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Matter in the Wrong Place
J.O.P. Bland Houseboat Days in China
At the best of times, and giving him all facilities, there is a wide gulf between the Chinaman's standard of cleanliness and ours. He endorses that scientific definition of dirt which calls it matter in the wrong place, and his philosophy teaches him that, sooner or later, the wanderer will find its way home without the help of man.
Weights
Montesquieu - the spirit of laws
It is very remarkable that the Chinese, whose lives are guided by rites, are nevertheless the greatest cheats upon earth. This appears chiefly in their trade, which, in spite of its natural tendency, has never been able to make them honest. He who buys of them ought to carry with him his own weights;
Featureless Plain
Arnold Toynbee on Peking, 1929
Peking is just something which human imagination and energy have done to so many square miles of the featureless, enormous North China plain: and if just this had not been done by men just here, those particular square miles would not have been distinguishable in any way from the thousands of others by which they are monotonously surrounded.
Shanghai Shooting Parties
(Author unknown, circa 1870)
The most enjoyable entertainment was one of the shooting parties that Shanghai taipans liked to arrange that took you out into the
country. You left on a slow, heavy houseboat and went up along one of the many creeks or canals, where pheasant, partridge,
quail, and an occasional woodcock hid behind tall reeds. The excursion up Soochow Creek was quite popular, and you stayed
on your houseboat for two or three days and walked across the empty cotton fields to do your shooting.
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