The Atlantic Bookshelf: A Guide to Good Books

OVER a hundred years ago the Waln family of Pennsylvania, Quaker merchants, sent their clipper ships to China, there to trade with one of the oldest and wealthiest families in the Empire. Relies of that trade survive to-day: the ship schedules; the lists of goods; family heirlooms inherited by Nora Wain of the twentieth century. Descendants of the Chinese merchants, visiting Philadelphia, pressed her to visit their family homestead in Hopei Province, where she was welcomed not as a guest but as an adopted daughter. Nora Waln is a Quaker: those Friendly qualities of simplicity and gentleness were the passport admitting her to a world seldom if ever opened to a ‘barbarian.