IT is for war correspondents to describe Sir Edward Seymour's “Forlorn Hope” in answer to despairing telegrams, the siege and relief of Tientsin and Peking, together with the subsequent punitive expeditions so-called. Why and how the Boxer Movement arose in China is still a problem to many minds. As some help to its solution I here attempt to picture in outline the condition of things before the uprising of 1900, that Annus Funestus, and that especially in relation to us foreigners in China, just as in Intimate China I tried to portray the Chinese people as far as possible apart from foreigners. Beginning with the decay of Peking, the stagnation of Taku, I here seek to reproduce in black and white the picturesqueness and the medieval usages, the drowsy dulness, then unexplained attacks on the part of the Chinese, the equally unexplained absence of all measures on the part of the British Government to prevent their recurrence: then again the friendliness of the people, the amiability of the officials, indications of progress on all sides, till on a sudden came the thunder-clap of 1900, with here and there in relief against the blackness of the following Typhoon the sympathetic and self-sacrificing kindliness of here an official, there a peasant, here a trembling1, ignorant woman, there an educated man.

May those who read these pages gain at least some insight into the many redeeming qualities of that last survival from the Past of Nineveh and Babylon, of Alexandria and Pompeii—the Chinese nation of to-day.

AN expedition up the river is one of the pleasures of Shanghai life. People's faces brighten as they talk of “going to the hills.” And there being no roads, the only way of really getting into the country is either to take a houseboat, and wind in and out of the various creeks, or with a yacht drop down to Woosung, or sail up the Huang Pu. We did the latter one winter's day, and the expedition left me rather meditative. Just as in the north I decided the graves were the only liveable-in places, being the only spots sheltered from sun and wind by trees, so here I found the graves were the only things, that made any variety in the landscape of flat alluvial plain, all cultivated, with every here and there a grave mound! It suggested irresistibly that the lives of those around were all flat, full of labour, varied but by deaths, and those not tragic, nor specially interesting.

We sailed on and on, beating against the wind as I have been told no yacht in England could, only a Shanghai yacht with its ingenious adaptation of the Chinese rig. We passed Ming Hong with its picturesque Lekin (Inland Taxes) and Life Saving Station, its pretty pavilion-topped gateway, and Bund, all facing south along the river side. No other boats ventured against the strong north-west blow, and the river felt lonely as we neared the Pagoda of Ta Kong. It seemed a pity not to land and look at something.

NOTHING is more striking in China than the weary, worn looks of the women—European, I mean. Why they should fade, whilst English men with rosy cheeks bloom in perennial youth, so that I not uncommonly take men of thirty-five for boys of twenty-two, has exercised my mind ever since I first caught sight of the European community on the Shanghai race-course. Now coming to Chefoo has, I think, at last explained it. English ladies in China live tightly girt, and gant-de-Suéded, just as if they were going to drive out in a carriage and take a turn in Hyde Park with the thermometer in the sixties. Now, as for months together here the thermometer seems to be in the eighties or nineties, this simply means that for months together the ladies here take next to no exercise, and in some cases none. No small proportion of them neither play lawn tennis nor ride. Meanwhile the men are walking, rowing, bathing, shooting, playing cricket, tennis, etc., etc., and hence, I imagine, the rosy cheeks of the one and the pale weariness of the others.

TWO years before, travelling through the English Lakes in the month of June and rejoicing in the rhododendrons and azaleas, so lovely there, I read Miss Gordon Cumming's account of the azaleas on the hills behind Ningpo, and thought I must some day come to China just on purpose to see them. But I did not then think that I should ever really do so. Now one night on board the good boat Kiangteen had brought us from Shanghai to Ningpo, reaching that place in pleasant time for breakfast. And next day saw us most comfortably installed in a friend's houseboat en route for Kongkou, where we were to take chairs to proceeed to the Snowy Hollow of Shih-to-sze. Ningpo boats are excellent, and the one lent us slipped along like an eel, propelled by two men with yulos at the stern. Though pleasant enough there was little to notice on the way. But before ever packing into the houseboat, we had been to see the various sights of Ningpo: the shops of the famous wood-carving; the grand old Fokien Guild House with its beautiful dragon-carved stone pillars, and air of departed grandeur; then in the foreign quarter the race-course, which is not circular but straight, and where no races are ever run: the church with its excellent memorial window to Bishop Russel, and last, but certainly not least, the new Bund.

IT had really been too hot to write an account of our expedition to the Dragon King's Cavern and the Dome, through the wonderful conglomerate region to the south and east of Ichang. This is as different as possible from the by comparison graceful and pleasing limestone country of the Ichang Gorge. But much more noteworthy, for, as far as I know, the only other example of it on at all as large a scale is Montserrat in Spain. We started in the afternoon, A. and I taking chairs, Mr M. trusting to his feet alone, but he had in the end to be carried pick-a-back over the stream, which we crossed and recrossed till I was almost tired of it. We only got into the conglomerate country towards evening, huge blocks of rock fallen down, and as A. pointed out to me, with the granite pebbles, which go to their making, generally broken in two, thus showing not only how violent had been the force of their disruption but how strong the conglomerate mixture that united them. Dry rivers with stony beds, mountains with bulging sides, always the cracks in them horizontal and quite straight, as if ruled by a ruler, and with little holes like those that come in a plum pudding in the boiling, reminding one of their common name of pudding-stone. The valleys here do not grow narrower and more winding as one goes up them, but end quite abruptly in precipices.

THOSE, who remember their sensations as children, when first taken to plunge into the cold sea, can realise a little the feeling, with which I contemplated starting off on a tour round the south of China among complete strangers to oppose footbinding, one of China's oldest, most deep-rooted, domestic customs.

The honorary secretary of our Natural Feet Society— to translate its Chinese name of Tien Tsu Hui—had done her best to prepare the way by writing beforehand to say that I was coming on behalf of the society, and the China Merchants’ Company—the one great Chinese steamship company—had most kindly at once granted me a free pass by their steamers all round China, but this made me all the more feel that I must work hard and accomplish much in order to justify their liberality. They had promised introductions to leading Chinese. But I had but few introductions to Europeans, and having mostly lived in the far west of China had hardly any acquaintance in the south.

We had taken of late to inviting Chinese officials to our meetings, and I still recalled the sinking of my heart when, the new Victoria Hall having been hired at Hankow, and the chairman of the Municipal Council having himself arranged the seats, the audience began to come in, official after official, some with retinues, some without, some also with that tremendous swagger, that makes one feel, as if the man, who thus walked, could think no subject in heaven or earth worthy of his interest.

TWENTY miles south of Chungking the range of mountains, that shields the eastern face of Szechuan's commercial centre, harbours a sequestered valley, in the floor of which bubble up the hot springs called by the Chinese Wen-tang. Having never visited a Chinese inland watering-place, we thought a visit to the Wen-tang would form a pleasant outing for the Christmas holidays, and accordingly, packing up our beds and a change of clothing, we set out on Christmas Eve to make the journey. Crossing the great river by the ferry to Hai-tan-chi, a long straggling village composed of a narrow, winding street of steep, stone steps, the terminus of the Great Kweichow Road, we ascended a thousand feet to the pass of “Hoang-ko Ya” (Banian Gap), so called from a group of magnificent Finis infectoria shading the last few hundred yards of the winding stone staircase, that leads to the summit of the gap, a thousand feet above the river. And leaving on our left the beautifullywooded peak of Lao-chun-tung, with its groups of halls and temples, rising in terraces one behind the other (commemorating some say the retreat in this spot of the philosopher Lao-tze, 600 B.C.), we traversed the Straszendorf, the narrow, covered-in street of which forms the first halting place for travellers bound from Chungking to the south. This pass leads into an upland valley, bounded on the east by another and loftier pine-clad range, its floor, here half a mile wide, terraced into an endless succession of paddy-fields, now clad in their winter garb of stagnant, but clear, water; their banks green with bean plants just beginning to flower.

WHAT are missionaries doing is a question so often asked in England, if not in China, that perhaps a few words as to what I saw and heard, as I passed up the great River Yangtze in 1899, may be of interest. To begin with Chiu-kiang, the first port, the American Methodist Episcopal Girls’ School there has already won itself quite a name. The girls have the advantage of a very skilled and energetic music teacher, they have sweet voices, and, as other schools say enviously, music is such a showy thing. They certainly sing very agreeably, and are capable of dealing with very difficult music. But the remarkable feature of this school, to my mind, is the way in which all up and down the river as one comes across a young Chinese woman with agreeable, friendly face and eyes, that show intelligent interest in what goes on around her one is always told, “Oh! she was brought up in Miss Robinson's school”. There are already many apparently happy marriages, where the wife and mother owes her teaching to this school. Children of the second generation are now following its courses, and Miss Robinson herself, though always looking frail and easily tired, is hoping to educate a third generation.

HOW interesting it would be at a flower show to throw open a table competition to Chinese men servants instead of European ladies! The idea has been suggested by the extraordinarily elaborate and very tasteful decorations lately seen in a remote outport, the one by a Ningpo boy, the other by a Pekingese. The Ningpo boy relied almost entirely on flat devices on the tablecloth; one a rosebush in miniature, formed of bits of flat grass for stalks, with leaves and rosebuds, all first detached, then most ingeniously laid together. The napkin by this place was twisted into a snake with red seeds for eyes, a black pupil to each, whilst the napkin opposite represented a wolf. Then came a landscape formed of very small bits of leaf, all green, and somewhat poetic in character. Beside another plate a miniature Abutylon plant appeared quite flat on the table, formed again of detached flower leaves and stalks, and this time with even the flowers pressed open and flattened. And so on all round the table.

The Pekingese hardly equalled the Ningpo boy in this his own specialty of flat pictures. But he had a bowl of magnificent crimson roses in the centre of the table, raised, and with a garland of flowers round the foot. His dishes of fruit were also particularly successful, being decorated with flowers of the same tone of colour as the fruit, only stronger, his table being as a whole all orange and crimson, relieved only by the white of the cloth.