paper and the pens (never absent from the humblest Chinese abodes), the wine-cups, the water ladles, the chop-sticks and, finally, the tobacco-pipes are all of bamboo. The man who dwells there is feasting on the tender shoots of the plant; and if you ask him, he will tell you that his earliest impressions came to him through the basket-work of his bamboo cradle, and that his latest hope will be to lie beneath some bamboo brake, on a cool hill-side. The plant is also extensively used in the sacred offices of the Buddhist temples. The most ancient Buddhist classics were cut on strips of bamboo ; the divination-sticks and the case which contains them are manufactured out of its stem ; while the courts outside the temple are fanned and sheltered by its nodding plumes. There are a variety of different sorts of paper made from the bamboo, but the kind which struck me as showing a new property in the fibre of the plant was that commonly used by the Fukien gold-beaters in the produc- tion of gold-leaf, thus occupying the place of the parchment employed for the same purpose in Europe. Fans and flutes are also made of bamboo, and even the looms on which the Chinese weave their silken fabrics are chiefly made out of the plant. Indeed, it is impossible to estimate its value to the Chinese. This much, however, I may unhesitatingly affirm, that so multifarious are the duties which the bamboo is made to discharge, and so wide-spread are the benefits which it confers upon the Chinese, as to render it above all others the most useful plant in the Empire.
We spent the night at the Baksa mission-station and left early next morning to walk to Ka-san-po, a distance of twenty-six miles. The first hill we got to after quitting Baksa gave us some faint notion of the journey now before us. We had to climb a rocky ridge, where the soil had been completely broken
