uest 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.

[Illustration: SNOW-CLAD MOUNTAINS BEHIND TALIFU.]

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.