The saddest part of seeing Lanchow was not that we had taken twenty-seven days to reach it, but that it would require fully that amount of time to undo again what we had done. The usual way of returning from the Kansu capital to Peking is simply to float down the Hoang Ho on goatskin rafts to where one can easily reach the advancing Suiyuan railway. We had hoped to do this, but we were prepared for the news that it was impossible so late in the season. November was nearing its last lap, and while the river at Lanchow was still open, big chunks of ice already drifting down it from the Tibetan highlands helped to confirm the general opinion that it would be frozen solid in its broader and more sluggish reaches farther north, where we would be left virtually stranded.

We each bought a stout Kansu pony, therefore, and a less lively one for the alleged mafu who was willing to leave the employ of our host and return to his family graves near Tientsin—if we would pay him to do so. Mafus usually walk by day and tend their masters’ horses by night, but we concluded to be generous, and as a result we acquired a troublesome companion rather than a useful servant; for the one thing which the Chinese coolie cannot stand is prosperity. Then we hired two carts, quite like those that had brought our belongings from Sian-fu, which agreed for a consideration of one hundred taels to set us down in Paotouchen in time, with good luck in trains, for us to spend Christmas with our families in Peking. We again set our plans to outspeed the usual schedule if possible, by dangling before the drivers a gratuity of a whole round dollar each for every day they made up.

This did not spare us from getting a late start, however, though that did not worry us so much as it would have before we had learned from experience that a delay in the first get-away is no proof that the days that follow will be similarly blighted. The unavoidable formalities of the last moment, such as the cartmen’s vociferous leave-taking of the inn that had housed them, made up mainly of shrieks of “Ch’ien!”—which, as I have said before, is the Chinese notion of how the word “money” should be pronounced—were further complicated by the task of getting rid of a man of unknown antecedents whom our experienced host caught surreptitiously slipping his baggage into one of the carts. He merely wished the pleasure of our company, he wailed, kneeling before us in the by no means carpeted street, and he would walk every step of the whole journey. Perhaps he would, but we should have been foolish to harbor in our midst a man who might be in league with the bandits, particularly after the Tuchun had taken the trouble to wire the Mohammedan generals along the way asking for guarantees of our safety. Besides, our expedition was quite unwieldy enough as it was. Thus it was almost nine o’clock when we streamed out across the incongruous American bridge and, striking northward along the edge of the river and that of the suburb which piles into the air behind it, were soon lost among an endless series of bare brown hills.

The homeward trip by the northern route was quite different from that by which we had come. Instead of passing several walled cities almost every day, there were often only two or three dreary little hamlets from dawn till dark, and for days at a time nothing whatever but the single mud compound or two where travelers stopped at noon and at night. There was almost no loess, but instead desolate desert hills or broad plateaus with few suggestions of even summer-time vegetation either on them or on the more or less distant ranges that shut them in. Without loess, there were of course few sunken roads—none worthy the name to any one who had seen the other route—and no cave-dwellings, but in place of them wind-swept mud hovels, sometimes enclosed within high walled compounds.

The hovels were particularly numerous on the first afternoon in the almost rich grain district that succeeded the first stretch of semi-desert—endless mud-walled compounds that looked like the ramparts of small cities, yet housing only a single family, though in China this may include as many as two score individuals of four, and even of five, generations. Most of the fields were covered with the moisture-protecting layer of stones. These are changed once in a generation, we heard, and the custom becomes more prevalent farther west, where the land grows ever drier until it merges into the Gobi Desert. Groups of peasants were still winnowing grain in the breeze on their threshing-floors, and everywhere sparrows enough to eat it all as fast as it was separated from the chaff made the air vociferous with their twittering. We plodded all day and well on into the moonlight across what finally became almost an uninhabited waste; and next day we climbed to an altitude of nearly eight thousand feet through stony, dreary mountains without people, except for one little surface coal-mine, and a rare shepherd, without vegetation except for little bunches of brown tuft-grass. Always there was a new wrinkled mountain range growing up ahead and another slipping away behind, though these usually flanked the broad river valley instead of crossing our trail.

We were always well on our way by sunrise, with two hours or more of walking behind us, for it was too bitter cold then to ride; and sunset often found us still in the saddle. On Thanksgiving day, for instance, we were up at four and off at five, for there was a stretch of ninety li without a single human habitation to be crossed before we could even make our noonday halt. A high wind and heavy clouds made riding for long distances impossible, and there was little indeed to keep us in a cheerful mood. A crumpled range of mountains lightly topped with newly fallen snow beautified the left-hand horizon; now and again a group of Gobi antelopes sped away like winged creatures through the kind of sage-brush that recalled Arizona or Nevada, their white flags seeming a saucy defiance to us; and in mid-morning we passed through the Great Wall. It was fortunate that our map showed this, for we might easily have mistaken it for the mud enclosure of rather an extensive field and never have given it a second glance. Instead of the mammoth stone barrier to be seen near Peking, it was a mere ridge of packed earth, perhaps eight feet high and as many wide at the base, with broad gaps in it here and there, through which wander the modern trails. The contractors evidently had something of a sinecure out here in the west where the emperor could not keep an eye upon them.

For miles before we reached the wall the sage-brush plain was piled everywhere with Chinese graves of all sizes, some of them completely covered over with drifted sand; but beyond it there was not a single artificial mound of earth, as if there were no use in being buried at all unless one could find a resting-place within the Great Wall. The vastness of the brown uninhabited world was particularly impressive in the absolutely dead silence which lasted for long periods, unbroken even by the chirping of a stray bird. One might have been in some “death valley,” yet only water seemed to be wanting in what might otherwise have been excellent farming country.

Evidently this lack was increasing, for there were only abandoned ruins left of what had once been a town, big temple and all, at the end of the ninety li. There was one hole in the sandy earth, at which all trails converged, and shepherds, cartmen, and miscellaneous travelers were constantly using the cloth bucket on a stick with which crude troughs about it were filled, and where great flocks of sheep disputed with horses, cattle, mules, and donkeys; but this only water for many miles in any direction was evidently growing insufficient for the demands made upon it. We had a frozen luncheon in the lee of a ruin, from which we could look across a vast section of the plain, dotted in the foreground with the grazing camels of a great caravan that had pitched its tents and piled its cargo within easy distance of the well, to where the yellowish brown turned to purple and rolled up into the wrinkled, snow-topped range that shut off the world on the west. All that afternoon there was the same silent, rolling landscape, which ended at last, just in time, as bitter cold night was settling down, at a single mud compound in a little hollow of the great solitude.

The next day, in contrast, was absolutely cloudless, and so were nearly all those of December. We rambled for more than twelve hours across a lifeless wilderness where a human being was a sight to remember and in which two rabbits were the only visible representatives of the rest of the animal kingdom. Deep sand, here and there alternating with a sort of sage-brush, made the progress of our carts exasperatingly slow—until I suddenly discovered the ease and pleasure of reading on horseback, with the result that I devoured every book we had with us and memorized a primer of the Chinese language before the journey ended. Yet two inns just rightly spaced greeted our eyes at noon and at nightfall, as two others did on several similarly unpeopled days. It hardly seemed possible that these had grown up so accurately by mere chance, especially as there was no natural feature to attract and sustain them, and sometimes water had to be brought thirty li or more on donkey-back, so that it cost us twelve coppers each to wash our faces and hands. In every case in which we asked, the proprietor was the son or grandson, born right here in the wilderness, of malefactors or political prisoners who had been sentenced by the Manchu dynasty to keep these inns at certain specified points along this old imperial highway.

On the sixth day north of Lanchow we reached the great sand-dunes which make what might almost be a possible automobile trail impossible even for Chinese carts. Great ridges of pure sand, everywhere given a corrugated surface by the winds that had piled them up during the centuries, stretch from some unknown distance back in the country, perhaps clear from the foot-hills of the western ranges, down to the very edge of the Yellow River. We might easily have fancied ourselves in the midst of the Sahara as we waded for three hours, much more on foot than on horseback, across this effective barrier to wheeled traffic, had it not been for the sight of the Hoang Ho sweeping around it in a half-circle so far below as to look like a mere brook, and the tumbled masses of mountains beyond, culminating in a cone that has smoked uninterruptedly, we were assured, for more then seven centuries. Boats that seemed from this height mere boys’ rafts rather than cumbersome barges capable of carrying two loaded carts glided up and down the stream amid myriad floating chunks of ice; but we strained our eyes in vain to make out, even through this brilliant, moistureless air, anything resembling our own outfit. Beyond the dunes we came down upon a cluster of mud compounds, most of them prepared to pose as inns if the opportunity offered, and just then unusually crowded with west-bound travelers. These were almost all soldiers, Mohammedan in faith and in many cases so Turkish of features that with their big reddish beards they seemed to be actors wearing masks above their cotton-padded Chinese uniforms. They were the escort of a new governor on his way to Eastern Turkestan, and the expedition was so large that though we came upon the vanguard, accompanying some veritable houses on wheels, early in the morning, we passed the last straggling carts and horsemen toward sunset.

This extraordinary demand upon the ferrying facilities brought upon us the dreadful experience of being separated from our commissary and forced to shift for ourselves. The rights of extraterritoriality are one thing, and the joy which Chinese soldiers sometimes take in putting a foreigner to annoyance and delay even without reason when so good an opportunity offers is quite another. The major had known of a colleague who, traveling in Manchuria, had been deliberately held on a river-bank for forty-eight hours because soldiers crossing to his side insisted on sending the boats back empty rather than delay one or two of them long enough for the “outside barbarian” to get his carts on board. With neither of us in evidence, and without even one of the major’s cards in his pocket, no doubt Chang was finding it impossible to prove that ours was an expedition of foreigners and therefore in a hurry, whatever might otherwise have been the attitude of these more western Moslems in Chinese uniforms.

When our usual lunch-hour was long past, and still no word came from the rest of our party, we mustered Chinese enough to get chopped straw and peas put before our horses, and eventually to obtain for ourselves a bowl of plain rice boiled and served under conditions and amid surroundings that had best not be specifically described, lest the major’s still unsullied reputation be seriously injured. Then we suddenly realized that it was already three o’clock, that the only place where we could possibly spend a night without our cots and our cook was still forty li away, and that this was a walled city where the gates probably closed at sunset. The result was the most speed we had attained since the spasmodic truck had dropped us in Sian-fu more than a month before. In fact, even the several goatskin rafts plying from town to town along an open stretch of the river could hardly keep up with us.

It was a curiously sudden change to a rich wide valley from the barren unpeopled wastes that lay behind us; yet the only real difference was irrigation. This had been brought to the western Hoang Ho centuries ago by the Jesuits, who had introduced a complete system, still functioning, with great sluices—ornamented in Chinese fashion with fancy water-gates and bridges showing the heads and tails of great fish in stone. What the good fathers probably did not introduce was the custom of turning all the roads into irrigation ditches and making travel virtually impossible whenever the peasants along the way chose to do so; for that one may see just outside the walls of Peking, and listen in vain for any law or even effectual protest against it. Clusters of trees that were almost numerous rose from in and about farm compounds, which grew so frequent before the day was done as to form nearly a continuous town, and every little while we passed a new, or a very well preserved, temple, high above each of which stood two slender and magnificent poplars that recalled the “pencil minarets” of Cairo.

But we had no time to spare for mere sight-seeing, nor even for debating the social effects of Jesuit foresight. For fast as we urged our horses on, the sun seemed to outdistance us without effort, like some runner of unlimited speed and endurance and a weakness for practical joking sauntering easily along just in front of his breathless competitors. The so-called roads, too, abetted this red-faced humorist; for they would of course instantly have lost their certificates of Chinese nationality if they had marched straight forward even when the goal was plainly in sight, so that they wound and twisted incessantly here on the flat valley just as they had in their random wandering across the uninhabited rolling plains behind us, just as a Chinese road will always and everywhere, though there is no more reason for it than for putting mustard on apple-pie. Even the accuracy in distances that had hitherto been almost praiseworthy had suddenly disappeared, as if still further to worry us. For it seemed at least a dozen times that the same answer was given to our question as to how far we still had to go, though we spaced this at considerable intervals; and the very best we could do, even at the risk of having to give our animals a day’s rest, was to hold our own.

We arrived at length, however, just as dusk was spreading, to find the gates of Chungwei still open and the sense of direction among its inhabitants so much better than outside the walls that we brought up before the home of the only foreigners in town without mishap and without delay. Fortunately this couple were Americans, in fact, the most American of all the missionaries we met on our western trip, so that there was no more embarrassment on our side than hesitation on the other when we walked in upon them to say, “Here we are, with nothing but the clothes we stand in; please take care of us.” It is a long cry, of course, from auxiliary work among American soldiers in Europe to the establishing of a mission in a town of far western China where foreigners had never lived before, so that we rather flattered ourselves that we, the first visitors this new station had ever known, were almost as welcome as we were made.

Chungwei is an ancient and more or less honorable town which claims eight thousand families within its walls, among whom only three merchants, without families, were Mohammedans. The city has no north gate because there is no more China north of it, the so-called Great Wall being almost within rifle-shot, and beyond that lies Mongolia. The broad plain on which it flourishes is shut in by mountains and sand-dunes, but is divided by the Yellow River, from which all the prosperity of the region comes. For in the autumn, after the harvest, the top layer of soil is cut up everywhere into big mud bricks, held together by the roots of the crops, and of these all buildings, even walls, fences, and most furniture, are made, and still there are always great piles of them left over. Then the river is let in upon the land and covers it once more with a rich silt that produces splendid rice—certainly there was no suggestion of a rice country on a cloudy December day with a high wind blowing—wheat and linseed in abundance, millet, kaoliang, buckwheat, potatoes as large as if they had come from America, cabbage enough to keep the population from starving if there were nothing else, magnificent grapes and peaches, and what our host assured us were the finest walnuts in China. In other words, all Chungwei needed to be a land of plenty and comfort, and possibly even of cleanliness, was to be somehow broken of the apparently unbreakable Chinese habit of bringing into the world, in the madness for male offspring, every possible mouth which the land can feed, with an instant increase to take up the slack offered by such improvements as the irrigation projects of the Jesuits.

We were luxuriating in the extraordinary experience of lying abed after daylight when there came a scratching on one of the paper windows of the dining-room where we had been accommodated, and we heard with astonishment Chang’s mellifluous voice murmuring, “Masters, what time like start this morning?” Our missing caravan had finally overcome the difficulties of the river passage and had reached Chungwei about two in the morning. Perhaps it was not so entirely out of sympathy for our weary employees as we fancied that we set ten o’clock as the hour of departure and turned over for another nap.

Our host very seriously doubted whether we could keep to our schedule and make Ningsia in four days, particularly with so late a start. But we had little difficulty in doing so, thanks mainly to the fact that the weather had turned bitter cold. For the peasants all along the cultivated part of the river valley had recently opened the irrigation sluices for the customary autumn flooding, and had it not chanced that thick ice formed a day or two ahead of us on all the streams thus created, we should have been at least a week in covering the four hundred and fifty li, as carts coming in from the northeast reported they had been. Even where the alleged road itself had not been frankly used as an irrigation ditch, it wandered and dodged and side-stepped in a sincere but more or less vain effort to keep out of the diked bare fields which in summer cover with green all this rich brown valley from sand-dunes to river. Now there were vast skating-rinks everywhere, doubly troublesome when they were half thawed in the early afternoons. By picking a roundabout way we could have skated much of the way home. But the crowded population of the valley took no advantage of the recreation offered them. Probably there was not a pair of skates in the province, certainly not unless they had been brought by a foreigner or some student returned from abroad; and Kansu sends no students overseas. Once in a while we saw a group of children timidly sliding on the ice, with the awkwardness and limited range of Mr. Pickwick, the boys often barefoot, the little girls in their bound feet usually only looking wistfully on. Now and again such road as remained jumped by an arched earth bridgelet over a larger irrigation ditch with an axle-cracking jolt, only to wallow on again through ice and half-frozen mud.

As if all this were not bad enough, the peasants here and there were felling big trees squarely across the road, and letting travel drag its way around them as best they could, or wait until the trunk had been sawed up. The traveler in rural China is constantly being reminded that he is an unwelcome trespasser on private domain.

Before we left Lanchow we had been warned that the road would “change gage” at Chungwei, and a day or two before we reached it our cartmen came to ask whether they should fit their carts with other axles there. That of course we recognized as a gentle hint for added cumshaw, which we met with innocent faces and the information that they might reduce their carts to one wheel, or increase them to six, with one under each animal, so far as we were concerned, as long as they made the hundred and some li a day which our schedule demanded. One of them, I believe, did change axles, for I recall that it was only the old opium-smoker with the three ill fed animals whose cart could never reach the two ruts at once. These were made by ox-carts peculiar to this region, their two wheels seven feet high and out of all proportion to the little load of chunk coal or bundles of straw which they carried in the small box between them. In places these cumbersome vehicles monopolized the road, but they were always quick to give us the right of way, even to the extent of climbing high banks or backing into ditches from which it could not always have been easy to extricate themselves. This seemed to be as much due to the natural good nature of the rustic drivers as to a certain fear, not so much of foreigners, since in this part of the journey we were usually so muffled as not to be easily recognized as such, as of an expedition whose equipment showed that it was not of local origin. One is constantly getting little hints that the Chinese feeling toward “outside-country” people may almost as easily exist toward those from another province, even another village, as toward those from foreign lands. Sometimes there were whole trains of these ostrich-legged carts crawling together across the uneven country—twenty-two of them in the caravan I counted one morning soon after sunrise, and they were carrying, among them all, about what an American farmer would consider one good load of straw. For some reason these contrivances do not shriek their ignorance of axle-grease anything like so loudly as they should, but instead are almost musical. For beneath the axle of each cart hangs a long bell, of scalloped bottom much like those in Chinese temples, with a clapper in the form of a baseball-bat hanging so far down that only its extreme upper edge strikes the bell, while the lower end gathers some of its impetus by bouncing off every hummock in the middle of the “road.”

Remnants of the Great Wall frequently appeared, and once the road passed through a half-ruined arch of it, one side still covered with the yellow bricks that had formerly made this gateway at least rather an imposing structure. Walnut and Chinese date-trees, willows and pencil-like poplars, all leafless now and showing their big stick nests of crows and magpies like some sort of tumor, clustered by the dozen about the farm-houses and were scattered here and there across the broad valley; but there were by no means enough of them, and the mountains above were totally bare. Many of the high-walled farm-yards looked at some little distance like great feudal castles, but on closer view the walls always proved to be merely of dried mud, with nothing but the usual dreary misery inside. Sometimes two or three score of these family dwellings were in sight at once, their flat roofs invariably piled high with bundles of wheat or straw, with corn and kaoliang stalks; but there was never any suggestion of comfortable prosperity about the interior or the inmates. Children in a single quilted rag, chapped and begrimed beyond belief on faces and hands and from the waist down, still huddled in sunny corners or ran halfheartedly about at some unimaginative game or other. When the weather is quite too bitter to be borne, they squat or lie upon the more or less heated k’angs indoors, to the injury of their growth and health. The American memorial hospital in Lanchow, by the way, treats many cases of cancer of the hips caused by burns from sleeping on these Chinese mud-brick beds.

The Chinese persistence in maintaining the highest possible birthrate in proportion to the available nourishment, and the constant subdivisions of agricultural holdings among the multiplying sons of succeeding generations, makes comfortable prosperity out of the question, whatever the fertility of the soil, the industry of the cultivators, or even such improvements as those introduced by the sixteenth-century Jesuits. There is much prattle of education as a cure. If by education is understood, among other things, the teaching that it is unwise, not to say criminal, for even the most poverty-stricken, the lame, the halt, and the blind, the mentally defective and the morally perverted, to marry as early and as often as possible, that there shall be no lack of sons to worship at the family mud-heaps, then it is sadly needed. But is it possible to educate, even to the point required for a republican form of government to function at all, a people whose entire time, strength, and energy are constantly required to keep it from slipping over the brink of starvation, even though that education come from some outside source and be widely adjusted to the problem in hand?

At this season there was no work to be done in the fields, and little anywhere else except the gathering of twigs and dried grass for fuel, or roadway droppings for use in the spring. Hence it was naturally the time for the dedicating of temples and worshiping within them. The attitude of the Chinese toward their gods has been excellently summed up as “respectful neglect”; but the treatment accorded them varies greatly in different regions. There is no means of computing how many religious edifices we passed on our way to Lanchow that were falling or had fallen into decay, that had been abandoned entirely except for a beggar or two posing as priests, or had become noisome dens in which thieves divide their booty and vagrants scatter their filth; that the traveler may see in almost any part of China. But the people in this far western valley of the Yellow River were above the average in piety, treating their gods with much more respect than neglect, perhaps because their good offices are so constantly needed to keep back from one side or the other the sand or the water that would mean quick ruin. At any rate, temples, field-shrines, monasteries, and numerous lesser signs of superstitions were so plentiful that the valley might have been mistaken for holy ground; and not only were those in a state of repair by no means common in China, but new ones were growing up. Early one afternoon we began to meet, first men and women, the latter all astride donkeys or packed into carts, in their gayest raiment and an unusually frolicsome mood, and then dozens of youths carrying furled banners; and at length the auditory tortures of Chinese “music” were wafted more and more painfully to our ears as our animals brought us nearer the focal uproar. A bright little temple, newly built back near the foot-hills, across which a sanddune seemed to be creeping, was being dedicated; and every village, every cluster of farm compounds for many li roundabout had come in person to bring their respects and to share in whatever benefits might accrue. It was a Taoist temple, according to Chang, but as he said something later about a statue of Buddha, and as a Confucian scroll was plainly in evidence, no doubt the new building conformed to the general Chinese rule of seating the three spiritual leaders of the race harmoniously side by side, with Buddha, the foreigner, courteously granted the central place of honor. The banners, it seemed, gay with colors and Chinese characters, were brought either to bless or to be blessed, after which they were carried back to their respective villages oozing a kind of deputy godliness. Inside, energetic young men were beating drums and shooting firecrackers to scare off devils—the timid Chinese are always exorcising evil spirits, but never tackle the real ones of graft, banditry, filth, the over-production of children, and all their other real ailments. Long after we had turned the ridge that shut off this corner of the valley, the charivari of droning priests and misused instruments drifted to our hearing.

The days had grown so short that we were forced to use both ends of the nights to piece them out. But for a week or more this was no great hardship, as a brilliant moon lighted both morning and evening and gave the landscape touches that were unknown to it by day. Under the rising or the setting sun the wrinkled ranges of rich-brown mountains wrapped the horizon in velvets of constantly varying shades. I recall particularly the heaped-up mass just across the river from an unusually picturesque walled town which we came upon just as the day was fading out, and the tint of old red wine, blending momentarily until it became the purple of the grape itself, seemed a masterpiece which even nature seldom attains. But the town, though it awakened again that hope of the romantic within its walls, was so miserable a den of broken stone “lions” and ruined former grandeur, of comfortless people staring like monkeys at merely strolling strangers, that we were only too glad to accept the hospitality of an inn outside the walls.

Beyond this there lay forty li of rolling half sand, utterly uninhabited, then another broad fertile valley with the same oversupply of big mud bricks and Jesuit irrigation works, or more modern but less effective imitations of them. Here there were even more skating-rinks, and incredible clouds of blue pigeons, from which the major easily gathered all the fowl we needed to vary our diet to the end of the trip, though much to the dismay of Chang, who whispered in my ear the horrible information that “they home-side pigeon.” The li suddenly grew longer, as they have a habit of doing unexpectedly, so that it was well after dark when we reached Yeh-shih-pu, a “Hwei-Hwei” town where we could not even have our own bacon for breakfast, because the innkeeper would not admit our cook to his kitchen until he had promised to bear in mind his religious scruples. Such mishaps, added to the fact that every article of food containing the slightest moisture was habitually frozen solid, made our repasts less Cleopatran than they might have been. Cold chicken or pigeon with little sheets of ice dropping from between the muscles as the famished traveler tears them apart may not be so bad, but the big Lanchow pears gained nothing by coming to the table as hard as stones, and certainly there is no call to praise the taste of frozen hard-boiled eggs, if they have any. Yet most such dainties, the pears in particular, were far worse if they were thawed out before serving.

It seemed almost summer again on the brilliant afternoon without wind when an almost good road picked us up and staggered erratically toward Ningsia. Perhaps there was some slight excuse for its vagaries, for much of the plain was covered with ice-fields thickly grown with tall reeds, which were being gathered and carried to town on every type of conveyance from coolie shoulders to giant-wheeled ox-carts. Among the constant processions of travelers in both directions Mohammedans appeared to be in the majority, with white felt skullcaps, or dirty “Turkish” towels worn like turbans, greatly predominating over any other form of head-gear. From a distance the city wall seemed merely a glorified example of those about farm compounds; and high above it, high in fact above the city gates, towered two pagodas against the distant horizon of the inevitable crumpled range of low mountains or high hills, hazy with shade along the base, bright with a slight fall of snow along the top, where the low winter sun could still strike them.

The Chinese protect their boys from evil spirits (the girls do not matter) by having a chain and padlock put about their necks at some religious ceremony, which deceives the spirits into believing that they belong to the temple. Earlaps embroidered in gay colors are widely used in Kansu in winter