The Revolutionist Occupation of La-chi-mi 221 
of his friends. The chief, who was in Chinese dress and 
spoke that language fluently, was extremely affable; he told 
me that he was on his way to La-chi-mi to join Li, and 
having given me instructions as to the best road to follow, 
took his leave. 
Next morning I found that he had given the necessary 
orders for my receiving safe conduct to Lu-k‘ou on the 
Salween, where another chief would take over the respon- 
sibility for my protection, though as a matter of fact I had 
no more escorts after leaving T‘u-wau, and no trouble of 
any kind with the people. In my experience it was the 
rarest exception for the tribesmen of the border country, 
or the mountain people of Western China, to be anything 
but friendly towards me. 
The Lao-wau chief had given instructions that relays of 
villagers were to carry my two loads from village to village, 
each of which was to furnish in addition one or two men as 
escort. Consequently a good deal of time was wasted on 
the road, as each village we arrived at implied a delay of 
quite half an hour while the village headman hunted up 
the requisite number of men—or women, as the loads were 
usually borne by the fair sex. As for the escorts, I never 
waited for them to put in an appearance at all. Previously 
I—or rather Sung—had engaged porters to accompany us 
for several days, so that delays of this nature had been less 
frequent; but under the new conditions of travel it was 
only when the villages lay far apart that we could make 
satisfactory progress. 
That evening, December 5, we reached Piao-tsun, an 
extremely picturesque village of sixty families, Minchia and 
Lissu, which certainly had nothing very Chinese in its ap- 
pearance. Situated well above the river, towards which the 
ground sloped away in terraced rice-fields, it owed its rustic 
charm to the fact that though the village was not straggling 
each hut had an individuality all its own. The little patch 
of vegetable garden in which each house stood was sur- 
rounded by a low mud wall, and further, by tall poles placed 
a few yards apart, up each of which twined a dense growth 
of runner beans. Thus the whole effect was partially to 
envelop the village with a wealth of green creepers from 
which the little thatched huts and whitewashed cottages 
