Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
A constant stream of pilgrims, largely blue-clad coolies on foot, passed up and down the sacred stairway
WANDERING IN NORTHERN CHINA
FOREWORD
There is no particular plan to this book. I found my interest turningtoward the Far East, and as I am not one of those fortunate personswho can scamper through a country in a few weeks and know all about it,I set out on a leisurely jaunt to wherever new clues to interest led me.It merely happened that this will-o’-the-wisp drew me on through everythingthat was once China, north of about the thirty-fourth parallel oflatitude. The man who spends a year or two in China and then attacksthe problem of telling all he saw, heard, felt, or smelled there is like thesmall boy who was ordered by the teacher to write on two neat pagesall about his visit to the museum. It simply can’t be done. Hence Ihave merely set down in the following pages, in the same leisurelywandering way as I have traveled, the things that most interested me,often things that others seem to have missed, or considered unimportant,in the hope that some of them may also interest others. Impressionsare unlike statistics, however, in that they cannot be corrected to afraction, and I decline to be held responsible for the exact truth ofevery presumption I have recorded. If I have fallen into the commonerror of generalizing, I hereby apologize, for I know well that detailsin local customs differ even between neighboring villages in China.What I say can at most be true of the north, for as yet I know nothingof southern China. On the other hand, there may be much repetitionof customs and the like, but that goes to show how unchanging is lifeamong the masses in China even as a republic.
Lafcadio Hearn said that the longer he remained in the East the lesshe knew of what was going on in the Oriental mind. An “old Chinahand” has put the same thing in more popular language: “You caneasi