Roughly, the mandarin or official language is spoken by all officials throughout the empire and by all classes in those provinces which lie north of the Yangtse, while south of this line Cantonese is the principal dialect, although the number of others is legion, and so pronounced are the differences between them that countrymen dwelling but a few miles apart are frequently at a loss to understand each other. On one occasion, when making "a little trip to Japan," I took my Pekingese boy with me. Having missed the fortnightly mail-boat I made the passage from Chefoo in a small German collier, and on arrival at Nagasaki took rickshas to the hotel. In the streets were a goodly number of Chinese, members of a considerable colony of small traders, and the sight of compatriots in a foreign land greatly delighted the boy, who, on my departure after tiffin to make a tour of the town, asked if he meanwhile might go out to drink tea with his countrymen. I gave permission, but on returning some hours later to the hotel found him in a very disappointed frame of mind, which was accounted for by his explanation that the Chinese residents in Nagasaki were all Cantonese, and that not being able to understand a word of mandarin they had perforce been obliged to converse with each other as best they could in pidgin English. He said, "Looksee b'long all same Chinaman, no savez talkee." The Pekingese are very discriminative and frequently condescendingly refer to all other Chinese as "outside men" or "foreigners." Pidgin English is a queer jargon composed of a verbatim translation of Chinese sentences together with a slight admixture of Portuguese and French, the frequent wrongful substitution of similar sounding words and a lavish use of the terminals _ee_ and _o_. "S'pose you wantchee catchee olo chinaware, compradore savez talkee my," represents, "If you want to get some old chinaware your Chinese agent will let me know," while I have heard "two times twicee" for "twice two," and "last day to-night" for "last evening." The word _pidgin_ means _work_ of any kind, as in "plenty pidgin" or "no got pidgin," and _pidgin English_ simply means a workable knowledge of colloquial English as picked up by tradesmen, servants and coolies, in contradistinction to English as taught in the schools. On the northern frontiers there is also pidgin Russian. The written language is the same everywhere, each character, of which the Chinese say there are between eighty and a hundred thousand, representing a complete word, so that before being able to read, and more especially write, a single sentence, each individual character in it must be closely studied and committed to memory, as we commit to memory the letters of the alphabet, but with the difference that whereas the alphabet consists of but twenty-six simple letters, Chinese caligraphy contains almost a hundred thousand characters of extreme complexity.