June 6, 1903.]
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CHINA OVERLAND TRADE REPORT. Now she can exchange freely goods carried by | train with all the products of Chinese labour and ingenuity. It la, no doubt, posible to make too much even of the value of bestera trade. Lord Cafron exposed himself, lately to a deserved rebuke when he fold the Indian princes to encourage native art, instead of 】 making purchases in Tottenham Court Road. Sir J. Blandell Maple showed conclusively that his firm is the largest purchaser of the Indian carpets which Lord Curzon thinks are neglected, But the first great success of the new railway will consist in its acquisition of the mail and passenger
correspondent will send his letters by a s voyage of to days to Shang hai when they can be carried by land in 18, so n to be reduced to 15 days. Time is money, and no traveller intent on business will spend five weeks on board a steamer when he can compass the same distance on land in less than half the time. The great steamship, companies in England have not yet taken the alarm, but the danger overhanging their business is not the less real. We may regret, on pat iotic grounds, that one supremacy is threatened, but it is impossible to view without interest and sympathy a revolution which is stirring the dry bones of Asia with a breath of fresh air.
YUNG LU'S FUNERAL.
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Then
two dogs, two pavilions, twổ đồcy and two stags, four men made out of gre then lion dogs, one god, ous silver, looking shes, particularly ridiculous as they wag heads on being carried, the lơng. attached to the gold lion's ears becomin greatly agitate. After them a long array of dags and rad umbrellas and plante in fullest flower all made of paper but in real lower pota and vases; again titles and all manner of insignia woven ont of greenery, long white ban. ners, men still in green and red livery leading five ponies with handsome red silk gowns thrown over their saddles. In between mourners in white clothes smoking cigarettes, then came men sonnding those antique wooden trampets, which may have breathed their deep sounds before the flood. After them men, in thể Palaos livery, long red gowns with disos again, carrying all Yung Lu's titles and the umbrellas presented. Behind them came. Mongol Lamas looking like particularly grand Mandarins in their golden brocades, sud men only logs splendid in red brocade with blzok oaps who said they were neither Limas nor Taoists, but as far as I could make out Lo To from the Pai-yni-mao. They were said to have queues inside their caps, but it did not look like it. Then many fantastie yellow constructions were carried by, green sedan chairs borne by motirners every now and then, and men with red clothes and a very high fez-like cap, flat back and front, who carried a gong but did not strike it as far as I saw. Then came Yung Lu's cart lined with blue silk, his horse, I presume, another groen so lan chair covered with leopard skins in which he was carried in processions, and which being empty went by with a jiggsty jorgsty-motion ad if mocking, "He is dead, dead, the man who used to ride in me; ses how alive I am! other chairs carried by mourners, a mula litter with flowering boughs laid on the seas. After that mock horses made of paper with whe is under their fest, but with ra 1 mines and tails. Many of these, and more with mock car's made of paper. Crowds of men dressed in green with blue feathers upstanding, throwing up into the air clouds of paper money. After this there were carried by imitation official caps, necklaces, purses and tobacco pouches and spectacle cases, books, etc., all to be burnt at the grave, and thus accompany the spirit. And then amidst a crowd of soldiery the ostafalque At this gate was now waiting the huge itself covered with red brocade with a.. catafalque that was to hide away the remain;
..little shawl: pattern on it, not half so effective leaving it behind, one by one the various details we thought as the pall so often seen in of the procession were reviewed as we walked Peking of dark blus with large golden dragons past resting-place after resting-place erected by worked upon it, Behind the comin monenings the wayside, with little altars on which were
carts and chairs, in each a woman in white with piles of cakes and pyramids of apples; those last white cloths tied round the head but as a rule generally made of flour and preternaturally rosy, smoking a cigarette. Then many smart carts but in one case certainly real, and where people and some very good-looking horses. Every were to come out and do reverence and bow low here and there along the routes was an as the coffin passed. All the Six Boards of little bonfire of paper money. Innumerable: Peking wer, thus represented. As a rule the Manchu women had turned out in their best rest-places were tents with windows made of blus⚫lothes and their extraordinary high heads of gauze. We walked on and on till we came to the Chao Yang gate and there looked round upon the lovely view of ng City. forest of trees with th. yellow Palace roofs just peeping above the spring green, in the distance the square drum tower with beside it the bell tower, near at hand the glittering green roofs of a temple dedicated to those who have attained virtue, in the middle distance the pavilion clad Coal Hill, and behind it the Pagoda by the northern "lake, The road straight from there was that along which the procession was to pass, and in the distance the Western bills standing out clear against the sky, a deep deep blue, except where they were covered with fresh fallen snow of the past night from which the wind blew to us with a most refreshing fillip.
Peking, 15th May, 1903. After a day of dry, burning heat, the wind got up at night and blew so hard it was impossible to sleep for fear of the trees being blown down and falling upon the house. It seemed as if each gust the wind said "Now you she'l coms dowa," and this morning, there was one broken down upon an adjassut roof and the ground strewn with leaves and twigs and great strips of bark. But the air, how different! Even in a woollen dress, I was shivering as we started out at 6 o'clock ou foot because it was too cold to sit in rickshas, to see Yang Eu's funeral. It seemed but the other day he was the A'cibiades of China, the handsome man with whom girls fell in love, and to whom horses none else could ride were sent because he could always subdue them And now he was dead. And most of the foreign papers had articles upon him as if one of the great movers of hatr d'against foreigners had been removed. But to me this has never seemed true.
The commercial, as well as the political, consequences of the completion of this great enterprise cannot but be prodigions; but it is proverbially diffe ill to forested what course com- merce will take, and chang hich one expects to be immediate often tako lang years to reach maturity. What is certain is that va t regions of a world which seemed to be dead have sud. denly been opened to the busy traffic and sayer curiosity of Europe.. We are become accu- tomed, for so many years to the marvel ons growth of America, and have followed with such obsequions admiration the progressive avance of the New World in the arts of civilisation, that we seam to have forgotten the existence of the Old World. Yet Asis is still the largest of all the continents, and is unequalled in the swarm ing multitude of her population and the abound ing fertility and wealth of her immense natural resources. The history of mankind is practically a record of the immemorial contest for suprem- acy between Europe and Asia After & pro- longed struggle, the splendid Asiatic monarchies were finally subdued to the : dominion of Greek civilisation, which lasted for just 1,000 years. But there is no escape from the working of the inevitable law of action and reaction, and the Arabian con. quests swept the Europeans ont of the East, and never spent their force till a great part of Europe itself had been brought under Moslem rule. After many centuries, there came another swing of the pendulum, and, since Spanish and Portuguese explorers. found their way round the Cape into Indian waters, the whole of the East bad accepted the supremacy of the maritime nations of Western Europe. Now another great revolution seems to be inevitable. The resurrection of land traffic throughout the vast Asiatic contineut must strike a blow at the monopoly which an island empire like England has enjoyed throngh the I reponderance of her shipping trade. The Suez Canal had previously done as much harm. In the old days, when Asia con'd only be approached by means of a long voyage round the Cape, England did just what she liked in the East, and had no competition to fear. Securely seated in her possession of India, whence sh's could draw unlimited supplies of meu and money to maintain her authority, she ruled, the undisputed mistress of the Indian and Chinese Beas, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and was obeyed by every nation from Zanzibar to Japan. This security was rudely disturbed by the intrusion through the Canal of every European Power and by the deter mination, as was shown in the recent Chinese War, of French, Germans and Russians to be partakers along wi h us in the spoils of the East. Now a blow is struck, not merely at our political supremacy, but at the maritime trade, which is the secret of our wealth and strength, China can now be reached by a route unfamiliar to Englishmen and controlled by foreign hands. The extension of the new railway from Port Arthur to Peking can only be a ques'ion of a
hair to see the funeral. Some were very proity;, very few years, and already the populons mar-
but most were disfigured by the red paint on ket of Northern China has been opened to the
their eyelids as well as all over their cheeks. immediate intercourse of Eastern Europe. The
Nearly every nation seems to have some disfigar value of commerce with the East is quite incal-
ing custom of this kind which to itself seems culable, and upon its possession has always
beautiful. And as we exchanged glances and!- depended the wealth and power of Western
smiles, I the more regretted that not being nations England owns in India the richest
native born on seeing some nice freshly laid! and most valuable part of the Asiatic Conti-
earth I had stepped upon it to find it had only nent, and the great rivers and inland waters of
bean laid over the surface of a quagmirs into Asia will always make her coasts very acces
which my foot sank five inches above the shoe sible. But now, suddenly, the northern part of
before a friend extracted me. But Asia, which we have always looked upou as of
came home through the orig m no account, has been brought into prominence.
we could not mind that or anything. The far-sighted policy of Russia aims not
booths for resting places were being, a merely at the possession but the effective cocu-
torn down barely two minutes after the pation of Siberia and Manchuria. For years
had been borne by; thus the ripple in the water the Russian slips sailing from Odessa to the
smooths over after a stone has been removed, Far East have been crowded with families of We came down off the wall and walked to thus the world that is alive ames its nenak emigrants from Southern Russia, who have meet the procession. First men on horsebackway of life after one of gone under the protection of the Tear, and with with European straw hats a little incongruously prominent is removed fro special gifts, to settle in 's country. Siberis, surmounting their red waistcoats, which with fancy Yang Lu's, spirit it has been proved, has plenty of good agricul- green sashes tied round them and red saddles ciently freed from the tural land and mineral wealth and in the tem showed out well. Then Yuan Shinkai's flesh to be either mortified perate latitudes to the south, far from the soldiers in dark. Ätting glothes, with again) of Arctic Son, white workers in
gon us before, only Yung live and prosper. straw hats. After them came the falconers in: a
ot nearly such a smirt funeral Here, then, Russia is quietly building up • grey and black carrying beautiful hooded of many Shanghai marchant, but among new kingdom. Her aupremacy over Northern bird, the other leading the dead man's bound; d were faces and feller who sie Chins, too, is now complete. Her commer there are seven of them, mid one of this very rehistoric age, and meeting them with that immense and pre porous empire has well and effectively dressed little party. Quite felyet, yes like coming face to face with a long hitherto been limited to a fe aravans arriving | an array of titles each borne by a man in a long laga dead and gone past.-Peking and Tientsin once a year at the
Nijai Novgorod, green gown with discs upon it; after them came Times.
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