Before passing on to the next section, one last volume, taken at haphazard, bears the weird title, A Record in Dark Blood.  This work contains notices of eminent statesmen and others, who met violent deaths, each accompanied by a telling illustration of the tragic scene.  Some of the incidents go far to dispose of the belief that patriotism is quite unknown to the Chinese.

* * * * *

Division C is devoted to Geography and to Topography.  Here stands the Imperial Geography of the Empire, in twenty-four large volumes, with maps, in the edition of 1745.  Here, too, stand many of the Topographies for which China is justly celebrated.  Every Prefecture and every District, or Department,—­and the latter number about fifteen hundred,—­has its Topography, a kind of local history, with all the noticeable features of the District, its bridges, temples, and like buildings, duly described, together with biographies of all natives of the District who have risen to distinction in any way.  Each Topography would occupy about two feet of shelf; consequently a complete collection of all the Topographies of China, piled one upon the other, would form a vertical column as high as the Eiffel Tower.  Yet Topography is only an outlying branch of Chinese literature.

Division C further contains the oldest printed book in the Cambridge University Library, and a very interesting one to boot.  It is entitled An Account of Strange Nations, and was published between 1368 and 1398.  Its contents consist of short notices of about 150 nationalities known more or less to the Chinese, and the value of these is much enhanced by the woodcuts which accompany each notice.

Among the rest we find Koreans, Japanese, Hsiung-nu (the forefathers of the Huns), Kitan Tartars, tribes of Central Asia, Arabs, Persians, and even Portuguese, Jean de Montecorvino, who had been appointed archbishop of Peking in 1308, having died there in 1330.  Of course there are a few pictures of legendary peoples, such as the Long-armed Nation, the One-eyed Nation, the Dog-headed Nation, the Anthropophagi,

              “and men whose heads
  Do grow beneath their shoulders.”

There is also an account of Fusang, the country where grew the famous plant which some have tried to identify with the Mexican aloe, thus securing the discovery of America for the Chinese.

The existence of many of these nations is duly recorded by Pliny in his Natural History, in words curiously identical with those we find in the Chinese records.

Some strange birds and animals are given at the end of this book, the most interesting of all being an accurate picture of the zebra, here called the Fu-lu, which means “Deer of Happiness,” but which is undoubtedly a rough attempt at fara, an old Arabic term for the wild ass.  Now, the zebra being quite unknown in Asia, the puzzle is, how the Chinese came to be so well acquainted with it at that early date.