1850.
Travels of M. Huc.
663
in a house where they undertook to defend the same, at a price quad- ruple what they would have had to pay elsewhere. The fact appears to be, that this was a village of banished malefactors, who were allow- ed to live there, upon condition of providing for officers on their journeys, and they made all who were not in authority pay, by robbery or extortion, for what was taken from them by their masters.
The missionaries re-entered China at the gate called that of Sín- yu-tsin. They were asked for passports, but got over that difficulty by dint of assurance. Our travelers correct the commonly- received opinion as to the magnitude and strength of the Great Wall of China. In many places they say it is a mere earthen rampart, at others, a few stones loosely piled together. At "the Hotel of the Three Social Relations," to which they repaired at the next city, Chwáng-láng, the missionaries were, for the first time, sus- pected to be Europeans, and worse than that, English spies. They got out of this scrape by asking how marine monsters could be expected to live on the earth and travel on horseback? At the next town, Ho-kiau-í, called, in the maps, Tai-hung fu-a name no longer in use, for the Chinese are constantly changing the names of their towns-they stopped for some time at "the Hotel of Temperate Climates," while their jawur paid an eight days' visit to the tú-sz', his countrymen jawurs, who dwell in the province
of Kánsuh.
On the return of the jawur, they crossed the mountain of Ping-ku to Láu-yáh pú, Old Duck village, where most of the men were engaged in knitting stockings. From Láu-yáh pú, the missiona- ries traveled in five days to the great, but not well-populated city of Sí- ning fú. The road thither was well kept, traversing a fertile cultivated country with trees, hills, and numerous rivulets. At Sí-ning fú, Tartars were not allowed to frequent the public inns. Houses of repose (sié kiá, as they were called), were provided for them, where they were supposed to be gratuitously entertained. After crossing the Great Wall upon two more different occasions, our tra- velers arrived at Tung-kiiu-enl, a small, but populous and busy town, full of Tartars, Turks, Eluths, and other strangers, who walked about arined with swords, perpetually quarrelling with one another. llere they were received in a house of repose, it being the fourth mouth of their journey, and now mid-winter.
The missionaries had to wait at this station for the arrival of a caravan to cross the wild country of Tangut, or Koko-nor; and in the interval they busied themselves with studying the Tibetan language
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