CHAPTER I. 
INCEPTION, AIM, AND OUTFITTING OF THE EXPEDITION. 
S'* centuries have elapsed since Marco Polo returned to Europe from his long 
sojourning in the unknown East. Wonderful indeed were the tales he 
brought, but none surpassing his description—incredible as it seemed—of the 
mighty dominions of the Grand Khan. It is related that on his death-bed the 
Venetian traveller was adjured to recant his narrative. But he remained firm; 
succeeding years have steadily piled up an overwhelming weight of testimony 
to his truthfulness; and never throughout this whole period have the peoples 
of the West failed to find in China a source of most lively interest and 
unlimited speculation. 
Nor, indeed, has this interest been of a purely abstract character, for, as 
century has followed century, merchants, missionaries, explorers and scholars, 
have made their way in ever-increasing numbers, to the shores and boundaries 
of the Celestial Empire. They have penetrated into the interior, studied the 
language, and investigated customs, classics, and folk-lore. They have written 
many books, compiled maps, and brought away pictorial records on film and 
canvas. Numerous Treaty Ports have been established, each with a large and 
increasing European population. In many towns of the interior, schools, 
colleges, and hospitals have been started under the direction of Europeans, 
who, living thus amongst the Chinese, obtain ample opportunity of studying 
their characteristics. Railways, too, have been opened, connecting the large 
cities of the maritime provinces, as well as those of the Hinterland. With 
all these facts in view, we may be tempted to wonder whether any great scope 
for the explorer still remains. 
And yet how little is really known. Cathay, with its paradox of barbarism 
and civilisation, its teeming millions of yellow-skinned agriculturalists— 
toiling to-day with implements as rude as those their forefathers wielded 
two thousand years ago—its mighty rivers and mountain ranges, its rich 
mineral deposits, its ancient tombs, and its relics of a bygone prosperity, 
remains still a land of mystery—enigmatic, perhaps inscrutable. Who can 
say that he knows the Chinese people? What scholar has wrested from their 
classics and their records all the secrets of that dim past, when war raged 
without cease along the Tartar marches, and the first dynasties of the infant 
Empire were emerging from the tumult and the strife? Can we be confident 
that even in the littoral and more traversed regions the flora and fauna hold 
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