The city is noted for its modern prison, with model workshops, the best in China. The police corps, uniformed in knee boots, tight tunics and German caps, and wearing swords, is a model gendarmerie. Yunnan, the farthest removed city of the empire from the capital, Peking, has been the foremost in these startling reforms since the French railway came through from the coast in 1910. Many Hongkong Chinese, who at once visited the place, are largely responsible for this reform leaven, but the chief credit is due to the progressive governor, Li Chin Hsi, who, remote as he was from headquarters, preserved order during the exciting months of 1911–12. In the streets the chair coolies rush along, with the right of way, shouting “Pei Ha” (We’ll poke you in the back). It was once the king town of opium, where a whole city walked for years in a sleep, but the government has largely stamped out both poppy field and opium joint. On the parade ground on a fall day of 1909, with military honors, the governor amusingly burned in public hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of opium and ivory pipes. On account of magnesian limestone and minerals in the water, awful-looking victims of goitre are constantly met. The poppy fields are now being used by a wide-awake people for the cultivation of mustard, rice, maize, sugar, banana, orange, pomegranates, bamboo, walnuts, etc. Many peculiar races and varied costumes are to be seen in this Museum of Languages: Shans with high black head-dress and a red band across their foreheads; Mohammedans with green turbans; Lolos without queues and hair piled on the head like men who have a perpetual nightmare; Tibetan women driving their pack trains to their mountain home, the “Roof of the World,” and driving their husbands, too! Burmese with combs in their hair, though they are not women! Kilted Kachins, carrying their long, two-handed dha-swords on their shoulders, and their women wearing bamboo sticks through their ears and chains of river shells and colored stones on their necks; Annamese in gorgeous gold silk, embroidered as though they were on their way to claim a throne; daring, dirty Bhamo muleteers, who dare to be full of polyglot oaths, for they wear nothing worth throwing mud at; women riding ponies, donkeys and mules, and trying to evade the thrust of one another’s pin-filled hair as though they were on tourney; aboriginal Miaos and Lolos with figured yellow cloaks like circus clowns, and wide hats whose rims are stayed down to their shoulders with strings; French surveyors in white duck and kettle helmets, and exhausting themselves with the vivacious volubility that you listen to on Marseilles’ Cannabiere; British in khaki, Calcutta topey-helmets and putties, and as “cool as cucumbers” both in tongue and temperature, men who “get there”; yellow-gowned bonzes wondering where their religion has flown of late; black-gowned Roman priests and flat-hatted _frères_ of the