60 A -tun-tsi 
At Batang, His Excellency Chao-Er-Feng, Warden of 
the Marches, who was recently executed by his own soldiers, 
was accused of committing numerous atrocities, beheading 
men, women, and children indiscriminately when the day 
of retribution came. This may or may not be true, but 
one thing is certain, namely that, under the circumstances 
in which he was placed, Chao acted on the whole humanely, 
according to his lights, on behalf of Chinese and Tibetans 
alike. He beat to death more Chinese soldiers for double- 
dealing with the Tibetans than he did Tibetans for murder- 
ing the Chinese. 
Personally my sympathies are all with the Tibetans, 
whom I like, but one must never forget, in judging the 
Chinese methods of repression and retaliation, that they 
were dealing with a barbarous and scattered people covering 
an immense tract of inaccessible mountains; that these 
people are hardy, resourceful, and unimpressionable ; and 
that they had wantonly put to the sword the Chinese 
Amban at Lhasa, one holding the rank of Viceroy—a 
position in the Chinese Empire second only to that of the 
Emperor himself—together with over a hundred of his 
followers. 
Between A-tun-tsi and the Mekong to the west is a 
high mountain rising in steep screes and precipices devoid 
of vegetation to a rocky ridge about 4000 feet above the 
village ; and when the summer rains break, great quantities 
of gravel and mud are washed down the valley, inundating 
the houses at the lower end of the village. Landslips of 
this nature occur periodically, every year mountains of 
mud descending and doing no little damage. In August 
IgI1 it rained furiously for a week and a tremendous 
quantity of the mountain came away, forming a river of 
liquid mud which damaged several houses and made a 
complete wreck of one. 
The deep valleys which seamed the high range to the 
east were clothed with vegetation up to 15,000 feet, above 
which altitude south-facing slopes, exposed to both sun and 
wind, presented bare screes with a scattered and highly- 
specialised flora, while north-facing slopes were covered 
with turf, forming what may be called alpine grass-land. 
In the narrow valley itself below 12,000 feet there was no 
