Excerpt from The Fall of the Nan Soung, Vol. 1 of 3: A Tale of the Mogul Conquest of China The literature of all European nations is rich in works upon the Chinese empire, but they are either too bulky for the general reader's time, or too difficult to be obtained, even by most of those who have the leisure to peruse them; and though some works of travellers exist, of less dimensions, and more easy of access, yet the information of most such is necessarily meagre, on account of their size, and they frequently betray the prejudice and ill-feeling naturally excited in men who enter a country where they are regarded and treated more as spies and prisoners than visitors or guests. I have sought to supply this deficiency, and to produce a work that might be read alike by the common novel reader and the student. The former, however, I fear, will complain that my work is tedious the latter, I hope, will be more considerate, as he will find in the following pages information collected from a variety of sources, at the expense of considerable time and labour, which I have weaved into a tale of fiction, the principal characters of which are historical. Though the period I have selected for my story that of the conquest of the Chinese empire by the Moguls in the latter half of the thirteenth century - may appear as too remote to permit of the manners of a people of the present day being illustrated in the persons of their sires so many generations back, yet the reader must recollect that the customs and ideas of the celestial empire exist, at present, the same as in the remotest antiquity, and that the Chinese consider any variation from the habits of their ancestors as being a most dread impiety. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.