adapt themselves as readily to
circumstances, are enduring, canny, and successful; you meet them in the
most distant parts of China. They make wonderful pilgrimages on foot.
They have the reputation of being the most quick-witted of all Chinese.
Large numbers come to Tali during the Thibetan Fair, and in the opium
season. They bring all kinds of foreign goods adapted for Chinese
wants--cheap pistols and revolvers, mirrors, scales, fancy pictures, and
a thousand gewgaws useful as well as attractive--and they return with
opium. They travel in bands, marching in single file, their carrying
poles pointed with a steel spearhead two feet long, serving a double
use--a carrying pole in peace, a formidable spear in trouble.

Everywhere they can be distinguished by their dress, by their enormous
oiled sunshades, and by their habit of tricing their loads high up to
the carrying pole. They are always well clad in dark blue; their heads
are always cleanly shaved; their feet are well sandalled, and their
calves neatly bandaged. They have a travelled mien about them, and carry
themselves with an air of conscious superiority to the untravelled
savages among whom they are trading. To me they were always polite and
amiable; they recognised that I was, like themselves, a stranger far
from home.

This is the class of Chinese who, emigrating from the thickly-peopled
south-eastern provinces of China, already possess a predominant share of
the wealth of Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Timor, the Celebes and the
Philippine Islands, Burma, Siam, Annam and Tonquin, the Straits
Settlements, Malay Peninsula, and Cochin China. "There is hardly a tiny
islet visited by our naturalists in any part of these seas but Chinamen
are found." And it is this class of Chinese who have already driven us
out of the Northern Territory of Australia, and whose unrestricted entry
into the other colonies we must prevent at all hazards. We cannot
compete with Chinese; we cannot intermix or marry with them; they are
aliens in language, thought, and customs; they are working animals of
low grade but great vitality. The Chinese is temperate, frugal,
hard-working, and law-evading, if not law-abiding--we all acknowledge
that. He can outwork an Englishman, and starve him out of the
country--no one can deny that. To compete successfully with a Chinaman,
the artisan or labourer of our own flesh and blood would require to be
degraded into a mere mechanical beast of labour, unable to s