254  THE  CHINESE  EMPIRE
port  in  1842  ;  they  were  driven  away  in  1856,  and  on  their
return  in  1857  found  their  houses  in  ruins.  The  head  houses
of  the  firms  were  then  generally  established  in  Hongkong,
and,  in  foreign  trade,  Canton  became  a  mere  commercia,
dependency  of  the  British  colony.  At  Canton  the  “  factory
sites  were  abandoned,  and  in  1859  a  new  residential  quarter
was  created  by  embanking  and  reclaiming  Shameen,  a  mu
flat  about  half  a  mile  long  and  a  fifth  of  a  mile  wide  in  h s
widest  part,  situated  at  the  south-west  corner  of  the  city*
Of  this  reclamation  four-fifths  were  assigned  as  the  Britis
concession  and  one-fifth  as  the  French  concession  ;  an
here,  surrounded  by  a  wide  moat  with  guarded  bridges,
the  foreign  community  lives,  somewhat  restricted  for  space,
but  self-governing  on  the  model  of  the  corresponding  con  &lt;
cessions  at  Tientsin.  This  completes  the  list  of  the  old-time
foreign  concessions,  all  dating  from  1859-61—Newchwang,
Tientsin,  Hankow,  Kiukiang,  Chinkiang  and  Canton.  T  e
city  and  suburbs  of  Canton  form  a  buzzing  hive  of  workers,
and  few  sights  in  the  world  are  more  instructive,  to  the
sociologist  and  ethnologist,  than  a  mere  cursory  trip  in
sedan-chair  through  the  narrow,  crowded,  reeking,  an
malodorous  streets,  in  which  the  busy  throng,  hustling,
shouting,  and  pushing,  yet  manages  to  disentangle  itself  by
some  rule  of  the  road  imperceptible  to  the  insight  of  the
mere  Westerner,  and  where  a  shop,  filled  with  priceless
treasures  of  antiquity  or  with  the  dainty  work  of  ivory
carvers  and  silk  embroiderers,  stands  cheek  by  jowl  wit
a  shop  in  which  an  artisan  carries  on  some  primitive  hand 1 '
craft  with  the  implements  and  by  the  methods  employed
by  his  progenitors  a  thousand  years  ago.  Even  the  hasty
globe-trotter,  who  allots  from  his  tour  three  days  to  India
and  three  hours  to  the  Empire  of  China,  may  profitably
employ  those  three  hours  in  such  a  trip,  and  feel  that  h#
time  has  not  been  wasted  ;  and  as  he  steams  back  to  Hong'
kong  he  will  have  the  history  of  half  a  century  of  foreign
relations  recalled  to  his  mind  by  the  sight  of  the  stately
Roman  Catholic  cathedral  erected  by  the  French  on
site  of  the  Viceroy’s  Palace,  destroyed  in  1857  by