The village seemed a death-trap.

Glancing comprehensively at one another as I entered the higher end of the town, a party of reveling tea-drinkers hastily pulled some cash from their satchels to settle accounts, and made a general rush into the street, where they awaited noisily the approach of a strangely wondrous and imposing spectacle, one that had not been seen in those parts for many days. The tramper, tired as he could be, at length approached, but the crowd had increased so enormously that the road was completely blocked. Tradesmen with their portable workshops, pedlars with their cumbersome gear and pack-horses could not pass, but had to wait for their turn; there were not even any tortuous by-streets in this place whereby they might reach their destination. Children lost themselves in the crush, and went about crying for their mothers. A party of travelers, newly arrived from the south by caravan route, got wedged with their worn-out horses and mules in the thick of the mob, and could not move an inch. As far as the eye could reach the blue-clad throng heaved restlessly to and fro under the blaze of the brilliant sun which harassed everyone in the valley, and, moving slowly and majestically in the midst of them all, came the foreigner. As they caught sight of me, my sandalled feet, and the retinue following on wearily in the wake, the populace set up an ecstatic yell of ferocious applause and turned their faces towards the inn, in the doorway of which one of my soldier-men was holding forth on points of more or less delicacy respecting my good or bad nature and my British connection. At that moment, the huge human mass began to move in one predetermined direction, and then a couple of mandarins in their chairs joined the swarming rabble. I had to sit down on the step for five minutes whilst my boy, with commendable energy, cleared these two mandarins, who had come from Chen-tu and were on their way to the capital, out of the best room, because his master wanted it.

As he finished speaking, there came a loud crashing noise and a shout—my pony had landed out just once again, and banged in one side of a chair belonging to these traveling officials. They met me with noisy and derisive greetings, which were returned with a straight and penetrating look.

No less than fifty degrees was the thermometrical difference in Ta-shui-tsing and Kiang-ti. Here it was stifling. Cattle stood in stagnant water, ducks were envied, my room with the sun on it became intolerable, and I sought refuge by the river; my butter was too liquid to spread; coolies were tired as they rested outside the tea-houses, having not a cash to spend; my pony stood wincing, giving sharp shivers to his skin, and moving his tail to clear off the flies and his hind legs to clear off men. As for myself, I could have done with an iced soda or a claret cup.

Very early in the morning, despite malaria shivers, I made my way over the beautiful suspension bridge which here graces the Niu Lan,[X] a tributary of the Yangtze, up to the high hills beyond.

This bridge at Kiang-ti is one hundred and fifty feet by twelve, protected at one end by a couple of monkeys carved in stone, whilst the opposite end is guarded by what are supposed to be, I believe, a couple of lions—and not a bad representation of them either, seeing that the workmen had no original near at hand to go by.

From here the ascent over a second range of mountains is made by tortuous paths that wind along the sides of the hills high above the stream below, and at other times along the river-bed. The river is followed in a steep ascent, a sort of climbing terrace, from which the water leaps in delightful cascades and waterfalls. A four-hour climb brings one, after terrific labor, to the mouth of the picturesque pass of Ya-ko-t'ang at 7,500 feet. In the quiet of the mountains I took my midday meal; there was about the place an awe-inspiring stillness. It was grand but lonely, weird rather than peaceful, so that one was glad to descend again suddenly to the river, tracing it through long stretches of plain and barren valley, after which narrow paths lead up again to the small village of Yi-che-shin, considerably below Ya-ko-t'ang. It is the sudden descents and ascents which astonish one in traveling in this region, and whether climbing or dropping, one always reaches a plain or upland which would delude one into believing that he is almost at sea-level, were it not for the towering mountains that all around keep one hemmed in in a silent stillness, and the rarefied air. Yi-che-shin, for instance, standing at this altitude of considerably over 6,000 feet, is in the center of a tableland, on which are numerous villages, around which the fragrance of the broad bean in flower and the splendid fertility now and again met with makes it extremely pleasant to walk—it is almost a series of English cottage gardens. Here the weather was like July in England—or what one likes to imagine July should be in England—dumb, dreaming, hot, lazy, luxurious weather, in which one should do as he pleases, and be pleased with what he does. As I toiled along, my useless limb causing me each day more trouble, I felt I should like to lie down on the grass, with stones 'twixt head and shoulders for my pillow, and repose, as Nature was reposing, in sovereign strength. But I was getting weaker! I saw, as I passed, gardens of purple and gold and white splendor; the sky was at its bluest, the clouds were full, snowy, mountainous.

Then on again to varying scenes.

Inns were not frequent, and were poor and wretched. The country was all red sandstone, and devoid of all timber, till, descending into a lovely valley, the path crossed an obstructing ridge, and then led out into a beautiful park all green and sweet. The country was full of color. It put a good taste in one's mouth, it impressed one as a heaven-sent means of keeping one cheerful in sad dilemma. The gardens, the fields, the skies, the mountains, the sunset, the light itself—all were full of color, and earth and heaven seemed of one opinion in the harmony of the reds, the purples, the drabs, the blacks, the browns, the bright blues, and the yellows. Birds were as tame as they were in the Great Beginning; they came under the table as I ate, and picked up the crumbs without fear. Peasant people sat under great cedars, planted to give shade to the travelers, and bade one feel at home in his lonely pilgrimage. Then one felt a peculiar feeling—this feeling will arise in any traveler—when, surmounting some hill range in the desert road, one descries, lying far below, embosomed in its natural bulwarks, the fair village, the resting-place, the little dwelling-place of men, where one is to sleep. But when towards nightfall, as the good red sun went down, I was led, weary and done-up, into one of the worst inns it had been my misfortune to encounter, a thousand other thoughts and feelings united in common anathema to the unenterprising community.

Tea was bad, rice we could not get, and all night long the detestable smells from the wood fires choked our throats and blinded our eyes; glad, therefore, was I, despite the heavy rain, to take a hurried and early departure the next morning, descending a thousand feet to a river, rising quite as suddenly to a height of 8,500 feet.

Now the road went over a mountain broad and flat, where traveling in the sun was extremely pleasant—or, rather, would have been had I been fit. Pack-horses, laden clumsily with their heavy loads of Puerh tea, Manchester goods, oil and native exports from Yuen-nan province, passed us on the mountain-side, and sometimes numbers of these willing but ill-treated animals were seen grazing in the hollows, by the wayside, their backs in almost every instance cruelly lacerated by the continuous rubbing of the wooden frames on which their loads were strapped. For cruelty to animals China stands an easy first; love of animals does not enter into their sympathies at all. I found this not to be the case among the Miao and the I-pien, however; and the tribes across the Yangtze below Chao-t'ong, locally called the Pa-pu, are, as a matter of fact, fond of horses, and some of them capable horsemen.

The journey across these mountains has no perils. One may step aside a few feet with no fear of falling a few thousand, a danger so common in most of the country from Sui-fu downwards. The scenery is magnificent—range after range of mountains in whatever direction you look, nothing but mountains of varying altitudes. And the patches of wooded slopes, alternating with the red earth and more fertile green plots through which streams flow, with rolling waterfalls, picturesque nooks and winding pathways, make pictures to which only the gifted artist's brush could do justice. Often, gazing over the sunlit landscape, in this land "South of the Clouds," one is held spellbound by the intense beauty of this little-known province, and one wonders what all this grand scenery, untouched and unmarred by the hand of man, would become were it in the center of a continent covered by the ubiquitous globe-trotter.

No country in the world more than West China possesses mountains of combined majesty and grace. Rocks, everywhere arranged in masses of a rude and gigantic character, have a ruggedness tempered by a singular airiness of form and softness of environment, in a climate favorable in some parts to the densest vegetation, and in others wild and barren. One is always in sight of mountains rising to fourteen thousand feet or more, and constantly scaling difficult pathways seven or eight or nine thousand feet above the sea. And in the loneliness of a country where nothing has altered very much the handiwork of God, an awe-inspiring silence pervades everything. Bold, grey cliffs shoot up here through a mass of verdure and of foliage, and there white cottages, perched in seemingly inaccessible positions, glisten in the sun on the colored mountain-sides. You saunter through stony hollows, along straight passes, traversed by torrents, overhung by high walls of rocks, now winding through broken, shaggy chasms and huge, wandering fragments, now suddenly emerging into some emerald valley, where Peace, long established, seems to repose sweetly in the bosom of Strength. Everywhere beauty alternates wonderfully with grandeur. Valleys close in abruptly, intersected by huge mountain masses, the stony water-worn ascent of which is hardly passable.

Yes, Yuen-nan is imperatively a country first of mountains, then of lakes. The scenery, embodying truly Alpine magnificence with the minute sylvan beauty of Killarney or of Devonshire, is nowhere excelled in the length and breadth of the Empire.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote U: The incredulous of my readers may question, and rightly so, "Then where did he get his saddle?" So I must explain that I met just out of Sui-fu a Danish gentleman (also a traveler) who wished to sell a pony and its trappings. As I had the arrangement with my boy that I would provide him with a conveyance, and did not like the idea of seeing him continually in a chair and his wealthy master trotting along on foot, I bought it for my boy's use. He used the saddle until we reached Chao-t'ong.]

[Footnote V: A new inn has been built since.—E.J.D.]

[Footnote W: Pronounced Djang-di. Famous throughout Western China for its terrible hill, one of the most difficult pieces of country in the whole of the west.]

[Footnote X: This river, the Niu Lan, comes from near Yang-lin, one day's march from Yuen-nan-fu. It is being followed down by two American engineers as the probable route for a new railway, which it is proposed should come out to the Yangtze some days north of Kiang-ti.]



CHAPTER XII.

Yuen-nan's chequered career. Switzerland of China. At Hong-shīh-ai. China's Golden Age in the past. The conservative instinct of the Chinese. How to quiet coolies. Roads. Dangers of ordinary travel in wet season. K'ung-shan and its mines. Tong-ch'uan-fu, an important mining centre. English and German machinery. Methods of smelting. Protestants and Romanists in Yuen-nan. Arrival at Tong-ch'uan-fu. Missionaries set author's broken arm. Trio of Europeans. Author starts for the provincial capital. Abandoning purpose of crossing China on foot. Arm in splints. Curious incident. At Lai-t'eo-po. Malaria returns. Serious illness of author. Delirium. Devotion of the missionaries. Death expected. Innkeeper's curious attitude. Recovery. After-effects of malaria. Patient stays in Tong-ch'uan-fu for several months. Then completes his walking tour.

Yuen-nan has had a checkered career ever since it became a part of the empire. In the thirteenth century Kublai Khan, the invincible warrior, annexed this Switzerland to China; and how great his exploits must have been at the time of this addition to the land of the Manchus might be gathered from the fact that all the tribes of the Siberian ice-fields, the deserts of Asia, together with the country between China and the Caspian Sea, acknowledged his potent sway—or at least so tradition says. She is sometimes right.

My journey continuing across more undulating country brought me at length to Hong-shih-ai (Red Stone Cliff), a tiny hamlet hidden away completely in a deep recess in the mountain-side, settled in a narrow gorge, the first house of which cannot be seen until within a few yards of entry. Inn accommodation, as was usual, was by no means good. It is characteristic of these small places that the greater the traffic the worse, invariably, is the accommodation offered. Travelers are continually staying here, but not one Chinese in the population is enterprising enough to open a decent inn. They have no money to start it, I suppose.

But it is true of the Chinese, to a greater degree than of any other nation, that their Golden Age is in the past. Sages of antiquity spoke with deep reverence of the more ancient ancients of the ages, and revered all that they said and did. And the rural Chinese to-day says that what did for the sages of olden times must do for him to-day. The conservative instinct leads the Chinese to attach undue importance to precedent, and therefore the people at Hong-shih-ai, knowing that the village has been in the same pitiable condition for generations, live by conservatism, and make no effort whatever to improve matters.

Fire in the inn was kindled in the hollow of the ground. There was no ventilation; the wood they burned was, as usual, green; smoke was suffocating. My men talked well on into the night, and kept me from sleeping, even if pain would have allowed me to. I spoke strongly, and they, thinking I was swearing at them, desisted for fear that I should heap upon their ancestors a few of the reviling thoughts I entertained for them.

I should like to say a word here about the roads in this province, or perhaps the absence of roads. They had been execrable, the worst I had met, aggravated by heavy rains. With all the reforms to which the province of Yuen-nan is endeavoring to direct its energies, it has not yet learned that one of the first assets of any district or country is good roads. But this is true of the whole of the Middle Kingdom. The contracted quarters in which the Chinese live compel them to do most of their work in the street, and, even in a city provided with but the narrowest passages, these slender avenues are perpetually choked by the presence of peripatetic vendors of every kind of article of common sale in China, and by itinerant craftsmen who have no other shop than the street. In the capital city of the province, even, it is a matter of some difficulty to the European to walk down the rough-paved street after a shower of rain, so slippery do the slabs of stone become; and he has to be alive always to the lumbering carts, whose wheels are more solid than circular, pulled by bullocks as in the days long before the dawn of the Christian Era. The wider the Chinese street the more abuses can it be put to, so that travel in the broad streets of the towns is quite as difficult as in the narrow alleys; and as these streets are never repaired, or very rarely, they become worse than no roads at all—that is, in dry weather.

This refers to the paved road, which, no matter what its faults, is certainly passable, and in wet weather is a boon. There is, however, another kind of road—a mud road, and with a vengeance muddy.

An ordinary mud or earth road is usually only wide enough for a couple of coolies to pass, and in this province, as it is often necessary (especially in the Yuen-nan-fu district) for one cart to pass another, the farmer, to prevent trespass on his crops, digs around them deep ditches, resembling those which are dug for the reception of gas mains. In the rainy season the fields are drained into the roads, which at times are constantly under water, and beyond Yuen-nan-fu, on my way to Tali-fu, I often found it easier and more speedy to tramp bang across a rice field, taking no notice of where the road ought to be. By the time the road has sunk a few feet below the level of the adjacent land, it is liable to be absolutely useless as a thoroughfare; it is actually a canal, but can be neither navigated nor crossed. There are some roads removed a little from the main roads which are quite dangerous, and it is not by any means an uncommon thing to hear of men with their loads being washed away by rivers where in the dry season there had been the roads.

The great lines of Chinese travel, so often impassable, might be made permanently passable if the governor of a province chose to compel the several district magistrates along the line to see that these important arteries are kept free from standing water, with ditches in good order at all seasons. But for the village roads—during my travels over which I have come across very few that could from a Western standpoint be called roads—there is absolutely no hope until such time as the Chinese village may come dimly to the apprehension that what is for the advantage of the one is for the advantage of all, and that wise expenditure is the truest economy—an idea of which it has at the present moment as little conception as of the average thought of the Englishman.

A hundred li to the east of Hong-shiih-ai, over two impassable mountain ranges, are some considerable mines, with antiquated brass and copper smelting works, and this place, K'ung-shan by name, with Tong-ch'uan-fu, forms an important center. As is well known, all copper of Yuen-nan goes to Peking as the Government monopoly, excepting the enormous amount stolen and smuggled into every town in the province.[Y]

The smelting is of the roughest, though they are at the present moment laying in English machinery, and the Chinese in charge is under the impression that he can speak English; he, however, makes a hopeless jargon of it. This mining locality is sunk in the deepest degradation. Men and women live more as wild beasts than as human beings, and should any be unfortunate enough to die, their corpses are allowed to lie in the mines. Who is there that could give his time and energy to the removal of a dead man? Tong-ch'uan-fu should become an important town if the rich mineral country of which it is the pivot were properly opened up. Several times I have visited the works in this city, which, under the charge of a small mandarin from Szech'wan, can boast only the most primitive and inadequate machinery, of German make. A huge engine was running as a kind of pump for the accumulation of air, which was passed through a long thin pipe to the three furnaces in the outer courtyard. The furnaces were mud-built, and were fed with charcoal (the most expensive fuel in the district), the maximum of pure metal being only 1,300 catties per day. The ore, which has been roughly smelted once, is brought from K'ung-shan, is finely smelted here, then conveyed most of the way to Peking by pack-mule, the expense in thus handling, from the time it leaves the mine to its destination at Peking, being several times its market value. Nothing but copper is sought from the ore, and a good deal of the gold and silver known to be contained is lost.

I passed an old French priest as I was going to Tong-ch'uan-fu the next day. He was very pleased to see me, and at a small place we had a few minutes' chat whilst we sipped our tea. In Yuen-nan, I found that the Protestants and the Romanists, although seeing very little of each other, went their own way, maintaining an attitude of more or less friendly indifference one towards the other.

The last day's march to Tong-ch'uan-fu is perhaps the most interesting of this stage of my journey. Climbing over boulders and stony steps, I reached an altitude of 8,500 feet, whence thirty li of pleasant going awaited us all the way to Lang-wang-miao (Temple of the Dragon King). Here I sat down and strained my eyes to catch the glimpse of the compact little walled city, where I hoped my broken arm would be set by the European missionaries. The traveler invariably hastens his pace here, expecting to run down the hill and across the plain in a very short space; but as the time passed, and I slowly wended my way along the difficult paths through the rice fields, I began to realize that I had been duped, and that it was farther than it seemed. Two blushing damsels, maids goodly to look upon, gave me the sweetest of smiles as I strode across the bodies of some fat pigs which roamed at large in the outskirts of the city, the only remembrance I have to mar the cleanliness of the place.

At Tong-ch'uan-fu the Rev. A. Evans and his extremely hospitable wife set my arm and did everything they could—as much as a brother and sister could have done—to help me, and to make my short stay with them a most happy remembrance. It was, however, destined that I should be their guest for many months, as shall hereinafter be explained.

* * * * *

A trio of Europeans might have been seen on the morning of Monday, May 10, 1909, leaving Tong-ch'uan-fu on the road to Yuen-nan-fu, whither the author was bound. Mr. and Mrs. Evans, who, as chance would have it, were going to Ch'u-tsing-fu, were to accompany me for two days before turning off in a southerly direction when leaving the prefecture.

It was a fine spring morning, balmy and bonny. It was decided that I should ride a pony, and this I did, abandoning my purpose of crossing China on foot with some regret. I was not yet fit, had my broken arm in splints, but rejoiced that at Yuen-nan-fu I should be able to consult a European medical man. Comparatively an unproductive task—and perhaps a false and impossible one—would it be for me to detail the happenings of the few days next ensuing. I should be able not to look at things themselves, but merely at the shadow of things—and it would serve no profitable end.

Suffice it to say that two days out, about midday, a special messenger from the capital stopped Mr. Evans and handed him a letter. It was to tell him that his going to Ch'u-tsing-fu would be of no use, as the gentleman he was on his way to meet would not arrive, owing to altered plans. After consulting his wife, he hesitated whether they should go back to Tong-ch'uan-fu, or come on to the capital with me. The latter course was decided upon, as I was so far from well—I learned this some time afterwards. And now the story need not be lengthened.

At Lai-t'eo-po (see first section of the second book of this volume), malaria came back, and an abnormal temperature made me delirious. The following day I could not move, and it was not until I had been there six days that I was again able to be moved. During this time, Mr. and Mrs. Evans nursed me day and night, relieving each other for rest, in a terrible Chinese inn—not a single moment did they leave me. The third day they feared I was dying, and a message to that effect was sent to the capital, informing the consul. Meanwhile malaria played fast and loose, and promised a pitiable early dissolution. My kind, devoted friends were fearful lest the innkeeper would have turned me out into the roadway to die—the foreigner's spirit would haunt the place for ever and a day were I allowed to die inside.

But I recovered.

It was a graver, older, less exuberant walker across China that presently arose from his flea-ridden bed of sickness, and began to make a languid personal introspection. I had developed a new sensitiveness, the sensitiveness of an alien in an alien land, in the hands of new-made, faithful friends. Without them I should have been a waif of all the world, helpless in the midst of unconquerable surroundings, leading to an inevitable destiny of death. I seemed declimatized, denationalized, a luckless victim of fate and morbid fancy.

It was malaria and her workings, from which there was no escape.

Malaria is supposed by the natives of the tropic belt to be sent to Europeans by Providence as a chastening for the otherwise insupportable energy of the white man. Malignant malaria is one of Nature's watch-dogs, set to guard her shrine of peace and ease and to punish woeful intruders. And she had brought me to China to punish me. As is her wont, Nature milked the manhood out of me, racked me with aches and pains, shattered me with chills, scorched me with fever fires, pursued me with despairing visions, and hag-rode me without mercy. Accursed newspapers, with their accursed routine, came back to me; all the stories and legends that I had ever heard, all the facts that I had ever learnt, came to me in a fashion wonderfully contorted and distorted; sensations welded together in ghastly, brain-stretching conglomerates, instinct with individuality and personality, human but torturingly inhuman, crowded in upon me. The barriers dividing the world of ideas, sensations, and realities seemed to have been thrown down, and all rushed into my brain like a set of hungry foxhounds. The horror of effort and the futility of endeavor permeated my very soul. My weary, helpless brain was filled with hordes of unruly imaginings; I was masterless, panic-driven, maddened, and had to abide for weeks—yea, months—with a fever-haunted soul occupying a fever-rent and weakened body.

At Yuen-nan-fu, whither I arrived in due course after considerable struggling, dysentery laid me up again, and threatened to pull me nearer to the last great brink. For weeks, as the guest of my friend, Mr. C.A. Fleischmann, I stayed here recuperating, and subsequently, on the advice of my medical attendant, Dr. A. Feray, I went back to Tong-ch'uan-fu, among the mountains, and spent several happy months with Mr. and Mrs. Evans.

Had it not been for their brotherly and sisterly zeal in nursing me, which never flagged throughout my illness, future travelers might have been able to point to a little grave-mound on the hill-tops, and have given a chance thought to an adventurer whom the fates had handled roughly. But there was more in this than I could see; my destiny was then slowly shaping.

Throughout the rains, and well on into the winter, I stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Evans, and then continued my walking tour, as is hereafter recorded.

During this period of convalescence I studied the Chinese language and traveled considerably in the surrounding country. Tong-ch'uan-fu is a city of many scholars, and it was not at all difficult for me to find a satisfactory teacher. He was an old man, with a straggly beard, about 70 years of age, and from him I learned much about life in general, in addition to his tutoring in Chinese. I had the advantage also of close contact with the missionaries with whom I was living, and on many occasions was traveling companion of Samuel Pollard, one of the finest Chinese linguists in China at that time. So that with a greatly increased knowledge of Chinese, I was henceforth able to hold my own anywhere. During this period, too, many days were profitably passed at the Confucian Temple, a picture of which is given in this volume.

END OF BOOK I.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote Y: In the capital there is a street called "Copper Kettle Lane," where one is able to buy almost anything one wants in copper and brass. Hundreds of men are engaged in the trade, and yet it is "prohibited." These "Copper Kettle Lanes" are found in many large cities.—E.J.D.]



BOOK II.

The second part of my trip was from almost the extreme east to the extreme west of Yuen-nan—from Tong-ch'uan-fu to Bhamo, in British Burma. The following was the route chosen, over the main road in some instances, and over untrodden roads in others, just as circumstances happened:

Tong-ch'uan-fu to Yuen-nan-fu (the capital city) 520 li. Yuen-nan-fu to Tali-fu 905 li. Tali-fu to Tengyueh (Momien) 855 li. Tengyueh to Bhamo (Singai) 280 English miles approx.

I also made a rather extended tour among the Miao tribes, in country untrodden by Europeans, except by missionaries working among the people.



FIRST JOURNEY

TONG-CH'UAN-FU TO THE CAPITAL



CHAPTER XIII.

Stages to the capital. Universality of reform in China. Political, moral, social and spiritual contrast of Yuen-nan with other parts of the Empire. Inconsistencies of celestial life. Author's start for Burma. The caravan. To Che-chi. Dogs fighting over human bones. Lai-t'eo-p'o: highest point traversed on overland journey. Snow and hail storms at ten thousand feet. Desolation and poverty. Brutal husband. Horse saves author from destruction. The one hundred li to Kongshan. Wild, rugged moorland and mournful mountains. Wretchedness of the people. Night travel in Western China. Author knocks a man down. Late arrival and its vexations. Horrible inn accommodation. End of the Yuen-nan Plateau. Appreciable rise in temperature. Entertaining a band of inelegant infidels. European contention for superiority, and the Chinese point of view. Insoluble conundrums of "John's" national character. The Yuen-nan railway. Current ideas in Yuen-nan regarding foreigners. Discourteous fu-song and his escapades. Fright of ill-clad urchin. Scene at Yang-lin. Arrival at the capital.

No exaggeration is it to say that the eyes of the world are upon China. It is equally safe to say that, whilst all is open and may be seen, but little is understood.

In the Far Eastern and European press so much is heard of the awakening of China that one is apt really to believe that the whole Empire, from its Dan to Beersheba, is boiling for reform. But it may be that the husk is taken from the kernel. The husk comprises the treaty ports and some of the capital cities of the provinces; the kernel is that vast sleepy interior of China. Few people, even in Shanghai, know what it means; so that to the stay-at-home European pardon for ignorance of existing conditions so much out of his focus should readily be granted.

From Shanghai, up past Hankow, on to Ichang, through the Gorges to Chung-king, is a trip likely to strike optimism in the breast of the most skeptical foreigner. But after he has lived for a couple of years in an interior city as I have done, with its antiquated legislation, its superstition and idolatry, its infanticide, its girl suicides, its public corruption and moral degradation, rubbing shoulders continually at close quarters with the inhabitants, and himself living in the main a Chinese life, our optimist may alter his opinions, and stand in wonder at the extraordinary differences in the most ordinary details of life at the ports on the China coast and the Interior, and of the gross inconsistencies in the Chinese mind and character. If in addition he has stayed a few days away from a city in which the foreigners were shut up inside the city walls because the roaring mob of rebels outside were asking for their heads, and he has had to abandon part of his overland trip because of the fear that his own head might have been chopped off en route, he may increase his wonder to doubt. The aspect here in Yuen-nan—politically, morally, socially, spiritually—is that of another kingdom, another world. Conditions seem, for the most part, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. And in his new environment, which may be a replica of twenty centuries ago, the dream he dreamed is now dispelled. "China," he says, "is not awaking; she barely moves, she is still under the torpor of the ages." And yet again, in the capital and a few of the larger cities, under your very eyes there goes on a reform which seems to be the most sweeping reform Asia has yet known.

Such are the inconsistencies, seemingly unchangeable, irreconcilable in conception or in fact; a truthful portrayal of them tends to render the writer a most inconsistent being in the eyes of his reader.

* * * * *

No one was ever sped on his way through China with more goodwill than was the writer when he left Tong-ch'uan-fu; but the above thoughts were then in his mind.

Long before January 3rd, 1910, the whole town knew that I was going to Mien Dien (Burma). Confessedly with a sad heart—for I carried with me memories of kindnesses such as I had never known before—I led my nervous pony, Rusty, out through the Dung Men (the East Gate), with twenty enthusiastic scholars and a few grown-ups forming a turbulent rear. As I strode onwards the little group of excited younkers watched me disappear out of sight on my way to the capital by the following route—the second time of trying:—

Length of Height stage above sea 1st day—Che-chi 90 li. 7,800 ft. 2nd day—Lai-t'eo-p'o 90 li. 8,500 ft. 3rd day—Kongshan 100 li. 6,700 ft. 4th day—Yang-kai 85 li. 7,200 ft. 5th day—Ch'anff-o'o 95 li 6,000 ft. 6th day—The Capital 70 li 6,400 ft.

My caravan consisted of two coolies: one carried my bedding and a small basket of luxuries in case of emergency, the other a couple of boxes with absolute necessities (including the journal of the trip). In addition, there accompanied me a man who carried my camera, and whose primary business it was to guard my interests and my money—my general factotum and confidential agent—and by an inverse operation enrich himself as he could, and thereby maintain relations of warm mutual esteem. They received thirty-two tael cents per man per diem, and for the stopping days on the road one hundred cash. None of them, of course, could speak a word of English.

The ninety li to Che-chi was mostly along narrow paths by the sides of river-beds, the intermediate plains having upturned acres waiting for the spring. At Ta-chiao (7,500 feet), where I stayed for my first alfresco meal at midday, the man—a tall, gaunt, ugly fellow, pockmarked and vile of face—told us he was a traveler, and that he had been to Shanghai. This I knew to be a barefaced lie. He voluntarily explained to the visitors, gathered to see the barbarian feed, what condensed milk was for, but he went wide of the mark when he announced that my pony,[Z] hog-maned and dock-tailed (but Chinese still), was an American, as he said I was. A young mother near by, suffering from acute eye inflammation, was lying in a smellful gutter on a felt mat, two pigs on one side and a naked boy of eight or so on the other, whilst she heaped upon the head of the innocent babe she was suckling curses most horribly blood-curdling. Dogs—the universal scavengers of the awakening interior, to which merest allusion is barred by one's Western sense of decency—just outside Che-chi, where I stayed the night, had recently devoured the corpse of a little child. Its clothing was strewn in my path, together with the piece of fibre matting in which it had been wrapped, and the dogs were then fighting over the bones.

To Lai-t'eo-p'o was a day that men might call a "killer."

It is a dirty little place with a dirty little street, lying at the foot of a mountain known throughout Western China as one of the wildest of Nature's corners, nearly ten thousand feet high, a terrific climb under best conditions. A clear half-moon, and stars of a silvery twinkle, looked pityingly upon me as I started at 3 a.m., ignorant of the dangerously narrow defile leading along cliffs high up from the Yili Ho. In the dark, cautiously I groped along. Not without a painful emotion of impending danger, as I watched the stellular reflections dancing in the rushing river, did I wander on in the wake of a group of pack-ponies, and took my turn in being assisted over the broken chasms by the muleteers. Two fellows got down below and practically lifted the tiny animals over the passes where they could not keep their footing. Gradually I saw the nightlike shadows flee away, and with the dawn came signs of heavy weather.

Snow came cold and sudden. As we slowly and toilsomely ascended, the velocity of the wind fiercely increased; down the mountain-side, at a hundred miles an hour, came clouds of blinding, flinty dust, making the blood run from one's lips and cheeks as he plodded on against great odds. With the biting wind, howling and hissing in the winding ravines and snow-swept hollows, headway was difficult. Often was I raised from my feet: helplessly I clung to the earth for safety, and pulled at withered grass to keep my footing. The ponies, patient little brutes, with one hundred and fifty pounds strapped to their backs, came near to giving up the ghost, being swayed hopelessly to and fro in the fury. For hours we thus toiled up pathways seemingly fitter for goats than men, where leafless trees were bending destitute of life and helpless towards the valley, as the keen wind went sighing, moaning, wailing through their bare boughs and budless twigs.

Such a gale, wilder than the devil's passion, I have not known even on the North Atlantic in February.

At times during the day progression in the deepening snow seemed quite impossible, and my two men, worn and weary, bearing the burden of an excessively fatiguing day, well-nigh threw up the sponge, vowing that they wished they had not taken on the job.

But the scenery later in the day, though monotonously so, was grand. The earth was literally the color of deep-red blood, the crimson paths intertwining the darker landscape bore to one's imagination a vision of some bloody battle—veritable rivers of human blood. To cheer the traveler in his desolation, the sun struggled vainly to pierce with its genial rays through the heavy, angry clouds rolling lazily upwards from the black valleys, and enveloping the earth in a deep infinity of severest gloom. The cold was damp. In the small hemmed-in hollows, whereto our pathway led, the icy dew clung to one's hair and beard. From little brown cottages, with poor thatched roofs letting in the light, and with walls and woodwork long since uniformly rotten, men and women emerged, rubbing their eyes and buttoning up their garments, looking wistfully for the hidden sun.

At Shao-p'ai (8,100 feet) a brute of a fellow was administering cruellest chastisement to his disobedient yoke-fellow, who took her scourging in good part. I passed along as fast as I could to the ascent over which a road led in and around the mountain with alarming steepness, a road which at home would never be negotiated on foot or on horseback, but which here forms part of the main trade route. From the extreme summit one dropped abruptly into a protecting gorge, where falling cascades, sparkling like crystal showers in the feeble sunlight occasionally breaking through, danced playfully over the smooth-worn, slippery rocks; a stream foamed noisily over the loose stones, and leapt in rushing rapids where the earth had given way; there was no grass, no scenery, no life, and in the sudden turnings the hurricane roared with heavenly anger through the long deep chasms, over the twelve-inch river-beds at the foot.

At Lai-t'eo-p'o accommodation at night was fairly good. Men laughed hilariously at me when I raved at some carpenters to desist their clumsy hammering three feet above my head. Hundreds of dogs yelped unceasingly at the moon, and with the usual rows of the men in mutual invitation to "Come and wash your feet," or "Ching fan, ching fan," the draughts, the creaks and cracks, the unintermitting din, and so much else, one was not sorry to rise again with the lark and push onwards in the cold.

Down below this horrid town there is a plain; in this plain there is a hole fifty feet deep, and had my pony, which I was leading, not pulled me away from falling thereinto, my story would not now be telling.

To Kongshan (6,700 feet), past Yei-chu-t'ang (8,100 feet) and Hsiao-lang-t'ang (7,275 feet), one hundred li away, was a journey through country considerably more interesting, especially towards the end of the day, a peculiar combination of wooded slope and rough, rock-worn pathways.

Hsiao-lang-t'ang, twenty-five li from the end of the stage, overlooks a wide expanse of barren, uninviting moorland. Deep, jagged gullies break the uneven rolling of the mountains; dark, weird caverns of terrible immensity yawn hungrily from the surface of weariest desolation, ever widening with each turn. Mist hid the ugliest spots high up among the peaks, whose white summits, peeping sullenly from out this blue sea of damp haze, told a wondrous story of winter's withering all life to death, a spot than which in summer few places on earth would be more entrancing. But these mountains are breathing out a solitude which is eternal. Man here has never been. Far away beyond lies the country of the aborigines; but even the Lolo, wild and rugged as the country, fearless of man and beast, have never dared to ascend these heights. They are mournful, cheerless, devoid of a single smile from the common mother of us all, lacking every feature by which the earth draws man into a spirit of unity with his God. Horrid, frowning waste and aimless discontinuity of land, harbinger of loneliness and of evil! People, poor struggling beings of our kind, here seemed mocked of destiny, and a hot raging of misery waged within them, for all that the heart might desire and wish for had to them been denied. If, indeed, the earth be the home of hope, and man's greatest possession be hope, then would it seem that these poor creatures were entirely cut off, shut out from life, wandering wearisomely through the world in one long battle with Nature whereby to gain the wherewithal to live in that grim desert. There were no exceptions, it was the common lot. Each day and every day did these men and women, with a stolidity of long-continued destitution, and temporal and spiritual tribulation, gaze upon that bare, unyielding country, pregnant only with aggravation to their own dire wretchedness.

In such spots, unhappily in Yuen-nan not few, does the mystery of life grow ever more mysterious to one whom distress has never harassed. A great pity seized my heart, but these poor people would probably have laughed had they known my thoughts.

As I passed they came uninterestedly to look upon me. They watched in expressive silence; they were silent because of poverty. And I, too, kept a seal upon my lips as I ate the good things here provided under the eyes of those to whom hunger had given none but a jealous outlook. Pitiful enough were it, thought I, merely to watch without allowing speech to escape further to taunt them. So I ate, and they looked at me. I came and went, but never a word was uttered by these men and women, or even by the children, whose most painful feeling seemed that of their own feebleness. They were indeed feeble units standing in a threatening infinitude of life, and their thoughts probably dwelt upon my luxury and wealth as mine could not help dwelling upon their hungry town of hungry men and famished children. Words cannot paint their poverty—men void of hope, of life, of purpose, of idea. Happy for them that they had known no other.

We ascended over a road of unspeakable torture to one's feet. Gazing down, far away into a seemingly bottomless abyss, we could faintly hear in the lulling of the wind the rush of a torrent, fed by a hundred mountain streams, which washed our path and in horrible disfigurement tore open the surface of the hill-sides.

The long day was drawing wearily to a close. As the sun was sinking beyond the uneven hills over which I was to climb before the descent to the town begins, the effect of the green and gold and red and brown produced a striking picture of sweet poetic beauty. I stood in contemplative admiration meditating, as I waited for my coolies, who sat moodily under a dilapidated roadside awning, nonchalantly picking out mouldy monkey-nuts from some coarse sweetmeat sold by a frowsy female. Then upwards we toiled in the dark, the weird groans of my exhausted men and the falling of the gravel beneath their sandalled feet alone breaking the hollow's gloom. Uncanny is night travel in China.

"Who knows but that ghosts, those fierce-faced denizens of the hills, may run against thee and bewitch thee," murmured one man to the others. They stopped, and I stopped with them. And in the darkness, pegging on alone at the mercy of these coolies, my own thoughts were not unsynchronistic.

At last, with no slight misgiving, we came down into the city's smoke. Dogs barked at me, and ran away like the curs they are. Midway down the stone footway my yamen runner too cautiously crept up to me in the dark, muttering something, and I floored him with my fist. Afterwards I learnt that he came to relieve me of the pony I was leading.

Every room in every wretched inn was occupied; opium fumes already issued from the doorways, and it was now pitch dark, so that I could scarce see the sallow faces of the hungry, uncouth crowd, to whom with no little irritation I tried to speak as I peered carefully into the caravanserai. Evident it certainly was that the duty lying nearest to me at that particular moment, to myself and all concerned therein, was to accept what I was offered, and not wear out my temper in grumbling. My boy, Lao Chang (an I-pien), the brick, expressed to me his regrets, and something like real sympathy shone out from his eyes in the dimness.

"Puh p'a teh, puh p'a teh" ("Have no fear, have no fear"), said he; and as I stood the while piling up cruellest torture upon my uncourtly host, he made off to prepare a downstair room (to lapse into modern boarding-house phraseology).

First through an outer apartment, dark as darkest night; on past the caterwauling cook and a few disreputable culinary hangers-on; asked to look out for a pony, which I could not see, but which I was told might kick me; then onward to my boy, who stood on a stool and dropped the grease of a huge red Chinese candle among his plaited hair, as he wobbled it above his head to light the way. He gripped me tenderly, took me to his bosom as it were, gave me one push, and I was there. He tarried not. What right had he to listen to what I in secret would say of the horrid keeper and his twice horrid shakedown inn? He passed out swiftly into outer darkness, uttering a groan I rudely interpreted as, "That or nothing, that or nothing."

It was a room, that is in so far as four sides, a floor and a ceiling comprise one. Of that I had no doubt. A sort of uncomely offshoot from the main inn building, built on piles in the earth after the fashion of the seashore houses of the Malay—but much dirtier and incomparably more shaky. For many a long year, longer than mine horrid host would care to recollect, this now unoccupied space had served admirably as the common cooking-room—the ruined fireplace was still there; later, it had been the stable—the ruined horse trough was still there. At one extreme corner only could I stand upright; long sooty cobwebs graced the black wood beams overhead, hanging as thick as icicles in a mountain valley; each step I took in fear and trembling (the slightest move threatened to collapse the whole dilapidation). Four planks, four inches wide at the widest part and of varying lengths and thicknesses, placed on a pile of loose firewood at the head and foot, comprised the bedstead on which I tremulously sat down. Upon this improvised apology for a bed, under my mosquito curtains (no traveler should be without them in Western China), I washed my blistered feet on an ancient Daily Telegraph, whilst my cook saw to my evening meal. His bringing in the rice tallied with my laying the tablecloth in the same place where I had washed my feet—the one available spot.

As I ate, rats came brazenly and picked up the grains of rice I dropped in my inefficient handling of chopsticks, and in scaring off these hardened, hungry vermin I accidentally upset tea over my bed, whilst at the same moment a clod-hopping coolie came in with an elephant tread, with the result that my European reading-lamp lost its balance from the top of a tin of native sugar and started a conflagration, threatening to make short work of me and my belongings—not to mention that horrid fellow and his inn.

During the night the moments throbbed away as I lay on my flea-ridden couch—moments which seemed long as hours, and no gleaming rift broke the settled and deepening blackness of my hateful environs. Every thing and every place was full of the wearisome, depressing, beauty-blasting commonplace of Interior China. Stenches rose up on the damp, dank air, and throughout the night, through the opening of a window, I seemed to gaze out to a disconsolate eternity—gaping, empty, unsightly. Waking from my dozing at the hour when judgment sits upon the hearts of men, I sat in ponderous judgment upon all to whom the bungling of the previous day was due. There were the rats and mice, and cats and owls, and creaks and cracks—no quiet about the place from night to morning. Then came the barking of dogs, the noises of the cocks and kine, of horses and foals, of pigs and geese—the general wail of the zoological kingdom—cows bellowing, duck diplomacy, and much else. So that it were not surprising to learn that this distinguished traveler in these contemptible regions was sitting on a broken-down bridge, looking wearily on to the broken-down tower on the summit of a pretty little knoll outside Kungshan, thinking that it were well a score of such were added did their design embrace a warning to evade the place.

Having done some twenty li by moonlight, I managed with little difficulty to reach Yang-kai (6,350 feet) by 3.0 p.m. This road, which is not the main road to the capital, was purposely chosen; most travelers go through Yang-lin. The journey is comprised of pleasant ascents and descents over the latter portion of the great Yuen-nan Plateau, and a very appreciable difference in the temperature was here noticed. While the people at the north-east of the province, from which I had come, were shivering in their rags and complaining about the price of charcoal, the population here basked under Italian skies in a warm sun. From Lui-shu-ho (7,200 feet) the country was beautifully wooded with groves of firs and chestnuts.

At the inn to which I was led the phlegmatic proprietor, after wishing me peace, assumed unostentatiously the becoming attitude of a Customs official, and scrutinized with vigor the whole of my gear, from an empty Calvert's tooth-powder tin to my Kodak camera, showering particularly condescending felicitations upon my English Barnsby saddle and field-glasses thereto attached.

His excitement rose at once.

He called loudly for his confederates—a band of inelegant infidels—and bidding them stand one by one at given distances, he gaped at them through the glasses with the hilarity of a schoolboy and the stupidity of an owl. He jumped, he shouted, he waved his arms about me, and handing them back to me with both hands, shouted deafeningly in my ear that they were quite beyond his ken; and then he sucked his teeth disgustingly and spat at my feet. His associates were speechless, asses that they were, and could only stare, in horror or impudence I know not.

Meantime Lao Chang brought tea, and sallied forth immediately to fraternize among old friends. As I drank my tea, after having invited them one by one to join me, slowly and with a fitting dignity, the empty stare, destitute of sense or sincerity, of these six upstanding Chinese gentry, sucking at tobacco-pipes as long as their own overfed bodies, forced upon me a sense of my unfitness for the unknown conditions of the life of the place, a sense of loneliness and social unshelteredness in the sterile waste of their fashionable life. They spoke to me subsequently, and I bravely threw at them a Chinese phrase or two; but when the conversation got above my head, I told them, quietly but determinedly, that I could not understand, my English speech seemed vaguely to indicate a sudden collapse of the acquaintance, the opening of a gulf between us, destined to widen to the whole length and breadth of Yang-kai, swallowing up their erstwhile confidences. One of them facetiously remarked that the gentleman wished to eat his rice; and as they cleared out, falling over each other and the high step at the entrance to the room, I thought that no matter how old they are, Chinese are but little children. But had I treated them as little children I should have found that they were old men.

There was in me withal a sense of better rank in the eyes of this super-excellent few who worshipped, in "heathen" China, the Satan of Fashion. As a matter of fact, their rank had emerged from such long centuries ago that it seemed to me to be so identified with them that they were hardly capable of analysis of people such as myself. As I looked pityingly upon them and the involved simplicity of their immutable natures, I realized an unconquerable feeling of inborn rank and natural elevation in respect to nationality. This is, however, against my personal general conception of Eastern peoples, but I must admit I felt it this afternoon. And so perhaps it is with the majority of Europeans in the Far East, who, because they have no knowledge of the language or a familiarity with national customs and ideas, remain always aliens with the Easterner. They cannot sympathize with him in his joys and sorrows, his likes and dislikes, his prejudice and bias, or understand anything of his point of view. This is one of the hardest lessons for the European traveler in China who has little of the language. Because we do not understand him, we call the Chinese a heathen—it is easier.

Now, to the Chinese his country is the best in the world, his province better than any other of the eighteen, and the village in which he lives the most enviable spot in the province—the center of his universe. Speak disparagingly about that little circle, critically or sympathetically, and he is at once up against you. It may develop narrowness of mind and smallness of soul. We Westerners think we know that it does; and the fact that he allows his mental horizon to be bounded by such narrow confines appears to us to render him anything but a desirable citizen and a full-sized man. But no matter. The Chinese, on the other hand, regards as barbarians all those men who have never tasted the bliss of a true home in the Empire which is celestial—part of this feeling is patriotism and love of country, part is rank conceit. But Englishmen are saying that England is the most Christian country in the world for the very same reason!

Rationally speaking, John is the "old brother" of the world, oldest of any nation by very many centuries. In common with all other travelers and those who have lived with this man, and who have made his nature a serious study, apart from racial bias, I am perplexed with conundrums which cannot be solved. Some of the conundrums are perhaps superficial, and disappear with a deeper insight into his life; others are wrought into his being. Yet he has a fixedness of character, reaching in some directions to absolute crystallization; he possesses the virility of young manhood and many of the mutually inconsistent traits of late manhood and early youth. I wonder at his ignorance of merest rudimentary political economy—but why? This man explored centuries ago the cardinal theories of some of our present-day Western classics. However, I have to teach him the form of the earth and the natural causes of eclipses. He is frightened by ghosts, burns mock money to maintain his ancestors in the future state, worships a bit of rusty old iron as an infallible remedy for droughts; I have seen him shoot at clouds from the city walls to frighten away the rain—and I despise him for it all. As I revise this copy, a rumor is current in the town in which I am resting to the effect that foreigners are buying children and using their heads to oil the wheels of the new Yuen-nan railway, and I despise him for believing it. The Chinese will not fight, and I sneer at him; he abhors me because I do. I ridicule his manner of dress; he thinks mine grossly indecent. I consider his flat nose and the plaited hair and shaven skull as heathenish; but the Chinese, eating away with his to me ridiculous chopsticks, looks out from his quick, almond-shaped eyes and considers me still a foreign devil, although he is too cunning to tell me. His opinions of me are founded upon the narrow grounds of vanity and egotism; mine, although I do not admit it even to myself, from something very much akin thereto.[AA]

I have been looked upon in far-away outposts of the Chinese Empire where foreigners are still unknown, as an example of those human monstrosities which come from the West, a creature of a very low order of the human species, with a form and face uncouth, with language a hopeless jargon, and with manners unbearably rude and obnoxious. Not that I personally answer accurately to this description, reader, any more than you would, but because I happen to be among a people who, as far back as Chinese opinion of foreigners can be traced, have considered themselves of a morality and intellectuality superior to yours and mine.

I write the foregoing because it sums up what may be termed the current ideas regarding Europeans, ideas the reverse of complimentary, which are the more unfortunate on account of the fact that they are held by the vast majority of a people forming a quarter of the whole human race. This is true, despite all the reform.

These ideas may be, and I trust they are, erroneous, but I know that I must keep in mind the extremely important desideratum in dealing with the Chinese that they look at me—my person, my manners, my customs, my theories, my things—through Chinese eyes, and although mistaken, misled, reach their own conclusions from their own point of view. This is what they have been doing for centuries, but we know that it all now is being subjected to slow change. The original stock, however, takes on no change whatever, and several generations must pass before this transfer of mental vision can be effected, when the Chinese will view all things and all peoples in their true light.

Next morning my three men were heavy. The lean fellow—I have christened him Shanks, a long, shambling human bag of bones—moved about painfully in a listless sort of way, betokening severe rheumatics; his joints needed oil. Four or five huge basins of steaming rice and the customary amount of reboiled cabbage, however, bucked him up a bit, and holding up a crooked, bony finger, he indicated intelligently that we had one hundred li to cover. Whilst engaged in conversation thus, sounds of early morning revelry reached me from below. My boy, his accustomed serenity now quite disturbed, held threateningly above the head of the yamen runner (who had given me a profound kotow the evening previous prior to taking on his duties) a length of three-inch sugar cane; he evidently meant to flatten him out. This I learned was because this shadower of the august presence wished to take Yang-lin (about 60 li away) instead of going to Ch'ang-p'o (100 li) as I intended. I got him in, looked him as squarely in the face as it is possible when a Chinese wants to evade your scrutiny, told him I wished to go to Ch'ang-p'o, and that I hoped I should have the pleasure of his company thus far. He replied with a grinning smile, which one could easily have taken for a smiling grin—

"Oh, yes, foreign mandarin, Ch'ang-p'o—100 li—foreign mandarin, foreign mandarin."

And I thought the incident closed. Such is the appalling gullibility of the Englishman in China.

We stopped for tea at a small hamlet ten li out. The place was deserted save for a small starving boy, whose chief attention was given to laborious endeavors to make his clothing meet in certain necessary areas. He evidently had never seen a foreigner. As he directed his optics towards me he winced visibly. He walked round me several times, fell over a grimy pail of soap-suds, stopped, gazed in enraptured enchantment with parted lips and outstretched arms as if he had begun to suspect what it was before him. To the eye of the beholder, however, he gazed as yet only on vacancy, but just as I was about to attempt self-explanation he was gone, tearing away down the hill as fast as his legs could carry him, the ragged remains of his father's trousers flapping gently in the breeze. As I rose to leave crackers frightened my pony, followed, in a few moments by a howling, hooting, unreasonable rabble from a temple near by. I found it was the result of a village squabble. I could scarce keep the order of my march as I left the tea-shop, so roughly was I handled by the irritated and impatient crowd, and had much ado to refrain from responding wrathfully to the repeated jeers of impudent, half-grown beggars of both sexes who helped to swell the riotous cortege. But through it all none of the insults were meant for me, so Lao Chang told me, and they did not mean to treat me with discourtesy.

Trees hollowed out and spanned from field to field served as gutters for irrigation; shepherds clad in white felt blankets sat huddled upon the ground behind huge boulders, oblivious of time and of the boisterous wind, while their sheep and goats grubbed away on the scanty grass the moorland provided; high up we saw forest fires, making the earth black and desolate; ruins almost everywhere recalled to one's mind the image of a past prosperity, which now were replaced by traces of misery, exterior influences which seemed to breed upon the traveler a deep discouragement. I came across some women mock-weeping for the dead: at their elbow two girls were washing clothes, and when little children, catching sight of me, ran to their mothers, the women stopped their hulla-baloo, had a good stare at me, exchanged a few words of mutual inquiry, and then resumed their bellowing.

Soon it became quite warm, and walking was pleasant. I was startled by the fu-song,[AB] who invited me to go to a neighboring town for tea. My men were far behind. I was at his mercy, so I went. Soon I found myself passing through the city gates of Yang-lin, the very town I was trying to keep away from. The yamen fellow turned back at me and chuckled rudely to himself. I insisted that I did not wish to take tea; he insisted that I should—I must. He led me to an inn in the main street, arrangements were made to house me, old men and young lads gathered to welcome me as a lost brother, and the fu-song told me graciously that he was going to the magistrate. In cruel English, with many wildly threatening gestures, did I protest, and the people laughed acquiescingly.

"Puh tong, puh tong, you gaping idiots!" I repeated, and it caused more glee.

Swinging myself past them all, I dragged my stubborn pony through the mob to the gate by which I had entered. My men were not to be found. I did not know the road nor much of the language. I sat down on a granite pillar to undergo an embarrassing half-hour. Presently my men hailed me, and approaching, swore with imposing loftiness at the discomfited guide. My bull-dog coolie dropped his loads, the fu-song somehow lost his footing, I yelled "Ts'eo" ("Go"), and with a cheer the caravan proceeded.

The following day we were at the capital.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote Z: I took a pony because I had made up my mind to return into China after I had reached Burma. In Tong-ch'uan-fu a good pony can be bought for, say, L3—in Burma, the same pony would sell for L10.

—E.J.D.]

[Footnote AA: For further excellent descriptions of the Chinese nature I refer the reader to Chester Holcombe's China: Past and Present.—E.J.D.]

[Footnote AB: i.e. Yamen escort.]



CHAPTER XIV.

YUeN-NAN-FU, THE CAPITAL.

Access to Yuen-nan-fu. Concentrated reform. Tribute to Hsi Liang. Conservatism and progress. The Tonkin-Yuen-nan Railway. The Yuen-nan army. Author's views in 1909 and 1910 contrasted. Phenomenal forward march, and what it means. Danger of too much drill. International aspect on the frontier. The police. Street improvements. Visit to the gaol, and a description. The Young Pretender to the Chinese throne. How the prison is conducted. The schools. Visit to the university, and a description. Riot among the students. Visit to the Agricultural School, and a description. Silk industry of Yuen-nan.

Yuen-nan-fu to-day is as accessible as Peking. After many weary years the Tonkin-Yuen-nan railway is now an accomplished fact, and links this capital city with Haiphong in three days.

Reform concentrates at the capital. The man who visited Yuen-nan-fu twenty, or even ten years ago, would be astounded, were he to go there now, at the improvements visible, on every hand. A building on foreign lines was then a thing unknown, and the conservative Viceroy, Tseng Kong Pao, the decapitator in his time of thousands upon thousands of human beings, would turn in his grave if he could behold the utter annihilation of his pet "feng shui," which has followed in the wake of the good works done by the late loved Viceroy, Hsi Liang.

The name of Hsi Liang is revered in the province of Yuen-nan as the most able man who has ever ruled the two provinces of Yuen-nan and Kwei-chow, a man of keen intellectuality and courtly manner, and notorious as being the only Mongolian in the service of China's Government. I lived in Yuen-nan-fu for several weeks at a stretch, and since then have made frequent visits, and knowing the enormous strides being made towards acquiring Occidental methods, I now find it difficult to write with absolute accuracy upon things in general. But I have found this to be the case in all my travels. What is, or seems to be, accurate to-day of any given thing in a given place is wrong tomorrow under seemingly the same conditions; and although no theme could be more tempting, and no subject offer wider scope for ingenious hypothesis and profound generalization, one has to forego much temptation to "color" if he would be accurate of anything he writes of the Chinese. Eminent sinologues agree as to the impossibility of the conception of the Chinese mind and character as a whole, so glaring are the inconsistencies of the Chinese nature. And as one sees for himself in this great city, particularly in official life, the businesslike practicability on the one hand and the utter absurdity of administration on the other, in all modes and methods, one is almost inclined to drop his pen in disgust at being unable to come to any concrete conclusions.

Of no province in China more than of Yuen-nan is this true.

Reform and immovable conservatism go hand in hand. Men of the most dissimilar ambitions compose the corps diplomatique, and are willing to join hands to propagate their main beliefs; and when one writes of progress—in railways, in the army, in gaols, in schools, in public works, in no matter what—one is ever confronted by that dogged immutability which characterizes the older school.

So that in writing of things Yuen-nanese in this great city it is imperative for me to state bare facts as they stand now, and make little comment.

THE RAILWAY

The Tonkin-Yuen-nan Railway, linking the interior with the coast, is one of the world's most interesting engineering romances. This artery of steel is probably the most expensive railway of its kind, from the constructional standpoint. In some districts seven thousand pounds per mile was the cost, and it is probable that six thousand pounds sterling per mile would not be a bad estimate of the total amount appropriated for the construction of the line from a loan of 200,000,000 francs asked for in 1898 by the Colonial Council in connection with the program for a network of railways in and about French Indo-China.

To Lao-kay there are no less than one hundred and seventy-five bridges.

The completion of this line realizes in part the ambition of a celebrated Frenchman, who—once a printer, 'tis said, in Paris—dropped into the political flower-bed, and blossomed forth in due course as Governor-General of Indo-China. When Paul Doumer, for it was he, went east in 1897, he felt it his mission to put France, politically and commercially, on as good a footing as any of her rivals, notably Great Britain. It did not take him long to see that the best missionaries in his cause would be the railways. At the time of writing (June, 1910) I cannot but think that profit on this railway will be a long time coming, and there are some in the capital who doubt whether the commercial possibilities of Yuen-nan justified this huge expenditure on railway construction. Whilst authorities differ, I personally believe that the ultimate financial success of the venture is assured. There are markets crying out to be quickly fed with foreign goods, and it is my opinion that the French will be the suppliers of those goods. British enterprise is so weak that we cannot capture the greater portion of the growing foreign trade, and must feel thankful if we can but retain what trade we have, and supply those exports with which the French have no possibility of competing.

* * * * *

THE MILITARY

The foreigner in Yuen-nan-fu can never rest unless he is used to the sounds of the bugle and the hustling spirit of the men of war.

In standard works on Chinese armaments no mention is ever made of the Yuen-nan army, and statistics are hard to get. But it is evident that the cult of the military stands paramount, and it has to be conceded, even by the most pessimistic critics of this backward province, that the new troops are sufficiently numerous and sufficiently well-organized to crush any rebellion. This must be counted a very fair result, since it has been attained in about two years. A couple of years ago Yuen-nan had practically no army—none more than the military ragtags of the old school, whose chief weapon of war was the opium pipe. But now there are ten thousand troops—not units on paper, but men in uniform—well-drilled for the most part and of excellent physique, who could take the field at once. The question of the Yuen-nan army is one of international interest: the French are on the south, Great Britain on the west.

On June 2nd, 1909, I rode out to the magnificent training ground, then being completed, and on that date wrote the following in my diary:—

"I watched for an hour or two some thousand or so men undergoing their daily drill—typical tin soldiery and a military sham.

"Only with the merest notion of matters military were most of the men conversant, and alike in ordinary marching—when it was most difficult for them even to maintain regularity of step—or in more complicated drilling, there was a lack of the right spirit, no go, no gusto—scores and scores of them running round doing something, going through a routine, with the knowledge that when it was finished they would get their rice and be happy. Everyone who possesses but a rudimentary knowledge of the Chinese knows that he troubles most about the two meals every day should bring him, and this seems to be the pervading line of thought of seven-eighths of the men I saw on the padang at drill. Officers strutting about in peacock fashion, with a sword dangling at their side, showed no inclination to enforce order, and the rank and file knew their methods, so that the disorder and haphazardness of the whole thing was absolutely mutual.

"Whilst I was on the field gazing in anything but admiration on the scene, I was ordered out by one of the khaki-clad officers in a most unceremonious manner. Seeing me, he shouted at the top of his thick voice, 'Ch'u-k'ue, ch'u-k'ue' (an expression meaning 'Go out!'—commonly used to drive away dogs), and simultaneously waved his sword in the air as if to say, 'Another step, and I'll have your head.' And, of course, there being nothing else to do, I 'ch'u-k'ued,' but in a fashion befitting the dignity of an English traveler.

"The reorganization of the army, with the acceleration of warlike preparedness, has the advantage that it appeals to the embryonic feeling of national patriotism, and affords a tangible expression of the desire to be on terms of equality with the foreigner. That officer never had a prouder moment in his life than when he ordered a distinguished foreigner from the drilling ground, of which he was for the time the lordly comptroller. And it may be added that the foreigner can remember no occasion when he felt 'smaller,' or more completely shrivelled.

"Whilst it is safe to infer that the motives that underlie the significant access of activity in military matters in Yuen-nan differ in no way from those which have led to the feverish increase in armaments in other parts of the world, such ideas that have yet been formed on actual preparations for possible war are most crude. On paper the appointments in the army and the accuracy of the figures of the complement of rank and file admit of no question, but the practical utility of their labors is quite another matter, and a matter which does not appear to produce among the army officials any great mental disturbance in their delusion that they are progressing. Yuen-nan is in need of military reform, reform which will embrace a start from the very beginning, and one of the first steps that should be taken is that those who are to be in the position of administering training should find out something about western military affairs, and so be in a position of knowing what they are doing."

The above was my conscientious opinion in the middle of last year. Now—in June of 1910—I have to write of enormous improvements and revolutions in the drilling, in the armaments, in the equipment, in the general organization of the troops and the conduct of them. Yuen-nan is still peculiarly in her transition stage, which, while it has many elements of strength and many menacing possibilities, contains, more or less, many of the old weaknesses. All matters, such as her financial question, her tariff question, her railway question, her mining question, are still "in the air"—the unknown x in the equation, as it were—but her army question is settled. There is a definite line to be followed here, and it is being followed most rigidly. Come what will, her army must be safe and sound. China is determined to work out the destiny of Yuen-nan herself, and she is working hard—the West has no conception how hard—so as to be able to be in a position of safeguarding—vigorously, if necessary—her own borders.

One question arises in my mind, however. Should there be a rebellion, would the soldiers remain true? This is vital to Yuen-nan. Skirmishings on the French border more or less recently have shown us that soldiers are wobblers in that area. The rank and file are chosen from the common people, and one would not be surprised to find, should trouble take place fairly soon, while they are still raw to their business, the soldiers turn to those who could give them most. It has been humorously remarked that in case of disturbances the first thing the Chinese Tommy would do would be to shoot the officers for treating him so badly and for drilling him so hard and long.

What is true of the capital in respect to military progress I found to be true also of Tali-fu.

A couple of years ago a company of drilled soldiers arrived there as a nucleus for recruiting units for the new army. Soon 1,500 men were enlisted. They were to serve a three years' term, were to receive four dollars per month, and were promised good treatment. The officers drilled them from dawn to dusk; deserters were therefore many, necessitating the detail of a few heads coming off to avert the trouble of losing all the men. It cost the men about a dollar or so for their rice, so that it will be readily seen that, with a clear profit of three dollars as a monthly allowance, they were better off than they would have been working on their land. Officers received from forty to sixty taels a month. Temples here were converted into barracks—a sign in itself of the altered conditions of the times—and I visited some extensive buildings which were being erected at a cost of eighty thousand gold dollars.

Military progress in this "backward province" is as great as it has been anywhere at any time in any part of the Chinese Empire.

THE POLICE

Until a few years ago, as China was kept in law and order without the necessary evil of a standing army, so did Yuen-nan-fu slumber on in the Chinese equivalent for peace and plenty. As they now are, and taking into consideration that they were all picked from the rawest material, the police force of this capital is as able a body of men as are to be found in all Western China. Probably the Metropolitan police of dear old London could not be re-forced from their ranks, but disciplined and well-ordered they certainly are withal. Swords seem to take the place of the English bludgeon, and a peaked cap, beribboned with gold, is substituted for the old-fashioned helmet of blue; and if the time should ever come, with international rights, when Englishmen will be "run in" in the Empire, the sallow physiognomy and the dangling pigtail alone will be unmistakable proofs to the victim, even in heaviest intoxication, that he is not being handled by policemen of his awn kind—that is, if the Yuen-nan police shall ever have made strides towards the attainment of home police principles. However, in their place these men have done good work. Thieving in the city is now much less common, and gambling, although still rife under cover—when will the Chinese eradicate that inherent spirit?—is certainly being put down. One of the features of their work also has been the improvement they have effected in the appearance of the streets. Old customs are dying, and at the present time if a man in his untutored little ways throws his domestic refuse into the place where the gutter should have been, as in olden days, he is immediately pounced upon, reprimanded by the policeman on duty, and fined somewhat stiffly.

THE GAOL

A great fuss was made about me when I went to visit the governor of the prison one wet morning. He met me with great ostentation at the entrance, escorting me through a clean courtyard, on either side of which were pretty flower-beds and plots of green turf, to a reception-room. There was nothing "quadlike" about the place. This reception-room, furnished on a semi-Occidental plan, overlooked the main prison buildings, contained foreign glass windows draped with white curtains, was scrupulously clean for China, and had magnificent hanging scrolls on the whitewashed walls. Tea was soon brewed, and the governor, wishing to be polite and sociable, told me that he had been in Yuen-nan-fu for a few months only, and that he considered himself an extremely fortunate fellow to be in charge of such an excellent prison—one of the finest in the kingdom, he assured me.

After we had drunk each other's health—I sincerely trust that the cute, courteous old chap will live a long and happy life, although to my way of thinking the knowledge of the evil deeds of all the criminals around me would considerably minimize the measure of bliss among such intensely mundane things—I was led away to the prison proper.

This gaol, which had been opened only a few months, is a remarkably fine building, and with the various workshops and outhouses and offices covers from seven to eight acres of ground inside the city. The outside, and indeed the whole place, bears every mark of Western architecture, with a trace here and there of the Chinese artistry, and for carved stone and grey-washed brick might easily be mistaken for a foreign building. It cost some ninety thousand taels to build, and has accommodation for more than the two hundred and fifty prisoners at present confined within its walls.

After an hour's inspection, I came to the conclusion that the lot of the prisoners was cast in pleasant places. The food was being prepared at the time—three kinds of vegetables, with a liberal quantity of rice, much better than nine-tenths of the poor brutes lived on before they came to gaol. Besworded warders guarded the entrances to the various outbuildings. From twenty to thirty poor human beings were manacled in their cells, condemned to die, knowing not how soon the pleasure of the emperor may permit of them shuffling off this mortal coil: one grey-haired old man was among the number, and to see him stolidly waiting for his doom brought sad thoughts.

The long-termed prisoners work, of course, as they do in all prisons. Weaving cloth, mostly for the use of the military, seemed to be the most important industry, there being over a score of Chinese-made weaving machines busily at work. The task set each man is twelve English yards per day; if he does not complete this quantity he is thrashed, if he does more he is remunerated in money. One was amused to see the English-made machine lying covered with dust in a corner, now discarded, but from its pattern all the others had been made in the prison. Tailors rose as one man when we entered their shop, where Singer machines were rattling away in the hands of competent men; and opposite were a body of pewter workers, some of their products—turned out with most primitive tools—being extremely clever. The authorities had bought a foreign chair, made of iron—a sort of miniature garden seat—and from this pattern a squad of blacksmiths were turning out facsimiles, which were selling at two dollars apiece. They were well made, but a skilled mechanic, not himself a prisoner, was teaching the men. Bamboo blinds were being made in the same room, whilst at the extreme end of another shed were paper dyers and finishers, carrying on a primitive work in the same primitive way that the Chinese did thousands of years ago. It was, however, exceedingly interesting to watch.

As we passed along I smelt a strong smell of opium. Yes, it was opium. I sniffed significantly, and looked suspiciously around. The governor saw and heard and smelt, but he said nothing. Opium, then, is not, as is claimed, abolished in Yuen-nan. Worse than this: whilst I was the other day calling upon the French doctor at the hospital, the vilest fumes exuded from the room of one of the dressers. It appeared that the doctor could not break his men of the habit. But we remember that the physician of older days was exhorted to heal himself.

Just as I was beginning to think I had seen all there was to be seen, I heard a scuffle, and saw a half-score of men surrounding a poor frightened little fellow, to whom I was introduced. He was the little bogus Emperor of China, the Young Pretender, to whom thousands of Yuen-nan people, at the time of the dual decease in recent Chinese history, did homage, and kotowed, recognizing him as the new emperor. The story, not generally known outside the province, makes good reading. At the time of the death of the emperor and empress-dowager, an aboriginal family at the village of Kuang-hsi-chou, in the southeast of Yuen-nan province, knowing that a successor to the throne must be found, and having a son of about eight years of age, put this boy up as a pretender to the Chinese throne, and not without considerable success. The news spread that the new emperor was at the above-named village, and the people for miles around flocked in great numbers to do him homage, congratulating themselves that the emperor should have risen from the immediate neighborhood in which they themselves had passed a monotonous existence. For weeks this pretense to the throne was maintained, until a miniature rebellion broke out, to quell which the Viceroy of Yuen-nan dispatched with all speed a strong body of soldiers.

Everybody thought that the loss of a few heads and other Chinese trivialities was to end this little flutter of the people. But not so. The whole of the family who had promoted this fictitious claim to the throne—father, mother, brothers, sisters—were all put to death, most of them in front of the eyes of the poor little fellow who was the victim of their idle pretext. The military returned, reporting that everything was now quiet, and a few days later, guarded by twenty soldiers, came this young pretender, encaged in one of the prison boxes, breaking his heart with grief. And it was he who was now conducted to meet the foreigner. He has been confined within the prison since he arrived at the capital, and the object seems to be to keep him there, training and teaching him until he shall have arrived at an age when he can be taught a trade. The tiny fellow is small for his eight years, and his little wizened face, sallow and delicate, has a plausible tale to tell. He is always fretting and grieving for those whose heads were shown to him after decapitation. However, he is being cared for, and it is doubtful whether the authorities—or even the emperor himself—will mete out punishment to him when he grows older. He did nothing; he knew nothing. At the present time he is going through a class-book which teaches him the language to be used in audience with the Son of Heaven—he will probably be taken before the emperor when he is old enough. But now he is not living the life of a boy—no playmates, no toys, no romps and frolics. He, like Topsy, merely grows—in surroundings which only a dark prison life can give him.

This was the first time I had even been in prison in China. This remark rather tickled the governor, and on taking my departure he assured me that it was an honor to him, which the Chinese language was too poor to express, that I should have allowed my honorable and dignified person to visit his mean and contemptible abode. He commenced this compliment to me as he was showing me the well-equipped hospital in connection with the prison—containing eight separate wards in charge of a Chinese doctor.

I smiled in return a smile of deepest gratitude, and waving a fond farewell, left him in a happy mood.

THE SCHOOLS

One would scarce dream of a university for the province of Yuen-nan. Yet such is the case.

In former days—and it is true, too, to a great extent to-day—the prominent place given to education in China rendered the village schools an object of more than common interest, where the educated men of the Empire received their first intellectual training. Probably in no other country was there such uniformity in the standards of instruction. Every educated man was then a potential school master—this was certainly true of Yuen-nan. But all is now changing, as the infusion of the spirit of the phrase "China for the Chinese" gains forceful meaning among the people.

The highest hill within the city precincts has been chosen as the site for a university, which is truly a remarkable building for Western China. One of the students of the late. Dr. Mateer (Shantung) was the architect—a man who came originally to the school as a teacher of mathematics—and it cannot be said that the huge oblong building, with a long narrow wing on either side of a central dome, is the acme of beauty from a purely architectural standpoint.

Of red-faced brick, this university, which cost over two hundred thousand taels to build, is most imposing, and possesses conveniences and improvements quite comparable to the ordinary college of the West. For instance, as I passed through the many admirably-equipped schoolrooms, well ventilated and airy, I saw an Italian who was laying in the electric light,[AC] the power for which was generated by an immense dynamo at the basement, upon which alone twenty thousand taels were spent. Thirty professors have the control of thirty-two classrooms, teaching among other subjects mathematics, music, languages (chiefly English and Japanese), geography, chemistry, astronomy, geology, botany, and so on. The museum, situated in the center of the building, does not contain as many specimens as one would imagine quite easily obtainable, but there are certainly some capital selections of things natural to this part of the Empire.

The authorities probably thought I was rather a queer foreigner, wanting to see everything there was to see inside the official barriers in the city. Day after day I was making visits to places where foreigners seldom have entered, and I do not doubt that the officials, whilst treating me with the utmost deference and extreme punctiliousness, thought I was a sort of British spy.

When I went to the Agricultural School, probably the most interesting visit I made, I was met by the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, a keen fellow, who spoke English well, and who, having been trained at Shanghai, and therefore understanding the idiosyncrasies of the foreigner's character, was invited to entertain. And this he did, but he was careful that he did not give away much information regarding the progress that the Yuen-nanese, essentially sons of the soil, are making in agriculture. For this School of Agriculture is an important adjunct.

Scholars are taken on an agreement for three years, during which time they are fed and housed at the expense of the school; if they leave during the specified period they are fined heavily. No less than 180 boys, ranging from sixteen to twenty-three, are being trained here, with about 120 paid apprentices. Three Japanese professors are employed—one at a salary of two hundred dollars a month, and two others at three hundred, the latter having charge of the fruit and forest trees and the former of vegetables.

In years to come the silk industry of Yuen-nan will rank among the chief, and the productions will rank among the best of all the eighteen provinces. There are no less than ten thousand mulberry trees in the school grounds for feeding the worms; four thousand catties of leaves are used every day for their food; five hundred immense trays of silkworms are constantly at work here. The worms are in the charge of scholars, whose names appear on the various racks under their charge, and the fact that feeding takes place every two hours, day and night, is sufficient testimony that the boys go into their work with commendable energy. As I was being escorted around the building, through shed after shed filled with these trays of silkworms, several of the scholars made up a sort of procession, and waited for the eulogy that I freely bestowed. In another building small boys were spinning the silk, and farther down the weavers were busy with their primitive machinery, with which, however, they were turning out silk that could be sold in London at a very big price. The colorings were specially beautiful, and the figuring quite good, although the head-master of the school told me that he hoped for improvements in that direction. And I, looking wise, although knowing little about silk and its manufacture, heartily agreed with the little fat man.

There is a department for women also, and contrary to custom, I had a look around here, too. The girls were particularly smart at spinning.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote AC: Soon afterwards a disturbance occurred among the students, and had it not been for the promptitude of the inspector, some of them might have lost their heads.

The electric light had just been laid in, and was working so well that the authorities found it imperative to charge each of the 400 resident students one dollar per month for the upkeep. This simple edict was the cause of the riot In a body the boys rolled up their pukais, and marched down to the main entrance, declaring that they were determined to resign if the order was not rescinded. The inspector, however, had had all the doors locked. The frenzied students broke these open, and incidentally thrashed some of the caretakers for interfering in matters which were not considered to be strictly their business.

Subsequently the Chancellor of Education visited the college in person, but no heed was paid to his exhortations, and it was only when the dollar charge for lighting was reduced that peace was restored.

The Chancellor, as a last word, told them that if they vacated their schoolrooms a fine of about a hundred taels would be imposed upon each man.

The occasion was marked by all the foolish ardor one finds among college boys at home, and it seems that, despite the enormous amount of money the college is costing to run, the students are somewhat out of hand.—E.J.D.]



SECOND JOURNEY

YUeN-NAN-FU TO TALI-FU (VIA CH'U-HSIONG-FU)



CHAPTER XV.

Stages to Tali-fu. Worst roads yet experienced. Stampede among ponies. Hybrid crowd at Anning-cheo. Simplicity of life of common people. Does China want the foreigner? Straits Settlements and China Proper compared. China's aspect of her own position. Renaissance of Chinese military power. Europeans NOT wanted in the Empire. Emptiness of the lives of the common people. Author erects a printing machine in Inland China. National conceit. Differences in make-up of the Hua Miao and the Han Ren. The Hua Miao and what they are doing. Emancipation of their women. Tribute to Protestant missionaries. Betrothal and marriage in China. Miao women lead a life of shame and misery. Crude ideas among Chinese regarding age of foreigners. Musty man and dusty traveller at Lao-ya-kwan. Intense cold. Salt trade. Parklike scenery, pleasant travel, solitude.

From the figures of heights appearing below, one would imagine that between the capital and Tali-fu hard climbing is absent. But during each stage, with the exception of the journey from Sei-tze to Sha-chiao-kai, there is considerable fatiguing uphill and downhill work, each evening bringing one to approximately the same level as that from which he started his morning tramp. I went by the following route:—