Now the contradictory element in the Chinaman's character comes out particularly strong in connection with this national defect of untruthfulness. A lie to him has no moral side, it is simply a display of cleverness, and the more perfectly it succeeds the greater is the applause it elicits; and yet there are occasions when the Chinaman's word is as good as his bond, and is as much to be relied upon as that of an Englishman who may have gained a reputation for integrity and honour. A Chinese merchant, for example, makes a contract months before to deliver so many chests of tea at a certain rate. The market in the meanwhile rises, a dearth has suddenly occurred in the foreign trade, and the buyer finds that if he keeps his engagements he will lose thousands of dollars. He never for a moment hesitates as to what he shall do; he does not even attempt to get the purchaser to make an advance upon the terms agreed to. The tea comes down the river from the mountain side on which it is grown, over rapids and down through whirling gorges, and away from the pure breezes of the hillside, and it is brought to the city where the merchant lives, and is handed over to him with as scrupulous a care as though he were being paid the advanced price that the later teas are getting. It is no uncommon thing for foreign merchants to bear testimony to the perfect honesty of the Chinese with whom they may have large business transactions, and one manager of a banking concern even declared in public that, though business extending over hundreds of millions of taels had been transacted with Chinese, the bank had never suffered by one single defaulter. This is all the more extraordinary, and is one of the startling perplexities in the Chinese character, since we know that in ordinary business life one has to keep one's weather eye open or he will find himself cheated most unmercifully. In spite of the complex nature of the Chinese, and the veiled way in which that mysterious brain of his works, there is no doubt but that there is a fascination about him to the men of the West such as none of the other nations of the East possesses. It is not because he is handsome, for, taking the ordinary run of Chinese that one sees in the streets, they are entirely wanting in all the elements of beauty that constitute the standard of the West.