neighborhood of the City of Kirin its valley is narrow. As one travels down its course he finds its right bank is edged by spurs of mountain ranges covered with dense forests. As the stream sweeps out upon the level plains, it divides into innumerable branches. The main stream broadens at some points to nearly 1,800 feet. Near Petuna, where it has almost completed the circuit of the western portion of Kirin Province, it makes a long detour before swallowing the Nonni, the largest of its tributaries. Here it attains the depth of 20 to 40 feet, and at the widest point measures about 180 yards. So it reaches the City of Harbin, the greatest distributing center of North Manchuria. Thence it makes its northeasterly way until it empties into the Amur.

It is this river system of the Sungari and the Nonni which justifies all sorts of extravagant prophecies about the great wheatfields of North Manchuria.

The Tumen and the Yalu are the two great streams which mark Manchuria from Chosen. The Tumen rises along the southern slopes of the eastern skirt of the Changpai range and flows on through some 750 miles into the Sea of Japan.

The Yalu is better known to America and Europe than most of the rivers of the Far East-largely because the men under Kuroki in the historic days of the RussoJapanese war crossed it in a dramatic manner and proved to the skeptical world that the East could beat the Occident at its own game of steel and explosives. Aside from that, the position of the river adds to the importance of the stream. It rises from the western slope of the Paitou-shan-White Head Mountain-in the Changpai range and rushes down to the Yellow Sea, past the old and new city of Antung. Antung is increasing in the magnitude of its foreign and domestic trade with the years that come and go.

As a navigable stream the Yalu has its limitations. It

is shallow for the most part, and its current is swift. It is some 500 miles long; but only light Chinese junks could make their way up to Maoehrshan, less than 270 miles from its mouth. Even near Antung the depth of its water does not always permit small coasting steamers to enter and clear with freedom. Only a light-draft steamer of high speed can navigate the stream with safety.

The Yalu attained a high fame largely because of the timber in its upper reaches, which has already been told of in Chapter I of this book.

On its way to the sea it annexes the Hun-kiang and the Aiho on the Manchurian side and the Jiho-ko and the Unjo-ko from the Chosen side.

But after all, it is the Liao River which is the Mississippi, the Nile, the Ganges, the Yangtze of Manchuria. The Liao is made up of two major streams: the Main or Western Liao, which bears the name of Sharamulen while it drains the plains of Inner Eastern Mongolia and the northwestern corner of the Province of Mukden, and the Eastern Liao, which rises in the northwestern spur of the Changpai range and rushes down through innumerable ravines till it meets and mingles with the Main or Western Liao near Sankiangkou-some 200 miles in length. Together they form the Great Liao which waters the fertile fields of the Province of Mukden. Its valley includes more than one fifth of the total area of Mukden Province-practically the whole of the cultivated fields.

The town of Chengchiatun, the present terminus of the Ssupingkai-Taonan Railway, Chantu, Kaiyuan, Fakumen, Tiehling, Hsinmin, Mukden, Liaoyang, and Newchwang are some of the more important cities and towns which the river and its tributaries, such as the Hun and the Taitse, have called into being. They cluster within

short distances from the river banks like so many precious fruits on the widespreading branches of a mother tree.

The Liao empties into the Gulf of Chihli. Fourteen miles from its mouth stands the port of Yingkou, the Newchwang of British treaty and British writers. The port was opened to foreign trade through the Treaty of Tientsin of 1858, ratified at Peking in October, 1860. The Treaty of Tientsin which the British forced from China was utterly innocent of the present Port of Yingkou. It meant Newchwang, an old town some 50 miles farther up the river. Perhaps the British were ignorant about the geographical details of this particular section of Manchuria when they signed the treaty. Perhaps the men who came to establish the British consulate liked Yingkou better than the old town of Newchwang. Anyway, with the usual British contempt of all oriental races, including the Celestials, they put their Consulate at Yingkou and called it Newchwang, without ceremony, without geographical conscience, with only their habitual arrogant readiness to take what they wished and "let the heathen rage."

Since then, up until very recent years, all the trade returns, travel books, official documents, knew the Port of Yingkou under the name of Newchwang. For the convenience of foreign shipping and foreign trade purposes, there is no question that the old town of Newchwang would have been a sad joke compared to Yingkou. Anyway when the first British consul hoisted his flag at Yingkou he must have felt a thrill chasing up and down his spine. For, in precisely the same manner, and at much the same sort of locality, the British had founded Calcutta, at the mouth of the Ganges, and Shanghai at the mouth of the greatest river in all China, the Yangtze. And for years and years after the establishment of the first British consulate at Yingkou the port

looked and acted as if it were going to be the one great entry port of all the hinterland of Manchuria and Mongolia.

Just as the Yangtze flows through the heart of Central China and through the most densely populated sections of the country, so also the Great Liao flows through the most fruitful, and therefore the most prosperous and populous, plains of Manchuria. For nearly 536 miles it has served as the one chief highway of traffic since days far beyond historic memories. Beans and grains, tobacco and hemp, and all the other agricultural products of Manchuria were wont to come down the river to the Port of Yingkou. And the junks which came down laden with the Manchurian products sailed back up the stream to their various home ports quite as heavily laden as on their outward journey with the cargoes of foreign and Chinese goods-sugar and salt and manufactured wares, mostly.

As early as 1861, when the first British Consul, Meadows, went there, he found the port doing a coastal business in the great Manchurian products—the soya beans and bean cakes. They were brought down the river in junks of six- to forty-ton capacity. At Yingkou the river junks transferred their cargoes to sea-going junks of more than 100 tons. They carried Manchurian products to the ports of South China and to the sugar plantations of the islands of the South Seas, which seemed to depend almost entirely on bean cake from Manchuria for fertilizer.

The Liao was a trying stream even for junks to negotiate. It was shallow, full of shoals. As a great trade highway for South Manchuria it had the grave drawback of being frozen tight four months every year. In the northern reaches the stream remained ice-tight fully half the year. But in the old days, when the trade of Manchuria lacked the proportions of the present, the