it marks the Chinese off from
all other Asiatics, and brings him a little nearer the West; and I do
not wonder at the touch of pride in the answer of the Chinese student at
a New England college when some one remarked on seeing her sitting on
the ground, college-girl fashion, with a number of her classmates, that
it probably came easier to her to do that, as she was used to it, "Oh,
no; I think you must be confusing us with the Japanese. We Chinese
learned to sit on chairs two thousand years ago."

But not only do the Chinese sit on chairs like ourselves, but they
"dine," just as the West does. Not merely are they ready to spend freely
on the pleasures of the table, but they make of dinner a social
function, longer and more elaborate, and sometimes even more deadly dull
than grand dinners at home. The un-Europeanized Indian, rich or poor, is
abstemious; he eats simply to satisfy hunger, and dining is with him no
more a social occasion than taking a bath at home,--much less, indeed,
than his own bathing, which seems to be often both a religious and a
social act. He would not think of entertaining his friends at a dinner
party. But my coolies at the wayside inns spent jovial hours over their
meals, and the gay Manchu or Chinese diners that I watched at the Peking
hotel might have been Americans at the Waldorf-Astoria, barring a few
details. And it seemed very Western, only it was quite Chinese, for the
chief of the Kalgan Foreign Office to express his regrets that my stay
was too short for him to arrange a dinner party for me.

So much has been said of the differences that exist in China, of the
wide separation between North and South and West, that I had expected to
find repeated there the conditions of India. But externally nothing of
the sort was observable. To begin with, almost all Chinese have black
hair, almost all wear blue clothes, and almost all eat rice. And the
obvious differences between the natives of Chihli and the natives of
Kwangtung, for example, are no greater than you would note in passing
from Maine to Mississippi; while in Yunnan and Szechuan, just as in the
Western States of America, you seem to be among people from "back East,"
only slightly modified by different conditions of climate and life.

The estimate given me by the Chinese Consul-General at Singapore, a
Kwangtung man, as to the proportion of the whole population speaking
some form of Mandarin, was about three hundred millions out of a
p