And so in China, it is religion which breaks the monotony of female life, and collects within the temples, on the various festivals, an array of painted faces and embroidered skirts that present, even to the European eye, a not unpleasing spectacle.

That painting the face was universal among the women of Greece, much after the fashion which we now see in China, has been placed beyond all doubt, the pigments used in both cases being white lead and some kind of vegetable red, with lampblack for the eyebrows.

In marriage, we find the Chinese aiming, like the Greeks, at equality of rank and fortune between the contracting parties, or, as the Chinese put it, in the guise of a household word, at a due correspondence between the doorways of the betrothed couple.  As in Greece, so in China, we find the marriage arranged by the parents; the veiled bride; the ceremony of fetching her from her father’s house; the equality of man and wife; the toleration of subordinate wives, and many other points of contact.

The same sights and scenes which are daily enacted at any of the great Chinese centres of population seem also to have been enacted in the Athenian market-place, with its simmering kettles of boiled peas and other vegetables, and its chapmen and retailers of all kinds of miscellaneous goods.  In both we have the public story-teller, surrounded by a well-packed group of fascinated and eager listeners.

The puppet-shows, agalmata neurospasta, which Herodotus tells us were introduced into Greece from Egypt, are constantly to be seen in Chinese cities, and date from the second century B.C.,—­a suggestive period, as I shall hope to show later on.

The Chinese say that these puppets originated in China as follows:—­

The first Emperor of the Han dynasty was besieged, about 200 B.C., in a northern city, by a vast army of Hsiung-nu, the ancestors of the Huns, under the command of the famous chieftain, Mao-tun.  One of the Chinese generals with the besieged Emperor discovered that Mao-tun’s wife, who was in command on one side of the city, was an extremely jealous woman; and he forthwith caused a number of wooden puppets, representing beautiful girls and worked by strings, to be exhibited on the wall overlooking the chieftain’s camp.  At this, we are told, the lady’s fears for her husband’s fidelity were aroused, and she drew off her forces.

The above account may be dismissed as a tale, in which case we are left with Punch and Judy on our hands.

To return to city sights.  The tricks of street-jugglers as witnessed in China seem to be very much those of ancient Greece.  In both countries we have such feats as jumping about amongst naked swords, spitting fire from the mouth, and passing a sword down the throat.

Then there are the advertisements on the walls; the mule-carts and mule-litters; the sunshades, or umbrellas, carried by women in Greece, by both sexes in China.