gtze on the borders of Tonquin, where there is a branch of the
Imperial Maritime Customs of China, is a journey of eight days over an
easy road. Four days from Mungtze is Laokai on the Red River, a river
which is navigable by boat or steamer to Hanoi, the chief river port of
Tonquin. In the middle of 1889 the French river steamer, _Le Laokai_,
made the voyage from Hanoi to Laokai in sixty hours.

From Yunnan City to Bhamo on the Irrawaddy, in British Burma, is a
difficult journey of thirty-three stages over a mountainous road which
can never by any human possibility be made available for other traffic
than caravans of horses or coolies on foot. The natural highway of
Central and Southern Yunnan is by Tonquin, and no artificial means can
ever alter it. At present Eastern Yunnan sends her trade through the
provinces of Kweichow and Hunan to the Yangtse above Hankow, or via the
two Kuangs to Canton. Shortness of distance, combined with facility of
transport, must soon tap this trade or divert it into the highways of
Tonquin. Northern Yunnan must send her produce and receive her imports,
via Szechuen and the Yangtse. As for the trade of Szechuen, the richest
of the provinces of China, no man can venture to assert that any other
trade route exists, or can ever be made to exist, than the River
Yangtse; and all the French Commissioners in the world can no more alter
the natural course of this trade than they can change the channel of the
Yangtse itself.

I am not, of course, the first distinguished visitor who has been in
Yunnan City. Marco Polo was here in 1283, and has left on record a
description of the city, which, in his time, was known by the name of
Yachi. Jesuit missionaries have been propagating the faith in the
province since the seventeenth century. But the distinction of being the
first European traveller, not a missionary priest, to visit the city
since the time of Marco Polo rests with Captain Doudart de la Gree of
the French Navy, who was here in 1867.

Margary, the British Consul, who met a cruel death at Manwyne, passed
through Yunnan in 1875 on his famous journey from Hankow; and two years
later the tardy mission under Grosvenor, with the brilliant Baber as
interpreter, and Li Han Chang, the brother of Li Hung Chang, as delegate
for the Chinese, arrived here in the barren hope of bringing his
murderers to justice.

Hosie, formerly H.B.M. Consul in Chungking, and well known as a
traveller in Western China,