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I passed an old French priest as I was going to Tong-ch'uan-fu the next day. He was very pleased to see me, and at a small place we had a few minutes' chat whilst we sipped our tea. In Yün-nan, I found that the Protestants and the Romanists, although seeing very little of each other, went their own way, maintaining an attitude of more or less friendly indifference one towards the other.
The second part of my trip was from almost the extreme east to the extreme west of Yün-nan from Tong-ch'uan-fu to Bhamo, in British Burma. Yün-nan-fu to Tali-fu 905 li. I also made a rather extended tour among the Miao tribes, in country untrodden by Europeans, except by missionaries working among the people. Stages to the capital. Universality of reform in China.
On a journey towards Chao-t'ong, some years ago, he went on ahead of his retinue of men and horses, and arriving at an inn at Tong-ch'uan-fu, asked the ta si fu the general factotum for the best room, and proceeded to walk into it. "No you don't," yelled the ta si fu, "that's reserved for Liu Ma Pang, and you're not to go in there."
Evans and handed him a letter. It was to tell him that his going to Ch'u-tsing-fu would be of no use, as the gentleman he was on his way to meet would not arrive, owing to altered plans. After consulting his wife, he hesitated whether they should go back to Tong-ch'uan-fu, or come on to the capital with me.
At the moment I am writing, in the middle of China, I know that I am safe enough here, but I do not disguise from myself that the wildest reports are still current within a quarter of a mile from me about me and my own kind in this peaceful city of Tong-ch'uan-fu. And it takes very little to light the fuse and to cause a terrible explosion here, in common with other places in this province.
A trio of Europeans might have been seen on the morning of Monday, May 10, 1909, leaving Tong-ch'uan-fu on the road to Yün-nan-fu, whither the author was bound. Mr. and Mrs. Evans, who, as chance would have it, were going to Ch'u-tsing-fu, were to accompany me for two days before turning off in a southerly direction when leaving the prefecture. It was a fine spring morning, balmy and bonny.
A hundred li to the east of Hong-shiïh-ai, over two impassable mountain ranges, are some considerable mines, with antiquated brass and copper smelting works, and this place, K'ung-shan by name, with Tong-ch'uan-fu, forms an important center.
Evans, of Tong-ch'uan-fu, who saved my life, a week or two after I left Chao-t'ong, as is recorded in a subsequent chapter. It was in the old days of the Bible Christian Mission than which the individual members of no mission in the whole of China worked with more zeal and lower stipends that a most interesting development in the mission took place.
After Tong-ch'uan-fu, right on to Burma, the rate of coolie pay varies considerably. Szech-wan people a mercenary lot. Adaptability to trading. None but nature lovers should come to Western China. The life of the Nomad. The opening of China, and some impressions. China's position in the eyes of her own people. Industrialism, railways, and the attitude of the populace.
Such are the inconsistencies, seemingly unchangeable, irreconcilable in conception or in fact; a truthful portrayal of them tends to render the writer a most inconsistent being in the eyes of his reader. No one was ever sped on his way through China with more goodwill than was the writer when he left Tong-ch'uan-fu; but the above thoughts were then in his mind.