i6o" Through the Yang-tse Gorges 



" Tao teh King " — classic of the path and virtue ; he lived 

 in the sixth century B.C., and was thus a contemporary of Con- 

 fucius, who is said to have visited him and to have been 

 overwhelmed by his mystical insight. Lao-tse disappeared 

 in the west after writing his Tao teh King, but it is highly im- 

 probable that he ever visited Szechuan, at that period a 

 wilderness in possession of wild aboriginal tribes. The 

 present. Taoist religion, with its magic rites and interminable 

 ceremonial worship, is a sad travesty of Lao-tse's pure 

 doctrine — not, unfortunately, an isolated instance of the 

 corruption that has perverted the original teaching of a Great 

 Founder. Lao-tse is reported to have dwelt in the cave near 

 the summit, from which exudes a fine spring of water. The 

 temples are spacious and handsome, the usual terraces and 

 flights of steps with fine stone balustrades uniting the various 

 sanctuaries. From the main terrace one looks over the silver 

 streak of the river and the city, which, though built on a 

 perpendicular walled sandstone bluff rising to 250 feet above 

 the river, from here appears flat, to the distant range, some 

 3000 feet above the river, which protects Chung-king on the 

 north. Lao-chiin Tung is a great summer resort of the 

 festive Chung-kingites ; but times here, as elsewhere, are bad, 

 and economy has to be studied in " shwa "-ing as in other 

 things, so that the priests, seventeen in number, complained 

 bitterly that they could not cover their expenses. There are 

 a number of Catholic converts about here whose mites are 

 diverted from the local deities, going to swell the fund from 

 which the distractingly ugly white-washed churches, affected 

 by missionaries, are built. Meanwhile the beautiful old 

 temples, with their cool halls and shady gardens, and every 

 aspect which art and nature can combine to soothe the brain, 

 weary of the outer world, are falling into decay. Even their 

 rich, deep, quiet-sounding bells are being slowly removed by 



