their route, and which are true of those countries at the present time, have become incorporated with the account of China itself. These Arabians describe a city called Canfu, which was probably Canton, at which place a very ancient mosque exists to this day. The frequency of fires, and the long detention of ships, from various causes, as stated by them, might be related of that emporium of foreign trade even at present. "This city," they observe," stands on a great river, some days distant from the entrance, so that the water here is fresh." It seems at that time to have been the port allotted to the Arabian merchants who came by sea; and the travellers notice "many unjust dealings with the merchants who traded thither, which, having gathered the force of a precedent, there was no grievance, no treatment so bad, but they exercised it upon the foreigners, and the masters of ships." We learn that the port was at length forsaken, in consequence of the extortions of the mandarins of those days; and "the merchants returned in crowds to Siraf and Oman." It is remarkable that the travellers describe the entrance to the port of Canfu as the "gates of China," which may possibly be a translation of Hoo-mun, "Tiger's gate," or Boca Tigris, as it is called from the Portuguese.

These Arabians mention in particular the relief afforded to the people from the public granaries during famine. The salt tax, as it now exists, and the use of tea are thus noticed: "The emperor also reserves to himself the revenues that arise from salt, and from a certain herb which they drink with hot water, and of which great quantities are sold in all the cities, to the amount of vast sums." The public imposts are stated to have consisted in duties on salt and tea, with a poll tax, which last has since been commuted into a tax on lands: these Arabians likewise mention the bamboo as the universal panacea in matters of police; and they very correctly describe the Chinese copper money; as well as porcelain; wine made from rice; the maintenance of public teachers in the towns; the idolatry derived from India; and the ignorance of astronomy, in which the Arabians were their first instructors. It is, in fact, impossible to comprise within our limits all the

7.

pertinent remarks, or even a small proportion of the correct information which may be found in this curious and antique relic of early Arabian enterprise. From the lights which it affords, as well as from other sources of information relating to the first intercourse of the Mahomedans with China, it has with tolerable certainty been inferred that, previous to the Mongol Tartar conquest, they resorted to that rich country by sea chiefly, and in the character of traders.

Subsequent to the establishment of the Mongol Tartar dynasty by Zenghis Khan, China was visited by the Arab, Ibn Batuta, whose travels have been translated by Professor Lee. He describes very truly the paper circulation instituted by the Mongols, a scheme which subsequently failed, in consequence of the paper being rendered utterly worthless by excessive issues, and the bad faith of the government, which derived a profit from the circulation. Even at that period, Batuta observes that "they did not buy or sell with the dirhem or dinar, for, should any one get these coins into his possession, he would melt them down immediately." If we may believe him, the Chinese junks in his time sailed as far as Calicut, and he himself embarked in one of them on his voyage to China,

The Mahomedan creed seems to have been established and protected as the religion of a considerable part of the population soon after the Mongol conquest, in the 13th century; and it meets with perfect toleration at the present day, its professors being freely admitted to government offices, from which Christians are rigidly excluded. There is a considerable mosque at Canton, of great antiquity, and forming, with its pagoda or minaret, a conspicuous object on the approach to the city by the river. Numbers of that persuasion occurred in every part of the route of the two British missions. Some gentlemen of the embassy were walking in 1816 with Dr. Morrison, at a village about fifty miles from Peking, when they observed inscribed, in Chinese, on the lantern of a poor shopman, an old Mahomedan." Being asked whence his progenitors came, the old man answered, " from the western ocean;" but he could give no further information,

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except that his family had resided there for five generations. Dr. Morrison met with another near Nanking, holding a government office, who said that his sect reached China during the Tâng dynasty, or about the period of the visit of those two Arabians, whom we have already noticed, in the ninth century. The same individual stated, that at Kae-foong-foo, in the province of Honan, there were some families of a persuasion denominated by the Chinese, "the sect that plucks out the sinew:" these, in all probability, must be the Jews mentioned by Grosier, who are said to have reached China as early as 200 years before Christ, in the time of the Han dynasty.

In the eighteenth volume of the Lettres edifiantes et curieuses there is contained an account of the pains taken by the Jesuits in China to investigate the origin of this remarkable colony of Jews at Kae-foong-foo. The most successful in his researches was Père Gozani, who in a letter dated 1704, thus

wrote:-"As regards those who are here called Tiao-kin-kiao, (the sect that extracts the sinew,) two years ago I was going to visit them, under the expectation that they were Jews, and with the hope of finding among them the Old Testament; but as I have no knowledge of the Hebrew language, and met with great difficulties, I abandoned this scheme with the fear of not succeeding. Nevertheless, as you told me that I should oblige you by obtaining any information concerning this people, I have obeyed your directions, and executed them with all the care and exactness of which I was capable. I immediately made them protestations of friendship, to which they readily replied, and had the civility to come to see me. returned their visit in the le-pai-sou, that is in their synagogue, where they were all assembled, and where I held with them long conversations. I saw their inscriptions, some of which are in Chinese, and the rest in their own language. They showed me their

I

religious books, and permitted me to enter even into the most secret place of their synagogue, whence they themselves (the commonalty) are excluded. There is a place reserved for the chief of the synagogue, who never enters there except with profound respect. They told me that their ancestors came from a kingdom of the west, called the kingdom of Judah, which Joshua conquered after having departed from Egypt, and passed the Red Sea and the Desert; that the number of Jews who migrated from Egypt was about 600,000 men. They assured me that their alphabet had twenty-seven letters, but that they commonly made use of only twenty-two; which accords with the declaration of St. Jerome, that the Hebrew has twenty-two letters, of which five are double. When they read the Bible in their synagogue they cover the face with a transparent veil, in memory of Moses, who descended from the mountain with his face covered, and who thus published the Decalogue and the Law of God to his people: they read a section every Sabbath-day. Thus the Jews of China, like the Jews of Europe, read all the Law in the course of the year: he who reads places the Ta-king (great sacred book) on the chair of Moses; he has his face covered with a very thin cotton veil; at his side is a prompter, and some paces below a Moula, to correct the prompter should he err. They spoke to me respecting Paradise and Hell in a very foolish way. There is every appearance of what they said being drawn from the Talmud. I spoke to them of the Messiah promised in Scripture, but they were very much surprised at what I said; and when I informed them that his name was Jesus, they replied, that mention was made in the Bible of a holy man named Jesus, who was the son of Sirach: but they knew not the Jesus of whom I spoke."

The first Pope who appears to have sent a mission for the conversion of the Tartars or Chinese to the Roman Catholic faith was Innocent IV. He despatched Giovanni Carpini, a monk, through Russia, in the year 1246, to Baatu Khan, on the banks of the

! For further particulars of the Jews in China, see Chinese Repository, vol. iii. p. 172.

Volga, from whence they were conducted to the Mongol Tartar court, just as the Great Khan was about to be installed. Carpini was astonished by the display of immense treasures, and, having been kindly treated, was sent back with a friendly letter: he was rather pleased than scandalised by the near resemblance of the rites of the Chinese Budhists to the forms of Catholic worship, and inferred from thence that they either already were, or would very soon be, Christians. In 1253, Rubruquis was in like manner despatched by St. Louis, during his crusade to the Holy Land, with directions to procure the friendship of the Mongols. He reached at length the court of the Great Khan, where, like his predecessor, he observed the near resemblance of Lama worship to the forms of Roman Catholicism, and concluded that it must be derived from a spurious Christianity; perhaps that of the Nestorians.

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It is needless in this place to enter into any detailed notice of the work of Marco Polo, which has been illustrated with so much erudition and industry by our countryman Marsden. The doubts which were once entertained of the veracity of Marco have long since given way to admiration of his simple and faithful narrative. Most of our readers will, perhaps, be aware that in the reign of Coblai Khan, the Mongol conqueror of China, Nicholas and Matthew Paolo or Polo, two noble Venetians, reached his court: they were extremely well received, and invited to return to China on their departure for Europe. In 1274 they accordingly came back, bearing letters from Pope Gregory X., and accompanied by young Marco, son to one of them. The youth, by his talents and good conduct, became a favourite with the Khan, and was employed by him for seventeen years, after which he with some difficulty obtained permission to return to his own country. The accounts which he gave at Venice of the vast wealth and resources of the Chinese empire appeared so incredible to Europeans in those days, that his tale was most undeservedly discredited, and he obtained the nick name of "Messer Marco Millione." Another account of Cathay or China was some time after written by Hayton, an Armenian, and translated into Latin.

According to him, the Chinese considered the rest of the world as blind, or seeing with only one eye; while themselves alone were blessed with a perfect vision.

John de Corvino, despatched to Asia in 1288 by Pope Nicholas IV., was the first successful promoter of the Roman Catholic faith in China: he arrived at Cambalu (as Peking was called by the Tartars), and met with a kind reception from the Emperor, notwithstanding the hostility of the jealous Nestorians. He was allowed to build a church, furnished with a steeple and bells, and is said to have baptized some thousands of converts, as well as to have instructed numbers of children in the Latin language, and the tenets of Christianity. The news of his progress reached Clement V. on his accession to the popedom, and he was immediately appointed Bishop of Cambalu, with a numerous body of priests, who were despatched to join him in his labours. On the death of Corvino, however, it is probable that no successor, possessed of the same enterprise and industry, was ready to succeed him; for the establishment which he had founded appears to have ceased, or at least sunk into insignificance.

Abundant evidence is afforded by Chinese records, that a much more liberal as well as enterprising disposition once existed in respect to foreign intercourse, than prevails at present. It was only on the conquest of the empire by the Manchows that the European trade was limited to Canton; and the jealous and watchful Tartar dominion, established by this handful of barbarians, has unquestionably occasioned many additional obstacles to an increased commerce with the rest of the world. We have already noticed the Chinese junks, which were seen by Ibn Batuta as far west as the coast of Malabar, about the end of the thirteenth century. Even before the seventh century, it appears from native records that missions were sent from China to the surrounding nations, with a view to inviting mutual intercourse. The benefits of industry and trade have always been extolled by the people of that country; the contempt, therefore, with which the present Tartar government affects to treat the European commerce must be referred entirely

to the fears which it entertains regarding the influence of increased knowledge on the stability of its dominion.

According to the Chinese books, commerce, on its first establishment at Canton, remained free from duties for many years, but its increasing importance soon led the officers of government to convert it into a source of gain. As in Siam and Cochin-China at present, the pre-emption of all imported goods seems at one time to have been claimed; but this did not last long, and the trade, after having continued to increase at Canton, was subsequently carried to other ports of the empire. The endeavour to prevent the exportation of silver appears to have been an error very early established; but the regulations on this subject, as might be expected, have always been as futile as they are at the present day.

It was not many years after the passage of the Cape by De Gama that the Portuguese in 1516 made their first appearance at Canton. Their early conduct was not calculated to impress the Chinese with any favourable idea of Europeans; and when, in course of time, they came to be competitors with the Dutch and the English, the contests of mercantile avarice tended to place them all in a still worse point of view. To this day the character of Europeans is represented as that of a race of men intent alone on the gains of commercial traffic, and regardless altogether of the means of attainment. Struck by the perpetual hostilities which existed among these foreign adventurers, assimilated in other respects by a close resemblance in their costumes and manners, the government of the country became disposed to treat them with a degree of jealousy and exclusion which it had not deemed necessary to be exercised towards the more peaceable and well-ordered Arabs, their predecessors.

The first places of resort to the Portuguese were the islands at the mouth of the Canton river.' The vessel despatched by Alfonso Albuquerque, the Captain-general of Malacca, reached one of these, under the command of Perestrello, and, as his voyage proved

1 We here quote, for convenience, from a small work printed at Macao in 1831, but never regularly published, called "The Canton Miscellany."

very successful, it had the effect of engaging others in similar enterprises. Being distinguished as the first person who ever conducted a ship to China under a European flag, he was followed in the ensuing year by a fleet of eight vessels, under the command of Perez de Andrade, who, on reaching the coast, was surrounded by junks of war, and his movements watched with suspicion. He was, however, permitted to proceed with two of his vessels to Canton; and, while successfully negotiating for a trade, received accounts that the remainder of his fleet had been attacked by pirates. Some of his vessels returned with cargoes to Malacca; the remainder sailed in company with some junks, belonging to the Loo-choo Islands, for the province of Foikien on the east coast, and succeeded in establishing a colony at Ningpo. The Portuguese subsequently brought their families to that port, carrying on a gainful trade with other parts of China, as well as with Japan. But in the year 1545 the provincial government, provoked by their ill conduct, expelled them the place; and thus was for ever lost to them an establishment on the continent of China, in one of the provinces of the empire best adapted to the ends of European trade. The general behaviour of the Portuguese had, from the first, been calculated to obliterate the favourable impression which the Chinese had received from the justice and moderation of Perez de Andrade. Only shortly after his visit, a squadron, under the orders of his brother Simon, was engaged in open hostilities, having established a colony at San Shan, near Macao, (vulgarly called St. John's,) and erected a fort there: they were finally defeated by a Chinese naval force, but continued to commit acts of piracy on the native trading vessels. Subsequently to this career of violence, and during the more recent periods of their connexion with China at Macao, the Portuguese appear, on the other hand, to have entertained too extreme an apprehension of giving umbrage to the native government; and while they imagined they were securing favour to themselves, their conduct has often served to encourage Chinese encroachment.

Among the early and desperate adventurers from Portugal, the exploits of Ferdinand

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Ar

Mendes Pinto have, by the help of some exaggeration, handed his name down as one of the principal. Having arrived with a crew of other desperadoes at Ningpo, he learned from some Chinese that to the north-east there was an island containing the tombs of seventeen Chinese kings, full of treasure. Pinto and his companions succeeded in finding the place, and plundered the tombs, in which they found a quantity of silver: being attacked, they were obliged to retire with only part of the booty; and a gale having overtaken them upon their return, in the neighbourhood of Nanking, only fourteen Portuguese escaped with their lives: these were taken by the Chinese, and after some maltreatment were sent to Nanking and condemned to be whipped, and to lose each man a thumb. They were next conducted to Peking, and on his way thither Pinto had occasion to admire the manners of the Chinese, their love of justice, and the good order and industry that prevailed among them. rived at Peking, they were at length condemned to one year's hard labour: but before the time expired they were set at liberty by the Tartars, who were then invading the country. Pinto and his companions now joined their liberators, and, while in their service, saw one of the chief Lamas, whom he called their pope. A curious description of this Tartar hierarchy has in later times been given by Père Gaubil. The Portuguese adventurers at length quitted the Tartars, found their way to the coast, and embarked again for Ningpo. Being treacherously abandoned on a desolate island, where they had almost died of hunger, Pinto and his companions were taken off by a pirate, and soon afterwards driven by adverse winds on the coast of Japan. On his return to Ningpo, this adventurer gave his countrymen so favourable an account of what he had seen, that a large expedition was fitted out for Japan: several, however, of the vessels were lost, and Pinto himself driven on the Loo-choo Islands, where he and his companions were taxed with the murder of some natives of Loo-choo, at the time when Malacca was taken by the Portuguese. The King being told that all his countrymen were pirates, gave orders that Pinto and the rest should be quartered, and their limbs