On the great North-West Road.
The first view of Lanchou city as it is approached from the North is certainly an impressive one. Allowing even that the traveller has come from the heart of Asia: that! he has crossed the deserted waste by which the Gobi Desert cuts off the province of Kansuh from the Hsinchiang: allow also that the miserable half-ruined villages which he has lately traversed while passing through the scenes of more than one Mohammedan rebellion! to disturb his judgement, bee impression remains.
in my own recollection the
Upon arriving at the far North West frontier of China such civilization as is there to be found is nothing to boast of. Chinese annals and no doubt later-day official correspondence describe such miserable, old-world town as! Ansichow as a miniature Poking. And Ansichow is the first Chinese town in China proper from which traveller ignorant of the country gets his initial impression of it. Asa matter of fact it is a city of the dead. Its walls are half buried in drifting sand, and the town itself has a lifeless, left-behind air. Suchow and Hangchow are fair specimens of solid and, in the old days, defensible Chinese towns, but reach Lanchow is to be conscious again of that indescribable feeling which every traveller in the interivr of China must once have felt, viz, that in provincial capitals at any rate there was a central authority, and thet the Son of Heaven at Peking had but to lift this finger for every Viceroy s well! as the millions under his control to tremble and obey. It was pleasant and possible to think such thoughts in the year 1906. Probably they were never altogether true, but such and other vagrant ideas herve to while away many a spare hour of travel, That any such idea could even be conceivable to-day interesting, when one ponders over what the passage of six years has done for China.
The position of Lanchow is in some ways unique. In itself the provincial capital of the Shen-Kan Viceroyalty it owes more of its i portance to the fact that while standing on one of the great high roads of the Empire it is also the for those unfortunate officials banished for all manner of reason to the Hsinchiang. In addition, Lanchow is supposed to command and exercise jurisdiction over the entire North Enst portion of Tibet, posted as it is on the high road to Sining and the Kokonor district. Finally, it is from Lanchow the very large, ever restless, and turbulent Mohammedan population of Kansuh is controlled.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.