New Forces in Old China: An Inevitable AwakeningBrown, Arthur Judson
History
New Forces in Old China: An Inevitable Awakening
Brown, Arthur Judson
China -- Commerce; China -- Foreign relations; China -- Politics and government; Missions -- China
No waters are too remote for the modern steamer. Its smoke
trails across every sea and far up every navigable stream. Ten
mail steamers regularly run on the Siberian Yenisei, while the
Obi, flowing from the snows of the Little Altai Mountains,
bears 302 steam vessels on various parts of its 2,000-mile
journey to the Obi Gulf on the Arctic Ocean. Stanley could
now go from Glasgow to Stanley Falls in forty-three days.
Already there are forty-six steamers on the Upper Congo.
From Cape Town, a railway 2,000 miles long runs via Bulawayo
to Beira on the Portuguese coast, while branch lines reach
several formerly inaccessible mining and agricultural regions.
June 22, 1904, almost the whole population of Cape Town
cheered the departure of the first through train for Victoria
Falls, where the British Association for the Advancement of
Science has been invited to meet in 1905. Uganda is reached
by rail. Five hundred and eighty miles of track unite Mombasa
and Victoria Nyanza. Sleeping and dining cars safely
run the 575 miles from Cairo to Khartoum where only five
years ago Lord Kitchener fought the savage hordes of the
Mahdi. The Englishman's dream of a railroad from Cairo to
the Cape is more than half realized, for 2,800 miles are already
completed. In 1903, Japan had 4,237 miles of well managed
railways which in 1902 carried 111,211,208 passengers
14,409,752 tons of freight. India is gridironed by 25,373
miles of steel rails which in 1901 carried 195,000,000 passengers.
A railroad parallels the Burmese Irrawaddy to Bhamo and
Mandalay. In Siam you can ride by rail from Bangkok northward
to Korat and westward to Petchaburee. The Trans-
Siberian Railway now connects St. Petersburg and Peking. In
Korea, the line from Chemulpho to Seoul connects with lines
under construction both southward and northward, so that ere
long one can journey by rail from Fusan on the Korean Strait
to Wiju on the Yalu River. As the former is but ten hours by
sea from Japan and as the latter is to form a junction with the
Trans-Siberian Railway, a land journey in a sleeping car will
soon be practicable from London and Paris to the capitals of
China and Korea, and, save for the ferry across the Korean
Strait, to any part of the Mikado's kingdom. The locomotive
runs noisily from Jaffa to venerable Jerusalem and from Beirut
over the passes of Lebanon to Damascus, the oldest city in the
world. A projected line will run from there to the Mohammedan
Mecca, so that soon the Moslem pilgrims will abandon
the camel for the passenger coach. Most wonderful of all is
the Anatolian Railway which is to run through the heart of
Asia Minor, traversing the Karamanian plateau, the Taurus
Mountains and the Cilician valleys to Haran where Abraham
tarried, and Nineveh where Jonah preached, and Babylon
where Nebuchadnezzar made an image of gold, and Bagdad
where Haroun-al-Raschid ruled, to Koweit on the Persian Gulf.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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