EXPLORATIONS IN MONGOLIA AND TIBET. 661 



In 1844, Father Hue, when on his way to Lh'asa, stopped for a while 

 at Kiieihua Ch'eug. He says of it: " With the exception of the la- 

 maseries, which rise above the other buildings, one only sees an ag- 

 glomeration of houses and shops huddled together without order, the 

 one against the other. The ramparts of the old city still exist in their 

 entirety, but the overllow of the population has been forced to cross 

 them. Little by little numerous houses have been built outside the 

 walls, vast quarters have been formed; and now the extra muros has 

 acquired more importance than the city itself."* 



Fifty years hardly count in the life of an inland city in Asia, and 

 Kuei-hua to-day is what it was in the days of Hue — an irregular mass 

 of tumble-down houses built around a small central walled town. 

 Dirty, muddy, unpaved streets, innumerable small shops, crowded 

 streets along which loaded camels and mules and clumsy carts are 

 moving, and where an occasional Mongol, very often much the worse 

 for liquor, is seen accompanied by his women folk iu green satin dresses 

 and much jewelry of silver and numerous strings of coral beads orna- 

 menting their hair, neck, and ears. 



The chief industry of the place is, and has been for at least a cen- 

 tury, the preparation of sheep and goat skins. Tallow is also an im- 

 portant article of trade, and sheep and camels in vast numbers are 

 annually sold here to supply the Peking market. The population, ex- 

 culsively Chinese, of this place is probably between 75,000 and 100,000. 



On the 25th of December, having completed arrangements for con- 

 tinuing my journey to Ning-hsia Fu in Kan-su in commodious carts 

 like tliose which had brought me thus far on my way, I left Kuei-hua 

 and in two days reached the Yellow River at Ho-k'ou,t where it makes 

 a sharp bend southward. 



Crossing the river — here about 400 yards wide — on the ice, we first 

 travelled over a country with sand dunes intersecting it here and there, 

 and finally entered the vast alluvial plains which stretch westward to 

 Alashan and are bounded to the north — on the left bank of the river, by 

 a range of mountains of an average altitude of some 1,800 feet. This 

 chain is called on European maps the Inshan (a corruption, 1 believe, 

 of Ch'ing shan, a name given to the eastern part of it) and is locally 

 known by a variety of names — as are all ranges in eastern Asia — Ta 

 ch'ing shan, Wula shan, Lang shan, etc.|: 



For thirteen days we travelled through the sandy waste, now and 

 then passing a small village of Chinese colonists settled in these Mon- 

 gol lands, where they cultivate the soil after a great expenditure of 

 labor on vast irrigation ditches, which are necessary to water the 

 l)arched soil and which the sands, driven before the nearly incessant 



*Huc, "Souveuirs (Vun voyage damns la Tartarie et Ic Thibet," (12rao. edit.) i, 



164. 



t Hue's Tehagan Kouren, 8ee op. cit., i, 215. -i 



tTiiiikowski," Voy. a Peking," ii, 265, 207, says this range is called Khadjar Khosho 



(Khajar liosho), or Onghiu oola. 



