PREFACE
The following account of life in Burma has been written to make the country and its people better known in America. At this time, when the United States has come into possession of large and important tropical lands, there is much quickening of interest in all such countries. Burma is much like the Philippine Islands in climate, and there is great racial similarity between the Burmese race and the Tagals.
But I have written chiefly to record the experiences and observations of a missionary in a great and important mission-field, which is not so well known in the home land as it deserves to be. My purpose has been to make the condition of missionary life, and much of other life, real to the reader, who has had no experience in a tropical country. It is hoped that this presentation of facts will add to missionary knowledge, and secure a better acquaintance with the races of Asia and the forces of civilization that are making for the uplift of Asiatic peoples.
In writing of mission work in Burma, I have given special prominence to that under the control of the Methodist Episcopal Church. There has been no printed account of this mission for the twenty-two years of its history, and it seems well to give some permanent form to the record of that which has been undertaken by our little band of missionaries in that field.
In writing of races, social life, and government, I have, of course, written of that which is seen through a missionary’s eyes. It so happens that I have had a great deal to do with people of various nationalities, in relations not directly of a missionary character. This has given me many opportunities to observe as a man, regardless of my calling. In all respects I have tried to be fair and accurate. I have always cherished a fellow-feeling with men whose labors brought them to Asia, and my sympathies have been with all such in honorable callings. It has been my purpose to reflect the conditions of life with which they are surrounded. There has been much excluded that I would gladly have recorded, if the limit of this book had allowed the additional facts. Some incompleteness of statement has been unavoidable, as I could not verify the details at the time and place of writing. Ten years is a short time to study great questions in the East, and to form conclusions on the greatest of them; but I trust that enough of well-digested facts has been told in this book to give the student of missions and mission lands an inside view of the questions discussed. For such defects as are due to the limitations of the author’s ability to gather or to present facts in a satisfactory manner, I must trust to the generous sentiments of the reader.
Julius Smith.