"THE East never sleeps, never rests. Its maze of confusion and mystery flows onward endlessly."
With these words Frank Owen, in Singapore Nights, hits off the appeal of the Orient. It will be the purpose of Oriental Stories to present in fiction the glamor and mystery of the East. There seems a genuine need for such a magazine, to fill a want that has long been felt. The Orient makes a romantic appeal to the imagination that no other part of the world can equal. The inscrutable mystery of Tibet, the veiled allure of Oriental harems, the charge of fierce Arab tribesmen, the singing of almond-eyed maidens under a Japanese moon, the whirling of dervishes, the barbaric splendor of mediæval sultans, the ageless life of Egypt—from all these the story-writers weave charms to shut out the humdrum world of everyday life, and transport the reader into a fairyland of the imagination, but a fairyland drat exists in its full reality in Asia.
Oriental Stories will publish not only tales of Asia and Asia Minor, but will include also fascinating tales of the East Indies, of Egypt, and of the littoral of North and East Africa, which is Oriental in language and character though not in geography. We shall present for your delectation not only vivid tales of romance, intrigue and red war in present-day Asia, but will offer you also vivid historical tales—of Genghis Khan the Red Scourge, of Tamerlane the Magnificent, of Saladin the Intrepid, of the wars between the Cross and the Crescent, of the spread of the Mogul conquerors into India, of the British conquest, of the awakening of China and Japan, and of Russian intrigue to set Islam against the British Empire. Samarcand, Singapore, Delhi, Bagdad, Damascus, Cairo, Herat and its Hundred Gardens, Ispahan, and a host of other cities whose very names weave a spell, will be the locales for these stories; Karakorum the desert capital of Genghis Khan; Xanadu the wonder-city of Kubla Khan; the Vale of Cashmere, long famed in song; Angkor, the fabled city in the forests of Cambodia; the Taj Mahal, tomb of Shah Jehan's favorite wife—where except in the Orient can such marvelous settings be found for fascinating stories?
We have been fortunate in obtaining a number of original poems by the contemporary Chinese poet, Hung Long Tom. These are not translations from the Chinese, but are written in English. However, as the style is entirely different from that of English poetry, a word or two about them might not be out of place. "Chinese poetry," writes Hung Long Tom, "is different from the poetry of other countries in so far as it attempts to be a picture rather than a poem. In China at times tiny bits of verse are written on squares of silk and hung on the walls. They are known as written pictures." So that
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