China’s Remarkable Achievements
The Chinese were the first inventors of printing, the first inventors of gunpowder and the magnetic needle. They were first to hatch eggs of fowl by steam, and to hatch fish eggs artificially; the first to have chain pumps and artesian wells. Their great wall and grand canal were made in the remote ages of the past; their penal code is two thousand years old; and their civil service examinations, which we are just learning to imitate, they have had for the last thousand years. China is ahead on bridges, the largest in the world being her structure at Lagang, over an arm of the China Sea. It is five miles long, built entirely of stone; has three hundred arches seventy feet high, and a roadway seventy feet wide. The parapet is a balustrade, and each of the pillars, which are seventy-five feet apart, support a pedestal on which is placed a lion twenty-one feet long, made of one block of marble. When our barbarian fore-fathers were wondering about the northern coasts of Europe, ignorant of letters or any of the fine arts, the literary Chinaman, dressed in silks and satins, was lounging on his sofa and drinking tea from painted porcelain cups.—Sel.