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58 without making mention of the brick-tea industry, more especially since at two other places only, Fuchow and Kiukiang, can a similar process be seen. At Hankow three Russian steam factories are engaged in pressing tea-leaf and tea-dust into bricks and tablets for the markets of Siberia, Mongolia, and Turkestan, at the rate of 20,000 tons a-year. It has been said that tea-dust also finds its way across the Pacific, where it fulfils the useful purpose of improving the colour—and inferentially the age—of American whisky; but then it has also been said by the ribald that soot is employed to perform a similar office for the tablets of Hankow tea.

Beyond Hankow the yellow waters of the great river stretch away westward like a ribbon, between low-lying plains cultivated with cotton. The resources of a river steamer are not great, and the lack of interest is doubly emphasised by the dull monotony of the landscape, broken only by the occasional graceful outline of argosies of white-sailed junks. We steamed uneventfully forward till the morning of the third day, when we found ourselves