open booths, where travellers can find rest and refreshment, and where
native women prettily arrayed in dark-blue, will brew you tea in
earthenware teapots. Very different are the Shan women from the Chinese.
Their colour is much darker; their head-dress is a circular pile formed
of concentric folds of dark-blue cloth; their dress closely resembles
with its jacket and kilt the bathing dress of civilisation; their arms
are bare, they have gaiters on their legs, and do not compress their
feet. All wear brooches and earrings, and other ornaments of silver
filigree.

From the valley the main road rises without intermission 6130 feet to
the village of Fengshui-ling (8730 feet), a climb which has to be
completed in the course of the afternoon. We were once more among the
trees. Pushing on till I was afraid we should be benighted, we reached
long after dark an encampment of bamboo and grass, in the lonely bush,
where the kind people made us welcome. It was bitterly cold during the
night, for the hut I slept in was open to the air. My three men and the
escort must have been even colder than I was. But at least we all slept
in perfect security, and I cannot praise too highly the constant care of
the Chinese authorities to shield even from the apprehension of harm one
whose only protection was his British passport.

All the way westward from Yunnan City I was shadowed both by a
yamen-runner and a soldier; both were changed nearly every day, and the
further west I went the more frequently were they armed. The
yamen-runner usually carried a long native sword only, but the soldier,
in addition to his sword, was on one occasion, as we have seen, armed
with the relics of a revolver that would not revolve. On May 10th, for
the first time, the soldier detailed to accompany me was provided with a
rusty old musket with a very long barrel. I examined this weapon with
much curiosity. China is our neighbour in Eastern Asia, and is, it is
often stated, an ideal power to be intrusted with the government of the
buffer state called for by French aggression in Siam. In China, it is
alleged, we have a prospective ally in Asia, and it is preferable that
England should suffer all reasonable indignities and humilities at her
hands rather than endanger any possible relations, which may
subsequently be entered into, with a hypothetically powerful neighbour.

On my arrival in Burma I was often amused by the serious questions I was
asked concerning th