Note 20 — Chapter III · HISTORY AND LEGEND

A writer in the Historians' History of the World, published by The Times (see vol. xxiv. p. 683), says of the Chinese, that "up to the advent of Europeans in the sixteenth century A.D. their records are untrustworthy." This is an erroneous and most extraordinary statement. The Chinese possessed valuable and, on the whole, reliable records centuries before a single one of the modern States of Europe had begun even to furnish material for history, far less produce trustworthy historical records of its own.