h the Yangtze has cut its deep and narrow channel. The area
is everywhere intersected by steep-sided valleys and ravines. The
world-famed plain of Chen-tu, the capital, is the only plain of any
size in the province, the system of irrigation employed on it being one
of the wonders of the world. Every food crop flourishes in Szech'wan, an
inexhaustible supply of products of the Chinese pharmacopoeia enrich the
stores and destroy the stomachs of the well-to-do; and with the
exception of cotton, all that grows in Eastern China grows better in
this great Garden of the Empire. Its area is about that of France, its
climate is even superior--a land delightfully _accidentee_. Among the
minerals found are gold, silver, cinnabar, copper, iron, coal and
petroleum; the chief products being opium, white wax, hemp, yellow silk.
Szech'wan is a province rich in salt, obtained from artesian borings,
some of which extend 2,500 feet below the surface, and from which for
centuries the brine has been laboriously raised by antiquated windlass
and water buffalo.

The best conditions of Chinese inns are far and away worse than anything
the traveler would be called upon to encounter anywhere in the British
Isles, even in the most isolated places in rural Ireland. There can be
no comparison. And my reader will understand that there is much which
the European misses in the way of general physical comfort and
cleanliness. Sanitation is absent _in toto_. Ordinary decency forbids
one putting into print what the uninitiated traveler most desires to
know--if he would be saved a severe shock at the outset; but everyone
has to go through it, because one cannot write what one sees. All
travelers who have had to put up at the caravanseries in Central and
Western China will bear me out in my assertion that all of them reek
with filth and are overrun by vermin of every description. The traveler
whom misfortune has led to travel off the main roads of Russia may
probably hesitate in expressing an opinion as to which country carries
off the palm for unmitigated filth; but, with this exception, travelers
in the Eastern Archipelago, in Central Asia, in Africa among the wildest
tribes, are pretty well unanimous that compared with all these for dirt,
disease, discomfort, an utter lack of decency and annoyance, the Chinese
inn holds its own. And in no part of China more than in Szech'wan and
Yuen-nan is greater discomfort experienced.

The usual wooden bedstead sta