The ruins both within and without the city were strewn with valuable bronze images. The people objected to these being taken away, as they contained the spirits of deceased monks, who would certainly wreak vengeance on them if their domiciles were removed from the sacred precincts. All of the trouble experienced by Carl Bock in the Zimmé States arose from his robbing the ruined temples of their images, and snapping his fingers in the faces of the chiefs and people when they remonstrated with him. How he escaped from the country with his plunder, and why he was not murdered, is an enigma to me. On the north end of a hillock which protrudes from the north-west corner of the city, where the old palace was situated, and near the river, are the walled grounds of a temple and pagoda, trimly kept, and in good repair. From these grounds the view of the country to the north and west is superb: the great spurs of Loi Pong Pra Bat in the distance look like isolated mountains, the spurs rising considerably higher than the crest of the range linking them together. This peculiar arrangement is noticeable in all the great hill-ranges that I saw in the Shan States, the spurs seeming to have been carved out of a great uneven plateau. Between the great spurs and the river several low hillocks, seemingly the remains of a low-lying plateau, are seen, and amongst these the river winds its way amidst limestone bluffs. In A.D. 1436 one of the pagodas in the city was rent by lightning, and the celebrated “Emerald Buddh,” cut out of green jasper, was exposed in the shrine in its breast. This image is now enthroned under a seven-tiered white umbrella in Wat Pra Kao, at Bangkok. When discovered it was removed to Zimmé, then being rebuilt after its destruction by the Siamese in 1430. Afterwards it was removed to Vieng Chang, probably early in the sixteenth century, when the successor of the Laos king who ruled at Zimmé moved the capital to Vieng Chang; and ultimately to Bangkok in 1779, two years after the Siamese had made Vieng Chang a province of their empire. The Lao, with heads shaven with the exception of a blacking-brush tuft at the top, have an absurd resemblance to the wooden monkeys on a draw-stick, formerly sold in the Lowther Arcade. One seen at Kiang Hai was decorated with a peculiar form of tattooing consisting of a mass of blue dots free from any design, with the exception of ornamental edging along the waist and below the knees. This style of tattooing may be a specimen of an ancient type once current amongst the eastern branch of the Shans. At a little distance it resembles a pair of knee-breeches. I have never seen it elsewhere, except in the case of one of the princes of Muang Nan.