I have recorded, under March, 1891, a case in which several Manchus were sentenced by the magistrate of Chinkiang, at the instance of the local general, to a bambooing for rowdy behaviour.  This is what followed:—­

“The friends of the prisoners, to the number of about three hundred, assembled at the city temple, vowing vengeance on the magistrate and general.  They proceeded to the yamen of the general, wrecked the wall and part of the premises, and put the city in an uproar.  The magistrate fled with his family to the Tao-t’ai’s yamen, where two hundred regular troops were sent to protect him against the fury of the Manchus, who threatened his life.”

This is what happened to another magistrate in Kiangsu.  He had imprisoned a tax-collector for being in arrears with his money; and the tax-collector’s wife, frantic with rage, rushed to the magistracy and demanded his release.  Unfortunately, she was suffering from severe asthma; and this, coupled with her anger, caused her death actually in the magistrate’s court.  The people then smashed and wrecked the magistracy, and pummelled and bruised the magistrate himself, who ultimately effected his escape in disguise and hid himself in a private dwelling.

Every one who has lived in China knows how dangerous are the periods when vast numbers of students congregate for the public examinations.  Here is an example.

At Canton, in June, 1880, a student took back a coat he had purchased for half a dollar at a second-hand clothes shop, and wished to have it changed.  The shopkeeper gave him rather an impatient answer, and thereupon the student called in a band of his brother B.A.’s to claim justice for literature.  They seized a reckoning-board, or abacus, that lay on the counter, struck one of the assistants in the shop, and drew blood.  The shopkeeper then beat an alarm on his gong, and summoned friends and neighbours to the rescue.  Word was at once passed to bands of students in the neighbourhood, who promptly obeyed the call of a distressed comrade, and blows were delivered right and left.  The shopkeepers summoned the district magistrate to the scene.  Upon his arrival he ordered several of the literary ringleaders, who had been seized and bound by the shopkeepers, to be carried off and impounded.  In the course of the evening he sentenced them to be beaten.  A body of more than a hundred students then went to his yamen and demanded the immediate release of the prisoners.  The magistrate grew nervous, yielded to their threats, and sent several of the offending students home in sedan-chairs.  The magistrate then seized the assistants in the shop where the row began and sentenced them to be beaten on the mouth.

Next morning ten thousand shops were closed in the city and suburbs.  The shopkeepers said they could not do business under such an administration of law.  In the course of the morning a large meeting of the students was held in a college adjoining the examination hall.  The district magistrate went out to confer with them.  The students cracked his gong, and shattered his sedan-chair with showers of stones, and then prodded him with their fans and umbrellas, and bespattered him with dirt as his followers tried to carry him away on their shoulders.  He was quite seriously hurt.