Page:Inside Canton.djvu/21

20 The next day with the rising tide we cleared the ports of the Tiger (Bocca Tigris, as the navigators say). This narrow pass obtains its name from an island which protects the entrance, and of which the double summit has some resemblance to a kneeling camel. From this moment, the banks of the Tchou-kiang became narrower and narrower, and we arrived before the village of Whampoa, where, a few days before, the French plenipotentiary and the viceroy of the two Kuangs had signed the treaty which was to bind France and China together for ten thousand years.

Whampoa is situated on the slope of a vast hill, and European ships have been accustomed to cast anchor at its foot. It is in some sort a succursal to the port of Canton, which the avaricious mandarins have ceded to the barbarians. One day this concession will be real, and I am convinced that England will command sooner or later at Whampoa, as she commands now at Hong-kong. The landscape we discovered in ascending the river is unparalleled in richness; as far as the eye can see there are nothing but rice plantations, bordered in the most remarkable way by litchi and banana trees, in the midst of which groups of trees stand out, casting their shade over pagodas, temples, hamlets, and villages without number. This luxuriousness of growth has nothing in common with the unregulated fertility of land left entirely to itself; here nature has submitted with