Books on China have appeared in large numbers during the past few years, and the production of another seems to demand some kind of apology. Yet it cannot be said that as a field for the ethnologist, the historian, the student of comparative religion and of folk-lore, the sociologist or the moral philosopher, China has been worked out. The demand for books that profess to deal in a broad and general way with China and its people as a whole has probably, indeed, been fully satisfied: but China is too vast a country to be adequately described by any one writer or group of writers, and the more we know about China and its people the more strongly we shall feel that future workers must confine themselves to less ambitious objects of study than the whole Empire. The pioneer who with his prismatic compass passes rapidly over half a continent has nearly finished all he can be expected to do; he must soon give place to the surveyor who with plane-table and theodolite will content himself with mapping a section of a single province. It is a mistake to suppose that any class of European residents in or visitors to the Far East possesses the means of acquiring sound knowledge of China and the Chinese. Government officials--whether Colonial or Consular--are sometimes rather apt to assume that what they do not know about China is not worth knowing; missionaries show a similar tendency to believe that an adequate knowledge of the life and "soul" of the Chinese people is attainable only by themselves; while journalists and travellers, believing that officials and missionaries are necessarily one-sided or bigoted, profess to speak with the authority that comes of breezy open-mindedness and impartiality. The tendency in future will be for each writer to confine himself to that aspect of Chinese life with which he is personally familiar, or that small portion of the Empire that comes within the radius of his personal experience. If he is a keen observer he will find no lack of material ready to his hand. Perhaps the richer and more luxuriant fields of inquiry may be occupied by other zealous workers: then let him steal quietly into some thorny and stony corner which they have neglected, some wilderness that no one else cares about, and set to work with spade and hoe to prepare a little garden for himself. Perhaps if he is industrious the results may be not wholly disappointing; and the passer-by who peeps over his hedge to jeer at his folly and simplicity in cultivating a barren moor may be astonished to find that the stony soil has after all produced good fruit and beautiful flowers. In attempting a description of the people of Weihaiwei, their customs and manners, their religion and superstitions, their folk-lore, their personal characteristics, their village homes, I have endeavoured to justify my choice of a field of investigation that has so far been neglected by serious students of things Chinese. It may be foolish to