Yiinyay is a country partly Chinese and partly occupied by aborigines. The Chinese are gradually spreading over the province and in course of time they will be the dominant race in numbers as in the power of political administration they long have been. This province has only since Marco Polo's time been absorbed into the Empire. The Chinese are able to amalgamate and inter many with alien nations without difficulty because they have no ceremonial laws forbidding fall citizenship to races other than their own. They reside in the plains where agriculture is easy. They build towns and become settled under magistrates, engage in trade and carry on the occupation of spinning, weaving, silversmith's and blacksmith's work, and the various arts which common life in China requires. The aborigines remain in possession of the mountains, and there are many parts of the province where the population is extremely thin. As the wayfarer goes forward on lands raised seven thousand feet above the sea level he sees round him mountains whose height is 7,000 feet more. The lakes are a striking feature of this lofty province: Sheets of water a hundred miles round are found there, twenty-five with wavy or crimped hair. They would have been considered handsome in any country. They were paler in colour than the man who was with them. He was a wild-looking copper-complexioned creature resembling 2 Mongol, wretchedly poor, but cheerful and communi-cativo or wished to be. He could not speak Chinese except the numerals. When Baber saw the women he says he felt in the presence of his own race. He adds: "heir straight and shapely forms, ill concealed by a very short and scanty gown, their sympathetic demeanour, their poverty and their presence with ourselves in a strange land, may possibly account for the interest my two companions evidently felt in them." Let this remark on the ethnology of Yunnan races be compared with Dr. Augustine Henry's notes on Yinnan: "There seems to be the same variety of the human being in Yianan as' in the vegetable world in the same region. There isa strange blending of Chinese, Malay, Negrito, perhaps even Catensian, here."
There can be little doubt that the navigation of the Indian Ocean in ancient times aided the dispersion of the races of mankind and was a cause of variety, It can never cease to be a wonder that the Karens of Burma were found by the American Baptist missionaries to possess traditions of the Deluge and other portions of the account given in the Old Testament of the early fortunes of humanity. If there are Caucasian tribes in Yiinnan they would land in the first instance on the coast of Burma and then climb the mountains to the Yunnan highlands in the course of later centuries. Hence the decision and exactness of form which Baber noted so widely different from the sluggish inaccentuation of the Chinese physique. Henry says the Chinese in Ytinnan dwell on the little tracts of good land which are found in the high-lying valleys and plains of the plateau. The chang chi, or poi-serious miasma, of the climate in portions of Yunnan is a perpetual check to the advance of Chinese colonists in certain localities. We and the chief commercial cities of the hear much, howeve of the extent of province are built on the borders of the poppy cultivation in Yunnan and these lakes. The aborigines are of the accounts of travellers also show various races. Baber speaks of two that the poisonous districts are of women he met aged sixteen and/ limited extent. The trade of Szemao
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.