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.