The scene is Wan, the head-quarters of a prefecture of the second provincial grade—a hien—in the far interior of China, removed from its eastern seaboard some thirteen degrees of longitude, and at a distance of 1100 sea-miles up the Great Yang-tsze Kiang. Surrounded by a hilly and broken country, with a fine range of mountains standing as a barrier against the north-west breezes, Wan has many features of situation and scenery which differ much from our preconceived notions of China, as derived from geographies; where it is represented as one immense fertile plain, intersected in every direction by canals and rivers, wooded with mulberry and tea trees, in which golden-pheasants innumerable nestle, and under the shade of which fishing cormorants industriously pursue their avocations; where porcelain pagodas and high-arched bridges meet the eye at every turn, and waterwheels revolve through an old habit which they cannot shake off, though the river has long since been diverted from its course to aid in supplying some enormous canal at the other extremity of the empire; where the people are a nation of astronomers and star-gazers, living in such crowds that they require to construct floating islands and hanging gardens in order to supply the demands of the commissariat. These notions must certainly give way before China in 1861, as seen on the Yang-tsze; these phantoms of China must fade, if we would learn how this thoroughly utilitarian and not in the least degree star-gazing nation exists in a country the size of half of Europe, and holds sway over a region almost rivalling the southern continent of the New World.