CHAPTER VI - THE FOREIGNERS—HANKOW AND BRITISH TRADE

Summary

Hankow or Hanmouth, Wu-Chang Fu, the capital of Hupeh, and Han Yang would be one city were they not bisected by the broad, rolling Yangtze, nearly a mile wide, and its great tributary the Han. Hankow and Han Yang are on the north bank, and Wu-Chang on the south. The “congeries of cities,” as the three have been aptly termed, is about 600 miles from Shanghai. Till 1863 Hankow was an open city, but the dread of an attack by northern banditti that year led the Government to enclose it with a stone wall, four miles in circuit and thirteen feet in height, raised by a brick parapet to eighteen feet.

Hankow considers that it has the finest bund in China, and I have no wish to dispute its assertion. In truth its length of 800 yards, its breadth of 80, its lofty and noble river wall and fine flights of stone stairs, ascending 40 feet from low water, its broad promenade and carriage-way and avenue of fine trees, with the “palatial” houses, very similar to those of Shanghai and Singapore, on the other side in large gardens and shaded by exotic trees, make it scarcely credible that the first authentic visit of Europeans to the city was that made by Lord Elgin in H.M.S. Furious in 1858, and that the site for this stately British settlement was only chosen in 1861, the year in which the port was opened to foreign trade.