NANKING'S SHRINES

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 303, 22 December 1937, Page 22

NANKING'S SHRINES

SACRED TO CHINESE.

CITY OF VICISSITUDES.

CHARM AND CHARACTER,

All roads in farthest Asia lead to Pciping, or Peking, as it was known to the outside world not very long ago. But Peking was the metropolis of a foreign dynasty, whose power was based on Manchuria, the centre of an Imperialist China, great and grasping.

That is not the China that we know-to-day, the China of the Republican era, says a writer in the Melbourne "Argus." For geographical, political, economic, and social reasons, China's new centre has shifted back to the gi*eat \angtse Valley, to Nanking, where it used to be under the Ming Dynasty.

To all intents and purposes the Japanese have been in possession of Peiping for several years, their occupation almost undisputed. To-day, by lorce, they seem about to enter Nanking. By right of might the foe may shortly hold in his hand a rich jewel, the facets of which reflect the palaces of the Ming emperors, the Temple of Confucius, the time-softened ruins of the Taiping Rel>ellion, and the marvellous tomb of Su.u Vat-sen, the "Father of the Republic."

In the 'fifties Nanking was burned by the Taiping rebels. In 1928 the Communists, under Russian direction, looted the city, destroyed foreign consulates and warehouses, and murdered European men after subjecting their wives to gross indignities.

At that moment Ohiang Kai-shek, the present generalissimo of China's armies, ap[>eared on the scene, the Kuomintang Government was formed, and, driving the Communist hordes out of Nanking, it made the city the seat of administration of the whole of China. Chiang Kai-shek, with his wonderful wife, is in flight from the Japarfese, whose devastating advance on Nanking makes the "tragedy" of 1028 appear trifling.

There will of cruel necessity be a new capital for China, but the Chinese will not despair. The great danger to China is Wt the Communists or the Japanese, or their own bandits, but the Chinese themselves. While they remain united as they have in this trouble they can lio[>e to return to their lost cities. If •they become demoralised by their reverses it means final ruin. But there is no sign of that. "Nanking has charm and character," wrote the late William Martin, editor of the "Journal De Geneve," in 1934. "The Drum Tower, dominating the city; the disused temple admiring itself in the Lake, of the Five Continents; the asthmatic little train that takes the coolies, amid a great clanking of old iron, from one end of the city to the other; the shepherds playing their flutes while they watch their flocks; the ponds that reflect the new Ministries; the picturesque and noisy beggars; the little post office where one wonders if anyone has even entered; the boulevards as broad as the Avenue de l'Opera, only a few steps away from zig-zagging footpaths; macadam roads deeply rutted; forests in the midst of the city; villages of thatched cottages; mud huts; old feudal walls; the magnificent Chinese roofs of the Ministry of Railways; the Bolshevist style and black carcase of the High Court; noiev'lanes; an open-air market in front of the Temple of Confucius; little eating with charming names (Flowery Spring) ; and a canal with sampans. There is nothing else on earth like the old world and paradoxical picturesqueness of this eity that is a whole countryside."