The Sun.
London, England, 1857-11-18 00:00:00

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description. I can only pause, however, to say a
word about the batteries. They are built of stone,
and some of them have very powerful guns, but
the wonder is that their armament has not long
ago been stolen by the pirates and convoy lorchas.
I have visited them all in different excursions down
the river. There is no guard-house, no magazine,
no sponge-rammer or worm; the iron guns and the
stone walls make up the battery. A naval officer
who accomponied me in one of my wanderings was
positively distressed at the forlorn condition of an
English-cast 32-pounder 13 feet long, and weighing
4 tons, so mounted that a charge of a pound of pow-
der would have thrown it from its rotten carriage.
I believe he would have provided the poor gun with
a decent carriage at his own expense, even it he
knew that he must meet its fire next day, so indig-
nant was he that a good gun should be so shame-
fully treated.
At the mouth of the Yuog we come to the city of
Chinghai with its enormous fleet of junks which
crowd the river, and its extensive artificial sea
beach of hewn granite. Here are those extraordi-
nary natural fortifications which the Chinese at-
tempted to utilise in the last war, and this was the
scene of themost tremendousslaughter that occurred.
The mouth of the Yung is beset by rocky islets and
sunken shoals, which make the approach difficult
and the channels intricate. Each shore is com-
manded by a high conical hill. That on the left. is
surmounted by a stone tower, that on the right by
a fort and a josshouse. On a former occasion I
passed a night and two days in that Pagan temple.
I slept, wrappd in my.eloak, a 1; the feet of a ter-
rible Indian god. All night long the Abbot in his
mitre sat upon his throne turning his back upon a
gigantic idol of " the Queen of Heaven,". and his
priests sat round the table before him. A thou-
, sand little dishes, each containing some article of
vegetable food curiously cooked, preserved, or made
into sweetmeats, covered not only the table, but
other temporary scaffoldings erected for the pur-
pose throughout the temple. It was a great cere-
mony, with a highly emblematical ritual. The
prayer was evidently for a favourable harvest., for
every fruit was taken up and blessed and chanted
over. The picturesque scene, the monotonous mut-
terings, and perhaps also the mosquitos kept me
awake till past midnight. When 1 awoke in the
morning the sun was invading my corridor, and
priests, aLd food, and scaffoldings, and tables had
all vanished. But the old Indian god scowled upon
us as ridiculously fierce as ever. Alas his divine
scowl had not scared away the mosquitoes.
From the embrasures on tke top of this Jess-
house Fort I could look down upon the scene of
that terrible carnage, when in the last war the
Chinese army of ten thousand men were routed in
ten minutes, when the flying multitude was arrested
by a line of bayonets, and when before the slaughter
could be stayed one-half the number either perished
by the steel or were forced into the broad river.
This lesson, repeated at Ningpo, and again on the
hills beyond, has never been forgotten.
In the Josshouse-fort there is one gun, mounted,
probably as an alarm gun. There is another sunk
half-way in the earth, with a British spike in it.
These are the defences of the mouth of the Yung.
At four o'clock in the morning we were tacking
through the islands ; at 10 we cast anchor in the
harbour of Chosen. We are accustomed in England
to think of Chusan as a fine, large island, open to
the Chinese seas, where you may see the sun, with
purple-coloured face, lift up his head from the dis-
tant waters. So upon its eastern side it probably is ;
not so as we are in the habit of approaching it. The
harbour of Tinghai is a land-locked strait, about
three-quarters of a mile across—not unlike the
Menai in some places. You might be in a made-
ra• e sized river ; you have come in through a
labyrinth of narrow channels, and you see no evi-
(fele° of an open sea. Many a city upon a Chinese
river looks mere like a seaport than this famous
port and harbour of Tinghai.
Nothing can be more picturesque to look upon
than the mountains and valleys of this fair island,
which now occupies all scope of view upon our left.
Gradual elevator's, clothed with small hamlets and
many-coloured vegetation, swell from t e strait,
affording charming sites f r barracks and hospitals
and head-quarter houses. Away behind the in-
terior hills rise into peaks on which the clouds are
resting. Narrow gorges Kid deep valleys run far
up inland, offering shady retreats in hot summer
months and fertile fields in every season.
The least pleasant is the fist on which the city
stands. Opposite to the spot where we cast anchor
the hills retire from the strait and form an amphi-
theatre. The interval between their base and the
water is a semicircle. Let the hills represent the
arc of a strung bow and the strait represent the
string. The area between is the swampy marsh
upon which the city of Tinghai stands, surrounded
by paddy-fields and moist grounds. Just at that
point of the siring where the archer would fix the
notch of his arrow there is a hill which nature
seems to have placed there to command and protect
the strait.

Such is the natural site of the land at the port of
Chusan. Along the shore of the strait, to the full
extent of the string of our bow, runs a green em-
bankment. You would think it a dam thrown up
as a protection against high tides, but that at regu-
lar intervals embrasures are left. The hill which
stands in the centre of the chord of our arc has been
fortified with walls and parapets of stone masonry ;
arid it is still surmounted by that same Josshouse
which 17 years ago obtained for it the name of Joss-
house Hill. There are stone batteries also upon
several of the islets ; all the narrow channels gra
thus commanded, and there is a large battery far
up the valley.
Except that the harbour contains, instead of a
Mandarin fleet, some 60 small trading junks, the
place must now look much as it did when our fleet
first sailed in—when the Chinese Admiral so feel-
ingly expostulated with us upon the injustice of
revenging insults put upon us by the Cantonese by
slaughtering the defenders of those weak intreuch-
ruents—when the old man, with a dignity and cou-
rage worthy of a better fate, acknowledged that our
power was too great to allow him to hope for suc-
cess, but declaring that his orders and his duty en-
joined him to die at his post, went smiling down
the side of our flagship, resigned to meet the doom
which too surely awaited hun in its most painful
form on the morrow.

If I recall the memory of these painful scenes
it is to protest against their recurrence. If these
places are to be again occupied let it be done sud-
denly, before any peremptory orders for a desperate
defence can arrive from Pekin. Not that Tinghai
is, under proper conditions, incapable of defence.
Garrisoned by English troops, it is difficult to con-
ceive a place more impregnable. Approached by
narrow rock-bound channels, covered by command-
ing heights, and having its own citadel hill, it is
formed for a place of strength ; but the Chinese
at Chusan seem to have learned only one lesson
from the last war—the inutility of all defences.
Yes : I think they have learnt one other lesson ; it
is that British dollars follow hard upon British
bayonets. I landed and walked along the embank-
ment ; there was not a gun. I olimbed the Joss-
house Hill. The masses of masonry that look so
imposing from below are all loose blocks which a
shot would topple over ; still no gun. In the Joss-
house was an old priest muttering and beating
upon his little drum, another smoking his pipe,
and a third asleep. A half-starved dog seemed
perishing under the same vice of idleness which per-
vades the place. His diet in a Buddhist temple
could not be very succulent, and his skin was worn
raw from lying all day long upon the stone floor.
Sloth had eaten into his bones. Two or three
Chinamen, sailors from the junks, were venting
their " Ey yaw," as they examined the representa-
tions of the punishments of the Buddhist Hell. Not
without reason, for the Joss-house of Tinghai is
richer than any temple I have seen in ingenious tor-
tures. The kings of Hell sit in judgment like
Chinese mandarins. The executioners are braying

the victims in mortars, boiling them in furnaces,

skinning them with knives, throwing them to tigers,
squeezing them between boards, cutting them up
and hanging the bits on hooks, beating them with
mallets, tormenting them with hot irons—all re-
presented in coloured plaster groups with a horrible

fidelity of detail, and.with an ingenuity of concep-
tion as to the instruments employed, which would
argue that the Buddhist priests are no contemptible
mechanics, and that it is well for the barbarians
they are not employed in the invention of warlike
tonnentaria.

No one, not even the deg, took any notice of me.
I looked from the top of the hill down into the city
of Tinghai—into the suburb which extends from
it up to the water side—upon the pagoda aid the
Artillery-hill—and upon the English tombs which
cover the descent of the hill upon which I was
standing. Everything was swamp and paddy.
Everything had the same listless, unprepared,
care-abandoned air. There was not a gun
visible from the spot, not a muzzle lurking behind
any ono of the hundred of embrasures which I
could count around. A few junks were working
up the canal or river which runs from the harbour
up to the city, and some others were unloading Joss-
house furniture upon the wharf below me. I had
heard men of the last war talk of gravel walks and