The Shan-Burmese seemed a peaceful, industrious class. In each house a loom is found in the verandah, and the girls are taught to weave from an early age. The women are always busy weaving silk or cotton putzos and tameins, preparing yarns, husking rice, or feeding and tending the buffaloes, besides doing their household duties. The men till the fields, but are not so industrious as the softer sex. A few are employed in smelting lead, and others work in gold, or smelt the silver used as currency. To six tickals[17] of pure silver purchased from the Kakhyens, one tickal eight annas of copper wire are added, and melted with alloy of as much lead as brings the whole to ten tickals’ weight. The operation is conducted in saucers of sun-dried clay bedded in paddy husk, and covered over with charcoal. The bellows are vigorously plied, and as soon as the mass is at a red heat, the charcoal is removed, and a round flat brick button previously covered with a layer of moist clay is placed on the amalgam, which forms a thick ring round the edge, to which lead is freely added to make up the weight. As it cools, there results a white disc of silver encircled by a brownish ring. The silver is cleaned and dotted with cutch, and is then weighed and ready to be cut up. Another industry is confined to the women, who make capital chatties from a tenacious yellow clay, which overlies this portion of the river valley, in some places forty feet thick; the earthenware is coloured red with a ferruginous substance found in nodules embedded in the clay. From the same clay, a number of Shan-Chinese from Hotha and Latha make sun-dried bricks outside the town, and a colony of the same people sojourn every winter at Bhamô, making _dahs_, or long knives, which are in great demand. A number of Kakhyens are often to be seen near the town, bringing rice, opium, silver, and pigs for sale. Their chief object is to procure salt, for which necessary they are dependent on Burma. They are not allowed to encamp within the town, but are compelled to shelter themselves outside the gates, in miserable wigwams. The Burmese assigned as a reason for their exclusion their dread of the Kakhyen propensity for kidnapping children and even men, and also because a small party might be the precursors of a raid.[18] A few days after our arrival, four children who had been stolen were recovered. One of them was brought by her mother, to show the large round holes bored in the back of the ears as a sign of servitude. The other three were little fat Chinese children, and adopted by the head tsitkay. A curious illustration of their habits of man-stealing was also afforded us.