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

Liao served the economic life of South Manchuria as nothing else did. In the high-water months of June, July, and August, there were reported no less than 10,000 vessels sailing up and down the stream; and even in other months there were always from six to eight thousand boats crowding its course. These junks made from four to eight trips a season, doing the important work of feeding the international business of the only port open to foreign trade in those days.

RIVER BASINS

These river systems give Manchuria her five major river basins.

The Liao Plain is by far the most populous and important of them all. Its area, as has been pointed out, includes one fifth of the Province of Mukden and stretches from northeast to southwest. The mountain spurs, which come almost together not far from Tungkiangkou, divide the plain into northern and southern sections. The Northern Plain is the extensive expanse of level land drained by both the West and the East Liao and their countless branches. On the north it touches the edge of the Central Plain-which we shall examine later. The soil is clayey and black and exceedingly fertile. But, unlike the southern portion of the Liao Basin, a large part of the Northern Plain is still left in its virgin state as grazing-ground for cattle. For the most part it is covered with dense growths of grasses and other vegetation.

When one passes south through Tungkiangkou into the valley of the Great Liao-as the union of the western and the eastern branch of the Liao is often called -a picture of the farming industry of the patient Chinese greets the eye. Here the fields bearing various crops spread to the horizon through all points of the

compass, broken only here and there by a cluster of farmers' huts hidden behind high, crenelated walls-for Manchuria, with rural peace brooding upon it, is still, like the rest of bandit-infested China, under constant threat of sudden raids by the mounted bandits called Hunghutze. Here along the lower reaches of the Liao was witnessed the invasion of the first flying army of Chinese farmers centuries ago when Manchuria was still a closed and forbidden land.

The quality of the soil and the agricultural development of this valley will be dealt with in detail in a chapter on farms and farmers. It is by far the richest section of Manchuria at present. About the only serious disadvantage of this section is the periodic flood from which it suffers. The great Liao has been left in its primitive state, allowed to overflow at its sweet pleasure in the rainy season. The valley, naturally, is covered more thickly than any other in Manchuria by farm villages; and they are more prosperous than in other districts.

There are more roads in this valley than in the other four plains. In winter when everything is frozen hard these roads serve the traffic after a fashion. In summer, in the wet season, they turn into so many canals of deep, ever-churned mud which beggars all adjectives. With all that, there is no question that this plain enjoys the best transportation facilities of any in Manchuria. For the great South Manchuria Railway covers its eastern section; and through a portion of its western section passes the Chinese line of Peking-Mukden railway.

The so-called Central Plain of Manchuria is that level land which rolls from the valley of the Itung River westward out to the great plains of Mongolia. Around the towns of Changchun-the northern terminus of the South Manchuria line-and Nungan the land is high, but the rest is a stretch of low land. Most of this plain is good farm land, although there are sections of it which

suffer from an excessive amount of alkali. The plain reaches down to the valley of the East Liao River on the south. Here a great section, which has been incorporated into Manchuria under the Chinese administrations instead of the Mongol princes, is now under cultivation.

The valleys of the Nonni and the Hulan-both of which flow into the Sungari-stretch away from the southwestern spurs of the Small Khingan Range (which forms the northeastern screen of the northern plain of Manchuria) westward to the foothills of the Great Khingans. Upon this plain stand the important cities of Tsitsihar and Suihua. Southward it extends to the valley of the Sungari. All this Northern Plain is much higher than the valley of the Liao. It is a sloping plateau. Only in the neighborhood of Anta one sees a stretch of low land, and between that and Tsitsihar there is marsh land covered with reeds and flags.

In this section the population becomes thicker as one proceeds to the southern edge of it. The Hulan, the Nonni, and their branches afford the chief transportation facilities in this section of the country.

Over a large section of the valley of the Nonni the soil is not of the best, containing more or less alkali. In some sections indeed it is saturated with soda and other salts. So much so that the extraction of soda from the soil is one of the ancient industries of Amur Province. The soda thus extracted from the soil of the steppes of this section is shipped down to Tientsin, Yingkou, and Dairen in the shape of bricks or cakes to be exported to the dyeing and silk districts of North China. Soil of this character of course is not fit for cultivation. Therefore and naturally it is largely left in its wild state. The fact that the major portion of this valley has been under the administration of Mongol chieftains accounts also for its undeveloped condition. To add to its trou