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PREFACE.
In writing the book which is herewith submitted to the public, I have kept two classes of readers more especially in view—firstly, that part of the reading public which takes a general interest in records of travel in distant lands; and secondly, that part of it which takes something more than an academic interest in the trade and enterprise of the people of Great Britain in foreign countries. To both of these classes the subjects of my present study—China and Japan—will, I believe, prove the sources of no small attraction. China, with her vast undeveloped resources, her overwhelming population, and, above all, her uneasy but fateful movement away from the well-worn paths of her past and towards
