As an illustration of the gulf which separates the moral
and intellectual conceptions of the East from those of the West, Sir Valentine Chirol, a propos of General Nogi's death, described in a letter to the Times of Monday how some fifteen years ago the Chinese Minister in London, Lo Fung-luh, when he came to die, cast off as of no worth his encyclopedic Western learning. Lo Fung-luh was dying of a painful disease when Sir Valentine Chirol last visited him, but he refused the aids of modern surgery
"He was lying on a low couch, and he pointed to a wizened little Chinaman who was crouching beside him on the ground over a smoking brazier. For about five minutes the Chinese medicine man continued to chant in a shrill nasal voice, whilst from time to time taking up a pinch of ashes from the brazier and sprinkling them over different parts of Lo Fung-luh's body with strange passes and incantations. He thereupon kow-towed throe times, and retired. 'I thought, my dear friend,' Lo Fung-Iuh then said to me, 'it might interest you to see how a Chinaman, steeped in your Western literature, saturated with your Western science and philosophy, dies—a Chinaman ! '"
