on holiday.

The rather extreme idea of walking across this Flowery Land came to me
early in the year 1909, although for many years I had cherished the hope
of seeing Interior China ere modernity had robbed her and her wonderful
people of their isolation and antediluvianism, and ever since childhood
my interest in China has always been considerable. A little prior to the
Chinese New Year, a friend of mine dined with me at my rooms in
Singapore, in the Straits Settlements, and the conversation about China
resulted in our decision then and there to travel through the Empire on
holiday. He, because at the time he had little else to do; the author,
because he thought that a few months' travel in mid-China would, from a
journalistic standpoint, be passed profitably, the intention being to
arrive home in dear old England late in the summer of the same year.

We agreed to cross China on foot, and accordingly on February 22, 1909,
just as the sun was sinking over the beautiful harbor of Singapore--that
most valuable strategic Gate of the Far East, where Crown Colonial
administration, however, is allowed by a lethargic British Government to
become more and more bungled every year--we settled down on board the
French mail steamer _Nera_, bound for Shanghai. My friends, good
fellows, in reluctantly speeding me on my way, prophesied that this
would prove to be my last long voyage to a last long rest, that the
Chinese would never allow me to come out of China alive. Such is the
ignorance of the average man concerning the conditions of life and
travel in the interior of this Land of Night.

Here, then, was I on my way to that land towards which all the world was
straining its eyes, whose nation, above all nations of the earth, was
altering for better things, and coming out of its historic shell.