Across the China-Tibet Frontier [37 
the level of the cobbled street, and being only a single 
story high, one looks right over the first floor. Often there 
is only a single room, which being partly underground is 
dark and dungeon-like. The numerous small shops are 
kept by Chinese and semi-Chinese, but the population of 
the village is mostly Tibetan, at least in appearance. The 
women put black grease on their foreheads and cheeks, a cos- 
metic which is supposed to prevent the skin cracking in the 
cold winds, though Huc, describing the origin of this habit, 
gives a much less prosaic reason for the black grease; but 
it is not beautiful. They wear their hair in innumerable tiny 
pig-tails which are collected together at the waist and woven 
into a single artificial plait hanging down to the ground ; or 
the entire contrivance may then be wound round the head. 
As usual, the official inn is kept by a Chinaman, who 
however is Tibetan in everything but birth. He showed 
me some wounds, the result of 800 blows recently inflicted 
by the official because the inn was not in a fit state of 
repair for government officials, and asked me for something 
to rub into them. 
As for the schools at which all children are bound to 
attend, I visited one, and found the children singing 
Chinese sounds out of a book of characters. Boys and 
girls were in separate rooms and the Chinese pedagogue 
in a third room, I suppose waiting till the children had 
learned a certain number of characters, when they would be 
called upon to repeat them without the book, or recognise 
a given character at sight. It is really astonishing what 
the Chinese have done as regards establishing schools in 
the smallest villages, though whether the idea of making 
all Tibetan children learn to speak and read Chinese is 
meeting with the success anticipated, is another matter. 
I had scarcely settled down in the village for the day 
when a Chinaman came and begged me to visit his son who 
on the previous day had been bitten by a dog. I found 
the child, who was only six years of age, sitting quietly in 
the room, with a nasty wound in the right lower jaw, now 
a horrible mess of clotted blood and red mud which had 
been plastered on to staunch the tlow of blood. It took 
half an hour to clean it with warm water and a lancet, for 
I had literally to cut away the scabs, an operation which 
