Chinese mettle

Chapter V
Some Aboriginal Tribes in Kweichow

Kweichow is supposed to be the original home of the Miao stock. The mountainous character of the province with its rugged fastnesses and deep valleys is admirably suited to be the refuge for the many tribes who have continually been driven back throughout the centuries by their enemies, the Chinese. Many have taken refuge in the neighbouring province of Yünnan and even in French territory south of the Red River. The hostility of the Chinese to them is due to three causes, as far as I can gather: (i) to the low morality of the tribes, (ii) to their illiteracy, and (iii) to their dissimilarity of character to the Chinese. The first two points are very vital to the Chinese: they are at the root of all their civilization, for no ancient race has laid greater stress on the necessity of morality and learning. Their contempt for the Miao is unbounded and out of all proportion. Our interpreter was astonished to find how different they were from all that he had ever heard, and decided that he must enlighten Peking on the subject when he returned home!

The character of the people is in striking contrast to that of the Chinese. They are warlike, frank, lawless, primitive, open-hearted, opposed to trading and city life: some are great riders, but we never saw one on horseback. This was due to their poverty, and we heard of no rich ones: no doubt the headmen have a certain relative wealth. In the north of Yünnan we heard of their having curious horse-races, when the course would be strewn with feathers. The men wore capes, which gave them a weird look of being birds of prey, as they swept along the course with outstretched arms in clouds of dust and feathers. It is like the Caucas Race in Alice in Wonderland: nobody wins.

The Miao are all agriculturists. They cultivate everything they require for food and clothing except salt, which is a Chinese Government monopoly: they only enjoy this luxury about twice a year, we were told at Ta-ting.

In self-defence they live in villages, many of which are almost inaccessible to the outside world and are only penetrated by missionaries. One of our friends describes her descent from one such village, with a man on each side holding her on to the saddle, while a third held on to the pony’s tail to prevent him going down headlong! The Miao huts are small and dark, and their love of colour is entirely confined to personal adornment. Red, white and blue are the dominant colours in their dress, and the material is hempen, the hemp for which is grown, spun, woven and dyed by themselves. The dyes are vegetable, and are of vivid colour. The different tribes have various designs, but, roughly speaking, all the women wear short full kilts and jackets.

The Ta Wha Miao (Great Flowery Tribe) are the gayest in colour that we saw: their designs are bold and effective, the colours used are scarlet and dark blue on a whitish ground, and very exact in line. The design consists of simple geometrical outlines, but these are often filled in with colour, and use is made of a roughly-stencilled pattern which is tacked on the material and worked over in coarse thread. I succeeded in purchasing a partly-worked piece of embroidery from one of the men of this tribe, his wife being away from home, though he evinced some anxiety as to what she would say on finding out that he had done so when she returned. The women seem very strong and independent, do most of the work in the fields, and I can fancy she might have a heavy hand! Also they are thoroughly feminine in their love of clothes. Many of them make quite an elaborate wardrobe, and when a girl is going to a festival of any sort she will take as much as forty pounds weight of clothes, which her young swain will carry for her, so as to have a variety of costume! One kilt I possess weighs nearly four pounds, and some kilts will have as many as thirty-one breadths of material in them. They swing their kilts with all the jauntiness of a Harry Lauder. Although the men are only about five feet in height and the women about half an inch less and very sturdy, their erect carriage lends them a certain attractive dignity. The women cling tenaciously to their national dress, but not infrequently the men discard their loose-flowing clothes for Chinese trousers, and many of them speak the local Chinese dialects.

Formerly these people had no distinctive names and kept no count of their age. Probably it is due to Western influence that they now have adopted them. Sometimes the Chinese would take the women as wives and settle down among them, but no Miao was allowed to marry a Chinese wife. One of them told this to my interpreter.

As a rule they wear nothing on their feet; but some of those who could afford it wear sandals, and the wealthier Miao (if so they can be called) had prettily embroidered ones for special occasions, with an embroidered band along the outer side of the foot, and fastened across the instep with a scarlet thread. The Miaos of both sexes wear stout puttees wound round and round their legs till they look like pillars; or a piece of felt tied with a white band. They are generally dyed a dark blue colour. Sometimes the girls’ unprotected feet get the skin cracked or cut with the stones on their rough mountain paths. They think nothing of sewing them up with needle and thread, as if they were stockings.

The style of hairdressing among the Great Flowery Miao is quite different from those of other Miao tribes. Their coarse black hair is very abundant; as long as they are unmarried girls they wear it in two plaits, hanging from close behind the ears to well below the waist. When a girl marries she coils her hair into a long horn, which stands out just above, and in a line with the shoulder. When she becomes a proud mother her horn is exalted into a lofty pyramid, rising straight upwards from the crown of her head.

The men wear the same kind of embroideries as the women, placed like a shawl across their shoulders, and a sort of long hempen garment falling below the knees and girded in at the waist. Their upper garment has loose sleeves, looped up about the elbow with ornamental braid, which they make on primitive little looms. Round their heads they wind cloth turbanwise, or else wear nothing. They live on the simplest diet, nothing but flour cooked before grinding, which they mix with water into a kind of porridge and eat twice a day: this, with some vegetables or herbs, is their staple food. They are addicted to drinking and fed no shame in it; both sexes have drinking bouts. No Chinese woman is ever seen drunk, and it is a most unusual vice among them: but if she should be drunk, she would be far too proud to be seen out of doors in such a condition. Morally the Ta Wha Miao seem to be at the bottom of the scale, and the Heh (black) Miao at the top.

Considering their extreme poverty we were much touched by these people asking Mr. Slichter to express to us their regret at not being able, on that account, to offer us hospitality. This was in reply to a message he had given them from us, expressing our pleasure at being with them and regret at not being able to visit their various villages, or talk to them in their own language.

There are supposed to be a very large number of different Miao tribes; the Chinese put the number at seventy. No one has yet attempted to classify them. Their language is practically the same throughout the tribes, with considerable local variations; but none of them have any written language, so that unless a careful study is soon made of it, there will be no lasting record kept. As they become assimilated with the Chinese, such a study will become increasingly difficult. The language seems to be limited in range, as one might expect. There is no word to express joy, gaiety, and it almost seems as if the reason may be that they experience so little happiness under usual conditions. All those we met in markets or on the road looked extremely dull and sullen, in marked contrast to the Chinese. I watched carefully and never saw a smile; yet those who have become Christians are the very reverse. A merrier crew it has never been my lot to see, and they beam from ear to ear. The Great Flowery Miao are never to be seen away from their own villages unless they are on the road to religious services. When they come to these services they often travel long distances, sixty or seventy miles, and bring their food in a bag on their backs; as they receive nothing from the missionaries of a material nature, it is evident that they are not “rice Christians.”

The Little Flowery Miao are so called because their clothes are embroidered in the finest little designs and remarkably beautiful both in design and colour. There are subtle touches of spring green introduced into a harmony of brown, black, white and yellow. There are no less than thirty-four rows of cross-stitch to the inch, and as accurate as though they had been ruled. To heighten the value of this delicate design there are long narrow rows of different-coloured superimposed folded pieces of material, sometimes as many as eight in number in the following order—orange, red, white; or orange, green, red, bright blue, indigo, orange, red, white. The last three colours are especially used in conjunction, sometimes as a sort of small panel of appliqué work in the midst of cross-stitch designs.

It is most interesting to note the complete contrast in design of the needlework of all these tribes with that of the Chinese. The latter is exclusively naturalistic, more so in fact than that of any other people, and includes the widest possible range of subject. The inexhaustible fertility of Chinese imagination is shown in their treatment of landscape, life in all its many forms, the unseen world, human and demonic passion; and everything depicted by the needle just as much as by the brush is full of life and action. The tribes-people, on the other hand, depict nothing naturalistic; all their designs are geometrical and of no mean quality. The fact that in primitive art elsewhere the naturalistic comes first and in course of time becomes conventionalized and geometric makes the work of these tribes an interesting problem. The only figures in their work are little rows of men and animals in cross-stitch. These are worked in red, blue, yellow, white and black on a black ground, only two or three stitches of each colour together, and other little designs mixed in with it. The result is ineffective. The figures are so small and inconspicuous that you only see them on close scrutiny.

The material on which the embroidery is made is a fine hempen native-made cloth, and it takes at least two years to complete the making of a garment, from the time the hemp is grown till the workmanship is finished. The general material worn is remarkably like the hessian cloth used in our kitchens, only more closely woven.

The Black Miao form a very striking contrast to the Flowery Miao. They are so called because their clothes, even the head-dress, are practically all black, and the embroidery on them is so small, so fine, so subdued in colour that the general effect is sombre. The men wear also very dark brown or black clothes. They live mostly in the south-eastern part of the province, but we met them in various places, and they looked decidedly more intelligent and less sulky than the others. They are quite a different type, though they all have very broad faces and black hair.

We met a large number of the “Wooden Comb” Miao at Tenten. They are much taller than the other Miao. They are so called because both men and women wear their long black hair rolled up and fastened on the top of the head with a wooden comb. These combs are mostly plain and unvarnished, but I have one which is very prettily decorated in several colours. They have quite a peculiar type of face, large Semitic noses, and the men wear a thickly-folded white band round their head. Their clothes are for the most part white, with a touch of blue, for instance, in the waistband, on to which a pocket is slung in front. The women dress mainly in dark blue, with an occasional touch of red in the skirts. The girls wear their jackets open down to the waist; but married women wear a kind of felt apron suspended from just above the breast. This felt is made of wool, which is beaten until it reaches the required thickness and density and becomes a solid mass. The cloth of which the jacket is made has a shiny surface like sateen, which also is produced by beating. Some of them wear thick twisted coils of scarlet thread wound twice round the head and fixed with a scarlet wooden comb.

I got my interpreter to make a list of the different Miao tribes living in the part of the province we visited. He did this at the dictation of one of their number. The various Miao-chia (chia means “family”) are mainly named on account of differences of clothing, especially as regards colour, but also sometimes by their occupation, as the “Shrimps” (Sa Miao), so called because they sell fresh-water fish and shrimps; the “Magpies,” called after the birds, because their dress is black and white; and the “West of the Water Miao” (Hsen-hsi Miao) because they live on the west of the river that we crossed between Anshunfu and Ta-ting: they are said to number only six villages.

In S. R. Clarke’s book, Among the Tribes in South-West China, much useful information is given about these tribes, under the headings of four groups, the Miao, the Heh-lao, the Chung-chia and the I-chia, or Lolo, or Nosu. Having lived for thirty-three years in China, mainly in Kweichow, he has collected many legends and details of their beliefs. The most interesting group to me was the I-chia, of whom my interpreter made a long list at the dictation of an evangelist, who was an I-chia. The tribes seem to have kept pretty distinct from one another up to the present time, but if peace reigns and they all become civilized, it is likely that the barrier to intermarriage will tend to break down.

The “Wooden Combs” are ancestor worshippers like the Chinese, and we had the good fortune to be given three of their “dooteepoussas” (I do not know how this word should be spelt, but have written it phonetically), namely sections of bamboo, each containing “a soul,” wrapped in cotton wool and fastened with a thread. A wooden pin runs crosswise through the bamboo, which prevents the “soul” being drawn out by a tiny bunch of grass, which protrudes from the top of the soul-carrier. As will be seen by the illustration, these are exactly in the shape of crosses and they have little cuts on the bamboo varying in number, which refer to the deceased. The Lolos also have these soul-carriers. In Yünnan Province the shape of these soul-carriers approximates to the Chinese ancestral tablets and Clarke gives another form of them which he calls a spirit hamper. The name “lolo” given to these tribes by the Chinese is said to come from this fact, lolo meaning a basket. The Lolos consider the name to be a term of terrible reproach, but do not object to be called Nosu or I-chia. They keep these spirits in their houses, or a tree, or hidden in a rock. The ones I possess are kept in a long box fastened against the outer wall of a house, with a shelter over it like a shrine: sometimes more than one family keeps their soul-carriers in the same box. The funeral rites of these people are very elaborate and extend over a whole year. Dr. A. Henry has kindly given me permission to quote his account of these people and their language from the Journal of the Anthropological Society for 1903. He spent much time studying their habits and language in Yünnan, and brought back from there large quantities of MSS., ancestral tablets and dresses.

“The ceremonies and rituals in case of death and burial are numerous and complicated. After death a hole is made with a pole in the roof of the house to enable the breath or soul to escape. A cow is brought to the door of the house, and from its head is extended a white cord, which is fastened to the hand of the corpse lying inside the coffin, and a ritual called Su-pu is read. If the death is unclean (all cases of death by accident, childbirth, suicide, etc., are impure, also a death is considered impure unless some one has been present when it occurred), a preliminary purificatory ritual is necessary, after which the usual rituals can be recited. On the second and third days after death two important rituals, the meh-cha and wu-cha, are read. When the coffin is being carried out for burial, a paper effigy is placed on it, which represents clothes for the soul of the dead man. At this time also the priest recites the “Jo-mo” or road ritual, and he accompanies the coffin a hundred paces from the house. The ritual begins by stating that as in life the father teaches the son, and the husband the wife, it is only the priest who can teach the dead man the road that his soul must travel after death. The threshold of the house is first mentioned, then the various places on the road to the grave, and beyond that all the towns and rivers and mountains that must be traversed by the soul till it reaches the Taliang Mountain, the home of the Lolo race. (The Lolos come mainly from Szechwan and the borders of Tibet.) Here the priest says that he himself must return, and entreats the dead man to pursue his way beyond the grave alone. The dead man then enters Hades, and stands beside the Thought Tree and the Tree of Talk, and there he thinks of the dear ones left behind and weeps bitterly. After this ritual is read, the priest returns to the house, and the coffin goes on to the grave.

The Lolos believe that for each person on earth there is a corresponding star in the sky. So when a man is ill, a sacrifice is often made of wine in cups to his star, and four-and-twenty lamps are lighted outside his room. On the day after a funeral a hole is dug in the death-chamber at a spot indicated by rolling an egg on the ground till it stops. A ritual is recited praying the star of the dead man to descend and be buried in this hole. If this were not done the star would fall and possibly hurt some one.

The ancestral tablet is made on the second day after the funeral and erected in the central room of the house on the ninth day, with an appropriate ritual. It is worshipped on certain dates and on all important occasions in life. It is called I-pu (= ancestor). It consists of a structure of wooden pieces, made out of the Pieris tree, the log of which was the ark of the Lolo deluge. A transverse bundle of grass is made of the same grass as is used for thatch. Two pieces of bamboo root represent the deceased father and mother, one having nine, the other seven joints. The inscription reads: “The dwelling place of so-and-so (giving the name), the pair, man and woman, our ancestors.” It is written by the priest with ink, the water of which is brought by the son of the house from a secret spring in the forest, from a locality only known to the family of the deceased.”

My three soul-carriers contain the souls of the men of three generations—son, father, grandfather. The Lolos have a Book of the Dead which Dr. Henry considers to be not unlike that of the ancient Egyptians.

There are a great many Lolo tribes, and the one which we came in contact with at Ta-ting is of great antiquity, showing virile and intellectual qualities that promise well for future development, should they leave their old isolation and get drawn into the stream of present-day Chinese progress. They are tall and well built, quite unlike the Chinese in appearance and carriage. Naturally the open-air life of all these tribesmen gives them a freer gait, and the absence of etiquette and formality shows itself in all their movements. The shape of their faces is oval, unlike the broad Miao type; their eyes are large and level; their cheekbones prominent and the contour of the face rounded; their noses long, arched and rather broad; their chins pointed. Their faces are apt to grow very wrinkled. The poise of the head of all these men struck me as indicative of an independent spirit.

All the tribes are practically autonomous, although nominally under Chinese rule: they have their own rulers, but these are responsible to, and many of them nominated by, the Chinese authorities. They frequently rent lands from them for cultivation, and law suits are very common among the I-chia about land and about daughters-in-law. Since the recrudescence of opium-poppy growing they have been compelled to use a certain proportion of land for its cultivation. They are not addicted to opium-smoking, and the Christians object to it on moral grounds: they have in consequence suffered considerable persecution and have even been evicted from the lands they had previously cultivated. They are terribly poor, and when the crops fail many of them die of starvation; this has happened during the last two years, which has been a period of great scarcity.

I quote in full Dr. Henry’s extremely interesting account of their language. “The Lolo language is of extreme simplicity, both as regards its phonology and syntax, and its manner of making new words. It belongs to the monosyllabic class of languages, of which Chinese is the most highly developed member. Attempts have been made to deny the primitive monosyllabic nature of the Chinese language, and to consider it as broken down from some pre-existent polysyllabic agglutinative tongue. I am of opinion that a comparative study of Chinese, Lolo, Miao, etc., will establish that this tonal monosyllabic class is primitive, and that we have the vocabularies of these languages’ original roots unchanged.

“To illustrate the simplicity of Lolo phonology, I may state that all words are monosyllables, composed of either a vowel or of a consonant followed by a vowel, as A, O, BA, BO, BI, BU. Such combinations as AB, ARD, STO, STAR are impossible. The initial consonants may all be considered simple, though such varieties occur as T and aspirated T, and four sibilants, as S, Z, TS and DZ. There is one apparent exception, namely SL, in SLA, SLO, SLU; but I found that this occurred in another district as THL, showing a certain instability of sound; and further research established that the original sound, still kept in Lolodom, is an aspirated L, so that we have L’O, L’A, L’U. Similar aspirations occur in connexion with T, P, CH, K and NG.

“Tones in Lolo are three or four, according to locality. There are no inflections whatsoever, the simple roots being unchangeable. All the words are simple roots, but by simple addition they can be used to express new ideas, thus gunpowder is now called fire-rice. I could only find one modification of the simple roots, occurring in four causative verbs, and they are these:

“The syntax is very simple, the place of words in the sentence being the most important factor. Post-positions, personal and demonstrative pronouns, interrogative words, adverbs of time, and a few auxiliary verbs occur; but relatives and conjunctions are absent. Numeral co-efficients are present, as in all the Chinese group of languages and in Malay. We cannot say two men, ten trees, but must say man two person, tree ten stem. The plural, tenses of verbs, etc., are rarely expressed, unless absolutely needed; and a Lolo sentence is very suggestive of baby talk. Thus, ‘If he comes I shall not see him,’ is expressed as ‘He come I he not see’; and ‘When he came I did not see him’ as ‘He come that time I not see.’

“I consider that the simple phonology and primitive syntax of the Lolo language are important to study, as we there see a primitive monosyllabic tongue, composed of simple roots, the type by which all languages must have begun.”

The Miao people were invited many years ago by the missionaries to learn to write their own language in romanized script, but they refused, saying they preferred their children to learn to read and write Chinese. It is obvious that this would be far better for them from a practical point of view. A Miao who knows Chinese thus can make a good living by translating Chinese contracts or official documents for his neighbours.

The religion of all these tribes is mainly animistic, but the Lolos have priests, though not temples. The priests have tents, divided into two parts, of which one is holy and the other holier. Their sacrifices have to be of flawless creatures, cows and fowls. Their creed might be summed up as “I believe in evil spirits, necromancy, ancestor worship and a future life.” By far the most potent factor in their existence is terror of demons. All their existence is overshadowed by fear. There are all kinds of horrible demons of various colours, green and red and blue: some have dishevelled hair and some have hair standing on end. To add to the horror, although they are like men in appearance, they are invisible. They shoot arrows of disease and send bad dreams to men.

In Yünnan they worship a stone placed at the foot of a Dragon tree, either in a wood behind the village or close to the houses. I did not see any in Kweichow, though I sketched just such a stone in Macao, where there were offerings of incense and scarlet paper. There is a sacrifice of a pig and a fowl made twice a year at the stone. The origin of this worship is not known, but it is now supposed to be addressed to a god in the sky, who protects the people. As regards the tree, it is a curious fact that it is not of any particular species, but that every village in the province of Yünnan, whether of the Chinese or of the aborigines, has one; they have the same belief about its being inhabited by a dragon, which protects the village.

The Ya-ch’io Miao offer in sacrifice an ox to Heaven and a pig to Earth, and once every thirteen years they sacrifice buffaloes to Heaven. Their sorcerers are men who wield great power, and it is a hereditary profession. The sorcerer must wear a special kind of hat when he is engaged in divination: without it he is powerless. He has special books (of which I am fortunate enough to possess one) with movable disks, superimposed one on another, for casting horoscopes. These books are handed down from generation to generation, and used to be copied out by hand; but nowadays they are printed. Such books were brought by an I-chia, who had become a Christian, in order to have them burnt; the missionary asked leave to keep them instead, explaining their historic value. The accompanying illustration is taken from one of these priceless old MSS. describing the Creation. It is written on a brittle kind of paper, extremely worn and fragile, and the leaves are fastened together with twisted strips of paper, acting as a string. This is a peculiarly Chinese way of binding, such as you may see students practising any day in class to fasten their notes. The colour of the paper is brown, the characters black, and the illustrations are painted in several shades of yellow and brown, forming a harmonious whole. The upper circle, containing a bird, is the moon; and the lower circle, containing a beast, is the earth.

Dr. Henry brought a large number of MSS. back from Yünnan, which are now in the British Museum, but they differ in certain respects from mine. In the first place, they contain no diagrams; secondly, they are all divided up metrically into groups of five characters, or seven; mine are not all divided into groups (as may be seen from the illustration, Ancient I-chia Script), and those that are in groups vary in number, four, or five, or six. He says that the subject-matter of all the MSS. which he studied is religious ritual, genealogies, legends and song, and all are written in verse. The script is quite unique: it is pictographic in origin, not ideographic like the Chinese. Many Chinese words are compound, one part denoting sound, the other part denoting meaning: Lolo words are never compounds.

The characters, as will be seen from the illustration, are decidedly simpler than Chinese. I had the good fortune to submit my MSS. when I was at Swatow (a couple of months later) to a learned Chinese scholar, who seemed greatly interested in them. He took them into his hands with devout reverence and care, as if they were of priceless value. He said that he had indeed seen such MSS. before, but that it was extremely rare: he at once said that it came from no Chinese source, but from aborigines in the north of Kweichow. When I asked if it were some hundreds of years old, he replied, “Oh! much older than that,” and stated that the numerals and certain other characters were the same as the Chinese script of three thousand years ago. One of the characters which he pointed out was that for the moon:

I have also compared my MS. with pages of Lolo writing published by Colborne Baber in the Geographical Society’s Supplementary Paper, 1882, and can find no exact correspondence between them. Surely it would be a most interesting study for some one to undertake, the more so that there is already a wealth of material lying ready to hand at the British Museum. The Lolo writing is also different from Chinese in that it is read in columns from left to right and the book begins at the same end as ours. It corresponds with the later Syriac mode of writing, and Dr. Henry suggests it may have had some connexion with the Nestorians, who were to be found in all parts of China from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries. S. R. Clarke mentions a spirit who controls the crops, and is called by the Lolos Je-so: the Christians suggested that this name be the one adopted for Jesus Christ, but it was not done.

The above-mentioned theory would account for some of the Lolo practices and beliefs, which are otherwise very difficult to account for, such as their keeping the Sabbath every sixth day, when no ploughing is allowed to be done, and the women are not even allowed to sew or wash clothes on that day. Of course this does not apply to all Lolos, but only to some in Yünnan. They have also the remarkable crosses (as seen in the soul-carriers), and they believe in patriarchs who lived to abnormal ages, such as six hundred and sixty or nine hundred and ninety years, as in the Old Testament records, not to mention the stories of the creation and the deluge. Their name for Adam has the two consonants d and m, it is Du-mu. The patriarchs are supposed to live in the sky: the chief of them is called Tse-gu-dzih, and this patriarch is also a deity who opened the box containing the seeds of death; he thus gave suffering humanity the boon of death. He also caused the deluge.

“The legend of the deluge,” says Dr. Henry, “runs that the people were wicked, and Tse-gu-dzih to try them sent a messenger to earth, asking for some blood and flesh from a mortal. All refused but Du-mu. Tse-gu-dzih then locked the rain gates, and the water mounted to the sky. Du-mu (? Adam) was saved with his four sons in a log hollowed out of the Pieris tree; and there were also saved otters, wild ducks and lampreys. From his sons are descended civilized people who can write, as the Chinese and Lolos. The ignorant races descend from men that were made by Du-mu out of pieces of wood. Du-mu is worshipped as the ancestor of the Lolos, and nearly all legends begin with some reference (like our ‘once upon a time’) to Du-mu or the Deluge. Du-mu and precedent men had their eyes placed vertically in their sockets; after him came the present race of men, who have their eyes placed horizontally. This quaint idea may have some reference to the encroachment of the oblique-eyed Mongolians, who have horizontal eyes, as it were, i.e. eyes narrow in height, whereas Europeans and other races have eyes that may be called vertical, i.e. wide from above downwards.

“The Lolos have a cosmogony. Their account of the Creation is that there were two Spirits, A-chi and A-li. A-chi made the sky, and made it evenly and well. A-li slept, and on awakening saw that the sky was completed. In his hurry to do his work, he dumped hurriedly earth here and there. This accounts for the inequalities of the earth’s surface. When the sky was first created the sun and moon were dull, and did not shine properly. They were washed by two sky-maidens, and have remained clean and bright ever since.”

Some of the Lolo tribes have the story of the Creation, but not all of them, whereas the story of the Deluge is universal, though not always the same. In some cases Noah has three sons, and in some no animals are mentioned. The Black Miao story is told thus by S. R. Clarke, to whom it was dictated:

This is just a sample of their ideas; now I will give a sample of their habits. They have big carouses on the open mountain slopes. A man desirous to enter into relationship with a girl will watch his opportunity for seeing her alone, and give as a signal a wide sweeping movement of the arm: if she acquiesces she will go to the carouse. These do not take place at stated intervals, but a party of young men will go off with girls in groups of twenty or thirty and sit round a big fire, singing their amorous ditties. These are mostly of a coarse nature not suited for publication, but Dr. Henry has translated the following song by girls working in the fields addressed to boys:

While the “courting-talk” goes on round the fire, there is a goodly store of weapons lying behind the singers. Any moment they may be attacked by the parents, brothers or friends of the girls. When this happens and the attack proves successful the luckless revellers are stripped naked.

The custom of the Little Flowery Miao is somewhat similar. Twice a year the men make music outside the houses where the girls live, and those who please go off with them to the hills for a carouse. Once a year the men choose their girls, and the other time the girls choose their men! The girls usually marry about fifteen or sixteen, and if they happen to be poor they go to the mother-in-law’s house very young. Among the tribes there are go-betweens to arrange marriages, but undoubtedly the young people have a better chance of selection by mutual liking than have the Chinese.

The music of the people is mostly produced from pipes, and has a certain charm; it is flute-like in sound, and some we heard was not unlike that of bagpipes without the drone. The I-chia are all fond of music and dancing. They were rather shamefacedly persuaded to dance for us, while one of them played. The steps were rather slow and stealthy, alternating with rapid pirouetting. They sank almost to the ground on one bent leg, while the other leg shot out in front to its furthest limit.

Witchcraft is firmly believed in by all the tribes. The witch-doctor has a great hold over them, and trades on their superstition shamelessly, getting wine, tobacco, or corn by means of what is called his “daemon,” without apparently stealing the things himself. The witch-doctor uses snake-poison to injure or kill people, and only he can make them well again! He also induces madness, so that the madman may fling off his clothes, which the doctor then picks up and carries off!

A curious story was told by an eye-witness to my friends in Ta-ting. He was present at the building of a house in the country by two stonemasons. They began quarrelling, and finally one went off in a great rage, refusing to finish his job. The other remarked confidently, “It does not matter; I shall get him back before evening”; but the onlookers did not believe it. The narrator of the story saw him go off to the hill-side and gather a bunch of grass and straw. He fashioned these into the figure of a man and cast spells upon it, after which he returned to his job and went on as if nothing had happened. Before he had finished the day’s work, the other man returned in great haste, dripping with perspiration; he apologized for his conduct and resumed work. He explained that after he had left in the morning he became very ill and suffered such agonies of pain that he felt sure he would die if he did not return at once.

Such is the kind of story that is current everywhere. It is a matter of common belief that the witch-doctor never has any children, and that this is a punishment from heaven. The influence of the missionaries brings them frequently into contact with strange happenings: one of them in Ta-ting. Miss Welzel was asked to visit a woman who had taken poison, to see if she could do anything for her: on inquiring into the case she was told that there had been no quarrel or any other known reason for her committing suicide. The woman said she had seen daemons come into the house through the window, who told her to take two ounces of opium in brandy, which she immediately did, after which she announced the fact to her family. They sent for Miss Welzel, but it was too late: the woman died a few moments after her arrival.