l. Here in Manchuria they are about three or
four feet high in most cases, and sometimes six. One of the famous
sights of Mukden is the Peilang, or Northern Tomb, where old Taitsun,
the first great Manchu Emperor of China, lies buried, and the grave
proper (reached after a long approach of temple buildings, magnificent
gates, images, and monuments) is a huge earth mound, probably an acre
in extent. The base is thrown up twenty-five or thirty feet high and
surrounded by a rock wall, while the cone-shaped summit runs up about
twenty feet higher. The Chinese have a deep-rooted superstition as to
the existence of a sort of devil or "fung-shui" in the ground, and to
disturb this fung-shui may prove the direful spring of more "woes
unnumbered" than the Iliad records. Such a fung-shui is supposed to
exist under the surface of the earth about the Mukden royal tombs,
and, accordingly, the railroad between Mukden and Peking had to run
twenty-five miles out of its proper course in order not to disturb it.

Mukden, Manchuria.

{78}

IX

WHERE JAPAN IS ABSORBING AN EMPIRE

"The Open Door in Manchuria--of what concern is it to me any more than
the revolution in Portugal or the Young Turks movement in
Constantinople?" With some such expression the average American is
likely to dismiss the question--a question whose determination may
prove the pivot on which will swing the greatest world-movements of
our time as well as the prosperity of many European and American
industries, and that of the labor dependent upon them.

I

Concerning Manchuria and all the issues involved in the present
struggle for its possession, all kinds of misconceptions are rife.
That it is a small country; that it is an infertile country; that it
must be already well developed in point of population and consumption
of goods: this is only the ABC of Manchurian misinformation.

In answer, it need only be said that Manchuria is larger than all our
New England, Middle, and South Atlantic States from Maine to Georgia
inclusive, and that into its borders all of Great Britain (England,
Scotland and Wales), together with all of the German Empire, could be
crowded, and still leave a gap so big that Holland, Belgium, and
Switzerland would lack thousands of square miles of filling it: while
as to population Manchuria has only 18,000,000 people as compared with
{79} 118,000,000 in the European countries just mentioned. And after
having travelled in all of t