With the forty-one cases of specimens we left Teng-yueh on June 1, behind a caravan of thirty mules for the eight-day journey to Bhamo on the outskirts of civilization. Our chair-coolies were miserable specimens of humanity. They were from S'suchuan Province and were all unmarried which alone is almost a crime in China. Every cent of money, earned by the hardest sort of work, they spent in drinking, gambling, and smoking opium. As Wu tersely put it "they make how much—spend how much!"
About every two hours they would deposit us unceremoniously in the midst of a filthy village and disappear into some dark den in spite of our remonstrances. We would grumble and fume and finally, getting out of our chairs, peer into the hole. In the half light we would see them huddled on a "kang" over tiny yellow flames sucking at their pipes. At tiffin each one would stretch out under a tree with a stone for a pillow and his broad straw hat propped up to screen him from the wind. With infinite care he would extract a few black grains from a dirty box, mix them with a little water, and cook them over an alcohol lamp until the opium bubbled and was almost ready to drop. Then placing it lovingly in the bowl of his pipe he would hold it against the flame and draw in long breaths of the sickly-sweet smoke. The men could work all day without food, but opium was a prime necessity.
It was almost impossible to start them in the morning and it became my regular duty to make the rounds of the filthy holes in which they slept, seize them by the collars and drag them into the street. Force made the only appeal to their deadened senses and we were heartily sick of them before we reached Bhamo.
The road to Bhamo is a gradual descent from five thousand feet to almost sea level. Because of the fever the valleys are largely inhabited by "Chinese Shans" who differ in dress and customs from the Southern Shans of the Nam-ting River. Few of the men were tattooed and the women all wore the enormous cylindrical turban which we had seen once before in the Salween Valley.
Map I: The red line indicates the travels of the Expedition
Click on image to view larger sized.
At noon of the fifth day we crossed the Yün-nan border into Burma. It is a beautiful spot where a foaming mountain torrent rushes out of the jungle in a series of picturesque cascades and loses itself in a living wall of green. The stream is spanned by a splendid iron bridge from which a fine wide road of crushed stone leads all the way to Bhamo.
What a difference between the country we were leaving and the one we were about to enter! It is the "deadly parallel" of the old East and the new West. On the one side is China with her flooded roads and bridges of rotting timber, the outward and visible signs of a nation still living in the Middle Ages, fighting progress, shackled by the iron doctrines of Confucius to the long dead past. Across the river is English Burma, with eyes turned forward, ever watchful of the welfare of her people, her iron bridges and macadam roads representing the very essence of modern thought and progress.
With paternal care of her officials the British government has provided dâk (mail) bungalows at the end of each day's journey which are open to every foreign traveler. They are comfortable little houses set on piles. Each one has a spacious living room, with a large teakwood table and inviting lounge chairs. In a corner stands a cabinet of cutlery, china, and glass, all clean and in perfect order. The two bedrooms are provided with adjoining baths and a covered passageway connects the kitchen with the house. All is ready for the tired traveler, and a boy can be hired for a trifling sum to make the punkah "punk." Such comforts can only be appreciated when one has journeyed for months in a country where they do not exist.
Our last night on the road was spent at a dâk bungalow near a village only a few miles from Bhamo. We were seated at the window, when, with a rattle of wheels, the first cart we had seen in nine months passed by. That cart brought to us more forcibly than any other thing a realization that the Expedition was ended and that we were standing on the threshold of civilization.