immense. At each interval of 12 or 15 miles, palaces were built to receive the ambassadors and all their suite. The people were obliged to bear the cost of the wood and other materials, and to supply the workmanship for all these buildings. All the roads were newly repaired, all the streams were cleared out, and at a later period when the ambassadors passed, it was still the poor people who were obliged to furnish everything necessary for them, and in the greatest profusion. The people were thus unusually op- pressed, perhaps four times more than if the king had gone to Kê Cho. The king it is said gave some money to pay the people, but the mandarins of the provinces kept it all to themselves.
At the 6th moon the ambassadors after having heen many times announced, entered the kingdom by the most northerly part of Ton- quin, and it took them more than a month to travel from the borders of China to Hué. They loitered, but not as had been wished, for the Chinese were accompanied by sorcerers or astrologers who decided if the water or the air of the country in which they found themselves were salubrious. It therefore often happened that on the decision of the sorcerers they passed through three or four stations in the same day. When they had stopped, and wished again to proceed the astrologers determined if there was nothing in the stars which opposed the journey, and they performed charms. They also frequently offered sacrifices. The Chinese never travel with- out all these superstitions. The caravan consisted of about 140 persons. At the head was a Chinese mandarin of the 2nd order, who was the first ambassador, besides three other inferior man- darins, an interpreter and four or five sorcerers or astrologers. The rest were soldiers. On the confines of the kingdom many Chinese vagabonds seeing that it would be profitable to be in the suite of the ambassadors, joined it as if to serve as escort. The Chinese professed a great contempt for the Anamites, and during the journey frequently subjected them to all kinds of annoyances. The soldiers and the vagabonds who followed the embassy, made the Cochin- Chinese carry them, and they proved themselves exacting and cruel. The king had given orders to treat the Chinese well and not to cross them in anything. Thus the Cochin-Chinese were obliged to submit to all. The people were constrained to furnish provisions of all kinds, and the Chinese wasted them in a strange manner. What they could not use, was thrown into the fields or into the rivers. However their natural voracity was not wanting ; at each station they weighed themselves, to ascertion if they had lost any of their good condition, and if they were a little reduced in their weight, they stopped to repair by eating what they had lost. At the station near where I was, in two days they caused an expense of at least 3,000 ligatures, which with the Cochin-Chinese is the same as 3,000 dollars to other people. Wherever the embassy passed, the mandarins of the provinces came to do it honor, and
