It is not impossible that the title of the present chapter may evoke a mental conversation between certain readers and the author, as follows:—

“Æsthetic pigtails!”

“Nay. Rather the land where the pigtail is objected to on aesthetic grounds.”

“Then you do not refer to “The Land of the Pigtail?’”

“Strictly speaking, no.”

“Thought you meant China.”

“I do.”

In China the truth always lies a foot below the surface. One must never generalise on the obvious there. “The Land of the Pigtail” is a traveller's generalisation. There was once a land to which the epithet might have been more safely applied. It was the land in which a distinguished gentleman once exclaimed, “When a man loses his queue, his head should go with it”—a sentence emphasised with an oath which was considered to be neither improper nor impolite in those days. In that land the pigtail was once adopted as an aesthetic adornment, and to this day is enshrined in the national art. The speaker was Sir William Fairfax, father of the famous mathematician, Mary Somerville.

The phrase “Land of the Pigtail,” stripped of all porcine suggestions, would properly indicate Manchuria. And not a few Chinese, watching the rapidly revolving kaleidoscope of events, have begun to prophesy the passing away of the Manchu dynasty, and to look upon their cranial appendages as a mere fashion of the day.