26 CONCERNING CHINESE ROADS 



in China. In dry weather the going is not bad — 

 twenty to twenty-five miles a day, or even more. 

 The dust is stifling, fine, penetrating stuff, for the 

 loess wears down into gullies one hundred and fifty 

 to two hundred feet deep. China has regarded 

 itself as a civilised country for over four thousand 

 years, but its glories lie in that past which the 

 young Venetian saw when he came travelling to 

 Cambaluc, the city of the Grand Khan, who, " in 

 respect to number of subjects, extent of territory, 

 and amount of revenue, surpasses every sovereign 

 that has heretofore been or that now is in the 

 world." Evidence of departed grandeur still hangs 

 about the carved bridges and lingers in grotesque 

 carvings by the roadside ; but the roads them- 

 selves, when they do not resemble the dried bed 

 of a water-course, are a more or less exact imita- 

 tion of a ploughed field. For the Chinaman, 

 living on the easy and self-satisfying principle 

 that what was good enough for his father is good 

 enough for him, and that any attempted reforms 

 would inflict an indignity on the pious memory of 

 his ancestors, leaves them " to gang their ain gait," 

 a perpetual reminder to the Westerner of Eastern 

 lethargy. In wet their condition, as 1 have said, 

 is hori'ible, and impossible for any means of trans- 

 port sa\'e pack-mules. A sweltering sea of mud 

 and slime, they baflle description. Occasionally a 

 cloud-burst in a narrow gully, the natural drains 

 of a tree-denuded country, brings down a minia- 

 ture tidal wave eight or ten feet high, which bears 

 men, mules, and carts unresisting in its wake. On 

 the road which we took such a disaster had 

 occurred but a few days earlier. A coolie was 



