The whole country is an undulating sea of green, patterned with red—in truth, rather monotonous for five days of journeying. The mud was abominable all the time, but with straw shoes and grippers I managed to do a good deal of walking. On several days my well-paid chair-men travelled “like gentlemen,” for labour is so abundant and cheap that they found plenty of coolies to carry my chair for forty cash for four miles (about a penny), and even for less! Every house has its opium field, its bamboo and palm groves, fruit trees and cedars, while the Rhus vernicifera, or varnish tree, the Aleurites cordata, or oil tree, and the Cupressus funebris, which it is impossible to avoid calling “the Noah's ark tree,” abound. The cultivation, except the ploughing for rice, is entirely by hand, and is so careful that it is easy to see that most of the indigenous plants have become extinct. Violas, fumitories, and the anemone Japonica, all of which grow profusely, but solely along the margins of the roads, were all that then or later I saw in the Red Basin; in fact, husbandry has made a clean sweep of “weeds.”

The farmhouses in that region are of mud, with thatched roofs, and look poor. Straw plaiting and the making of the very large straw hats which the coolies wear in summer are the great industries.