Lion and Dragon in Northern China (Classic Reprint)

Book excerpt: Excerpt from Lion and Dragon in Northern China Cinderella beautiful and presentable before any Fairy Prince can be expected to find in her the lady of his dreams: and the Godmother has certainly not yet made her appearance, unless, indeed, the British Colonial Office is presumptuous enough to put forward a claim (totally unjustifiable) to that position. By no means do I, in the absence of the Fairy Prince, propose to ride knight-like into the lists of political controversy wearing the gage of SO forlorn a damsel in-distress as Weihaiwei. Let me explain, dropping metaphor, that the following pages will contain but slender contribution to the vexed questions of the strategic Importance of the port or of its potential value as a depot of commerce. Are not such things set down in the books of the official scribes? Nor will they constitute a guide-book that might help exiled Europeans to decide upon the merits of Weihaiwei as a resort for white-cheeked children from Shanghai and Hongkong, or as affording a dumping-ground for brass-bands and bathing-machines. On these matters, too, information is not lacking. As for the position of Weihaiwei on the playground of international politics, it may be that Foreign Ministers have not yet ceased to regard it as an interesting toy to be played with when sterner excitements are lacking. But it will be the aim of these pages to avoid as far as possible any incursion into the realm of politics: for it is not with Weihaiwei as a diplo matic shuttlecock that they profess to deal, but with Weihaiwe1 as the ancestral home of many thousands of Chinese peasants, who present a stolid and almost changeless front to all the storms and uctuations of politics and war. Books on China have appeared in large numbers during the past few years, and the production of another seems to demand some kind of apology. Yet it cannot be said that as a field for the ethnologist, the historian, the student of comparative religion and of folk-lore, the sociologist or the moral philosopher, China has been worked out. The demand for books that profess to deal in a broad and general way with China and its people as a whole has probably, indeed, been fully satisfied: but China is too vast a country to be adequately described by any one writer or group of writers, and the more we know about China and its people the more strongly we shall feel that future workers must confine themselves to less ambitious objects of study than the whole Empire. The pioneer who with his prismatic compass passes rapidly over half a continent has nearly finished all he can be expected to do; he must soon give place to the surveyor who with plane-table and theodolite will content himself with mapping a section of a single province. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."