Untitled

300
EAST ASIA.
habits They even combine together for the purpose of robbing, or resisting
robbery and for all manner of fanciful But these societies have all one
objects.
tendency-to squeeze the non-members. From the Triad Society, which was at
the bottom of the late rebellion, to the Tailors' Union at Hong Kong, the rules and
reflations of which have been in the North China Herald, all have the
published
same practical object in view. The 'Tinte Brotherhood,' the 'Triads,' the
'Heaven and Earth Society,' the 'Queen of Heaven's Company,' the
Family,' the ' Pure Tea Set,' are all obnoxious to the general description given
memorial published in the Peking Gazette containing the follQwing specific charges :-
'They carry off persons
in order to extort ransoms for them; they falsely assume
the characters of police officers; they build false boats professedly to guard the
grain-fields, and into these they put from ten to twenty men, who cruise along the
Fig.
144. PORTAGE IN CHEK.IANO.
rivers, violently plundering the boats of travellers, or forcibly carrying off
the wives and daughters of the tanka boat people. The inhabitants of the villages
and hamlets fear these robbers as they would tigers, and do not offer them
any resistance. The husbandman must pay these robbers a charge,
'
in a
else as soon as
his crop is ripe it is plundered, and the whole field laid bare. In the precincts of
the metropolis they set fire to places during the night, that under pretence of
saving and defending, they may plunder and *
carry off."
AND FOREIGN TRADE.
The value of the commerce of China can scarcely be even approximately
estimated, except perhaps for salt and the other produce burdened by Government
Op. dt. p. 191.