By this time the fine Tyne-built, gray Chinese cruiser _Hai Chi_, which
sailed from New York in October, arrived at Shanghai, and amid wild
rejoicing, such as only the southern Chinese can express, ran down the
triangular yellow dragon and hoisted the square tri-color sun flag of
the republican revolution. She was at once ordered to report at the
arsenal with her heavy load of ammunition, which was a godsend to the
revolutionists. This cruiser was the best known abroad of Chinese war
vessels, and at once became the flagship of the rebel navy. She is
armed with two eight-inch, and ten four-point-seven guns. On December
14th, Doctor Sun Yat Sen (Sunyacius), with the American, Homer Lea,
arrived safely at Penang, Straits Settlements, a hotbed of Chinese
reform, which has from time to time sheltered all the reformers like
Sun, Kang, etc., since the coup d’état in 1898. The rich foreignized
Cantonese owners of tin mines have been loyal to reform from the
beginning. When Sun arrived at Singapore on December 16th, a band of
Chinese girls met him, each waving the tri-color of the revolution and
of the emancipation of Chinese womanhood, and singing the Chinese
Marseillaise, _Chung Kwan_. The Chinese wore no queues, and the
caricatures which they distributed showed the pig, the dog, the monkey
and the Manchu as all belonging to the races which wear queues! Who
will say that the Chinese are not distinguished for humor! I have for
years been trying to point out this quality in them.
The first wave of the revolution, which had died down somewhat by
the Hankau defeat, had rolled on even into far mountainous Tibet,
and Gyangze, a walled and fortified town on the trade route between
Lhasa and Darjeeling, fell before the revolutionists on December 14th.
Gyangze will be remembered for the stand it made against Sir Francis
Younghusband’s brilliant campaign in 1904 to open up the way from India
to Lhasa, and also for the operations in its neighborhood by General
Chao Ehr Feng, who drove the sacred plotting Dalai Lama for the first
time out of China into India in the startling campaign of 1910.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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