Through the Land of the Cross-bow 201 
which gives to so much of this country a withered and 
forlorn aspect, was again replaced by terraced rice-fields, 
and snow-clad mountains dimly seen through the clouds to 
the west proclaimed the fact that we were not far from 
the Mekong. 
A large village called Pi-iu-ho, one of a group of three, 
was our halting place, but though the population was entirely 
Lama, there were—in addition to wooden huts with shingle 
roofs—not a few houses built of mud bricks after the manner 
of the Chinese, and roofed with tiles. Nor were the people 
by any means ignorant of western curiosities, for while 
taking a compass-bearing surrounded by a crowd of interested 
Lama men, I overheard one of them instructing his more 
ignorant companions to the effect that the instrument I held 
was a watch. Possibly he did not know what a watch was, 
but anything which is more or less round and has a needle 
under a glass face, such as a compass or an aneroid baro- 
meter, is a watch in Western China, so that my friend’s 
erudition was quite astonishing for a Lama. 
Major Davies considers it probable that both the Lama 
and the Pé-tzu tribes are really Minchias under another 
name, but this I did not find to be the case. They them- 
selves emphatically denied that they were either Minchia or 
Chinese—they seemed quite hurt at the mere suggestion— 
and though I did not take down any vocabularies, I heard 
both Lama and Minchia spoken, and certainly they were 
not the same; the Lama tongue, or what I heard of it, had 
a superficial ring of Tibetan about it, though I do not for a 
moment mean to suggest that there is any connection between 
the two. But to point to any characteristics, either of 
scientific value or of simple convenience which will serve 
to distinguish the Lamas from the Minchias on the one 
hand, and from the Chinese on the other, is a difficult 
matter. As Major Davies remarks, the unconscious power 
possessed by the Chinese for absorbing the ruder people 
with whom they come in contact is quite astonishing ; only 
the Tibetans seem able to resist—even to reverse the 
process. But the peculiarity of the case lies in the fact that 
there are scarcely any Chinese between Wei-hsi and 
La-chi-mi, the inference being that the people themselves 
are immigrants, and were thoroughly imbued with Chinese 
