ABSTRACT
I accompanied Admiral Cooke to Nanking, then the seat of Chiang Kai-shek’s government. The plane took us across the river and loess country which, so I read, has sustained the world’s oldest continuous civilization. From an altitude of about 6,000 feet it looked, but for the wide, diked channels of the great rivers, featureless and monotonous. Although settlements varied in size, they were indistinguishable from one another by any architectural variety which could be noted from afar. I do not know what might have been the Chinese equivalent of the European domes, town halls, palaces, and castles. If such ostentatious landmarks from the hand of man ever existed, they must have been destroyed by natural or man-made disasters or by the wear of negligence and time.
