When gold is worth in Shanghai 35 times its weight in silver, it may be bought in Yunnan City or Talifu for from 25 to 27.5 times its weight in silver, and in quantities up to hundreds of ounces. To remit silver by telegraphic transfer from Shanghai or Hong Kong to Yunnan city costs six per cent., and either of the two leading banks in the city will negotiate the transfer from their agents at the seaports of any amount up to 10,000 ounces of silver in a single transaction. The gold can always be readily sold in Shanghai or Hong Kong, and the only risk is in the carriage of the gold from the inland city to the seaport. So far as I could learn, no gold thus sent has gone astray. It is carried overland by the fastest trade route—that through Mungtze to Laokai—and thence by a boat down stream to Hanoi in Tonquin, from which port it is sent by registered post to Saigon and Hong Kong. Here then is a venture open to all, with excitement sufficient for the most blase speculator. Ample profits are made by the dealer. For instance, a large quantity of gold was purchased in Yunnan city on the 21st January, 1894, at 23.2, its value in Shanghai on the same date being 30.9; but on the date that the gold arrived in Shanghai its value had risen to 35, at which price it was sold. At the time of my visit gold was 25.5 to 27 in Yunnan, and 35 in Shanghai, and I have since learnt that, while gold has become cheaper in the province, it has become dearer at the seaport.

The gold is brought to the buyer in the form of jewellery of really exquisite workmanship, of rings and bracelets, earrings and head ornaments, of those tiny images worn by rich children in a half circlet over the forehead, and bridal charms that would make covetous the heart of a nun. Ornaments of gold such as these are 98 per cent. fine and are sold, weighed on the same scales, for so many times their weight in silver. They are sold not because of the poverty of their owners, but because their owners make a very large profit on their original cost by so disposing of them. If, however, the purchaser prefer it, gold will be brought him in the leaf 99 per cent. fine, and this is undoubtedly the best form into which to convert your silver. The gold beaters of Yunnan are a recognised class, and are so numerous that they have a powerful guild or trade's union of their own.

Gold-testing is also a recognised profession, but the methods are primitive and require the skill of an expert, consisting, as they do, of a comparison of the rubbing on a stone of the unknown gold, with a similar rubbing of gold whose standard has been accurately determined. One of the best gold-testers in the city has been taught electric gilding by Mr. Jensen and does some skilful work.

The principle of self-protection restrains the Chinaman from the ostentatious exhibition of his wealth—he fears being squeezed by the officials who are apt to regard wealth as an aggravation of crime, to be the more severely punished the better able is the accused to purchase exemption from punishment. I have seen a stranger come into the room where Mr. Jensen and I were sitting, who from his appearance seemed to be worth perhaps a five-dollar bill, and after a preliminary interchange of compliments, I have seen his hand disappear up his long sleeve and produce a package of gold leaf worth perhaps 2000 taels of silver. This he would offer for sale; there was some quiet bargaining; when, should they agree, the gold was weighed, the purchaser handed a cheque on his Chinese banker for the amount in silver, and the transaction was finished as quickly and neatly as if it had taken place in Bond Street, and not in the most inland capital of an "uncivilised country"; whose civilisation has nevertheless kept it intact and mighty since the dawn of history, and whose banking methods are the same now as they were in the days of Solomon.

The silver of Yunnan is of the same standard as the silver of Shanghai, namely 98 per cent. pure, and differs to the eye from the absolutely unalloyed silver of Szechuen.

The cash of Yunnan vary in a way that is more than usually bewildering. Let me explain, in a few sentences, the "cash" currency of the Middle Kingdom. The current coin of China as everyone knows is the brass cash, which is perforated so that it may be carried on a string. Now, theoretically, a "string of cash" contains 100 coins, and in the Eastern provinces ten strings are the theoretical equivalent of one Mexican dollar. But there are eighteen provinces in China, and the number of brass cash passing for a string varies in each province from the full 100, which I have never seen, to 83 in Taiyuen, and down to 33 in the Eastern part of the province of Chihli. In Peking I found the system charmingly simple. One thousand cash are there represented by 100 coins, whereas 1000 "old cash" consist of 1000 coins, though 1000 "capital cash" are only 500 coins. The big cash are marked as 10 capital cash, but count the same as 5 old cash. Nowhere does a Chinaman mean 1000 cash when he speaks of 1000 cash. In Tientsin 1000 cash means 500 cash—that is to say 5 times 100 cash, the 100 there being any number you can pass except 100, though by agreement the 100 is usually estimated at 98. In Nanking I found a different system to prevail. There cash are 1075 the 1000, but of the 10 strings of 100 cash, 7 contain only 98 cash each, and 3 only 95, yet the surplus 75 cash—that is to say the number which for the time being is the Nanking equivalent of 75—are added all the same. At Lanchow in Chihli on the Imperial Chinese Railway near Shanhai-kwan, 16 old cash count as 100 cash, yet 33 are required to make up 200; in Tientsin from which point the railway starts, 1000 cash are really 500 cash and 98 count there as 100. Now 2000 Chihli cash are represented by 325 coins, and 1000 by 162 coins, and 6000 by 975 coins, which again count as 1000 large cash and equal on an average one Mexican dollar. Therefore to convert Lanchow cash into Tientsin cash you must divide the Lanchow cash by 3, count 975 as 1000, and consider this equal to a certain percentage of a theoretical amount of silver known as a tael, which is always varying of itself as well as by the fluctuations in the market value of silver, and which is not alike in any two places, and may widely vary in different portions of the same place.

Could anything be simpler? And yet there are those who say that the system of money exchange in China is both cumbrous and exasperating. Take as a further instance the cash in Yunnan. Everyone knows that theoretically there are 2000 cash in the tael, each tael containing 20 "strings," and each "string" 100 cash, but in Yunnan 2000 cash are not 2000 cash—they are only 1880 cash. This does not mean that 1880 cash are represented by 1880 coins, not at all; because 62 cash in Yunnan are counted as 100. Eighteen hundred and eighty cash are therefore represented by only 1240 cash coins and all prices must be paid in this proportion. Immediately outside the city, however, a string of cash is a "full string" and contains 100 cash or rather it contains as few cash as possibly can be passed for 100, a fair average number being 98.

Silver is weighed in the City banks and at the wholesale houses on the "capital scale," but in the retail stores on scales that are heavier by 14 per cent. (one mace and 4 candareens in the tael). Outside the city on the road to Tali there is a loss on exchange varying according to your astuteness from 3 to 6 per cent. on the capital scale.

There are two chief banks in Yunnan city. Wong's whose bank, the signboard tells us, is "Beneficent, Rich, United," and Mong's "Bank of the Hundred Streams," which is said to be still richer.

With Mr. Jensen I called one evening upon Wong, and found him with his sons and chief dependents at the evening meal. All rose as we entered and pressed us to take a seat with them, and when we would not, the father and grown-up son showed us into the guest-room and seated us on the opium-dais under the canopy. The opium-lamps were already lit; on a beautiful tray inlaid with mother-of-pearl there were pipes for visitors, and phials of prepared opium. Here we insisted on their leaving us and returning to their supper; they finished speedily and returned to their visitors. We were given good tea and afterwards a single cigar was handed to each of us. In offering you a cigar it is not the Chinese custom to offer you your choice from the cigar box; the courtesy is too costly, for there are few Chinamen in these circumstances who could refrain from helping themselves to a handful. "When one is eating one's own" says the Chinese proverb, "one does not eat to repletion; when one is eating another's, one eats till the tears run."

Wong is one of the leading citizens of Yunnan, and is held in high honour by his townsmen. His house is a handsome Chinese mansion; it has a dignified entrance and the garden court is richly filled with plants in porcelain vases. It may thus be said of him, as of the Confucian Superior Man, "riches adorn his house and virtue his person, his heart is expanded, and his body is at ease."

A Szechuen man, a native of Chungking, fifty-nine years of age, Wong is a man of immense wealth, his bank being known all over China, and having branches in capital cities so far distant from each other as Peking, Canton, Kweiyang, Shanghai, Hankow, Nanchang, Soochow, Hangchow, and Chungking. I may add that he has smoked opium for many years.

I formed a high opinion of the intelligence of Wong. He questioned me like an insurance doctor as to my family history, and professed himself charmed with the amazing richness in sons of my most honourable family. He had heard of my native country, which he called Hsin Chin Shan, the "New Gold Mountain," to distinguish it from the Lao Chin Shan, the "Old Gold Mountain," as the Chinese term California. I was the more pleased to find that Wong had some knowledge of Australia and its gold, because a few months before I had been pained by an incident bearing on this very subject, which occurred to me in the highly civilised city of Manila, in the Philippine Islands. On an afternoon in August, 1893, I stood in the Augustine Church, in Old Manila, to witness the funeral service of the Padre Provincial of the Augustines. It was the first occasion for one hundred and twenty-three years that the Provincial of the Order had died while in the actual exercise of his office, and it was known that the ceremony would be one of the most imposing ever seen in the Islands. The fine old church, built by the son of the architect of the Escorial—the only building in Manila left standing by the earthquake of 1645—was crowded with mourners, and almost every notability of the province was said to be present. During the service two young Spaniards, students from the University close by, pushed their way in beside me. Wishing to learn who were the more distinguished of the mourners, I asked the students to kindly point out to me the Governor-General (Blanco), and other prominent officials, and they did so with agreeable courtesy. When the service was finished I thanked them for the trouble they had taken and was coming away, when one of them stopped me.

"Pardon me, Caballero," he said, "but will you do me the favour to tell me where you come from?"

"I am from Australia."

"From Austria! so then you come from Austria?"

"No, sir, from Australia."

"But 'Australia'—where is it?"

"It is a rich colony of England of immense importance."

"But where is it?" he persisted.

"Dios mio!" I exclaimed aghast, "it is in China."

But his friend interposed. "The gentleman is talking in fun," he said. "Thou knowest, Pepe, where is Australia, where is Seednay, and Melboornay, where all the banks have broken one after the other in a bankruptcy colossal."

"Ya me figuraba donde era," Pepe replied, as I edged uncomfortably away.

During my journey across China it was not often that I was called upon to make use of my profession. But I was pleased to be of some service to this rich banker. He wished to consult me professionally, because he had heard from the truthful lips of rumour of the wonderful powers of divination given to the foreign medical man. What was his probable tenure of life? That was the problem. I gravely examined two of his pulses—every properly organised Chinaman has four hundred—and finding his heart where it should be in the centre of his body, with the other organs ranged round it like the satellites round the sun—every Chinaman is thus constructed—I was glad to be able to assure him that he will certainly live forty years longer—if Heaven permit him.

Wong has a grown-up son of twenty who will succeed to the bank; he is at present the managing proprietor of a small general store purchased for him by his father. The son has been taught photography by Mr. Jensen, and has an excellent camera obtained from Paris. He is quite an enthusiast. In his shop a crowd is always gathered round the counter looking at the work of this Chinese amateur. There are a variety of stores for sale on the shelves, and I was interested to notice the cheerful promiscuity with which bottles of cyanide of potassium and perchloride of mercury were scattered among bottles of carbonate of soda, of alum, of Moet and Chandon (spurious), of pickles, and Howard's quinine. The first time that cyanide of potassium is sold for alum, or corrosive sublimate for bicarbonate of soda there will be an eclat given to the dealings of this shop which will be very gratifying to its owner.

The telegraph in Yunnan is very largely used by the Chinese, especially by the bankers and officials. By telegraph you can remit, as I have said, through the Chinese banks, telegraphic transfers to the value of thousands of taels in single transactions. It is principally the banks and the Government who make use of the telegraph, and their communications are sent by private code. When the Tsungli Yamen in Peking sends a telegram to the Viceroy in Yunnan it is in code that the message comes; and it is by private code also that a Chinese bank in Shanghai telegraphs to its far inland agents. Messages are sent in China by the Morse system. The method of telegraphing Chinese characters, whose discovery enabled the Chinese to make use of the telegraph, was the ingenious invention of a forgotten genius in the Imperial Maritime Customs of China. The method is simplicity itself. The telegraph code consists of ten thousand numbers of four numerals each, and each group so constituted represents a Chinese character. Any operator, however ignorant of Chinese, can thus telegraph or receive a message in Chinese. He receives, for instance, a message containing a series of numbers such as 0018, 0297, 5396, 8424. He has before him a series of ten thousand wood blocks on which the number is cut at one end and the corresponding Chinese character at the other, he takes out the number, touches the inkpad with the other end, and stamps opposite each group its Chinese character. The system permits, moreover, of the easy arrangement of indecipherable private codes, because by adding or subtracting a certain number from each group of figures, other characters than those telegraphed can be indicated.

I need hardly add that the system of wood blocks is not in practical use, for the numbers and their characters are now printed in code-books. And here we have an instance of the marvellous faculty of memorising characteristic of the Chinese. A Chinaman's memory is something prodigious. From time immemorial the memory of the Chinese has been developed above all the other faculties. Memory is the secret of success in China, not originality. Among a people taught to associate innovation with impiety, and with whom precedent determines all action, it is inevitable that the faculty of recollection should be the most highly developed of all the mental faculties. Necessity compels the Chinaman to have a good memory. No race has ever been known where the power of memory has been developed even in rare individual cases to the degree that is common to all classes of the Chinese, especially to the literati.

The Chinese telegraph clerk quickly learns all the essential portion of the code-book by heart. The book then lies in the drawer a superfluity. It is claimed for Chiang, the second Chinese clerk in Yunnan, that he knows all the 10,000 numbers and their corresponding characters.

Telegrams from Yunnan to Shanghai cost twenty-two tael cents (at the present value of the tael this is equal to sixpence) for each Chinese character; but each word in any other language is charged double, that is, forty-four cents.



From Yunnan to Talifu is a distance of 307 miles. The native banker in the capital will remit for you by wire to his agent in Tali the sum of 1000 taels, for a charge of eight taels, exclusive of the cost of the telegram, and, as the value of silver in Tali is one per cent. higher than it is in Yunnan, the traveller can send his money by wire with perfect safety, and lose nothing in the remittance, not even the cost of the telegram.

The telegraph offices are separated from the city wall by a small common, which is quite level, and which the Chinaman of the future will convert into a bowling green and lawn-tennis ground. There is a handsome entrance. The large portal is painted with horrific gods armed with monstrous weapons. The Chinese still seem to adhere to the belief that the deadliness of a weapon must be in proportion to the savageness of its aspect. Inside, there are spacious courts and well-furnished guest rooms, roomy apartments, and offices for the mandarin, as well as comfortable quarters for Mr. Jensen and his body of Chinese clerks and operators. There is a pretty garden all bright and sunny, with a pond of gold fish and ornamental parapet. Wandering freely in the enclosure are peacocks and native companions, while a constant playmate of the children is a little laughing monkey of a kind that is found in the woods beyond Tali. At night a watchman passes round the courts every two hours, striking a dismal gong under the windows, and waking the foreigner from his slumbers; but the noise he makes does not disturb the sleep of the Chinese—indeed, it is open to question if there is any discord known which, as mere noise, could disturb a Chinaman.

The walls that flank the entrance are covered with official posters giving the names of the men of Yunnan City who contributed to the relief of the sufferers by a recent famine in Shansi, together with the amounts of their contributions and the rewards to which their gifts entitled them. The Chinese are firm believers in the doctrine of justification by works, and on these posters one could read the exact return made in this world for an act of merit, apart, of course, from the reward that will be reaped in Heaven. In a case like this it is usually arranged that for "gifts amounting to a certain percentage of the sums ordinarily authorised, subscribers may obtain brevet titles, posthumous titles, decorations, buttons up to the second class, the grade of licentiate, and brevet rank up to the rank of Colonel. Disgraced officials may apply to have their rank restored. Nominal donations of clothes, if the money value of the articles be presented instead, will entitle the givers to similar honours."—The Peking Gazette, August 22, 1892.

In the centre of the green stands the hollow pillar in which Chinese printed waste-paper is reverently burnt. "When letters were invented," the Chinese say, "Heaven rejoiced and Hell trembled." "Reverence the characters," is an injunction of Confucius which no Chinaman neglects to follow. He remembers that "he who uses lettered paper to kindle the fire has ten demerits, and will have itchy sores"; he remembers that "he who tosses lettered paper into dirty water, or burns it in a filthy place, has twenty demerits and will frequently have sore eyes or become blind," whereas "he who goes about and collects, washes, and burns lettered paper, has 5000 merits, adds twelve years to his life, will become honoured and wealthy, and his children and grandchildren will be virtuous and filial." But his reverence has strict limits, and while he reverences the piece of paper upon which a moral precept is written, he often thinks himself absolved from reverencing the moral precept itself, just as a deacon in England need not necessarily be one who never over-reached his neighbours or swindled his creditors.



CHAPTER XV.

THE FRENCH MISSION AND THE ARSENAL IN YUNNAN CITY.

The most prominent structure within the city walls is the Heavenly Lord Hall (Tien-chu-tang), the pile of buildings which form the headquarters of the French Mission in the province of Yunnan. It was a master-stroke to secure possession of so important a site. The palace is on a higher level even than the yamen of the Viceroy, and must intercept much of the good fortune that would otherwise flow into the city. The facade of the central hall has been ornamented with a superb cross of porcelain mosaic, which is a conspicuous object from the city wall. A large garden, where the eucalyptus has been wisely planted, surrounds the buildings. In residence in the Heavenly Hall are the venerable Vicaire Apostolique of the province, Monseigneur Fenouil, the Provicaire, and four missionary priests, all four of whom are from Alsace. In the province altogether there are twenty-two French priests and eight ordained Chinese priests—thirty in all; their converts number 15,000. Monseigneur Fenouil is a landmark of Western China; he first set foot in the province in 1847, and is the oldest foreign resident in the interior of China. No Chinaman speaks purer Chinese than he; he thinks in Chinese. Present in the province throughout the Mohammedan insurrection, he was an eye-witness of the horrors of religious warfare. Few men have had their path in life marked by more thrilling episodes. He was elected Bishop, in 1880, by the unanimous vote of all the priests in the province, a vote confirmed by Rome; which is, I am told, the mode of election by which Catholic Missionary Bishops in China are always chosen.

The grand old Bishop seemed much amused at my journey. "I suppose you are riding a mule," he said, "for you English have large bones, and the Chinese ponies are very small." I said that I had come so far most of the way on foot. "You speak Chinese, of course?"

"Hardly at all; I speak only a dozen words of Chinese."

"Then you have a Chinese interpreter? No! An English companion who can speak Chinese? No! A Chinese servant who can speak English? No, and no escort! But without doubt you are armed? No! No escort, no revolver, no companion, and you can live on Chinese food. Ah! you have a brave heart, Monsieur."

At the time of my visit to Yunnan, Pere de Gorostarza, the accomplished Provicaire, was absent at Mungtze deciding a question of discipline. Four months before one of the most trusted converts of the mission had been sent to Mungtze to purchase a property for the use of the mission. He was given the purchase-money of 400 taels, but, when he arrived in Mungtze, and the eye of the mission was no longer upon him, he invested the money, not in premises for the mission, but in a coolie-hong for himself. His backsliding had availed him little. And he was now defending his conduct as best he could before the Bishop's deputy.

Converts of the French mission in China, it is well to remember, are no longer French subjects or proteges; the objection is no longer tenable that the mission shields bad characters who only become converted in order to escape from the consequences of their guilt.

How wonderful has been the pioneer work done by the Jesuit Missionaries in China! It may almost be said that the foundation of all that we know about China we owe to the Jesuit Missionaries. All maps on China are founded upon the maps of the Jesuit Missionaries employed for the purpose by the Emperor Kanghi (1663-1723), "the greatest prince who ever graced the throne of China." Their accuracy has been the wonder of all geographers for a century past. "Now that the 'Great River' (the Yangtse) has been surveyed," says Captain Blakiston, "for nearly 1600 miles from the ocean, and with instruments and appliances such as were unknown in the days of those energetic and persevering men, no small praise is due to the first Christian explorers for the extraordinary correctness of their maps and records." The reports of the early Jesuit Missionaries even Voltaire describes as the "productions of the most intelligent travellers that have extended and embellished the fields of science and philosophy."

Yet we, as Protestants, are warned by a great missionary that we must not be deluded by these insidious compliments; we must not forget that the work of the Jesuits in China "overtops all other forms of superstition and error in danger, and stands forth an organised conspiracy against the liberties of mankind. The schemes of the Jesuits must be checked."

One Sunday morning Mr. Jensen and I rode round the city wall. This is one of the most massive walls in a country of walled cities. It is built of brick and stone over a body of earth thirty feet thick; it is of imposing height, and wide enough for a carriage drive. When I was mounted on my mule the upper edge of the parapet was on a level with my forehead. There are six city gates. The great north gate is closely barred all through the rains to prevent the entrance of the "Flood God," who, fortunately, his intelligence being limited, knows no other way to enter the city than by this gate. The great turreted south gate is the most important of all, as it is in all Chinese cities. Near this gate the Viceroy's Yamen is situated, and the Yamen of the Futai (Governor of the Province); both buildings, of course, looking to the south, as did the Temple of Solomon and the tombs of the Mings, and as Chinese custom requires that every building of importance shall do, whether temple or yamen, private residence or royal palace. But why should they look south? Because from the south the sun comes, bringing with it "genial and animating influence," and putting new life into plant and animal after the winter.

The south gate is a double gate in a semi-circular bastion. Beyond it is a splendid triumphal arch erected by a grateful community to the memory of the late viceroy. A thickly-populated suburb extends from here to the wide common, where stands the lofty guardian pagoda of the city, 250 feet high, a conspicuous sight from every part of the great Yunnan plain. Rich temples are all around it, their eaves hung with sweet-toned bells, which tinkle with every breath of wind, giving forth what the Chinese poetically describe as "the tribute of praise from inanimate nature to the greatness of Buddha."



In the early morning the traveller is awakened by the steam whistle of the arsenal, a strange sound to be heard in so far inland a city in China. The factory is under Chinese management, a fact patent to any visitor. Its two foremen were trained partly in the arsenal in Nanking under Dr. Macartney (now Sir Halliday Macartney), and partly in the splendid Shanghai arsenal under Mr. Cornish. I went to the arsenal, and was received as usual in the opium-room. There was nothing to conceal, and I was freely shown everything. The arsenal turns out Krupp guns of 7-1/2 centimetres calibre, but the iron is inferior, and the workmen are in need of better training. Cartridges are also made here. And in one room I saw two men finishing with much neatness a pure silver opium-tray intended for the Fantai (provincial treasurer), but why made in the arsenal only a Chinaman could tell you. Work in the furnace is done at a disadvantage owing to the shortness of the furnace chimney, which is only 25 feet high. All attempts to increase its height are now forbidden by the authorities. There was agitation in the city when the chimney was being heightened. Geomancers were consulted, who saw the feeling of the majority, and therefore gave it as their unprejudiced opinion that, if the chimney were not stunted, the fungshui (good luck) of the Futai's yamen (provincial governor), and of that portion of the city under its protection, would depart for ever. All the machinery of the arsenal is stamped with the name of Greenwood, Battley and Co., Leeds. Rust and dirt are everywhere, and the 100 workmen for whom pay is drawn never number on the rare pay days more than sixty persons, a phenomenon observed in most establishments in China worked by government. Yet with a foreigner in charge excellent work could be turned out from the factory. The buildings are spacious, the grounds are ample.

The powder factory is outside the city, near the north-eastern angle of the wall, but the powder magazine is on some rising ground inside the city. No guns are stationed anywhere on the walls, though they may be in concealment in the turrets; but near the small west gate I saw some small cannon of ancient casting, built on the model of the guns cast by the Jesuit missionaries in China two centuries ago, if they were not the actual originals. They were all marked in relief with a cross and the device I.H.S.—a motto that you would think none but a Chinaman could select for a weapon designed to destroy men, yet characteristic of this country of contradictions. "The Chinese statesman," says Wingrove Cooke, the famous Times correspondent, "cuts off 10,000 heads, and cites a passage from Mencius about the sanctity of human life. He pockets the money given him to repair an embankment and thus inundates a province, and he deplores the land lost to the cultivator of the soil."

Du Halde tells us that "the first Chinese cannon were cast under the directions of Pere Verbiest in 1682, who blest the cannon, and gave to each the name of a saint." "A female saint!" says Huc.

Near the arsenal and drill ground there is a large intramural swamp or reedy lake, the reeds of which have an economic value as wicks for Chinese candles. Dykes cross the swamp in various directions, and in the centre there is a well known Taoist Temple, a richly endowed edifice, with superior gods and censers of great beauty. Where the swamp deepens into a pond at the margin of the temple, a pretty pavilion has been built, which is a favourite resort of the Yunnan gentry. The most chic dinner parties in the province are given here. The pond itself swarms with sacred fish; they are so numerous that when the masses move the whole pond vibrates. Many merits are gained by feeding the fish, and, as it happened at the time of my visit that I had no money, I was constrained to borrow fifteen cash from my chair coolies, with which I purchased some of the artificial food that women were vending and threw it to the fish, so that I might add another thousand to the innumerable merits I have already hoarded in Heaven.

Upon a pretty wooded hill near the centre of the city is the Confucian Temple, and on the lower slope of the hill, in an admirable position, are the quarters of the China Inland Mission, conducted by Mr. and Mrs. X., assisted by Mr. Graham, who at the time of my visit was absent in Tali, and by two exceedingly nice young girls, one of whom comes from Melbourne. The single ladies live in quarters of their own on the edge of a swamp, and suffer inevitably from malarial fever. Mr. X. "finds the people very hard to reach," he told me, and his success has only been relatively cheering. After labouring here nearly six years—the mission was first opened in 1882—he has no male converts, though there are two promising nibblers, who are waiting for the first vacancy to become adherents. There was a convert, baptised before Mr. X. came here, a poor manure-coolie, who was employed by the mission as an evangelist in a small way; but "Satan tempted him, he fell from grace, and had to be expelled for stealing the children's buttons." It was a sad trial to the mission. The men refuse to be saved, recalcitrant sinners! but the women happily are more tractable. Mr. X. has up to date (May, 1894), baptised his children's nurse girl, the "native helper" of the single ladies, and his wife's cook. Mr. X. works hard, far too hard. He is of the type that never can be successful in China. He was converted when nearing middle age, is narrow and uncompromising in his views, and is as stern as a Cameronian. It is a farce sending such men to China. At his services there is never any lack of listeners, who marvel greatly at the new method of speaking Chinese which this enterprising emissary—in London he was in the oil trade—is endeavouring to introduce into the province. Of "tones" instead of the five used by the Chinese, he does not recognise more than two, and these he uses indifferently. He hopes, however, to be understood by loud speaking, and he bellows at the placid coolies like a bull of Bashan.

I paid an early visit to my countrymen at the Yesu-tang (Jesus Hall), the mission home, as I thought that my medical knowledge might be of some service. I wished to learn a little about their work, but to my great sorrow I was no sooner seated than they began plying me with questions about the welfare of my soul. I am a "poor lost sinner," they told me. They flung texts at my head, and then sang a terrifying ballad, by which I learnt for the first time the awful fate that is to be mine. It is something too dreadful to contemplate. And the cheerful equanimity with which they announced it to me! I left the Yesu-tang in a cold sweat, and never returned there.

Missionary work is being pursued in the province with increasing vigour. Among its population of from five to seven millions, spread over an area of 107,969 square miles, there are eighteen Protestant missionaries, nine men and nine ladies (this is the number at present, but the usual strength is twenty-three). Stations are open at Chaotong (1887), Tongchuan (1891), Yunnan City (1882), Tali (1881), and Kuhtsing (1889). The converts number—the work, however, must not be judged by statistics—two at Chaotong, one at Tongchuan, three at Yunnan City, three at Tali, and two at Kuhtsing.

That the Chinese are capable of very rapid conversion can be proved by numberless instances quoted in missionary reports on China. The Rev. S. F. Woodin (in the Records of the Missionary Conference, 1877, p. 91) states that he converted a "grossly immoral Chinaman, who had smoked opium for more than twenty years," simply by saying to him "in a spirit of earnest love, elder brother Six, as far as I can see, you must perish; you are Hell's child."

Mr. Stanley P. Smith, B.A., who was formerly stroke of the Cambridge eight, had been only seven months in China when he performed that wonderful conversion, so applauded at the Missionary Conference of 1888, of "a young Chinaman, a learned man, a B.A. of his University," who heard Mr. Smith speak in the Chinese that can be acquired in seven months, and "accepted Him there and then." (Records of the Missionary Conference, 1888, i., 46). Indeed, the earlier the new missionaries in China begin to preach the more rapid are the conversions they make.

Now, in this province of Yunnan, conversions will have to be infinitely more rapid before we can say that there is any reasonable hope of the proximate conversion of the province. The problem is this: In a population of from five to seven millions of friendly and peaceable people, eighteen missionaries in eight years (the average time during which the mission stations have been opened), have converted eleven Chinese; how long, then, will it take to convert the remainder?

"I believe," said a late member of the House of Commons, who was once Lord Mayor of London, speaking at the anniversary meeting of the China Inland Mission in 1884, "I believe God intends to accomplish great things in China," and, undoubtedly, the opinion of an ex-Lord Mayor on such a subject is entitled to great weight.

"The Gospel," he said, "is making rapid progress in China.... We are amazed at the great things God hath wrought" (in the conversion of the Chinese).

Let us examine for a moment an instance of the rapid progress which excited the amazement of this good man. No missionary body in China is working with greater energy than the China Inland Mission. Their missionaries go far afield in their work, and they are, what their mission intends them to be, pioneer Protestant missionaries in Inland China. At the present time, the beginning of 1894, the Inland Mission numbers 611 male and female missionaries. They are assisted by 261 paid native helpers, and the combined body of 872 Evangelists baptised during the year just passed (1893) 821 Chinese. These figures, taken from China's Millions, 1894, p. 122, attest a rather lower rate of progress than the other missions can boast of; but a considerable part of the inland work, it must be remembered, is the most difficult work of all—the preaching of the Gospel for the first time in newly-opened districts.



The Viceroy of the two provinces of Yunnan and Kweichow, Wong-wen-shao, is one of the most enlightened rulers in China. No stranger could fail to be impressed with his keen intellectual face and courtly grace of manner. His career has been a distinguished one. Good fortune attended him even at his birth. He is a native of Hangchow, in Chehkiang, a city famous in China for its coffins. Every Chinaman will tell you that true felicity consists in three things: to be born in Peking (under the shadow of the Son of Heaven); to live in Soochow (where the girls are prettiest); and to die in Hangchow (where the coffins are grandest). Twelve years ago he was Governor of the province of Hunan. Called then to Peking as one of the Ministers of State of the "Tsungli Yamen," or Foreign Office, he remained there four years, his retirement being then due to the inexorable law which requires an official to resign office and go into mourning for three years on the death of one of his parents. In this case it was his mother. (A Chinese mother suckles her child two and a half years, and, as the age of the child is dated from a time anterior by some months to birth, the child is three years old before it leaves its mother's breast. Three years, therefore, has been defined as the proper period for mourning.) At the termination of the three years, Wong was reappointed Governor of Hunan, and a year and a half later, in May, 1890, he was appointed to his present important satrapy, where he has the supreme control of a district larger than Spain and Portugal, and with a population larger than that of Canada and Australia combined. In May, 1893, he made application to the throne to be allowed to return to his ancestral home to die, but the privilege was refused him.

Before leaving Yunnan city the Mandarin Li kindly provided me with a letter of introduction to his friend Brigadier-General Chang-chen Nien, in Tengyueh. Since it contained a communication between persons of rank, the envelope was about the size of an ordinary pillow-slip. The General was presumably of higher rank than the traveller; I had, therefore, in accordance with Chinese etiquette, to provide myself with a suitable visiting card of a size appropriate to his importance. Now Chinese visiting cards differ from ours in differing in size according to the importance of the person to whom they are to be presented. My ordinary card is eight inches by three, red in colour—the colour of happiness—and inscribed in black with the three characters of my Chinese name. But the card that I was expected to present to the General was very much larger than this. Folded it was of the same size, but unfolded it was ten times the size of the other (eight by thirty inches), and the last page, politely inscribed in Chinese, contained this humiliating indication of its purport: "Your addlepated nephew Mo-li-son bows his stupid head, and pays his humble respects to your exalted Excellency."



I still have this card in my possession; and I should be extremely reluctant to present it to any official in the Empire of lower rank than the Emperor.



CHAPTER XVI.

THE JOURNEY FROM YUNNAN CITY TO TALIFU.

I sold the mule in Yunnan City, and bought instead a little white pony at a cost, including saddle, bridle, and bells, of L3 6s. In doing this I reversed the exchange that would have been made by a Chinaman. A mule is a more aristocratic animal than a pony; it thrives better on a journey, and is more sure-footed. If a pony, the Chinese tell you, lets slip one foot, the other three follow; whereas a mule, if three feet slip from under him, will hold on with the fourth.

My men, who had come with me from Chaotong, were paid off in Yunnan; but it was pleasant to find all three accept an offer to go on with me to Talifu. Coolies to do this journey are usually supplied by the coolie agents for the wage of two chien a day each (7d.), each man to carry seventy catties (93lbs.), find himself by the way, and spend thirteen days on the journey. But no coolies, owing to the increase in the price of food, were now willing to go for so little. Accordingly I offered my two coolies three taels each (9s.), instead of the hong price of 7s. 9d., and loads of fifty catties instead of seventy catties. I offered to refund them 100 cash each (2-1/2d.) a day for every day that they had been delayed in Yunnan, and, in addition, I promised them a reward of five mace each (1s. 6d.) if they would take me to Tali in nine days, instead of thirteen, the first evening not to count. To Laohwan, who had no load to carry, but had to attend to me and the pony and pay away the cash, I made a similar offer. These terms, involving me in an outlay of 36s. for hiring three men to go with me on foot 915 li, and return empty-handed, were considered liberal, and were agreed to at once.

The afternoon, then, of the 19th April saw us again en route, bound to the west to Talifu, the most famous city in western China, the headquarters of the Mohammedan "Sultan" during the great rebellion of 1857-1873.

By the courtesy of the Mandarin Li, two men were detailed to "sung" me—to accompany me, that is—and take the responsibility for my safe delivery at the next hsien. One was a "wen," a chairen, or yamen runner; the other was a "wu," a soldier, with a sightless right eye, who was dressed in the ragged vestiges of a uniform that reflected both the poverty of his environment and, inversely, the richness of his commanding officer. For in China the officer enriches himself by the twofold expedient of drawing pay for soldiers who have no existence, except in his statement of claim, and by diverting the pay of his soldiers who do exist from their pockets into his own.



As I was leaving, a colossal Chinaman, sent by the Fantai to speed the foreign gentleman on his way, strode into the court. He was dressed in military jacket and official hat and foxtails. He was the Yunnan giant, Chang Yan Miun, a kindly-featured monster, whom it is a pity to see buried in China when he might be holding levees of thousands in a Western side-show. For the information of those in search of novelties, I may say that the giant is thirty years of age, a native of Tongchuan, born of parents of ordinary stature; he is 7ft. 1in. in his bare feet, and weighs, when in condition, 27st. 6lb. With that ingenious arrangement for increasing height known to all showmen, this giant might be worth investing in as a possible successor to his unrivalled namesake. There is surely money in it. Chang's present earnings are rather less than 7s. a month, without board and lodging; he is unmarried, and has no incumbrance; and he is slightly taller and much more massively built than a well-known American giant whom I once had permission to measure, who has been shown half over the world as the "tallest man on earth," his height being attested as "7ft. 11in. in his stockings' soles," and who commands the salary of an English admiral.

We made only a short march the first evening, but after that we travelled by long stages. The country was very pretty, open glades with clumps of pine, and here and there a magnificent sacred tree like the banyan, under whose far-reaching branches small villages are often half concealed. Despite the fertility of the country, poverty and starvation met us at every step; the poor were lingering miserably through the year. Goitre, too, was increasing in frequency. It was rarely that a group gathered to see us some of whose members were not suffering from this horrible deformity. And everywhere in the pretty country were signs of the ruthless devastation of religious war. That was a war of extermination. "A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple."

Crumbling walls are at long distances from the towns they used to guard; there are pastures and waste lands where there were streets of buildings; walls of houses have returned whence they came to the mother earth; others are roofless. In the open country, far from habitation, the traveller comes across groups of bare walls with foundations still uncovered, and dismantled arches, and broken images in the long grass, that were formerly yamens and temples in the midst of thriving communities. Yet there are signs of a renaissance; many new houses are being built along the main road; walls are being repaired, and bridges reconstructed. When an exodus takes place from Szechuen to this province, there is little reason why Yunnan should not become one of the richest provinces in China. It has every advantage of climate, great fertility of soil, and immense mineral resources hardly yet developed. It needs population. It needs the population that dwelt in the province before the rebellion involved the death of millions. It can absorb an immense proportion of the surplus population of China. During, and subsequent to, the Taiping rebellion the province of Szechuen increased by 45,000,000 in forty years (1842-82); given the necessity, there seems no reason why the population of Yunnan should not increase in an almost equal proportion.

On the 22nd we passed Lu-feng-hsien, another ruined town. The finest stone bridge I have seen in Western China, and one that would arrest attention in any country in the world, is at this town. It crosses the wide bed of a stream that in winter is insignificant, but which grows in volume in the rains of summer to a broad and powerful river. It is a bridge of seven beautiful arches; it is 12 yards broad and 150 yards long, of perfect simplicity and symmetry, with massive piers, all built of dressed masonry and destined to survive the lapse of centuries. Triumphal archways with memorial tablets and pedestals of carved lions are befitting portals to a really noble work.

On the 23rd we reached the important city of Chuhsing-fu, a walled city, still half-in-ruins, that was long occupied by the Mohammedans, and suffered terrible reprisals on its recapture by the Imperialists. For four days we had travelled at an average rate of one hundred and five li (thirty-five miles) a day. I must, however, note that these distances as estimated by Mr. Jensen, the constructor of the telegraph line, do not agree with the distances in Mr. Baber's itinerary. The Chinese distances in li agree in both estimates; but, whereas Mr. Jensen allows three li for a mile, Mr. Baber allows four and a-half, a wide difference indeed. For convenience sake I have made use of the telegraph figures, but Mr. Baber was so scrupulously accurate in all that he wrote that I have no doubt the telegraph distances are over-estimated.

We were again in a district almost exclusively devoted to the poppy; the valley-plains sparkled with poppy flowers of a multiplicity of tints. The days were pleasant, and the sun shone brightly; every plant was in flower; doves cooed in the trees, and the bushes in blossom were bright with butterflies. Lanes led between hedges of wild roses white with flower, and, wherever a creek trickled across the plain, its willow-lined borders were blue with forget-me-nots. And everywhere a peaceful people, who never spoke a word to the foreigner that was not friendly.

On the evening of the 24th, at a ruined town thirty li from Luho, we received our first check. It was at a walled town, with gateways and a pagoda that gave some indication of its former prosperity, prettily situated among the trees on the confines of a plain of remarkable fertility. Near sundown we passed down the one long street, all battered and dismantled, which is all that is left of the old town. News of the foreigner quickly spread, and the people gathered into the street to see me—no reception could be more flattering. We did not wait, but, pushing on, we passed out by the west gate and hastened on across the plain. But I noticed that Laohwan kept looking back at the impoverished town, shaking his head and stuttering "pu-pu-pu-pu-hao! pu-pu-pu-hao!" (bad! bad!) We had thus gone half a mile or so, when we were arrested by cries behind us, and our last chairen was seen running, panting, after us. We waited for him; he was absurdly excited, and could hardly speak. He made an address to me, speaking with great energy and gesticulation; but what was its purport, Dios sabe. When he had finished, not to be outdone in politeness, I thanked him in English for the kindly phrases in which he had spoken to me, assured him of my continued sympathy, and undertook to say that, if ever he came to Geelong, he would find there a house at his disposition, and a friend who would be ever ready to do him a service. He seemed completely mystified, and began to speak again, more excitedly than before. It was getting late, and a crowd was collecting, so I checked him by waving my left hand before my face and bawling at him with all my voice: "Putung, you stupid ass, putung (I don't understand)! Can't you see I don't understand a word you say, you benighted heathen you? Putung, man, putung! Advance Australia, dzo (go)!" And, swinging open my umbrella, I walked on. His excitement increased—we must go back to the town; he seized me by the wrists, and urged me to go back. We had a slight discussion; his feet gave from under him and he fell down, and I was going on cheerfully when he burst out crying. This I interpreted to mean that he would get into trouble if I did not return, so, of course, I turned back at once, for the tears of a Chinaman are sadly affecting. Back, then, we were taken to an excellent inn in the main street, where a respectful levee of the townsfolk had assembled to welcome me. A polite official called upon me, to whom I showed, with simulated indignation, my official card and my Chinese passport, and I hinted to him in English that this interference with my rights as a traveller from England, protected by the favour of the Emperor, would—let him mark my word—be made an international question. While saying this, I inadvertently left on my box, so that all might see it, the letter of introduction to the Brigadier-General in Tengyueh, which was calculated to give the natives an indication of the class of Chinese who had the privilege to be admitted to my friendship. The official was very polite and apologetic. I freely forgave him, and we had tea together.

He had done it all for the best. A moneyed foreigner was passing through his town near sundown without stopping to spend a single cash there. Was it not his duty, as a public-spirited man, to interfere and avert this loss, and compel the stranger to spend at least one night within his gates?

This was what I wrote at the time. I subsequently found that I had been sent for to come back because the road was believed to be dangerous, there was no secure resting-place, and the authorities could not guarantee my safety. Imagine a Chinese in a Western country acting with the bluster that I did, although in good humour; I wonder whether he would be treated with the courtesy that those Chinamen showed to me!

On the 25th an elderly chairen was ready to accompany us in the morning, and he remained with us all day. All day he was engrossed in deep thought. He spoke to no one, but he kept a watchful eye over his charge, never leaving me a moment, but dogging my very footsteps all the hundred li we travelled together. Poorly clad, he was better provided than his brother of yesterday in that he wore sandals, whereas the chairen of yesterday was in rags and barefoot. He was, of course, unprovided with weapon of any kind—it was moral force that he relied on. Over his shoulder was slung a bag from which projected his opium-pipe; a tobacco pipe and tobacco box hung at his girdle; a green glass bottle of crude opium he carried round his neck.

The chairen is the policeman of China, the lictor of the magistrate, the satellite of the official; the soldier is the representative of military authority. Now, China, in the person of her greatest statesman, Li Hung Chang, has, through the secretary of the Anti-Opium Society, called upon England "to aid her in the efforts she is now making to suppress opium." If, then, China is sincere in her alleged efforts to abolish opium, it is the chairen and the soldier who must be employed by the authorities to suppress the evil; yet I have never been accompanied by either a chairen or a soldier who did not smoke opium, nor have I to my knowledge ever met a chairen or a soldier who was not an opium-smoker. Through all districts of Yunnan, wherever the soil permits it, the poppy is grown for miles, as far as the sight can reach, on every available acre, on both sides of the road.

But why does China grow this poppy? Have not the literati and elders of Canton written to support the schemes of the Anti-Opium Society in these thrilling words: "If Englishmen wish to know the sentiments of China, here they are:—If we are told to let things go on as they are going, then there is no remedy and no salvation for China. Oh! it makes the blood run cold, and we want in this our extremity to ask the question of High Heaven, what unknown crimes or atrocity have the Chinese people committed beyond all others that they are doomed to suffer thus?" (Cited by Mr. S. S. Mander, China's Millions, iv., 156.)

And the women of Canton, have they not written to the missionaries "that there is no tear that they shed that is not red with blood because of this opium?" ("China," by M. Reed, p. 63). Why, then, does China, while she protests against the importation of a drug which a Governor of Canton, himself an opium-smoker, described as a "vile excrementitious substance" ("Barrow's Travels," p. 153), sanction, if not foster, with all the weight of the authorities in the ever-extending opium-districts the growth of the poppy? To the Rev. G. Piercy (formerly of the W.M.S., Canton), we are indebted for the following explanation of this anomaly: China, it appears, is growing opium in order to put a stop to opium-smoking.

"Moreover, China has not done with the evils of opium, even if our hands were washed of this traffic to-day. China in her desperation has invoked Satan to cast out Satan. She now grows her own opium, vainly dreaming that, if the Indian supply lapse, she can then deal with this rapidly growing evil. But Satan is not divided against himself; he means his kingdom to stand. Opium-growing will not destroy opium-smoking." (Missionary Conference of 1888, Records, ii., 546.)

"Yet the awful guilt remains," said the Ven. Archdeacon Farrar on a recent occasion in Westminster Abbey, "that we, 'wherever winds blow and waters roll,' have girdled the world with a zone of drunkenness, until I seem to shudder as I think of the curses, not loud but deep, muttered against our name by races which our fire-water has decimated and our vice degraded." (National Righteousness, December 1892, p. 4.)

And this patriotic utterance of a distinguished Englishman the Chinese will quote in unexpected support of the memorial "On the Restriction of Christianity" addressed to the Throne of China in 1884 by the High Commissioner Peng Yue-lin, which memorial stated in severe language that "since the treaties have permitted foreigners from the West to spread their doctrines, the morals of the people have been greatly injured." ("The Causes of the Anti-Foreign Disturbances in China." Rev. Gilbert Reid, M.A., p. 9.)

Forty li from our sleeping place we came to the pretty town of Shachiaokai, on some undulating high ground well sheltered with trees. Justice had lately been here with her headsman and brought death to a gang of malefactors. Their heads, swinging in wooden cages, hung from the tower near the gateway. They could be seen by all persons passing along the road, and, with due consideration for the feelings of the bereaved relatives, they were hung near enough for the features to be recognised by their friends. Each head was in a cage of its own, and was suspended by the pigtail to the rim, so that it might not lie upside down but could by-and-by rattle in its box as dead men's bones should do. To each cage a white ticket was attached giving the name of the criminal and his confession of the offence for which he was executed. They were the heads of highway robbers who had murdered two travellers on the road near Chennan-chow, and it was this circumstance which accounted for the solicitude of the officials near Luho to prevent our being benighted in a district where such things were possible.



Midway between Shachiaokai and Pupeng there was steep climbing to be done till we reached Ying-wu-kwan, the "Eagle Nest Barrier," which is more than 8000 feet above the sea. Then by very hilly and poor country we came to Pupeng, and, pursuing our way over a thickly-peopled plateau, we reached a break in the high land from which we descended into a wide and deep valley, skirted with villages and gleaming with sheets of water—the submerged rice-fields. At the foot of the steep was a poor mud town, but, standing back from it in the fields, was a splendid Taoist temple fit for a capital. In this village we were delayed for nearly an hour while my three men bargained against half the village for the possession of a hen that was all unconscious of the comments, flattering and deprecatory, that were being passed on its fatness. It was secured eventually for 260 cash, the vendors having declared that the hen was a family pet, hatched on a lucky day, that it had been carefully and tenderly reared, and that nothing in the world could induce them to part with it for a cash less than 350. My men with equal confidence, based upon long experience in the purchase of poultry, asserted that the real value of the hen was 200 cash, and that not a single cash more of the foreign gentleman's money could they conscientiously invest in such a travesty of a hen as that. But little by little each party gave way till they were able to tomber d'accord.

A pleasant walk across the busy plain brought us to Yunnan Yeh, where we passed the night.

On the 27th we had an unsatisfactory day's journey. We travelled only seventy li over an even road, yet with four good hours of daylight before us my men elected to stop when we came to the village of Yenwanshan. We had left the main road for some unknown reason, and were taking a short cut over the mountains to Tali. But a short-cut in China often means the longest distance, and I was sure that this short-cut would bring us to Tali a day later than if we had gone by the main road—in ten days, that is, from Yunnan, instead of the nine which my men had promised me. Laohwan, who, like most Chinaman I met, persisted in thinking that I was deaf, yelled to me in the presence of the village that the next stopping place was twenty miles distant, that "mitte liao! mitte liao!" ("there were no beans") on the way for the pony, and that assuredly we would reach Tali to-morrow, having given the pony the admirable rest that here offered. As he stammered these sentences the people supported what he said. Obviously their statements were ex parte, and were promoted solely by the desire to see the distinguished foreign mandarin sojourn for one night in their hungry midst. So here I was detained in a tumble-down inn that had formerly been a temple. All of us, men and master, were housed in the old guest-room. Beds were formed of disused coffin boards, laid between steps made of clods of dry clay; the floor was earth, the windows paper. The pony was feeding from a trough in the temple hall itself, an armful of excellent grass before it, while a bucket of beans was soaking for him in our corner. Other mules and ponies were stationed in the side pavilions where formerly were displayed the scenes of torture in the Buddhist Hells.

As I wrote at a table by the window, a crowd collected, stretching across the street and quarrelling to catch a glimpse of the foreign teacher and his strange method of writing, so different from the Chinese. Poor sickly people were these—of the ten in the first row three were suffering from goitre, one from strabismus, and two from ophthalmia. All were poorly clad and poorly nourished; all were very dirty, and their heads were unshaven of the growth of days. But, despite their poverty, nearly all the women, the children as well as the grandmothers, wore silver earrings of pretty filigree.

Now, even among these poor people, I noticed that there was a disposition rather to laugh at me than to open the eyes of wonder; and this is a peculiarity of the Chinese which every traveller will be struck with. It often grieved me. During my journey, although I was treated with undeniable friendliness, I found that the Chinese, instead of being impressed by my appearance, would furtively giggle when they saw me. But they were never openly rude like the coloured folk were in Jamaica, when, stranded in their beautiful island, I did them the honour to go as a "walk-foot buccra" round the sugar plantations from Ewarton to Montego Bay. Even poor ragged fellows, living in utter misery, would laugh and snigger at me when not observed, and crack jokes at the foreigner who was well-fed, well-clad, and well-mounted in a way you would think to excite envy rather than derision. But Chinese laughter seems to be moved by different springs from ours. The Chinaman makes merry in the presence of death. A Chinaman, come to announce to you the death of a beloved parent or brother, laughs heartily as he tells you—you might think he was overflowing with joy, but he is really sick and sore at heart, and is only laughing to deceive the spirits. So it may be that the poor beggars who laughed at that noble presence which has been the admiration of my friends in four continents, were moved to do so by the hope to deceive the evil spirits who had punished them with poverty, and so by their apparent gaiety induce them to relax the severity of their punishment.

To within two or three miles of this village the road was singularly level; I do not think that it either rose or fell 100 feet in twenty miles. Forty li from where we slept the night before, having previously left the main road, we came to the large walled town of Yunnan-hsien. The streets were crowded, for it was market day, and both sides of the main thoroughfares, especially in the vicinity of the Confucian Temple, were thronged with peasant women selling garden produce, turnips, beans and peas, and live fish caught in the lake beyond Tali. Articles of Western trade were also for sale—stacks of calico, braid, and thread, "new impermeable matches made in Trieste," and "toilet soap of the finest quality." I had a royal reception as I rode through the crowd, and the street where was situated the inn to which we went for lunch speedily became impassable. There was keen competition to see me. Two thieves were among the foremost, with huge iron crowbars chained to their necks and ankles, while a third prisoner, with his head pilloried in a cangue, obstructed the gaze of many. There was the most admirable courtesy shown me; it was the "foreign teacher" they wished to see, not the "foreign devil." When I rose from the table, half a dozen guests sitting at the other tables rose also and bowed to me as I passed out. Of all people I have ever met, the Chinese are, I think, the politest. My illiterate Laohwan, who could neither read nor write, had a courtesy of demeanour, a well-bred ease of manner, a graceful deference that never approached servility, which it was a constant pleasure to me to witness.

As regards the educated classes, there can be little doubt, I think, that there are no people in the world so scrupulously polite as the Chinese. Their smallest actions on all occasions of ceremony are governed by the most minute rules. Let me give, as an example, the method of cross-examination to which the stranger is subjected, and which is a familiar instance of true politeness in China.

When a well-bred Chinaman, of whatever station, meets you for the first time, he thus addresses you, first asking you how old you are:

"What is your honourable age?"

"I have been dragged up a fool so many years," you politely reply.

"What is your noble and exalted occupation?"

"My mean and contemptible calling is that of a doctor."

"What is your noble patronymic?"

"My poverty-struck family name is Mo."

"How many honourable and distinguished sons have you?"

"Alas! Fate has been niggardly; I have not even one little bug."

But, if you can truthfully say that you are the honourable father of sons, your interlocutor will raise his clasped hands and say gravely, "Sir, you are a man of virtue; I congratulate you." He continues—

"How many tens of thousands of pieces of silver have you?" meaning how many daughters have you?

"My yatows" (forked heads or slave children), "my daughters," you answer with a deprecatory shrug, "number so many."

So the conversation continues, and the more minute are the inquiries the more polite is the questioner.

Unlike most of the Western nations, the Chinese have an overmastering desire to have children. More than death itself the Chinaman fears to die without leaving male progeny to worship at his shrine; for, if he should die childless, he leaves behind him no provision for his support in heaven, but wanders there a hungry ghost, forlorn and forsaken—an "orphan" because he has no children. "If one has plenty of money," says the Chinese proverb, "but no children, he cannot be reckoned rich; if one has children, but no money, he cannot be considered poor." To have sons is a foremost virtue in China; "the greatest of the three unfilial things," says Mencius, "is to have no children." (Mencius, iv., pt. i., 26).

In China longevity is the highest of the five grades of felicity. Triumphal arches are erected all over the kingdom in honour of those who have attained the patriarchal age which among us seems only to be assured to those who partake in sufficient quantity of certain fruit-salts and pills. Age when not known is guessed by the length of the beard, which is never allowed to grow till the thirty-second year. Now it happens that I am clean-shaven, and, as it is a well-known fact that the face of the European is an enigma to the Oriental, just as the face of the Chinaman is an inscrutable mystery to most of us, I have often been amused by the varying estimates of my age advanced by curious bystanders. It has been estimated as low as twelve—"look at the foreigner," they said, "there's a fine fat boy!"—and never higher than twenty-two. But it is not only in China that a youthful appearance has hampered me in my walk through life.

I remember that on one occasion, some years ago, I obliged a medical friend by taking his practice while he went away for a few days to be married. It was in a semi-barbarian village named Portree, in a forgotten remnant of Scotland called the Isle of Skye. The time was winter. The first case I was called to was that of a bashful matron, the baker's wife, who had lately given birth to her tenth child. I entered the room cheerfully. She looked me over critically, and then greatly disconcerted me by remarking that: "She was gey thankfu' to the Lord that it was a' by afore I cam', as she had nae wush to be meddled wi' by a laddie of nineteen." Yet I was two years older than the doctor who had attended her.

If in China you are so fortunate as to be graced with a beard, the Chinaman will add many years to your true age. In the agreeable company of one of the finest men in China, I once made a journey to the Nankow Pass in the Great Wall, north of Peking. My friend had a beard like a Welsh bard's, and, though a younger man than his years, forty-four, there was not a native who saw him, who did not gaze upon him with awe, as a possible Buddha, and not one who attributed to him an age less than eighty.

Next day, the 28th of April, despite my misgivings, my men fulfilled their promise, and led me into Tali on the ninth day out from Yunnan. We had come 307 miles in nine days. They walked all the way, living frugally on scanty rations. I walked only 210 miles; I was better fed than they, and I had a pony at my hand ready to carry me whenever I was tired.

My men thus earned a reward of eighteen pence each for doing thirteen stages in nine days. Long before daylight we were on our way. For miles and miles in the early morning we were climbing up the mountains, till we reached a plateau where the wind blew piercingly keen, and my fingers ached with the cold, and the rarefaction in the atmosphere made breathing uneasy. The road was lonely and unfrequented. We were accompanied by a muleteer who knew the way, by his sturdy son of twelve, and his two pack horses. By midday we had left the bare plateau, had passed the three pagoda peaks, and were standing on the brow of a steep hill overlooking the valleys of Chaochow and Tali. The plains were studded with thriving villages, in rich fields, and intersected with roadways lined with hedges. There on the left was the walled city of Chaochow, beyond, to the right, was the great lake of Tali, hemmed in by mountains, those beyond the lake thickly covered with snow, and rising 7000 feet above the lake, which itself is 7000 feet above the sea.

We descended into the valley, and, as we picked our way down the steep path, I could count in the lap of the first valley eighteen villages besides the walled city. Crossing the fields we struck the main road, and mingled with the stream of people who were bending their steps towards Hsiakwan. Many varieties of feature were among them, a diversity of type unlooked for by the traveller in China who had become habituated to the uniformity of type of the Chinese face. There were faces plainly European, others as unmistakably Hindoo, Indigenes of Yunnan province, Thibetans, Cantonese pedlars, and Szechuen coolies. A broad flagged road brought us to the important market town of Hsiakwan, which guards the southern pass to the Valley of Tali. It is on the main road going west to the frontier of Burma, and is the junction where the road turns north to Tali. It is a busy town. It is one of the most famous halting places on the main road to Burma. The two largest caravanserais in Western China are in Hsiakwan, and I do not exaggerate when I say that a regiment of British cavalry could be quartered in either of them. At a restaurant near the cross-road we had rice and a cup of tea, and a bowl of the vermicelli soup known as mien, the muleteer and his son sitting down with my men. When the time came to go, the muleteer, unrolling a string of cash from his waistband, was about to pay his share, when Laohwan with much civility refused to permit him. He insisted, but Laohwan was firm; had they been Frenchmen, they could not have been more polite and complimentary. The muleteer gave way with good grace, and Laohwan paid with my cash, and gained merit by his courtesy.



CHAPTER XVII.

THE CITY OF TALI—PRISONS—POISONING—PLAGUES AND MISSIONS.

Three hours later we were in Tali. A broad paved road, smooth from the passage of countless feet, leads to the city. Rocky creeks drain the mountain range into the lake; they are spanned by numerous bridges of dressed stone, many of the slabs of which are well cut granite blocks eighteen feet in length. At a stall by the roadside excellent ices were for sale, genuine ices, made of concave tablets of pressed snow sweetened with treacle, costing one cash each—equal to one penny for three dozen. We passed the Temple to the Goddess of Mercy, and entered Tali by the south gate. Then by the yamen of the Titai and the Great Five Glory Gate, the northern entrance of what was for seventeen years the palace of the Mohammedan king during the rebellion, we turned down the East street to the Yesu-tang, the Inland Mission, where Mr. and Mrs. John Smith gave me a cordial greeting.

Tali has always been an important city. It was the capital of an independent kingdom in the time of Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. It was the headquarters of the Mohammedan Sultan or Dictator, Tu Wen Hsiu, during the rebellion, and seemed at one time destined to become the capital of an independent Moslem Empire in Western China.

The city surrendered to the Mohammedans in 1857. It was recaptured by the Imperialists under General Yang Yu-ko on January 15th, 1873, the Chinese troops being aided by artillery cast by Frenchmen in the arsenal of Yunnan and manned by French gunners. At its recapture the carnage was appalling; the streets were ankle-deep in blood. Of 50,000 inhabitants 30,000 were butchered. After the massacre twenty-four panniers of human ears were sent to Yunnan city to convince the people of the capital that they had nothing more to fear from the rebellion.

In March, 1873, Yang was appointed Titai or Commander-in-chief of Yunnan Province, with his headquarters in Tali, not in the capital, and Tali has ever since been the seat of the most important military command in the province.

The subsequent history of Yang may be told in a few words. He assumed despotic power over the country he had conquered, and grew in power till his authority became a menace to the Imperial Government. They feared that he aspired to found a kingdom of his own in Western China, and recalled him to Peking—to do him honour. He was not to be permitted to return to Yunnan. At the time of his recall another rebellion had broken out against China—the rebellion of the French—and, like another Uriah, the powerful general was sent to the forefront in Formosa, where he was opportunely slain by a French bullet, or by a misdirected Chinese one.

After his death it was found that Yang had made a noble bequest to the City of Tali. During his residence he had built for himself a splendid yamen of granite and marble. This he had richly endowed and left as a free gift to the city as a college for students. It is one of the finest residences in China, and, though only seventy undergraduates were living there at the time of my visit, the rooms could accommodate in comfort many hundreds.



Tali is situated on the undulating ground that shelves gently from the base of snow-clad mountains down to the lake. The lower slopes of the mountain, above the town, are covered with myriads of grave-mounds, which in the distance are scarcely distinguishable from the granite blocks around them. Creeks and rills of running water spring from the melting of the snows far up the mountain, run among the grave-mounds, and are then trained into the town. The Chinese residents thus enjoy the privilege of drinking a diluted solution of their ancestors. Half-way to the lake, there is a huge tumulus of earth and stone over-grown with grass, in which are buried the bones of 10,000 Mohammedans who fell during the massacre. There is no more fertile valley in the world than the valley of Tali. It is studded with villages. Between the two passes, Hsiakwan on the south, and Shang-kwan on the north, which are distant from each other a long day's walk, there are 360 villages, each in its own plantation of trees, with a pretty white temple in the centre with curved roof and upturned gables. The sunny reaches of the lake are busy with fleets of fishing boats. The poppy, grown in small pockets by the margin of the lake, is probably unequalled in the world; the flowers, as I walked through the fields, were on a level with my forehead.

Tali is not a large city; its wall is only three and a half miles in circumference. Before the rebellion populous suburbs extended half-way to Hsiakwan, but they are now only heaps of rubble. In the town itself there are market-gardens and large open spaces where formerly there were narrow streets of Chinese houses. The wall is in fairly good repair, but there are no guns in the town, except a few old-fashioned cannon lying half buried in the ground near the north gate.

One afternoon we climbed up the mountain intending to reach a famous cave, "The Phoenix-eyed Cave" (Fung-yen-tung) which overlooks a precipice, of some fame in years gone by as a favourite spot for suicides. We did not reach the cave. My energy gave out when we were only half-way, so we sat down in the grass and, to use a phrase that I fancy I have heard before, we feasted our eyes on the scene before us. And here we gathered many bunches of edelweiss.

As we were coming back down the hill, picking our way among the graves, a pensive Chinaman stopped us to ask our assistance in finding him a lucky spot in which to bury his father, who died a year ago but was still above ground. He was sorry to hear that we could not pretend to any knowledge of such things. He was of an inquiring mind, for he then asked us if we had seen any precious stones in the hillside—every Chinaman knows that the foreigner with his blue eyes can see four feet underground—but he was again disappointed with our reply, or did not believe us.

At the poor old shrine to the God of Riches, half a dozen Chinamen in need of the god's good offices were holding a small feast in his honour. They had prepared many dishes, and, having "dedicated to the god the spiritual essence, were now about to partake of the insipid remains." "Ching fan," they courteously said to us when we approached down the path. "We invite (you to take) rice." We raised our clasped hands: "Ching, ching," we replied, "we invite (you to go on), we invite," and passed on. They were bent upon enjoyment. They were taking as an aperitif a preliminary cup of that awful spirit tsiu, which is almost pure alcohol and can be burnt in lamps like methylated spirit.

On the level sward, between this poor temple and the city, the annual Thibetan Fair is held on the 17th, 18th, and 19th of April, when caravans of Thibetans, with herds of ponies, make a pilgrimage from their mountain villages to the ancient home of their forefathers. But the fair is falling into disfavour owing to the increasing number of likin-barriers on the northern trade routes.

There are many temples in Tali. The finest is the Confucian Temple, with its splendid halls and pavilions, in a beautiful garden. Kwanti, the God of War, has also a temple worthy of a god whose services to China in the past can never be forgotten. Every Chinaman knows, that if it had not been for the personal aid of this god, General Gordon could never have succeeded in suppressing the Taiping rebellion. In the present rebellion of the Japanese, the god appears to have maintained an attitude of strict neutrality.

The City Temple is near the drill-ground. As the Temple of a Fu city it contains the images of both Fu magistrate and Hsien magistrate, with their attendants. In its precincts the Kwan of the beggars, (the beggar king or headman), is domiciled, who eats the Emperor's rice and is officially responsible for the good conduct of the guild of beggars.

In the main street there is a Memorial Temple to General Yang, who won the city back from the Mohammedans. But the temple where prayer is offered most earnestly, is the small temple near the Yesu-tang, erected to the goddess who has in her power the dispensation of the pleasures of maternity. Rarely did I pass here without seeing two or three childless wives on their knees, praying to the goddess to remove from them the sin of barrenness.

Some of the largest caravanserais I have seen in China are in Tali. One of the largest belongs to the city, and is managed by the authorities for the benefit of the poor, all profits being devoted to a poor-relief fund. There are many storerooms here, filled with foreign goods and stores imported from Burma, and useful wares and ornamental nick-nacks brought from the West by Cantonese pedlars. Prices are curiously low. I bought condensed milk, "Milkmaid brand," for the equivalent of 7d. a tin. In the inn there is stabling accommodation for more than a hundred mules and horses, and there are rooms for as many drivers. The tariff cannot be called immoderate. The charges are: For a mule or horse per night, fodder included, one farthing; for a man per night, a supper of rice included, one penny.

Even larger than the city inn is the caravanserai where my pony was stabled; it is more like a barracks than an inn. One afternoon the landlord invited the missionary and me into his guest-room, and as I was the chief guest, he insisted, of course, that I should occupy the seat of honour on the left hand. But I was modest and refused to; he persisted and I was reluctant; he pushed me forward and I held back, protesting against the honour he wished to show me. But he would take no refusal and pressed me forward into the seat. I showed becoming reluctance of course, but I would not have occupied any other. By-and-by he introduced to me with much pride his aged father, to whom, when he came into the room, I insisted upon giving my seat, and humbly sat on an inferior seat by his side, showing him all the consideration due to his eighty years. The old man bore an extraordinary resemblance to Moltke. He had smoked opium, he told Mr. Smith, the missionary, for fifty years, but always in moderation. His daily allowance was two chien of raw opium, rather more than one-fifth of an ounce, but he knew many Chinese, he told the missionary, who smoked daily five times as much opium as he did without apparent injury.

In Tali there are four chief officials: the Prefect or Fu Magistrate, the Hsien or City Magistrate, the Intendant or Taotai, and the Titai. The yamen of the Taotai is a humble residence for so important an official; but the yamen of the Titai, between the South Gate and the Five Glory Tower, is one of the finest in the province. The Titai is not only the chief military commander of the province of Yunnan, but he is a very much married man. An Imperialist, he has yet obeyed the Mohammedan injunction and taken to himself four wives in order to be sure of obtaining one good one. He has been abundantly blessed with children. In offices at the back of the Titai's yamen and within its walls, is the local branch of the Imperial Chinese telegraphs, conducted by two Chinese operators, who can read and write English a little, and can speak crudely a few sentences.

The City Magistrate is an advanced opium-smoker, a slave to the pipe, who neglects his duties. In his yamen I saw the wooden cage in which prisoners convicted of certain serious crimes are slowly done to death by starvation and exhaustion, as well as the wooden cages of different shape in which criminals of another class condemned to death are carried to and from the capital.

The City prison is in the Hsien's yamen, but permission to enter was refused me, though the missionary has frequently been admitted. "The prison," explained the Chinese clerk, "is private, and strangers cannot be admitted." I was sorry not to be allowed to see the prison, all the more because I had heard from the missionary nothing but praise of the humanity and justice of its management.

The gaols of China, or, as the Chinese term them, the "hells," just as the prison hulks in England forty years ago were known as "floating hells," have been universally condemned for the cruelties and deprivations practised in them. They are probably as bad as were the prisons of England in the early years of the present century.

The gaolers purchase their appointments, as they did in England in the time of John Howard, and, as was the case in England, they receive no other pay than what they can squeeze from the prisoners or the prisoners' friends. Poor and friendless, the prisoners fare badly. But I question if the cruelties practised in the Chinese gaols, allowing for the blunted nerve sensibility of the Chinaman, are less endurable than the condition of things existing in English prisons so recently as when Charles Reade wrote "It is Never Too Late to Mend." The cruelties of Hawes, the "punishment jacket," the crank, the dark cell, and starvation, "the living tortured, the dying abandoned, the dead kicked out of the way"; when boys of fifteen, like Josephs, were driven to self-slaughter by cruelty. These are statements published in 1856, "every detail of which was verified, every fact obtained, by research and observation." ("Life of Charles Reade," ii., 33.)

And it cannot admit, I think, of question that there are no cruelties practised in the Chinese gaols greater, even if there are any equal to the awful and degraded brutality with which the England of our fathers treated her convicts in the penal settlements of Norfolk Island, Fort Arthur, Macquarie Harbour, and the prison hulks of Williamstown. "The convict settlements were terrible cesspools of iniquity, so bad that it seemed, to use the words of one who knew them well, 'the heart of man who went to them was taken from him, and there was given to him the heart of a beast.'"

Can the mind conceive of anything more dreadful in China than the incident narrated by the Chaplain of Norfolk Island, the Rev. W. Ullathorne, D.D., afterwards Roman Catholic Bishop of Birmingham, in his evidence before the Commission of the House of Commons in 1838: "As I mentioned the names of those men who were to die, they one after another, as their names were pronounced, dropped on their knees and thanked God that they were to be delivered from that horrible place, whilst the others remained standing mute, weeping. It was the most horrible scene I have ever witnessed."

Those who have read Marcus Clarke's "For the Term of His Natural Life," remember the powerfully-drawn character of Maurice Frere, the Governor of Norfolk Island. It is well known, of course, that the story is founded upon fact, and is a perfectly true picture of the convict days. The original of Maurice Frere is known to have been the late Colonel ——, who was killed by the convicts in the prison hulk "Success," at Williamstown, in 1853. To this day there is no old lag that was ever exposed to his cruelty but reviles his memory. I once knew the convict who gave the signal for his murder. He was sentenced to death, but was reprieved and served a long term of imprisonment. The murder happened forty-one years ago, yet to this day the old convict commends the murder as a just act of retribution, and when he narrates the story he tells you with bitter passion that the "Colonel's dead, and, if there's a hell, he's frizzling there yet."

Captain Foster Fyans, a former Governor of Norfolk Island Convict Settlement, spent the last years of his life in the town I belong to, Geelong, in Victoria. The cruelties imposed on the convicts under his charge were justified, he declared, by the brutalised character of the prisoners. On one occasion, he used to tell, a band of convicts attempted to escape from the Island; but their attempt was frustrated by the guard. The twelve convicts implicated in the outbreak were put on their trial, found guilty, and sentenced to death by strangulation, as hanging really was in those days. Word was sent to headquarters in Sydney, and instructions were asked for to carry the sentence into effect. The laconic order was sent back from Sydney to "hang half of them." The Captain acknowledged the humour of the despatch, though it placed him in a difficulty. Which half should he hang, when all were equally guilty? In his pleasant way the Captain used to tell how he acted in the dilemma. He went round to the twelve condemned wretches, and asked each man separately if, being under sentence of death, he desired a reprieve or wished for death. As luck would have it, of the twelve men, six pleaded for life and six as earnestly prayed that they might be sent to the scaffold. So the Captain hanged the six men who wished to live, and spared the six men who prayed for death to release them from their awful misery. This is an absolutely true story, which I have heard from men to whom the Captain himself told it. Besides, it bears on its face the impress of truth. And yet we are accustomed to speak of the Chinese as centuries behind us in civilisation and humanity.

I went to two opium-poisoning cases in Tali, both being cases of attempted suicide. The first was that of an old man living not at the South Gate as the messenger assured us, who feared to discourage us if he told the truth, but more than a mile beyond it. On our way we bought in the street some sulphate of copper, and a large dose made the old man so sick that he said he would never take opium again, and, if he did, he would not send for the foreign gentleman.

The other was that of a young bride, a girl of unusual personal attraction, only ten days married, who thus early had become weary of the pock-marked husband her parents had sold her to. She was dressed still in her bridal attire, which had not been removed since marriage; she was dressed in red—the colour of happiness. "She was dressed in her best, all ready for the journey," and was determined to die, because dead she could repay fourfold the injuries which she had received while living. In this case many neighbours were present, and, as all were anxious to prevent the liberation of the girl's evil spirit, I proved to them how skilful are the barbarian doctors. The bride was induced to drink hot water till it was, she declared, on a level with her neck, then I gave her a hypodermic injection of that wonderful emetic apomorphia. The effect was very gratifying to all but the patient.

Small-pox, or, as the Chinese respectfully term it, "Heavenly Flowers," is a terrible scourge in Western China. It is estimated that two thousand deaths—there is a charming vagueness about all Chinese figures—from this disease alone occur in the course of a year in the valley of Tali. Inoculation is practised, as it has been for many centuries, by the primitive method of introducing a dried pock-scab, on a lucky day, into one of the nostrils. The people have heard of the results of Western methods of inoculation, and immense benefit could be conferred upon a very large community by sending to the Inland Mission in Talifu a few hundred tubes of vaccine lymph. Vaccination introduced into Western China would be a means, the most effective that could be imagined, to check the death rate over that large area of country which was ravaged by the civil war, and whose reduced population is only a small percentage of the population which so fertile a country needs for its development. Infanticide is hardly known in that section of Yunnan of which Tali may be considered the capital. Small-pox kills the children. There is no need for a mother to sacrifice her superfluous children, for she has none.

Another disease endemic in Yunnan is the bubonic plague, which is, no doubt, identical with the plague that has lately played havoc in Hong Kong and Canton. Cantonese peddlers returning to the coast probably carried the germs with them.

The China Inland Mission in Tali was the last of the mission stations which I was to see on my journey. This is the furthest inland of the stations of the Inland Mission in China. It was opened in 1881 by Mr. George W. Clarke, the most widely-travelled, with the single exception of the late Dr. Cameron, of all the pioneer missionaries of this brave society; I think Mr. Clarke told me that he has been in fourteen out of the eighteen provinces. His work here was not encouraging; he was treated with kindness by the Chinese, but they refused to accept the truth when he placed it before them.

"For the Bible and the Light of Truth," says Miss Guinness, in her charming but hysterical "Letters from the Far East"—a book that has deluded many poor girls to China—"For the Bible and the Light of Truth the Chinese cry with outstretched, empty, longing hands" (p. 173). But this allegation unhappily conflicts with facts when applied to Tali.

For the first eleven years the mission laboured here without any success whatever; but now a happier time seems coming, and no less than three converts have been baptised in the last two years.

There are now three missionaries in Tali—there are usually four; they are universally respected by the Chinese; they have made their little mission home one of the most charming in China. Mr. John Smith, who succeeded Mr. Clarke, has been ten years in Tali. He is welcomed everywhere, and in every case of serious sickness or opium-poisoning he is sent for. During all the time he has been in Tali he has never refused to attend a summons to the sick, whether by day or night. In the course of the year he attends, on an average, between fifty and sixty cases of attempted suicide by opium in the town or its environs, and, if called in time, he is rarely unsuccessful. Should he be called to a case outside the city wall and be detained after dark, the city gate will be kept open for him till he returns. The city magistrate has himself publicly praised the benevolence of this missionary, and said, "there is no man in Tali like Mr. Smith—would that there were others!" He is a Christian in word and deed, brave and simple, unaffected and sympathetic—the type of missionary needed in China—an honour to his mission. I saw the courageous man working here almost alone, far distant from all Western comforts, cut off from the world, and almost unknown, and I contrasted him with those other missionaries—the majority—who live in luxurious mission-houses in absolute safety in the treaty ports, yet whose courage and self-denial we have accustomed ourselves to praise in England and America, when with humble voices they parade the dangers they undergo and the hardships they endure in preaching, dear friends, to the "perishing heathen in China, God's lost ones!"