Two thousand years before Christ the Chinese had written characters. Later they invented the hair pencil, which is in use to this day. They grind down a jet-black ink, in which they dip the brush, and hold it vertically when they write. The manufacture of the ink is their secret, and the "Indian ink" which we use in Europe is obtained from them. A hundred years after Christ paper was made in China. In an ancient town at Lop-nor, where wild camels now roam, I found a collection of Chinese letters and documents on paper which had remained buried in the desert since A.D. 265. In A.D. 600 the Chinese had invented the art of printing, which in Europe was not invented until 850 years later. The Chinese were acquainted with the magnetic needle 1100 years before Christ, and made compasses, and they knew of gunpowder long before Europeans. Three thousand years ago the Chinese were proficient in the art of casting bronze. In the interior of the country are still to be found most beautiful objects in bronze--round bowls on feet decorated with lions and dragons, vases, dishes, cups, and jugs, all of dark, heavy bronze executed with the finest and most artistic detail. The porcelain manufacture attained its greatest excellence in the time of Kang Hi and Kien Lung. Then were made vases, bowls, and dishes of such exceeding perfection that neither the Chinese themselves nor any other people at the present time can produce their match. The arrangement of colours and the glaze excite the admiration of all connoisseurs. Porcelain articles of this period are now extremely rare, and fetch enormous prices. In Japan I saw a small green Chinese bowl on three feet, with a cover, which had cost eleven hundred pounds. Compared to the Kang Hi vases, the finest porcelain that can be produced nowadays is mere rubbish. The Chinese language is as singular as everything else in the great kingdom. Every word is unchangeable. While we say "go, went, gone, will go, should go, going," the Chinese always say simply "go." The precise meaning is shown by the position of the word in a sentence or by the help of certain auxiliary words, as, for example, "I morning go," "We yesterday go," where the future or past tense is indicated by the words "morning" and "yesterday." A single word, _li_, for instance, may have a number of different significations, and what it denotes in any particular case depends on the tone and pronunciation, on its position in the sentence, and on the word which comes before or after. The language is divided into many different dialects, of which the principal is the mandarin or the dialect of the educated. Every word has its particular written sign, and the Chinese language accordingly possesses 24,000 different written characters; only one man in twenty and one woman in a hundred can read and write it.