92 Through the Lutzu Country to Men-kong 
when suddenly a number of men came out from the houses 
and advancing towards us, made us welcome in the most 
friendly manner, bowing and smiling to me, and exchanging 
conversation with the men. Thus we were escorted into 
the village by the chief and his friends, and were quartered 
in the best house available. 
Saung-ta contains about twenty-five houses built along 
the edge of the river bank. Behind it is a very narrow 
cultivated platform, and cultivation extends up the lower 
slopes of the mountains for some distance. Just below 
the village, the river narrows and silently enters the 
gorges, but here it is divided by an island of shingle and 
chatters merrily by. There are a few houses on the oppo- 
site bank also, the Lutzu crossing backwards and forwards 
in their canoes, several of which were drawn up on the 
beach. The houses are built, not with gable ends and slat 
roofs, but in the Tibetan style, with flat mud roofs which 
are reached through a square aperture in the centre; an 
open shed usually covers one side of the roof, forming the 
second story, and there may be two or three rooms down 
below, instead of the one large room common to the Lutzu 
huts at Cho-la. A few miles higher up the Salween, the 
Lutzu finally give place to the Tibetans, just as on the 
Mekong the Moso and Lissu tribes do, and it is obviously 
their influence that we see at work here. 
Tibet, it must be remembered, is largely a region of 
deserts and semi-deserts, using the term in its widest 
significance to include regions rendered more or less devoid 
of vegetation by salt steppes, by wind, or by lack of rain, 
and towards China at least the limit of desert conditions 
marks the limit of the race. Perhaps it is just these highly 
abnormal conditions which render the agricultural Chinese 
immigrants powerless to cope with the situation, and cause 
their gradual absorption by the thoroughly acclimatised 
Tibetans. 
At Cho-la and T‘sam-p‘u-t‘ong we have, if not the 
original Lutzu architecture, at least remnants of it, but 
this type of log hut with slat roof is, as a matter of fact, 
built by many tribes, being indeed almost universal in 
the Mekong and Salween valleys till we get down south 
amongst the Shans. 
