Читать книгу The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism (Vol. 1-4). The History of Sea Voyages, Discovery, Piracy and Maritime Warfare онлайн

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“The Yellow Sea, the Sea that’s Red,

The White, the Black, the one that’s Dead.”

Between the thirtieth degree of north latitude, where the group of the Choosan Islands commences, and the thirty-seventh degree, this sea of soup, this reservoir of tawny liquid, ranges, fed by three great rivers, the Tseen-Tang, the Yangtsze-Kiang, and the Hwang-Ho, the greatest of which is the second, and which contributes the larger part of the muddy solution held in its waters. Forty-five miles from the embouchure of the Yangtsze-Kiang, you reach the Woosung anchorage, and a few miles further the city of Shanghai, where the tributary you have been following divides into the Woosung and Whampoa branches, at the fork of which the land ceded to the British is situated. Here there is a splendid British consulate, churches, mansions, and foreign mercantile houses.

The old city was built over three centuries ago, and is encircled, as indeed are nearly all large Chinese cities and towns, by a wall twenty-four feet high and fifteen broad; it is nearly four miles in circumference. Shanghai was at one time greatly exposed to the depredations of freebooters and pirates, and partly in consequence of this the wall is plentifully provided with loop-holes, arrow-towers, and military observatories. The six great gates of the city of Shanghai have grandiloquent titles, à la Chinoise. The north gate is the “calm-sea gate;” the great east gate is that for “paying obeisance to the honourable ones;” the little east one is “the precious girdle gate;” the great south is the gate for “riding the dragon,” while another is termed “the pattern Phœnix.”