LHINA is a very large country. It has a circumference of 8000 miles, a distance about equal to the diameter of the globe, and it is larger than the whole European continent.

The Chinese people form fully one-fifth of the total population of our planet and they knew how to use gunpowder and how to write letters at a time when our ancestors still painted their faces a pale blue and hunted the wild boar with a stone axe. To give an adequate description of such a country in a few pages is out of the question.All I can give you is a sketch, an outline.The details(if you are interested)you can afterwards fill in by yourself, for there is enough literature on China to upholster two or three libraries.

China, like India, is a peninsula, but a semi-circular peninsula, not a triangular one. In another very important way it is different from India.No obliging mountain-range cuts it off from the rest of the world.On the contrary, the mountains of China resemble the fingers of a hand stretching out westward.In consequence thereof, the rich Chinese plains bordering upon the Yellow Sea have at all times been wide open to the hardy pioneers of central Asia.

In order to overcome this handicap, the Chinese emperors of the third century before our era(the period during which Rome and Carthage fought for the mastery of the Mediterranean)constructed a gigantic wall,1500 miles long and 20 feet wide and more than 30 feet high, which ran all the way from the Gulf of Liao-tung to Kiayu-Kwan, just west of the borders of the Gobi Desert.

This granite barrier has done its duty well and honorably. In the seventeenth century it fell before the onslaughts of the Manchus.All the same, a fortification which has held its own for almost twenty centuries is no mere trifle.Those we build nowadays are useless after ten years and have then got to be renewed at enormous cost.

China looks like a vast circle neatly divided into three parts by the Yangtsze-Kiang in the south and the Hwang-Ho in the north. The northern part, in which Peking is situated, has very cold winters and moderately hot summers, as a result of which the people eat millet and no rice.The central part, protected against the winds from the north by the Tsing-ling-shan range, has a much warmer climate and a much denser population which eats rice and does not know the sight or taste of grain.The third part, south China, has warm winters and very hot and moist summers and raises everything that will grow in the tropics.

Northern China is again divided into two parts, the mountain regions of the west and the plains of the east. These mountain regions of the west are the famous loess country.Loess is a very fine sort of loam, looking a yellowish gray, and it is very porous, as a result of which the rain of Heaven disappears as fast as it touches the earth, while rivers and brooks cut themselves deep ravines which makes travel from one part of the country to the other as difficult as it is in Spain.

The plain of the east is situated on the Gulf of Chih-li which is so rapidly being filled up with the deposits carried down by the Hwang-Ho that it is almost unnavigable and has no good harbor. A little further towards the north there is another river, much smaller than the Hwang-Ho but quite as useless from the point of view of navigation, which has the distinction of being the Chicago River of Peking, the great drainage canal which looks after the sewage disposal of the Chinese capital.

It is however a very ancient town and it has seen a great many ups and downs. In 986 it was conquered by the Tartars who rebaptised it Nanking or the“southern capital”.In the twelfth century the Chinese recaptured it but did not care to retain it as their capital and made it a second-rate provincial center, called Yen-shah Fu.Half a century later it was once more taken by another Tartar tribe who now called it Chung-tu or the“central capital”.Another century later it was occupied by Genghis Khan, who however refused to come and live there in fatuous ease but remained faithful to his tent in the heart of the Mongolian Desert.One of his successors, the famous Kublai Khan, felt differently.He rebuilt the ruins of Peking and baptised them Yenking, although at that time they were better known by their Mongolian name of Cambaluc or the“city of the Khan”.

Finally these Tartars were expelled too, and a king of Chinese origin, the first one of the famous Ming dynasty, mounted the throne. Yenking then became Peking.As Peking it has ever since remained the center of the Chinese government, but so far removed from the rest of the world that it was not until the year 1860 that a European ambassador was allowed to visit the capital in his official capacity and with all the pomp and circumstance befitting a man whose father had given the British Museum the Elgin marbles.

The city in the hey-day of its power must have been tremendously strong. The walls were sixty feet thick and almost fifty feet high and defended by square towers and gateways which were fortresses in themselves.On the inside, the city was like a Chinese puzzle, containing a number of smaller cities, the one inside of the other, an imperial city, and a Manchu city and a Chinese city and, after the middle of the nineteenth century, a foreign city.

Until the Boxer outbreak of 1900 the foreign diplomatic representatives lived in a small square of their own just between the Manchu city and the Chinese city. After the siege, this diplomatic ghetto was strongly fortified and heavily garrisoned with troops of the different countries to prevent a recurrence of this most unfortunate incident.Peking, of course, contains a number of palaces and temples.But here I would like to draw attention to a very interesting difference between the temperaments of the people of China and those of India which explains to a certain degree why these two countries have practically nothing in common except that they are both of them hopelessly overpopulated.

The Hindus have always taken their Gods very seriously and when they built them a temple it must be the biggest, the most expensive and the showiest temple.“Not a cent for public improvements, but millions for the Gods!”was the slogan of the Brahmans The Chinese are nominally Buddhists but every Chinaman from the humblest laundry-man in Mott Street to the most powerful of the old Mandarins had fallen under the influence of that shrewd old sage, Kung-fu-tsze or Confucius, who during the second half of the sixth century had preached his gospel of common, everyday horse-sense without wasting much time upon vague discussions about the Life Hereafter. And it was completely in keeping with the Confucian notions about the“sensible thing to do”that the Chinese rulers spent the greater part of their revenue upon public improvements, upon canals and irrigation dams and Chinese walls and river improvements, but just enough upon their temples and shrines not to make the Gods feel that they were in any way being slighted.

As the ancient Chinese were a people of tremendous artistic ability, they could achieve much more satisfactory results and at a much smaller cost than the natives of the Ganges valley. It is true that nowhere in China does the traveller find anything at all comparable to the vast structures of India.A few gigantic statues of animals guarding the gardens of the Ming rulers, some sixty miles north of Peking, and here and there a large Buddha.That is all.The rest is of modest dimensions, albeit of excellent proportions.But curiously enough, the art of China appeals to the people of the west much more than does the art of India.Chinese paintings and sculptures and pottery and lacquer-work fit into a European or American home, whereas their Indian counterparts disturb the harmony and are slightly upsetting, even when seen in a museum.

To the modern business world China is important because it has very large coal deposits and the second largest iron deposits in the world. When the English and German and American mines get exhausted, we can still go to the province of Shan-si to keep warm.

To the south-east of the province of Chih-li lies the province of Shan-tung with the peninsula of that name which separates the Gulf of Chih-li from the Yellow Sea. This part of China is very mountainous, except for the valley of the Hwang-Ho, which formerly ran due south into the Yellow Sea.But it changed its course suddenly in 1852,and that little affair showed us that a flood in China really meant a flood.In order to find a parallel for the Hwang-Ho's behavior we would have to imagine the Rhine suddenly making up its mind to flow into the Baltic or the Seine deciding to run into the North Sea instead of the Gulf of Biscay.As the Hwang-Ho has changed its mouth ten times since the end of the seventeenth century we are by no means certain that the present channel will be definite.Dikes and dams which in other parts of the world are apt to keep a river within bounds are of no avail against such rivers as the Hwang-Ho and the Yangtsze, for the dikes through which the river broke in the year 1852 were fifty feet high and they tore apart like tissue paper.

And then there is something else that makes these rivers such a nuisance. You must have heard the Chinese referred to as the yellow race and you must have seen articles in the newspapers about the Yellow Peril, etc.,As a rule we associate the idea of yellow and Chinese with the color of a Chinaman's face.But when the emperors of China called themselves Hwang-ti, which meant Lord of the Yellow Earth, they were not thinking of their subjects but of the land inhabited by these subjects.The yellow loess mud carried down by the Hwang-Ho turns everything in northern China yellow-the water of the river, the water of the sea, the roads, the houses, the fields, the clothes of the men and women.And it is that yellow dust which has given its name to a race which for the rest is really not much more yellow than the average city dweller of the west.

In order to permit his subjects to proceed from northern China to central and southern China without running the risk of a long sea voyage, one of the Chinese emperors who lived during the thirteenth century ordered a canal to be built that should connect the Hwang-Ho with the Yangtsze-Kiang. It was more than a thousand miles long and fulfilled its purpose faithfully until the year 1852 when the Hwang-Ho moved from the Yellow Sea to the Gulf of Chih-li and the canal was destroyed together with the old river bed.But this Grand Canal, the longest in the world, shows that the ancient rulers of the land were men of enlightened views.

But to return to the peninsula of Shan-tung. Its hard granite coast has been responsible for the formation of several very important harbors.One of those, Wei-hai-wei, was until recently in English hands.The British had“rented”it from China when Russia occupied Port Arthur on the other side of the Gulf of Chih-li to use it as a naval base and a station of their Trans-Siberian railroad.The“renting contract”stipulated that England should withdraw as soon as the Russians had disappeared from the Liao-tung peninsula.But when Japan took Port Arthur in 1905,the English remained.The Germans, not to be outdone, must then occupy the bay of Kiao-Chow, further towards the south, and the city of Tsing-tao, both of them also parts of the Shan-tung peninsula.This meant that the Great War also had its reverberations in the Far East.Germans and Britons fought for the possession of something which belonged to neither of them and, as usually happens in such cases, a third party, the Japanese, got away with the stolen goods.

In order to regain a little of the goodwill of the Chinese, Wei-hai-wei and Kiao-Chow have since been returned to China. But if Japan succeeds in taking Manchuria, the old game will probably begin all over again.

In the east central China consists of a wide and fertile plain which is really the continuation of the plain of northern China, but the interior is mountainous. Through these mountains the Yangtsze-Kiang wends its tortuous way until at last it reaches the East China Sea.It takes its way through the province of Szechuen, a region almost as large as France, but supporting a much larger population as the red soil is exceedingly fertile.Several mountain-ranges running from south to north cut it almost completely off from the rest of the world.As a result it has suffered but little from the visitation of the White Man and is distinctly more Chinese than the rest of China.

Continuing its course towards the sea, the Yangtsze next traverses the province of Hu-peh where the famous city of Hankow is situated. This was the center of the revolution of 1911 which upset the last emperor of the Manchu dynasty and turned the oldest monarchy in the world into a republic.Up to Hankow the Yangtsze is navigable for sea-going vessels with a displacement of not more than 1000 tons.Below Hankow, the river is the main artery of commerce for central China until it reaches Shanghai, the center of China's foreign trade and one of the first Chinese harbors which was opened to foreign commerce at the conclusion of the so-called“opium war”between England and China in the year 1840—1842.

To the south of the Yangtsze delta lies Hang-chow, in the east Su-chow, the name of which suggests tea. The suggestion is correct.The lower part of the Yangtsze valley is very fertile and it was for this reason that Nanking, which is situated where the Yangtsze begins its delta, was for a long time not only the most important city of central China but also the residence of its emperor.

Partly on account of its historical past and partly on account of its strategic position, half-way between Canton and Peking, and partly because it is not directly menaced by the guns of foreign warships, the city of Nanking was chosen as the center of that government which at the moment of writing(Jan. 2,1932,seven minutes past midnight)seems to be the“official government”of China.

As for southern China, it is a mountainous country and, although it raises tea and silk and cotton, it has always been a comparatively poor region. Once upon a time it was covered with forests, but the forests were cut down and the soil was washed away by the rain, and the bare rocks remained.Hence wholesale emigration to all parts of the world which have not yet passed laws restricting the number of Chinese visitors.

The most important city in southern China is Canton, which is the main harbor of import into China just as Shanghai is the most important center for export to Europe. At the mouth of the Canton River(the city itself is a few miles inland)lie two foreign possessions.On the right bank, Macao, all that remains of the Portuguese possessions in China and now merely a sort of oriental Monte Carlo, and Hong-Kong a city which the English took during the opium war and have kept ever since.

Of the two islands off the coast of southern China, Hai-nan is still Chinese, but Formosa, an old Dutch colony, has belonged to Japan since the Chinese-Japanese War of 1894—1895.

Ninety percent of the Chinese are, always have been and probably always will be farmers who live on their own products and starve when there is a bad season. But forty-eight harbors have been opened up for the foreign trade and their main exports are silk and tea and cotton.Curiously enough, there is no export of opium.The Chinese emperors have always tried to protect their people against this unfortunate habit-forming drug and gradually the old poppy fields have been changed into cotton fields.

As for railroads, the Chinese fought the idea longer than any other nation because, with their respect for the memory of their parents and ancestors, they feared to upset the peaceful slumbers of these departed worthies when the engines should come thundering down the roads of iron. The few miles built in 1875 between Shanghai and Wu Sung, its harbor, caused such a storm of protest that they were immediately discontinued.And even today the Chinese railroads describe wide circles around all cemeteries.Still, there are now over 10,000 miles of railroad in actual use and the bridge across the Hwang-Ho near Tsi-nan is the biggest railroad bridge in the world.

As for China's foreign trade, almost 60%is still in the hands of England and her colonies and that probably explains why England has been obliged to discontinue her old ruthless policy towards the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire. A boycott of English goods by these industrious Celestials would mean a loss of millions of dollars a day.It is good policy to keep on friendly terms with a customer who happens to represent the interests of one-fifth of the entire human race.

When the earliest ancestors of the Chinese dimly emerged from the nebulous realm of the past, they were already living on the Yellow Earth along the banks of the Hwang-Ho, north-west from the heart of the present China. The fertile loess fields must have been very desirable in the eyes of an agricultural people.Furthermore it also settled the housing problem, for it allowed a man to dig himself a comfortable little home in the side of a convenient hill and not bother about draughty walls or a roof that leaked.

According to reliable accounts of travellers who are familiar with that part of the world, there are spots which are known to be densely populated but where one fails to see a single vestige of human habitation until the first rays of light tell of the coming of another day. Then, like so many rabbits who swarm out of their holes to enjoy the sun, those men, women and children begin their endless tasks of gathering food until eventide, whenthey disappear once more into the bowels of the earth.

Having occupied the mountains, the Chinese then spread eastward. The turbulent Hwang-Ho carried millions of tons of mountain loess into the plains and thereby fertilized them until they were fit to support further millions of human beings.The Chinese followed in the wake of the river and twenty centuries before the beginning of our era(1500 years before the founding of Rome)the Chinese had wandered as far as the Yangtsze and the center of their empire had been moved from the Hwang-Ho region to the great plain of central China.

During the fourth and fifth centuries before the birth of Christ, three great moral teachers arose among them, Kung-fu-tsze or Confucius, Mang-tsze or Mencius, and Lao-tsze, whose name has not been latinized. What the religious conceptions of the Chinaman were at the time these three prophets made their appearance, we do not know.Nature apparently was worshipped as the forces of Nature will always be worshipped by those who depend upon them for their living, and not Confucius nor Mencius nor Lao-tsze were religious founders in the sense of the word as applied to Christ or Buddha or Mahommed.

They merely taught a moral code based upon the acceptance of man as a pretty inferior and not very brilliant product of creation but capable of great development provided he fell into good hands and was willing to listen to the precepts of his elders and betters. From our own Christian point of view, these three can of course be accused of preaching a very worldly and decidedly materialistic doctrine.None of them said much about humility and meekness or preached that we must return good for evil.They knew that the average man was not capable of such noble and elevated deeds, and furthermore they seem to have doubted whether such a rule of conduct was really for the ultimate good of the community at large.Wherefore they suggested such things as that evil should be answered with justice and that one should pay one's bills and keep contracts and honor the memory of honorable ancestors.

These three Chinese philosophers spread their morality pretty thin but every one got at least a smear of it. I don't say that this was a better system than ours or a worse one.But it was a system not devoid of certain very definite advantages.It gave a people consisting of 400,000,000 different individuals, speaking a couple of dozen different dialects(a Chinaman from the north finds it just as hard to understand a brother Chinaman from the south as a Swede trying to make conversation with an Italian)and living under entirely different circumstances, at least one thing in common—a decidedly Chinese attitude towards the ups and downs of life, a practical philosophy of existence which will pull the humblest of coolies through hardships that would either kill the average European or American or would drive him to commit suicide.

And these ideas were sufficiently simple to be understood by almost every one. As a proof whereof I refer you to the miracles of assimilation performed by the Chinese during the 4000 years of their history.They are preposterous and at the same time fabulous.During the tenth century China became part of the greatest empire that ever existed, that Mongolian commonwealth that reached from the Baltic to the Pacific.But all those Mongolian rulers were like Kublai Khan.They ended by becoming Chinamen.After the Mongolians came the Mings(1368—1644),the last purely Chinese dynasty to rule the country.They were succeeded by a Tartar prince who came from and who was the founder of the Manchu dynasty.But although the Chinese, as a token of submission to their Manchu masters, were forced to grow their hair long and wear a pig-tail and shave the rest of their heads, the Manchus soon became even more Chinese than the Chinamen themselves.

After the last Manchu invasion the Chinese were left completely to themselves and by merely guarding their harbors against all foreign visitors from the west, the civilization of China had a chance to settle down for a little rest. But the moment it did this, it petrified more completely than any other country of which we have ever heard.Its political system became even more rigid than that of the old Russia of pre-revolutionary days.Literature froze, even their incomparable art became as stereotyped as that of the Byzantine mosaic makers of ancient Constantinople.Science no longer made any progress.If by chance some one still happened to invent something new it was at once discarded as foolish and undesirable, just as the medical department of our own army tried to discourage the use of chloroform because it was both new and foolish.Because they were cut off so completely from the rest of the world and never had for chance of finding out what other nations were doing, it was easy for the Chinese to convince themselves that their own methods were best, that their own army was invincible, that their own art was the most sublime art ever wrought by the hands of human beings and that their own customs and habits were so superior to those of all other nations that it was ridiculous to compare the two.Many other countries have in a mild way tried such a policy of exclusion but it has always ended in disaster.

Since the early half of the sixteenth century the Chinese had allowed a few“foreign devils”,hailing from Portugal and England and Holland, to settle in two or three of their Pacific ports for the sake of the profits that were to be derived from the trade with Europe. But the social status of those unfortunate foreigners had been most unsatisfactory.They were treated like a respectable colored doctor who by chance is obliged to travel on the same boat with a delegation of the descendants of Virginia's first settlers.

When England in 1816 sent Lord Amherst(nephew of Jeffrey and the man who interviewed Napoleon on St. Helena in 1817)to ask the Son of Heaven to mitigate the hardships from which the English merchants suffered in Canton, he was told that an interview with the Celestial Majesty depended upon his willingness to kow-tow before the imperial throne.The kow-tow, which literally meant“knocking the head three times upon the ground before the sacred throne”was something which a Dutch sea-captain could afford to do, for once he had kow-towed himself out of the reception room he knew that he could take home enough tea or spices to be comfortable for the rest of his life.But the representative of His British Majesty was somewhat differently placed.Lord Amherst curtly refused and as a result was not even allowed to enter the gates of Peking.

Meanwhile Europe, growing rich in consequence of the invention of James Watt and the application of steam for the purpose of exploiting our little planet, was clamoring for new worlds to conquer. China of course was No.I on the list.The direct excuse for the outbreak of hostilities was not exactly flattering to the pride of the white race, least of all for that part of it which ever since 1807,when Dr.Morrison had reached Canton as the first European missionary, had been telling the Chinese what a fine thing Christianity really was and why they should give it a chance.Even those pedantic and narrow-minded Mandarins(merely a Chinese title for administrator)who then ruled China were still sufficiently steeped in the teachings of Confucius to refuse to let their people be exposed to the unlimited importation of opium.But the British India Company was making millions of pounds out of the sale of poppy-seed to the people of the Yangtsze and the Hwang-Ho.The British India Company insisted upon importing opium into China and the Chinese authorities refused to let the stuff be landed.Opium and hurt feelings then led to the war of 1840 in which the Chinese, to their dumbfounded surprise, discovered that they were absolutely no match for the despised foreigners and that during the centuries of voluntary seclusion they had dropped so far behind the rest of humanity that it was doubtful whether they would ever be able to catch up.

This fear bids fair to come true. Ever since the disastrous days of the opium War, China has been completely at the mercy of the westerner.The Chinese people, who are apt to go on plowing and harvesting, no matter who is fighting in the adjacent fields, have at times given evidence of the fact that they are beginning to realize that something is wrong with their country.The first outbreak of discontent occurred about eighty years ago.The Chinese then blamed the disasters of their hapless land upon the“foreign”Manchu dynasty and rose up in rebellion to set themselves free.

While the Manchus were engaged in a war with England and France, southern China started the so-called Tai-ping rebellion. They ceased to shave their heads and they cut off their pig-tails, but the imperial armies, led at first by an American engineer named Ward and afterwards by an Englishman, a certain Charles George Gordon, a sincere Christian and a profound mystic, were much too powerful for the poor misguided revolutionists.The“Emperor”whom they had elected to replace the Manchus burned himself alive with all his wives and concubines in his residence in the city of Nanking.Hundreds of thousands of people were executed and Gordon returned to England to devote himself to acts of charity and piety, performed in his leisure hours when he was not drilling troops, and to prepare for his tragic end of which you shall hear in the chapter on Africa.

Then in 1875 there was slight difference of opinion between the Manchus and Germany, and Germany sent a squadron to purify the Chinese coast of pirates. During 1884 and 1885 there was a war with France which cost the Chinese Anam and Tongking, and in 1894 there was a war with Japan, now thoroughly Europeanized, which ended with the cession of the island of Formosa.

Then began the great European rush for armaments and strategic points. The Russians took Port Arthur, the English took Wei-hai-wei, the Germans took Kiao-Chow and the French took kiang Hung on the left bank of the Mekong River.America, which has thus far always mixed sentiment(and often, alas, sentimentality)with its foreign policies, talked vaguely about“maintaining the open door”and the European nations were turning the territory they had stolen into impregnable fortresses and closed the door whenever their uncle from across the ocean was not looking.

The Chinese people, patient and plodding though they are by nature, began to grasp the fact that they were being cheated right and left. Once more holding the foreign Manchu dynasty responsible for all their humiliations and misery, they started the unfortunate Boxer rebellion of the year 1901.They began their operations by murdering the German ambassador(their plausible excuse was that he had first struck a Chinaman)and then besieged the foreign legations in Peking.As a result an army of Russians, Japanese, Englishmen, Austrians Germans, Italians, French and Americans marched to the relief of the sorely beset foreign quarter, saved the ministers and their families from an untimely end, and then by way of retribution plundered Peking as that rich city had never been looted before.The Forbidden City, the heart of the imperial residence, was broken into.Nothing was spared, no matter how holy it might be to the Chinese, and the German commander-in-chief, who arrived with an extra 20,000 men(when the shooting was already over but the plundering still in full swing)had been instructed by his imperial master to“follow in the footsteps of the Huns”an unfortunate expression which came home to roost a little over a dozen years later and which was one of the worst boomerangs old Wilhelm ever sent forth during the days when he indulged in that sport in preference to his present craze for chopping wood.

Condemned to pay enormous indemnities and humiliated in every possible way by their ever more aggressive European neighbors, the Chinese people once more rose in rebellion in the year 1911 and this time they were successful, for the Manchu dynasty was abolished and China was turned into a republic.

But this time, however the Chinese had learned the lesson that the nations of the west are not primarily interested in chapters from the writings of Confucius, but care much more for coal concessions and iron concessions and oil concessions and that therefore those possessed of these valuable raw materials must either know how to defend their property or sink it to the bottom of the ocean if they want it to be absolutely safe. In short, China began to recognize the necessity of following the example of Japan by taking a short course in“westernization”.Foreign teachers were engaged from all over the world, but principally from Japan, which was nearby and handy.

In the meantime, Russia had started upon its ambitious plan to convert one-sixth of the world into an industrial state, administered according to the Gospel of Saint Marx;and Russia, being a very close neighbor of China could whisper strange words into the ears of the long-suffering coolies who had been born to sweat and work, no matter who ruled them or whether they were being exploited by the English or the French or the Japanese.

The result of all these conflicting ideas, plans and emotions is the chaos which has descended upon China since the end of the Great War, during which it was forced to take the side of the Allies in a quarrel in which as usual it had nothing to gain and a great deal to lose.

I am not prophet. I don't know what will happen during the next ten or fifteen years.Conditions probably won't change very much, for poor China tried too late to catch up with the procession.But may the good Lord have mercy upon us if she ever does, for oh, what a bill we shall have to pay then!What a bill!