FOLK RELIGION IN SOUTHWEST CHINA 



By DAVID CROCKETT GRAHAM * 

 (With 28 Plates) 



BACKGROUND 

 GEOGRAPHY AND CLIMATE 



West China is a land of abounding and fascinating wonders. It has 

 a climate varying from warm-temperate to that of perpetual snow. 

 It has many mountain ranges, with peaks of great grandeur and 

 beauty, such as Wa Shan, Mount Omei, Minya Konka (over 24,000 

 feet high), and numerous others on the China-Tibetan border that are 

 more than 20,000 feet in altitude. It has wide, U-shaped valleys in 

 Sikang and western Szechwan, and many beautiful and often rugged 

 V-shaped gorges carved through the mountains by the mighty rivers, 

 some of which are in places over 2 miles deep, fed by hundreds of 

 smaller streams. There are deserts, loess deposits, semiarid regions, 

 rolling grasslands, plateaus, and fertile valleys, basins, and plains. 

 Of the many great precipices, some of them overhanging, that at 

 Mount Omei is 6,000 feet high and is believed by some to be the high- 

 est in the world. There are natural bridges, and deep funnels going 

 down into the earth, often into solid rock, through which the water 

 disappears, sometimes reappearing many miles away. There are water- 

 falls, balanced rocks, and pools of blue water surrounded by naturally 

 formed yellow stone, like those of Yellowstone Park. 



West China, which comprises nearly half the territory of China, 

 includes the provinces of Ching-hai or Kokonor, Kansu, Shensi, Si- 

 kang or eastern Tibet, Szechwan, Kweichow, and Yunnan. It has a 

 population of about 120 millions. 



Richardson (1940, pp. 103-105) has pointed out that West China 

 can be regarded as a series of plateaus, bounded by mountain ranges 

 and cut by deep river valleys, which decrease in altitude from west to 

 east. He divides these into three zones, north, central, and south. 

 Farthest west on the north is Ching-hai or Kokonor, with an altitude 

 of approximately 4,000 meters. East of Ching-hai is Kansu, with an 

 altitude of from 1,500 to 2,000 meters. Farther east is Shensi, alti- 



* Dr. Graham died at Englewood, Colo., on September 15, 1961, while this 

 book was in press. — Editor. 



SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS, VOL. 142, NO. 2 



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