Tales From Lands Far Away

The Land of Opposites-China

A half century ago the world laughed at Jules Verne for imagining that it would ever be possible to go around the world in eighty days. It was not until years later that Nellie Bly, a reporter, actually encircled the globe in that space of time. Now we are dreaming of making such a journey in ten days and our aeroplanes are flying at a rate of speed that would take one around the world in eight days. At this hour thousands of young men can handle these flyers as easily and with almost as little danger as they can handle an automobile. With aerial mail routes already established in many countries it will not be long until mail service by aeroplane will be established around the world.

This book is a series of Birdseye Views of Far Lands something the same as one would see on a flying visit to various countries. In this way it will be possible to get glimpses of countries on every continent in one small volume and thus give interesting and valuable information about countries and peoples in all parts of the world. Young people especially are in the mind of the writer. As most of the information was secured by rambling through these countries and rubbing elbows with the common people it will be difficult to keep from using the personal pronoun quite often.

It is fitting that our first view be of China which is one of the oldest civilizations on the earth. This great agricultural people have tilled the same soil for forty centuries and in most cases it yet produces more per acre than the soil of perhaps any other country. The Chinese are a great people. Although they are just awakening from a sleep that has lasted twenty centuries or more, yet the world can learn many valuable lessons from them. They used to embody the genius of the world and even yet have skill along certain lines that is simply amazing. Many of the great inventions that have blessed the world and which we are using today were wrought out by these people and it will not be out of place here to recount some of their achievements.

The Chinese invented printing five hundred years before Caxton was born and the Peking Gazette is said to be the oldest newspaper in the world. They invented paper nearly eighteen centuries ago and had books hundreds of years before the days of Gutenburg. They invented the compass twenty centuries before Jesus was born in Bethlehem. They invented gunpowder ages ago and were the first people to use firearms. They used banknotes and bills of exchange long before other nations, and the modern adding machine is founded upon a principle which has been used by them a thousand years. They discovered the process of rearing the silkworm and they dressed in silk when our forefathers wore clothing made of the skins of animals. The writer has crossed the Atlantic more than a dozen times on ships with watertight compartments, a so-called modern safety device, but the Chinese had watertight compartments in their junks hundreds of years before modern steamships were ever dreamed about.

To the Chinese we must credit the making of asbestos, the manufacture of lacquer, the carving of ivory and many other important industries. Even today they make the finest dishes and the best pottery. At one time they built a tower two hundred and fifty-six feet high entirely of porcelain. Ages ago they dug the longest and in some respects the greatest canal ever dug on earth, the Grand Canal of China, which was a thousand miles long and some of which is in use to this day. They built the Great Wall of China which was fifteen hundred miles in length and which was a greater undertaking than the building of the Pyramids of Egypt.

The Chinese were the first people to coin money in a mint; the first to have a standard of weights and measures; the first to have a system of marking time. They had a celestial globe, an observatory, and noted the movements of heavenly bodies more than four thousand years ago. A Chinaman was the first to distill and use intoxicating liquor and for this he was dismissed from the public service by the ruler who said, "This will cost someone a kingdom some day." They are industrious, resourceful and skillful and should they become warriors and introduce modern methods and instruments of warfare the world would be up against the most frightful peril of all ages. Napoleon Bonaparte said of China, "Yonder sleeps a mighty giant and when it awakens it will make the whole world tremble."

The Chinese are one of the strongest races of people in existence. They have only been conquered twice but in both cases they absorbed their conquerors and made Chinese of them. Although old, out of date and slow, they have principles in their civilization that will last as long as time, and China will be a great nation long after some of the so-called great nations now in existence are forgotten.