And at the end of the journey Taichow itself, a wretched fishing village inside a grandly bastioned, high-walled, moat-encircled town enclosure, with a beach of rough shingle covered with stinking fish in the process of sun-curing—Taichow without a single other European inhabitant, Taichow which prides itself on its pirates, its oysters and its groves of square-stemmed bamboos.