Page:Through China with a camera.pdf/119

 indeed, nothing in the whole picture of this southern metropolis suggestive of a teeming land population, save the centre of the city itself. But to the south of the wall there is the broad Pearl river, and communicating with this stream a network of canals and creeks, the whole more densely populated perhaps than the city. In the boats which crowd these water- ways a vast number of families pass their lives, and subsist by carrying merchandise or conveying passengers to different parts of the province. The population of Canton is computed at about a million souls, although the official census returns it at a figure considerable higher.

As in Peking, so at Canton, the space within the walls is divided into two unequal parts, the one occupied nominally by the Tartar garrison and official residences only, and the other containing the abodes of the trading Chinese population. But the descendants of the old Tartar soldiers, too proud to labour, and too haughty to stoop themselves to the mean artifices of trade, have become impoverished in process of time, and have disposed of their lands and dwellings to their more industrious Chinese neighbours. As to the houses themselves, they every- where preserve one uniform low level, but the monotonous appear- ance thus produced is at rare intervals broken by some tall temple, which rears its carved and gilded roof from amid a grove of venerable trees, or by the nine-storied pagoda, or lofty quadrangular towers that mark the pawnshop sites. The pawnshops in this strange city rear their heads heavenwards as proudly as church steeples, and indeed at first we mistook them for temples. What was our surprise then, to discover in them the Chinese reproduction of that money-lending establishment which is found in the shady corners of our own bye-streets, beneath a modest trinity of gilded balls, and whose private side