Their speech is Turkish, though altered in certain parishes to a considerable extent by contact with Chinese and Tibetans. Their re-Ygion is Islam and their reputation is not good—they are reckoned wild to the verge of savagery, cruel, thievish and rascally. Yet this may be largely a distorted view held by their hereditary enemies the Chinese. On a recent visit we found them friendly and simple-minded, though doubtless at times they can be fanatical enough. They are poor and their district does not admit of much intensive agriculture, but they appear frugal and intelligent, though they are very ignorant of the outside world and very few can write Chinese, though most of them can speak it to some extent.
A Wenrer or Races.
Their flashing black eyes, bushy beards, high noses, arched and decided eyebrows, pick many of them out in a moment from the Chinese or the Moslems of other areas. Up here on the edge of China, we see a welter of races, and that extraordinary power of fusion and penetration that has made the sons of Hon masters of all China, from the Eastern Sea to the walls of the Himalayas and the southern sea to the separating expanses of Mong] deserts.
Turks, though they be. one feels a curious sense of kinship for this Salar race from far away, like ouvselves strangers in a strange land
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.