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In 552 he was driven out by a Chinese army led by one of the princes and was killed. The new emperor had been a prince in the upper Yangtze region, and his closest associates were engaged there. They did not want to move to the distant capital, Nanking, because their private financial interests would have suffered. The emperor therefore remained in the city now called Hankow.
The rent of the tenants, paid in form of grain, was then sold to the army, and the merchant's gains increased. Tenants could easily be found: the density of population in the Yangtze plains had further increased since the Sung time.
We left the Taku ferry by way of a steep trail through an open pine and spruce forest along the rim of the Yangtze gorge where the view was magnificent. Someone has said that when a tourist sees the Grand Cañon for the first time he gasps "Indescribable" and then immediately begins to describe it. Thus it was with us, but no words can picture the grandeur of this titanic chasm.
This must remind you of some of my letters from the Yangtze, two years ago. We started this morning at 6.30 in the 'Granada: the General and I, with both our staffs. We had gone on famously to this point, scraping through the mud occasionally with success. In rounding a corner, however, at which a French gunboat had already stuck before us, we have run upon a bank.
The modernist students, most of whom were sons of merchants who owned railway shares, supported the movement, and the government was unable to control them. At the same time a great anti-Manchu revolution began in Wuch'ang, one of the cities of which Wuhan, on the Yangtze, now consists. The revolution was the result of government action against a group of terrorists.
"The Master said: 'The princely man is one who knows neither grief nor fear. 'Absence of grief and fear? said Niu, 'Is this the mark of a princely man? The Master said, 'If a man look into his heart and find no guilt there, why should he grieve? Or of what should he be afraid?" The Yangtze River trip from Hankow to Shanghai, mentioned in my last letter, I found very interesting.
It was evident, therefore, that the Yangtze River does not act as an effective barrier to the distribution of even the smallest forms and that the region in which we were now working would not produce a different fauna. This was an important discovery from the standpoint of our distribution records but was also somewhat disappointing. The photographic work already had yielded excellent results.
Most disagreeable and undignified is it anywhere to get into the habit of standing up for what people are pleased to call their little rights, but nowhere more so than on the Upper Yangtze houseboat, under the gaze of a Yangtze crew.
Beyond this I had but a hazy notion, which however I was able to verify from a map of Asia in the possession of one of the officers, to the effect that the mountain chains to the west of the sources of the Yangtze separated that river system from the basin of the Brahmaputra in Tibet Proper, where I expected to be able to find English assistance.
This is by no means an isolated case. Some years ago a foreign steamer was burned on the Yangtze River, and the crowds of watching Chinese did little or nothing to rescue the passengers and crew. Indeed, as fast as they made their way to shore many of them were robbed even of their clothing and some were murdered outright.
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