China by Harry Alverson Franck — Read

It was still another style of train that carried us from Mukden to Shanhaikwan, the first town of China proper. The cars had rounded roofs and were divided into compartments, like the cabins on a ship. The train was packed full of Chinese soldiers, in very faded gray cotton uniforms. They crowded some of the cars so that other passengers could not get on at all, and they even slept on and under the tables in the dining-car. Very few of them had tickets. We were to find this a common thing on all Chinese railways. Many of the soldiers of the different marshals and generals ruling China are not well trained or disciplined; some of them are hardly real soldiers at all. But the trainmen, not being able to do anything against their rifles and bayonets, have to let them ride whether they have any real right to or not.

At Shanhaikwan the Great Wall of China reaches the sea at last, weary from its more than 1500 miles of climbing over the mountains. I passed through the Great Wall in half a dozen different places before I left China, so that it came to be like an old acquaintance. As you perhaps know, it was built nearly two thousand years ago, to keep the wild Mongolian tribes living north and northwest of it from getting into ancient China. Yet they did get in, in spite of this great barrier along the frontier, conquering, and for quite a long time governing, all China.