In Kansu, where Muhammedans fare now most numerous and where Christians would seem to have been numerous in 1500, one might expect to find traces in monuments or tradition of the Nestorian and it Is hard to believe that almost nothing of the sort hus been revealed to the many missionaries in that province, "T do remember, indeed, having heard of the finding of a stone with a cross clearly cut on it at Sining, eight days journey south of Kanchow, but T never hoard what eventually he-game of this nor whether it led to other discoveries. This stone was found in 1918 on a hill side beyond the south wall of Sining, which hill side is now a great cemetery, The local missionaries, both Protestant and Catholic, heard of it and went to ace it and almost immediately afterwards it disappeared, Accord ing to report tt of grave yards round about feared that it might prove to be the ancient landmark of a Christian church of cemetery and that the misslonari would lay claim to the strength of 1 said that the magistrate moved the stone to his yamen to! calm the anxiety of the Jandownors and to prevent a_possible dispute with the missionaries, Now it seems to me that if there were no local tradition of an coylier Christian community (Polo mentions a church at Sining) there would have been no great anxiety about the tenure of the Tand since mission work there was no older than the memory of scores of the elders of the town. Bearing my theory of a Moslem absorption of the Christian communities mind, I should have suspected that the landowners were worried he-cause they knew that an earlier Christian' community had been amalgamated with the local Moslem community and because the land had been expropriated from the Moslems after one of their several rebellions and occupied by the victorious Chinese. This would ne-count for their nervousness. They might fear that the Christians of this generation, with their special rights, would lay claim to pro} known to have belonged to an earlier Christian church and demand for the present church what the Moslems could not demand often woniler if missionaries do not hear more frequently than is record. ed of such cases og this and deem them of too little interest to publish, and it is to elicit just such seemingly unimportant information, that T am encroaching at such length upon your space.
Persecution or Absorption Finally F should like: to add that, in my opinion, the absorption of the Nestorian church. by Inlam in Ching
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.