Stolen Idols by E. Phillips Oppenheim — Read

Wu Ling, the trader, Chinese representative of the great house of Johnson and Company, at home and amongst his merchandise, was strangely installed. He sat in the remote corner of a huge warehouse, packed from floor to ceiling with an amazingly heterogeneous collection of all manner of articles. There were bales of cotton and calico goods from Manchester, woollens from Bradford, cases of firearms from Birmingham, and six great crates of American bicycles in the foreground. A Ford automobile stood in the middle of the floor, and, farther back, in the recesses of the room, which seemed to be of no particular shape, and which wandered into many corners, were piles of Chinese silks, shelf after shelf of china bowls and ivory statuettes.

Hanging from the walls were mandarins' robes of green and blue, embroidered with many-coloured silks, fragments of brocade, and one great pictorial representation of the grounds of an emperor's palace, woven with miraculous skill into a background of pale blue material. From the more distant parts of the warehouse came an insidious, pungent odour, as of a perfume from which the life had gone but the faintness of which remained; a perfume which spread itself with gentle insistence into every corner of the place and seemed to envelop even its more sordid details with an air of mystery. In the great open yard, blue-smocked Chinamen were packing and unpacking in amazing silence. The only sound in the warehouse itself came from the clicking of a typewriter before which, on a plain deal bench, was seated a black-haired, sallow-faced youth in European clothes.