Passing into China we are still in the midst of Shan peoples, whose range appears formerly to have extended up to the right bank of the Yang-tse-Kiang, and whose cradle has been traced by de Lacouperie to "the Kiu-lung mountains north of Sechuen and south of Shensi in China proper[444]." This authority holds that they constitute a chief element in the Chinese race itself, which, as it spread southwards beyond the Yang-tse-Kiang, amalgamated with the Shan aborigines, and thus became profoundly modified both in type and speech, the present Chinese language comprising over thirty per cent. of Shan ingredients. Colquhoun also, during his explorations in the southern provinces, found that "most of the aborigines, although known to the Chinese by various nicknames, were Shans; and that their propinquity to the Chinese was slowly changing their habits, manners, and dress, and gradually incorporating them with that people[445]." This process of fusion has been in progress for ages, not only between the southern Chinese and the Shans, but also between the Shans and the Caucasic aborigines, whom we first met amongst the Kakhyens, but who are found scattered mostly in small groups over all the uplands between Tibet and the Cochin-Chinese coast range. The result is that the Shans are generally of finer physique than either the kindred Siamese and Malays in the south, or the more remotely connected Chinese in the north. The colour, says Bock, "is much lighter than that of the Siamese," and "in facial expression the Laotians are better-looking than the Malays, having good high foreheads, and the men particularly having regular well-shaped noses, with nostrils not so wide as those of their neighbours[446]." Still more emphatic is the testimony of Kreitner of the Szechenyi expedition, who tells us that the Burmese Shans have "a nobler head than the Chinese; the dark eyes are about horizontal, the nose is straight, the whole expression approaches that of the Caucasic race[447]."