wander as freely as a Cockney holiday maker in Thanet.
The pretence that scientific expeditions rob China of treasures which Chinese expeditions. will some day recover and conserve for the nation is idle and irritating. ° The bungling and destructive diggings of Chinese curio hunters in such provinces as Honan, Shensi and Shansi, destroy more historical evidence, lost to science for all time, in a single year than a dozen arch-' jwological expeditions could bring to light in a decade. And "Nationalism" would prefer it rit behind opposition to scientific expeditions is such that the "patriots" would rather see every monument to China's antiquity splintered, every ancient site ploughed into complete confusion, than let the alien excavate material which' would throw light on China's! ancient past and illumine history. No foreign expert _has lever been able to get official permission to excavate an ancient:
Chinese grave, but throughout North China there are thousands of professional grave robbers eternally active, _destroying forever archaeological material which China cannot replace, just harvest a few bits of bronze jand pottery for curio dealers lor the collections of Chinese officials.
During the past quarter of a leentury some—_astonishingly fruitful archwological work has been done in Chinese Turkestan, by British, German, French, Japanese, Swedish and Russian scientists, yielding manuscripts lof inestimable value to the scholarly world but of no intrinsic worth to the treasure hunter. Among other discoveries were the manuscript fragments of the Tokharian lan-Jguage, an Indo-European dialect, resembling more closely the languages of classical' "Europe than any language in Asia. To {the most scholarly Chinese these fare no more ' than barbarous scrawls,-while to the hundreds jot treasure diggers whd now] swarm over all the sites visited, by the European scientists and lover many that they have discovered themselves, -destroying infinitely valuable material, such manuscripts are less than waste paper. The "Nationalists" would say that some day China will send her own expeditions to; uncover and collect these treasures and that meanwhile any: European who trifles with them'
violating China's sovereign' rights. The real feeling "We are not going to let you make face' by doing in China what we are unable to do or are not interested in doing." And with this attitude there is no reason why the scientific world should have the slightest! patience.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.