In the evening we are at Yung-ch’ang.  Here I saw for the first time in my life a man carrying a cangue, and a horrible, sickening feeling seized me as I tramped through the densely-packed street and watched the poor fellow.  The mob were evidently clamoring for his death, and were prepared to make sport of his torments.  There is nothing more glorious to a brutal populace than the physical agony of a helpless fellow-creature, nothing which produces more mirth than the despair, the pain, the writhing of a miserable, condemned wretch.

Great drops of sweat bathed his brow, and as one, looked on one felt that he might pray that his hot and throbbing blood might rush in merciful full force to a vital center of his brain, so that he might fall into oblivion.  The jeers and the mockery of a pitiless multitude seemed too awful, no matter what the man’s crime had been.

Yung-ch’ang (5,500 feet) is as well known as any city in Far Western China.  I stayed here for two days’ rest, the only disturbing element being a wretch of a mother-in-law who made unbearable the life of her son’s wife, a girl of about eighteen, who has probably by this time taken opium, if she has been able to get hold of it, and so ended a miserable existence.

On a return visit this mother-in-law, as soon as she caught sight of me, ran to fetch an empty tooth-powder tin, a small black safety pin, and two inches of lead pencil I had left behind me on the previous visit.  I have made more than one visit to Yung-ch’ang, and the people have always treated me well.

Along the ten li of level plain from the city, on the road which led up again to the mountains, I counted-no less than 409 bullocks laden with nothing but firewood, and 744 mules and ponies carrying cotton yarn and other general imports coming from Burma.  There was a stampede at the foot of the town, and quite against my own will, I assure the reader, I got mixed up in the affair as I stood watching the light and shade effects of the morning sun on the hill-sides.  Buffaloes, with a crude hoop collar of wood around their coarse necks, dragged rough-hewn planks along the stone-paved roadway, the timber swerving dangerously from side to side as the heavy animals pursued their painful plodding.  To the Chinese the buffalo is the safest of all quadrupeds, if we perhaps except the mule, which, if three legs give way, will save himself on the remaining one.  But it is certainly the slowest.  I am here reminded that when I was starting on this trip a journalistic friend of mine, who had spent some years in one of the coast ports, tried to dissuade me from coming, and cited the buffalo as the most treacherous animal to be met on the main road in China.  He put it in this way: 

“Well, old man, you have evidently made up your mind, but I would not take it on at any price.  The buffaloes are terrors.  They smell you even if they do not see you; they smell you miles off.  It may end up by your being chased, and you will probably be gored to death.”