I
have heard of a pailou in Kwangtung province in honour of a woman marked
out among women for her years, her goodness, and above all for her many
descendants, who numbered six sons, forty grandsons, one hundred and
twenty-one great-grandsons and two great-great-grandsons.

Han Yuean Kai is on the mandarin road that connects Chengtu and Ya-chou
with the frontier. Here we entered a new magistracy, and it was
necessary to send to Ch'ing Ch'i, the district headquarters, for a fresh
relay of soldiers. One of those who had come with me from Ta-shu-p'u
started at once on our arrival at Han Yuean Kai about the middle of the
afternoon, and made the journey, twenty-five li each way, to Ch'ing
Ch'i-hsien and back before night, bringing with him the two men who were
to go on with me. Truly the West China man is no weakling.

During the next day we were following the great tea-road, the road by
which most of the twelve million pounds of brick tea consumed by the
guzzling Tibetans is carried to the frontier market at Tachienlu. At all
hours of the day straggling lines of men or ponies or mules were in
sight, toiling along under their precious burdens. Between Ya-chou, the
starting-point of this traffic, and Tachienlu there are two high passes
to cross, seven thousand feet above the level where the journey begins,
and the whole length of the road is a wearisome succession of ups and
downs. And the loads carried are extraordinary. Baron von Richthofen
says, "There is probably no road in the world where such heavy loads are
carried by man across high mountains." The oblong package, called "pao,"
in which the tea is made up, weighs perhaps eighteen pounds, and,
according to the German traveller, ten or eleven form an average load.
But Baber declares that he had often seen a coolie carrying eighteen
pao, and on one occasion a man with a load of twenty-two, certainly
equivalent to four hundred pounds. I saw nothing like that, but I passed
many a poor wretch sweating under a burden of two hundred and
twenty-five or two hundred and fifty pounds. Day after day they creep
along, rarely covering more than six or seven miles a day. Every four
hundred yards they rest, but the loads are taken off only at noon and
night. At other times they relieve themselves for a moment from the
intolerable strain by placing an iron-shod crutch under the load. On the
march they carry this in the hand, tapping the ground as they go, and
all along the road the g