New Forces in Old China | Page 5

. . . . .Title View of Canton, Showing House Boats. . . . . . . . 22 H. I. H. Prince Su and Attendants. . . . . . . . . 32 A Rut in the Loess Region. . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Germans Building Railway Bridge in Shantung. . . . 56 A Shendza in Shantung. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Climbing Tai-shan, the Sacred Mountain . . . . . . 70 The Grave of Confucius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Part of the Author's Escort of Chinese Cavalrymen. 92 Watching the Author writing in his Diary at a noon stop A Snap Shot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 The Bund, Shanghai . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .112 American Cigarette Posters on a Chinese Bridge . .112 The Chinese Cart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .130 The Old and The New. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .130 French Military Post, Saigon . . . . . . . . . . .150 German Soldiers on the Bund, Tien-tsin . . . . . .150 The British Legation Guard, Peking . . . . . . . .174 The Temple of Heaven, Peking . . . . . . . . . . .198 Memorial Arch, Hall of the Classics, Peking. . . .228 Graduating Class, Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Canton, 1904. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .268 Approach to the Imperial Palace in the Forbidden City, Peking. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .320 Two of China's Great Men Yuan Shih Kai and Chang Chih-tung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .344 Map. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .370

PART I
Old China and its People
I
THE ANCIENT EMPIRE
HE must be dead to all noble thoughts who can tread the venerable continent of Asia without profound emotion. Beyond any other part of the earth, its soil teems with historic associations. Here was the birthplace of the human race. Here first appeared civilization. Here were born art and science, learning and philosophy. Here man first engaged in commerce and manufacture. And here emerged all the religious teachers who have most powerfully influenced mankind, for it was in Asia in an unknown antiquity that the Persian Zoroaster taught the dualism of good and evil; that the Indian Gautama 600 years before Christ declared that self-abnegation was the path to a dreamless Nirvana; that less than a century later the Chinese Lao-tse enunciated the mysteries of Taoism and Confucius uttered his maxims regarding the five earthly relations of man, to be followed within another century by the bold teaching of Mencius that kings should rule in righteousness. In Asia it was 1,000 years afterwards that the Arabian Mohammed proclaimed himself as the authoritative prophet. There the God and Father of us all revealed Himself to Hebrew sage and prophet in the night vision and the angelic form and the still, small voice; and in Asia are the village in which was cradled and the great altar of the world on which was crucified the Son of God.
We of the West boast of our national history. But how brief is our day compared with the succession of world powers which Asia has seen.
Chaldea began the march of kingdoms 2,200 years before Christ. Its proud king, Chedor-laomer, ruled from the Persian Gulf to the sources of the Euphrates, and from the Zagros Mountains to the Mediterranean. Then Egypt arose to rule not only over the northeastern part of Africa, but over half of Arabia and all of the preceding territory of Chaldea. Assyria followed, stretching from the Black Sea nearly half-way down the Persian Gulf and from the Mediterranean to the eastern boundary of modern Persia. Babylon, too, was once a world power whose monarch sat
``High on a throne of royal state, which far Outshone the wealth of Ormus or of Ind.''[1]
[1] Milton, ``Paradise Lost,'' Book II.
Persia was mightier still. Two thousand years before America was heard of, while France and Germany, England and Spain, were savage wildernesses, Persia was the abode of civilization and culture, of learning and