THE HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS OF KWEICHOW 157 



The party consisted of my niece (Dr. Edwards of 

 Taiyuan fu), myself, an interpreter from Peking, and a cook, 

 who proved an admirable servant; we picked him up at 

 Yiinnanfu at the last moment. We were advised to approach 

 Kweichow from the west, and it gave me the opportunity of 

 travelling by a fresh route through Yunnan, by railway to 

 the capital and then eastward by chair. We were agreeably 

 surprised to get permission for this, as it appeared that the 

 roads were infested with robbers, who had just captured 

 various missionaries, but a military escort was considered 

 (quite correctly, as we proved) a guarantee for our safety 

 from molestation. We had on more than one occasion pain- 

 ful evidence of the presence of robbers on the road, wheie 

 summary justice had been taken on them. 



We left Yunnanfu March 27, 1920, by the ordinary route 

 via Malong, Kiitsingfu, Ping Yi. We rose to an altitude of 

 6,200 ft., passing through magnificent mountain scenery, and 

 the air was laden with the scent of jasmine, daphne, roses, 

 large white sweet-scented rhododendron, clematis montana, 

 and numbers of different kinds of ferns. All the hedges 

 were bursting into bloom and birds singing and sun shining, 

 when we crossed the frontier at the top of a pass into 

 Kweichow through a most dilapidated archway. On the 

 Yunnan side of it there are guardian lions with scales and 

 dust carved on them, to indicate that wind and rain rule in 

 Yunnan, while the lions on the Kweichow side of the archway 

 have only scales on them, indicating that rain rules in Kwei- 

 chow, a truth which was almost daily our experience from 

 the very hour that we entered the province. 



There was a little village at the summit of the pass, 

 and on the further side of it a gateway in a wall admitted 

 us to a steep rocky pathway leading down a glorious valley, 

 a truly worth y entrance into the rose garden of the world. 

 From that day, April 3, till we left the province, a month 

 later, we revelled in the beauty of the vegetation, and I 

 counted no less than twenty-three varieties of wild roses, 

 most of them very sweet-scented, the majority of them being 

 white briar roses of different kinds. No doubt there were 

 other varieties not yet in bloom, for we were fully early. 

 There were several different varieties of azaleas, iris, and 

 rhododendrons, and we saw many flowering trees (such as 

 the catalpa bungei) and shrubs, many of which were quite 

 unknown to us. Above the village where we spent the first 

 night in Kweichow was a crag, on which was a Buddhist 

 monastery, whence we looked down on the tree tops sur- 

 rounding it and saw a wealth of white feathery blossom, as 

 delicate as snow flakes. From this time on we found that 



