tribes of people in Szech'wan,
may justify me in the eyes of the reader for placing on record my own
impressions as a general contribution to this most exciting discussion.
I also lived at Shih-men-K'an (mentioned in the last chapter), among the
Hua Miao for several months, traveled fairly considerably in the
unsurveyed hill country where they live, and am the only man, apart from
two missionaries, who has ever been over that wonderful country lying to
the extreme north-east of Yuen-nan. One trip I made, extending over three
weeks, will ever remain with me as a memorable time, but I regret that I
have no space in this volume for even the merest reference to my
journey.

Some of my friends in China might say sarcastically that mankind is
destined to arrive at years of discretion, and that I should have known
better than to include in my book anything, however well founded, of a
nature tending to continue the wordy strife touching this vexed question
of Mission Work, and that no matter how strikingly set forth, this is an
old and obsolete story, fit only to be finally done with. It is for such
to bear with me in what I shall say. There are thousands of men in the
West who are entirely ignorant of men in China other than the ordinary
_Han Ren_, and if I enlighten them ever so little, then this chapter
will have served an admirable end.

In North-East Yuen-nan the tribes I came most in contact with were:--

(i) The Miao or Miao-tze, as the Chinese call them; or the Mhong or
Hmao, as they call themselves.

(ii) The I-pien (or E-pien), as the Chinese call them; or the Nou Su (or
Ngo Su), as they call themselves.

Probably the Nou Su tribes are what Major Davies calls the Lolo Group in
his third division of the great Tibeto-Burman Family; but I merely
suggest it, as it strikes me that the other branches of that group,
including the Li-su, the La-hu, and the Wo-ni, seem to be descendants of
a larger group, of which the Nou Su predominate in numbers, language,
and customs. However, this by the way.

It may not be common knowledge that in most parts of the Chinese Empire,
even to-day, there are tribes of people, essentially non-Chinese, who
still rigidly maintain their independence, governed by their own native
rulers as they were probably forty centuries ago, long before their
kingdoms were annexed to China Proper. There are white bones and black
bones, noses long and flattened, eyes straight and oblique, swarthy
faces, f