hina is not
meant any matter of the last half-hour, such as Columbus's discovery
of America or the landing at Plymouth Rock; these things to the
Chinaman are so modern as to belong rather in the category of recent
daily newspaper sensations along with the Pinchot-Ballinger
controversy or the Thaw trial. If he wishes something genuinely
historic, he goes back three or four thousand years. For example, a
friend of mine, at a little social gathering in New England some time
ago, heard a young Chinese student make a talk on his country.
Incidentally he was asked about a certain Chinese custom. "Yes,"' he
answered, "that is our custom now, since we changed. But it has not
always been so. We did the other way up to four or five centuries
before Christ." Whereupon the audience, amazed at the utterly casual
mention of an event two thousand {125} years old as if it were a happening
of yesterday, was convulsed in merriment, which the young Chinaman was
entirely unable to understand.

When Christ was born Peking (or what is now Peking, then bearing
another name), having centuries before grown into eminence, had been
destroyed, rebuilt, and was then entering upon its second youth. About
the time of the last Caesars it fell into the hands of the Tartars,
who gave place to the Mongols after 1215. It was during the reign of
the Mongol Emperor, Kublai Khan, that Marco Polo visited his capital,
then called Cambulac. Seventy-three years before Columbus discovered
America the Emperor Yung-loh, whose tomb I saw near Nankou, built the
great wall that surrounds the Tartar City to this day--forty feet
high, wide enough on top for four or five carriages to drive abreast,
and thirteen miles around.

Yet the history which the foreigner in Peking is likely to have most
often in mind is really very recent. For it has been only ten years
and a few months since the famous Boxer outbreak. The widely current
idea is that this Boxer movement originated in anti-missionary
sentiment, but this is not borne out by the facts. The late Col.
Charles Denby, long American Minister to China, pointed out very
clearly that the main cause was opposition to the land-grabbing
policies of European nations. Once started, however, it took the form
of opposition to everything foreign--missionaries and non-missionaries
alike. I passed the old Roman Catholic Cathedral the other day in
company with a friend who gave me reminiscences of the siege that
sounded like echoes