Peking, Sept. 3.
Li Kuan Ch'iao, a very big and notoriously rich walled village in Honan, near the Yellow River, has been almost obliterated by bandits, according to a report in the Chinese papers. The '"Yi-Shih Pao" says that no troops were stationed in the district but that the Li Kuan Ch'iao community maintained a very efficient band of militia' who have hitherto beaten off all bandits in every attempted foray and who had thereby earned: the animosity of the whole fraternity. A few days ago the tufei of the whole district got together and made a determined assault upon the village. The militia held out for two days and two nights but the bandits finally broke in and looted the place. To make their work complete they then demolish-every little hamlet within a radius of 10 ti and finally went off with 800 captives. The troops, of course, arrived after the event.
Throughout the bandit areas in Hupeh, Honan, Shantung, Anhui and many other provinces the residents has given up all hope of protection from the precious national army and have in every community worth looting, attempted to organize militia maintained at the community's expense. The men willing to enlist in these bodies are not always those that, the various villages and towns are most proud of and with the recent boom in the bandit business many of them have shown a disposition to walk off with the rifts and ammunition supplied by the village fathers. The "Yo Shih Pao" today tells a story which illustrates this. In Hupeh, in the Tsaoyang district, the militia of Wangchiach'eng have gone over to the bandits in a body.
The militia of Wanfutien, Sviyangtien and Hoyuan, all in the Suihsien district (Hupeh), have followed the same bright example en masse.
It is reported locally that a certain French Father, whose Chinese nam> is An,, recently arrived in Hankow from Sui-hsien (the centre of Hupeh's worst bandit area) and called upon Governor Hsiao Yaonan in Wuchang in company with the French Consul-General. Together they asked that the Tuchun stop the present war upon the bandits and that he negotiate Father Malotto's release. The Tuchun, who has already shown considerably more enerev than most in organizing for bandit extermination and has prodded his subordinates into more than usual activity thereby committing himself, refused to entertain the sug-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.