Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE AMONG THE CHINESE Lives there a land which has no political parties ? Then look there for the secret society in all its rank luxuriance. China abounds in it. Socially its curse is that it upholds its members in private evil more than in the public good at which its charter loftily aims, and from the exercise of which it is prevented by the present stunted constitution of the country. At Tientsin there is a house known to foreigners from its door as the " Society of the Red Door." To the initiated it is the " Society which Meets Injury with Retaliation." The branch at Hang- chow, known as Hung Pang, or Red Association, is constantly fomenting rice riots between the villagers and the up-country boatmen who arrive from the Grand Canal, as a pretext for political risings. Only recently they captured a prefectural city and it was necessary to call upon the reorganized Imperial troops to dislodge them. In Che-kiang Province the Chiu Sik Lun (Earthen Pot Society) murdered a governor in August, 1907, for discouraging the principles of the New China party, and the effect has eddied at last as far as Peking, in the institution of the new Supreme Council, whose duties are proclaimed to be the educating of the country toward representative government. The echoes of the fourth century rescripts of Honorius, or the nearer melancholy of the Chinese edicts of 1898! Unless China does more for real representation, dissolution is not staved off forever, any more than it was during the lingering centuries of the Roman Empire. Advance and a partial reaction divide history, and China has had her share of the latter during the Manchu tenancy of the throne. The most famous secret society is the Triad (Sam Hop Wui), the members of which are supposed to go armed for privat...