The Land of the Blue Poppy

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III ON THE LI-TI-FING North of Tali are bare rounded hills of red earth, and richly cultivated plains tucked in amongst the mountains where, mile on mile, wave fields of kidney-bean, wheat, and blue-flowered flax. Sometimes we would meet strings of women carrying loads of salt, cotton, beans, or...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III ON THE LI-TI-FING North of Tali are bare rounded hills of red earth, and richly cultivated plains tucked in amongst the mountains where, mile on mile, wave fields of kidney-bean, wheat, and blue-flowered flax. Sometimes we would meet strings of women carrying loads of salt, cotton, beans, or rice to the local market and driving mules laden with planks and firewood. Curiously enough these women supported the loads on their backs by means of a strap passing round the forehead, after the manner of jungle tribes and dwarf races, thus walking with bent backs and contracted chest; and certainly, except for their clothes, the people about here had nothing Chinese in their appearance, being mostly Minchia with a very pronounced type of countenance. One evening we came upon an isolated limestone hill, curiously sculptured into holes and caves, and from its base issued two very hot springs smelling strongly of sulphurous gases. Such springs are abundant in Western China at the foot of every great mountain range. On the fourth day after leaving Tali we reached Chien-ch'uan, an important market city standing at the head of a small plain, partly occupied by a lake, from which rises the Yang-pi river. Continuing northwards, the undulating valley began to take on more and more the character of plateau country, the ascent being very gradual, albeit we were hemmed in by mountains on either side, those to the east still capped by winter snow. There was little cultivation now, the valley floor being frequently boggy and used chiefly for grazing purposes, while the uncleared mountain slopeswere covered with brushwood below and with pine forests higher up. Abruptly came the head of the pass, and the narrow plateau seemed quite suddenly to drop away into a big blue valley, in...