href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@29546@[email protected]#P105" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">Pu Yi the Son of Heaven and Emperor of the Middle Kingdom

105 How China Is Dealing with Opium Intemperance 106 A Man-made Desert 117 Pumping Water for Irrigation 117 Transportation and Travel in China 118 Fashionable Chinese Dinner Party 137 How Lumber Is Sawed in the Orient 137 A Quotation from Confucius 138 The Great Wall of China 147 Chinese Woman's Ruined Feet 147 Chinese School Children 148 The American Consulate at Antung 148 A Filipino's Home 157 The Carabao, the Work-stock of the Filipinos 158 An Old Spanish Cathedral 158 Society Belles of Mindanao, Philippine Islands 181 A Street Scene in Manila 181 Two Kinds of Workers in Burma 182 Types at Darjeeling, Northern India, and at Delhi, Central India 205 Two Rangoon Types 206 A Hindu Faquir 213 Some Fashionable Hindus 213 Hindu Children 214 The Taj Mahal from the Entrance Gate 241 Gunga Din on Dress Parade 242 Bathing in the Sacred Ganges at Benares 249 The Battle-scarred and World-famous Residency at Lucknow 250 Burning the Bodies of Dead Hindus 255 An Indian Camel Cart 255 Travel in India 256

{xix}

WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP

{3}

I

JAPAN: THE LAND OF UPSIDE DOWN

"I cannot help thinking," said one of my friends to me when I left home, "that when you get over on the other side of the world, in Japan and China, you will have to walk upside down like the flies on the ceiling!"

While I find that this is not true in a physical sense, it is true, as Mr. Percival Lowell has pointed out, that, with regard to the manners and customs of the people, everything is reversed, and the surest way to go right is to take pains to go dead wrong! "To speak backward, write backward, read backward, is but the A B C of Oriental contrariety."

Alice need not have gone to Wonderland; she should have come to Japan.

I cannot get used, for example, to seeing men start at what with us would be the back of a book or paper and read toward the front; and it is said that no European or American ever gets used to the construction of a Japanese sentence, considered merely from the standpoint of thought-arrangement. I had noticed that the Japanese usually ended their sentences with an emphatic upward spurt before I learned that with them the subject of a sentence usually comes last (if at all), as for example, "By a rough road yesterday came John," instead of, "John came by a rough road yesterday."

And this, of course, is but one illustration of thousands that might be given to justify my title, "The Land of Upside Down," the land of contradictions to all our Occidental ideas. That {4} Japan is a land "where the flowers have no odor and the birds no song" has passed into a proverb that is almost literally true; and similarly, the far-famed cherry blossoms bear no fruit.