PREFACE
Every intelligent person that I have met whose good fairy has led him to the Celestial Empire has fallen under the spell of that marvellous people and marvellous land. I am fired with the ambition to cast that spell even on those who have never been there, by showing them as accurately and vividly as I can, with pen and brush, what the face of China actually is.
People may describe with success the soul of a people, provided it is sufficiently near the surface, but the foreigner who has known and loved China for a lifetime would be the first to repudiate the possibility of doing this in the case of China. I would rather take Browning’s view—“Nor soul helps body more than body soul”—and try to set down faithfully the things I have seen, that they may lead others to study China for themselves.
It may be objected that the picture is too much couleur de rose, because I have not dwelt on the dark side of things: but there is a use for eyelids as well as for eyes.
This book is the result of a year spent in Shansi, 1893–94, and six months spent in travel through the provinces of Shantung, Chili, Hupeh, Szechwan, and Yünnan during 1907–8. The former visit was mainly spent at a medical mission at Taiyüanfu, which was then remote from Western influences; now everything has changed, and I travelled from north-east to south-west of the Empire and found no village untouched by the great awakening. On the first occasion I was always conscious of a certain hostility in the attitude of the people towards foreigners; this time it was quite the reverse. Considering the behaviour of many travellers towards the Chinese, this seems to me really astonishing; but they are very sensitive in their appreciation of mental attitude, and they responded unhesitatingly to the call we made on their chivalry by placing ourselves unreservedly in their hands. We were repeatedly warned not to do this, but our confidence was justified by the event. In no European country could we have been more courteously treated, and in very few have I travelled so happily and so free from care.
The journey was one long series of pleasant surprises, and my friend expressed the feelings of both of us when, on crossing the frontier into Burma, she exclaimed: “If only we could turn round and go all the way back again!” If any one is induced by reading this book to make personal acquaintance with China, it will not have been written in vain.