Whoever draws the first complete road map of northwest Ohina will be parent to a most intricate and baffling web of crooked lines, as much a puzzle to the uninitiated as an anatomical chart of the nervous system. But it will be possible to draw through the very thick of this web, like a spinal chord, a heavy line bisecting the whole north from the Peking-Hankow railway to the uttermost limits of Chinese Turkestan; for traffic, like all else in China, runs in ruts and all the highways and byways of the north are mere trails and tracks leading into or out of the big "Kuan Lu." On this route, which passes through four provincial capitals and four great natural barriers, the traveller can exhume the best of ancient whine's romantic and turbulent history. If one were to set about tracing the history of the north's great highway he would find no beginnings, for after he had followed it back to the last written document and the last battered and illegible stone tablet, he would find it emerging from the fog of Chinese heroic mythology as deep rutted and well defined as is to-day.
The day after war was declared throughout Europe, I met Sir Aurel Stein, a most scholarly pilgrim to the waste places, emerging from the Nan San, near Kanchow, in the far northwest, and found him aglow over certain tablets, documents, weapons and the like that he bad dug out of the tinder-dry soil of adjacent deserts. They were the oldest Chinese documents in existence, and these very ancient trophies all had to do with the history of the great road and the Great Wall. Many—if I remember rightly—dated from the period of the earlier Han dynasty, let us say the second century B.C,, and were concerned with military manceuvres and trade over the well established road, that may well have been a millennium old even then.
Now in its rare old age the rai ways are encroaching upon this ago, when I set out for the far west, the long trail started at Honanfu and led almost directly west through Tungkuan and Hsi An, over the Liu Pan and on to Lanchow. Now the railway has reached Tungkuan and the prospective traveller can start on his long ride to Kashgar at this famous fortress on the Shensi border and reach Heian, the nucleus of old China, and the happy hunting ground of archeologists yet unborn, in four or five easy stages. All one needs is to buy a horse, saddle him, take a few lessons in the OF
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.