China by Harry Alverson Franck — Read

China is the oldest living member of the family of nations. It is the country in which conditions to-day are most nearly like what they were thousands of years ago. The long journey we are about to make through all parts of it will be like going to a great museum. But this museum, instead of containing the relics of people long dead, will look, for the most part, as if it were being lived in by an ancient race. Here and there, however, we shall see things that make us think of our Western civilization.

It seems hardly necessary to tell anyone where China is, or to say that the Chinese make up nearly one-fifth of the whole human race. You probably know that China occupies most of eastern Asia between Russian Siberia and the Pacific Ocean, or the China Sea, and that its climate ranges all the way from that of Canada to that of Florida.