The ethnological problem is thus succinctly stated by Commandant d'Ollone:
Are there in the midst of China populations which do not belong to the Yellow Race? If there are and they have come from elsewhere, we ought to find traces of their passage, colonies which they have left on the way, discover whence they came and to what original family to assign them. If, however, they are indigenous, or at least if they arrived before the beginning of history, then the Far East is not the cradle of the Yellow Race; it is this last which has come from far and has dispossessed the indigenous races, incorporating many of them without doubt, and its homogeneity is a fiction.
Here may be quoted a note by Madame Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine, Vol. II, page 280;
"What would you say to our affirmation that the Chinese—I speak of the inland, the true Chinaman, not of the hybrid mixture between the Fourth and Fifth Races now occupying the throne, the aborigines who belong in their unallied nationality wholly to the highest and last branch of the Fourth Race—reached their highest civilization when the Fifth had hardly appeared in Asia" (Esoteric Buddhism, p. 67). And this handful of the inland Chinese are all of a very high stature. Could the most ancient MSS. in the Lolo language (that of the aborigines of China) be got at and translated correctly, many a priceless piece of evidence would be found. But they are as rare as their language is unintelligible. So far one or two European archaeologists only have been able to procure such priceless works.
This was written in 1888. It may be added that the Lolo nobles preserve very carefully their genealogies. To return to the Miao-Tseu. They, says d'Ollone,
are usually considered as having no writing of their own. Taking advantage of the fact that one of them, who had a law-suit, asked my help, I begged him to put his case in writing. This he did without any difficulty, and assured me that since their subjection by the Chinese, the latter having destroyed all the books they could discover, the Miao-Tseu had hidden those that remained, and had feigned ever since to be ignorant of the art of writing; they possessed, however, numerous books containing the annals of their race.
We must refer our readers to d'Ollone's book for an interesting account of his "hunt for documents."
After studying the Miao-Tseu and the semi-independent Lolos the expedition returned to Ma-Tao-Tseu, whence they had set out, where d'Ollone met some pimos or learned Lolos who while they can read the sacred books, have no priestly functions and must by no means be considered as priests. With one of them, who was especially intelligent and well-informed, "my Lolo professor," as he calls him, d'Ollone worked hard for a fortnight, learning the Lolo writing and laying the foundations of a Lolo-French dictionary. At the end of that time,
as a recompense for my zeal, my professor presented me with five volumes, treating, he said, of religion, geography, history, mathematics, and various sciences.