Lhe writer of these notes was H.3 Magistrate und Secretary of the Court of vnsuls in Shanghai, 1897 to 1901. Afterwards he was Assistant Secretary end then Secretary of the Great Northern Railway in London, being delegate for that Railway to the International Railways Congresses at Washington and Berne.
During the time of the Government control of the railways he was given special leave to accompany Admiral Jellicoe on his world cruise in H. MU. S.. New Zealand, as far as Eqypt and India.
When the British railways were fused into four great systems, Mr. Burrows was offered the secretaryship of the bly East Coast group, but he declined for private reasons. Socially, in Shanghai, he will be remembered as the Secretary of the now defunct Bachelors' Ball.—Ed.
The old hand arriving Shanghai to-day has to be prepared for a good many shocks. He ig brought to within a few hundred yards of The Bund in a finer that never could have ventured further than Woosung, He sees a man-o'-war of unheard-of proportions at the British buoy and he sees trams running down The Bund. Of the old landmarks on The Bund nothing remains but the Customs—now doomed—and even the old Brand house, with its famous tree, has gone. Tt was on The Bund that the Kaiser's Guards once, and only once, did the goose-step. Now even the monument which they came to celebrate seems mysteriously to thave disappeared! One wonders how many remember the Wheelbarrow Riots, when news was brought to a very full mid-day gathering at the Shanghai Club bar that the rioters were advancing over the bridge from the French Concession." Armed with bottles, sticks and cocktails, the club turned out to a man and the riot was over in ten minutes! It is interesting to speculate what would happen to-da if similar news was brought to the largest Har in the East. Surely the heaviest cavalry in Europe could not withstand their onset But it docs not take long, after a tour of the city, to see that the changes are brought about by the inevitatsle march of time and that sentiment must give way to utility. There is one thing..at remains unchanged in Shan: ha: and that is the old spirit of comradeship and Jove of sport. The welcome extended to an old hand by his contemporaries, as well as by those who were griffins in his day, is indeed a stirring emotion. Tt is something to feel the thrill at the Races when famous names of old go up en the board, or the names of their sons—to see the characteristic walk of the timekeeper still unchanged—and the hand of a Steward go up to his moustache exactly as it did in 1900—to hear again the happy laugh of a recent airman of the Municipal Council—to recall the angle of the jaw and the grip of the feet of a crack jockey, the same angle and the same grip that Jed Shanghai many years ago to tall him the Fred Archer! of the East. I good to hear the old cheer go up for a winning owner who plays the game. Every—sportsman knows the sound.
At the Race Club itself there are memories enough. In 1897 old hands talked about snipe being shot on the Race Course, the number varying with the cocktails consumed: there were no houses in the middle: the Paper Hunt sometimes finished there: whilst on the opposite side lies the creek where in 1900 the Chinese gathered in force to prevent the extension of the Settlement. Probably few remain who remember that the attack was thrown into confusion by the charge an absolutely innocent body of amahs armed with nothing more formidable than perambulators! There are not many who know that this same Race Club was, with the Cathedral and the British Consulate, chosen as one of the refuges to which every woman and child wags to go, if the Boxer rising reached Shanghai. Lists actually were drawn up of the names, and even the very food of the foreign community was apportioned. Shanghai had a closer call then than it cared to admit. The attitude of the Viceroy at Nanking, Liu Kung-yi, towards the Dowager Empress was an unknown quantity, as he had refused the entree to the foreign Consuls at Nanking. It was due to the initiative of the British Consul at Nanking that Shanghai got the news of the Viceroy's challenge to Peking, news which sent the Chinese back on to the streets and the foreigners on to the pavement, within half an hour after Liu Kung-yi had unceremoniously removed the head of the Peking envoys. The British' Consul, finding out, through his boy's brother in the Palace, that the Viceroy suffered from a distressing complaint, sent down to Shanghai for every conceivable remedy that could be bought. The benefits to the Viceroy gave our Consul the entree. The Great War showed that, if necessary, the British were by no means as lacking in intelligence work and espionage as the world had image ined. and it is clear that, in the above instance, the British Consul also was versed in the fundamental principles of these sciences!
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.