Foochow, Hankow, Peking, Tientsin, Amoy, and other places, are now planning local athletic meetings, to be held this spring and summer, with the object of selecting, by the process of elimination, no fewer than 100 picked Chinese athletes to go to Japan to compete in the Far Eastern Games to be held in Tokio in May, 1917. A representative of the "North China Daily News" called on Mr. J. Howard Crocker, executive secretary of the physical education department of the Y.M.C.A., to whom is due much of the credit for creating country-wide interest in physical training.
When asked to give an outline of this very modern and western-like movement on China's part, Mr. Crocker surprised his questioner by taking him back to the dim ages prior to 1300, when there was a recognized system of athletics in China. In those times princes were not princes if they could not ride, and it was as necessary that they should excel in archery and other sports as it was that they should be hard-riding horsemen. Letters, writing, court etiquette, and physical training were among the rules enforced upon the gentry class of ancient times, and it was Chi Japan, that introduced j But, with the coming of the Ming Dynasty, all this was changed. The literary tests became so severe that all the time of the student was absorbed. All thought of physical excluded, even school topped and forgotten,—and China stood still.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.