Ideas that in some cases are due to deliberate Chinese propagandaĪbroad. In our own land there are many very false ideas about China false Nothing else on hand to pick up and preserve such crumbs of informationĪs we can for surely to know as much of the truth about ourįoreign neighbors as possible is important, above all in this new age. Way through the woods because of the trees. Tell even what he has seen, and in many cases he has long since lost his Their probable future, you may take it for granted that he has beenīut as I have said before, the “old-timer” will seldom sit down to That he really knows nothing whatever about the Chinese people or If he knows almost everything, he has just recentlyĪrrived if he is in doubt, he has been here a few years if he admits Hand” has put the same thing in more popular language: “You canĮasily tell how long a man has been in China by how much he doesn’t He knew of what was going on in the Oriental mind. Lafcadio Hearn said that the longer he remained in the East the less Of customs and the like, but that goes to show how unchanging is lifeĪmong the masses in China even as a republic. On the other hand, there may be much repetition What I say can at most be true of the north, for as yet I know nothing In local customs differ even between neighboring villages in China. If I have fallen into the commonĮrror of generalizing, I hereby apologize, for I know well that details ImpressionsĪre unlike statistics, however, in that they cannot be corrected to aįraction, and I decline to be held responsible for the exact truth ofĮvery presumption I have recorded. In the hope that some of them may also interest others. Often things that others seem to have missed, or considered unimportant, Wandering way as I have traveled, the things that most interested me, Have merely set down in the following pages, in the same leisurely Small boy who was ordered by the teacher to write on two neat pagesĪll about his visit to the museum. The problem of telling all he saw, heard, felt, or smelled there is like the The man who spends a year or two in China and then attacks That was once China, north of about the thirty-fourth parallel of

It merely happened that this will-o’-the-wisp drew me on through everything I set out on a leisurely jaunt to wherever new clues to interest led me. Who can scamper through a country in a few weeks and know all about it, Toward the Far East, and as I am not one of those fortunate persons There is no particular plan to this book.

Iron wandering willows