THE LAND OF THE LAMAS

I

PEKING, T'AI-YUAN, HSI-AN, LAN-CHOU FU

NIBET has been my life hobby. I began while at college to study the few works written by Europeans on this subject, and was later on led to learn Chinese as a means of gaining further information about the country and its inhabitants. In 1884 I was attached to the United States Legation at Peking, and it seemed then as if I might be able to carry out cherished schemes of exploration in Tibet if I could but learn the spoken language, a knowledge which, from the first, I held to be an absolute requisite of success. No foreigner could help me, for none spoke the language, and none of the natives whom I at first met would consent to teach me, being suspicious of the use I might make of my knowledge. I finally gained the friendship of an intelligent lama from Lh'asa, and with him for the next four years I studied Tibetan, giving also some time to the study of Chinese.

European travelers who had attempted to enter Tibet had usually done so from either India or western China. The frontiers along both these countries are thickly inhabited, or rather the only practicable roads through these border-lands pass by large towns and villages, and so those

1

travelers had found themselves confronted on the very threshold with the one serious obstacle to ingress to the country, a suspicious people, who see in every stranger desirous of visiting their country a dangerous interloper, whose sole purpose is to steal the treasures with which they think their land is teeming, and a possible forerunner of invading armies.

To the north, Tibet is composed of high plateaux intersected by numerous chains of mountains running from east to west, a bleak, arid country, either desert or inhabited by a scattered population of nomads. To the south of these pastoral tribes, and then only in the larger valleys, live a sedentary people who cultivate the soil. Hence it appears that a traveler, coming from the north, can advance much farther into the country without having to fear serious opposition by the people than from any other side.

These considerations and the further fact that the only serious attempt to enter Tibet from the north, that of Fathers Huc and Gabet in 1845, had proved successful, made me choose this route as the one I would follow.

In the winter of 1888, having resigned my post of Secretary of Legation, I made preparations for my journey. The route selected was the highway, which, passing by Hsi-an Fu and Lan-chou Fu, leads to Hsi-ning Fu near the Koko-nor, and which from that point is known as the northern route to Lh'asa. My outfit was simple and inexpensive, for, dressing and living like a Chinaman, I was incumbered neither with clothes nor foreign stores, bedding, tubs, medicines, nor any of the other endless impedimenta which so many travelers consider absolute necessities.

The most rapid and on the whole the most convenient

way to travel in northern China is by cart; each will carry about 300 pounds of goods, and still leave. room enough for a passenger and driver, and the tighter one is packed in one of these primitive conveyances the more comfortably will one ride, for, as these carts are innocent of springs or seats, the jogging when they are empty is

SILVER SCALES AND CASE, AND SHOE OF SYCEE.

dreadful. I made a contract with a cart firm to supply me with two carts, with two mules to each, to take me to Lan-chou Fu, the capital of the province of Kan-su, in thirty-four days. For every day over this they were to pay me Tls. 2,' I giving them the same amount for every day gained on the time agreed upon. This arrangement

1 A tael or ounce of silver is worth about $1.25. In Chinese it is called liang. The word tael is of Dutch or Malay origin. See Yule, "Glossary of

Reference," p. 675. In Mongol the word liang becomes lan, a word used by Russians instead of tael.

worked admirably, and I reached my destination two days ahead of time. Early on the morning of December 17th, having donned the comfortable Chinese dress, and taken leave of the German Minister, whose guest I had been while in Peking, I left for a five weeks' jog through northern China, accompanied by one servant, a man called Liu Chung-shan, who had traveled with Lieutenant Younghusband through Chinese Turkestan to India a year or two previously.

It was late at night when we reached Tou-tien, a large, straggling village, composed of inns and eating-houses, where we stopped only for a few hours to feed the mules and rest, taking advantage of the bright moonlight to push on. I found it somewhat difficult at first to accustom myself to this mode of starting in the middle of the night, or rather as soon as the moon rose, but as it is a custom of the country, it is best to comply with it, otherwise one arrives too late at the inns to get either rooms or food.

Every one we passed in the night the drivers thought was a brigand, and, to judge from the number of watchhouses and patrolmen along the road, there seemed to be some reason for their fears. Even within the immediate vicinity of Peking, and notwithstanding the strenuous efforts of the high officials, highway robbery and brigandage break out afresh every winter. Poverty usually prompts the peasant to adopt this means of making both ends meet.

The road as far as Pao-ting Fu, the capital of the province of Chih-li, lay over the flat but wonderfully fertile plain which stretches across all the eastern and northern parts of the province, but which at this season of the year did not present a single feature of interest. Some

twenty miles before reaching Pao-ting we passed through the town of An-su ("Peace and Tranquillity"), an appropriate name for a place which owes its local celebrity to the numerous "sing-song girlies" who go from one inn to the other singing songs which they accompany on the san-hsien (three-stringed banjo). An-su Hsien has not, however, a monopoly of this mode of entertaining the weary traveler, for all along my route through this province I found these "wild flowers," as the Chinese euphemistically call them, ugly, dirty, powdered, and rouged, and many of them not more than ten or twelve years old.

Pao-ting Fu,' though not large, is a densely populated city, and a very important business center, receiving great quantities of foreign goods from Tientsin, with which city it has good river communication. The streets are narrow and dirty, the shops small but well-stocked with every variety of merchandise. A number of foreign missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, live here in extremely comfortable quarters, and do not appear to be overburdened with work. Leaving Pao-ting for T'ai-yuan Fu, the capital of the province of Shan-hsi, the road at first lay over a level, densely populated, and well-cultivated country, now bare in the extreme. Even the dead grass had been carefully raked up to supply fuel for the k'ang, for this, with sorghum stalks, roots, and dry twigs which they knock off the trees, is all the people use to heat their homes and cook their food, though coal is both cheap and plentiful in the hills near-by.

At Ching-feng-tien, a small village, we stopped for the night in a wonderfully clean inn. Throughout northern China the inns are all alike. They are built around the

1 It is 110 miles S. S. W. of Peking, or 335 li. The li is usually estimated as a

third of a statute mile. I have followed this estimate throughout this work.