115
control. Lung Yun still maintained his own troops, well equipped and better paid and fed than those of Chungking, out of the revenues he had collected from the supplies which had flowed over the Indo-China railway and the Burma road. The control of the only communications into China had made the Governor of Yunnan a very rich man.
My experiences during the subsequent year were to be discouraging. In the past my championship of the Chinese cause had been unpopular with my own people; it had involved me not only in disapproval but also in financial loss. As the situation in Western China unfolded itself to me I began to wonder whether, after all, there was not a lot to be said for the view of the die-hards. Since my return to England I have made a point of studying the aspects to which I have drawn attention in these writings. I examined the history of Sun Yat Sen's Three Principles and the record of Kuo Min Tang teaching. I have set out the facts as they came to my notice, and will leave it to the reader to judge for himself how far the extraordinary incidents in which I was now to find myself involved sprang from independent impulses present in a backward province, or more directly from the nationalist teaching of Sun Yat Sen.
As the 'plane flies in from India, over the mountains of Yunnan, and begins to circle to come down to Kun-ming, the ribbon of the Burma road shows up below where it passes a cluster of villas nestling, some fifteen miles short of the town, at the foot of the hills on the edge of the lake. The 'plane crosses the tip of the forty-mile long lake to land on the large airfield at the far side of the city, 6,150 feet above sea level.
Accommodation in the city was hard to find; for some weeks I stayed out at the lakeside. Owing to its height, Kun-ming enjoys an excellent climate all the years round, cool in summer, mild in winter. The great mountain ranges to the west absorb the moisture of the monsoon, leaving an adequate but moderate rainfall: apart from a period in the autumn the sun shines daily. The two Chinese characters Yun and Nan mean 'South of the Clouds,' an appropriate reference to the climate of Szechuan to the North East, where for six months in the year, at Chungking, they never see the sun.
The foreign community, in addition to the small number of French who were concerned with the operation of the railway line to the Indo-China border, included the Consuls of the leading countries, and an increasing number of American military personnel, attached to the