The Revolutionist Occupation of La-chi-mt 217 
demanded roughly enough my business. I of course gave 
him the required information though with no very good grace, 
adding that Captain Li had already spoken with me, which 
seemed to satisfy my interlocutor. ‘Oh! you have come 
from La-chi-mi! That’s all right then!” he said, blustering, 
and straightway returned to the village. He was a person 
of no account and apparently wished to convey quite the 
opposite impression by offering me the only offence I received 
throughout the journey. 
It was evening before we reached Ying-p‘an-kai, a village 
of a hundred families fairly divided between Minchia and 
Chinese. Here I found comfortable quarters in a temple 
on the hill side, and amidst the pungent odour of burning 
incense made up my bed in one corner under the gaze of 
a galaxy of ferocious-looking gods. 
One can usually prevail on the authorities of a Chinese 
temple which, as in this case, is sometimes tended by a 
layman, to give one shelter for the night, or even for the 
week-end; indeed many spots to which Europeans living 
on the coast or in the interior annually resort have no other 
accommodation than that afforded by a Buddhist temple, 
which is gladly put at their disposal by the bonzes for the 
sake of a little gain. But certainly they might just as well 
be put to such service, since they are no longer houses of 
prayer, Buddhism having no hold on the people of China; 
and this fact the Chinese have themselves recognised for 
some time by transforming many of the disused temples 
into schools and barracks. As a house of refuge from the 
curiosity of the Chinese a temple is infinitely superior to 
an inn, besides being as a rule both cleaner and more 
commodious. In this instance, however, the janitor de- 
murred and remarked that since I had no passport, he was 
not going to let me sleep in the temple. Sung floundered 
on gaily, but he was too meek to make much impression on 
a really truculent man such as we had to deal with, and 
feeling rather incensed at the didactic tone he chose to 
adopt towards us, I now chipped in, saying that it was 
none of his business whether I had a passport or not and 
that I was certainly going to stay the night. 
The man seemed rather surprised to learn that I had 
been following the conversation silently, but he now became 
