delights on Recent History.
Chequered picturesque careers are the common lot of Chinese officials. The unchanging repose which the untutored Western mind is apt to associate with all things in Cathay is not for them. The tide of Court favour, taken at the flood and leading on as it seems to fortune at any moment, lose itself in a lagoon. To be a man of foreign exporience and learning is but to increase the chances of variety. Such a life-story, full of interest, full of ups and downs, has fallen to Shen Tun-ho, Taotai, who holds high rank at present as Ca-Director of the Imperial Bureau of Mines and Railways. His Excellency is in the enviable position of having won the esteem and gratitude of Chinese and for= eigners alike for the part he played during the unhappy summer of 1900, Shen Tun ho's police remain to this day one of the surest guarantees for peace in the unsettled North. A shrewd man of affairs, a patriot with a single-minded desire that his countrymen shall not be dispossessed of just rights, yet with full appreciation of the benefits to be derived from free intercourse with the outer world, Shén's tact and savoir faire have helped to pull his country out of many difficultic [he record of his experience reads like a romance.
Tt was in the 7th year of H. M. Kuang Hsii (1881) that Mr. Shen, who was at that time acting as interpreter to Mr. Chen, magistrate of the Mixed Court at Shanghai, made his first_ important rise in life. 2. the late Liu Kun-yi was then in his earlier tenure of the Nanking viceroyalty and contemplated starting the Nanking and Chinkiang line of telegraphs. Foreign assistance was _necessary and instruction also for the Chinese who were to be trained up as operators. Liu, Taotai of Shanghai, was asked to recommend a Western-trained official to ce-operate in the work and it was on his nomination that Shen came to the notice of the Viceroy, under whom ho served so long. After the telegraphic lino had been laid, Shen, who had been educated partly in England, was appointed to start a school for instruction in English, in the Nanking arsenal. The object was to train up mon not only for telegraphic work but for the diplomatic service. Thirty students were immediately enrolled.
Within a year Viceroy Liu had been impeached by a censor and was removed from his high office. To him succeeded, TLE. Tso Tsung-tang, an honest, well: meaning man but of pronounced ant foreign views. Shén's English training was no recommendation to his now superior, but Tso did not dismiss him simply on that ground. Instead he enquired into Shén's proficiency in Chinese and was surprised to find it of high order. Ie thereupon decided to retain' his services in connection with the establishment of a torpedo college, a project very rear to his Excellency's heart. Captain Frederick Harvey, R.N., the inventor of Harvey's torpedo, was brought out from England to act as instructor and Shen was promoted to be ce-director of the Torpedo College with him. Together they started a large institution in the running of which Shen found full oceupation for four busy years.
Blockade-Running in Formosa, When the Franco-Chinese war broke out in 1854, Teo Teung-tang was sent
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.