Page:Weird Tales Volume 38 Number 01 (1944-09).djvu/92

I don't think I've ever missed reading an issue since the first one away back in 1923. And now that Weird Tales has come of legal age, I hope it's only beginning a long and lusty life.

Edmond Hamilton.

 

Streets of Defeat

Frank Owen tells us more interesting facts on China and reminds us of the debt we owe the Chinese. Let us hope, as Mr. Owen says below, that in "The Long Still Streets of China" the Japs will be overwhelmingly and completely crushed.

 

For more than twenty years I have been writing stories for Weird Tales and interesting years they have been. I believe the stories have been liked because of the lore of old China which I have endeavored to get into them. For the Chinese are very appealing people, so friendly, so human, so forthright. They have given to civilization so very much and have asked so little in return. The very paper on which this magazine is printed would not have been possible had not Ts'ae Lun invented paper in A.D. 105. He made it from the ancient bark of trees—the inner bark. His experiments were sponsored by the Emperor. The finished product was called the Marquis Ts'ae's paper. Nor could writers like me scribble stories had not the pencil been invented by Mung Teen of Tsin (B.C. 246-205). It was called the "Tsin Pencil."

Porcelain, carved jades, tea, rare rugs, cinnabar, and lapis lazuli have come from that fabulous country where there is only one doctor for every hundred and sixty thousand people, where there is so much poverty and famine and suffering, and yet whose untapped mineral resources are so immense they almost seem mythical. No wonder gluttonous Japan is so anxious to swallow this vast country with its age old wisdom. Even in the days of the T'angs twelve hundred years ago China enjoyed as free a press as we have in America today. And freedom of worship was given to all men. Perhaps the Japanese believe that they may be able to absorb something of that intangible quality that makes the Chinese respected the world over.

Po Chui, one of China's greatest poets, used to read his poems to his washwoman to make certain that anyone could understand them. At the other extreme is Lao Tzu's Tao Teh

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