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on earth had induced me to make such an appalling selection of colours. When I explained that the selection had very kindly been made by Mrs. L..... the temperature quickly rose to boiling point. As the ladies said, "Why, Mrs. L. . . . hardly ever comes to the Club; and she never plays bridge". I beat a hasty retreat to drown my sorrows at the bar, and soon after found it convenient to give up bridge altogether.
In the Club the consumption of liquids, refreshing or otherwise, varied. Sometimes it led to peculiar situations. There was the occasion in 1924 I think when late one night the two other members of the Municipal Council, by which the small affairs of the Concession were managed, took offence at the vinous truculence of their Chairman, and called in the police to remove him to cool his heels in the cells. Unfortunately the two strong-minded, but junior, members of the Council on the following morning, when they awoke refreshed by a night of comfort at home in bed, had quite forgotten the events of the previous evening; and it was not till later in the day, after he had himself come to, that they received a plaintive reminder from their Chairman requesting that he might be released from his own police cells.
Throughout the period of 1911-1926 the Treaty Ports, such as Kiu Kiang, provided harbours of refuge, to whose security hundreds of thousands of Chinese threatened by the tide of civil war, fled.
Kiu Kiang had had its share of recent disturbances. For Sun Yat Sen, having applied to British officials for help and having met with a refusal, based on the correct British attitude of non-interference in the internal affairs of a friendly country, had turned to Russia. Michael Borodin with a group of Bolshevik advisers had consequently proceeded to Canton to advise the Kuo Min Tang Revolutionary Party and there, with consummate skill, had created the intellectual cohesion necessary to the effort of unifying China. Borodin appealed to the deep-seated exclusive instincts of the sons of Han, the inhabitants of a kingdom, which from time immemorial had been called the Middle Kingdom, because all other peoples existed only in outer darkness.
The instrument was the Chinese Revolutionary Army, led by officers indoctrinated with Kuo Min Tang ideology at the Whampoa Military Academy, of which General Chiang Kai Shek was principal. By October of 1926 this army, fighting staunchly through incredible hardships against