NOTES ON KANSTJ. 



GEORGE E. KING, M.B.CH.B. 

 LANCHOWFU, KANSUH. 



In the course of medical wanderings in the little-known 

 north-western corner of China, various peculiar and interest- 

 ing experiences are met with, and now not so much to impart 

 information but to invite explanation, I am putting on paper 

 a few details of things seen in Kansuh. 



The province is most easily understood as consisting of 

 three tracts — a central tract, made up of the basins of the 

 Yellow Eiver and some of its great tributaries, and bounded 

 on north and south by two mountain-chains : the northern- 

 chain separating it from the Mongolian deserts, and the 

 narrow strip of watered land between the mountains and the 

 deserts that constitutes the northern tract of Kansuh. And 

 a southern tract of land sloping southwards towards Szechuen 

 where the streams flow into the Yangtse. This southern 

 tract is mountainous and partakes of the characteristics of 

 western China. Indeed, the contrast between the north and 

 south parts of Kansuh is so great as to make it almost un- 

 believable that they belong to one province. Again, on the 

 west the province rises into the mountains of Tibet and the 

 steppes of Central Asia, so that for variety of scenery, 

 diversity of inhabitant, and glamour of novelty, the province 

 has hardly an equal throughout China. 



The northly tract as I have described it is long — reaching 

 from Ningsiafu to Kanchowfu and Ansihchow. It thus 

 would take some 35 days to travel from one end of it to the 

 other, though its utmost width cannot be greater than 250 li 

 or 3 days journey. It is the product of the age-long war 

 between the desert and the mountains — the last stand as it 

 were of man on the encroaching desert edge, where faced 

 with the limitless expanse in front that would engulf him, 

 and with his back to the stable mountains behind that 

 nourish him with their streams of water, the race is fighting 

 still the battle against the unhasting, unstaying desert sands. 

 Each of the cities here might be the duplicate of the other 



