We have now to consider that “lord mayor's show” of urchins with red boards, an umbrella-bearer or two, evil-visaged lictors ad lib., and the great sedan-chair, which we saw, in glaring incongruity to all surroundings, passing along the Shanghai Bund. Had we met it in the streets of any Chinese city, it might have appealed to us as containing some elements of barbaric splendour, albeit of a shabby-genteel kind, and we can imagine that amid such surroundings, and to Chinese eyes, it might appear quite imposing. But here, along a macadamised road, with trees on one side and three-storied edifices on the other, amid ‘rickshas, carriages, and well-drilled police, it was manifestly barbaric with the splendour left out. Which means—and a significant fact this—that Western civilisation reveals the incongruities of mandarindom.

One authority on China has hardly been quoted in these pages, the Empress Dowager. It would only be gallant to allow a lady of such dignity to have her say on a subject which she has made a life-long study.

On the general subject of the old economy, including the institution of mandarindom, she said (Imperial Decree, November 13, 1898): “As the Empire has always prospered under the old régime, and the methods of old—inaugurated and sanctioned by the sacred ancestors of our dynasty—have attained the acme of excellence, there is no necessity for making any changes….”