Loading tea, Whampoa; and Ariel, other tea clippers and Chinese junks in the harbour at Foochow (both illustrated)

Whampoa Reach was the large deep-water anchorage in the Pearl River where incoming cargoes for China were measured and assessed for tax and where the clipper ships would lie idle as they waited for the new season's tea crop to come down from the hills ready for the legendary races home to England or the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Particularly in the early days of the China tea boom, the anchorage at Whampoa was, at the height of every season, as busy a port as any other in the Far East although it was gradually superseded by Foochow as the years went by.