My journey was by the following route:--
Length Height
of Stage Above Sea
1st day Ho-chiang-p'u 90 li 5,050 ft.
2nd day Yang-pi 60 li 5,150 ft.
3rd day T'ai-p'ing-p'u 70 li 7,400 ft.
5th day Hwan-lien-p'u 50 li 5,200 ft.
6th day Ch'u-tung 95 li 5,250 ft.
7th day Shayung 75 li 4,800 ft.
T'ai-p'ing-p'u (two days from Tali-fu), bleak and perched away up among
the clouds, could never be called a town; it is merely a ramshackle
place which gives one sleep and food in the difficult stage between
Hwan-lien-p'u and Yang-pi.
Like most of the small places which suffered from the ravishings of the
Mohammedan destructions of the fifties, it has seen better days.
Cottages hang clumsily together on ledges in the mountains, 7,400 feet
above the sea, standing in their own vast uncultivated grounds. People
are of the Lolo origin, but all speak Chinese; their ways of life,
however, are aboriginal, and still far from the ideal to which they
aspire. They are poor, poor as church mice, dirty and diseased and
decrepit, and their existence as a consequence is dreary and dull and
void of all enlightenment.
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