and tiger-skins besides other peltries.
The tiger-skins are particularly valuable as having longer and
richer fur than those of Bengal.

Of the Manchus as a people, I shall speak later on.[*] Those remaining
in their original habitat are extremely rude and ignorant; yet
even these hitherto neglected regions are now coming under the
enlightening influence of a system of government schools.

[Footnote *: Part II. page 140 and 142; part III, pages 267-280]

Mongolia, the largest division of Tartary, if not of the Empire,
is scarcely better known than the mountain regions of Tibet, a
large portion of its area being covered with deserts as uninviting
and as seldom visited as the African Sahara. One route, however,
has been well trodden by Russian travellers, namely, that lying
between Kiachta and Peking.

In the reign of Kanghi the Russians were granted the privilege of
establishing an ecclesiastical mission to minister to a Cossack
garrison which the Emperor had captured at Albazin trespassing on
his grounds. Like another Nebuchadnezzar, he transplanted them
to the soil of China. He also permitted the Russians
[Page 58]
to bring tribute to the "Son of Heaven" once in ten years. That
implied a right to trade, so that the Russians, like other envoys,
in Chinese phrase "came lean and went away fat." But they were
not allowed to leave the beaten track: they were merchants, not
travellers. Not till the removal of the taboo within the last
half-century have these outlying dependencies been explored by
men like Richthofen and Sven Hedin. Formerly the makers of maps
garnished those unknown regions

"With caravans for want of towns."

Sooth to say, there are no towns, except Urga, a shrine for pilgrimage,
the residence of a living Buddha, and Kiachta and Kalgan, terminal
points of the caravan route already referred to.

Kiachta is a double town--one-half of it on each side of the
Russo-Chinese boundary--presenting in striking contrast the magnificence
of a Russian city and the poverty and filth of a Tartar encampment.
The whole country is called in Chinese "the land of grass." Its
inhabitants have sheepfolds and cattle ranches, but neither fields
nor houses, unless tents and temporary huts may be so designated.
To this day, nomadic in their habits, they migrate from place to
place with their flocks and herds as the exigencies of water and
pasturage may require.

Lines of demarcation exist for large tracts belonging to