Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 1.djvu/111

 cause their facilities for the import and export of goods are better when no enclosure exists. There are 18,000 families at Ching-tê-chên. Some are large merchants whose dwellings occupy a vast space and contain a prodigious multitude of workmen. It is commonly said that the place has a million souls in it. For the rest, the town is at least a league in length, on the banks of a fine river. It is not merely a heap of houses, as might be supposed. The streets are as straight as a line. They intersect and cross each other at fixed distances. The whole space is occupied by them, and the houses are, if anything, too close together; the streets too narrow. Passing through them, one imagines oneself in the midst of a fair. On all sides are heard the cries of porters making their way along. The expense of living is much more considerable than at Ju-chou, for everything that is needed has to be imported, even to the wood for the kilns. Yet, despite the high cost of living, Ching-tê-chên is the asylum of a number of poor families who have not the means of subsisting in the neighbouring villages. Young people and men of the poorest physique find employment. Not even the blind and the deformed fail to make a living by grinding the colours. "In ancient times," says the history of Fu-liang, "Ching-tê-chên counted only three hundred porcelain kilns." At present it has fully three thousand. No wonder that conflagrations are often seen there, for which reason several temples have been erected to the God of Fire. The worship and the honours paid to this deity do not diminish the number of calamities. A short time ago, eight hundred houses were reduced to ashes. They will be quickly rebuilt, if one may judge by the multitude of carpenters and masons employed in the quarter. The profits made by letting shops render the Chinese very active in repairing losses of this kind. Ching-tê-chên is situated in a vast plain surrounded by high mountains. The mountain on the east, forming the city's background, takes the shape of a semi-circle on the outer side. From these hills issue two rivers which join. One of them is small, but the other is very large and forms a fine port, nearly a league long, in a vast basin where the