KING-TE-TECHING, a famous village belonging to the district of Jao-te-cheou-fou, a city of China, in the province of Kiang-si. This village, in which are collected the best workmen in porcelain, is as populous as the largest cities of China. It is reckoned to contain a million of inhabitants, who consume every day more than ten thousand loads of rice. It extends a league and a half along the banks of a beautiful river, and is not a collection of straggling houses intermixed with spots of ground: on the contrary, the people complain that the buildings are too crowded, and that the long streets which they form are too narrow; those who pass through them imagine themselves transported into the midst of a fair, where nothing is heard around but the noise of potters calling out to make way. Provisions are dear here, because every thing consumed
is brought from remote places; even wood, so necessary for their furnaces, is actually transported from the distance of an hundred leagues. This village, notwithstanding the high price of provisions, is an asylum for a great number of poor families, who could not subsist anywhere else. Children and invalids find employment here, and even the blind gain a livelihood by pounding colours. The river in this place forms a kind of harbour about a league in circumference: two or three rows of barks placed in a line sometimes border the whole extent of this vast basin.