the rapid extension of Chinese trade,
and the removal of the prejudices of the people, that the history of
Chinese cities, like those of the Western States and California, will
have to be rewritten every ten years to be at all correct.

This is peculiarly the case in respect to Shanghai, which, from an
insignificant place, almost unknown in the western world, has sprung up
to an importance in trade surpassing that of any city on the China
coast. It has, from its proximity to the tea district, and easy
communication with the vast country watered by the Yang-tze river, taken
almost without an effort the great trade that once centred in Canton,
and every year shows a greater amount of tonnage in the Woosung river,
and larger exports of tea, silk, and cotton.

Approaching the entrance to the Woosung river from the Pacific, the
waters of the Yang-tze are plainly discernible at sixty to seventy miles
from its mouth, and when near the point where the ship's head is turned
from the broad current of the great river into that of the Woosung, a
thick, yellow mud rolls out with the tide, and discolors the water as
far as the eye can reach. It is like the waters of the Nile or the
Mississippi, turbulent in the great tideways, and heavy with the
coloring matter of the soil it has washed for thousands of miles. It is
evident that we are approaching a great commercial city, although for
miles we can see only a low coast, well cultivated, but without signs of
a town. The number of ships and steamers passing in and out on a fine
day would remind a New Yorker of the