Excerpt from Glimpses of China and Chinese Homes Chinese Characteristics. Dr. Smith was for twenty-two years connected with the American Board of Foreign Missions in China. He says: The circumstance that a person has lived twenty-two years in China is no more a guarantee that he is competent to write of the charac teristics of the Chinese than the fact that another man has lived for twenty-two years in a silver mine is proof that he is a fit person to compose a treatise on metal lurgy or bi-metalism. This is unquestionably too modest, as will be realized by any one who has read his remarkable analysis of Chinese character, yet it may stand as a warning to those who generalize about the Chinese on slight acquaintance. Whatever conclusions I have come to, superficial as they may be, are curiously borne out by the testimony of others who have spent as many years in the Empire as I have days, and have travelled as many thousand miles in the country as I have single miles. Most of this material appeared first in a series of ar ticles in the American Architect under the title of Journal Sketches in China, and to the publishers of that journal, and to its editor, Mr. William Rotch Ware, I am indebted for the privilege of publishing them in book-form. A number of sketches have been added. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.