Directory_and_Chronicle_1845 — Page 216

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products, tea brought from the upper parts of the province is the only article of trade likely ever to become an important item of ex- port. The province of Fuhkien is the great black tea district of the empire, and the famous hills of Bohea (Wúí) are situated only 150 miles to the northwest of Fuhchau. It does uot therefore seem to be an unreasonable ground of hope that with the arrival of British capital at the port, the tea-merchants should prefer bringing their teas by a more direct and less expensive route to Fuhchau to the difficult, tedious and expensive overland route of more than six hun- dred miles to Canton. A cargo of tea may be brought in boats in four days down the stream to Fuhchau, while the expensive route over the mountainous country to Canton would occupy almost as many weeks. The growers also are said to be desirous of bringing their teas to Fuhchau and exchanging them in barter for European goods. Some of them, during the last season, brought down a large cargo, of which the only resident foreign merchant purchased 600 chests, in return for which they willingly took half the purchase in British manufactures. * * *

They first took me to a hot spring, strongly impregnated with sulphur, of which I tasted a little, but which they prevented my drinking, saying that their horses were brought thither to water. They led the way in a smrll body to the Táng mún, or “ Aot Bath gate," through which they conducted me into a little suburb, where the Mánchús and Chinese inhabitants are mingled together. We soon arrived at the public hot baths, where for a fee of two copper cash, the inhabitants possess the privilege of an ablution in these medical springs, to which some persons ascribe a more general absence of those cutaneous diseases, which they fancy to be more common elsewhere than at Fuhchau. Here the first object which I beheld was about twenty men in a round circular bath of not more than six feet in diameter, all immersed up to their chins in the steam- ing fluid and packed as closely as faggots. A shout of laughter unusual among the serious gloomy people of Fuhchau proceeded from these twently heads, trunkless as far as my eye was concerned, moving on the surface of the water. Three or four naked men were anxiously sitting as expectants on the edge, till one of the twenty emerging out of the bath; made room for another to pack himself down among

the bathers. One or two others might be seen anoin- ting their bare bodies with linimeut or plaster, having apparently been using the bath to cure their sores.