The great lines of Chinese travel, so often impassable, might be made permanently passable if the governor of a province chose to compel the several district magistrates along the line to see that these important arteries are kept free from standing water, with ditches in good order at all seasons.  But for the village roads—­during my travels over which I have come across very few that could from a Western standpoint be called roads—­there is absolutely no hope until such time as the Chinese village may come dimly to the apprehension that what is for the advantage of the one is for the advantage of all, and that wise expenditure is the truest economy—­an idea of which it has at the present moment as little conception as of the average thought of the Englishman.

A hundred li to the east of Hong-shiih-ai, over two impassable mountain ranges, are some considerable mines, with antiquated brass and copper smelting works, and this place, K’ung-shan by name, with Tong-ch’uan-fu, forms an important center.  As is well known, all copper of Yuen-nan goes to Peking as the Government monopoly, excepting the enormous amount stolen and smuggled into every town in the province.[Y]

The smelting is of the roughest, though they are at the present moment laying in English machinery, and the Chinese in charge is under the impression that he can speak English; he, however, makes a hopeless jargon of it.  This mining locality is sunk in the deepest degradation.  Men and women live more as wild beasts than as human beings, and should any be unfortunate enough to die, their corpses are allowed to lie in the mines.  Who is there that could give his time and energy to the removal of a dead man?  Tong-ch’uan-fu should become an important town if the rich mineral country of which it is the pivot were properly opened up.  Several times I have visited the works in this city, which, under the charge of a small mandarin from Szech’wan, can boast only the most primitive and inadequate machinery, of German make.  A huge engine was running as a kind of pump for the accumulation of air, which was passed through a long thin pipe to the three furnaces in the outer courtyard.  The furnaces were mud-built, and were fed with charcoal (the most expensive fuel in the district), the maximum of pure metal being only 1,300 catties per day.  The ore, which has been roughly smelted once, is brought from K’ung-shan, is finely smelted here, then conveyed most of the way to Peking by pack-mule, the expense in thus handling, from the time it leaves the mine to its destination at Peking, being several times its market value.  Nothing but copper is sought from the ore, and a good deal of the gold and silver known to be contained is lost.

I passed an old French priest as I was going to Tong-ch’uan-fu the next day.  He was very pleased to see me, and at a small place we had a few minutes’ chat whilst we sipped our tea.  In Yuen-nan, I found that the Protestants and the Romanists, although seeing very little of each other, went their own way, maintaining an attitude of more or less friendly indifference one towards the other.