In making this diversity clear, it is necessary only to cite a few illustrations. There is not even a standard of currency in China. Each province or group of provinces has its own standard tael, differing greatly in value from the tael which may be the basis of value in the next province or group. There is no government coinage whatever. All the mints are privately owned and are run for profit in supplying the local demand for currency, and the basis of this currency is the Mexican dollar, a foreign unit. They make dollar bills in Honan Province. I went into Chili Province and offered some of these Honan bills in exchange for purchases. The merchants merely looked at them and shook their heads. "Tientsin dollar have got?" was the question. So the money of a community or a province is simply a local commodity and has either a lower value or no value elsewhere, for the simple reason that the average Chinaman knows only his local money and will accept no other. The diversity of language is as easily observed as the diversity of coinage. On the wharves at Shanghai you can hear a Canton Chinaman and a Shanghai Chinaman talking together in pidgin English, their only means of communication. When I was travelling in the Northwest, I was accosted in French one day by a Chinese station-agent, on the Shansi Railroad, who frankly said that he was led to speak to me, a foreigner, by the fact that he was a "foreigner" too. With his blue gown and his black pigtail, he looked to me no different from the other natives; but he told me that he found the language and customs of Shansi "difficult," and that he sometimes grew homesick for his native city in the South. That the Chinese of different provinces really regard one another as foreigners may be illustrated by the fact that, during the Boxer troubles about Tientsin, it was a common occurrence for the northern soldiers to shoot down indiscriminately with the white men any Cantonese who appeared within rifle-shot.