cies of
ash. The whole countryside is dotted over with this tree, so cut as to
resemble the pollard willow. On arrival the scales are carefully made up
into small packets of twenty or thirty scales each, wrapped in leaves
and attached to the branches of the white wax tree. After a short
interval the insects emerge from the scales and secrete a waxlike
substance, covering the boughs and twigs with a white deposit about a
quarter of an inch thick. This is carefully gathered, and after
purification by boiling is made up into the small cakes of commerce to
be put to various uses. It forms an important ingredient in sizing and
polish, and also in giving a gloss to silk; but especially it is valued
as imparting a greater consistency to tallow for candles, as it melts
only at a temperature of 160 deg. Fahrenheit. But the Standard Oil
activities have dealt a serious blow to the white wax industry. Kerosene
is now in general use where there is any lighting at all, and whereas
formerly ten thousand coolies annually hurried up the valley carrying
scales to Chia-ting, we now saw only a few hundred.

A generation ago Chien-ch'ang was perhaps the least known part of all
China to the outside world. About the middle of the thirteenth century
the Mongol, Kublai Khan, acting as general of the forces of his
brother, Genghis Khan, went through here to the conquest of Tali, then
an independent kingdom in the southwest, and the untiring Venetian
following in his train noted a few of the characteristics of Caindu, the
name he gave both to the valley and the capital city. Six centuries
elapsed before the next traveller from the West came this way. In the
late seventies Colborne Baber, Chinese Secretary of the British
Legation, traversed the valley from north to south, being the first
European since the time of Marco Polo to enter Ning-yuean-fu, save for an
unfortunate French priest who arrived a few months earlier, only to be
driven out with stones. At that time, according to Baber, "two or three
sentences in the book of Ser Marco to the effect that after crossing
high mountains he reached a fertile country containing many villages and
towns, and inhabited by a very immoral population," constituted the only
existing description of the district.

In spite of the importance of this route it remained until a few years
ago very insecure. Overhung almost its entire length by the inaccessible
fastnesses of Lololand, the passing caravans dared journ