the second century A.D.  This is perhaps a suitable place for explaining that the famous Peking Gazette, often said to be the oldest newspaper in the world, is not really a newspaper at all, in that it contains no news in our sense of the term.  It is a record only of court movements, list of promoted officials, with a few selected memorials and edicts.  It is published daily, but was not printed until the fifteenth century.

Every Chinese boy may be said to have his chance.  The slightest sign of a capacity for book-learning is watched for, even among the poorest.  Besides the opportunity of free schools, a clever boy will soon find a patron; and in many cases, the funds for carrying on a curriculum, and for entering the first of the great competitions, will be subscribed in the district, on which the candidate will confer a lasting honour by his success.  A promising young graduate, who has won his first degree with honours, is at once an object of importance to wealthy fathers who desire to secure him as a son-in-law, and who will see that money is not wanting to carry him triumphantly up the official ladder.  Boys without any gifts of the kind required, remain to fill the humbler positions; those who advance to a certain point are drafted into trade; while hosts of others who just fall short of the highest, become tutors in private families, schoolmasters, doctors, fortune-tellers, geomancers, and booksellers’ hacks.

Of high-class Chinese literature, it is not possible to give even the faintest idea in the space at disposal.  It must suffice to say that all branches are adequately represented, histories, biographies, philosophy, poetry and essays on all manner of subjects, offering a wide field even to the most insatiate reader.

And here a remark may be interjected, which is very necessary for the information of those who wish to form a true estimate of the Chinese people.  Throughout the Confucian Canon, a collection of ancient works on which the moral code of the Chinese is based, there is not a single word which could give offence, even to the most sensitive, on questions of delicacy and decency.  That is surely saying a good deal, but it is not all; precisely the same may be affirmed of what is mentioned above as high-class Chinese literature, which is pure enough to satisfy the most strait-laced.  Chinese poetry, of which there is in existence a huge mass, will be searched in vain for suggestions of impropriety, for sly innuendo, and for the other tricks of the unclean.  This extraordinary purity of language is all the more remarkable from the fact that, until recent years, the education of women has not been at all general, though many particular instances are recorded of women who have themselves achieved success in literary pursuits.  It is only when we come to the novel, to the short story, or to the anecdote, which are not usually written in high-class style, and are therefore not recognized as literature proper, that this exalted standard is no longer always maintained.