He came after me with a butchers' knife.

I love a phrase of Dizzy's in one of his later letters to Lady Bradford, whom he reproaches for her addiction to what we now call week-end visits to country houses: “the monotony of organized platitude.”

The division of hsien cities, as opposed to sheng or fu cities, into two administrative units was unique to Kiangsu. One example is Wu-chiang hsien city....An exceptional example of flourishing nonadministrative cities was the above-mentioned Wu-chiang hsien on the Grand Canal south of Soochow near the Chekiang border. After the settlements in Chen-tze hsien were split off from this hsien during the Yung-cheng reign, Wu-chiang was left with four chen, five shih (interchangeable with chi meaning market) and 175 villages for a population of 247,000....Also southeast in Wu-chiang hsien was Sheng-tze chen, formerly a village of 50 to 60 households in the early Ming period, which first became a shih owing to trade in silk thread and later was reputed to have increased its population a hundred times, becoming the largest chen in the hsien.

Flying ants can be swarmers.