Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. Vol. 13, no. 3.

Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. Vol. 13, no. 3. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    44/128 (page 174)
    building of this bridge or viaduct the great sea-barrier of the Che- kiang Province and the banks of the Ngo chiao River, &c., were completed; and there, the low-lying land being drained off, a country half as large as Holland was, by digging canals, raised gradually to an altitude, so as to give land enough to nourish a population of more than 8,000,000 ; and the bridge is now only used as a tow- path when the wind is dead ahead, and as a road for the few foot passengers who do not like going by the cheap omnibus-boats, which start twice a day from Ningpo to Hang-chow. I may here mention that the system of omnibus-boats and transit companies, conducted on a far greater scale than is generally supposed, is almost universal in China. ^The Shao hsing Viaduct runs various distances in the centre of the main canal, sometimes one mile, some- times only a few yards, once for nearly ten miles, it is now and then lost in recovered land, sometimes it forms an embankment of the canal, and sometimes crosses it, a modern high bridge being placed in the centre. The recovered land itself looks like a series of islands ; about every quarter of a mile is a fresh-water canal, in which are dozens of chain-pumps, worked by treadles, buffaloes, and hand, for the purpose of irrigation; so valuable is land about here for this cause, and by reason of the facilities of transport, that it lets, merely for the purpose of agriculture, at about 71. an acre. I may here perhaps mention that the chain-pump was deemed so ingenious a contrivance by an Australian farmer who was my guest at Ningpo, that he has introduced it into his farm there. Making a short detour from our route, which lay through Shao hsing, we visited the celebrated Yu lin or Temple of Yu, where there is a copy of the well-known Yu tablet which has caused so much discussion. Yu was the third great Emperor of China, and lived about 2300 years before Christ. His great work was the draining of the marshes of Shauhsi and Shautung, and he has by some scholars been thought to be identical with Noah. I commonced to study the question in an historical point of view, and collected as many Chinese modern transcripts as I could. In this I was aided by the Intendant of Circuit of Ningpo and other native scholars. I found that while all Chinese writers are agreed on the form of the ancient character in the inscription, there are as many as eleven modern Chinese versions. The whole inscription contains 77 characters, on the modern rendering of 38 of these cha- racters all the works I have seen are agreed ; 39 characters are variously rendered. The Rev. Mr. Hudson and Dr. McCartee were kind enough to aid me with their more mature Chinese scholarship in writing a paper on the subject. I submitted this paper to Mr.