was asked his height mentioned a measure which was ridiculously inadequate to cover his length, and upon being questioned admitted that he had left out of account all above his shoulders!  He had once been a soldier, where the height of the men’s clavicle is important in assigning the carrying of burdens.  And since a Chinese soldier is to all practical purposes complete without his head, this was omitted.

Of a different sort was the measurement of a rustic who affirmed that he lived “ninety li from the city,” but upon cross-examination he consented to an abatement, as this was reckoning both to the city and back, the real distance being as he admitted, only “forty-five li one way!” (p. 49) ...

The habit of reckoning by “tens” is deep-seated, and leads to much vagueness.  A few people are “ten or twenty,” a “few tens,” or perhaps “ever so many tens,” and a strictly accurate enumeration is one of the rarest of experiences in China....  An acquaintance told the writer that two men had spent “200 strings of cash” on a theatrical exhibition, adding a moment later, “It was 173 strings, but that is the same as 200—­is it not?” (p. 54).

A man who wished advice in a lawsuit told the writer that he himself “lived” in a particular village, though it was obvious from his narrative that his abode was in the suburbs of a city.  Upon inquiry, he admitted that he did not now live in the village, and further investigation revealed the fact that the removal took place nineteen generations ago!  “But do you not almost consider yourself a resident of the city now?” he was asked.  “Yes,” he replied simply, “we do live there now, but the old root is in that village.”

...The whole Chinese system of thinking is based on a line of assumptions different from those to which we are accustomed, and they can ill comprehend the mania which seems to possess the Occidental to ascertain everything with unerring exactness.  The Chinese does not know how many families there are in his native village, and he does not wish to know.  What any human being can want to know this number for is to him an insoluble riddle.  It is “a few hundred,” “several hundreds,” or “not a few,” but a fixed and definite number it never was and never will be. (p. 55.)

After breaking camp on the day following our departure from the “White Water” we rode along a broad trail through a beautiful pine forest and in the late morning stood on an open summit gazing on one of the most impressive sights which China has to offer.  At the left, and a thousand feet below, the mighty Yangtze has broken through the mountains in a gorge almost a mile deep; a gorge which seems to have been carved out of the solid rock, sharp and clean, with a giant’s knife.  A few miles to the right the mountains widen, leaving a flat plain two hundred feet above the river.  Every inch of it, as well as the finger-like valleys which stretch upward between the hills, is under cultivation, giving support for three villages, the largest of which is Taku.