had a couple of steamers which had become old and worn in the service, and they were astonished and delighted one day when some of the Chinese merchants offered to purchase the gamy ships aforesaid. The directors laughed as they received the money and transferred the vessels, and they laughed long and often when they thought how completely they had sold the Celestials in selling them the antiquated craft. The pigtailed merchants started a line between Rangoon and Singapore with their two steamers, and then the joke was complete. But in a very short time the freight list of the English company declined, and each month it declined more and more.

The new line had all the business; its managers sent to London and bought some new steamers; it extended its service to the coast of Sumatra, and received therefor a subsidy from the government of the Netherlands Indies; and it has gone on prospering and prosperous ever since. The British India Company runs its steamers

with the lightest cargoes, and sometimes none at all, and but for its mail contract it would withdraw altogether from that particular service. Its directors laugh no more at the verdancy of the Chinese in buying that pair of venerable steamers, and are inclined to avoid the subject.

Westward beyond Burmah the Chinese have not penetrated in great numbers, but they are far from unknown. They are in Ceylon, and in Calcutta, Bombay, and other cities of British India, and some of them have strayed to London and a few of the Continental cities. In Calcutta and Bombay they have a monopoly of the manufacture of bamboo chairs and baskets, and many of them have set up as tailors, bootmakers, and the like, to the disgust of their competitors. Thus far the Chinese question has no importance in India; but if we may judge of that country by others where the Celestials have taken foothold, its discussion in the land of the Vedas and Shastas cannot be long delayed.

VII.

STATISTICS OF CHINESE TRADE.

CHINA has been a trading nation considerably against her will, and nearly every concession relative to foreign commerce has been forced from her at the cannon's mouth. China was once the only producer of tea in the world. Other nations wanted her tea and sent ships there to get it. Her silk was also in demand, and brought a high price, and her porcelain wares and ivory carvings were unrivalled. The other nations had very little that was wanted in China, and consequently nearly all the purchases in the Celestial Empire were paid for with solid silver. For centuries there has been a steady stream of silver poured into China, and the end is not yet; Mexican and other dollars are melted into "sycee," and in this shape form a very inconvenient medium of

exchange. The model for a block of sycee silver is a woman's shoe; and as there is no national standard for the size of a Chinese woman's foot, the ingots vary in size, and necessitate the weighing of every lot of silver bought or sold. Each party to the transaction weighs the metal, and it sometimes happens that a difference in the weighing apparatus leads to a quarrel. A local poem thus describes this Oriental currency:

"Some ask me what the cause may be
That Chinese silver's called sycee.
But probably they call it so

Because they sigh to see it go."

I have elsewhere alluded to Kiachta, on the Mongolian frontier, which was founded in 1727 as an entrepôt of international commerce between Russia and China. Russia consumed a great deal of tea, and for a hundred and fifty years all the tea used in the Muscovite Empire was imported through Kiachta. Alarmed at the great drain of silver to pay for this tea, the Russian gov

ernment, early in the present century, ordered that the importation of tea should be paid for “with articles of Russian manufacture," and not with coin. The wheels of commerce were blocked by this edict, but only for a short time. The merchants at the frontier were not slow to devise a means of keeping the word of promise to the ear and breaking it to the hope. The Russians cast their silver money into idols of varying sizes and weights; and as the material was of coin standard, the value was readily determined by weight. These idols were clearly "articles of Russian manufacture," and met the requirements of the law. The government again interfered, on the ground that a Christian nation should not lend itself to the encouragement of idolatry by making heathen images. Then the merchants adopted the shoe as the model for silver castings, and silver shoes for Chinese ladies were regular articles of commerce. But I doubt if a single one of these has ever served the actual purposes of a