Page:A wandering student in the Far East vol.1 - Zetland.djvu/167

Rh mills of Bombay, to be woven into the common cloth which clothes the bulk of the province's 45,000,000 inhabitants, by the housewives of Ssŭch'uan. Numerous small towns are scattered along the road, their streets providing a common playground for children, dogs, pigs, and poultry, except when a market is being held, which is usually the case every fifth day, when they become choked with people from the districts round.

The population, which at a modest estimate is placed at 45,000,000 to-day, has increased rapidly during the past two centuries, for a census taken in the year 1710 gave a return of only 144,154 souls. This surprisingly small population in a province nearly three times the size of Great Britain was not, however, due to natural causes, but to a rebellion headed by three desperadoes, Li Tzu-ch'eng, Chang Hsien-chung, and Wang San-huai, in the declining years of the Ming dynasty. The most remarkable and, as Colborne Baber points out, ultimately almost the only figure in the story was Chang, whose taste for slaughter amounted almost to a passion. Some of the reforms