With hazy ideas of Sax Rohmer's Chinese underworlds and opium den ife fitting through my mind I started a pilgrimage of Shanghai's bona fide native city.
With four walls, which are being rapidly demolished, live half a million or more Chinese inhabitants, Imagination boggles how life is sustained, congested as it is alike in commerce and domesticity.
Even the main thoroughfares are B so narrow that it is well-high impossible to pass each other when walking, but to be in a rieshaw is haft-raising: every minute I expect ed to be dumped into the doorway of one of the infintestimal toy-like shops.
Innumerable are the occupations romantic in jade, which the Chinese pursue in this
ivory, bone, porcelain, metal, bamboo, and' camphor woods, silk ups, each and all with amazing hereditary skill and patience. opening of a missionary exhibition. Suddenly, as large parties of Sunday school children and grown-ups were leaving the building, there was a loud crack and a large portion of the high ceiling in the main entrance fell with a crash.
Several children and adults were struck by the falling plaster, and some were buried under heaps of debris. The screams of the injured brought hundreds of helpers through a blinding cloud of dust to their rescue, and they were quickly ex-tricoted and rushed to Westminster Hospital, which almost adjoins the building.
'A boy of 12 died soon after admission. Of the seven other persons injured five are detained in hospital and three, including a girl and boy, are ina serious condition. About 20 persons who witnessed the accident were treated for shock.
'The cause of the' collapse remains a mystery, and an inquiry is to be held.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.