g, gambling, and smoking opium. As Wu tersely
put it "they make how much--spend how much!"

About every two hours they would deposit us unceremoniously in the midst of
a filthy village and disappear into some dark den in spite of our
remonstrances. We would grumble and fume and finally, getting out of our
chairs, peer into the hole. In the half light we would see them huddled on
a "kang" over tiny yellow flames sucking at their pipes. At tiffin each one
would stretch out under a tree with a stone for a pillow and his broad
straw hat propped up to screen him from the wind. With infinite care he
would extract a few black grains from a dirty box, mix them with a little
water, and cook them over an alcohol lamp until the opium bubbled and was
almost ready to drop. Then placing it lovingly in the bowl of his pipe
he would hold it against the flame and draw in long breaths of the
sickly-sweet smoke. The men could work all day without food, but opium was
a prime necessity.

It was almost impossible to start them in the morning and it became my
regular duty to make the rounds of the filthy holes in which they slept,
seize them by the collars and drag them into the street. Force made the
only appeal to their deadened senses and we were heartily sick of them
before we reached Bhamo.

The road to Bhamo is a gradual descent from five thousand feet to almost
sea level. Because of the fever the valleys are largely inhabited by
"Chinese Shans" who differ in dress and customs from the Southern Shans of
the Nam-ting River. Few of the men were tattooed and the women all wore the
enormous cylindrical turban which we had seen once before in the Salween
Valley.

At noon of the fifth day we crossed the Yuen-nan border into Burma. It is a
beautiful spot where a foaming mountain torrent rushes out of the jungle in
a series of picturesque cascades and loses itself in a living wall of
green. The stream is spanned by a splendid iron bridge from which a fine
wide road of crushed stone leads all the way to Bhamo.

What a difference between the country we were leaving and the one we were
about to enter! It is the "deadly parallel" of the old East and the new
West. On the one side is China with her flooded roads and bridges of
rotting timber, the outward and visible signs of a nation still living in
the Middle Ages, fighting progress, shackled by the iron doctrines of
Confucius to the long dead past. Across the river is English Burma, with
eyes