FROM PEKING TO MANDALAY
[CHAPTER I]
INTRODUCTION
The journey of which an account is given in the following pages was not undertaken in the special interests of geographical or other science nor in the service of any Government. My chief object was to gratify a long-felt desire to visit those portions of the Chinese Empire which are least known to Europeans, and to acquire some knowledge of the various tribes subject to China that inhabit the wild regions of Chinese Tibet and north-western Yunnan. Though nearly every part of the Eighteen Provinces has in recent years been visited and described by European travellers, my route between Tachienlu and Li-chiang was one which—so far as I am aware—no British subject had ever traversed before me, and of which no description in book-form has hitherto appeared in any European language.
From the ethnological point of view the Chinese Far West—to which the greater part of this book is devoted—is one of the most interesting regions in the world, and presents problems the solution of which would settle many of the vexed questions relating to the origin and inter-relations of the Asiatic peoples. As for its geographical interest, it may be sufficient to say here that the principalities of Chala and Muli contain what are probably the highest spots inhabited by man on the face of the globe, and that several of the passes crossed by my little caravan are loftier than the highest of the passes existing along the route traversed by the British expedition to Lhasa. My own contributions to geographical and ethnological lore are of the slenderest; but if I can persuade some of my readers that Tibetan Ssuch'uan and western Yunnan are worth visiting, be it only for the glory of their mountain scenery, I shall consider that my book has fulfilled the most useful purpose to which it aspires.
For those who are seized by a craving to revert for a time to something like the nomadic life of our remote forefathers, or to pass like the old Hindu ascetics into "the homeless state," there can be no country in the world more full of charm than some of the wilder and less-peopled regions of the Chinese Empire. There are enormous areas in that country covered with primeval forests in which man's foot has never trod, lofty mountains whose peaks are crowned with sparkling diadems of eternal snow, grand and savage gorges in which Nature has carved for herself in indelible letters the story of the world's youth, and gloomy chasms through which rush the mighty rivers that carry to the Indian Ocean and the Pacific snows that melted on the white roof of the world. And amid all this magnificence and desolation there are lovely valleys and stretches of garden-land that might have been chosen as the Edens of a hundred mythologies, and which in historic times have been the homes of religious recluses and poets, who, like others of their kind in Western lands, found in silence and solitude a refuge from the bitterness and pain of the world, or a hermitage in which, amid scenes of perennial beauty, they could weave their flowers of thought into immortal garlands of human words.
LOVE OF NATURE IN CHINA
It is a mistake to regard the Chinese as essentially a prosaic race, caring only for material things and nothing at all for what we should call things of the spirit. If they have less power of artistic creation than the Japanese—and even that may be doubted—they are quite as sensitive as the people of any other race to the magic of beauty in either nature or art; and especially do they—like our own Ruskin—take a vivid delight in the loveliness of mountain scenery. There is a well-known story of a Chinese scholar who, like the scholars of most lands, was blest with few of this world's goods, and, unlike a great many of them, was noted for his zealous devotion to the service of his country's gods. One night he heard the voice of an invisible being that spoke to him thus: "Your piety has found favour in the sight of heaven; ask now for what you most long to possess, for I am the messenger of the gods, and they have sworn to grant your heart's desire." "I ask" said the poor scholar "for the coarsest clothes and food, just enough for my daily wants, and I beg that I may have freedom to wander at my will over mountain and fell and woodland stream, free from all worldly cares, till my life's end. That is all I ask." Hardly had he spoken when the sky seemed to be filled with the laughter of myriads of unearthly voices. "All you ask?" cried the messenger of the gods. "Know you not that what you demand is the highest happiness of the beings that dwell in heaven? Ask for wealth or rank, or what earthly happiness you will, but not for you are the holiest joys of the gods."
To those of our own day—and there are many such—whose highest ideal of happiness is that of this poor Chinese scholar, to roam at will through the beautiful places of the world, or perhaps even to dwell in some lonely hermitage far removed from
"The weariness, the fever and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan,"