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Putting his forces in march, Hung made a remarkable progress of about one thousand miles to Woo-chang on the Yang-tse-Kiang and down that stream, the army fighting its way through all opposition. When towns and cities submitted their people were spared. Slaughter awaited those who resisted. Food and clothing were obtained by requisition on the people.
All around it were waterways leading to the sea, but the Grand Canal itself, stretching away to the Yang-tse-kiang, was held by the Taeping general Chung Wang.
Got under way from our moorings early in the morning of Monday the 19th, and dropped down with the tide; getting out of the Woo-Sung, anchored in the Yang-tse-Kiang, on the 20th, passed Saddle Island, and dismissing the pilot, headed for Amoy, at which port we were to look in on our return.
At a distance of six hundred paces from the shore of the 'Yang-tse-Kiang' is the wonderful Island of Chin-shan, or 'Golden Mountain. This island is covered with gardens and pleasure-houses. Art and nature have united their efforts to give it the most enchanting aspect.
A pilot comes on board to take us through the dangerous, uncertain fairway, and a little later we have flat land on both sides of us, and are in the estuary of the river. Shanghai is situated on a small affluent which runs into the Yang-tse-kiang close to its mouth, and large ocean steamers cannot go up to the town. After the Delhi has dropped its anchor we proceed up the river in a steam tender.
We left the ship at the broad mouth of the Yang-tse-Kiang and in a small river boat went up a tributary to Shanghai, a distance of twelve miles. A shrinking horror seized me as if I were at the threshold of the infernal regions as we crossed the draw bridge over the moat and entered the narrow gate of the vast city of more than a million souls.
Steamers ploughed their way for a thousand miles up the Yang-tse-Kiang; engineers became busy exploiting the coal and iron mines of the Flowery Kingdom; great factories, equipped with the best modern machinery, sprang up in the foreign settlements; foreign books began to be translated and read; and the empress even went so far as to receive foreign ambassadors in public audience and on a footing of outward equality in the "forbidden city" of Peking, long the sacredly secluded center of an empire locked against the outer world.
Meanwhile, the British arms prevailed; and when the fleet reached the first bend in the Yang-tse-kiang, there happened a solar eclipse; it was impossible not to see that the sun of China had set for ever!
Curtis, accustomed to the vagaries of Chinese junks in the swift currents of the Yang-tse-Kiang, adopted the only measures which promised any degree of success. He ran to the helm, which had been lashed on the starboard side to keep it from fouling any submerged piles near the bank.
The Woo-Sung river empties into the Yang-tse-Kiang about 40 miles from its confluence with the ocean, and the city of Shanghae is situated upon the Woo-Sung, about three leagues above its junction with the Yang-tse-Kiang, which is one of the largest rivers in China, and washes the walls of the city of Nankin, formerly the southern capital of the Empire.
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