Wang the Ninth: The Story of a Chinese Boy

BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR POLITICAL: Manchu and Muscovite The Re-Shaping of the Far East (2 volumes) The Truce in the East and its Aftermath The Coming Struggle in Eastern Asia The Conflict of Colour The Fight for the Republic in China The Truth about China and Japan ROMANTIC: Indiscreet Letters from Peking The Forbidden Boundary The Human Cobweb The Unknown God The Romance of a Few Days The Revolt The Eternal Priestess The Altar Fire Wang the Ninth. The Story of a Chinese Boy
NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1920
Copyright, 1920, By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.
VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK
This book is a partial explanation of the phenomenon of China which seems so strange when curtly dealt with in the daily press.
It has quality of being true and should therefore be known.
Peking, July, 1919

Wang the Ninth was born a few years before the end of the nineteenth century in a village called prosaically in the vernacular Ten Li Hamlet because it lay ten li or Chinese miles from the great imperial highway. He was the eighth child; that was why, according to immemorial custom, he was called the Ninth, since the numeral eight added to his patronymic signified that opprobrious epithet term tortoise, a nickname which no Chinese could survive. When he was little more than three and scarcely weaned (for the children of this land are suckled until they can run) he was unceremoniously put on a creaking wheelbarrow and trundled off into the unknown.
This inconsequential hegira was the beginning of his great adventures,—and was the natural aftermath of a curiously swift tragedy in an environment saturated with inaction.
Famine had suddenly descended on Ten Li Hamlet, and his brothers and sisters, having been leased or sold one after another to neighbours (you can use whichever expression you like), he and his father had become the last survivors in a disrupted family. For his mother, too, had tired of privation. She had sat ominously quiet for one whole week and had then slipped away with a travelling blacksmith, who had been working for a season not fifty feet from the family home of mud-bricks and who disappeared as he had come—like a wraith in the night.