Through Shên-kan : the account of the Clark expedition in north China, 1908-9 / by Robert Sterling Clark and Arthur de C. Sowerby, edited by Major C. H.Chepmell.

  • Clark, Robert Sterling, 1877-1956.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Through Shên-kan : the account of the Clark expedition in north China, 1908-9 / by Robert Sterling Clark and Arthur de C. Sowerby, edited by Major C. H.Chepmell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    INCEPTION, AIM, AND OUTFITTING OF THE EXPEDITION. JCJIX centuries have elapsed since Marco Polo returned to Europe from his long sojourning in the unknown East. Wonderful indeed were the tales he brought, but none surpassing his description—incredible as it seemed—of the mighty dominions of the Grand Khan. It is related that on his death-bed the Venetian traveller was adjured to recant his narrative. But he remained firm; succeeding years have steadily piled up an overwhelming weight of testimony to his truthfulness; and never throughout this whole period have the peoples of the West failed to find in China a source of most lively interest and unlimited speculation. Nor, indeed, has this interest been of a purely abstract character, for, as century has followed century, merchants, missionaries, explorers and scholars, have made their way in ever-increasing numbers, to the shores and boundaries of the Celestial Empire. They have penetrated into the interior, studied the language, and investigated customs, classics, and folk-lore. They have written many books, compiled maps, and brought away pictorial records on film and canvas. Numerous Treaty Ports have been established, each with a large and increasing European population. In many towns of the interior, schools, colleges, and hospitals have been started under the direction of Europeans, who, living thus amongst the Chinese, obtain ample opportunity of studying their characteristics. Railways, too, have been opened, connecting the large cities of the maritime provinces, as well as those of the Hinterland. With all these facts in view, we may be tempted to wonder whether any great scope for the explorer still remains. And yet how little is really known. Cathay, with its paradox of barbarism and civilisation, its teeming millions of yellow-skinned agriculturalists— toiling to-day with implements as rude as those their forefathers wielded two thousand years ago—its mighty rivers and mountain ranges, its rich mineral deposits, its ancient tombs, and its relics of a bygone prosperity, remains still a land of mystery—enigmatic, perhaps inscrutable. Who can say that he knows the Chinese people ? What scholar has wrested from their classics and their records all the secrets of that dim past, when war raged without cease along the Tartar marches, and the first dynasties of the infant Empire were emerging from the tumult and the strife ? Can we be confident that even in the littoral and more traversed regions the flora and fauna hold 1