clipses. He
is frightened by ghosts, burns mock money to maintain his ancestors in
the future state, worships a bit of rusty old iron as an infallible
remedy for droughts; I have seen him shoot at clouds from the city walls
to frighten away the rain--and I despise him for it all. As I revise
this copy, a rumor is current in the town in which I am resting to the
effect that foreigners are buying children and using their heads to oil
the wheels of the new Yuen-nan railway, and I despise him for believing
it. The Chinese will not fight, and I sneer at him; he abhors me
because I do. I ridicule his manner of dress; he thinks mine grossly
indecent. I consider his flat nose and the plaited hair and shaven skull
as heathenish; but the Chinese, eating away with his to me ridiculous
chopsticks, looks out from his quick, almond-shaped eyes and considers
me still a foreign devil, although he is too cunning to tell me. His
opinions of me are founded upon the narrow grounds of vanity and
egotism; mine, although I do not admit it even to myself, from something
very much akin thereto.[AA]

I have been looked upon in far-away outposts of the Chinese Empire where
foreigners are still unknown, as an example of those human monstrosities
which come from the West, a creature of a very low order of the human
species, with a form and face uncouth, with language a hopeless jargon,
and with manners unbearably rude and obnoxious. Not that _I_ personally
answer accurately to this description, reader, any more than you would,
but because I happen to be among a people who, as far back as Chinese
opinion of foreigners can be traced, have considered themselves of a
morality and intellectuality superior to yours and mine.

I write the foregoing because it sums up what may be termed the current
ideas regarding Europeans, ideas the reverse of complimentary, which are
the more unfortunate on account of the fact that they are held by the
vast majority of a people forming a quarter of the whole human race.
This is true, despite all the reform.

These ideas may be, and I trust they are, erroneous, but I know that I
must keep in mind the extremely important desideratum in dealing with
the Chinese that they look at me--my person, my manners, my customs, my
theories, my things--through Chinese eyes, and although mistaken,
misled, reach their own conclusions from their own point of view. This
is what they have been doing for centuries, but we know that it all