Across China on Foot

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: We arrived, of course, in the winter, and, having seen it at a time when the sun could do but little in increasing the stenches, we leave it to the imagination as to what it would be in the summer, in a city which for heat is not excelled by Aden. During the summer of 1908 no less than twenty-eight...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: We arrived, of course, in the winter, and, having seen it at a time when the sun could do but little in increasing the stenches, we leave it to the imagination as to what it would be in the summer, in a city which for heat is not excelled by Aden. During the summer of 1908 no less than twenty-eight foreigners succumbed to cholera, and the native deaths were numberless. The people were suffering very much from the cold, and it struck me as one of the unaccountable phenomena of their civilisation that in their ingenuity in using the gifts of Nature they have never learned to weave wool, and to employ it in clothing? that is, in a general sense. There are a few exceptions in the Empire. The nation is almost entirely dependent upon cotton for clothing, which in winter is padded with a cheap wadding to an abnormal thickness. The common people wear no underclothing whatever. When they sleep they strip to the skin, and wrap themselves bodily in a single wadded blanket, sleeping the sleep of the tired people their excessive labour makes them. And, although their clothes might be the height of discomfort, they show their famous indifference to comfort by never complaining. These burdensome clothes hang around them like so many bags, with wide gaps here and there where the wind whistles in to the flesh. It is a national characteristic that they are immune to personal inconveniences, a philosophy which I found to be universal, from the highest to the lowest. Everybody we met, from the British Consul- General downward, was surprised to know that wehad no knowledge of the Chinese language, and seemed to look lightly upon our chances of ever getting through. This was written at the time I was in Hankow. When I revised my copy, after I had spent a year and a half rubbing along with th...