China's Great Record.

King Country Chronicle, Volume III, Issue 172, 12 July 1909, Page 3

China's Great Record.

In combating the view that the Chinese are an inferior race, at a dinner to the new Consul in Sydney, Mr Ping Nam, president of the Chinese Merchants' Society, gave a few facts concerning the way in which his country had taken a part in the race for civilisation. The cry that the Chinese were inferior, he said, ws untenable. Such a cry is historically untenable. The examination of our records as a nation, the fact that our ancestors invented the compass shortly after the death of Aristotle, discovered the manufacture of porcelain, lacquer ware, silk, printed their classics five centuries anterior to the time of Caxton, established the coinage of the squareholed copper cash several hundred years before the Christain era, used carrier pigeons for bringing home news from ships before Vasco di Gama flourished, the fact that we are a nation which represents a fourth of the human race, a nation that claims a history extant for over 4000 years, which has witnessed the rise to glory and the decay of Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece and Rome —all these things show it to be untrue that the Chinese are an inferior race. China alone has survived her contemporaries. Since the accession of Emperor Yao in Ping Yang, about 4250 years, memorable for their unbroken chain of history, have imperceptibly rolled by, making our people the greatest nation on the face of the globe.