I endeavored to get the details of the population of the province of Szech’wan, the variability of the reports providing an excellent illustration of the uncertainty impending over everything statistical in China—­estimates ranged from thirty-five to eighty millions.

The surface of this province is made up of masses of rugged mountains, through which the Yangtze has cut its deep and narrow channel.  The area is everywhere intersected by steep-sided valleys and ravines.  The world-famed plain of Chen-tu, the capital, is the only plain of any size in the province, the system of irrigation employed on it being one of the wonders of the world.  Every food crop flourishes in Szech’wan, an inexhaustible supply of products of the Chinese pharmacopoeia enrich the stores and destroy the stomachs of the well-to-do; and with the exception of cotton, all that grows in Eastern China grows better in this great Garden of the Empire.  Its area is about that of France, its climate is even superior—­a land delightfully accidentee.  Among the minerals found are gold, silver, cinnabar, copper, iron, coal and petroleum; the chief products being opium, white wax, hemp, yellow silk.  Szech’wan is a province rich in salt, obtained from artesian borings, some of which extend 2,500 feet below the surface, and from which for centuries the brine has been laboriously raised by antiquated windlass and water buffalo.

The best conditions of Chinese inns are far and away worse than anything the traveler would be called upon to encounter anywhere in the British Isles, even in the most isolated places in rural Ireland.  There can be no comparison.  And my reader will understand that there is much which the European misses in the way of general physical comfort and cleanliness.  Sanitation is absent in toto.  Ordinary decency forbids one putting into print what the uninitiated traveler most desires to know—­if he would be saved a severe shock at the outset; but everyone has to go through it, because one cannot write what one sees.  All travelers who have had to put up at the caravanseries in Central and Western China will bear me out in my assertion that all of them reek with filth and are overrun by vermin of every description.  The traveler whom misfortune has led to travel off the main roads of Russia may probably hesitate in expressing an opinion as to which country carries off the palm for unmitigated filth; but, with this exception, travelers in the Eastern Archipelago, in Central Asia, in Africa among the wildest tribes, are pretty well unanimous that compared with all these for dirt, disease, discomfort, an utter lack of decency and annoyance, the Chinese inn holds its own.  And in no part of China more than in Szech’wan and Yuen-nan is greater discomfort experienced.