The scope of the work being restricted to the points of contact between China and the rest of the world, nothing recondite is attempted, still less is any enigma solved. It is the belief of the author that the so-called Chinese mystery has been a source of needless mystification; that the relation between China and the outer world was intrinsically simple; and that to have worked from the basis of their resemblances to the rest of humanity would have been a shorter way to an amicable understanding with the Chinese than the crude attempt to accommodate Western procedure to the uncomprehended differences which divided them. It needed no mastery of their sociology to keep the Chinese strictly to their written engagements and to deter them from outrage. But discussion was the invitation to laxity; and laxity, condoned and pampered, then defiant and triumphant, lies at the root of the disasters which have befallen the Chinese Empire itself, and now threaten to recoil also upon the foreign nations which are responsible for them. This responsibility was never more tersely summed up than by Mr Burlingame in his capacity of Chinese Envoy. After sounding the Foreign Office that astute diplomatist was able to inform the Tsungli-Yamên in 1869 that "the British Government was so friendly and pacific that they would endure anything." The dictum, though true, was fatal, and the operation of it during thirty subsequent years explains most that has happened during that period, at least in the relations between China and Great Britain. A word as to the orthography may be useful to the reader. The impossibility of transliterating Chinese sounds into any alphabetical language causes great confusion in the spelling of names. A uniform system would indeed be most desirable, but common practice has already fixed so many of them that it seems better, in a book intended for general reading, not to depart too much from the conventional usage, or attempt to follow any scientific system, which must, after all, be based upon mispronunciation of the Chinese sounds. As regards personal names, it may be convenient to call attention to the distinction between Chinese and Manchu forms. In the case of the former the custom is to write the _nomen_, or family name, separately, and the _pre-nomen_ (which by Chinese practice becomes the _post-nomen_) by itself, and, when it consists of two characters, separated by a hyphen--_e.g._, Li (_nomen_) Hung-chang (_post-nomen_). In the case of Manchus, who are known not by a family name, but by what may be termed, for want of a better expression, their _pre-nomen_, it is customary to write the name in one word, without hyphens--for example, Kiying, Ilipu. As the Chinese name usually consists of three characters or syllables, and the Manchu usually of two, the form of name affords a _prima facie_ indication of the extraction of the personage referred to. Polysyllabic names, as San-ko-lin-sin, are generally Mongol.