678 EXPLORATIONS IN MONGOLIA AND TIBET. 



From a liiiudred to a hundred and thirty Chinese also reside here, all, 

 or nearly all, of them having native wives. 



Wheat, oats (wild?), and barley are grown here extensively, and the 

 gardens supplied us with cabbages, turnips, and several other kinds 

 of vegetables, one, called in Chinese o sung, I found especially pala- 

 table. Cats, pigs, and fowls were seen in every house, and I was pre- 

 sented by the Chinese officer in command of the little garrison here 

 with grapes, peaches, and apricots (wild varieties, I believe), brought 

 herefrom the Rongmi, or ^Herres chaades,^'' as the French missionaries 

 call them, some two days' distance down the Eiver of Golden Sands 

 (Chin-sha ho or Chin chiang ho). 



For the first time in Tibet I saw house sparrows {cheuha, in Tibetan) 

 at Gartok. 



Leaving Gartok on the 12th of September, we reached Bat'ang on the 

 15th, and here the geographical j)ortion of my work was at an end. The 

 people between Gartok and Bat'ang are Chinesified to a considerable ex- 

 tent, and have also a few customs introduced among them from inter- 

 course with the tribes living south of them, Lissus, Mosso, and others. 

 Among other things borrowed from these tribes is a peculiar jew's-harp, 

 carried by every Avoman of this region, and consisting of three different 

 toned harps of bamboo ; two or three women often play together, and 

 to this accompaniment they dance a slow, shuffling step in which grace 

 and beauty are conspicuously absent. 



I remained at Bat'ang four days, and then proceeded to Lit'ang, 

 which I reached on the 24th, and finally arrived at Ta-chien-lu, on the 

 Chinese frontier, on the 2d of October. From this locality to Shanghai, 

 where I arrived on the 1st of November, I followed the route taken by 

 me in 1889, and for a description of which 1 must again refer the reader 

 to the pubHshed account of my first journey. 



Before closing this brief account of my journey I must mention that in 

 July, when on the Dang ch'u (and even earlier, when in N^amru), I heard 

 that some foreigners had passed through the country some six months 

 previous, coming, it was supposed, from the west. In August I again 

 heard vaguely of these travellers, and on the 18th of that month, while 

 camped near the Ze ch'u at Lah'a in Nar peihu, I was shown by a native 

 a note he had received from a foreigner commanding an expedition which 

 had passed through here several months before. It was signed Capt. 

 Henry Bower, of the Seventeenth Bengal Cavalry, and he had come, I 

 learned later, from Lndak byway of the deserts to the northwest of Tibet 



Since then I have had the pleasure of meeting Capt. Bower in Lon- 

 don, and we have been able to compare notes. From this compari- 

 son it results that after the 10th of August (I had then reached the 

 I ch'u Valley), our routes were very nearly parallel till we arrived near 

 Ch'amdo, after which point they were identical. 



Finally, I would like to call attention to the rich fields of research 

 China and its dependencies afford the explorer, be he geographer, bota- 

 nist, geologist, or ethnologist. Though volumes enough to fill a goodly 



