He would get some excellent shooting, especially in the Salwen Valley,
not exactly a health resort, however; and had he inclinations towards
botanical, ethnological, craniological, or philological studies, he
would be at a loss to find anywhere in the world a more interesting
area.
But a man should never leave the "ta lu" (the main road) in China if he
would experience the minimum of discomfort and annoyance, which under
best conditions is considerable to an irritable man. As I sit down now,
on the very spot where Margary, of the British Consulate Service was
murdered in 1875, I regret that I have sacrificed a great deal to secure
most of the photographs which decorate this section of my book. No one,
not even my military escort, knows the way, and is being sworn at by my
men therefor. How I am to reach Man Hsien, across the river at Taping, I
do not quite know. Manyueen, so interesting in history, is a native
Shan-Kachino-Chinese town untouched by the years--slovenly, dirty,
undisciplined, immoral, where law and order and civilization have gained
at best but a precarious foothold, the most characteristic feature of
the people being the gambler's instinct. But I remember that I am coming
into Burma, into the real East, where the tangle and the topsy-turvydom,
the crooked vision and the distorted travesty of the truth, which result
from judging the Oriental from the standpoint of the Europeans and
looking at the East through the eyes of the West, impress themselves
upon one's mind in bewildering fashion as a hopeless problem.
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