A

But that does not mean that China has not learned anything in the thousands of years between.

The Chinese were the first people to make silk; and think how many grand folk of every country wear it now!

They were the people who discovered how to make porcelain. Even kings had to use earthenware till China men showed how fine transparent cups and bowls could be made.

They had gunpowder, and knew how to print books long before Caxton.

There were astronomers and poets and thinkers in old China, and more people learnt to read there than in any other country in old days.

B

One of our latest inventions is the taxi-cab; but a learned professor in Cambridge has found that in China a kind of taxi-cab was used about I,600 years ago.

Instead of marking up twopences every quarter of a mile, the Chinese machine struck a drum, and when ten short Chinese miles had been traversed, a bell was rung.

C

You may have read the story of Rip van Winkle, who went to sleep for a hundred years.

China went to sleep for long years, or rather, got too sleepy to care to stir；but now she is waking, and when she gets to stirring it will be like the waking of Gulliver in Lilliput.