This middle basin of the Central Kingdom—China—is correctly defined in the words of a dispatch penned by Sir Claude Macdonald to the Chinese Foreign Office on February 19, 1898, as ‘The Yangtse region’ and the ‘provinces adjoining the Yangtse.’ A more exact definition is the ‘Yangtse basin,’ as is the definition of the northern basin we have just described—the ‘Basin of the Yellow River.’ The boundaries of the Yangtse basin are the crests of the water-partings that surround the catchment area, which area, in order to confine ourselves to the Middle Kingdom proper—the ‘eighteen provinces,’—we bring to an end in the west at the political frontier of Tibet, cutting out from our purview that upper part of the basin that lies along the higher courses of the Yangtse across the frontier. This limit, as given in modern Chinese maps, in no way corresponds with the geographical limit, the province of Szechuan; which the older maps marked as bounded on its western border by the Tatung river, and which is the true physiographical and ethnographical limit, the boundary being now made to embrace a large slice of the Tibetan plateau up to and beyond Batang: much as Yunnan, since the suppression of the Mahometan rebellion in 1875, is now made to include Atuntse and the country west of Tengyueh, nearly up to the walls of Bhamo.