94
Notices of the Pei Ho
FEB
high water. Immediately within the bar, the water deepened to three or four fathoms. The river was there about five hundred yards in width.
Mr. Gutzlaff, who visited Tientsin in a Chinese vessel, in Sep., 1831, says "the river has no regular tides, but constantly flows into the sea with more or less rapidity." Chi. Rep., vol. I., p. 136.
On its southern bank, or the left of the entrance, is the small vil- lage of Tungkú. Its situation is low and swampy, and the ground in its vicinity is covered, in summer, with the Arundo phragmites, a long and not altogether useless reed.
From this village the vessels first move almost due north for three or four miles, then turning westward and southward, 'making a com- plete elbow,' they move against the current, till nearly due west from Tungkú they reach Síkú (Seekoo); thence turning again westward and northward, and making another elbow, they arrive at Tákú; and thus on, in a zigzag course, they wind their way to Tientsin, a dis- tance of forty miles in a right line, but more than twice that follow- ing the river's channel.
Dr. Abel says, no country in the world can afford fewer objects of interest to the traveler, than the banks of the river between the sea and Tientsin: the land is marshy and sterile, the inhabitants are
poor
and squalid, their habitations mean, dirty, and dilapidated; and the native productions of the soil are few and unattractive. The banks of the river, during his first day's journey, were not much above its level; the country beyond them was low, exhibiting a dreary waste, unbroken by marks of cultivation. Patches of millet, inter- spersed with a species of bean, occasionally surrounded mud-huts, on the immediate margin of the river. During the second day's journey, the country gradually, though slowly, improved. The land along the banks, bears the strongest marks of recent formation; consisting of clay and sand, in nearly equal proportions, and being free from the smallest pebble. The beds and shells, alternating with strata of earth, of unequal thickness, mark its periodical and unequal accu- mulation by the soil, which is brought down by the river at different The debris of the mountains (situated on the north * and west) afford, no doubt, the materials of its accumulation. Amherst's Embassy, pp. 76, 79.
seasons.
Referring to this part of the river, Staunton says its banks are higher than the adjacent plains; accordingly, large quantities of earth were placed along its sides, in order immediately to fill up any
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The Pei ho takes its rise in two branches, about lat. 41° 30′ on the north of the Great Wall; one due north from Peking the other more to the westward