The Sikiang is one of the great rivers of China and indeed of the world. Its width at Wuchow at low water was nearly a mile and our steamer anchored in twenty-four feet of water to a floating dock made fast by huge iron chains reaching three hundred feet up the slop to the city proper, thus providing for a rise of twenty-six feet in the river at its flood stage during the rainy season.

— Farmers of Forty Centuries by F. H. King (1911)