-Among the moderns, one of the most interesting references in the volume is that to the work of Lan Ting-yuan (one of the most attractive writers of the Manchu Dynasty), who thus gives his impressions of the foreigner "To the extreme west there are the red-haired and western foreigners, fierce, violent lot, quite unlike the other bar-parians of the western island. Among them are English, the Islamists, the French, the Dutch, the Spaniards and the' Portuguese. These are all very fierce nations; their chips are strong and do net fear typhoons; and their guns, powder and munitions of war generally are superior to those of China. Their natures are dark, dangerous and inscrutable; wherever they go they spy around with a view to seizing other peoples' lands. Of all the island barbarians under heaven, the western barbarians and the Japanese are the three most deadly.
It is not a flattering portrait but we must excuse the writer; perhaps he wrote hurriedly, and upon insufficient data, Beside, the League of Nations had not then been invented; nor had the Great War, to make the world fit for poison-gas, been fought!
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.