The Face of China by Emily Georgiana Kemp

I now must go back to my first coming to Tientsin in 1893. From Shanghai I came in a coasting steamer, and it was after starting that I made the rather disconcerting discovery that I was the only woman on board. Nevertheless it was the pleasantest voyage I ever had, as my cabin had a proper bed in it and its own bathroom, and I made the happy discovery that Chinese servants could be the best in the world, while the officers all conspired to amuse me. The voyage lasted a week, and the slow passage up the mouth of the Peiho (_ho_ means "river") was quite a new experience. We ran into the soft banks pretty frequently, and they crumbled like dust; sometimes we were in imminent danger of carrying away a hut as well, but happily that did not occur. One dreadful object kept recurring again and again -- a tall pole on the river-bank with a basket on the top, containing a criminal's head.

At Tientsin I was met by one of my sisters and her husband, who had come to take me into Shansi. The European town was very dull and prosaic, and the native city abjectly squalid, but now the former is well laid out and there are plenty of large houses, shops, schools, colleges, and tramways. I was not sorry to get away from it, however, as I was anxious to see the real China, and we soon got our things accommodated in a small house-boat to travel up the river to Paoting-fu. Three little compartments were all we had, but we spent a good part of each day walking on the banks and admiring the lovely autumn colouring of the rushes. On my return a year later we were not so fortunate, as the war with Japan was in full swing, so that the country was too disturbed for us to walk about, and we had to take whatever could be got in the way of a boat, namely, one infested with cockroaches and other vermin. For three days and nights we sat in misery, scarcely able to eat or sleep, and when we opened our trunks at Tientsin we found them simply swarming with cockroaches. They had eaten all the straw of a bonnet, leaving nothing but lining and trimmings!