inevitable explosion. My own conviction, expressed in my first edition, that the only hope of continued national existence for Korea lay in the maintenance of her connection with China has not, in my opinion, been falsified by the issue of the campaign, since the independence, which was the nominal pretext of the latter, and is now claimed as its result, is a phantom which not even the interested auspices of Japan have so far persuaded to materialise, and which will assuredly be the source of further trouble in the future.

CHINA

'And so he passed with his folk, and wan the Lond of Cathay, that is the Grettest Kyngdom of the World'

SIR JOHN MAUNDEVILLE: Travels

CHAPTER VIII

THE COUNTRY AND CAPITAL OF CHINA

Minæque

Murorum ingentes, æquataque machina cœlo.

VIRGIL: Eneid iv. 88, 89.

Transition

A MORE singular contrast can scarcely be found than is
presented by the transition from Korea to China. From
romantic mountain-scenery the traveller passes,
'at least on his way up to Peking, to flat and to China.
featureless plains. He exchanges the miniature
Korean stallion, which rarely advances beyond a walk, for
the sturdy China pony, upon which he will with ease cover
seven miles an hour, or a day's march of forty miles. In
place of the confined and filthy Korean hostelry, he will
sleep with comparative comfort in the ample surroundings
of a Chinese inn. He has left behind the most supine and
spiritless of the peoples of the Far East, and sees about
him the frugal, hard-limbed, indomitable, ungracious race,
who oppose to all overtures from the outside the sullen
resistance of a national character self-confident and stolid,
a religious and moral code of incredible and all-absorbing
rigour, and a governing system that has not varied for
ages, and is still wrapped in the mantle of a superb and
paralysing conceit. Most travellers deplore the transition.
from Japan to China as one from sweetness to squalor, from
beauty to ugliness, from civilisation to barbarism, from
warmth of welcome to cheerless repulsion. And yet I am