nounce a funeral oration over the departing glories of the port of Yingkou. For in spite of all the unkindly blows from fate and from the hands of railway-builders, the tonnage figures of Yingkou for 1922 show 153 ships of the total tonnage of 167,095 engaged in foreign trade, and 933 ships of the total tonnage of 828,752 in coastal trade. Her total import, export, and coastal trade amounted in value to no less than 59,505,820 Hk. taels that year.

THE YALU RIVER

The Yalu, as we saw in Chapter II, rises in the Changpai range, flows southwesterly, marking Manchuria from Chosen, and finally empties into the Bay of Chosen. Its 500-mile course is even more unkindly to navigation than that of the Liao. The lightest possible Chinese junks alone can hope to reach Maoerhshan, 270 miles from its mouth. Unlike the Liao, its current is swift at many places, making it much more trying to negotiate by anything but rafts. It has all the disadvantages of the Liao in winter time, only they are aggravated. It closes up solid for at least four months every year with ice. In summer time, in the months of July and August, it has an evil reputation among the boatmen for violent and wicked floods. In autumn its waters fall so low that it becomes one continuous flow of boatmen's curses.

With all its sins, the Yalu is even in these advanced days of ours the one and only artery of transportation for the entire section of Manchuria it drains. In its upper reaches the country is so mountainous that the only means of transporting any freight at all is on the backs of pack horses or of patient coolies; and that is slower and more precarious and expensive than wrestling with the swift currents of the Yalu. In the plains overland transport by cart cannot compete with the Yalu water

way, which is incomparably cheaper. It so happens also that the chief, almost the only, freight that comes down the river is timber, for which the Yalu is famous throughout the Far East. For this commodity the stream is navigable for a considerable distance above Maoerhshan. By the time the river reaches Maoerhshan, however, it has annexed more than twenty-four streamlets from the Manchurian side and four fairly good-sized mountain currents from the Chosen side; and as a natural result the river takes on the aspects of an avenue through which commerce might be persuaded to parade. Moreover its gradient becomes gentler. From this point on the size of the lumber rafts is doubled. Boats with a cargo capacity of 35 piculs make this point regularly in the open season. From where the waters of the Hunkiang flow into the Yalu the river becomes much wider and deeper. From old Wiji on down to its mouth, where it is so wide that one can hardly tell where the Yalu ends and the sea begins, the river presents the aspects of a great trade route.

The commonest boats on the Yalu are light junks called tsaotze, carrying from 40 to 130 piculs. When they go up the stream they are loaded lightly as the usual thing, having only the sail and the sculls to work their way up the stream, which is not at all a simple task on the Yalu. On their way downstream they carry full cargo whenever the volume of water permits them to do so. These junks rarely sail below Antung; they ply back and forth between Antung and the points up the river, going as far up as Maoerhshan at times.

PORT OF ANTUNG

The Port of Antung stands some thirty miles from the old port of Tatungkou at the mouth of the Yalu. It holds a position in relation to the Yalu similar to

that of the port of Yingkou with the Liao. In the days of Emperor Tungchi (1862-1874 A.D.) a steady stream of fishermen and ginseng-hunters from Shantung came trickling into this section on the Yalu. They came here on the same outward tide of migration which peopled the valley of the Liao as we have seen. Soon the town of Shahotzu sprang up. That is the old town of Antung of to-day. It went on expanding until in 1876 the Chinese Government saw the wisdom of establishing in this old town a District Office and called it Antung-hsien. From that point on the development of the port was exceedingly rapid. Not long after that the exploitation of Yalu timber began to attract the attention of foreigners and Chinese alike. Antung was opened to foreign trade and residence through a commercial treaty between the United States and China that was signed on October 8th, 1903, and came into force on January 13th, 1904, when ratifications were exchanged at Washington.

After the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 the complexion of the port of Antung completely changed, though up-river transportation facilities and conditions on the Yalu have not much changed since the days of Tungchi. Only, of course, there is a tremendous increase of the lumber rafts. Those that come thundering down the river these days were entirely beyond the wildest imaginings of half a century ago. It is true also that when the Japanese came into this section of Manchuria following the Russian war, and took over the timber trade in connection with the Chinese, they tried quite a number of new types of boats on the Yalu. One of them was a Japanese boat which had been used with success on swift streams in Japan like the River Fuji. This type of boat proved effective in a marked degree. It succeeded in navigating the river far beyond Maoerhshan, going up as far as Keizanchin. The great Yalu Timber Company, the scope and activity of which we described

at length in Chapter I, also tried a very light river steamer, a curious-looking craft which had the appearance of a couple of flat-bottomed torpedo boats joined together. It drew less than fifteen inches of water and had a speed of ten knots. It was a success for a short distance up the stream but evidently was not profitable for a long stretch of the river.

THE SUNGARI

The Sungari is quite different from both the Liao and the Yalu, as we noted in Chapter II. Of the entire length of the stream from its sources in the Changpai ranges to where it joins the Amur, more than 1,130 miles, all but about sixty miles in its upper reaches is navigable by junks and river steamers of light draft. As a trade route it is far from attaining the importance of the Liao. It cannot be compared even with the Yalu. It flows northward toward the arctic sea, while trade and population came into Manchuria from the south. That of course is the chief reason why the stately flow of the Sungari does not loom as impressively as the lessfavored streams which empty into the southern seas upon whose shores stand the populous consuming ports of South China. Only eleven of all the Districts of Kirin and Amur Provinces which it waters are any way developed even to this day. That takes in hardly one half the territory through which it flows. The rest of the region that is to say the greater portion of its valley-is covered with forest areas and virgin steppes all innocent of the plough.

Yet the story of the Sungari as a trade route is by no means brief. As early as 1658 the Chinese Government built on its bank some forty fighting ships to meet the invasion of the Russians from the north. That spot was called "Chuang-chang"-which means a ship-build