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SUI FU TO YÜN-NAN FU.

to the kindness of Mr Faers, my preparations for resuming the road once more were soon completed. The smiling hills and valleys of Ssŭch'uan, with its teeming population, its enormously developed agricultural wealth, its vast neglected mineral resources, and its magnificent waterways, lay behind: before me stretched a different land—the rugged gorges and plateaux of Yün-nan, sparsely populated, ill-developed, a land the despair alike of the merchant and the engineer, yet a land which, on account of its geographical position, has succeeded in setting England and France bidding for the privilege of building railways across its rugged surface and striving to build up trade upon its ungracious soil.