THE DESTRUCTIVE TYPHOON IN CHINA.-GREAT LOSS OF LIFE AND PROPERTY.

Auckland Star, Volume V, Issue 1493, 23 November 1874, Page 3

THE DESTRUCTIVE TYPHOON IN CHINA.-GREAT LOSS OF LIFE AND PROPERTY.

The full account of the destructive typhoon in China, referred to in our telegrams on Saturday, is described as the most violent and fatal within the memory of living men. It is estimated that the loss of life in the city of Victoria, in the island and villages of the immediate neighbourhood and the adjacent waters amounted to several thouaands. Six steamers and twentyseven European large vessels in the harbour were either sunk, driven on shore, dismasted, or more or less damaged, whilst the destruction of property on shore was wholesale. Many Chinese villages were wholly destroyed Macao—a small peninsula belonging to Portugal—suffered worse even than Hongkong, being left literally a colossal ruin. The loss of life there was enormous. The labour of grave-digging becoming too great, the dead bodies as washed up by the sea and disentombed from fallen houses, were heaped together and burned ; more than a thousand being thus destroyed in one day At least 10,000 persons perished in the K-s^angtung province only, and some accounts' put the number at 100,000. A correspondent gives the following description of Macao after the catastrophe:—"The way lies over huge mounds of debris on which one can walk only with the utmost difficulty, and occasionally not a little danger. !No description could convey an adequate idea of this desolating scene. As you near the place, you are almost arrested by—a smell, horrid and repugnant in the extreme. The large mass of rums over which I was treading were indeed a huge sepulchre, a mighty tomb. What number of dead bodies are lying beneath them will not be known for weeks ; the putrid essences which they emit are the only indications of death. Only a few yards off the harbour's edge a dozen corpses are floating in the water, stiff and rigid, with uplifted hands, as though the last human effort had been to clutch at anything which promised succour] It is impossible to give anything like an accurate estimate."