These Shan alphabets of Hindu origin are supposed by de Lacouperie to be connected with the writing systems which have been credited to the Mossos, Lolos, and some other hill peoples about the Chinese and Indo-Chinese borderlands. At Lan-Chu in the Lolo country Prince Henri found that MSS. were very numerous, and he was shown some very fine specimens "enlumines." Here, he tells us, the script is still in use, being employed jointly with Chinese in drawing up legal documents connected with property. He was informed that this Lolo script comprised 300 characters, read from top to bottom and from left to right[450], although other authorities say from right to left. Of the Lolo he gives no specimens[451], but reproduces two or three pages of a Mosso book with transliteration and translation. Other specimens, but without explanation, were already known through Gill and Desgodins, and their decipherment had exercised the ingenuity of several Chinese scholars. Their failure to interpret them is now accounted for by Prince Henri, who declares that, "strictly speaking the Mossos have no writing system. The magicians keep and still make copy-books full of hieroglyphics; each page is divided into little sections (_cahiers_) following horizontally from left to right, in which are inscribed one or more somewhat rough figures, heads of animals, men, houses, conventional signs representing the sky or lightning, and so on." Some of the magicians expounded two of the books, which contained invocations, beginning with the creation of the world, and winding up with a catalogue of all the evils threatening mortals, but to be averted by being pious, that is, by making gifts to the magicians. The same ideas are always expressed by the same signs; yet the magicians declared that there was no alphabet, the hieroglyphs being handed down bodily from one expert to another. Nevertheless Prince Henri looks on this as one of the first steps in the history of writing; "originally many of the Chinese characters were simply pictorial, and if the Mossos, instead of being hemmed in, had acquired a large expansion, their sacred books might also perhaps have given birth to true characters[452]." Although now "hemmed in," the Mossos are a historical and somewhat cultured people, belonging to the same group as the _Iungs_ (_Njungs_), who came from the regions north-east of Tibet, and appeared on the Chinese frontiers about 600 B.C. They are referred to in the Chinese records of 796 A.D., when they were reduced by the king of Nanchao. After various vicissitudes they recognised the Chinese suzerainty in the fourteenth century, and were finally subdued in the eighteenth. De Lacouperie[453] thinks they are probably of the same origin as the Lolos, the two languages having much in common, and the names of both being Chinese, while the Lolos and the Mossos call themselves respectively _Nossu_ (_Nesu_) and _Nashi_ (_Nashri_).