Page:Ningpo to Shanghai.djvu/19

Rh restrain the streams within narrower channels. Rather to want of pecuniary means than to lack of engineering skill, this inability has to be attributed. From Tching ko to Haou loong the distance is 6 miles, almost due South.

Haou loóng within the memory of the oldest inhabitant in 1857 had never been visited by foreigners, and that old gentleman, the oldest inhabitant, one of several of eighty years of age and upwards, was a patriarch of the Clan Tzing;&mdash;a clan showing in its ancestral Hall the tablets of twenty generations. The tablets spoken of,&mdash;though alike in shape to the tablets usually seen, viz pieces of half-inch durable board, about a foot long and two or three inches wide, with a small stand,&mdash;are here painted green and picked with gold; the characters denoting the name of the honoured spirit being also gilt. Of one thousand families in Haou loong seven hundred glory in the name of Tzing.

The tax on land here is 450 Cash per year per mow (6) or, according to the rate of currency, about fourteen Shillings per acre. Neighbouring villages pay 300 cash per mow only,&mdash;the villagers having objected, vi et armis, to pay more. But the Tzings are loyal men. One of their clan, in 1856, received the degree of Sutsai. They look upward for the Celestial glance, and, like sycophants all the world over, bear uncomplainingly the burdens their more independent countrymen resist. Four hundred and fifty cash a mow, however, is not so high a rate as is levied in other parts of the province. On a professed annual value of 6,000 cash, ten per cent is known to be taken. (7) That the land tax generally is deemed a trying burden is evidenced by the fact that in many cases, as told of by Dr Medhurst in the account of his visit to Teen muh san in 1854, and by other writers, the landholders 