ch have never been revealed to the eye of the
white man. When had the old Chinatown been laid out; when had those
hidden warehouses, those opium dens and hiding-places of the Mongolian
proletariat been erected, those dens in which all manner of criminals
celebrated their indescribable orgies and which silently hid all these
evil-doers from the far-reaching arm of the police? When had the new
Chinatown sprung up? When had the new quarter been provided with an
endless network of subterranean passages, so that soon all was just as
it had been before the earthquake? No one had paid any attention to
these things. The Mongolian secret societies never paused for a moment
in their invisible conspiracy against the ruling whites, and succeeded
in creating a new underground world, over which the street traffic
rolled on obliviously.

A narrow cellar entrance and greasy, slippery steps led into Hung Wapu's
store, behind which there was a chop-house, which in turn led into an
opium-den. The rooms behind the latter, from which daylight was forever
excluded, were reserved for still worse things. No policeman would ever
have succeeded in raiding these dens of iniquity; he would have found
nothing but empty rooms or bunks filled with snoring Chinese; the
abominable stench would soon have driven him out again, but if, by any
chance, he had attempted to penetrate further and to explore the walls
for the purpose of discovering hidden openings, the only result would
have been a story in the next day's papers about a "missing" policeman.

Hung Wapu, whose plump face, with its enormous spectacles, resembled
that of an old fat boarding-house keeper, was standing at the entrance
to his cellar-shop late on the evening of May sixth. A disgusting odor
and the murmur of many voices reached the street from the cellar. The
policeman had just made his rounds, and Hung Wapu looked after him with
a cunning grin as his heavy steps died away in the distance.

The coast was clear for two hours. Hung Wapu went in and locked the
door, above which a green paper-lantern swung gently to and fro in the
soft night wind. Hung Wapu passed through the store to the chop-house,
where several dozen Chinese were squatting on the ground dining on
unmentionable Chinese delicacies, which consisted of anything and
everything soft enough to be chewed. No one watching the vacant
expression of these people would have dreamed for a moment that anything
was wrong; no one obser